Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

You sit again at the same café facing the bay. Night falls. You order ouzo again and they bring you the white bottle.

“Please, Javier, I do understand. But our love exists to be used. I don’t want only the rare perfect moments. Javier, Javier, don’t hurt me. Love is made to be used, to be spent. Only by using it can we make it last. Only when it is gone will it renew itself. Give yourself to me, Javier. Only by giving will you receive.”

White, bled, and exhausted, are the guardian lions of the island of Delos alive? Javier was afraid to go down to them and so were you. The point is that they are there and they aren’t there. They are there because their hind legs rest sunken forever in the stone pedestal, their forelegs are erect and secure, about to rush upon whoever would profane; they are there because of their long torsos and powerful ribs, their eroded heads, their open throats, their grieving eyes. But they are not there because your Island of Delos itself is not there, Elizabeth. It’s a dream, a mirage, and everything it contains is a dream. It exists only for you. And you want your men, myself, Franz, Javier, to let themselves be dragged into the mirage, to be infected by it and participate in it. When you and Javier stopped before the lions, you dared to say that they held a mystery, a miracle, a surprise, and Javier said nothing. And that afternoon in Mykonos, on your way back, you pursued him like a rejected and bitter fury, baiting him …

“You wanted to defeat me, Ligeia. You’ve always wanted to defeat me, to pull me away from my purposes and down me and drown me in the rites of your sensuality. And I had wanted you because I needed a bridge between my world and the world of what is. You didn’t give it to me. You gave me only an appetite that was always aroused, always waiting to be satisfied. You demanded that I attend to it, and to your dream built upon it, rather than to my own needs. Shut up now. Shut up, it’s enough, enough! You will never understand how you have destroyed me.”

You burst out laughing.

In the first chapter of his Pandora’s Box, Javier wrote: “A novel discloses what the world has within itself but has not yet discovered and may never discover.”

* * *

Δ “It looks like scenery from a movie by Pedro Armendáriz and María Félix,” Isabel laughed. She pressed down harder on the accelerator.

You turned and looked back at your husband, seated beside Franz. “And I know all your defects.”

“The advantage in losing your innocence is that you also lose your prejudices,” Javier replied.

“Hey, we’re going into Cholula now,” said Franz.

“Listen!” you cried, Dragoness. “Listen, I’m going to tell everything! Out with it, everything!” You looked at them, from one to the other, and found only patient, tolerant smiles. There was no need for Javier to lean forward, apparently to light your cigarette, and whisper, “I remember, too, Ligeia, but I don’t talk.”

Aloud, he went on: “As a child, I used to scribble on the walls of toilets the words I was afraid to speak to anyone’s face. Bitter insults … challenges. Then later I came to understand that writing books amounts to the same thing … insults and challenges converted into the names of characters. But the advantage was now my dream and my life were the same at least, and one could summon up the other at any time. How about you, Franz?”

“I’ve said it before. The small truth becomes the big lie. And it’s the same with lies.” Isabel turned down the radio to listen to him. “For example, it’s a small lie that when you are accused, you always stand, while your accuser kneels. But just the same, that’s a big truth. It’s what really happens.”

It’s so nice to have a man around the house, sang Eartha Kitt.

You laughed, Elizabeth, Ligeia, Dragoness. “I’ve wanted to tell you something, Javier. That we make love and speak and write the words of love only to add to the unreality of the world. To make life a little better lie.”

Javier nodded. “We say things that are alien to life,” he said quietly. “Fearing that the world may merely accept their strangeness and observe to us, somehow, that it has all been said before, that we’ve failed to surprise, nor have we made the world change in the least.”

“Zero hits, zero runs, one big error,” said Isabel. She laughed alone. “And which needs the new manager, the writer or the world?”

