Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

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Δ A world of ants was there and Javier wanted to give it his attention, Elizabeth, because although minuscule, it contained everything. He began to follow the ants and his path became the entire length of the island of Delos, for the ants had taken possession of it all. They carried miscroscopic bits of marble. That fascinated him. Little by little, a grain at a time, as the centuries had passed they had carried away the dwelling place of Hermes and the temple of Isis. And you didn’t want to look at the ants, you stopped in the House of Masks, fascinated, in turn, by the floor mosaic of Bacchus. You interrupted and distracted Javier, forcing him to look at what you began to explain to him, as if it were not present before his eyes: the panther, at once grave and vital, one claw raised and an acanthus necklace, while the God astride him holds a lance of peace (ribbons and laurel) and a mirror. He rides there examining himself, narcissistically. Androgynous Dionysus, pearls at his throat, his chest covered, his belly naked, his hips broad, his robe rolled and falling down over the loins of the panther. The ants, you told me, streamed through the panther’s yellow eye, gnawing it, blinding it, and Javier stared at them and followed them and did not notice the mosaic masks, the alternating devils and angels with false faces; he went out into the debris of walls, columns, streets, pediments, temples, porticoes, from which Apollo’s light was to have been born. Ants and the wind and the sun and the thistles had built a second Delos that you explored without a guide. Open to the sky, Delos of the lost faces, eroded away if not beheaded. Pagan Isis in the center of the simplicity of a temple of two columns and two buttresses, a contrived simplicity that contrasted with the confused richness of the striated rocks and the yellow thistles above which rose the foreign sanctuary of the second Pantheon. Chameleons jumped among the rocks, brown as the stone itself, or stretched on scattered statues of Cleopatra and her husband Dioscurides, Artemis and her deer, Cybele, the great phallus of porous marble set erect above enormous testes. The water in the pools among the ruins and at the bottom of the cistern was stagnant. Javier observed details while you raised your eyes and searched for some totality that would encompass everything, some tactile, audible unity in this lifeless world that possesses no surviving or resurrected being in what you are accustomed to. Delos is not a museum. It is not the ancient preserved for modern appreciation. Nor is it a point of contrast that can sharpen the definitions of a life foreign to it, a past which, Javier wrote in his notebook, if it could be held by or included within the contemporary rat race might perhaps console us for certain of our lacks. Nor is it even a ruin that grows alongside the lives, indifferent to the old stone, of the descendants, fishermen and peasants, of the ancient faces; there are no descendants, no one lives on Delos, in Delos there is only Delos, not man, there is only what time and the wind and the sun and the ants have made of what Delos was. Nevertheless, Delos is not dead. And your eyes, Elizabeth-Ligeia, insisted that morning on grasping everything, fusing everything and carrying away a complete picture of the dry mountains and the bare rocks that here, as in all Greece, are the objects toward which the marble arms stretch to rescue, here beside the sun and the sea, from impenetrable sadness and distance. Ah, Dragoness, here again you insisted on creating a mirage. You, Dragoness, the young wife, are dreaming on top of Mount Cynthus. If Javier looks down to see the minute concrete reality, you break in and force him to look up, at the dream. Your fantasy obtrudes upon his observation and thought. You move side by side, his slacks touching your skirt, and you feel compelled, driven, to drag him down to that sufficient lie which offers us consolation and inflicts upon us paralysis …

“Did you believe that it was later? No, right there and then. There, there…”

… descending among the stones toward the distant and beautiful point of the island, you both approached it that hot September morning, naked and sweating beneath the burning sun, with the same fear. He held your hand and would have liked to find an answer for you, but your questions that afternoon when you returned to Mykonos on the Meltemi, rocked by an Aegean which had begun to lose summer’s calm, the patched and mended canvas sails swelling, your unspoken questions would not permit him to answer.

“And just what overwhelming thought was it that came to you in the ruins of Delos, Ligeia, and made it possible for your make-believe to become mere bitching as we were eating in that restaurant on the dock?”

“Oh? You have a free moment when you can listen to me? You don’t have to run scribble something down?”

You drank Turkish coffee together and Javier paid and you got up and walked in step toward the Matoyannia and the high whitewashed stairs with painted wooden railings that lead directly from the street to the quarries above.

“But you don’t carry it off well, my love. When you pretend that your muse is sweating you, you don’t really seem at all burdened. Or at least, not burdened with inspiration.”

Badly shaven men wearing white shirts and old caps, donkeys loaded with baskets: grapes, figs, tomatoes, pumpkins. You walked past the Alefcandra, where the white houses fall with mossy skirts into the gulf, showing their piles of gnawed green wood covered with barnacles like the hull of a ship.

“What you fail to pretend well is that you aren’t pretending. It shows, Javier. Fake, fake. You’re not so goddamn tired. You’re just tired of me.”

Javier looked up toward the mountain. Then the church of Paraportiani, the sand castle of his boyhood, of the vacations Ofelia and Raúl had promised and never provided, a white sand castle with smooth corners caressed rather than built by two hands, left to crystallize in the sun, to be worn away by waves of hard white water.

“But maybe I’m wrong. Let’s look at it another way. You’ve come to be afraid you may satiate me. Can that be it? Admit it, Javier. That’s why you stay at your work so long. You…”

You pass into the Hagia Heleni. A golden belly, a cloister where you cannot breathe. Incense rises as high as the shining cross, the copper candelabra. Light enters from a very high, very small niche. The walls are covered with icons of dull gold. Javier is in front of you and your voice pursues him: “You don’t want me to think that you…”

Fifty saints, apostles, virgins, martyrs, patriarchs, priests, each framed by a golden circle, all surrounding the virgin of St. Cyril. In her arms she holds a child who lifts her mantle with one hand and in some secret, even forbidden way seems to dominate her.

“That you’re available…”

Javier hurries on down a white street past the statue of the heroine of 1821, Mado Mavrogennous. Your sandals, following, are noisy upon the cobblestones.

“But don’t be afraid of exhausting our love, Javier. If you trust yours, then don’t worry about the weakness of mine.”

You follow him down the little street, smudging your shoulders with white plaster. There are many small shrines. High chairs line each side. The whiteness blinds and tires Javier and he searches for some relief from it. Venders of cactus leaves and chestnuts. The millers who at twilight roll up the sails of their wind vanes. Children with cropped scabby heads. Old women, staring, with enormous balls of yarn. Sailors who sweat as they haul boats up the sand. Porters with their pants rolled to their knees and makeshift jute hoods.

“Do you think that we should give ourselves to each other only when everything is perfect? I understand, Javier, but you’re wrong.”