Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“Shit, Javier. I’m hungry. I’m going to order something to drink.”

You put on your robe and went out in the hall.

“He wasn’t there,” Javier said to himself as you, in the hall, shouted: “Clerk! Bellboy! Miss! Hey, whoever’s in charge here! What sort of a dump is this, anyhow?”

“The Cholula-Hilton,” Javier murmured.

A young Indian appeared.

“What drinks do you have? Tequila? Do you have Damiana liqueur?”

The youth nodded yes, no, again and again, constantly smiling. He went away. You dropped on the bed.

“Who was Alexander Hamilton?” Javier said idly. He was building a castle with the dominoes.

“George Arliss, my love.”

“Juárez?”

“Paul Muni. He and Arliss split the biographical parts. Richelieu, Pasteur, Zola, Wellington. Voltaire, Rothschild.”

“Good. Who invented the telephone?”

“Don Ameche.”

“The electric light?”

“Spencer Tracy.”

“The news services?”

“Edward G. Robinson.”

“ Beau Geste, first and second?”

“Ronald Colman, Ralph Forbes, Neil Hamilton. Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, and Robert Preston; Mary Brian or Susan Hayward; Noah Beery or Brian Donlevy; William Powell or J. Carrol Naish.”

“Excellent, Ligeia. You pass.”

“Oh, I used to see three or four movies a week. Sometimes more. All of us belonged to fan clubs. But you don’t remember. I bet you don’t remember James Cagney squeezing a grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face. Or Clark Gable on the hatch of the Bounty. Or Errol Flynn as Captain Blood dueling on the Spanish Main.” You laughed and drew your robe over your breasts. “Poor Olivia de Havilland was in all those movies. All of them, always pretty, sighing, her face deadly serious. The girl who was really elegant was Kay Francis. Very languid, very slender.”

Javier yawned and his castle of dominoes collapsed.

“We all tried to imitate Kay Francis. We would try to make our voices nasal like hers. We’d practice lying down on a sofa, sipping a cocktail. Of course her sofas were always covered with white fur. Then Carole Lombard came along with a new style. A woman’s spontaneity. Wackiness, comedy. We wanted to leave home forever and have careers in Manhattan, to be like Rosalind Russell and marry someone like Cary Grant. Ha, Javier. Garbo was something else again. She was simply divine. A woman who belonged to the gods. And John Garfield, John Garfield! He died fucking. Yes, I pass, all right!”

The Indian youth entered carrying a tin tray with a bottle of tequila on it, two small glasses, a saucer of slices of lemon, and a salt shaker. Printed on the tray was Cerveza Corona la Rubia de Categoría. He put the tray on the night table and said he was sorry, they had no Damiana.

“What a pity. It’s an aphrodisiac.” You gave the boy a peso. He smiled and hesitated. “Go on, take it.”

You poured the two glasses and passed the salt shaker and the lemon slices to Javier. He squeezed lemon into his glass and sprinkled the rim of the glass with salt. “This won’t be good for my stomach, Ligeia. You know that.”

You looked at each other as he slowly sipped his tequila.

“John Garfield,” Javier sighed. He looked up at the ceiling, with his glass in his hand. “You know, when you witness death, it changes you. Cruelly, unnecessarily. You never want to think again of the man who died. John Garfield.”

“Forget John Garfield. Never mind him. Forget him.” You drank the clear liquid squeezing the lemon into your lips and sucking the salt that you had on your fist.

Javier drank. He spat a lemon seed.

“But you don’t want to forget anything, do you?” You took your wristwatch from the night table and stared at it for several minutes. Later you were going to tell me that once again you were thinking that when it first started, you hadn’t wanted to blame his attitude on something so simple as your having opened one of his letters. A letter you didn’t even read. You had preferred to blame it on yourself, on your slowness in responding to the immediate passion you had both felt when you first met. Or, rather, on your insistence that passion should be more than passion, that it should uncover his broken, hidden mask. You had told yourself that was the reason for the new silences, for the new kind of happiness which for you was indeed happiness, though different, for the behavior that was never decisive, for the long hours alone in the apartment while Javier went out to explore the streets of Mexico City. And you didn’t realize at the time that gradually your passion was becoming merely a feeling that went on calmly from day to day without moments of crisis or climax. A sentiment, a direction rather than movement in that direction. You told me that once, Dragoness. Or maybe it was I who told you. You went on to say that a sentiment locks us up inside ourselves, does not, like passion, throw us into the arms of others. Passion is shared; sentiment is not. And now as you sipped your drink you realized that twenty years ago you had sought to return to passion by finding it in Javier’s writing, not only the words but the act.

“No, Javier, you always want to hang on to everything, don’t you?”

“I’ve told you that…”

“I refused to admit that everything happened simply because I opened that letter of yours. That would have been ridiculous.”

You rested your chin on your fist, dampened by saliva, tasting of salt. You began to hum. Javier tried to guess the tune. You lowered your voice and leaned forward, letting your face drop until your forehead touched your knee. You rubbed your leg.

“I always thought you understood,” Javier whispered. He looked at the back of your head and reached out and took the wristwatch and turned the hands. “I had gone to see you, not only women younger than you but you too in paintings that had been done by a man who had died of tuberculosis God knows when. I took your hand and we walked out of the gallery, Ligeia. And for the second time you were my Greek stele…”

You raised your head from your knee. “No, I told myself it was my fault, because I hadn’t been content with the passion we felt when we first met, I wanted more. That it should reveal us to each other, the things hidden.”

The watch skipped several hours and Javier laughed.

“My Attic stele. Distant. Motionless. At rest. Remote. One woman who could satisfy my hunger for many women.”

Again you looked at each other.

“We could have played games, Javier. Who did the girl in the window run away with? Miriam. Where did she go? Why didn’t you go after her? So now you’ll never know her name or hear her voice. Please…”

Javier finished his tequila with one swallow and poured his glass full again.

“It’s going to hurt your stomach, Javier. Tomorrow you’ll feel sick and you’ll be complaining that now your vacation has been spoiled.”

“Take another drink yourself. If I could only be sure about it.”

“About what?”

“My stomach. If I could only say, operate on the duodenum, take out the gall bladder. But no one knows where the trouble is. Upset stomach. Tiredness. Cold hands. Gas pains. A longing never to open my eyes again. Insomnia. Shit. What were you humming?”

“Cannonball Adderley. Lillie. Sweet and slow. And listen to Yusef Lateef’s flute. There’s a Mephistopheles for you. A Negro one.”

Javier calmly threw his tequila glass at the bureau mirror. You watched him and went on quietly, “Their only way of communicating is their music. Lillie. It’s a song of desperation. That’s all.” The mirror shattered and the pieces fell, showing black paint on their backs, their sound covered that of the glass falling.