A Change of Skin

  “I love you.”

  “We’ll have time, Hanna. More than enough. I promise you.”

  “Don’t talk. Come.”

  A brilliant, spectral, happy, sorrowing fugue. The organ stops all movement. For a moment so brief. Only a moment. The dance of death is a hymn of happiness. Listen. Don’t stop listening. Johannes Brahms. Who worked for ten years on this funeral file of voices and tones, this wreath that cannot be touched, this Deutsches Requiem. He found the title in a forgotten notebook that had belonged to his teacher, Robert Schumann. Now almost a pizzicato. It dies, ends. The dancers return to their places in the procession. Their voices are silent as the horn speaks. The march. The lament. An effort to recapture the dance.

  “Why?”

  “It’s like learning to remember you.”

  The procession has created its own memory. First that of the corpse they carry on their shoulders. Now memory of the procession itself, its grave pace, its lament, its dance. Even what is happening in this moment is memory. The orchestra begins to recover all the loose threads. The voices, dispersed for a little, unite. What they have been is reviewed and remembered and then they burst forth with the jubilation of trumpets: a plea for resurrection, the will to be born again. The brasses that formerly were sad now are gay in a great double fugue of faces rising toward the light, voices set free but nevertheless prescient of a grieving horn that proclaims desire and denies its fulfillment.

  “No, Franz, not this way. It’s not what I want.”

  “Forgive me.”

  “Forgive you for what? Desires are never evil.”

  “No, they say that an intention alone can damn you.”

  “That’s foolish. It’s like music, Franz. Only when you play it and hear it does it become music. Isn’t that the point? I love you. But I want time to love you…”

  Rest. Acceptance. Serenity. Enjoyment. A last, quick affirmation. Before resignation again. No one will understand it. Johannes Brahms. After ten years composing it, he performed it for the first time in the cathedral at Bremen. The Weser with its intertwining yellow fogs. Its mirror of oil and gasoline. An eleventh-century cathedral. Crude, clean. A stone skeleton. Iron. Ships. Textiles. Tobacco. Sugar. Bremerhaven.

  “I was in Germany when I was a little boy.”

  “I’ve never been to Germany.”

  A moment of rest. Solitude. The voice of a man, a man alone who sings above all of them: mein Herz. From his heart. He sings, with his heart open, the lament: “He passed like a shadow.” The choir repeats that grief from afar. Merely repeats. Then begins to grow, led by him, his solitary voice lifting it to a summit of weariness, exhaustion. The choir collapses. His voice revives it. He offers new words: “My life.” My life is your life.

  “No, I have nothing to complain about.”

  “Will you wait for me?”

  The orchestra, light, isolated, stripped of all excess, transposes the melody from instrument to instrument. The voice of the man, grief and liberation, despair and faith, dominates, creating an oasis in death’s desert, convoking the brilliant brasses. He asks that everything be forgotten, even this death that unites them. So that they can be. In order to be. They will not understand. No one will understand. In order to be. Requiem.

  “Goodbye. Goodbye, Franz. Write to me. Franz, Franz, don’t forget me.”

  “Let me go now, Hanna. I have to go. I’ll write to you.”

  A German requiem. The liturgical words are not used. No. Those words pray for the dead who confront the horrors of the Last Judgment. These are words of consolation. They try to reconcile the living to the ideas of suffering and death.

  “Who are you? Tell me, I’m asking you.”

  “Excuse me. I musn’t be late. Let me pass.”

  Bach: Actus Tragicus. Cantata 106. Bach asks the love and aid of the Redeemer who leads dead souls to a better world. But not Brahms. This is a German requiem. Never pronounce that name: Christ. Don’t even think of Him. That’s for those who believe. But the voice of the Redeemer is still here. The Fourth Movement. Sweetness. The eternal dialogue between male and female. Life accepted. An intent to humanize everything. To make pain and death ours. To name them and see them so that they can be what we possess. Everything will pass, will pass. Be comforted.

  “I’m sorry. We don’t have that name.”

  “Excuse me. Heil Hitler!”

