A Change of Skin

  He noticed that that Christmas Raúl wanted to be closer to her and bought her a new dress. But when he approached her, he could only embrace her and then step back with his hands on her shoulders, shy, tender, mute, without kissing her. Neither did she kiss him. With a tired smile she thanked him and after the meal she went out as usual to return three or four hours later fresh, revived, and one day Raúl did not appear for supper and then there were two mysteries. Heaven and earth are full of Thy Glory, Holy Father. Hosanna in the highest. In that other time.

  * * *

  Δ Sure, let him give thanks if he wants to for the beginnings of another dry and long and timeless time when he can use his endless words. For you only the rainy months are different: a line drawn in the dust which you welcome, Elizabeth, because you need dates, frontiers of time to cross and leave behind, in order to assure yourself that you still preserve the strength of your youth.

  “And that’s what we live for. Nothing else. Are you listening to me, Javier? I tell you that’s all, and if you don’t believe me, then ship ahoy, graduate and join the Navy. Okay, okay, hold your horses.”

  We live only to store up strength that will allow us to sustain our postures during old age. Everything is a remnant of youth, something saved from that which was not for its own sake but for the sake of what it was going to become. Good night, sweet prince: life is usury. Well, usury or not, life is for you definitely not anonymous death on the sidewalk before a glass and concrete apartment building, a modern building that was divided up into apartments when it was first constructed, not, like the old homes, years afterward. For you, that is, life is not death. But for Javier death is life. His answer to the body on the sidewalk was in his eyes before his eyes saw the body, a dead lump thrown there before your building. He already knew what to say because he had said it and written it a thousand times, that that dead lump or any other dead lump on the sidewalk before any building is living, still a part of life as it dies. You saw how he looked at the corpse. His eyes thanked it for being there face down, stabbed through, its tongue lapping the puddle of its own blood.

  “You thanked him because it was he who was dead and not you, Javier. That was it. That’s why all of you in Mexico carry that expression in your eyes. You are all always expecting and waiting for the act or the accident that will eliminate someone else instead of you. That’s all. And so silently you were telling that poor defunct cadaver, as my caifán friend would put it, that his death was the…”

  The most important event in his life. Of course, Dragoness, though neither you nor any of your countrymen understand it. To commit murder or to be murdered is to acquire a value which our other life, our life of breathing, digesting, moving, cannot afford. You know, Elizabeth, there’s something I’ve been wanting to explain to you …

  “Who was he? Did he have a name? I suggested that we telephone the police immediately. You looked at me with pity, Javier, and said no, we were not going to call the police. I didn’t understand. I knew nothing about it. Juan Jiménez or Pedro López, a mechanic or a cab driver or a pimp or a civil servant, married, single, old, young, happy or beset by misfortune, was lying there stiffening and still bleeding, living, you told me, the most important event of his life without even knowing it. And you and I were his only witnesses, as if he had died merely for you and me to see him. But what did he know about our presence and our certainty that he was dead.”

  It’s a myth, Elizabeth. Listen now. How could he be grateful to you and Javier for knowing that at its end his life had finally accomplished that other act, the only act of value since the moment he had emerged wet and blind between the legs of his mother? I tell you it is simply an old and familiar myth. You know in advance how it will end. Ulysses will return to Ithaca. Penelope will be faithful to her weaving. Medea will murder her own children. What do you expect?

  “You squeezed my hand. You told me that the dead man before us was finally alive. That all the dead are living.”

  That you were observing a vital, not a mortal, rearrangement of the relationships the man held with the world. That his murder had given value to a being who had no other value. That you should forget your simple logic: life is good, death ends life, therefore death is bad. That we deceive ourselves when we think we achieve a revenge or inflict a punishment when we murder a man. That the murdered man had not died because he lacked the words to persuade his murderer not to do it, to substitute words for death. No, not even that. He had been murdered because his murderer wanted to give him the totality of life. His murderer in killing him had done him a favor.

