Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

Morgana is finishing. The last touches: eyebrows, eyelids, the lips again. And now we know this woman who formerly was faceless. She raises her naked arms and fastens her hair at the back of her neck with a copper-rusted ribbon. Her naked arms, bronzed from the sun, then the tossing movement with both hands. That is how we always see her, her arms raised while she ties up her hair with a ribbon. Sometimes in profile, sometimes from behind, sometimes in front as if she were a turning statue with a windblown blue curtain for her grape-leaf garment. From in front, in profile, from behind, as Morgana slowly turns her, makes her drop her hands. We inspect Morgana’s work. Kneeling, Elena looks on. “Yes, Becky,” the woman with the new face says quietly, “the God of Israel exists and lives, though far from us. He is not merely one more fantasy created by these mock men who love women as if they were dreams and dreams as if they were women, who murder innocent childen with abortions before birth and gas chambers after birth. No, Becky. God is real.” She is a beautiful Jewess. A beautiful dark-skinned Jewess whose beaded sweat we can see on her temples, in her armpits, on her upper lip, at the division of her breasts. A dark-haired Jewess of black prolonged orgasms. The discovery of America. Land-ho. Bullshit. “I’ll come home, Becky. I’ll make one more voyage and come home.” Elena covers her with the damp trench coat and her arms drop.

“Elenita,” says the Capitana, “peel me a grape.”

“When are you going to tell me the story of that monster of a bed, Capitana?”

“Get them out of here, caifán. With a little order and dignity, please. Who’s paying, you? Gladiolo, make out his check and wait downstairs. When you go out, caifán, try not to attract the attention of every cop in the colonia. We have a little protection, but not very much. And God knows what would happen if anyone was to find out about this witches’ Sabbath you and your … The dough, caifán, let’s have the dough. That old bed? Bah, it came in handy, didn’t it? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“But you’ve been here for years, Capitana. I know you know about it.”

“Years, caifán, you said it. Long years and a few happy days.”

“I believe you were here when the house first opened.”

“Yeah. And I remember you, too. You were just a squirt kid who used to come in to have his horn sharpened every now and then. I remember, all right.”

“Be careful with the step, Capitana.”

“Always the gentleman, caifán. Thank you, I appreciate it. Look, please don’t bring these werewolves of yours back again. It’s indecent to have that many in one bed at the same time. The prestige of the house suffers.”

“You heard the madam, werewolves. Move along. There’s blood in the streets.”

“I suppose you’ve forgotten how I was in the old days.”

“Forget, Capitana? How could I? A sugar dumpling. A ripe mango. Just to look at you was enough to make a man…”

“Yeah, and today, a pot gut and double chins. But still lively, old man. And still smart.”

“Tell me about that bed. I’m curious.”

“Why not, if you want to know? I don’t mind telling you. It’s just that I hate to remember. I don’t like to go back to anything. It hurts, you know. Not always. But often, too goddamn often. Well, the bed. When we moved in, the house was empty except for the patio, where there were canaries in cages, and for that big bedroom, where the bed was. We let the canaries die. Who cared about canaries? There wasn’t another stick in the whole house. Oh, yes, the bead curtain that we still have between the bar and the living room. And a bottle of morphine tablets hidden away behind the bed. With a syringe and a needle or two. What do you think of that, eh? But I don’t know. Maybe she was dying of cancer or something. The señora who owned the house, I mean. And yes, there was a painting, a portrait of that honest lady. The head of a woman, but her face was the face of a little girl. So, she had died and her son had sold the house and everything in it except the canaries in the cages and the big bed and the painting and the bead curtain, and you know who was the buyer and what business began. They said that the son would be back to get the bed and the painting. He wanted them in memory of his mother. But he never showed. We didn’t complain. Beds like that aren’t made any more. It’s given us damn good service. Hah, just imagine, that gentle girl-faced lady passed her entire life in that bed. Slept there, fucked there, gave birth there, dreamed there, finally died there, all alone at the last with her Sacred Heart of Jesus hanging on the wall and her memories watching her from the shadows. A decent, Godfearing, well-bred lady, as proper as white gloves. And now in less than half a lifetime, how many thousands of broads have spread their legs on that old bed. Shit, caifán, what can you be sure about in this mess we call life? That saintly lady has been rolling in her grave, I suppose, while we were rolling on her mattress. Thanks for coming tonight. It’s good to see old friends sometimes. Come back again. It’s your own home, you know, any time you want it. Open the door for him, Gladiolo. Those kids, though … keep them out in the pasture where they can kick up their heels as they please. In the barn…” The six Monks filed past her silently. She squeezed my arm and pulled my ear down to her lips. “Listen, caifán, come back all by yourself some evening. Don’t forget your little mango. Shit, you can die crossing the goddamn street. Better to do it in bed, eh, fucking your fat old hot mama.”

The door closes behind us and we are alone and exhausted. Once we are in the ancient Lincoln convertible, no one will speak. No one will know where we are going, why we are going there. I will know nothing except that I want to write what they have told me, that they have told me enough and more than enough, and to put it down on paper well, cleanly, truly, will be to face all the sand of an endless desert. I will betray them. I’ll have to, for as my cousin Pepe Bianco shut up among his books in his place on Cerrito in Buenos Aires puts it, every novel is a betrayal, an act of bad faith, an abuse of confidence. For at bottom we are most contented with what appears to be, with what goes on monotonously day after day and by its repetitiveness earns, and perhaps deserves, the name of reality. I don’t give a damn in the drugstores on Broadway. Fiche moi la paix in the cafés on the Boulevard St-Germain, Andate a fare un culo in the restaurants of Piazza Campitelli, Me importa madre in the supermarkets along Insurgentes, Me importa un corno in the movie houses of Lavalle, and who knows how the hell they say it but we can be sure that they say the same damn thing in the hotels of Mayakovsky Square, at the camp grounds of the Tatra, in the shops on Carnaby Street. So why do we wear ourselves to less than shadows writing books that say only that the reality that matters is a false one and that death awaits us unless we protect ourselves with lies, with appearances put on like wigs, with lunatic aspirations, the aspirant lunacy, to be precise, of a book. Truth bares its teeth at us from every side. Our lie isn’t what threatens us. What threatens is truth, which waits as patient as a diamond and makes us drowsy and satisfied, conquers us with contentment so that it can overcome us as we were first overcome in the beginning of everything. If we were to let it, truth would annihilate us. For “truth” is the same as the beginning and the beginning was nothingness and nothingness is death and death is the enemy, so let us all lie together, or surely we shall all lie alone. Truth would like to offer us a vision of the beginning, of life before it learned to doubt, before it was contaminated by idea. And that vision is precisely the vision of the end: the other face of creation is apocalypse. And the “lies” we spinners of tales tell betray “the true” simply in order to hold away from us, from all of us, that day of judgment when the beginning and the end shall be one. Yet nevertheless literature pays its homage to original, mortal, entirely unacceptable might; we recognize it because we must if we are to control and limit it. Not to recognize it, not to limit it, is to open the door on the fanged wolf of assassinating purity. And if that happens, all of us end up very small brown turds, Daddy-oh and Big Mama, desiccated and scentless.