* * *

Δ I got out of my turismo limousine in the square in Cholula and said to you, Dragoness, though you didn’t hear, that the evil is not to be a whore but to be a whore who makes bad investments. The evil is not to be a thief, but to be a crummy pickpocket. The evil’s not to be a crook, but to be … But what the hell, what difference does it make in the end? All that matters is the harem and the sideshow, the carnival acts that can divert us for a little. The magician Simon, for example. Simon Magus, who sought the mother of everyone, the mother of the temple, the mother of everyone, the loving bitch who becomes, in Irenaeus’s translation, the Helen whose skin launched the ships of Troy and who emigrates from flesh to flesh until she finally reaches the cathouse: our little lost lamb, the only lamb who merits redemption. But Hippolytus lays it on the line: the whole earth is only earth and it makes small difference where you sow, so long as you sow. And when Simon the Magician got to Rome, he ordered his disciples to bury him alive so that he could rise again on the third day, a ploy he found most admirable. They obeyed. They dug his grave and put him into it and waited three days and then many more, but Simon Magus did not rise, then or later. No, adds malicious Hippolytus, “for he was not the Redeemer.” That may be granted, but it’s beside the point. The point is that orthodoxy is no stronger or weaker than the heresies that keep it bouncing. A dogma without its heresy is pale and feeble tea indeed, Dragoness. For when orthodoxy absorbs the central moonshine of a faith, all tenets and rites that lie toward the fringes — the midnight eye, the seer’s crystal ball, the fangs of the vampire — can live on only as heresy, only by going underground in the hope of some day being touched by the purple of bonding consecration. The beauty of a well-made gospel is that it has two faces and it survives precisely because we can play heads and tails with it. Pascal, that Dracula whose beat was from convent to convent, shocks us: “Earth is not the dwelling place of truth; truth wanders among men lost and unrecognized.” And the very Testament of your old folk proclaims: “Follow not the multitude.” What if fair-haired J.C., our era’s first hippie, had made his peace with Rome and the Pharisees and sat down to a few quiet hands of gin rummy with Iscariot, as if his ministry were a movie made by Buñuel? Or what if he had joined the laundry soap business of Pilate, Procter, and Gamble? What our gentried holy don’t dig about the Holy Ghostling nailed to His cross is that in reality He was history’s first psychopath, the first Son of Man really way out in grassy left, and that if He were making His pitch today we would find Him with His legs wrapped around a motorcycle, His eyes goggled and a wide belt circling His waist, or shaking His behind to the watusi in order to shake free of the sanctimonious. And those bits about reviving the dead, walking on water, and sailing up from neighborhood chimneys were merely shock treatments, for then as now, to shock was the only way to consecrate. Suppose J.C. had had the politician-sportsmen of the P.R.I. in his corner, or that master handler, L.B.J.; Jesus, he would still be stuck there in Israel, buried in his little province, and the New Testament would have to be written by Theodore White: The Making of a Savior, A.D. 32. No, whatever He was, Christ was no square. He was cool enough to come across with a new nervous system for the race called human, and that was why the stay-putters of the time saw Him as an undesirable. The stay-putter always has it all worked out, a code that covers everything, a rule for whatever turns up. But the hipster, the Son of Man who lives on gut, must gamble everything, for only by doing so can he fuse opposites, integrate the poles of life, and refuse to be stopped by every chance “Hey, hold it there.” And who can you trust, Dragoness, if not those who depend only on themselves: the whores and the crooks, the artists and the exiles, the refugees and the hermits; in short, the heretics, Christ’s children, who are one with the Children of Mary. The story of our Shining Childe Christ is simply the story of individual energy, apocalyptic, devastating, then as now the only true salvation for anyone. That’s precisely what He wanted to tell us. Come on over to the other side, my Magdalene, and don’t let them piss on you, and I’ll sober you up with water from the Dead Sea. And you, my Hooligan Twelve, let’s split the hell out of here fast, for time is running and we still have the merchants to instruct on whether business is always business, lepers are crawling around us like lice, children are waiting, little and afraid of my spikes, too long and too scary, and last but not least, I have a date with my Father to keep. Hustle, cats, hustle. And suddenly only Lautréamont could finish the parable of the children: they end up maimed. You don’t like that, eh? Look, Dragoness, the New Testament tells us in words that are beat enough to be almost clear that J.C. was going, going, man, going cool and crazy and high and open, clawing, digging it, swinging, with it. And if you give the Bastard the credit He deserves, you have to admit that He chose his time and place well and knew exactly the right moment to let the curtain drop. A Cat like that don’t live to die of old age, Dragoness, in His carpenter’s pad with His chest clogged up with anti-phlogiston. No: He gets the word young and goes straight to the hairy mountain of Ixtapalapa, dying young like James Dean and John Garfield and Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan and Raymond Radiguet and Shelley, Novalis and Isidore Ducasse, to say nothing of Mayakovsky, Kleist, Pushkin, Sergei Esenin, Alexander Blok, and