  And man will abide. Will labor. Make love. Thus. As always. Will be again what we were before. We shall labor. Raise the burned buildings. Sing with our mugs of beer tapping a table. Weep over our misfortunes, the misfortunes of others. Love our wives, our parents, our children. Hope. And be pitied. We deserve to be pitied. For now we are weak. Ah: the mother. The voice of woman. The Fifth Movement. It corresponds to the Third. It’s the response to the Third. Union with the voice of man. The woman’s solo, reminding us again of our loss, comforting us with tenderness.

  “Put her on the list.”

  “And the boy?”

  The male solo is confirmed on a different level. The mother too sustains the pace and power of the march. She gives a tender dignity to might and justice. She tells us: “We also suffered, understood, proved ourselves. Let us go forward.” She prepares us for a new effort. She comforts us. No eagles now, no fire, only the voice of our mother who comes into the field and picks us up, leads us home again, secretly promises us return and resurrection. Softly she tells us that we have been defeated. A horn is heard. The choir is asking for judgment.

  “Yes. Yesterday at six in the morning.”

  “And he too?”

  Now the voice of the man states days of wrath. Dies irae. Dies illa. Solvet saeclum in favilla. Teste David cum Sybilla. The choir is not sure. Death, defeat, and rejection have weakened it. But the man’s voice soars again, dominating, giving the choir wings and strength. And as the choir supports him, he allows himself a moment of gentleness. The choir lifts him on its wave and carries him to the last movement. The First Movement again. March, processional, march, processional, and the eagles reappear on the golden standards, the black flags again unfurl. They were men, they were ours. We shall not allow the judgment of other men to be made against them. They are our dead. Let them rest. Though they have died, we live.

  “Franz, Franz! They’re playing Brahms’s Requiem tonight in the palace garden!”

  “I’ll get our tickets. Wait for me there.”

  He who would touch our coldness will burn his fingers. Our tears are fed by a frozen heart.

  “For over a thousand years the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia were part of the territory of our people. Czechoslovakia, having evinced its inherent powerlessness to survive, has fallen prey to its own dissolution. The German Reich cannot tolerate continual disturbances in these areas.”

  “Hanna, my love, my love, my love.”

  * * *

  Δ You turned off the radio, laughing: “Brahms in Holy Week. That’s lack of respect.”

  “How will we manage tonight?”

  “I’ll think of something. Why?”

  Isabel laughed and tickled Javier’s ear.

  On the plain stood the blackened ruins of old haciendas. Burned lifeless walls, fields that afterward had not been tilled again. High walls without windows, with open holes. Towers of dark brick. Old wooden gates that had passed through fire. Cane presses, abandoned, rusty. Abandoned high-wheeled carts. Burned-out stables, grain rooms, vague memories of patios. Empty fields. The towers of the old haciendas ruined, alone.

  “The road to the right goes into Cholula,” said Javier.

