Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“That is the heroism that you never recognize in me, Ligeia. Ah. It would be more heroic then to write, write, write, but never to publish, to hold back waiting for a better era. I don’t know. Ask me some day and see if then I answer you. For now I don’t know. Honestly, I do not know. Believe me.”

“Javier,” you whispered in his ear, Pussycat, as the car moved across the ford.

“What?”

“This scene with the bulls,” you smiled. “Why don’t you write it?”

* * *

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.” For whether or not he was there, sleeping or paying you no attention, it was all the same. It made no difference at all.

You know, Dragoness, some actions lead to a magnificent absence of conclusions: nothingness is the real value of certain moments in life. And you say to Javier, who perhaps is not even in the room, that following the incident of your opening his letter, for many months you and he lived a suspended kind of life that consisted indeed of desiring and awaiting, but each alone and separately. You would like to recall it clearly, for it was the bridge across time that led you — little by little, of course, with all the fine gradations, the dead moments and the stretched ones, that one could ask for — to what you live and are today. Says who, eh? Greece, your return, the first months in Mexico City, when the war began, those days remained behind you, pushed back by a desire you both shared but neither mentioned aloud: to attain some new discovery that would not suppress but sharpen your passion. As you put it, Ship ahoy, to graduate and join the Navy. If the road toward that waiting and unknown truth was a time of imperceptible change, slow, marked by an absence of visible events, yet you walked it together. You can confess that when the change came, you were both hoping that it would be an explosion that would blow your lives up and split them apart.

“No, it wasn’t like that. It was never like that. What can I know about him? I speak for myself alone.”

You speak for the silent although smiling breakfasts during which you waited without daring to drink your coffee, driven by God knows what need to preserve the surface of all those actions that concealed the happiness and the desperation of your desire. You would put the slices of bread in the toaster …

“… Adjust the heat, serve marmalade on the little plates. When the toast was ready, I would smear it with butter, and all the time, every morning, I waited for you to speak, to ask something of me, and you went on reading the newspaper in silence — and I shall never forget the names in those black headlines: Rundstedt, Wavell, Gamelin, Timoshenko — reading, sometimes smiling at me as in silence I implored you to tell me what you saw when you walked the city, how your writing was going, begged you to let me read what you wrote as you used to…”

“Do you remember Hart Crane’s The Bridge, Ligeia? I want to find something like that. To give the city its echo in poetry.”

After breakfast he would go out to wander the city in search of the sounds he wanted to echo. And you would go out and walk too.

“Yes, like you, I would go out and walk alone. But we didn’t walk the same parts of the city. I confined myself to our neighborhood, to the streets near Reforma. Reforma between Chapultepec and the Cuauhtémoc circle…”

… was your limited area. The length of the dusty promenade — today it is concrete — beneath the ash trees, past streets that in those days were quiet, past elaborate residences dating back to the turn of the century and boasting relief decorations of urns and vines, some boasting mansard roofs that awaited snow that would never come, carriage gates painted green, white-framed French windows, stone balustrades around the level roofs, up the steep steps to the reception floor. Damp cellars, servants standing in the half-opened doors, elderly inhabitants passing in and out in their elderly expensive cars, a Pierce-Arrow, an Isotta-Fraschini, a Rolls with fringed red-velvet cushions and much luster of gold, passing through wide green gates into the parklike gardens, invisible from the street because of the high walls, of manicured lawn and tall palms. It was a Mexico City you did not know, a disappearing Mexico City, a quarter from the past which had been reserved for you and welcomed you, defended you from the city you feared, that you knew only by fragmentary hurried glimpses caught while you were on your way to a movie downtown or to some restaurant: the shadowed city of hard faces, Dragoness, of criminal eyes, scars, misfortunes, curt and injurious speech, a city always near violence: Mesones, San Juan de Letrán, La Moneda, Corregidora, Argentina, Guerrero, Peralvillo: where the city’s sleeping lions lie, the buyers and sellers of pot and horse, the women of the night who chew our language and spit it back at us transformed, our bat-breed. The bullfights, the cabarets, the cheap movie houses, the vaudeville theaters of that time, all these made you afraid, Dragoness. I know, oh, don’t I know. You always felt that you were followed and spied upon, feared that the muttered compliment of some man who watched you pass might change, without the slightest hesitation, into an act of blood. You doubted your physical integrity: it was as if those glassy eyes, eyes not only of the staring men but of the women and children too, could see more about you than you knew yourself. It was as if they were all diviners and magicians, those dark-skinned millions with their intolerable passivity, their sudden violence, their unhappy smiles, their jeering sadness, their brutality and rancor; it was as if they were the priests of a magic that could turn a simple crossing of glances into some petty death, some destiny as shadowy as that carried in their dark eyes, their callused hands, their thick lips, in their centuries of humiliation and frustrated revenge.

“I think sometimes that all Mexicans just want to get even.”

No, you did not have to go to their haunts and lairs. You could remain far from them, in a neighborhood that at that time was peaceful. Soon the impoverished old families would sell their homes and Niza, Hamburgo, Génova, and Londres would become streets of fashionable restaurants, expensive shops, cabarets, and open-air cafés, a prowling ground for Lancias and Jaguars and vampires in black sweaters and black net stockings and immigrant gringos and the existential heroes of the Café Tirol and the Kinneret, those careful and impatient revolutionaries who make the revolution inside themselves in order to get it over and done with the quicker. And even then these streets would remain for you a barrier against the gangrenous darker city, the hovels of mud and galvanized iron, the bare feet, the scabies, the hands searching through trash and garbage, the black eyes with their criminal or scatological or magical purposes.

“Every Mexican’s look has three possibilities. To kill or to undress or to bless. You had a question to ask of the city, Javier, but you didn’t get an answer. The city had not changed, but you changed. Only a year and a half ago we came home to the apartment late one night and we met a death that didn’t need to happen. That was what I thought. But you thought that it was a necessary death precisely because it was so trivial. I saw the boy’s body lying there against the door of our building. I didn’t know how to respond to it…”

No, Dragoness, for you Yankees have made it a law that in order to show respect for death, one must not know how to react to it. Above all, one must be shocked, believe that death has broken something and that it will break those who contemplate it. Above all, one must have no answer for death.