A Change of Skin

  You read as actors reading scripts, Elizabeth, to find, written by others, words and actions you can build your days of. And on that night at the party, you made up the answers as you went along, followed the path he hinted at: a path that led to a love that without pride would be lost because pride, impeding it, forced it into being. That led to a man who could be the accomplice of your passion but not your intelligence, a man Javier would never know. The real stranger in this game he forced upon you was that unknown lover, not you. He himself, in the role he was acting, was the stranger, and you played your responding part because you wanted the promised reward: that he would take you afterward and fuck you as he hadn’t for a long time, as if you were indeed a new woman and he a new man, and it wouldn’t matter by whose name he called you as you made love, all that would matter would be the passion you had found together again after so long, had found through different names and different faces but the same pulsing flesh …

  “So I said to you, silently at first, Let’s go now, to the apartment. Quick, quick, let’s go to your apartment, the one I do not know tonight though I know it better than the mirror there knows my face, my hands have touched and remember every inch, every angle, every surface. I’ve done my part. I waited for him, I let him make believe about me. And now nothing matters except to lie beneath him, beneath you, as quickly as I can. You can call me any name you want. That doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except…”

  You embraced him in the taxi, Dragoness. You kissed up his body, his chest, his neck, his cheek, his ear, his eyes, finally his lips. Then a long and silent kiss that lasted blocks. Every movement you made I could see in the rear-view mirror.

  “We kissed in the taxi and I stopped hearing, seeing, I merely felt. I was hot, Javier, as hot as I have ever been in my life. I could hardly wait, control myself. Then the cab driver said something. I don’t remember what. Whatever it was, it broke everything apart.”

  The cab passed the circle at Rin and Niza without turning off. It continued on down to the Caballito, then down Avenida Juárez. Javier told me to stop at the corner in front of Bellas Artes.

  “You weren’t going to take me to the apartment. Your apartment, ours, whose didn’t matter, just so it had a bed. Everything would be wasted. I didn’t want to leave the cab. I still wanted to have you naked on top of me, that was all I wanted. To strip off my stupid dress and the garters and the stockings, which were all I was wearing under it, and be fucked, fucked, fucked. But you wouldn’t let that happen. You took me by the wrist and made me get out. We walked along a deserted street. I following, with the passion I had felt hotter and stronger than for years slowly draining away. What did you want now? What new game was this, or what part of what old game? Earlier in the evening you told me that you hadn’t used up all your suprises. What did that matter? I didn’t want to be surprised. I wanted the habitual. The old habit when it had been new, before it became old and a habit. The love we had made in the beginning.”

  That was what you told me later that evening, Dragoness. I remember well. Javier lying passed out in the living room. I with my candle cooking your papaya for you. And by the way, I didn’t notice you cooled off so much then.

  “We stopped in front of a little joint. Somewhere near the Plaza Garibaldi. I went into a cave filled with smoke, following you, a little hole that stank of piss and beer. What in God’s name could you want there? Two tequilas. Then two more. And words, words, words. And then to toss pumpkin seeds at the face of the mariachi musician who was blowing the trumpet. You threw the seeds at him, right in his face, and waited motionless while he walked toward us, fat, dark-skinned, and put down his instrument and took off his hat and grabbed you by the lapels and began to beat you, there in front of all of them…”

  Muscular and graceful as a tiger? Come off it. I saw him too. Fat-bellied, flabby, less than nothing, his cheeks powerful from blowing the trumpet so many years, for the rest less than nothing. His mustache curled around his mouth.

  “They made a circle around us and laughed and yelled.”

  They were coaching from the corner, Dragoness, that’s all. Give it to him, the son of a bitch, smash him, send him to the Red Cross, gouge his eyes, slice his balls, shiv him, put him in his coffin, choke him, hang him by his horn, stomp him, cold-cock him. Up his ass for the shit we’ve had to swallow, for the right you are sir and the just as you say sir, the step this way ma’m, the thank you for nothing, not a goddamn thing, for the fat-assed queers on the prowl. Kill him. Kill him!

  “I couldn’t move. I understood that I was there to be your witness, to see you with blood running from your nose and gums. They kicked the air out of you and you doubled up. Your face began to look battered. Your hair came down over your forehead. Your eyes were closed. Tears were pouring down your cheeks.”

  He fell to the floor amid the butts, the upset cuspidors, the bottle caps. And you had to watch, to take it all in. Before he would make love to you, you had to know him this way. A ruin to be pitied, not slept with, Dragoness. And you had to accept him so. Pick him up from the floor and lead him out into the cold dawn on Aquiles Serdán. Wipe him off, gently, with your handkerchief. That was what he had wanted.