  * * *

  Δ Javier said: I won’t pay attention to you. I’ll go back to Isabel’s room. No, I’ll stop in the corridor and look through the keyhole. Darkness. I’ll open the door gently, and you won’t wake. You always succeed in disappointing me. And that isn’t easy. You are lying there whispering, not asleep. You didn’t deserve my worry. Now I’ll be quiet not for you but for myself. I’ll tiptoe barefoot across the room. Bar
efoot because I left my shoes in Isabel’s room. I forgot them. Into the bathroom like a shadow in the night. I won’t turn on the light. I’ll find my pills and take one. I can tell them by their size. There, I’ll swallow it. I don’t want a stomach spasm and I know that one is coming. The pill will stop it. I’ll sit on the john and wait. Think about something else. Just as I do when I make love. There are problems I must consider, solve, that’s why they pay me. And Monday I’ll be back in the office. I have to check those recommendations before they are sent to New York. I’ll stress that high prices for imports must not be established unless simultaneously prices of raw materials are regulated. Request the Economic and Social Council to submit its findings to the General Assembly. Aaaahhh, there now. And Goodchild is scheming to be promoted over me. I’ll have to go to New York to fight that. The Ministry of Foreign Relations will stand behind me, I think. They can’t be allowed to discriminate against Latin Americans. Oh, no. Resolution … in my briefcase, Resolution Three-forty-one, section twelve. Let’s have it, make it serve for something now and then. Aaaah, again. What day’s today? Wednesday. Wednesday, not Holy Thursday. Wednesday? Yes, let it serve for something finally. No, it’s Sunday. Only Sunday. When do they perform the Passion? Every goddamn day. Every day, hunger, then agony. Will there ever be a day that won’t be the same? The day I die, maybe. We’re all going to die. And Ligeia will be beside me, forcing me to understand that in loving all life we also loved all death. And at last I’ll be able to laugh at her, stop listening to her, be alone with my fear that I may know I’m dying, be aware of it. Damn, I’m going to have to take another pill. Yes, to die consciously, certain of death in the moment of death. Before eternity can be discerned. Another wait, longer than this one. To be dead waiting for eternity to put in its appearance, which it refuses to do, to go on, dead, waiting. And Ligeia will have been right and death will simply be another life with the same old rules. I remember a Bosch painting in the museum in Rotterdam. Figures in paradise, but paradise has its own hell, a hell that in turn opens upon another abyss even blacker. No way out. No way. For in our imaginations are all possibilities, and our imaginations go where we go. Harvard. The river Charles in summer, swimming with sun-puffed condoms. And I in love with Ligeia. I thought you understood. It was there, then. Have you ever realized how I loved you, distant but at every moment present in my imagination? Nature represented, remembered, not nature itself, which was what you wanted to be. My Attic Stella, distant, motionless, frozen, beyond reach, complete, a woman who could contain and satisfy all my hunger for variety, my mental polygamy …

  * * *

  Δ A world of ants was there and Javier wanted to give it his attention, Elizabeth, because although minuscule, it contained everything. He began to follow the ants and his path became the entire length of the island of Delos, for the ants had taken possession of it all. They carried miscroscopic bits of marble. That fascinated him. Little by little, a grain at a time, as the centuries had passed they had carried away the dwelling place of Hermes and the temple of Isis. And you didn’t want to look at the ants, you stopped in the House of Masks, fascinated, in turn, by the floor mosaic of Bacchus. You interrupted and distracted Javier, forcing him to look at what you began to explain to him, as if it were not present before his eyes: the panther, at once grave and vital, one claw raised and an acanthus necklace, while the God astride him holds a lance of peace (ribbons and laurel) and a mirror. He rides there examining himself, narcissistically. Androgynous Dionysus, pearls at his throat, his chest covered, his belly naked, his hips broad, his robe rolled and falling down over the loins of the panther. The ants, you told me, streamed through the panther’s yellow eye, gnawing it, blinding it, and Javier stared at them and followed them and did not notice the mosaic masks, the alternating devils and angels with false faces; he went out into the debris of walls, columns, streets, pediments, temples, porticoes, from which Apollo’s light was to have been born. Ants and the wind and the sun and the thistles had built a second Delos that you explored without a guide. Open to the sky, Delos of the lost faces, eroded away if not beheaded. Pagan Isis in the center of the simplicity of a temple of two columns and two buttresses, a contrived simplicity that contrasted with the confused richness of the striated rocks and the yellow thistles above which rose the foreign sanctuary of the second Pantheon. Chameleons jumped among the rocks, brown as the stone itself, or stretched on scattered statues of Cleopatra and her husband Dioscurides, Artemis and her deer, Cybele, the great phallus of porous marble set erect above enormous testes. The water in the pools among the ruins and at the bottom of the cistern was stagnant. Javier observed details while you raised your eyes and searched for some totality that would encompass everything, some tactile, audible unity in this lifeless world that possesses no surviving or resurrected being in what you are accustomed to. Delos is not a museum. It is not the ancient preserved for modern appreciation. Nor is it a point of contrast that can sharpen the definitions of a life foreign to it, a past which, Javier wrote in his notebook, if it could be held by or included within the contemporary rat race might perhaps console us for certain of our lacks. Nor is it even a ruin that grows alongside the lives, indifferent to the old stone, of the descendants, fishermen and peasants, of the ancient faces; there are no descendants, no one lives on Delos, in Delos there is only Delos, not man, there is only what time and the wind and the sun and the ants have made of what Delos was. Nevertheless, Delos is not dead. And your eyes, Elizabeth-Ligeia, insisted that morning on grasping everything, fusing everything and carrying away a complete picture of the dry mountains and the bare rocks that here, as in all Greece, are the objects toward which the marble arms stretch to rescue, here beside the sun and the sea, from impenetrable sadness and distance. Ah, Dragoness, here again you insisted on creating a mirage. You, Dragoness, the young wife, are dreaming on top of Mount Cynthus. If Javier looks down to see the minute concrete reality, you break in and force him to look up, at the dream. Your fantasy obtrudes upon his observation and thought. You move side by side, his slacks touching your skirt, and you feel compelled, driven, to drag him down to that sufficient lie which offers us consolation and inflicts upon us paralysis …

