Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“Proffy, I give up trying to understand you. It’s like all that complicated nothing you wrote about the Indians, in your little notebook. So what? Who cares about the Indians? I certainly don’t. Do you think I give a damn about that stupid Pepsicoatl? I’m tight, Proffy, nothing can shake me up. Nothing, do you get that? What you just did to me, for example. For you it was a great experience. But for me, I knew it already, even though it was the first time. I’m ready … ready for everything, even when it takes me by surprise. And there you have it. That’s the difference between you and your kind and me and my kind. Don’t worry, Javier, I won’t tie you down. You can stop shaking. Relax. I’m not looking for a husband. All I’m looking for is orgasms. How’s that?”

“May God bless you, Isabel.”

“You’re impulsive, my love. That’s what you are. Impulsive.”

“Yes, I may be impulsive. And you, aren’t you tired of standing there humped like a camel?”

“Leave me alone. It still burns. For Christ’s sake, Javier, stop playing games. If you’re a son of the age of Don Porfirio and Queen Victoria, that’s what you are, don’t you understand? Please, stop fooling yourself. Do you think I don’t know you? Why did you feed me that line about working in television? Do girls fall for it? You tell them you’ll make them stars? Are you ashamed of the work you really do? God, what mediocrity! God, what a drag you are! No, Javier. No, no, stay still. Javier, Javier, not that way…”

It seems that sometimes one has to think about something that has nothing to do with the present, in order to prolong the present. Javier placed his hands on your waist and closed his eyes. When you noticed, Isabel, you were already saying:

“Second-rate, Javier. You’re just second-rate. They all say so. The whole faculty, the students.”

Javier was silent and you sighed with relief, Pussycat.

“What’s wrong, Isabel?”

“It burns, tú. ”

* * *

Δ You parked your brother under a tree and he smiled and said that you could leave him there for a while. He wanted to read. You and Javier walked away down one of the paths in Central Park. It was cold, the trees were bare. You took Javier’s arm to stop for a moment and look back at Jake in his wheelchair. He waved one hand to you and with the other pulled up the zipper of his Scotch-plaid jacket. The cold had reddened his face, his eyes were dark and deep-set, his black hair was curly. He had taken after Gershon, he was clearly a Jew, while you, Elizabeth, were falsely Jewish, a blonde. Jake looked small and helpless and somber in the distance. He began to read and you and Javier walked on holding hands and you invited him to come to your home that evening and listen to records, you had a collection of Kay Kyser that he would enjoy, and afterward you could go to a movie. New York was filled with those signs: Garbo loves Taylor. You began to talk about the movies, telling him that you went two or three times a week and one of the best scenes you had ever seen was the one where James Cagney pushed a grapefruit in the face of Mae Clarke, a good way to begin the day, eh? Both of them in pajamas. You talked about love, adventure, violence in the movies, about Clark Gable on the deck of the Bounty challenging malevolent Charles Laughton, about Errol Flynn as Captain Blood dueling on a tropical beach with that English villain, Basil Rathbone, who ended up cut through by Blood’s sword and tossed aside on the sand, his face washed by waves. You told Javier that you wanted him to teach you many things. Everything, for you knew nothing except what you had learned in the movies and you didn’t want to spend your time with him telling each other “Me Tarzan, you Jane,” or repeating over and over “Lizzie loves Javier.” You stopped and the noises were the accustomed ones, the elevated in the distance, dry twigs under your feet, muffled traffic, the laughter of some girls who were singing very far away. And maybe, you weren’t sure, the voice of a radio, the music of a record player. Then you were racing back along the path with a look of disbelief on your face, your hands to your mouth as if to stifle a scream, your shawl and heavy brown coat flying, Javier right behind you unable yet to see what you saw: Jake’s wheelchair whirling toward the stone bridge pushed by black-skinned hands while Jake tried to get up, get out, and looked all around for you and your boyfriend, the wheels sliding across wet grass and mud, shouts, “Kike Christ-killer, Christ-killer,” shouts and laughter, out of sight beneath the bridge, the sound of baseball bats against flesh and metal, shouts of triumph, then the swift flight of the Negro youths, six, eight, nine, a whole gang of them who ran away as hard as they could without looking back, leather jackets, wool caps, the book lying on the path. And there, under the bridge, lying beside his overturned and smashed wheelchair in a stink of urine and sodden newspaper, Jake with his legs in their leather and steel braces raised on one of the wheels. His face white. His mouth open. His skull misshapen and bleeding from the blows of the bats. Cards with the faces of Indian chiefs strewn around him. He had died with his arms raised helplessly to protect his head. He had died at thirteen, captured, defeated. And you, Elizabeth, knelt in the water beside him and touched his red lips.

* * *

Δ You found Franz, Dragoness, outside Isabel’s door.

“I’ve been looking for you.”

Franz raised his finger to his lips. You put your arms around his neck and hugged him and did not try to listen too, because inside you a creeping snail was telling you softly about your dream and then as you stood there embracing Franz you saw the white empty corridors of an insane asylum, the white and chrome rooms of a hospital, nor did you think for a moment that Franz might have a dream very like yours, that he might be seeing also a world of black tiles covered by a cold tangle of low twisted trees growing over seventy-eight thousand corpses, the dead of seven centuries gathered layer upon layer in Prague’s Jewish Cemetery under the carved symbols: Israel’s clusters of grapes, Levi’s sacred cup, Cohen’s open and joined hands; and stones are at the corners of the graves because these dead are in the desert and the wind of Exodus must not be allowed to uproot them and carry them away converted into sand; no, they must become the stone and moss of centuries, and Franz looked among the black stones for a name, Rissenfeld, Lederova, Waldstein, Schön, Maher … But he found only the names of the places on the monument raised at the entrance to the cemetery:

Belsec

Majdanek

Flossenburg

Lodz

Stutthof

Ravensbrück

Riga

Monovice

Piaski

Mauthausen

Trostinec

Oranienburg

Treblinka

Auschwitz

Bergen-Belsen

Buchenwald

Dachau

Raasika

Terezin

There are no tombstones standing erect and worn, covered by moss and lichen. The name he seeks is not there. And you, embracing Franz in the corridor of the hotel, stopped on the Long Island highway without hearing or seeing the cars passing and finally opened your eyes, shivering with your hands deep in the pockets of your raincoat and the brim of your hat down. You lost all contact with reality and saw only the vertical stones of Mount Zion cemetery, the gray tombstones crowded together, the graves squeezed against each other, a plain of graves stretching all the way to the horizon and eventually becoming lost on this autumn afternoon against the skyland of Manhattan across the river; and in Queens this cemetery was the model or anticipation, perhaps the specter of the city and when you returned home you sat on the old couch with its worn velvet and the crocheted backs and armrests and you thought about Jake, looked at your hands, stretched them out, twitched them, and thought about Jake while your hands sought something to protect, cover, conceal.