  “We stepped across the body. You yawned. You opened the door and silently we went up to our apartment. The board squeaked just as always. You said that you had decided not to go to the office tomorrow. And when tomorrow came, you didn’t even listen to me when I brought in the afternoon paper and read aloud about the murder. His name was Enrique Rocha. A medical student. A couple had been standing on the sidewalk kissing and a cop came along and told them to break it up. Enrique Rocha, who just happened to be passing, asked the cop what the hell difference did it make whether or not they were kissing on the sidewalk? Let him mind his own business and leave lovers in peace. In peace, Javier, in peace. The cop swung at Enrique Rocha and Enrique defended himself. The cop pulled out a knife and stabbed him. The couple who had been kissing ran off but today they decided to tell their story. The cop fled after robbing the dying medical student of his shoes. Today he is hiding somewhere. They’re looking for him, they’ll find him, and then they’ll let him go.”

  So the student was outfielded by the old man with the scythe, and the copper skipped. That’s the way it always goes, Dragoness. Ciao, Enrique Rocha. Bye-bye, copper. It’s myth, Elizabeth. Pure myth.

  “So you had been right. I wanted to call the police and you wouldn’t let me. Enrique Rocha? A medical student? No. Simply an abstract being who discovered as he lay there, with his mouth open and his eyes open and the knife in his guts, that in Mexico death is alive.”

  Javier laughed: “And you wanted me to call the police!”

  He laughed a long time and my eyes wandered around our apartment, the same apartment we had taken so many years ago when we returned from Europe and the same one we have today, except that today it is joined to the next apartment: we had the wall torn down and made the two into one, spacious and comfortable, when we returned to Mexico for the second time in 1950. How many things remain that we had in the beginning? I don’t know. Sometimes I feel sad touching the old sandalwood bookcase, now out of sight in the maid’s room, used to keep linen. When I rub my fingers over the bindings of the old secondhand books we bought and loved in those days. Faust translated by Nerval. Do you remember it? Kleist’s Penthesilea. Even a life of Byron by Maurois that we picked up from an old bookseller on the Quai Voltaire. Secondhand, the Grasset edition, wrapped in cellophane that was supposed to make it look newer and that gave a devilish glitter to Byron’s face on the cover. Some of those books are gone now, you’ve taken them away, leaving gaps. And our posters we threw out with the trash, silently, a little ashamed, when they began to be tattered. The poster of bright flags and a fantastic nude surrounded by puffy shadows. That of the red-faced beer drinker clad in black. The Yugoslav peasant woman, thin as the spire of a cathedral. Moreau, Hals, Meštrović. And the clothing, the suits, shoes, underwear, and the combs, vases, the leather cases, the sheets, towels, even the silver and china, everything leaves us, disappears so silently and gradually that we are not even aware. I used to like to smell your towel when you dried yourself after your shower. Today so little is left. Almost nothing except the books. The books we have kept; when we traveled, they traveled with us. We packed them in wooden boxes lined with newspaper and nailed the boards down and shipped them to Argentina when our money ran out and you took that job in the diplomatic service.

  * * *

  Δ Your head rolled to the left until it leaned on Franz’s shoulder. He looked away from the road and gla
nced at you. The ash-gray hair that you color afresh each night using a lacquer dye, not a real dye, and an atomizer; you could wash the gray out any time you cared to and make your hair a different color. Your half-open mouth, wide, the lips full. Your plucked eyebrows. Your large, aquiline nose, the nostrils dilated a little. Your closed eyes. Gray eyes, Elizabeth, that change colors as the hours of the day change. Your broad strong hands. Your arms, crossed beneath the black shawl. Your white blouse, your tamarind-colored skirt, the glistening stockings, the low-heeled shoes. Franz looked at you and you opened your eyes and his head turned back to his driving.

  “By repeated crime, even a queen survives her little time.”