  “These people don’t understand me, Ligeia. I’ve said it before and it’s true, in Mexico a man can’t do anything. They can’t criticize, they can’t appreciate, there are no standards, there is no certainty, everything is liking or disliking, mere feeling. And unlike Vasco Montero, I don’t own a chapel. Look. Look what they say about the book here.”

  The little book bound in manila paper that took its place on the lowest shelf of the bookcase and there gathered dust. He did not publish again.

  “Come on, Javier. Let’s go home now.”

  Home in the same taxi that had brought you. The driver had waited.

  “Shit, Javier. Shit.”

  You got out of bed and left the room without turning on the light and walked along the hotel corridor to Franz’s room.

  * * *

  Δ “‘Paul traveled, but only to cities where Jews lived or Jewish culture was known, for only there could they understand his teaching. And after the dispersion of the year 70, a Jew had to buy the right to live in Gentile communities. That was how the German Judengasse formed, the Portuguese judiaria, the Provençal carriera, the French juiverie. The Church forbade Christians to engage in commerce. But not the Hebrews. Recently arrived, free of local customs, they had a point of view the local people lacked, and could see and seize opportunities the latter were blind to. The Council of Ravenna decreed that all Jews must wear a wheel cut of yellow cloth … so they could be distinguished from Christians. The Jews gathered in the Italian borghetto were the first bourgeoisie. The last ghetto in Western Europe was the serraglio degli ebrei or saeptum Hebraicum in Rome; it came to an end in 1885.’”

  Professor Maher closed his book.

  “Pivo! Pivo!” he shouted.

  Franz and Hanna laughed. Kamilla was already at the door, plump and smiling, with the beer on a tray. She entered immediately and served their glasses. The room, Maher’s studio, smelled of old muslin and waxed stone. A large house, five stories high, entered through the broad arcade in front of the plaza; a varnished cedar gate, then up the stairs to Professor Maher’s quarters, weakly illuminated by winter light that came through honey-colored stained panes the leaded dividers of which formed, curiously, the head of Jan Hus.

  They laughed and drank and the conversation followed the course that had been established the first time Hanna had brought Franz there: music versus architecture. Franz’s simple idea was that the new in architecture is not something that just happens but that it results, in the first place, from the fact that the people who live in buildings change. Because people change, so must architecture, which must be at the service of valid human needs, not of some fixed idea about what is and is not monumental, or of models handed down from the past, or of the spirit of decorativeness. Maher, on the contrary, thought precisely in terms
of models from the past: if a building of the twentieth century did not attain the total integration and eternality of the cathedral of St. Vitus, it was not worth the raising. For Maher, the architect would always be the medieval master-builder surrounded by his apprentices and assistants. Franz pointed out that unfortunately this could no longer be. If Gropius was right about anything, he was dead right in warning that today the architect had been abandoned by the craftsmen, they had vanished into industry; today the architect had to compete with scientists, engineers, industrial researchers, and labor as merely one more wheel in a collective undertaking in which, nevertheless, his role was to provide that tension between reality and illusion which can make a building be at the same time both a work of art and a functional object. Maher, as Hanna smiled, became impatient with such theorizing and grunted that certainly architecture might confuse its function with that of mere utilitarianism, for it was, after all, an art of the concrete. For himself, he would simply go on building and visiting Gothic cathedrals in his imagination, abstract and musical. He wiped the foam from his lips and added, Well, yes, Franz might be right. All abstract beauty probably was born of something very concrete, of the tension the young man referred to.

  Kamilla, and at times Hanna, for she liked to help, labored hard to keep the professor’s instruments polished and gleaming. And he, for all his spirituality, with no apology minutely scrutinized his accounts and carried on a permanent inquiry with Kamilla concerning the fate of the crowns earned by five lessons, seven students a day, fourteen tiring hours, with three bottles of pivo at the end of it. Well, why not pivo? Beer is a fit drink for a man who earns his livelihood by working with the classical wind instruments: the flute, the oboe, the clarinet, and the bass horn: windy work, foamy refreshment, eh? And Franz and Hanna would hold hands and know that the moment had come for stories, for the old music teacher to remember the origins of his instruments the way other men remember great events or the faces of women they have loved or the names of their noblest ancestors. Take the oboe, for example. He reached out and caressed the instrument. The oboe was born in the court of Louis XIV. Oboe, hautbois. When Lully was named superintendent of music for the royal chamber, he introduced the Italian style of indoor music-making and little by little shifted the former open-air concerts into the rooms of the palace, thus converting music from what one heard in the background during public ceremonies into an entertainment based on intimacy, closed doors. The musicians of the Écurie du Roi accepted the style and from their effort at refinement was born the oboe, invented by Jean Hotteterre and Michel Philidor. And so the good professor drank and orated, waxing eloquent as he referred to the clarinet, invented by Denner in Nuremberg and discovered by Mozart thanks to the musicians of Mannheim, the oboe di caccia and the oboe d’amore of Bach; and the Arabic instrument, the lute, first manufactured by the German craftsmen of Bologna, the Malers, Hans Frei, and Nikola Sconvelt first, later the Germans of Padua, the Hartungs, and of Venice, Magno Dieffopruchar, and of Rome, Büchenberg. The Germans of Italy … that German weakness for sunny skies!

