Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

She ran down the passageway and went on running past the arcades and the National Theater.

* * *

Δ Here’s something for you, Elizabeth. Something ripe. Yesterday fourteen women in their sixties wearing fashionable hats of felt and velvet and fur-trimmed winter coats sat in a Munich courtroom in the leather chairs provided for the accused and awaited the court’s verdict. Fourteen middle-aged ladies with red noses, bifocals, and scarves. Between 1942 and 1945 they were employed as nurses in the insane asylum at Obrawalde and the charge is that during that time they murdered some eight hundred persons who were neither inmates of the asylum nor patients but had been sent there precisely to be murdered. There’s a picture of the asylum, too. Very handsome. Large buildings, a surrounding park. Each patient was examined when he arrived. The sturdier ones were dispatched to Department 19, the forced labor camp. Those who were feebler went to Department 20 to be liquidated. The method was simple and direct: a massive intravenous injection of barbiturate. For the children something a bit more humane: spoonfuls of jelly with the drug mixed into it. Those who resisted were tubed, orally or anally. They were all defectives: retarded mentally or physically deformed. At Obrawalde alone, eight thousand of them were murdered in the program of euthanasian extermination decreed by the Third Reich. The secret was known: a group of children peeked through a keyhole and saw and told the asylum dentist. But it went no further, for the dentist knew that, after all, the good nurses were merely carrying out orders, and orders are orders. Several of the ladies had balls of yarn in their laps and knitted as they awaited the verdict. One of them testified that she administered the children’s little spoonfuls lovingly, and the children always smiled at her. “If it wasn’t legal,” protested another, “why didn’t the police come and forbid it?” The judge set them free. “They were mere automatons,” he pronounced. “They were simple-minded women incapable of understanding what they were doing.” By way of celebration, the fourteen ladies went from the courtroom to a teahouse around the corner and there ordered coffee, chocolate, and slices of pie topped with whipped cream.

* * *

Δ Franz looked in the rearview mirror and saw Isabel’s face half hidden by the orange gauze that secured her Italian straw hat. He could not see but imagined her green eyes, her long neck, her tanned shoulders, her sleeveless dress of yellow shantung. Then her face was concealed entirely as Javier kissed her. Javier’s shaved cheeks. His sad dark eyes, closed now. His thick eyebrows and his thinning, graying hair.

“I can’t wait to get where it’s hot,” Isabel whispered.

“We’ll be in Veracruz tomorrow.”

“That’s not soon enough. Why can’t we drive all night? I can take turns with Franz.”

“Our plan was to loaf along slowly and see everything. It was your idea.”

“We can see everything on the way back. Now I want to be in the heat and the sun as soon as I can. I want to be in the sea. Don’t you?”

“No, I want to kiss you. Why did you open the door?”

“How will we manage tonight?”

“I’ll think of a way.”

You laughed softly, Pussycat, and tickled Javier’s ears.

* * *

Δ As he released you and fell exhausted on the bed, you remained there on all fours, shaking your loose hair like a lioness. You would have liked to be able to roar at him. Instead you said curtly: “So now there’s nothing left, eh?”

“What do you mean?”

“That was all that was missing.”

“When it’s all over, anything left is surprising,” said Javier.

“Don’t babble. Oh, you’ll use it.”

“Yes? Just how?”

“To get rid of another illusion. Go on, Proffy. I can Freudianize you as far as you want.”

“You speak the damnedest Spanish I’ve ever heard, Isabel.”

“Never mind what kind of Spanish I speak. It’s a living Spanish, at least, and you can use a little life, Professor. That’s why you don’t write anything.”

“Just what do you know about it?”

“Plenty, my love, plenty. I’ve got a nose that can smell some stinks a mile away and against the wind.”

“May God bless you and your perceptive nose, Isabel.”

“You’re impulsive, my love. That’s what you are.”

“Yes, I may be impulsive. And you, aren’t you tired of standing there humped like a camel?”

“Leave me alone. It still burns. Look, Javier, you just can’t be a middle-aged beatnik. It’s out of the question. So for Christ’s sake stop playing games. If you’re a son of the age of Don Porfirio and Queen Victoria, that’s what you are, don’t you understand, and you better stop fooling yourself. Face up to the truth. Stop losing sleep. You’re not a romantic, so forget it. So … No, Javier! No, no, stay still. Javier, Javier, not that way…”

* * *

Δ You sat in the rocker for several minutes, Elizabeth, your eyes still not adjusted to the darkness. The small glowing hands of your watch showed 8:15.

“So you still don’t want to answer me. I’ve startled you and you haven’t had time yet to think what to say. Or maybe it’s just that you aren’t here. Are you here, Javier? Really and completely here? Okay, okay, don’t talk to me. I wouldn’t listen if you did. I would think about something to avoid hearing you. The Virginian, for example. Richard Arlen and Mary Brian, but Gary Cooper and Walter Huston had the leads. At the end they shot it out in the street while everyone ducked for cover. The good guy and the bad guy. Gary Cooper.”

When you say that, smile, pardner.

Sure, smile, Dragoness. Laugh. And when you and Jake hid in the closet you had to put your hands to your mouth and nose to keep from laughing. At first her voice was as calm as usual. “Beth, Jake, come on, we have to go out.” She was making an effort to control herself, you could tell that. You held back your laughter. “I’m telling you to come on. They’re waiting for us. We shouldn’t be late.” Jake pinched you and you shook silently. “Children, children, where are you? It is Friday evening and they are waiting us. The food will get cold. Be good now. There’s going to be matzo balls and gefilte fish. Don’t that sound good? Children, come on out now. It’s late already and they’re waiting.” Jake pinched your thigh and you tugged on your braids to keep from laughing and your mother’s voice rose and began to tremble. “They’re not here? Out with their father, that’s where they must have gone. I bet they went out with their father! Bethele, Yankele, where are you? You are tormenting me, stop it! Come on out! The Mendelssohns will be insulted! On time we can never be now, please, please!” You and Jake held hands, waiting, calm now, quite certain of what she would yell next. “Beth! Jake! You’re scaring me! You’re making me afraid! I’m afraid, don’t you hear me? I’m afraid!” With your eyes closed in the darkness of the closet you could see her clearly, her hair drawn severely back but as always wavy and electric with tones of copper, a few rebellious wisps surrounding her pale, transparent, veinless face. Her thick arms and her knotty hands extended beseechingly.

“Beth, make the light.”

She would never turn on the light herself. She always asked someone. And when the light went on, her hands would move absently to her forehead as if she were brushing something away. One Friday a month you were invited to the Mendelssohns. The Mendelssohns who had known Rebecca’s parents in the old country and here were successful, already well-to-do, and Rebecca when she came in from the street, from the half darkness of that thirteen-block walk, would put her hand to her forehead, brushing the light away.