  * * *

  Δ Your times with Franz have all been like this twilight in Cholula. When he looked at you in the car this morning, you opened your eyes and returned his look but rather than seeing him you were remembering him, as though to you his present moment were, because of your memories, a kind of longing for the past that Franz himself once explained by reading aloud a beautiful letter of Freud’s you showed him in a biography: “Strange and secret desires emerge inside me—perhaps from my ancestral heritage—toward the Orient and the Mediterranean and a very different life; desires from the close of infancy that will never be fulfilled, that do not conform to reality.” Well, Elizabeth, what do you know about this man who awakens in you strange and secret desires? That he came to Mexico after the war, that for some time he worked as a mechanic, that today he is a salesman in an agency that sells European cars. You met him little more than a year ago. You arrived alone at a Cuevas show where Javier had agreed to meet you. You were looking at and admiring a sepia drawing of the Marquis de Sade and his family, an obscene, peaceful intimacy of the sort we can be rescued from only by the devil or a clown, and Sade as Cuevas had depicted him was both: the devil-clown, as though Chaplin and Mephistopheles had joined hands to create a new being, a saintly criminal, an erotic ascetic, an assassin who gives birth, a liberator who tyrannizes. You shuffled names—the famous who constitute your kudos—and with Cuevas repeated Buster Keaton and Boris Karloff, Tod Browning and Jean Genet, George Grosz and Al Capone. You were not attempting to justify yourself or to become one with the age; you were merely taking pleasure in the awareness that incompatibles no longer exist, that the old Manichaeism which has led us by the split nose since the time of Plato, obliging us always to make choices, always to create blacks and whites, has taken a step that cannot be reversed toward the only position that matters today: a position not midway between external good and evil, objective, clearly separated, but between the moral options that are found only in subjective unity: the evil, he said, is not to be a thief but to be a petty pickpocket; not to be a murderer but to be an incompetent murderer.

  “And if they capture you?” you asked, opening your eyes wide.

  “That makes no difference. Every murderer wants to be captured, even compels his capture. But the bad murderer lets himself be captured merely through negligence. He is a good murderer if he is discovered despite his professional competence, knowing that he must be judged because that is part of the dialectic of the myth, required in order to fulfill the legendary beauty of redemption. Raskolnikov. And then his every act becomes important and meaningful.”

  “Like Monsieur Verdoux.”

  “Exactly. There you have the clown-criminal, the juggler-murderer whose being is a fusion of opposites.”

  And Franz, beside you, merely said: “We can commune only with our opposites.”

  * * *

  Δ Franz lay beside you on the thin hard mattress in the hotel in Cholula, whistled the Merry Widow Waltz, and from time to time spoke, coldly, distantly, almost curtly, a word at a time, now and then whistling again to space out his narrative:

  “We were students of architecture. But music was our passion. Those were good days. Youth. Mugs of beer. Talk, talk, talk until dawn. Schultzie. How we used to laugh with Schultzie, the waitress in the rathskeller. We’d pinch her behind. We’d laugh. She wore no panties. In our honor, she said. So that we could pinch her as we pleased. That was what she said. She served us beer. Beer, beer. And we were studying architecture but our love was music. Cantata 106. Actus Tragicus. Ein Deutsches Requiem. Tristan. That was happiness. More beer. A round for the whole house. White sausages with yellow mustard. The Dreigroschenoper came to Munich. Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne. Ulrich suggested we go to Albertstrasse. Heinrich didn’t want to. He finally confessed he had the clap. We laughed and laughed, but Heinrich cried. Schultzie rubbed his head. She told him to pinch her and cheer up. We ate marinated herring. Den man Mackie Messer nennt. We went to the theater, the three of us. The shark has teeth. Heinrich stomped out before the third act ended. We found him in a nearby beer hall. He was furious. Brecht was an anarchist. An enemy. We saw Schultzie walk by without her cap and apron. She didn’t greet us.”

  He turned the knob of his transistor radio. Stately, solemn music. “Hah,” He chuckled. “Brahms in Holy Week.” You listened, lying naked beside him while night fell over Cholula. You looked at him questioningly, dubiously. “Of course I recognize it,” he said, answering your eyes. “I’ve heard it a dozen times in the garden of the Wallenstein Palace. In the evening. Sitting on a folding chair. Almost darkness. Looking without much attention toward the baroque portico. Between the columns, very slender columns, Elizabeth, were the orchestra, the soloists, the chorus. Figures that in a certain way complemented the architecture. An eighteenth-century palace. At the beginning, each time, maybe I wasn’t really listening. Just remembering what I had been taught. Brahms found his title in an old notebook of his teacher, Schumann. That sort of thing. Thinking more than listening. And not noticing that something else, a girl’s hair, had caught and was holding my attention. Then afterward, everything flowed together. The darkness. The graveled path crunching beneath my feet. The bells of the Mala Strana…”

