Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“It was in those days that Vasco Montero returned to Mexico City from Spain. Earlier he had fought there on the Republican side. He had written beautiful war songs with Prados and Alberti. His first book had come out and there were many parties given to fete him. And presently he was your competitor, Javier, you who were coasting still on the prestige of your own first book, published in 1937. But Vasco Montero was a generous and good-intentioned man and he wanted no part of a literary rivalry. Maybe you would have preferred rivalry, an open war. It didn’t happen, however, and I felt that precisely because the rivalry never came out into the open, it was deeper and more serious to you and more demanding upon you. You hadn’t published again. You kept your plans entirely to yourself. I had no way of knowing whether your project of a great poem about Mexico City was advancing. And you and I were passing through another crisis, a different crisis and one that now seems set in another century.

“You know, almost my earliest memory has to do with those two in Boston, Sacco and Vanzetti. Gershon told me about them. Two humble immigrants who had been framed because they had passed out leaflets Gershon read to me … ‘Fellow workers, you have fought all wars…’ When they were finally executed, I remember Gershon wore a black armband for days.”

Yes, Dragoness. Everything was clear then and became clearer as the thirties came on. Not even justice was ambiguous. Nor dream itself: dream was only the light cast by a darker reality. History was idea and politics was morality. Do you remember? Everything was so clear. Children were selling apples on street corners in New York. The lines of those waiting for the handout of relief, bread and beans, wound for blocks. The unemployed marched on Washington in their dirty felt hats and their tattered coats. Okies in the Dust Bowl, wooden shacks, mouths empty not only of food but of teeth, babies with rickets, young women with dry breasts. Paul Muni in I Am a Fugitive. Dos Passos. While in Russia Stalin was building a new world free of those horrors and in Spain the war for all mankind was being fought: those were the good. The evil was Father Coughlin ranting over the radio, Huey Long ranting in Baton Rouge, the American Bund ranting in the beerhalls of the Middle West, Hitler ranting at demonstrations in Nuremberg.

It was all very clear. The revolution was the unity of all humble human beings, Dragoness. All artists, all men of justice, all over the world. A unity that transcended governments and nationalities. Politics had to be moral, history had to be conscious.

“Then one day in Greece we opened the paper and we couldn’t believe it. A pact between Ribbentrop and Molotov. It wasn’t true, it couldn’t be true. It was one more lie by the news services, which always lied. But it wasn’t a lie. It was true all right.”

You have wandered all lands.

Then you could only tell yourselves that so long as the two of you, and others like you, maintained it and believed it, the dream could be kept alive. The revolution was art and art was the revolution. Picasso was the revolution, so was Brecht, so was Eisenstein. The rest didn’t matter. The rest would pass. Some day sooner or later Stalin would die. But the dream would not die.

“… 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…”

Javier brought you home to Mexico City and the days passed with you alone in the apartment on Nazas while he walked the city and whether his writing was moving ahead or not was unknown to you, and the days passed with the objects in the living room and the light from the window, the days passed. And one night you snapped on the bed lamp at three in the morning and kissed Javier’s neck and waited for him to turn over. He covered his eyes with one hand and finally, groggily, looked at you and listened to you. Those long hours alone in the apartment, during which you stared at and animated all the things that surround us and touch us and become part of our lives at the same time that we become part of them, had given you your theme, a theme that in appearance had nothing to do with our illusory sadness, our petty bourgeois and idealistic sadness, but that by a kind of transmutation, a secret communication between mirroring surfaces that did not know how close together they were, had been born of the objects in the room.

So one day youth enters the apartment. Your own youth.

You summon up your youth. Thanks to a sustained and unhappy effort of your imagination, an effort that almost destroys you, you succeed in giving body again to your youth, not in your own body but separated from you: a phantom.

Have you harvested the fruit of your labors?

“Listen to me, caifán. Drowsy, Javier lit a cigarette and I told him.”

For several hours, several days, you succeed in maintaining that reincarnated image from your past. And what do you do with it? You use it to make love. You become young again and now you can make love truly, through the phantom that is you, with all the experience added, the nostalgia, the retrospective desire that you could not feel when you were really young. Yes, you tell him, we can possess what we desire only when we have ceased to desire it. Something like that. And Javier writes it down and makes it his second book, a novella of eighty pages that was published in a beautiful binding.

Why did you tell him that story, Dragoness? Maybe because one day you had dared to open a letter addressed to him. Maybe because you knew that he wanted proof that your love for him meant a sacrifice and a loss and a sorrow for you, and for that reason was a more valiant love, just as you both believed, without saying it, that when our external dream breaks down and falls apart we are merely compelled to maintain it within us, inside us, with greater suffering and greater fidelity: and perhaps in the end, when his mistrust of you finally became converted into a motive for love, Javier feared that although you were giving up everything for him, you were doing it because you loved him not as he really was but as he seemed to be, his mask. Could that have been why you told him that story, Dragoness? So that through his imagination written out, a phantom, he would show you what it was he feared that you loved: his own and real phantom?

