Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“What pretty cards you won today.”

But Jake didn’t smile. And when he did, merely to thank you, it was already too late and you knew you couldn’t believe his smile. You rubbed his curly hair and regretted that too and Jake remained motionless and you went to your room, nervous and sad, and tried to read, following the words mechanically: The Dream Life of Balso Snell, by Nathanael West. You were tempted to go back to the living room and say something. But what should you say? Maybe it was better to leave things as they were and to resolve never to make another mistake with your brother. You put the book aside. How were you supposed to act with him? You didn’t know. Which attitudes seemed merely condescending, which hurt him, which seemed natural to him? You went to your door and cracked it and listened, but Jake was silent.

Before the paralysis when you had used to say, “When we grow up, we’ll go to the university together,” it had been understood that your dream, and his too, was that you would both leave the world of your parents behind and do things, simple, natural things, actions that would be entirely your own, not inherited, not bound to the past. And then he would laugh and accept it as if you were stating the only possibility. Now everything was again as it used to be when you were small and would hide in the closet and listen to your mother Becky looking for you, saying that she was afraid, please you should both of you come out and turn on the lights, except that now Jake was not in the closet with you but outside in the living room with Becky, you were alone and did not know who hid in this game, you or Jake and your mother, and it was you who had to ask them to come out and not frighten you.

“Who is he?”

“He’s a Mexican. He has a scholarship and is going to spend the semester here.”

* * *

Δ The newspaper again, Dragoness, for a final time. The story is datelined San Luis Potosí and I read it as I walk under the arcades of the Cholula plaza. At the Rancho de los Humos, which belongs to the Municipal District of Valles, a young woman, assisted by her husband and his friend, murdered her three newborn children and buried them. Her name is Delia Alvarado Olguín, her husband-accomplice is Emiliano Hernández Lucio, and the friend is one Gabriel García. Mere ignorance was the principal element in the triple infanticide. Poverty was an important consideration. Three babies had been born when only one was expected. Delia couldn’t cut it. She asked her husband if he agreed and when he gave his consent, she suffocated the three babies and her husband and Gabriel García buried them. That was several days ago. The neighbors found it strange that a woman who had been about to give birth was from one day to the next no longer pregnant, yet there was no newborn child in the house, and they notified the police, who yesterday investigated. Delia and her husband and their friend are now in jail. The neighborhood is in a uproar, the hue and cry is that the unnatural mother must be killed. And she, Delia, if she had a chronicler beside her, would exclaim: “Receive me into the home of your different land, into your halls, and I will do away with your sterility, I will give you children of your seed, such enchantments do I know.” And the chronicler, tired, tempted to change his role to one of participation in the game, would reply sententiously: “Yes, my name will die with me, so come with me, be my woman. But you yourself must make your own escape from this land, for I must be innocent, innocent even in the eyes of strangers.” And Delia, before the act, would whisper: “Don’t exile me. I am a woman and there is nothing more brutal. I will be brave. I will not doubt you. But a woman is only a woman and is born to weep.” And then the chorus of all the women of Los Humos, a chorus of black witches, would remember and screech, “You are man’s fate, less than a shadow. You may kill but the dead will love you and you will love the dead. Your children have departed. They live no longer. Think about your children.” Delia would console herself quietly: “Pain itself is good. Oh, children, children, destroyed by the lasciviousness of a father. For it was your lust, your hunger for new loves, that killed them.”

So I finish reading and throw the newspaper aside, Elizabeth, Dragoness. I have read it from cover to cover, beginning to end, and now know all the news of this Sunday, April 11, 1965.

* * *

Δ The world has surrendered to insistent sleep when you wake, Elizabeth, alone in the night in Cholula, alone in a hotel bedroom, awake remembering a nightmare you would like to go on dreaming. In the darkness you look for the body of your man but it is not there beside you. You put on your robe and run into the corridor to Franz’s room at the same moment that Isabel moves away from Javier and he lies on her bed face down.

“So now there’s nothing left, eh?”

“What do you mean?”

“That was all that was missing.”

“When it’s all over, anything that is left is surprising.”

“I tell you that if you think you’re tired of me, then you better damn well let me go my way and you go yours.”

“Little girl. Silly little girl. Come here.”

“Leave me alone. Let me think about this. Don’t touch me. Let me tell you straight to your face that whatever you have to do, Proffy, you have to do with your bourgeois family and your stupid drugs and your busy little prick and your sinecure with the United Nations, with your violence, with everything else you are. Sure, anything can be used for a book. But you’ve got it backwards. You don’t use everything for writing. You use it for doing nothing. So split, seagulls, split.”

“And my indifference to everything? The nothingness? The no one?”

“You mean your self-centered narcissism, that’s all. You don’t want to risk the knockout, that’s all. Listen, Javier, the point is that my generation was born psychoanalyzed while yours hasn’t even made an appointment to see the doctor yet. You want me to tell you something? For me there’s no waiting. Do you understand that? No waiting! If I want something, I take it, do it, or drop it. You’ve really made me laugh, you know. Courting me a whole year, little by little, always strictly by the old-fashioned rules. You behaved with me like a Freddy Ainsworth-Hill. Ay, those pretty formalities. The long preparation. The holy conventions to be observed before the final beginning lay. Well, please yourself, Prof, but it’s top much for me. Neither of us has to render his account to anyone. So bang, you go your way and I’ll go mine. Goodbye, sayonara, ciao. As a friend of mine puts it, rape unto others as they would rape unto you.”

“Little girl, little girl. Let me tell you a story, so you’ll understand something. You publish a book and immediately they raise you high. You’ve given Mexican literature its new and ordained direction. You’re the greatest. You’re king of them all. You’re Big Shit. Do you know why? So that by and by they can cut your balls off next to your neck. They build you up first, so they can chop you down later. They make you into a demi-god so that when they castrate you they can feel they’ve done something. And when they do castrate you, it’s all over. Ya, the end, that’s it, period. You think I can’t speak your language, little nut? I know your language and I know more. I know the crazy logic of this country. If you fall on your ass here, it’s fuck you, friend, fuck you. But if you do something, it’s the same thing. And you never expect that. It takes you by surprise. You expect to be crushed if you fail, but not to be murdered because you succeed. But that’s Mexico. If you dare to go on living, you’re the failure of failures. If you die in time, you’ve got it made. Do you understand me, Isabel? That’s our little Mexico. And that’s all our little Mexico is. The only country in the world that hasn’t killed its gods. Everyone else, including the chicken-shit Christians wherever you find them, kills his gods so he can worship them. But here they’re still on the loose, laughing, mocking, setting everything upside down, making national heroes of the most blatant traitors, making Robin Hoods of pickpockets. Oh, I could tell you about it. But you know already.”