  “Did you believe that it was later? No, right there and then. There, there…”

  … descending among the stones toward the distant and beautiful point of the island, you both approached it that hot September morning, naked and sweating beneath the burning sun, with the same fear. He held your hand and would have liked to find an answer for you, but your questions that afternoon when you returned to Mykonos on the Meltemi, rocked by an Aegean which had begun to lose summer’s calm, the patched and mended canvas sails swelling, your unspoken questions would not permit him to answer.

  “And just what overwhelming thought was it that came to you in the ruins of Delos, Ligeia, and made it possible for your make-believe to become mere bitching as we were eating in that restaurant on the dock?”

  “Oh? You have a free moment when you can listen to me? You don’t have to run scribble something down?”

  You drank Turkish coffee together and Javier paid and you got up and walked in step toward the Matoyannia and the high whitewashed stairs with painted wooden railings that lead directly from the street to the quarries above.

  “But you don’t carry it off well, my love. When you pretend that your muse is sweating you, you don’t really seem at all burdened. Or at least, not burdened with inspiration.”

  Badly shaven men wearing white shirts and old caps, donkeys loaded with baskets: grapes, figs, tomatoes, pumpkins. You walked past the Alefcandra, where the white houses fall with mossy skirts into the gulf, showing their piles of gnawed green wood covered with barnacles like the hull of a ship.

  “What you fail to pretend well is that you aren’t pretending. It shows, Javier. Fake, fake. You’re not so goddamn tired. You’re just tired of me.”

  Javier looked up toward the mountain. Then the church of Paraportiani, the san
d castle of his boyhood, of the vacations Ofelia and Raúl had promised and never provided, a white sand castle with smooth corners caressed rather than built by two hands, left to crystallize in the sun, to be worn away by waves of hard white water.

  “But maybe I’m wrong. Let’s look at it another way. You’ve come to be afraid you may satiate me. Can that be it? Admit it, Javier. That’s why you stay at your work so long. You…”

  You pass into the Hagia Heleni. A golden belly, a cloister where you cannot breathe. Incense rises as high as the shining cross, the copper candelabra. Light enters from a very high, very small niche. The walls are covered with icons of dull gold. Javier is in front of you and your voice pursues him: “You don’t want me to think that you…”

  Fifty saints, apostles, virgins, martyrs, patriarchs, priests, each framed by a golden circle, all surrounding the virgin of St. Cyril. In her arms she holds a child who lifts her mantle with one hand and in some secret, even forbidden way seems to dominate her.

  “That you’re available…”

  Javier hurries on down a white street past the statue of the heroine of 1821, Mado Mavrogennous. Your sandals, following, are noisy upon the cobblestones.

  “But don’t be afraid of exhausting our love, Javier. If you trust yours, then don’t worry about the weakness of mine.”

  You follow him down the little street, smudging your shoulders with white plaster. There are many small shrines. High chairs line each side. The whiteness blinds and tires Javier and he searches for some relief from it. Venders of cactus leaves and chestnuts. The millers who at twilight roll up the sails of their wind vanes. Children with cropped scabby heads. Old women, staring, with enormous balls of yarn. Sailors who sweat as they haul boats up the sand. Porters with their pants rolled to their knees and makeshift jute hoods.