Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

And if you hear me, you deny me. Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine, cum Sanctis tuis in aeternum.

* * *

Δ Isabel stopped in the Cholula market in front of the clothing stall. A mended canvas, held up by two staves in front and in back tied to an iron ring in the wall that formerly was probably used to tie horses and mules; shadowed heaps of skirts, blouses, and shawls. The woman attending was an Indian with narrow forehead and wide cheeks. She offered the shawls silently, spreading them in the sun so that Isabel and you, Elizabeth, could see the details that had been wrought slowly and lovingly, thread by thread, in the distant huts of the old women weavers who had spent their entire lives before their looms, joining the threads patiently, red, blue, black, yellow, shading the tones until each shawl would glisten a little in sunlight and retain that light in darkness, shining with the slightest movement of head or arm. The old woman showed them without speaking. She was small and dark, as ageless as all Indians, her face wrinkled but her hair lustrous and young. She chewed a tortilla and showed the shawls.

“Let me see the yellow one,” Isabel said. The woman offered it, her face completely passive. Isabel spread the shawl around her shoulders and crossed it over her breasts. She raised it until it covered her head. You watched her, Elizabeth.

“What do you think?”

“It’s very pretty. But why spend money?”

“What do you mean?”

You took off your own black shawl and held it in your hands. You looked at it.

“I mean I’ll give you mine.”

“But, Betty, I…”

“Take it, please. I’d like to give it to you.”

The old woman listened impassively, continuing to show one shawl after the other. She said quietly, without looking at Isabel: “Better to buy one. New.”

“Pardon me?” said Isabel.

“Go on and take it, Isabel. I want you to have it.”

The old woman nodded and Isabel covered herself with your shawl and you walked on, and when you met Franz and Javier again, Javier looked at Isabel and saw that she was wearing your shawl now, that it almost concealed her face.

* * *

Δ Ofelia opened the door and went out onto the gallery that surrounded the patio. Javier kept his eyes fixed on his book. Mosquitoes buzzed around the naked light bulb and Ofelia stood there with her face of a girl grown old. Javier prayed silently that she would go away again, if only to preserve the rites of the habitual. She ought not to have come out of her dark room, where steps could be heard, then not heard. He was always hearing her. Her hand touched the knob of his bedroom, then left it. A key opened a padlock and a door that was never opened creaked slowly. A dog barked softly in this house that never had pets. Ofelia in the kitchen making a racket with her pots and pans. And his own steps in the rooms that were used every day, the rooms that were dark but had at least a little furniture. He felt that the noises like the silences were contrived, artful, that that was why they existed. It was a house of absences. Some ghostly hand had removed the ornaments from the wooden pedestals, those legacies from another era, another family, that had once held statues: an era that had been Ofelia alone, or Ofelia with Raúl, perhaps, but each alone; and now its remnants had neither being nor reason for being. Perhaps the house had once belonged to his grandparents and that was why Ofelia wanted to hold on to it until the end. He never knew for sure, for just as the present could not be talked about simply because it was the present, so the past was excluded, because it was not the present, from those hardly audible conversations of his childhood, conversations carried on almost in whispers behind the closed door of a bedroom or a train compartment. What was this old house with its stone façade and its steep mansard roofs in a land where snow never fell? Who had built it, for whom had it been built? Why had they returned there after fifteen years living on trains and in border towns and thereafter preserved the building, though it was decaying, instead of selling it and moving to some smaller, newer house in a modern neighborhood? Later, when he learned all that had happened during the years of the old building, he made up stories of violence and bloodshed, but he could not quite believe them. Brush your teeth. Don’t walk with your hands in your pockets. Don’t begin eating until your father begins. He could not believe that there had been real violence outside that silent house where the only words ever spoken to him had to do with good manners. At any rate, he could not believe in a violence that could destroy fortunes and displace lives. Such tales as those were only in books or songs. If violence existed at all, it existed only in the lower berth of a sleeper or in the hidden play-yard of a priests’ school, concealed and furtive violence that never presented itself openly proclaiming itself to be what it is, with everyone looking on. Violence had been the secret accident of innocent eyes meeting a private life into which those eyes had peeked; violence was what was created by innocence as it rushed pell-mell into a world that had not invited it. Precisely for that reason the exhaustion he suffered because of his mother’s silent persecution, because of the wordless war of steps and coughs and keys and rattles and barking dogs and silence again, seemed too much. He could not see clearly that Ofelia was playing the role of an innocence which, like that of a child who unconsciously opens the curtains of a berth, discovered him in behavior that would be seen as evil only if observed by others. Nor could he understand yet that everything Ofelia did was a plea for grace, a desire, as she provoked him and wearied him, that he would come near and join her in a guilt she did not want to bear alone longer, but to share. How do I know all this, Elizabeth? I know it because I read that little book of Javier’s, his first, The Dream. And it’s possible for me to read it, as it isn’t for you, because I’m not involved in his games or he in mine, nor do I, as you do, have to read looking for my own image in the imagery of the poems: I never, as you did, fell in love with him through his writing. You thought that he had written for you and to you before he had ever met you. As though he had a clear premonition of you even as an adolescent, as though when he wrote about the summer rain in a shadowy patio in Mexico City he were already in touch with you in the small and shadowy room of your Jewish home in New York City.

Well, maybe … but now: Ofelia dares to cross her threshold and to advance toward her son, closing her flowery bathrobe as she nears him, adjusting a comb in her red hair. She hands him a letter, its envelope already torn open.

“Here. This came for you.”

Javier takes the opened letter and without attentiveness reads what the editor has written: his book has been accepted, they congratulate him, please come to our office on Argentina to sign your contract. And immediately and for the first time in his life he felt the trembling of that secret cranial lobule that moves from its position in order to pierce our helpless meninges like an awl; the fever, the pain that spreads through the entire body, which is unprepared and surprised because an ordered and well-mannered brain knows by heart that one must not begin to eat before Father and that the fingerbowl is used to wash your hands after eating shrimp. He dropped the letter and sprang up and grabbed his mother by the shoulders and stared at her wildly, while Ofelia opened her mouth and simply stood there.

“You have no right! No right!”

She tried to close her mouth and escape from him.

“You’ve never done anything except humiliate me! Lie to me! You’re indecent!”