A Change of Skin

  The bull stopped bellowing. He stiffened, as if for all to see him. His cowardice had become courage and there was also his physical pride in simply being there beneath the sun. His torpid eyes became large black coins, living and brilliant. He dilated his wet and elastic nostrils and snorted. He began to tremble with fury, his straight loins, his haunches and rump, the sharp ridge of his back. All his body was made for struggle now: the thick and powerful muscles in front, the lean swiftness behind. His hooves were black, his nostrils large, his chest deep, his breathing savage, and he was filled with the bravery that rises only from fear. Franz, the shawl cape held open at his side, was still approaching, and the two figures, the slow moving man and the motionless bull on the white sand, made an image fit for the painted wall of an ancient cave, the face of an imperial Roman coin, a Greek mosaic.

  At last the bull’s eyes understood that there were two objects before him: the man and the cape. Franz became still. He held the shawl motionless in his sun-browned fists and the wind hardly stirred it. The veins in his forearm were swollen and bluish. His heels were together, his right leg tense, ready to stiffen when the bull charged. You stared with fear, Elizabeth, while Isabel, tittering, held back her laughter and Javier merely looked on. Franz had dominated the bull. Everything, the scent of the cows, the bellowing of the other bulls and the yearlings, the roar of the waterfall, had disappeared, and the bull had become deaf, completely hypnotized by the man and the black cape. The bull charged. His head lifted the cape and he swept past Franz, furiously hooking his horns to the right. Carried forward by his weight, the bull skidded to the end of the strip of sand and bellowed with pain as he fell. He rose again. For a second he tried to rest, but Franz was already pressing him, pinning him where he stood by repeating “Toro! Toro!” Franz’s jaw protruded, his lips were parted stiffly. Both man and animal were wet with fear. Franz’s shirt stuck to his back, the dust had whitened his leather shoes. Beneath his clothing his body could be seen stripped down to violence and tenseness, stripped to nerves and muscles and concentration.

  Again the bull charged. Again his head and shoulders swept past Franz’s sucked-in belly, again he lifted the cape with his neck in a movement that was fixed yet flexible. He was completely dominated now. This time he did not slide and fall; he whirled like a spark and charged a third time as Javier turned his back and walked to the Volkswagen, opened the door and sat behind the wheel and with all his strength pushed down on the horn. The horn blared, guttural, cutting, penetrating, filled the silent air with noise, and Javier stared through the dusty windshield and saw the bull make a new charge and the moment of danger when Franz, distracted by the horn a moment before the bull reacted to it, raised his head. The bull’s head was wrapped in the black shawl. The cattle jerked into sound and movement. Nervous, bellowing, they tried to locate the source of the frightening horn. Javier continued to press down as sweat dripped from his forehead. Franz stood on the strip of sand still trying to hold the bull’s attention, and beyond were the herd with their growing fear. The first to move was a sandy-colored heifer who bellowed and turned; then a bull with a ragged hide and then all of them, bellowing, tossing their heads and snorting as fear ran from one to the other like an electric shock. Their sweat and slaver fell from them, urine dribbled, their bellies heaved. Some threw themselves into the river and were carried toward the falls. Others, caught up by terror, stampeded toward the far bank with their shoulders and horns bumping. Finally the bull facing Franz also caught the fear. He bellowed louder than any of them, shook his head crazily, and ran after the herd. The cattle reached the other side of the river and disappeared in a cloud of dust as they raced away from the lunatic racket of the horn.

  Franz hung his head. You ran toward him, Elizabeth, and embraced him. Isabel smiled and walked to the car, where Javier, exhausted, was leaning forward upon the button of the still-sounding horn.

  The ford was free. The bellowing and the sound of hooves became faint. The sun shone down on a green river of vague slime. Javier straightened and the horn stopped. Once again the chirruping of birds in the round trees across the river could be heard. Javier stepped out of the car and pushed the seat forward and got into the back seat. Isabel followed him. Her smile was hidden but showed in her mischievous eyes as she looked at Javier, trying to find the same amusement in him. You and Franz neared the car, Elizabeth. The two men had the same tenseness, the same serious pallor. To fight a bull: to rest a fist on the button of a horn.

  “You put him in danger. Good God, didn’t you know what you were doing?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Franz. “He chased them away better than I did.”

  “Don’t make excuses for him! What if they had stampeded toward us?”

  “As it turned out, they didn’t.”

  “And he distracted you. You could have been gored. What a difference then!”

  “Honestly, it isn’t important.”

  “My God, what a difference!”

  Javier smiled at you, Elizabeth.

  Franz started the engine. He drove forward without moving his head. His blue polo shirt was wet with sweat. His gray flannel trousers and his shoes were covered with dust.

  Isabel whispered something.

  “What?” said Javier.

  You straightened Franz’s corduroy coat on the back of the seat, Dragoness. His dark glasses fell out. You retrieved them and carefully cleaned them, using a handkerchief from your purse, and returned them to his pocket.

  “This scene with the bulls,” Isabel whispered in Javier’s ear, smiling. “Why don’t you write it.”

  “Isabel, Isabel,” Javier said, almost groaning.