Gaudier-Brzeska: one more year and they would be saying there goes an old bum with dove shit on his forehead instead of a crown of thorns. Do you know why He could stand up to temptation in the desert? Because He was His own tempter, His own crippled Satan. God, imagine how it would have turned out if the Establishment could have gotten Him to stretch out on a couch and talk away His manias of persecution, His complexes about His Holy Father and His Virgin Mother, His double personality … or was it triple? Then goodbye my beloved Calvary, and out He passes with sand up to his neck en attendant Golgotha. I tell you, Dragoness, He made it damn rough for them, for no one could be sure whether a true follower should be a fisherman cockfighter or one of those others, those who kept up the Pharisee routine, Barabbas and Judas Iscariot and my abused Magdalene and all the Starters and Stoppers, Leapers and Hoppers, whether he should be a Saul Stalin (Qui Jacet S.S.) or one of those who play the classic spiritual stud but without facing temptation or discovering truth. Consider the Gnostics, for example: they tell faith to go to hell if that will lead them to knowledge, always secret, diabolic wisdom, the universe itself become a great unanswered question. And they never tired of poking their inquiries at an ailing God who was Creator of the black world that now went its way without Him, masterless. Then they emptied themselves writing the fantastic literature that their gospels represent. To give an example: it was Simon the Cyrenaic who was crucified, not Christ; Christ, dying of laughter, had hauled ass to the hills of the Lord where the wine flows and the Salomes cheerfully go down on their backs. Read well your Clement of Alexandria, Dragoness. There you learn that it was the Gnostics who had the guts to rehabilitate Cain. And if there was ever a fugitive, a man persecuted and alienated, it was Cain, a son rejected by the cruel Maker of Gods, the God who antedated Creation. Fair-haired Christopher, the God-Discoverer, came to cry fool to Him, but was frustrated by the mealy priests. Well, who has a better right to redemption than Cain or the Sodomites or Esau, or for that matter Judas himself, who gave Christopher the shaft with such ease and without whom the Crucifixion would never have come to be, and ergo…? The bitching Gnostics prefigured that great pastor the Marquis de Sade and extended salvation to the condemned and made them ours. For if the Savior came to save, why in God’s name should the Church give itself over to damning? And do you think they had done enough then? You don’t know them, Dragoness; the Gnostics were not boys to stop halfway and secure. They go on and tell you that if you want to fight your lasciviousness, give in and enjoy it, that to extirpate your sensuality, you must free and satiate your sensuality. For if there is a divine nature in all of us, is the good only that which lays down external dogma, the Christian line? Why the hell do we participate each of us in the Divine — grace — if not to go our own individual ways, unforeseen, even heretical? So here we go, Dragoness. That’s called taking the sword in your mouth and swallowing it up to the hilt, and sure enough, the Fair-Haired One told us, “There are eunuchs who have become eunuchs only to win the kingdom of heaven.” So, you see, the Gnostics put their balls on the table so that Baudelaire and Breton could be born, and Genet and Miller, so that we could dream the American Dream that enacts the crimes of Monk Ambrose in the feudal castles of Beverly Hills with the Bleeding Nun, la Belle Dame Sans Merci, Pollyanna Equanil of our masturbating dreams; you can hear his steps on the carpets of the glass prisons. And in regard to Marcion, when Polycarp saw him, he shouted, “I know you, First-born of Satan!” simply because Marcion, a hipster if there ever was one, had been the first to understand that God is the Alien, the entirely Other: for if the world is no more than an unrealizable tension between love and justice that ends in the final proof of nothingness — the corpse and the pit — then the Creator of the World is no Kin to God, Who is absolute Love and Justice. We can indeed blame the Creator for the horrors of life. But not God, the Alienated, the Outsider. And with Him only those like Himself can communicate: the beats and the lunatics, the apostates, the lost in heresy. Such, my dear Elizabeth, is the miracle of hell. So Origen said rightly that once Christ showed up we could see that thanks to Him there have been and there will be many more Christs. No one will remain Satan forever: only God is eternal, all can become Christs, even Satan himself; everything will make its way back to Divinity, murder as well as sodomy, rebellion like incest, blasphemy like prostitution. For if only God is eternal, how can hell be eternal? It don’t figure, does it, Dragoness? Thus Satan cannot remain eternally alienated from God: if he could, that would be his victory; and the miracle of hell is that all its tormented roads lead to paradise. Origen was anathematized, but he, prescient, had already cut off his balls to throw them in their faces. Which was why I told you in the beginning that Simon Magus scored a solid point when he testickled the sense of humor of St. Peter, the cockfighter and fisherman, by offering him gold in exchange for the secrets of the Holy Ghost, the first simony. Solemn old Pete observed him quietly and Simon the Magician went into myth, along with his Helen of Troy, the prostitute of the Phoenician temple who was the mother of God and of the myth itself, and ended buried alive in order to demonstrate that he was not by a long shot the Redeemer, to squelch the pompous mummies who had then as now taken over the whole show.