Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

White Rabbit laughs and touches her match to the letter. It burns like a bamboo Buddist Monk.

They chuckle and begin to sing the Marines’ Hymn, everyone except White Rabbit, Jakob, and myself, who have something of a sense of propriety.

“Look, we better go inside quick,” I say to them. “The cops keep an eye on this place.”

No one moves. They are holding themselves stiff, at attention. From the halls of Montezuma … Sure, the goddamn bastards began their legend right here in Mexico.

Boston Boy moves closer to her. I would like to hold a match to him, his yellow beard and hair. He takes her arm. “No, Lisbeth. I didn’t want you for that. I swear it. Not to wipe away a guilt I never felt for a moment.” White Rabbit lifts her face, washed of its makeup by the gasoline, a face without eyebrows, without lips, without shadows, a face with slightly crossed eyes.

“Then why?”

“You’ll die if I don’t explain everything, won’t you?” He speaks with his voice softer and softer. “To possess again a girl I had lost years ago.” His voice drops to a whisper in her wet hair.

“Come on, come on, we have to get inside.”

“What? Hanna? Who is Hanna?” Not a muscle of her face moves. Face of the sea, of the green wet earth, of dry flame. Everyone stares with phony seriousness at Jakob while Boston Boy raps his knuckles on the brass door and the eyes of Gladiolo appear in the peep window. “I don’t know who Hanna is,” says Boston Boy. “I never knew her well.” Gladiolo stares at us, sniffs, sees and recognizes me. “Order, order,” snaps our judge. “The witnesses will testify in turn.” “Did you fall into an oil well or something?” asks Gladiolo, sniffing. His face is rouged and powdered, his eyes are made up.

The Capitana, the madam of the house, greets us and leads us through crowded drawing rooms. It’s an old building, from the end of the last century. The stink of our gasoline-drenched clothes overpowers smells of powder and perfume and ripe fish. The whores are in a group at the foot of the wide stairs quietly jabbering with each other while their customers, tight pants and narrow lapels, drink at the bar and the girls’ pimps circulate with drinks on embossed metal trays. The Capitana, shaking her head and fanning her fingers delicately back and forth in front of her nostrils, guides us to the stairs. “The girls with you probably want to be alone, I suppose, very secluded, eh? We have some fine shows later in the evening. The drinks will come up in just a minute. Cigarettes, whatever you care for. How many girls do you want? I have to admit,” shaking her head and chuckling a little, “that I don’t know which of you want girls and which want men. You there in the red pants, how about it, pussy or prick? Unbutton, joven, and let an old woman have a peek at you.” Rose Ass-Long Dong unbuckles his belt and drops his pants and the Capitana stares. “God save us! Girls, take a look at the way this man is hung!”

Long Dong-Rose Ass is pale, his hair is like straw, his nose a little like Pinocchio’s. He speaks, softly, “It’s that I wanted … to be a witness of something…”

“Witness?” cries the madam. “With that hose between your legs, you only want to watch? Ah, come off it, don’t be selfish. Ay, papacito. ”

Long Dong sits bare-assed on the edge of the bed. The room is very large and has no windows. The windows have been bricked up, plastered over. Once, perhaps, there was a balcony to the right. “And maybe,” Long Dong goes on, “that’s all I have been. I’ve remained merely a witness. Only a looker-on. But I swear I didn’t know it.” Judge Morgana has jerked off her boots and she falls on top of Long Dong. “The witness will be coherent or shut his mouth.” She shuts his mouth for him, with kisses. Long Dong quickly undresses her. “Capitana,” I say, “dry our clothes for us, won’t you? This night will be longer than a forest road, deeper than the mountains of the sea. And none of us is Sanforized. Tell the girls to be a little less impatient. To step back and stop biting their fingernails. Better: make them look the other way.” “Let’s get the hell out of here,” a whore mutters. “They don’t want us. ” “No, they’re not serious clients. They’ve just come for the kicks.” “But my God, look at that man’s prick! He’s hung like a Piedras Negras bull. Like a Zacatlan burro.” “ Ay , what a shaft, what a baseball bat!” “Girls, listen!” cries the Capitana. “We’ll hold a raffle for him!” She stands like an oak. An old oak with hanging moss, her double chins. “We’ll raffle him off. Get them undressed.” They crowd around us, laughing, murmuring, on their knees with their heads bowed, trembling with excitement and with satisfaction in the servility of their roles. Professionals, their hands expert. They are ancient slave girls. They are cinnamon-skinned geishas, pockmarked, overperfumed, undressing their lords and ladies, ourselves, who stand like statues. Long Dong and Judge Morgana are alone in the bed. An enormous bed such as you don’t see any more. Four posts carved with vines and topped with urns. A high headboard. A red silk coverlet. Long Dong the muddled witness but the experienced lover; Morgana the passive judge naked except for the black garter belt that hangs upon the bones of her hips like a cowboy’s cartridge belt without cartridges. Long Dong is saying: “If I could only get my thoughts straight. But it seems that everything happened so long ago. We all had that dream. Didn’t you have it?” “Who wants to buy her chance in the raffle? The chance of a lifetime, girls. You’ll never see another to equal it.” While the trial continues:

