Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“And was that your dream too, Elizabeth?” asks Brother Thomas.

The whores draw their cards one by one and hold them face side down. At a signal from the Capitana, they all turn the cards over. “Ooooooh, nooooo! Look who has the rooster!” “God, what luck!” “What saint did you pray to, Elenita?” “But she doesn’t know her cunt from a hole in the ground. She’s no more a whore than I am a copper.” “If that black-haired bitch who came with them hasn’t tired him out, you’ll be flying high in a minute or two, Elenita.” “A pearl before a sow … shit, shit!” And the Capitana, the only gentle voice: “Put down your towels, Elenita. Your chance has come.” “Better have an alcohol rub first. You’ll need all the pep you can find.” “We were cheated. Capitana, you did that on purpose!” “I? I didn’t do anything. Didn’t you see her draw it herself?” So Elena the towel girl wins the raffle. Short stooped figure wearing black cotton stockings, a checked gingham dress, a tattered white sweater. The towel girl. Flabby breasts. Wrinkled face. Sinewy arms. Brown hands accustomed to wiping away blood and semen, to cleaning the cunts of whores and the pricks of apes like King Kong, monarch of the jungle. Elena of the warm washcloths, the soft white towels, always ready, quick, Long Dong is yours, you can forget your towels for a while.

In the hot season, snakes leave their dens. Their old skin is no longer good enough, and abandoning their solitude they go out into the sun to join their brothers in a tangled mass and wriggle over the trampled fields of Eden, scraping across the bristled earth until their skin is pulled away in strips and they become naked skeletons with egglike eyes. And I don’t know who touches whom when Rose Ass-Long Dong-Javier rises from the bed and we all pile in. I don’t know what he says to Elenita, the runt, twisted, ugly towel girl who has seated herself on a stool beside him, still holding her stack of towels, while the Capitana amuses me with the black kiss and a pair of socks that I think belong to Jakob fly past my nose.

“I wrote a short book. I left my mother. I met a woman and we went to Greece. That much I know is true. At least I believe it is true. But the world didn’t change. It denied me and refused to notice me.”

“Look, young señor, the rooster!”

“I wanted to be one with the world, with my dream, with art, action…”

“Look, señor, just look.”

“Did I lose confidence in the strength of my desire?”

“See, señor, I have the rooster.”

“Now let me try to stand beside Franz. Accuse me too…”

“I won, señor! I won!”

“We are just alike. Except that what was action in him in me was only possibility, latency. In me it lacked all greatness, all courage. I have been a kind of larva Franz.”

“I won the raffle, señor.”

“Try to see it, Elenita. We were told that the world could be made over only when we all acted together, as one. A single man, alone, could do…”

“The raffle, I won the raffle!”

“But history never thinks. History acts.”

“And my prize, señor? What about my prize?”

“My isolated desire could do nothing. Nor could love, the proclamation of the desire we all have.”

“Aren’t you going to be nice to me, señor?”

“Can love be a summary of everything the world is? Can we be one with the world by making ourselves one with a woman?”

“That’s in God’s hands, señor. Are you going to force me to be satisfied just watching?”

“And isn’t love really a struggle, a resistance, a desire: like the world, something we must conquer or let conquer us? Doesn’t one lover always impose his being upon the other, prevent the other from becoming what he might? And … what? What the hell comes next? Damn my memory, I’ve…”

“Elena! Elenita! A towel to Number 6! Damn it, where has she taken off to now? Elena! Why in God’s name do we pay her? All she does is sit and listen to the drunks make their confessions. Elena! I’m dripping like a sponge, damn it, hurry up!”

“Touch it if you want to, Elenita.”

“Oh, I want to, señor.”

“You have very pretty hands.”

“I have to have something pretty. The rest of me…”

“I like your hands. They’re heavy as two wet stones. They’re heavy as a bag full of silver.”

“That’s from carrying the towels all the time. Sometimes my arms are so numb I can’t feel them.”

“Is it enough for you just to watch?”

“But I ought not to have entered the raffle. Meddling in something that isn’t my business. They’re going to be mad at me. They’ll holler and yell at me. Better put the little rooster back and let someone else … Thank you, young señor. You’ve been kind.”

“They’re yelling for you already. Is it true that you listen to men’s confessions, Elenita?”

“Yes, when they’re drunk they like to talk and they know I never tell. But I have to go. They’ll fire me if I don’t hurry.”

“Sit still. I’ll pay them for the time you stay with me. What do you earn?”

“Just my tips, my meal. Now and then a drink.”

“Come here, Elenita.”

“No, señor. Not to the bed. They’ll get mad.”

“Come here, Elenita. Come and listen to my confession. Just listen, that’s all. Can you understand me?”

“No, I never understand. That’s why men talk to me. While they’re waiting, before or after, they all talk to me, like cloudbursts they talk. And I forget everything, every word. I can’t remember. They call me forgotten Elenita, the forgetter. Yes. That’s me.”

“Come here and forget some things that don’t mean anything.”

“No, señor. I’m not the one for you to do this with.”

“Lie down.”

Jey joneybonch. Loveydovey. Hazme un huequito, cherriblossom. Foqui-foqui …

“I’ll put the light out now.”

“ Ay, señor, señor!”

“Good, Elenita? Deep enough?”

“Oh, my God. Everybody fuck everybody.”

“Do you smell my Negro friend, Elena? Who ever made up that lie that Negroes smell different from the rest of us, worse? Touch the blond señor’s whiskers. Rub the back of our girlfriend who has no eyebrows. Jakob, what the hell are you doing with your socks on in bed? Listen, Elena, while I ask Jakob a few silly questions. Are you trying to shape up by making love, Jake? Don’t you know that while we forget it the world goes its own way? Don’t you see that in your battle, which is exactly like mine, my first dream, that dream of far away, of rebellion, you have been defeated too?”

And I am among, beneath, between the tangle of bodies, half suffocated. The absence of laughter frightens me. The cadaverous solemnity in which none of us touches any of the others, in which we are all kept secure by the mask of the language we are speaking, English, English too in the mouths of these dark Mexican whores with their joneybonch and foqui-foqui, and when Rose Ass puts out the light, every hand is withdrawn from the skin it was touching, darkness snatches our pleasure away from us, our hands flee to refuge against their own bodies, and the lingua franca of young, beardless Rose Ass forces isolation upon all of us who understand his Germanic English … “The destroyers of idols have now become the idolizers of idols…” and Rose Ass lies like a thin sardine on the edge of the silent, creaking bed, pressed against Elena the towel girl … “… Triumphant rebellion becomes the new institution, the law of the new oppression imposes respectability upon all until we must flee to imagine an untouchable madness, to feel the new sickness that has come to infect us…” and the foreign tongue immobilizes the whores, restrains their mockery, protects us from them, and in their own way they are part of our game too, listening without understanding as he says in English: