Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

At last the bull’s eyes understood that there were two objects before him: the man and the cape. Franz became still. He held the shawl motionless in his sun-browned fists and the wind hardly stirred it. The veins in his forearm were swollen and bluish. His heels were together, his right leg tense, ready to stiffen when the bull charged. You stared with fear, Elizabeth, while Isabel, tittering, held back her laughter and Javier merely looked on. Franz had dominated the bull. Everything, the scent of the cows, the bellowing of the other bulls and the yearlings, the roar of the waterfall, had disappeared, and the bull had become deaf, completely hypnotized by the man and the black cape. The bull charged. His head lifted the cape and he swept past Franz, furiously hooking his horns to the right. Carried forward by his weight, the bull skidded to the end of the strip of sand and bellowed with pain as he fell. He rose again. For a second he tried to rest, but Franz was already pressing him, pinning him where he stood by repeating “Toro! Toro!” Franz’s jaw protruded, his lips were parted stiffly. Both man and animal were wet with fear. Franz’s shirt stuck to his back, the dust had whitened his leather shoes. Beneath his clothing his body could be seen stripped down to violence and tenseness, stripped to nerves and muscles and concentration.

Again the bull charged. Again his head and shoulders swept past Franz’s sucked-in belly, again he lifted the cape with his neck in a movement that was fixed yet flexible. He was completely dominated now. This time he did not slide and fall; he whirled like a spark and charged a third time as Javier turned his back and walked to the Volkswagen, opened the door and sat behind the wheel and with all his strength pushed down on the horn. The horn blared, guttural, cutting, penetrating, filled the silent air with noise, and Javier stared through the dusty windshield and saw the bull make a new charge and the moment of danger when Franz, distracted by the horn a moment before the bull reacted to it, raised his head. The bull’s head was wrapped in the black shawl. The cattle jerked into sound and movement. Nervous, bellowing, they tried to locate the source of the frightening horn. Javier continued to press down as sweat dripped from his forehead. Franz stood on the strip of sand still trying to hold the bull’s attention, and beyond were the herd with their growing fear. The first to move was a sandy-colored heifer who bellowed and turned; then a bull with a ragged hide and then all of them, bellowing, tossing their heads and snorting as fear ran from one to the other like an electric shock. Their sweat and slaver fell from them, urine dribbled, their bellies heaved. Some threw themselves into the river and were carried toward the falls. Others, caught up by terror, stampeded toward the far bank with their shoulders and horns bumping. Finally the bull facing Franz also caught the fear. He bellowed louder than any of them, shook his head crazily, and ran after the herd. The cattle reached the other side of the river and disappeared in a cloud of dust as they raced away from the lunatic racket of the horn.

Franz hung his head. You ran toward him, Elizabeth, and embraced him. Isabel smiled and walked to the car, where Javier, exhausted, was leaning forward upon the button of the still-sounding horn.

The ford was free. The bellowing and the sound of hooves became faint. The sun shone down on a green river of vague slime. Javier straightened and the horn stopped. Once again the chirruping of birds in the round trees across the river could be heard. Javier stepped out of the car and pushed the seat forward and got into the back seat. Isabel followed him. Her smile was hidden but showed in her mischievous eyes as she looked at Javier, trying to find the same amusement in him. You and Franz neared the car, Elizabeth. The two men had the same tenseness, the same serious pallor. To fight a bull: to rest a fist on the button of a horn.

“You put him in danger. Good God, didn’t you know what you were doing?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Franz. “He chased them away better than I did.”

“Don’t make excuses for him! What if they had stampeded toward us?”

“As it turned out, they didn’t.”

“And he distracted you. You could have been gored. What a difference then!”

“Honestly, it isn’t important.”

“My God, what a difference!”

Javier smiled at you, Elizabeth.

Franz started the engine. He drove forward without moving his head. His blue polo shirt was wet with sweat. His gray flannel trousers and his shoes were covered with dust.

Isabel whispered something.

“What?” said Javier.

You straightened Franz’s corduroy coat on the back of the seat, Dragoness. His dark glasses fell out. You retrieved them and carefully cleaned them, using a handkerchief from your purse, and returned them to his pocket.

“This scene with the bulls,” Isabel whispered in Javier’s ear, smiling. “Why don’t you write it.”

“Isabel, Isabel,” Javier said, almost groaning.

* * *

Δ Javier had gone to sleep on the bed, Isabel, and you were reading his notebook and quietly humming “Moon River.”

… But one must suspect that despite their apparent freedom and disinterest, all of the elements of the sky bow before the stone memory of the serpent that girds and imprisons the base of the altar. They were men. Where are they now? Does a hidden river of blood flow down the stairs? Stone cannot see, but the time that culminated here could see. And death can see. The water-sun flows over this world and its men die by drowning. The earth-sun — and I see you, sculptured earth that bears the weight of the pyramid, tilled earth as rigid as the fangs of the serpent in stone which will not endure so long as you — the earth-sun receives the blood. The fire-sun, above and within at the same time, consumes and murders. The air-sun, most ferocious of all, in its silence contains the others, earth, fire, and water. And where are you, you who were once living men? Come forth. Speak to me. What will you say? Look, eyes, and see. Don’t lose a single heartbeat of this still living earth. We stand here, the four of us, facing your symbols, all that remains after the great conflagration of noon. Your symbols? And how are we different from you? Do we await, as you did, the cataclysm, the rupture of the veil, the appearance of the twilight monsters who will devour us? And are they not always here among us? I draw closer. I touch the stone feathers …

Beside you Javier moved and you closed the notebook and looked over at him. He was sleeping the stupor of Cholula’s afternoon. With one hand you covered your mouth to hold back your laughter as you read on:

… What beauty is this, and how does it differ from the beauty we know? Can you say? Yes: for us, our beauty is a model, an example to be followed, an incitement to transpose the model from its fixed expression into our own living experience. The example of art is held before us to be actualized again, though what we create may fall far short of the model, actualized in our daily life. Thus beauty ends up wasted in the merely fashionable. But the beauty I find here, this richness, this barbaric luxury of Xochicalco is something else. Something that is realized not as a model, not to be repeated, that indeed is incapable of further extension. The beauty of the barbaric ends in itself, lives in its distance from, not its identification with, life …

You could no longer restrain your laughter, Isabel. You say that it welled up from deep within you, from the very soles of your feet, and burst out, though you tried to stifle it with your hand and Javier’s open notebook. You laughed so violently, though still silently, that the bed began to shake and Javier drowsily opened his eyes. Now you had no time to return the notebook to the night table. Javier opened his eyes and your laughter burst into sound and he could not understand it, and you, feeling caught, read aloud: “You are in a moment when time seems to flee from you, yet stand still…”