Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“You’re insulting me now. Stop it, Javier. You’ll tempt me to hurt you really. To say something that won’t be nice.”

You were fondling his penis, trying to arouse him, but there was no strength in you and he smiled because there was none in him either.

“Don’t try to tell me that the life of exile I’ve lived with you has been good. Don’t say that on the day you leave me for another woman. Don’t make me remember that my time with you has been borrowed time. Think of my brother, murdered. Think of my father in his lonely hotel room. Of my mother locked up in an asylum cursing me for having abandoned my race to be your wife.”

There was a secret game in your words now, although neither of you were aware of it. You had agreed to prove that each of you was helpless. Neither of you quite knew what you were saying.

“My race … God … To be a Jew.”

Javier touched you in the crotch and nothing happened.

“The word I heard all my childhood. Jew, Jew. The only word that still ties me to my dead brother and my crazy mother. Becky used to say it during meals, breaking into the conversation, and then begin to moan, almost to lose control of herself. She would get up and walk away trembling. Desperate. They … because of the way life has always been for us, Javier, the life of Jews, they taught me that the only way is to demand, to insist, and to doubt. That even when we’re trampled on, locked up in concentration camps, thrown into exile, our salvation is to go on demanding, demanding, refusing to be content, and doubting.”

“Be quiet, Ligeia. You’re babbling.”

“Demand and doubt. That’s the way I am. And that was where I made the mistake with you. I made you fail by asking too much of you, demanding more than…”

“Leave me alone! Shut up!”

“That you should write more and better than you could write. That you should love me more than you could love me.”

“Shut up! And take your hand away!”

“And even if you hadn’t failed, I would have doubted your success and you and myself, everything. I can’t believe blindfolded. I have to do things, to test things and be sure. I have to believe without believing.”

“And I? Belief without doubt for me?”

You moved away from him. “You, Javier? For you, whatever people believe in. It doesn’t matter. You know better than I.”

“No, it doesn’t matter. Faith is nothing. What counts is what you know. That’s much more destructive.”

“I’m tired, Javier.” You stood up. “Don’t go through that again. I’ve heard it over and over.”

He remained on the floor. You picked up the dented tray.

“No, faith doesn’t hurt us. It’s knowledge. Ligeia. Listen to me. Do you remember that novel I started?”

“How could I forget it?” You felt light, free, safe, as you calmly picked up the fragments of the mirror and the bottle. “It came and went and came and went in your black briefcase, always a plan, never an act. Shit. Chapters you were going to make notes for and organize and some day, when you had time, inspiration, the right mood, God knows what…”

“Tell me: tell me what it was about.”

“A man who loved a woman who loved him.”

“Yes, on the surface that was all. But there was more to it than that. Tell me.”

“Love brought them to knowledge they hadn’t had before.”

“Yes. Go on.”

“In the flesh there’s a miracle that must be suppressed. Everyone has felt it. Everyone lets it escape. But not these two. They knew how to preserve the miracle, to hold on to it. Shit, Javier! You dirty bastard!”

“And then?”

“And then they understand that their secret can’t be communicated. But they’re tempted and they try. Temptation comes disguised as an impulse to be generous. They reveal their secret to others and at once the miracle vanishes. It’s misunderstood. They are left naked, saddened. They have opened Pandora’s box.”

“Which is?”

“I don’t remember, Javier. How can I remember everything? The point was that when they opened it their treasure turned to ashes. So you have to be selfish. Some things can’t be shared. Love is between two people and only two people, even if it is poor, pretentious, clumsy, absurd. Love that others can share is not love. Love exists only for the lovers. I think that’s about it.”

“Yes. There was no answer. What the man and the woman had discovered could be known only to themselves.”

You had put the pieces of glass on the tray and now you stood. You were tired, it was hard to move. “Why didn’t you write that book, Javier? You had a beautiful theme.”

He joined his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling.

“I don’t really know. Or rather, I do know. I did have the feeling the book needed, an intuition of the beauty that was possible. But I never wrote it because I thought no one would understand me.”

“You can’t mean that. What a child.”

“No, I don’t mean it. It’s just one more excuse. The fact was that the theme itself didn’t allow me to write it. It would have been like revealing a secret that ought not be revealed. It would have violated the very logic of the book.”

“Javier, my love…”

You stood beside him. There was something in the air, a feeling of repose, of a little truth finally attained. “We’ve lived through so much together. Isn’t the past enough to go…”

“No, it isn’t.” He looked at you, his head still resting back on his joined hands. “It isn’t enough because now we know each other. It’s a great lie that the more you know each other, the more you love each other. A proud and foolish lie. What you love is the unknown. What you haven’t possessed yet. And maybe to stop loving when you begin to know the other person is … well, necessary for sanity. Because if we loved and knew each other, yet went on loving, we would all be out of our minds.”

You hugged him and said quietly, “You don’t know me, Javier, all you know is how to talk. And I’ve caught your damn wordiness. You’re like every other Mexican. You have to justify yourself with words. Anything can be an excuse. The climate, the cactus, Montezuma, the shit you have to eat. Javier…”

“Yes?”

“We used to dream together. Why did we stop?”

“We stopped one dream when Russia and Germany signed a treaty of friendship. Ribbentrop and Molotov. And what difference did it make? Who were Ribbentrop and Molotov?”

You caressed his neck. “We believed in so much in those days. Maybe that could have saved us, to go on believing in something. It was a kind of faith. You and I together in the LEAR, singing the Internationale. Together reading Dos Passos and Miguel Hernández. Together listening to the Spanish Civil War songs. Raising our clenched fists…”

He moved away from your face and saw your gray eyes filled with tears, Elizabeth, and his lips trembled.

“Who knows? We learned that we’re all guilty. Maybe that was the only lesson of those days.”

You let him hold you and were grateful for the weakness of your body in his arms, for the shadows of the bedroom.

“Yes. And only now, so late, have we come to see that the guiltiest of all are those who know that they aren’t innocent and so stop fighting their guilt. Javier … Javier…”

Your face moved away from his shoulder. Your body moved away. You held him with your hands on his shoulders, knowing something at last, at last finding the words before they were forgotten again and forever.

“I understand, Javier. Let me say it quickly. The struggle is between those who are all guilty and that’s why it is tragic. The just and the unjust are both guilty. Neither is innocent. Justice isn’t innocent, merely just. That’s why it’s so terrible. Do you see what I mean, Javier?”