“What dream? Please relate it. Dates and facts.”

“The dream with which I left Mexico and my mother?”

“Continue. In detail. Don’t summarize.”

“The dream that took us to Greece?”

“Remember carefully. Precisely.”

“The dream of the thirties. Of my early reading, of the romantics…”

“The witness will please define what is a romantic.”

“Someone who paws your dream.”

“That is sufficient. Go on.”

“Everything is impending. Everything is an aberration. Both the beautiful and the criminal.”

“You need not follow chronological order. Let the first be last.”

“I can say on oath that I have remembered Raúl and Ofelia only to try to know whether they lived for my sake. But I don’t want to go on talking about them. If I can, I’ll stop.”

“The witness will endeavor to be born again.”

And the girls wait, staring at Long Dong’s blooded razor, his lecherous shadow, his Nestle tower, his golden banana, his octopus nerve, his black fish. “Who wants in the raffle?” “Here, Capitana, here’s my ten pesos.” “Here’s mine.” Stone ear of yellow-kerneled corn. Slim head of a slant-eyed fox. Fur of a puma. And the humpbacked older woman, squat Elenita, the towel girl, with her wrinkled elephant skin, tough hide that will never serve for a lady’s gloves. “Pay up, girls, pay up.” The Capitana’s teeth grin like piano keys. “What’s he saying to her there?” “Christ knows. They’re speaking Chinese or something.” “… And the point is, a few minutes ago the attorney for the defense spoke about rediscovering the unity we have lost. About desire fulfilled simply by being desired. And I realized…” “Yes, my love. Deeper. A little deeper.” “… that both the poets and the criminals…” “You, too, Elenita? You can’t resist a horn like that either? Well, pay up, pay up. God will choose the winner.” “… could be born of the same mother. Sade is named Auschwitz. Lautréamont is Treblinka. Nietzsche is Terezin…” “No more now. The cards go into the chamber pot and each of you will draw one. The girl who draws the rooster wins the cock.” “… And our dream, the dream I could never write, was born of the spirit of those times…” Into the white chamber pot drop the cards one by one: the Soldier, the Serpent, the small Negro, the Watermelon, the Rooster … “… and was part of those times and had to die with those times…” “Quick, my love! Now, quick! Don’t worry about who’s next. Come for me now, I’m first.” She has her legs locked around his waist. “… to end with the end of that world which had crippled all of us…” The Charro. The Skeleton, with its tapers. The Hunchback. One card for each whore. “… and the only way to destroy that world was to do just what the attorney for the defense said. Put everything to the test. Compel reality to submit itself to will and our purpose. Our desire that no man had dared to feel before…” The Capitana hoists the chamber pot and shakes it well, rotates it, mixes the cards. “Wait your turns. No cheating. Everything square and aboveboard. We’re whores all right, but we’re honest whores.” “More, my lover! More, more!” “… So there had to be two revolutions instead of one. One in the world. One within ourselves.” “Oh, my love, my love, my love!” “Victory for will and desire at last. At last an end to the terrible oppositions that for centuries had isolated us from each other. Yours and mine. Word and action. Dream and waking. Body and soul. Homeland, flag, family, property…” He stops. If he were to go on, his words would be drowned, he would have to squirt them out as foam.