Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

He pushed her harshly away and raised his hand and felt his open palm sting against her dry, slightly oily skin, the wrinkles and bags where the face cream had penetrated, the flabby furrows of her face. He moved away and knelt and picked up the letter and avoided her eyes. But Ofelia — he did not see her face, nor did he know whether she was crying — took him by both hands and forced him to stand and squeezed him against her breasts, loose beneath the cotton robe, made his head rest on her shoulder as she caressed his neck and told him, then or later, when she died, that a woman, she, owed obedience and that she had always wished only to obey and something in her world had broken when the man she had chosen had not understood that, either did not know how to command or didn’t want to command. In Ofelia’s arms, feeling her aroused nipples against his smooth slender chest, Javier finally told her that it was no good, useless: neither she nor Raúl could ever tell him who he was; it was useless. He admitted that he was not ready to accept others’ pain or joy and he refused to pity anyone. He told her that he was giving her notice that he intended to leave, to go away and leave her as soon as he had the means. From time to time she nodded and caressed the back of his head as it leaned on her shoulder, and said to him words that were entirely irrelevant: first get your degree, you need a profession, you’re not going to sell electric cords like your father, you’re not going to talk about money all day. Are you? Are you, Javier? And Javier, who had no other hold by which to grip the memory of his father, read over Raúl’s journals and account books, the memorials he had left of his life of additions and subtractions, credits and debits, his correspondence with Montgomery Ward, the names with which he had walked through the world, brokers, commission agents, traveling salesmen, clerks, the books collated and sewn together like a gospel: the Ordinary Expenditures and the Capital Expenditures, the Inventory Book, the Book of Balances and the imperatives of Yahweh: a guilty bankrupt, a fraudulent bankrupt: was that the reason, Mama? Was that why? Don’t you know? Aren’t you ever going to tell me?

And the old man sits on an iron bench in the Alameda and looks tired. The afternoon is damp and sultry, the air is hazy with dust. Passers-by do not turn to glance at him. Nevertheless, he resembles only himself. Maybe his curly gray hair is not unusual. But between his forehead and his eyelashes lies a message that no casual observer could understand. His eyes are dark, veiled like the dusty air. Inspecting them from close enough, one might suspect, though one would never state it, that he is dreaming awake, calmly dreaming his private nightmare, which is simply everyone’s nightmare. That is why he holds his eyes open. No one asks him about his dream. Probably he would not tell. But it is also true that he waits now, and has long waited, seated in the Alameda, for someone to discover that dream with no assistance beyond the veiled look in his eyes. That is why he is sitting there. Around his eyes is a fine net of wrinkles which if they were deeper would disappear. Two deep nervous lines cross his cheeks and join on his chin. And it is all a mask: the body is hidden by a cheap, shapeless, nondescript suit, gray, bulky around the shoulders and the lapels, old, not too worn, too large for the emaciated figure within it. A Sunday suit, old Sundays, few Sundays. He raises his finger to the collar of his checked red shirt — he is wearing no tie — and feels that he is suffocating silently and without need to. Near him, a fountain drips; above, trees interlace. The dust thickens, a vertical mirror of frosted glass that thickens the shadows at the corners of the park, the shadows of the surrounding buildings. The old man sits looking toward Avenida Hidalgo. Toward the domes and the red stone façades and high towers of San Hipólito, toward the Plaza Morelos, freshened by a fountain of frogs, cherubim, and tritons, toward the market where funeral crowns and wreaths are sold, horseshoes of white and violet flowers, toward the tilting tezontle front of Santa Veracruz. Now he looks down at his shoes. Beside his shoes is the same cardboard suitcase of the old journeys by train. He wants to shut his eyes. In the darkness of his closed eyes liquid trills and murmurs will pass. And what if in this moment that his eyes are shut there should pass also the one person who is capable of understanding his look? His expression becomes more intense. He offers his dream; he even makes an involuntary gesture of imploration. His eyes search eagerly for what they must remember: the bronze of the fountain, the painted iron of the bench, dried foam, the black cloth of the park photographer, brown trunks of trees, the fleeting flight of wings. He studies the sides of the Alameda a long time, and finally, tired, shuts his eyes.

Javier stops in the distance and looks at him. He can’t be sure. If the old man would only open his eyes. No, no, it’s merely another of the city’s paupers. That’s all. Doubtless burdened with some melodramatic, sordid story: a bore. But the suitcase? No, no. And the old man does not open his eyes and Javier walks on to Bolívar and buys his train ticket to New York, his ticket away from the flat, dark, incomprehensible world of his home, away from this city that lets itself be loved only from afar, that exacts sacrifice from all who are near.

* * *

Δ And you, Elizabeth, perhaps were already awaiting his arrival as you listened to the dry sound of the little cards falling on the paved path. Jake smiled as he tossed them down. If they landed face up, he smiled again. If instead they showed their backs, printed with the story of some last-century soldier or Indian chief, he said, “Oh, shucks.”

A card landed with the face of Sitting Bull looking up at the sky. Jake laughed and said to his playmate, “I win. Give me a Crazy Horse.”

You were seated on a bench near your brother’s wheelchair, reading, preparing for your first year’s finals at City College. Now and then you looked at Jake playing with the boy who picked the cards up for him. The cards came with bubble gum. There were other series: baseball, boxing, airplanes. But those with the Indian chiefs were the most coveted. They were larger, shinier, and more durable.

“Let’s see now, I’m missing Rain-in-the-Face,” said Jake. “And I have two too many Thunderclouds.”

“Oh, pick them up yourself,” said the boy who kept losing. He walked away into the park, slouching his shoulders.

You shut your book and ran to Jake and picked up the cards. You knelt before him and handed them to him one by one. He shuffled the cards and said, “I’m still missing Rain-in-the-Face.”

“You’ve played long enough, Jake.”

“All right.”

He sat in his wheelchair and fingered and admired the cards he had won that Saturday afternoon. You returned to your bench and went on reading without understanding the words you read. You were thinking that what you feared every time you brought Jake to the park had not happened today: nobody had yelled at him. He had added to his collection of cards, and when you went home, he would sit on the floor and spread them out on the couch and examine them for hours, arrange them chronologically, with a serious face read the stories printed on the back. You interrupted him:

“Jake, do you want to go to City College when you’re old enough?”

Immediately you felt bad. It was a clumsy question, for Jake had already missed one year of school because of his sickness. He shrugged his shoulders and without looking at you said, “I don’t know.” He stopped playing with his cards. He gathered them together, slowly, into a stack. His eyelids were dark and drooping. You bit your lip.