Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

He did understand, you knew, yet he could answer you laughing. Maybe that was what you found unforgivable.

“Madness may be the mask too much knowledge wears, Ligeia. I’m tired. Go get in the tub and finish what you were doing. Hurry up. I want to take a shower.”

You wiped away your tears.

“Is Isabel waiting for you?”

“Ligeia, please, please…”

“You must feel very satisfied with yourself.”

You went to the bathroom. Javier had left the light on.

“Why?”

“Now you can go to a living woman. With a name. Isabel. Before you were looking for a phantom. And phantoms are more comfortable but less satisfying to your pride.”

You opened his medicine kit again.

“A phantom?”

It was empty. All the bottles were on the shelf.

“Me. Your phantom. Like that night at the party when you pretended I was some other woman, an unknown woman, so that you could live out your fantasy. Phaedra. Medea. I don’t remember now. Do you? We went down into a cave together. Oh, boy. The mariachi musicians. A private voyage to Cathay.”

“You cooperated willingly enough.”

You began to open the bottles of medicine.

“Because I loved you. But you have never loved me or any woman. You’ve loved Woman. Capital W. Phantom. That was how you could go on feeling free and unchained. A real woman of flesh and blood would have been too much burden for you. Whatever her name, Ligeia or Isabel. Listen to me, Javier.”

Silently, calmly, without fear, almost professionally, you emptied the rest of his medicines into the toilet.

“Isabel is flesh and blood too, you know. Just like me. Are you listening?”

“I’m listening.”

“She too will demand your time, your love. And you aren’t the young man you were twenty years ago. Listen, Javier. She’s twenty-three. And you are over forty.”

You pulled the chain of the toilet and watched the whirlpool of pills and water as Javier shouted from the bedroom: “But I don’t have the illusions I had twenty years ago! Can’t you understand that? With her I don’t go out to conquer the golden fleece the way I did with you! The golden fleece!”

He laughed louder than the sucking of the toilet.

“It escaped us, Ligeia. We didn’t find it. We spent our lives looking, but we couldn’t get past the guards at the door, the monsters, the dragons, the bulls, the snakes! There were too many of them. So it wasn’t worth it. Nothing was worth it. Neither your father nor your brother nor your crazy mother. Nothing, nothing.”

You turned off the bathroom light.

“I can go with Isabel now if I want to, precisely because my illusions are gone. And because Isabel is young. Do you hear me, Ligeia? She’s young! She doesn’t have lines at the corners of her eyes…”

You turned on the light again and looked for your lipstick, your eyebrow pencil, your eyeshadow. Swiftly you began to put makeup on.

“She doesn’t have a double chin. She doesn’t have a flabby belly…”

You looked for your stockings, your panties, your brassière among the wet towels thrown on the tile floor.

“Do you hear me? She’s young! Isabel is young, she’s twenty-three years old … Ligeia … answer me!”

You did not see yourself in the mirror, so you had no way of knowing how you looked. You came out of the bathroom slipping on your bra, feeling for its hooks, and Javier saw you with your makeup on, your eyebrows black, your lips red. Your voice was calm as you continued, awkwardly, nervously, to put on your clothes.

“Just remember, Javier, that for me there was only one moment. A moment when I woke in New York, I think, or in Falaraki, yes, no, on the coast of Long Island after a night of rain. The first time.”

“She’s young,” Javier hissed.

“Just that moment when I woke and felt you get up and move aside the sheets that covered my feet and look at me tenderly. Tenderly, afraid you might wake me.”

“The sea. You always remember the sea. You’re lying. Women hate the sea.”

“You wanted to touch my lips, but you were afraid you’d wake me. Then finally you couldn’t resist. You took me in your arms and lifted me as I opened my eyes. You closed my eyes with your fingers and I was small and tender in your arms. On that one moment I have lived. Always hoping that some day it might come back. But not any more.”

You put on your blouse and buttoned it.

“I slept with Vasco, Javier.”