  In the darkness of Prague’s night, the bells of the Mala Strana are tolling. One, two, strongly. Three, softly. Four, five, the deep penetrating response. He ascends through a tunnel of light to a garden higher than the level of the street. Another baroque palace, long abandoned. Decapitated statues and black cherubin scattered without order, sacks of lime and heaps of coal piled against them. Brahms found his title in 1856, he repeats to himself. Then he worked on the Requiem for ten years. He knows that there are passageways from courtyard to courtyard, palace to palace, and if he hears footsteps behind him on the gravel, he is no more frightened today that he was at the age of seven when he first began to discover this city, a city that like no other seems to have been built by the lightest and most mysterious of fantasies. He knows that when he reaches the end of the maze of walks and corridors, Prague will lie before him, and he feels himself master of the old palaces, of the spacious darkness; he walks along humming the first movement. Each movement has three parts: a masterpiece of balance and tripartite symmetry. He comes out on a terrace with stone balustrades from which he sees rows and rows of houses and also the Vltava, a strip of silver fixed between its bridges; and farther, beyond the green cupolas and the brown towers, is the forest. Yes, there are steps behind him. In the white summer night he stares at the lamps on the roof of Czerny Palace. And if Mozart holds to the Latin of the liturgy, Brahms writes his Requiem in German. The balustrades of the Church of Loreto show a dance of cherubim who sustain the holy shields above the entrance. The angels are cupids with halos of black iron. The cloister has a chapel with the remains of old frescoes and a golden altar among the sunflowers and the dry grass. The gravel paths have baroque statues: centurions, angels, a dancing Christ. Is he aware of the shadow that follows him? He will not stop, will not turn. Standing in the churchyard, in the warm darkness, in a rich moment into which is fused everything he loves, the city, the music, the old buildings, the darkness itself, he hums and does not look back. It is disorderly order that permits an infinity of approaches. Yet the classical element limits the levels of comprehensio
n and makes them rational. A musical prayer that now is not for the dead threatened with the horrors of final judgment, but for the living who must accept suffering and death. The steps behind follow him to the greenhouses beyond the churchyard, greenhouses no higher than the earth itself. Then a street, the street lamps black iron columns with the lamps grouped around them. He walks slowly past wooden gates and white passageways with small asymmetrical doors; he slows still more and the steps behind him stop, a girl’s steps, her heels tapping the paving stones of Loretanzka Street. He turns, looking about him at the painted façade of the Museum of Arms, the stone gladiators with their maces and daggers, the dripping mouths of the gargoyles, the covered stairs and the iron railings, the motionless hanging clothes, the great walls, the Christ which serves as a drain for the water flying on the tower. He goes on, down toward the river and the bridge, humming, looking at the paving stones under his feet, thinking that in 1639 Heinrich Schütz composed the first Mass for the dead to have a German text, a Teutsche Begräbniss-Missa; Bach’s Cantata 106 unites old hymns, biblical texts, and texts by the composer himself; but where Bach writes of the charity and help of a Redeemer who guides dead souls to a better world, Brahms avoids the name of Christ entirely. Brahms’s German Requiem ends as it begins: the first movement and the seventh are identical; the content of the second movement reappears, more vigorously organized, in the sixth: in the second, the dance of death gives way to a hymn of happiness, while in the sixth, the mourning uncertainty opens upon a serene vision of the Last Judgment, and the movement ends with a powerful, glorious Handelian double fugue. Only the third and fifth movements begin with solo voices. In the third the voice is that of desperate, suffering man; in the fifth it is the consoling voice of a woman. He stopped, in sight of the bridge. The steps following him had already become something familiar and accustomed. He stopped in the square before the bridge and saw a blind man with a white cane waiting for the last trolley and turned around until he saw her, stopped also. She walked forward into the dim greenish light of the lamps on the bridge. He waited. She made a gesture that was partly fearful, partly shy. A dark beret. Lustrous dark bobbed hair. A short jacket, a skirt belted around her thighs. A handbag of glossy beads which she was carrying near her breasts. The third movement begins with the words “He passed by like a shadow” and the orchestration is light and the melody is passed from instrument to instrument …