Carlos Fuentes: A Change of Skin

You felt Javier’s eyes and passed your hand over your hair.

“The truth of it is that love can be created without passion,” Javier said. “One can appreciate beauty and a woman’s character quite coldly and with no desire. Love without hunger, without urgency.” Franz raised an eyebrow and shrugged his shoulder. I would have done the same, Dragoness. Really I would.

Now you were passing through a village and Franz slowed down. You deliberately turned your head away from the window. But Isabel pressed her nose to the glass and watched the gray, unwhitewashed, one-story adobe houses go by, the little roadside stands selling eggnog and mulberries and plums and cheap crockery junk, the motionless figures stiff with cold and wrapped in gray cloaks. Her nose was against the glass and her breath clouded it and she drew a cat in the cloud and then began to play tick-tack-toe with herself, drawing round O’s and X’s. Ah, me. Her right hand, which was drawing the X’s, was defeated by the O’s of her left. She stopped and stroked her fingers across the sun-brown skin of her arm. Now there was a true forest to the right and against that dark background Isabel ought to have been able to see her eyes reflected in the window, green and brilliant above her smooth high cheeks. A lovely woman, Dragoness. No one can accuse me of not appreciating her. No one. Suddenly she moved forward and leaned across the seat and opened the door beside you and without a sound lunged toward it. Javier caught her by the shoulders and jerked her back just as soundlessly while you reached and pulled the door shut again and Franz said evenly and without surprise, “Careful there.” Then Isabel had fallen face down across Javier’s crossed legs, her mouth open against his thighs, and was crying, waiting for him to caress and calm her, touch her long dark hair, wipe away her tears. Javier paid her no attention. When he moved his hands, it was only to raise them and study his fingernails. He laughed softly and reached forward and touched the back of your neck. You did not move, Elizabeth. You stared straight ahead. Bravo. As you would put it, you had graduated and joined the Navy, ship ahoy.

“Which way here?” Franz asked.

You and Javier spoke at the same time: “Don’t go through Cuernavaca.” “Just follow the highway.”

“Yes, but how far?”

“To the turnoff.”

“Is it before or after the tollbooth?”

“After. You pay toll to Alpuyeca. Before Alpuyeca, you turn off.”

“I remember now.”

“You mean you’ve been to Xochicalco before?”

“Hell, Lisbeth, of course I have. All four of us were … I mean, the three of us were there just last year.”

“How silly, I had forgotten. Little Isabel.” That bitchy smile of yours.

“What?”

“Nothing. I meant that when we went to Xochicalco last year you hadn’t made your debut yet.”

“Very funny,” Javier said slowly.

“Yes, isn’t it?” At last you turned and looked back at them. But Isabel’s head was not resting on your husband’s thighs now. She was sitting up powdering her nose.

“How much is the toll?”

“I believe it’s five pesos.”

“I don’t have change.”

“I do. Here, take it.”

“Then to the right?”

“Yes. I think there’s an arrow you follow.”

“Turn on the radio again, Franz.”

“There, hold it, Franz. I like that.”

“What waltz is it?”

“The Merry Widow,” said Franz.

And while the four of you sped along a winding road exchanging your pleasantries, I was traveling the superhighway to Puebla leaning comfortably back and looking over certain tourists’ pamphlets that are not passed out by travel agencies because a visit to such places gives a commission to no one. Still, one has to be informed. To know for example that the little fortress is entered by a stone door above the arch of which hangs a single yellow electric bulb, and on either side of the door is a window. Grass grows above from a thin scab of earth, as if the fortress were a cellar or a tomb or the buried gallery of a mine, and chimneys emerge factorylike from the grass. First is the administrative section with its flat ceilings: a reception room, the guards’ room, a hall with racks for rifles, then the Commandant’s office. To one side, the room where clothing is stored. Beyond, the garage, then the first yard, and at last you enter the prison proper. A brick wall encloses the yard. Around everything is a deep ditch bottomed with mud.

You move the mirror in front of your face and let your gray eyes study themselves and you notice that Javier is talking again, saying that perhaps simply to know that one loves is enough for the woman but it forces him, the man, to create something, a vision of the woman to correspond to his love. You turn and rest your arm on the back of the seat and stare fixedly at Javier, afraid of what he may say next, imploring him silently not to go on, not to repeat everything, to leave at least some of those words you know by heart well hidden, known only to himself and to you. You interrupt: “How many hours before we get to the sea?” and you try to think of some subject that may interest and divert him, a subject broad, deep, long enough to last all the way to the sea.

A village is passing and deliberately you turn away from the window and lift a hand to your eyes because you do not want to see it. One more village exactly like every other you have seen. None of them different from the first you saw when you first came to Mexico: all motionless wretched moribund. And you fool yourself thinking that was why you came: to discover romantic Mexico, your husband’s homeland. If only he then, so handsome, so poetic, had resembled his country. Its misery, rags, sickness.

That is one face of Mexico. The other is the tawdry face of a land that has given up its poverty in order to achieve only vulgarity, only to ape the lousy States. So that in coming here you escaped nothing. You remained a captive. No, Dragoness, I’m not telling you. I’m just asking.

Isabel lies on Javier’s knees. He feels her warm moist breath through the thin cloth of his trousers and he is thinking, you can be sure, that in truth the appeal of this young woman is based on a catlike mimesis (Am I doing well, Dragoness? Have I caught him?) that may be her most significant charm as well as her most obvious one. He holds up his hands and passes his fingers through his gray, thinning hair and with a sigh reflects that the tenderness Isabel believes is enough for herself and for a lover too might, if he were younger, be enough even for him. And she does not understand that it isn’t enough. She does not know him.

Isabel cries, thinking that you and Franz can’t hear her. What a childish, transparent act, you say silently. Well, let her cry until his pants are soaked, if she wants to. God knows who can understand her. And now he, just as transparent, is touching my neck and trying to tease me into looking back, but I won’t do it. He wants me to turn and see him pawing her, letting her embrace him, kiss him, young, weak, young with the intuitive perversity of innocence, another woman, his little Isabel. I won’t look back at them. I will keep my eyes straight ahead on the white line that separates traffic and proclaims that if you cross it you risk an accident, you chance death itself. A white line that will not end until we reach the sea.

“Have a cookie, Franz?”

He shook his head. You took one of the cookies and it crunched in your mouth. You held the small cellophane-wrapped package behind your head. “Want a cookie back there?”

“What are they?” said Javier.

“Chocolate. Don’t be afraid, they’re from Sanborns. Especially baked for gringo stomachs.” You laughed and waved the package around.