You touched your hair, shook it out, short and faded, graying. You did not look at Javier.

“Yes, I slept with him. And it was from him that I got that story, that story of youth returning, that story you wrote. It was really writen by Vasco Montero. He thought of it. I stole it. You put it in words, that was all.”

You looked for your purse in the debris of the room.

“I went that far, yet you failed. I wanted to conquer a whole world for you. But you let that world slip out of your hands. That was just as well. You weren’t worthy of it.”

You waited. Javier didn’t speak. You kept your eyes away from him. “I’m telling you that I went to bed with Vasco to get a story for you.”

“You really did, didn’t you?” Javier said. “And you made me think that we had thought of it together.”

“You’d like to escape.” Finally you faced him. “But you can’t. For you everything is an aphorism. Except this: you couldn’t get anywhere with your own ideas. You had to accept and use Vasco Montero’s alms. Leavings from a rich table, from a true poet who could afford to throw you his scraps and be none the poorer.”

You were going to tell me some day, Dragoness, that after that you and Javier said no more. You, dressed, your face made up, your purse in your hand, sat on the edge of the bed thinking about what you would some day have to tell me. You were thinking that this was the end of the road, of the memories and the lies too, a long long road in search of what you had already possessed. All that you knew, all that you wanted, all that you lost and all that you found, you had known, wanted, lost and found in the very beginning as much as now. But in the beginning a part of you had defeated the rest of you and that made all the difference. It made you helpless to use your wisdom. And tonight another part of you was holding you as helpless to use your wisdom as you had been then. Ah, Dragoness, the difficult answer is that we must be able to bless whatever we love, whatever we dream, touch, even what we scorn or fear and reject.

* * *

Δ With the plans spread on his knees, Franz looked up and saw the staked hops, beyond them a row of bushy trees, an apple orchard to the right, and to the left, beet fields stretching all the way to the forest on the distant slope. A few farm workers were busy among the hops, sitting or squatting, harvesting the vines that wound up the black stakes. He looked back at the site that had been chosen. A brick kiln had stood here once and he was able to use its old foundations as footing. Later in the day, trucks with bricks from the Lovosice yard would arrive and work could begin immediately. The construction crew was already there, standing in files of five, their clothing gray and their heads shaved. The timbers were already stacked, the clay and lime had been heaped in piles, the kegs of nails had been opened. Slowly he rolled up the blueprints and then he went to talk to the foremen and he did not return to Terezin until after dark, in the old convertible Mercedes, and as they passed the train station in Theresienstadt he asked the driver to stop. He stood up and tried to understand what was going on on the platform. Someone was playing chords on a double bass and to its accompaniment dark figures were moving, unintelligible voices rose singing. Smoke from the locomotives wreathed low, now concealing, now revealing the dancing figures. Franz got out of the convertible and walked toward them. They were wearing top hats and their gray clothes and their faces were smeared with coal dust and they were unloading coal and singing as they worked. One of them had the double bass. Franz could understand nothing of their song except the words, Now Marion is leaving. Some of the guards were urging the singers on and others were kicking the round cardboard boxes in which the top hats had arrived, playing imaginary soccer. It was a grotesque scene: the dim lights, the clouds of smoke and steam, the dancing figures, the music. His driver picked up three more double basses at the station, to be deposited in the storerooms where all the equally useless confiscated things were kept. The old derbies and the dusty dress forms, the ragged prayer books, the horse-drawn hearses, the postcards, the family daguerreotypes, the mustache cups, the straw- and saw-dust-stuffed horses, the glass paperweights containing a landscape upon which snow fell when they were shaken. And what were the gold-framed portraits of the old emperors, Wilhelm and Franz Josef, doing here among all this junk? He shook the paperweight and watched the false snow drift down and in the distance heard the Merry Widow Waltz. Then he walked out and saw the top-hatted workers from the station marching in. Later it transpired that beneath their hats they were smuggling in stolen coal and stolen sausages.