Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

He laughed a long time and my eyes wandered around our apartment, the same apartment we had taken so many years ago when we returned from Europe and the same one we have today, except that today it is joined to the next apartment: we had the wall torn down and made the two into one, spacious and comfortable, when we returned to Mexico for the second time in 1950. How many things remain that we had in the beginning? I don’t know. Sometimes I feel sad touching the old sandalwood bookcase, now out of sight in the maid’s room, used to keep linen. When I rub my fingers over the bindings of the old secondhand books we bought and loved in those days. Faust translated by Nerval. Do you remember it? Kleist’s Penthesilea. Even a life of Byron by Maurois that we picked up from an old bookseller on the Quai Voltaire. Secondhand, the Grasset edition, wrapped in cellophane that was supposed to make it look newer and that gave a devilish glitter to Byron’s face on the cover. Some of those books are gone now, you’ve taken them away, leaving gaps. And our posters we threw out with the trash, silently, a little ashamed, when they began to be tattered. The poster of bright flags and a fantastic nude surrounded by puffy shadows. That of the red-faced beer drinker clad in black. The Yugoslav peasant woman, thin as the spire of a cathedral. Moreau, Hals, Meštrović. And the clothing, the suits, shoes, underwear, and the combs, vases, the leather cases, the sheets, towels, even the silver and china, everything leaves us, disappears so silently and gradually that we are not even aware. I used to like to smell your towel when you dried yourself after your shower. Today so little is left. Almost nothing except the books. The books we have kept; when we traveled, they traveled with us. We packed them in wooden boxes lined with newspaper and nailed the boards down and shipped them to Argentina when our money ran out and you took that job in the diplomatic service.

* * *

Δ Your head rolled to the left until it leaned on Franz’s shoulder. He looked away from the road and glanced at you. The ash-gray hair that you color afresh each night using a lacquer dye, not a real dye, and an atomizer; you could wash the gray out any time you cared to and make your hair a different color. Your half-open mouth, wide, the lips full. Your plucked eyebrows. Your large, aquiline nose, the nostrils dilated a little. Your closed eyes. Gray eyes, Elizabeth, that change colors as the hours of the day change. Your broad strong hands. Your arms, crossed beneath the black shawl. Your white blouse, your tamarind-colored skirt, the glistening stockings, the low-heeled shoes. Franz looked at you and you opened your eyes and his head turned back to his driving.

“By repeated crime, even a queen survives her little time.”

* * *

Δ Your times with Franz have all been like this twilight in Cholula. When he looked at you in the car this morning, you opened your eyes and returned his look but rather than seeing him you were remembering him, as though to you his present moment were, because of your memories, a kind of longing for the past that Franz himself once explained by reading aloud a beautiful letter of Freud’s you showed him in a biography: “Strange and secret desires emerge inside me — perhaps from my ancestral heritage — toward the Orient and the Mediterranean and a very different life; desires from the close of infancy that will never be fulfilled, that do not conform to reality.” Well, Elizabeth, what do you know about this man who awakens in you strange and secret desires? That he came to Mexico after the war, that for some time he worked as a mechanic, that today he is a salesman in an agency that sells European cars. You met him little more than a year ago. You arrived alone at a Cuevas show where Javier had agreed to meet you. You were looking at and admiring a sepia drawing of the Marquis de Sade and his family, an obscene, peaceful intimacy of the sort we can be rescued from only by the devil or a clown, and Sade as Cuevas had depicted him was both: the devil-clown, as though Chaplin and Mephistopheles had joined hands to create a new being, a saintly criminal, an erotic ascetic, an assassin who gives birth, a liberator who tyrannizes. You shuffled names — the famous who constitute your kudos — and with Cuevas repeated Buster Keaton and Boris Karloff, Tod Browning and Jean Genet, George Grosz and Al Capone. You were not attempting to justify yourself or to become one with the age; you were merely taking pleasure in the awareness that incompatibles no longer exist, that the old Manichaeism which has led us by the split nose since the time of Plato, obliging us always to make choices, always to create blacks and whites, has taken a step that cannot be reversed toward the only position that matters today: a position not midway between external good and evil, objective, clearly separated, but between the moral options that are found only in subjective unity: the evil, he said, is not to be a thief but to be a petty pickpocket; not to be a murderer but to be an incompetent murderer.

“And if they capture you?” you asked, opening your eyes wide.

“That makes no difference. Every murderer wants to be captured, even compels his capture. But the bad murderer lets himself be captured merely through negligence. He is a good murderer if he is discovered despite his professional competence, knowing that he must be judged because that is part of the dialectic of the myth, required in order to fulfill the legendary beauty of redemption. Raskolnikov. And then his every act becomes important and meaningful.”

“Like Monsieur Verdoux.”

“Exactly. There you have the clown-criminal, the juggler-murderer whose being is a fusion of opposites.”

And Franz, beside you, merely said: “We can commune only with our opposites.”

* * *

Δ Franz lay beside you on the thin hard mattress in the hotel in Cholula, whistled the Merry Widow Waltz, and from time to time spoke, coldly, distantly, almost curtly, a word at a time, now and then whistling again to space out his narrative:

“We were students of architecture. But music was our passion. Those were good days. Youth. Mugs of beer. Talk, talk, talk until dawn. Schultzie. How we used to laugh with Schultzie, the waitress in the rathskeller. We’d pinch her behind. We’d laugh. She wore no panties. In our honor, she said. So that we could pinch her as we pleased. That was what she said. She served us beer. Beer, beer. And we were studying architecture but our love was music. Cantata 106. Actus Tragicus. Ein Deutsches Requiem. Tristan. That was happiness. More beer. A round for the whole house. White sausages with yellow mustard. The Dreigroschenoper came to Munich. Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne. Ulrich suggested we go to Albertstrasse. Heinrich didn’t want to. He finally confessed he had the clap. We laughed and laughed, but Heinrich cried. Schultzie rubbed his head. She told him to pinch her and cheer up. We ate marinated herring. Den man Mackie Messer nennt. We went to the theater, the three of us. The shark has teeth. Heinrich stomped out before the third act ended. We found him in a nearby beer hall. He was furious. Brecht was an anarchist. An enemy. We saw Schultzie walk by without her cap and apron. She didn’t greet us.”

He turned the knob of his transistor radio. Stately, solemn music. “Hah,” He chuckled. “Brahms in Holy Week.” You listened, lying naked beside him while night fell over Cholula. You looked at him questioningly, dubiously. “Of course I recognize it,” he said, answering your eyes. “I’ve heard it a dozen times in the garden of the Wallenstein Palace. In the evening. Sitting on a folding chair. Almost darkness. Looking without much attention toward the baroque portico. Between the columns, very slender columns, Elizabeth, were the orchestra, the soloists, the chorus. Figures that in a certain way complemented the architecture. An eighteenth-century palace. At the beginning, each time, maybe I wasn’t really listening. Just remembering what I had been taught. Brahms found his title in an old notebook of his teacher, Schumann. That sort of thing. Thinking more than listening. And not noticing that something else, a girl’s hair, had caught and was holding my attention. Then afterward, everything flowed together. The darkness. The graveled path crunching beneath my feet. The bells of the Mala Strana…”