Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“Did I escape from it, Ligeia? Tell me, please. I ask you today with words, but I have been asking you silently since the first day I met you and told myself that you possessed what I lacked, the will to leave the patio and the shadows of the house and go out into the world and there recover the strength that had been robbed from me by Raúl and Ofelia. That was why I fell in love with you…”

“Your trouble is simple. You want to understand everything, and to do nothing. No, Javier. I’m too tired.”

“We might sell the house,” Raúl whispered.

Ofelia’s voice turned shrill. “No! It’s his only illusion! I won’t take it away from him!”

But it was not his illusion but hers. The voices became faint again as Ofelia put her finger to her lips. It was an illusion that would remain silent and motionless because elegance demanded silence and stillness, that would remain a way of belonging rather than of being until one day, crystalline and brittle, it would break forever. The woman of fifty with the face of a contrite young girl would say later that nothing had been important except their decision to hold on, even if what they were holding to was merely appearances. “I was not going to allow you to attend public school and grow up unprepared for life, with no manners … No!”

He noticed that that Christmas Raúl wanted to be closer to her and bought her a new dress. But when he approached her, he could only embrace her and then step back with his hands on her shoulders, shy, tender, mute, without kissing her. Neither did she kiss him. With a tired smile she thanked him and after the meal she went out as usual to return three or four hours later fresh, revived, and one day Raúl did not appear for supper and then there were two mysteries. Heaven and earth are full of Thy Glory, Holy Father. Hosanna in the highest. In that other time.

* * *

Δ Sure, let him give thanks if he wants to for the beginnings of another dry and long and timeless time when he can use his endless words. For you only the rainy months are different: a line drawn in the dust which you welcome, Elizabeth, because you need dates, frontiers of time to cross and leave behind, in order to assure yourself that you still preserve the strength of your youth.

“And that’s what we live for. Nothing else. Are you listening to me, Javier? I tell you that’s all, and if you don’t believe me, then ship ahoy, graduate and join the Navy. Okay, okay, hold your horses.”

We live only to store up strength that will allow us to sustain our postures during old age. Everything is a remnant of youth, something saved from that which was not for its own sake but for the sake of what it was going to become. Good night, sweet prince: life is usury. Well, usury or not, life is for you definitely not anonymous death on the sidewalk before a glass and concrete apartment building, a modern building that was divided up into apartments when it was first constructed, not, like the old homes, years afterward. For you, that is, life is not death. But for Javier death is life. His answer to the body on the sidewalk was in his eyes before his eyes saw the body, a dead lump thrown there before your building. He already knew what to say because he had said it and written it a thousand times, that that dead lump or any other dead lump on the sidewalk before any building is living, still a part of life as it dies. You saw how he looked at the corpse. His eyes thanked it for being there face down, stabbed through, its tongue lapping the puddle of its own blood.

“You thanked him because it was he who was dead and not you, Javier. That was it. That’s why all of you in Mexico carry that expression in your eyes. You are all always expecting and waiting for the act or the accident that will eliminate someone else instead of you. That’s all. And so silently you were telling that poor defunct cadaver, as my caifán friend would put it, that his death was the…”

The most important event in his life. Of course, Dragoness, though neither you nor any of your countrymen understand it. To commit murder or to be murdered is to acquire a value which our other life, our life of breathing, digesting, moving, cannot afford. You know, Elizabeth, there’s something I’ve been wanting to explain to you …

“Who was he? Did he have a name? I suggested that we telephone the police immediately. You looked at me with pity, Javier, and said no, we were not going to call the police. I didn’t understand. I knew nothing about it. Juan Jiménez or Pedro López, a mechanic or a cab driver or a pimp or a civil servant, married, single, old, young, happy or beset by misfortune, was lying there stiffening and still bleeding, living, you told me, the most important event of his life without even knowing it. And you and I were his only witnesses, as if he had died merely for you and me to see him. But what did he know about our presence and our certainty that he was dead.”

It’s a myth, Elizabeth. Listen now. How could he be grateful to you and Javier for knowing that at its end his life had finally accomplished that other act, the only act of value since the moment he had emerged wet and blind between the legs of his mother? I tell you it is simply an old and familiar myth. You know in advance how it will end. Ulysses will return to Ithaca. Penelope will be faithful to her weaving. Medea will murder her own children. What do you expect?

“You squeezed my hand. You told me that the dead man before us was finally alive. That all the dead are living.”

That you were observing a vital, not a mortal, rearrangement of the relationships the man held with the world. That his murder had given value to a being who had no other value. That you should forget your simple logic: life is good, death ends life, therefore death is bad. That we deceive ourselves when we think we achieve a revenge or inflict a punishment when we murder a man. That the murdered man had not died because he lacked the words to persuade his murderer not to do it, to substitute words for death. No, not even that. He had been murdered because his murderer wanted to give him the totality of life. His murderer in killing him had done him a favor.

“We stepped across the body. You yawned. You opened the door and silently we went up to our apartment. The board squeaked just as always. You said that you had decided not to go to the office tomorrow. And when tomorrow came, you didn’t even listen to me when I brought in the afternoon paper and read aloud about the murder. His name was Enrique Rocha. A medical student. A couple had been standing on the sidewalk kissing and a cop came along and told them to break it up. Enrique Rocha, who just happened to be passing, asked the cop what the hell difference did it make whether or not they were kissing on the sidewalk? Let him mind his own business and leave lovers in peace. In peace, Javier, in peace. The cop swung at Enrique Rocha and Enrique defended himself. The cop pulled out a knife and stabbed him. The couple who had been kissing ran off but today they decided to tell their story. The cop fled after robbing the dying medical student of his shoes. Today he is hiding somewhere. They’re looking for him, they’ll find him, and then they’ll let him go.”

So the student was outfielded by the old man with the scythe, and the copper skipped. That’s the way it always goes, Dragoness. Ciao, Enrique Rocha. Bye-bye, copper. It’s myth, Elizabeth. Pure myth.

“So you had been right. I wanted to call the police and you wouldn’t let me. Enrique Rocha? A medical student? No. Simply an abstract being who discovered as he lay there, with his mouth open and his eyes open and the knife in his guts, that in Mexico death is alive.”

Javier laughed: “And you wanted me to call the police!”