Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“This effort to remember is in reality an attempt to forget, Dragoness.”

* * *

Δ Do you remember? Irene Dunne played the absent-minded millionairess. Jean Arthur was the vulgar newswoman with a heart of gold, William Powell the ironic majordomo, Alice Brady the lady with bats in the belfry, Eugene Pallette the diabetic millionaire, Myrna Loy the wife with a good sense of humor, Roland Young the rich tourist with a fondness for ectoplasm, Cary Grant the epitome of natural elegance, Charles Ruggles the man of large means who won the English valet in a poker game. And beautiful, mad, irresistible Carole Lombard, and Mae West who winked one eye and said “Beulah, peel me a grape” and wriggled her hourglass body. And you and Javier were holding hands in the Brooklyn movie and watching The Four Daughters because John Garfield was in it and you had never liked any actor as much as you liked John Garfield, who looked like Javier and whose name was Jules Garfinkle and who had lived walking with humiliation on one side and danger on the other, intuitively the first existential hero, before Bogart or Brando or Dean: that living contradiction, the hero-villain, the saint-assassin, the artist-vulgarian who died fucking. And today when the television shows some old movie featuring John Garfield, you see to it that Javier is there to watch and remember.

You and Javier do not see eye to eye about Latin American artists and intellectuals. “They are all alike,” you say vehemently. “Using art merely to be able to feel like aristocrats, to climb into the oligarchy they pretend to be struggling against. Everything they do is so elegant, so nice, so pretty-pretty. It’s simply their way to escape from the horrors of the crude, foolish, stuttering middle class. That’s all. They may call it ‘form’ or ‘good taste’ but it is really impotence and fear and a longing for the past. And most of all it is vulgar social climbing.”

“And your gringo artists?” Javier retorts. “The hero with hair on his chest? Aren’t they trying to escape their different middle class by pretending to be stevedores, baseball players, tiger hunters, railroad workers, boxers?”

It ends calmly. “Florence Rice,” you say quietly. “Who remembers Florence Rice today? Or Arline Judge? So many lovely faces that once were as famous as Rochelle Hudson and Madge Evans and Jean Parker, and today no one even knows their names.”

You held hands together in the movie and the movie made everything the same for both of you. Then when it was over you walked out into that other movie that had not changed all through your childood: the kleikodeschnik standing outside the synagogue with his face contrite and his hands joined, the ototot forever trimming his old Russian beard, the languid and cultivated schönerjud who played chess on the second floor of a neighborhood café, the old woman waiting for the funeral to emerge, her handkerchief already open to receive alms from the mourners, the emancipated radikalke with the shrill voice …

“And would you like that I should be such a crazy woman like that, Beth? That is what you would like I should be?”

“No, Mama. I didn’t say that.”

“Then stop paying attention to your father. Let him play pinochle and feel modern. Let him be all wrong, only don’t let him know it. Come and take my hand, Beth. Lie down here beside me. We can’t escape it. It’s deeper even than we think. You will see if then he doesn’t understand what I have understood. That the important thing in life is what we are leaving behind when we die. Those who will cry for us.”

You squeezed Javier’s hand in the Brooklyn theater and again watching television today. John Garfield, playing the piano. “It doesn’t seem the same today, does it? Today there is nothing unusual about it.”

“Today there is no point in the mother tongue,” whispered Gershon.

“Shut up! What are you saying? Renegade! Goy!”

“All that the Lord hath said will we do, and be obedient,” you say to yourself as the car leaves the shadows of the avenue of trees. It is one in the afternoon. Franz glances at his watch. The earth is white. White trees. White hillsides. The fine dust rises. Ahead is the river, the ford. “Blessed be he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

* * *

Δ Franz slowed to a stop, cut off the motor, and set the hand brake. All of you got out, silent, though Isabel held back for a moment. Dust swirled up around your legs. You stood beside the car. In the ford, almost motionless, was a herd of cattle. They covered the narrow strip of earth that stretched between the two arms of the river. Bulls, cows, yearlings, in the middle of the ford blocking your way. Bulls with short thin horns and brown hides glistening under the sun. Bulls with curly foreheads and short necks, with powerful haunches and planted hooves, motionless, guarding the passage across the river. Bulls with thick high skulls and long tails, their muzzles buried in the swift water. Short-horned heifers feeding on the white grass on the other side with a side-to-side munching movement of the head. Nervous, jumpy yearlings peering through between the legs and beneath the stomachs of the larger bulls. Bulls with myopic eyes, smoothly bellowing, bulls with rubber-capped horn tips and heavy dewlaps. The protruding sleepy eyes of the cows.

You walked forward, the four of you, to the edge of the finger of sandy soil from which extended the natural bridge the river had created between two whirling pools. Downstream a little way, the river poured over a falls. The cattle watched you with a low, lost gaze, moved their short round ears nervously, went on sweating sweat you could smell. Suddenly a cow lost her footing at the edge of the ford and slipped slowly, at first with a pathetic serenity and torpidity, then with nervous hopelessness, toward the deep water. She sank with all her weight, began to swim showing the crown of her head a few times, and then was swept out of sight over the waterfall. None of the animals turned toward her. Although nervous, their movements were peaceful. Slowly they munched the white grass, drank the green water. Their swollen eyes seemed distant and unseeing.

The four of you stared at the cattle. Isabel, very nervous, laughed and then covered her mouth. Abruptly, Franz took your black shawl, Dragoness, and walked out along the finger of sand toward a large bull that little by little, as Franz drew nearer, appeared more and more nervous. The bull swayed his head from side to side. He sniffed the air. So did the other animals, and suddenly the bull had become their chieftain. He did not conceal his fear of the man advancing toward him. Sweat poured out and made his black hide more lustrous. He humped and pissed, and his eyes became opaque. Franz continued to move toward him. Finally the bull’s eyes seemed to fix themselves upon the man, to separate him from his scent and from the sound of his feet sliding across the sand. Both eyes slowly focused and the bull bellowed and jerked his head violently backward. He was seeking anything, a smell or a snort or any noise, that might be able to draw his fear and attention away from the tenacious figure still walking toward him: the bull was seeking an escape, a way out. But the herd had become a motionless wall of black hides and eyes and green and white horns. His only escape was to move forward, to charge.

The bull stopped bellowing. He stiffened, as if for all to see him. His cowardice had become courage and there was also his physical pride in simply being there beneath the sun. His torpid eyes became large black coins, living and brilliant. He dilated his wet and elastic nostrils and snorted. He began to tremble with fury, his straight loins, his haunches and rump, the sharp ridge of his back. All his body was made for struggle now: the thick and powerful muscles in front, the lean swiftness behind. His hooves were black, his nostrils large, his chest deep, his breathing savage, and he was filled with the bravery that rises only from fear. Franz, the shawl cape held open at his side, was still approaching, and the two figures, the slow moving man and the motionless bull on the white sand, made an image fit for the painted wall of an ancient cave, the face of an imperial Roman coin, a Greek mosaic.