Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

The Monks understand me. Sure, they understand. That’s why bearded Boston Boy has his foot against the floorboard and we are whirling along Insurgentes like a projectile that knows it has a target. I would like to know what that target is, to learn if it is the one I suspect. But we are all too tired. I look at their faces, carried beside and around my own in the illusory immobility of togetherness, and I see that I don’t really know who they are or who they were a moment ago, much less who they may be an hour from now. April’s night wind, Mexican wind of dust blown from the dry lake beds of the flat valley, twists and disfigures those young faces, and perhaps among them there is someone I have never known: may not this same wind, born of land that once was water, may it not whip the muffler worn by a German student who takes the 7:15 tram, toss the hair of a pair of young lovers on a Greek island of goats and pebbles, drift golden fog around the heads of the baroque statues of a Karlsbrücke, beneath the Tropic of Cancer throb the lost polyphony of a great requiem, dissipate the gaseous warmth of a Jewish block in Manhattan, touch closed the eyes of an old man seated in the sun on a bench in Mexico City’s Alameda Park? I confess I don’t know. There are many things I don’t know. Ask me some other day. Maybe I’ll be wiser then. Now, at this moment, seated within this night-hurtling ancient Lincoln, I refuse to admit that if I should relax my will and my imagination, the six young faces and bodies traveling with me would be carried away into darkness like so many tiny sparks from a dying fire, that they, like the wind, the car, the night itself, are my creatures, and if I should cease to sustain them with my creative love, they would disappear in a whirl of transparent circles, vanish even from memory. Yes, I speak of loving you, my six Monks, for you are my six Monks, my six Monkkin, Monkkernels, Monkkites, Monkkings, Monkknights, Monkkittens, Monkknaves, and as with me you race through this April night at something near a hundred kilometers an hour, we see together my compatriots pushing their carts down the aisles of open supermarkets bright with light, buying canned goods that bombs may fall a little sooner on Peking, the world be saved a little sooner for freedom and Palmolive soap, standing before rotisseries that slowly turn with chickens under the arm that the helmeted Marines may cross the Rio Grande in the north and the Bío-Βíο in the south and we ourselves become the last Vietnamites; we see them emerging from Sears carrying a new aspirator that the world may become one wide field of burning napalm, see them climb into their Chryslers and Plymouths and Dodges that the universe may achieve the New Order of peace and tranquillity and decency sans all upsetting spectra, yellows, blacks, reds, and all unsettling specters like you, my Monkkeeners, my Monkkreatans, my Monkkristers, my Monkkillers. But now it isn’t my wind I hear. I never huffed and puffed up a wind that wails like that, that blinks its red light and waves its gauntleted hand for us to pull over and stop in front of the illuminated glass box of the Comercial Mexicana, where pleasant families, we can see them from our car through glass and more glass, an aquarium of a market, pass along shoving their carts and baby carriages, carrying their wire baskets and their children drowning among bottles of catsup and heads of lettuce and boxes of Kleenex provided to wipe away their snot as they wail. And the boxes of Kleenex and the files of artichoke militia (dry beneath their scales, Pablo) suffocate with so many children heaped on top of them and the man in brown raises his goggles and swings off his stilled wheels and swaggers toward us on shining boots as he takes out his ticket book and his pencil and Boston Boy assumes an expression of innocence. Play it cool, now, Boston Boy. Just play it cool. The cop wants fifty pesos and that’s all he wants. Viva the Emperor President seated upon the Great Pyramid. Si haut que l’on soit placé, on n’est jamais plus haut que sur son cul, quoth Cousin Michel, the Old Man of the Mountain.

“Ninety kilometers an hour, señor. At the very least. Don’t give me that innocent look.”

“No, no, Officer. I’m not innocent.”

“So? You admit it?”

“Everything, Officer. I admit everything.”

“Take it easy, young man. You’re going to force me to haul you in.”

“I’ve nothing to hide. I’ll confess everything.”

“And remember, the young ladies will have to go with you…”

“That makes no difference. I accept my responsibility. In reality I never wanted to find her. I was afraid.”

“If you’re planning on spending the night in the bust, you have every reason to be afraid.”

“The truth is, I thought she was safe. They had told me that the musicians were going to be excepted, that they weren’t going to touch them…”

“No one is safe in the peni, young man. No one.”

“I tell you, she wasn’t really in danger. There was no need for me to do anything. Why should I? The danger would have been to draw attention to her.”

“In the peni they don’t respect anyone. Not even grandmothers. Do you understand what I mean, young man?”

“Yes. In those places it’s best to be invisible. If I had let anyone know I was looking for her, it would have been like pointing her out to them. They would have noticed her, while before they didn’t. Do you see what I mean, Officer?”

“What I see is that on top of speeding and reckless driving, you’re drunk. Polluted, if the young ladies will excuse the word. Stoned. Even your hands are shaking. Let me have a whiff of your breath.”

“If I found her, I hurt her. Not to find her was a favor to her. To see her only from the distance. And I would have put myself in danger, too. Well, I accept that. But I would have lost the confidence of my superiors. Maybe I would even have lost my job. And it was my first assignment. I had studied to build and now, in the midst of all the destruction, I had been given an opportunity to build. What more could I ask?”

“Look, señor, don’t try my patience.”

“And one day she saw me and didn’t recognize me or didn’t want to recognize me, all she saw was my uniform. ‘Let me pass,’ she said. That was all she said.”

“I don’t think you have a very clear idea of Mexico City’s peni, young man. Drug addicts and perverts. Not the best of company. And the cells are cold as tombs.”

“Then what, Officer, if it had turned out that she hated me? What if she had rejected me? Wasn’t it better for both of us to remain apart in our separate worlds united only by our memories, Prague, the Karlsbrücke, that summer of concerts in the Wallenstein Gardens, the Requiem? The hope and the promise that we had been in those young days? Wouldn’t that seem wiser, Officer, more rational?”

“They don’t wear kid gloves in the peni, señor. They aren’t exactly polite and well-mannered. Try to understand the situation you put me in. I don’t want to force a night in the peni on anyone. But…”

“And escape? To try to escape?”

“Ah, just try it, young man, just try it. Plenty have tried and no one has made it yet.”

“To end up, both of us, electrocuted on that damn fence, trapped by the dogs of the Hundenkommando, executed by a volley against the death wall? Or simply caught and shipped off to the ovens of Auschwitz?”

“Look, my friend. I’m trying to do you a favor. Stop speaking Chinese to me. Show a little more respect for authority.”

“No, Officer, there was no way out. The only intelligent thing was to accept the situation and wait. She was one of the musicians and the musicians were safe. The war would end one day. Why risk our lives foolishly? And to top it all, she was pregnant.”