Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“‘Is what Elizabeth said true?’

“‘What?’

“‘That if you were tempted enough, you would love someone else.’

“‘You are the only girl I love, Elsa.’

“‘But maybe … some day…’

“‘No, Elsa. I understand my duties and responsibilities.’

“‘And I’m sure that I can love only once in my life.’

“‘Yes. Nothing will ever separate us.’

“‘Nothing, Reinhardt. And when we have children, we’ll be even closer.’

“‘How many shall we have?’

“‘As many as God sends us.’

“‘I believe I’ve chosen well. Without a woman to give us; breath, we can’t do anything in life.’

“‘I want to see you honored, respected by everyone. You’re going to be a great architect, Reinhardt.’

“I couldn’t take it any longer, Lisbeth. I had to cover my mouth. I pushed Ruby away and opened my eyes. Everything was spinning. I tried to look at Elsa and Reinhardt and I saw four of them. The couples talking in whispers seemed very near yet very far and my own body was enormous yet at the same time tiny, as if my knees were heavy mountains yet also feathers in the wind. I leaned forward vomiting. Elsa gave a little cry. Reinhardt knelt over me. ‘Hey, Franz is sick. A glass of water.’ The ceiling light came on, white and cold again. I closed my eyes and then opened them immediately and looked toward the refrigerator, our piece of furniture that was as cold and colorless as the light. Lorenz, the blackclad Russian monk, was moving toward the refrigerator with a clean glass in his hand. I shouted, ‘No, Lorenz, please!’ Lorenz opened the refrigerator. ‘Close it, Lorenz, please, close it! You’re drunk, it isn’t true, you haven’t seen anything!’ Lorenz let the glass drop to the floor. Lya, standing behind him, screamed, screamed, bit her nails and screamed, her face as pale as flour. Herr Urs von Schnepelbrücke, lightly covered with frost, had arrived at our party.”

Franz stopped.

“Well, what happened?”

“Nothing. Reinhardt married Elsa. He was killed shortly afterward, right at the beginning, in Poland.”

“And the dwarf?”

“He finally crashed the party. Haven’t I just told you?”

“Yes, but what happened to him after the party?”

“Nothing. He stayed there in our little students’ room in Germany. He must still be there.”

* * *

Δ “Javier? Are you here? Put on the light, I can’t see the bed. That goddamn mania you have for always drawing the curtains. Or is it night already? Javier, are you here? Did you take your blessed Nembutal? Okay, okay, if you don’t want to answer, I don’t really care. Aaaay, I’m bushed. Damn it, if you don’t turn the light on, I’m going to fall over something. This rotten little stinking little hotel. We ought to have gone straight on to Veracruz, Javier, to the sea. That’s all right, you don’t have to move. Aaaaay, all I want to do is rest. The pillow’s cool, thank God. Christ, wouldn’t I give something to sleep the way you do? You don’t really need those silly pills. Do you hear me? I say you don’t need those stupid pills. I wish we had gone straight on to the sea and were there already. Javier. Do you hear me? Why don’t you answer me? Are you here? Javier, Javier, I swear, forgive me, I don’t do it to hurt you but to help us both. To offer you, to offer both of us, with naturalness and spontaneity, a way out. A way to keep the dream going, Javier. To keep it up.”

When he brought you home to Mexico City, at the outbreak of the war, you went on dreaming about him. It had become your habit to go to bed with a book and little by little to let your attention drift away from your reading as you repeated his name over and over, until finally you fell asleep with the book open, hypnotized by the word Javier. You knew that a little later he would come into the bedroom, close your book, and put out the light. Your dream would already have formed: his face and figure, exactly. Yet perhaps not completely: perhaps only a color, a glitter, an iridescence like that of the stars that roll through space, the blue stars that come toward us, the red ones that move away, the yellow stars that do not move at all. His presence in your dream was like a flaming blue star. And when you woke in the morning and saw him face down beside you with his hair mussed, you would have liked to prolong that presence within you, but you couldn’t: he would have to wake and dress and go out and you would be left to pass the day alone in your apartment on Nazas, there alone or walking the neighborhood alone. After breakfast he left, and there you were. You had a yellow lamp of tarnished glass that had been made from an old pulque demijohn. You could see your face in it, deformed by the refraction, and you used to run your hands over the smoothness of the glass. And seated on the sofa with your knees together you would lean forward and pick up the black ashtray of burned Oaxacan clay that was your husband’s favorite, that he always used when he was in the living room and always carried to the table to smoke after lunch and into the bedroom when he read and smoked in bed. You ran the sensitive tips of your fingers over the black clay. You passed your fingers also over the square low table of polished pine that stood before the sofa, let your fingertips linger on the rings left by his glass of beer, on the scars where his cigarettes had burned out. You would walk across the jute rug with your hands together behind your back, slowly, reflectively, as though you were trying to step in his steps, all the way to the squeaking board that always announced his arrival home again, and then back, repeating your actions in reverse: walk across the rug, touch the marks and scars on the table, feel the weight of the black ashtray between your hands, touch the imperfect mirror of the demijohn lamp. Nor did you stop there. You searched for other things that would speak to you of him. You would sit on your heels on the floor or cross-legged or lying back against the sofa or lying forward with your chin propped on your palms, and look at every corner of this room you shared with him. The bookshelves that occupied one entire wall from the door to the corner; the titles and authors that were arranged according to no plan, entirely helter-skelter: Rilke, Dostoevsky, Cervantes, Reyes, Huidobro, Kleist, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Sheridan Le Fanu, Gérard de Nerval, Emily Brönte, D. H. Lawrence, Byron, Euripides, Quiroga. The pine stool in front of the books was covered with a hand-loomed piece of Huichol cloth and on it was the pulque demijohn. From your position on the floor all the room was reflected in the yellow glass, the closer objects made very large, those farther away small at the end of a tunnel of light, the cblong of the window brilliant and motionless on one curving side. The deep, comfortable sofa with its Scotch plaid upholstery that was beginning to be a little worn now. The wide low table marked by his beer glass and his cigarettes, with his favorite ashtray and a candelabra without candles, a clay and plaster tree painted a thousand colors supported by a legless angel who carried on his rosy shoulders the trunk, the branches, the blue and yellow and red blooms. A pack of “Alas” cigarettes that he had forgotten. A box of “La Central” matches with its sand-paper striking surface and its blurred small reproduction of Corot’s “The Sowers.” The thin English chair that Javier had rescued from his parents’ home, with its lace back. Here he read, made notes, and consulted books, seated on the floor like you with his book open on the low table, his glass of beer staining the polished tabletop, his cigarette butts burning it, his arm, sometimes his head, resting on the chair. You spent many mornings studying the apartment in this way, always seated on the floor or stretched out, looking at the ceiling and watching the changing lights of passing day that entered through the Venetian blinds and made figures on the ceiling, reflections from the sun, from white clouds, from the chrome accessories of automobiles, even the nickel-plated bells of street venders.