Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“Do you think I’ve been anything else, Javier? Do you think I’m still Elizabeth Jonas, the girl you met in New York? Don’t you see that I’ve become you yourself? What you’ve wanted me to become. That I speak and think now not as myself but as you? That my own being has vanished?”

“I know that you’re confused. That you have always wanted to exhaust me. That you never understood me.”

“No, Javier, that’s not true.” You sat on the edge of the bed, hollow with tiredness. “I’ve understood you, all right. I wanted to join your Miriam game in Buenos Aires. But you refused to let me, you wanted to play alone. Always alone. And when I understood that, that you would never share, and you knew that I did, the coldness and scorn began. Oh, I understand. To you love and the new, the undiscovered, are the same thing. Do you admit that?”

“I won’t talk like this, Ligeia.”

You wrapped the sheet around you and went into the bathroom. You shut the door. Behind you, Javier was saying harshly: “You’ll never understand the ways you destroyed me!”

And you, hearing him without hearing him, knowing without hearing, repeated it: he would never understand how you had destroyed him, yet become the victim yourself. And had it really begun that first morning in Delos?

Running water could be heard in the bathroom. Javier hid his face in the pillow.

“You had no right, Ligeia. No right, no right.”

You looked at your naked body in the bathroom mirror. He would be saying that the ruins you had visited today could belong to you only if they did not belong to you. You went to the tub and dipped your fingers.

“Look, at night they do have hot water.”

“I know now that it’s impossible. I’ve stopped blaming you…”

“Hey! There’s hot water.”

And later you would believe and tell yourself that with you out of the bedroom he said dryly that the Greek ruins are not really ruins, because man has issued from them, descended from them, and that you had understood this and that was why today you had insisted on returning to Xochicalco …

“You’re missing a good chance to shave.”

“Do you think I’m blind? That I didn’t notice you hiding at the foot of the pyramid trying to wrap the stone serpent around you? What do you think you were doing? What were you looking for?”

You sat in the tub and sighed.

“No, it isn’t possible any longer. It can’t go on. Why do you think we went back to Xochicalco?”

You bit your finger and smiled.

“Those ruins,” he would be saying, and you would not hear, “are not like the Greek ruins.”

Silently you got out of the tub. He would be saying now that the ancient Mexican ruins belonged to no one, were isolated from everything, everyone, had no echo. Without drying off, you went to the medicine cabinet. They never decay, he would be going on, because decay can be detected only by a point of reference and the Mexican ruins have none. They have never been part of life or of man. You began to laugh. You took the bottle of tranquilizers and opened it. Covering your laughter with the palm of your hand, you dumped the capsules into the toilet and watched them lose their layer of green gelatine and become soft and then sink, loosing their white dust as they disintegrated.

“But be careful. They’re going to snatch your damn myths away from you.”

You returned to the medicine cabinet and got the stomach pills and dumped them into the toilet too.

“What did you do with my collection of pebbles, Javier?” you shouted, laughing.

You stuck your head into the bedroom.

“Why don’t you answer me? You’re so damned exasperating with your silence.”

Javier heard your voice and rose from the bed. He walked toward you, pulling on his jockey shorts. You watched him through the cracked door.

“What, Ligeia?”

“I asked why don’t you answer me?”

He leaned against the door, exhausted.

“What is it you want me to say?”

“Shit,” you said from the other side of the door. “Don’t you know the only thing that ever bothers me? When you start with someone new, you break away from the someone old.”

“What in God’s name are you talking about? Don’t you have Franz? Your affair with him is newer still. Than what is left of our old affair, Ligeia, the remnant that hangs on holding itself intact still for some reason, God knows why.”

“My problem is to be young. That’s the new, the undiscovered.”

“Let me in.”

“No. If you come in here, we won’t be able to talk. That’s my problem, Javier. Franz … Franz is merely looking for something he has lost a long time. That’s what I think, at least. And I’m looking for the love you stopped giving me. Isabel is the only danger. She’s the only one who can mean the future, not the past. And you, when you used to love me, what did you want from me?”

“You know what I wanted, Ligeia.”

“I have nothing now. I gave up everything for you. Neither parents nor brother nor anything. If you leave me, I have no country to go home to. I gave up everything.”

“Why, Ligeia? Why?”

“Because I loved you!”

“You loved me. Are you so sure of that? Wasn’t it perhaps that you had to have someone, maybe anyone, to take you away from your family and your country, to take you to other lands that you had distorted and colored with that crazy romantic imagination of yours, made into realms of sun and happiness? You and Franz understand each other precisely because you are both Northerners. All of you from the North are always running away from your fog, your Holy Scriptures, puritanism, order. From death. Toward the sun, toward us who live under the sun, toward the south…”

“I loved you! I loved your dream!”

“And now you feel that a fraud has been played upon you?”

“What a word. I only wish I could hold in my loss and my pain, Javier. Javier, what happened, what happened? I loved you and you loved me…”

“You were a princess with the lust of a bull. You made love like a lioness giving birth. And you made me into a sterile ruin. I didn’t marry a woman. I married a tigress. A tigress in her imagination, in her words, in her constant demands, in her cunt…”

“Javier, Javier, not now. Don’t say words that aren’t really your own. Don’t play games, not now…”

“You know the old king who too late learned to distrust the words of women and to see them as they really are: the daughters of gods in their breasts, of Satan himself in their loins.”

“Javier. You promised. You promised.”

“Shut up. Open the door. Look at me.”

“No. We won’t be able to talk.”

Javier pushed against the door and you did not resist. You stared at each other, both nearly naked. Javier took you by the arm and pushed you roughly into the bedroom.

“There’s your sulfur pit. Burning, stinking. Consuming itself and whoever touches it.” He pushed you down on the bed. He took three drawers from the bureau one after the other and threw them on the floor. “Okay, Ligeia. Let’s go! Let’s roll!” His clothing was strewn around the room. You got up from the bed as he went on: “Men heaped on women, women on beasts, beasts on other men, all endlessly fucking, a chain of nose to ass from which none can free himself. Like dogs in the street.”

You were already standing in front of the wardrobe mirror, looking at yourself, lifting your breasts in your hands, studying your face.

“We tie ourselves to each other so that we can destroy each other. To rob each of us of his solitary identity.”

You turned your back on the mirror and against your back felt the coolness of the glass. You felt your tiredness.

“That isn’t what I wanted,” Javier said. Very slowly he began to kick the drawers, crushing in their flimsy ends and backs. “But you wanted it and you achieved it.”