  Kamilla served the knedlik with a kind of mustard sauce and between bites Maher would go on reminiscing, as if he had at that moment entered an ancient hall in which in a single circle were gathered all his loved instruments, the viola, the rebec, the zither, the lute, the psaltery, the harp, the drum, the trumpets, the horns, the cymbals, the bells, the timbrels, the flutes, the German cornet, the various medieval bagpipes: the cornemuse, the chevrette, the muse de blef. And Hanna, smiling, followed the score of Guillaume de Machaut while Maher sang from memory and concluded: “And to me it seems that such a melody has never been seen or heard…”

  They continued to see each other every Friday evening at the concerts in the Wallenstein Palace, sitting on folding chairs in front of an open hall with stucco decorations and mythological frescoes illuminated by floodlights. They listened to Brahms’s German Requiem sitting closer and closer together, their shoulders and arms touching, then holding hands, then Franz’s arm around her.

  “Aren’t you cold?”

  “No, I’m fine now.”

  Grant them eternal rest, oh Lord, and eternal light. Two groups of cellos. Separated by the gloomy violas. The choir at its softest. A lament. But the melancholy and sadness of the instruments is endowed with a certain gaiety by the human voice. The voices in two groups too: the men low, the women higher-toned, happier. The brilliant sounds of the violins, the clarinets, and the flutes are here excluded. The lament of the cellos, their chords opening and stretching to unite them, a movement that is interrupted by the violas. The meaning of the tonal color: that we do not go down to sadness, we rise to it. It is a scream that is not a scream, an ascending unhappiness that contains yet conceals its secret shriek.

  “Where do you live, Hanna?”

  “In a boarding house. My family live in Zvolen. I used to go see them during vacation. But there are so many things to do, to hear in Prague in the summer. I think they understand. And you?”

  The resigned, melancholy file of mourners moves forward. They bear the body of the one who has died. They carry him, and us, to the place of rest. They remember him. The harp remembers. Life lives surrounded by grief. That tension increases. In counterpoint the voices of the men and the women endure their suffering, elevate it. But the organ drags them downward again, prevents them from remembering, forces the music into a funerary march dominated by the voices of the men. Those of the women repeat in a tone that tries to recapture fleeing life.

  “I’ll go to Germany in the fall. To study architecture.”

  “Oh…”

  Now the violas in a struggle burdened with pain. Memory tries to enter. It becomes the razor’s edge between life and death, but it cannot separate them and melts, becomes confused. A mixed choir now: memory and life and death are one. A solemn acceptance, dignified, not weeping. The women alone, soft, slow. The men again with prolonged accents: the march resumes. A horn announces that they had stopped, impels them to continue moving toward the place of rest. They walk slowly, their voices rising to create the illusion of a haste that wants to escape pain while their bodies desire to prolong it.

  “No, there’s no one in the boarding house Sundays. They all go out. Especially now, when it’s so warm and beautiful.”

  “Hanna.”

  The invitation of the harp: let us rest, remember, for one instant. Let us stop and remember. The march resumes. Death is with us already. Memory cannot resurrect life. It cannot bring back the beat of a heart, sweat in a palm, the blink of living eyes. In their highest registers the violin and the viola accompany the mourners, are doubled, and finally attend the unconscious transformation of the march into dance.

  “Hanna! Stop! Wait for me! What’s wrong?”

  “Never mind, it’s nothing, nothing. I’m tired, that’s all. Don’t pay any attention. I ran and got tired. Really, that’s all. Come on now, catch me.”

  “Hanna!”

  “It’s just the wind, that’s all. It makes me cry. Always. Catch me!”

  The women’s voices as they separate from the mourners and sinuously move their arms above their heads. A muted diminuendo thins and at the same time makes brilliant. Spectral happiness, its eyes shut, leads the dancers. The dance and the funeral procession advance together. They recognize each other. For a brief moment happiness. And when it is suspended, the tone of grief does not return. A different tone appears, a natural, almost everyday tone. It distracts them. It contrasts with sorrow that is authentic, just as the happiness was authentic. A celebration now. Every act in which we join together must be festive. Birth. Marriage. Death. Feasting. Everything that unites us, that takes us away from our solitude. Dance. A duel. Drunkenness. War. A party.