  * * *

  Δ Javier had gone to sleep on the bed, Isabel, and you were reading his notebook and quietly humming “Moon River.”

  … But one must suspect that despite their apparent freedom and disinterest, all of the elements of the sky bow before the stone memory of the serpent that girds and imprisons the base of the altar. They were men. Where are they now? Does a hidden river of blood flow down the stairs? Stone cannot see, but the time that culminated here could see. And death can see. The water-sun flows over this world and its men die by drowning. The earth-sun—and I see you, sculptured earth that bears the weight of the pyramid, tilled earth as rigid as the fangs of the serpent in stone which will not endure so long as you—the earth-sun receives the blood. The fire-sun, above and within at the same time, consumes and murders. The air-sun, most ferocious of all, in its silence contains the others, earth, fire, and water. And where are you, you who were once living men? Come forth. Speak to me. What will you say? Look, eyes, and see. Don’t lose a single heartbeat of this still living earth. We stand here, the four of us, facing your symbols, all that remains after the great conflagration of noon. Your symbols? And how are we different from you? Do we await, as you did, the cataclysm, the rupture of the veil, the appearance of the twilight monsters who will devour us? And are they not always here among us? I draw closer. I touch the stone feathers …

  Beside you Javier moved and you closed the notebook and looked over at him. He was sleeping the stupor of Cholula’s afternoon. With one hand you covered your mouth to hold back your laughter as you read on:

  … What beauty is this, and how does it differ from the beauty we know? Can you say? Yes: for us, our beauty is a model, an example to be followed, an incitement to transpose the model from its fixed expression into our own living experience. The example of art is held before us to be actualized again, though what we create may fall far short of the model, actualized in our daily life. Thus beauty ends up wasted in the merely fashionable. But the beauty I find here, this richness, this barbaric luxury of Xochicalco is something else. Something that is realized not as a model, not to be repeated, that indeed is incapable of further extension. The beauty of the barbaric ends in itself, lives in its distance from, not its identification with, life …

  You could no longer restrain your laughter, Isabel.
You say that it welled up from deep within you, from the very soles of your feet, and burst out, though you tried to stifle it with your hand and Javier’s open notebook. You laughed so violently, though still silently, that the bed began to shake and Javier drowsily opened his eyes. Now you had no time to return the notebook to the night table. Javier opened his eyes and your laughter burst into sound and he could not understand it, and you, feeling caught, read aloud: “You are in a moment when time seems to flee from you, yet stand still…”

  Javier stared at you, his mouth hanging open. He still did not understand. You scrambled up and knelt on the bed beside him and read again: “The beginning and the end are identical, like the serpent…” You went on rocking with laughter.

  Javier lifted himself on his elbows and across his face ran every possible emotion. He loves me, he hates me, you said to yourself. I please him. I humiliate him. I excite him. You read aloud a third time as he grabbed at your thigh and you jumped from the bed. “And therefore there is neither beginning nor end but only an opaque and eternal nightmare during which one waits vainly…”

  He grunted and jumped after you. You had never seen him like that. But you still laughed as you spun away from him, escaping his lethargic hands: “… waits for another dawn…”

  He leaped toward you and you fought back with the notebook, your mouth opened and your eyes shining. You dodged behind the table. Javier knocked the table over and you yelled something and ran swiftly toward the bed with the notebook between your hands. For the first time you were aware that you were naked. And he, just as naked, forgetting his flaccid exposed penis—that exhausted sunflower, Pussycat—and his flabby stomach, was seeing your nakedness for the first time, as if desire were being born again from his fury. You noticed something new in the swift rush of your blood, in the flush that spread over you as you stood there feeling fear for the first time, paralyzed, trapped, smelling all the smells that you had not left in the bathroom. He was attracted or even captured by those smells, you realized, and now only one decision was left to you, whether to walk to him and offer yourself quickly and quietly, or to stop and wait until he felt himself to be master of the situation simply because you were doing nothing. You say that you did not even turn your back on him, you continued facing him, so that he could see and feel your fear. But ah, Isabel, you understood that even that movement would have petrified him and made him see that you knew exactly what was happening. No, you didn’t move. You stood there, rigid and motionless, the notebook in your hands, trying to disappear without daring to close your eyes. You were an ostrich with its head sunk in who knows what dark sands of your body. You were a chameleon, trying to take on the transparent color of the air. And he walked toward you as if you were not really there and as he embraced you, sluggishly, almost like a child, almost helplessly, you were aware of his nakedness too and that he smelled of something sour and spoiled. He took your shoulders and turned you until your back was against his chest, your damp hair, of black sand, against his face. His hand spread your buttocks, first very gently. Then the fingers stiffened and entered your anus and the sand of your hiding place broke apart and you were concealed no longer as the opening that had been dry and tense now softened to a melted, smooth stickiness. He passed his other hand forward between your legs and rubbed your clitoris. You bent like a stretched bow, Isabel, and fell on the bed face down, already lost in a dark forest of salty flowers and rotted ferns and damp roots. The fish, hard as silver, as glass, sought its stinking algae. Now there were no secrets. The mine had been opened and pierced to its deepest, rose and black gallery. Your ultimate shame had been uncovered and the conquest had turned you into a statue of salt. Nevertheless, it was your victory, one that you had forced upon him without saying it or wishing it, making him believe that he had accomplished what in reality was the consequence of the strength of your passivity, that enduring strength you had never before put to the proof and that now had made him reveal himself in the act of sodomy, made him destroy with each thrust and withdrawal, telling you by his violent panting that now the words and apologies were behind, literature had ended, there was only this ultimate liberty which you granted with clenched teeth and a pain like that of giving birth. It was new for both of you, yet you understood quite clearly what was happening to you for the first time at the age of twenty-three. He himself had let you read the explanation not long after you had first met him, back during those days when he still behaved as if you were only another student he had seduced, a girl who wanted to receive not his love but his knowledge. They were words written in the same blue notebook that now had fallen from your hands:

  … Perhaps then, when I first met Ligeia, the tenderness that Isabel thinks is enough for her and enough for a lover would have been enough for me too. But she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t realize that a writer’s entire life is like some absorbing novel read in the small hours of the morning during adolescence, read just as dawn breaks, a novel with the title Lost Illusions. It is a bitter and sad paradox that in attempting to say everything, to give everything its meaning, one ends by emptying all life of what meaning it has naturally and by coming to see that after all nothing can be said through the cold and artificial forms of literature. When did I discover this? Was it the very vulgarity of a vender of figs, skinny and penniless, who was forced off a beach by the owners of a restaurant? Was it my refusal to see her searching helpless eyes, to allow her and her problems to break the delicate balance between imagination and act that I had come to the islands to find? Was it losing Ligeia’s collection of little pebbles? Why did I let all that distract me from my central passion, my poem, from the concentration of my purpose? What did my poem have to do with an old woman who sold figs, or with colored pebbles, or even with Ligeia? My unity was overcome by divisiveness: words could not conquer the fragmentation of reality, a fragmentation that was there already, before I tried to write it. Then once again only the determination to make everything fixed, and again the failure to fix the past, to devour the present, to accept all of the future’s premonitions. Moi, j’aurais porté toute une société dans ma tête? Ah, ha, ha …

  “God, what a difference!”

  “You found it so different? It really surprised you? Yet it didn’t last long. How long does it take for an effrontery imposed upon the body to wear off? By contrast with what I have wanted to share with you, and you have never understood, what does this matter?”

  … To struggle with a fleshless enemy. Never to know whether abstention rather than the work in progress is the sure way. I must think this through. How do you live suspended in air, uncertain of the real value of what you do and what you cease to do? If to act is to fail, and to abstain is to succeed because abstention leaves at least a mark of protest, then how can one describe an epoch that ought to be left undescribed? For this monstrosity of an era should not be allowed to leave any of its demented words for the ear of posterity …

  “Would you laugh at me, Ligeia? Yes, you would. You can’t understand.”

  … From our first years together I always understood that the meaning of our age is to be found in taking all meaning away from it. The absurd. That is to be Byron today … and every effort to answer that deafness with a creative effort, a book or a painting or a score, is to cooperate with an era that deserves only its silence. The artist’s work must remain within him and never be given light. To hand it over to those who do not deserve it is obvious weakness. So long as we do not share our work, our work can have value, that is the precondition for value today. Within me, within me: the whole struggle. The meeting between what I feel intuitively and what I understand. The bridge of my spirit, to be crossed only by my spirit. Within me the debate between the tradition’s conventions, the strength of one century become the limitations and debilities of the next. Within me the search for the absolute, the failure of incompleteness, the creation of that incompleteness which, simply because it is all that can be attained, is converted into my tiny absolute. Within
me the giants disguised as windmills: no one will ever believe that they are giants, that the insane has become the rational because it alone sees what reasonable fools cannot see. To hold faith: not to express anything, not to reveal anything. Not to expose ourselves, neither to attrition before dogma nor to the diminution of mere indifference: why should what we have be taken from us to be destroyed and prostituted? Better silence. Always silence, if we prefer not to accept the corruption of those who insist we be what we are not, and of those others who isolate us and gnaw upon us and render us harmless. I don’t know. I don’t want to look behind me. I don’t live in some other century but in this one, a time that assassinates with prison or with success, that destroys with the gallows or with applause, that, whether it accepts or refuses what we write, nevertheless always attacks and annihilates us. There is no way out. So long as our age of ironic barbarism endures, we must hold fast and sing the panegyric of a society that insists upon being called holy, or hold fast and serve the grindstone wheels of that other society which already feels itself to be holy because it distributes refrigerators liberally. There’s no solution. No one wants our work. Everyone demands us to be high priests, acolytes of the great cults. Who will save himself? He who must sing the glories of labor or he who must sing the glories of the products of labor? There is no way out. Better to keep silent.

  “That is the heroism that you never recognize in me, Ligeia. Ah. It would be more heroic then to write, write, write, but never to publish, to hold back waiting for a better era. I don’t know. Ask me some day and see if then I answer you. For now I don’t know. Honestly, I do not know. Believe me.”