Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“But how much is all this going to cost?”

“Cost? Well, figure it yourself. Furniture, curtains, material for the cushions, paint, varnish, wax, ashtrays, utensils for the kitchen, light, gas, telephone … I’d say about forty thousand pesos.”

“A motel room is only thirty pesos, Isabel. Well, at least we will save on food. We won’t be eating out.”

“Oh, yes, we will. I like to show you off and I don’t know how to cook. I like to broil my steaks at Delmonico’s, Javier, to cook my Dutch tongue on Jena and my quenelles in La Lorraine…” You laughed. Then you went on, “No, I don’t mean it. I don’t care about fancy restaurants. The important thing is to be with you, and it doesn’t matter where. There’s another point … we won’t waste so much time. Oh, yes, a record player. I can’t live without a record player.”

“Live?”

“Two or three nights a week, silly. And if one of us wants to be alone, the other takes off. Don’t you like to be alone now and then?”

You rubbed your chin, put on a record, and began to whirl slowly.

“Trini López at PJ’s. Recorded live. If I had a hammer …”

You went into the bathroom and closed the door behind you. Javier sat alone on the bed. He tapped his stomach reflectively. Water began to run loudly.

“Isabel?”

You did not answer.

“Isabel!” he raised his voice.

“What?” you said from the bathroom.

“I didn’t expect you to suggest an apartment. I was hoping that…”

“I can’t hear you, Javier. I’ll be out in a second.”

“You’re tired of it now. You have other things to do. Okay, I understand. Yes. Thanks anyhow…”

I’d hammer in the morning …

“… ‘You’re older than I am. Your life is settled, you don’t want to change it. Your character, too. I can understand … Thanks, thanks for everything. It was nice while it lasted. I’ll never forget you…’ Oh, shit.”

If I had a bell …

“‘… Oh, I knew it couldn’t go on. I never had any illusions…’”

I’d ring it in the morning …

“‘… But I didn’t just make you up. I touched you and you were real…’”

It’s the bell of freedom …

“A motel room on the road to Toluca, Isabel. With the taxi waiting outside. Is that all?”

“I’m coming right out. Be a little patient.”

“The same old thing? Believing that now it is different?”

The record ended. Javier listened to the gurgle and bubble of the water running from the faucets and in the bowl of the toilet.

You came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. With one hand you shook out your wet hair.

“What were you saying?”

Javier covered his lower abdomen. You hummed to yourself as you worked your hair into a ponytail and tied it with a yellow ribbon. You threw your hair forward over your head again, the hairpins between your teeth. When you finished putting your hair up, you rubbed your head with both hands and looked for your lipstick in the disorder of the dresser top. You pursed your lips to paint them orange.

“Isabel, when we were at Xochicalco today…” Javier began quietly.

You stopped with the lipstick raised to your mouth. “No, Javier.”

“Yes, no. None of you ever understand.”

“Just no.” You got up, dropping the towel.

“But listen to me.”

“I told you no.” You retrieved the towel and folded it like a wet, heavy whip.

“I want to talk with you about Xochicalco. About what we saw this morning.”

“I know what you want to talk about. No, it bores me.” You slapped Javier’s legs with the wet towel.

“Stop it, Isabel.” Javier drew his legs back. Laughing, you slapped his buttocks. “Stop it, it hurts.” He hunched up, chin to his knees, and closed his eyes.

“The silly things you say hurt more. Who wants to hear about Xochicalco? What’s Xochicalco to me?” You knelt on the bed beside him and tickled his waist. “What a tummy you have.”

Javier opened his eyes. “Why did you open that door this morning?”

“Which door?”

“The car door.” Javier did not look at you.

“Because you were talking to me, not to Betty, who I suppose is used to you.”

“What? What did I say?”

“The same thing you say so often. You need love without love. You prefer desire without desire. No, you weren’t talking to Betty. You were talking to me.” You put your mouth to Javier’s ear and whispered: “Do you know what you call me when we make love?”

Javier hid his face in the pillow. “Forgive me. Please, forgive me.”

You laughed and jerked the sheet off him.

“Stop it!” he cried sharply. “I tell you I don’t like it.”

“I’m not allowed to see it except when it’s stiff and hard? I’d like to see it taking a little nap sometime.”

“Then here, and stop talking.”

You moved between his legs and laughed. “Baby,” you said. “Big baby. What do you really think? Go on, chatter all you want to, I don’t really care. My darling. Do you know something? Today I’ve found out that you tell fibs.”

* * *

Δ “No, it was true. I made love to you twice because I thought that you had understood. You had to understand, for not long afterward you repeated it. They sent me along with the secretariat to a conference in London. A Modigliani show was on at the Tate.”

You agreed to meet there after the morning plenary session and Javier said goodbye to you, to Elizabeth with the falsely gray hair and the heavy eyebrows and the thick lips and the Chanel suit with its torero jacket embroidered with pearls. He arrived at the Tate at two in the afternoon and did not look for you immediately. He studied the paintings with a certain distraction, seeking first a spontaneous reaction to those women with long necks and eyes lacking the cornea, with dark pubes and thin lips, women he had always associated with the twenties but who now he realized were the living women of Thessaly, Mycenae, and Crete, lank and linear; and now it all came back suddenly and without warning, the smells and lights and sounds of the time spent in Greece. Those women of Modigliani’s, fixed in their frames, gave off scents of hyacinth and hibiscus, sounds of draymen’s horses clomping along the pavement, of carpenters’ hammers, the light of the sun filtering through to the bottom of the sea. The orange of the fishing boats, the blue of the Chapel of St. Nicholas, the white of the stairs and pedestals at Mykonos, the ocher and red of the warrior-saint altar-pieces, the Naples yellow of the windmills; once again the haze of incense, the smells of smoking pigs with their bellies open, of donkeys lying dead beneath vultures and flies, of frying chitterlings in the impenetrable kitchens, of garlic, olives, cheese. Javier turned with the feeling that he was being stared through as if his body were transparent, and there they were, the English girls who had come here to see themselves in the Italian mirror, today’s women with loose dark hair and low-cut sweaters and red, green, black stockings of filigree, looking with their black and green eyes at their own images reflected in the paintings. The models had returned to life and were visiting themselves. And behind them, the woman, her hair dyed black now and loose like that of the nude woman on the blue cushion in the painting at her back, her eyebrows plucked thin, her lips painted narrow, her mascara-weighted lashes curling around her clear eyes, her neck made longer by the frill of lace that extended to her waist. She herself had contrived that out-of-date get up, the dress as loose and shapeless as a tunic, falling from her shoulders like a pen stroke. In her smile was readiness, in her eyes was nostalgia. Her long pale hands were joined at the level of her hips with a kind of self-consciousness, the knowledge that they could serve to hide or isolate or protect the sacred parts of a body that belonged to herself and to him at the same time.