* * *

Δ Look, Elizabeth, it’s a hall of mirrors, it’s always been a hall of mirrors, but only now do we understand. And you, you understand too, don’t you? The electric fence charged at high tension. The first prisoners pass through it June 14, 1940. That’s what my brochure says, and brochures don’t lie. The portal above which grass grows today opens only to allow the columns of trucks to come and go to and from other prisons, and the car of Commandant Jökel to pass in and out. The prisoners arrive and are taken to a receiving room and made to face the wall. Their valuables are removed from them and their names are removed from them and they are given numbers they do not know and their descriptions are recorded. Next to the receiving room is the guard room, where the work details are checked in and out, where mail is censored. And then the hall with the locked gun racks for the guards’ rifles, and the office of Commandant Jökel. The clothing room where they turn in their civilian garments and receive trousers marked with three red stripes and a military jacket with a red triangle on its back or, if you’re a Jew, a yellow star. Once a week towels are passed out and now and then sheets and even underwear. You can see the garage where the Commandant’s car and a truck are kept, and then you enter the prison proper passing beneath the huge inscription, ARBEIT MACHT FREI, and on to the administration offices where Rokyo assigns cells and duties and decides who will leave each morning to work in the Schicht factory, who to the Sputh factory in Lovisice, who to the leather factory in Zalhostice, who to the brick kiln, for everyone must work, seven in the morning until seven at night. Then the mess hall and the guard Hohaus who is in charge of buying food for the fortress and feeding the prisoners: half a pound of bread and a cup of black bitter water in the morning before leaving for work; at noon thin soup or herb tea; more soup just as watery at night after returning. The barbershop, where they have their hair shaved when they first come and afterward the weekly sterilization, the disinfectant rubbed in. Next to the kitchen the boiler room. Then the cells with the double-deck wooden bunks against the wall, the stove that is never used, the light bulb it is forbidden to turn on, cells always damp where men and women and children return from work drenched and cannot dry their clothes but must put them on wet again at five the next morning. One hundred and twenty to each cell, one toilet, one sink, the windows always closed despite the stench. Cell 16, where old men and the feeble peel potatoes. Cell 14, the dormitory of those who work in the laundry. Cell 13, home of those Very Important Prisoners who carry packages and letters, the cooks and valets and barbers of the Black Shirts. Cell 12, for prisoners of German nationality who have squealed. Then the solitary cells, twenty of them along a corridor, no light, concrete floors, open only to Rokyo and Neubauer. Beyond the solitary cells, the prison kennels and another corridor. Two shower heads and a wooden bathtub. But this is not for washing but for torture, for interrogation beneath the ice-cold streams to the slap and whip of rubber hoses. The true bathroom, beside the hut that is used both for garbage and for disinfecting prisoners. The bath is for Saturday. First the women, then the men, and before the women go, all the doors of the men’s cells are locked. Adjoining the bath, the infirmary tended by a prisoner-physician; the official doctor visits twice a week, in the evenings, and merely to sign death certificates. There are real beds in the infirmary, but Jews are not allowed there. A small concrete bridge that leads to the old stable, now become the hospital for women. Cells 9 and 8. There are beds for two hundred but there are five hundred patients, they infect one another, the beds must be reserved for gangrenes and abscesses. The men’s hospital, its floor covered with straw and paper mattresses stained by dysentery. The guards’ garden, where women prisoners raise vegetables. Beyond the bridge, to the right, on a low earthen elevation, the morgue, the small dark room from which the dead prisoners go out to the incinerator in the ghetto: and the ghetto comprises the entire city. From the incinerator they return to the prison in urns marked F or M, Frau, Mann. Cell 2, for Jews; Cell 1, for Russian prisoners. The Herrenhaus, the mansard-roofed mansion with porches and central heating and surrounding hedges and rooms filled with lacquered furniture and a huge radio and small glass tables and reproductions of Alpine landscapes and a selection of classical records, the dining room with its polished chairs, the bedrooms with their mahogany beds, and the Czech maids, the park with its graveled paths, and beyond, the women’s section. The same monotonous cells, the same wooden bunks, the same closed windows looking out on the gray mud of the Moravian landscape. Four cells for female political prisoners. One for Jewesses. Two for the women who have rebelled against their work assignments under the Occupation; they will stay only two weeks, and some, those who have entirely refused to work, will be sent to Germany. A cell where wooden buttons are painted, socks for the troops are knitted. Some of the women work in the guards’ vegetable garden, sew dresses for the female guards, make prisoners’ shirts and underwear. Some clean the officers’ bedrooms and offices, some milk the cows and goats. Cell 32, the isolation cell for women who are sick; here only the doctor can pass. Cell 33, for the condemned. Here sixty-five women lie on the floor. They are fed every third day, once every third day. No one is allowed near them, but from the mess hall next door the men of the Lebensmittelraum have dug a tunnel through which they pass food in. The canteen of the SS, where women prisoners scrub floors and wash windows three times a week. Behind the canteen, in the same building, the shops: blacksmith, locksmith, carpenter: toys, coffins, knives. Then wash-troughs where only men work, except when on occasional Saturdays a few women prisoners are allowed to scrub their sisters’ underwear. The fourth yard of the fortress. Four great rooms on the left: here the bunks are of four tiers and there are eight hundred prisoners to each of the enormous cells, with one small window and three sinks. During winter the damp walls are covered with frost and the sinks are frozen. These prisoners suffer from diarrhea, there are not enough bunks to go around, they must sleep on the floor in their own excrement, and each new group arrives with its own fleas, lice, and typhus. By the end of the war, this part of the fortress will have infected all the rest. On the right, the solitary cells. Then through a door along a long dank corridor with bins of potatoes on both sides, and out through a small iron door to the execution yard: the scaffold on the left; on the right, the wall. Jökel himself gives the command to fire; it is repeated by Oberscharführer Josef Lewinski, and the rifles crack. Here is the Hundenkommando with the Alsatian dogs Jökel has trained. And just beyond are the guards’ recreation rooms, their movie theater, the swimming pool where Jökel’s daughters giggle and splash in their flowery bathing suits. Around everything trenches are being dug constantly. There are no shovels for the prisoners and they excavate the earth handful by handful and carry it off in their caps. Arbeit Macht Frei.