A Change of Skin
Well, maybe … but now: Ofelia dares to cross her threshold and to advance toward her son, closing her flowery bathrobe as she nears him, adjusting a comb in her red hair. She hands him a letter, its envelope already torn open.
“Here. This came for you.”
Javier takes the opened letter and without attentiveness reads what the editor has written: his book has been accepted, they congratulate him, please come to our office on Argentina to sign your contract. And immediately and for the first time in his life he felt the trembling of that secret cranial lobule that moves from its position in order to pierce our helpless meninges like an awl; the fever, the pain that spreads through the entire body, which is unprepared and surprised because an ordered and well-mannered brain knows by heart that one must not begin to eat before Father and that the fingerbowl is used to wash your hands after eating shrimp. He dropped the letter and sprang up and grabbed his mother by the shoulders and stared at her wildly, while Ofelia opened her mouth and simply stood there.
“You have no right! No right!”
She tried to close her mouth and escape from him.
“You’ve never done anything except humiliate me! Lie to me! You’re indecent!”
He pushed her harshly away and raised his hand and felt his open palm sting against her dry, slightly oily skin, the wrinkles and bags where the face cream had penetrated, the flabby furrows of her face. He moved away and knelt and picked up the letter and avoided her eyes. But Ofelia—he did not see her face, nor did he know whether she was crying—took him by both hands and forced him to stand and squeezed him against her breasts, loose beneath the cotton robe, made his head rest on her shoulder as she caressed his neck and told him, then or later, when she died, that a woman, she, owed obedience and that she had always wished only to obey and something in her world had broken when the man she had chosen had not understood that, either did not know how to command or didn’t want to command. In Ofelia’s arms, feeling her aroused nipples against his smooth slender chest, Javier finally told her that it was no good, useless: neither she nor Raúl could ever tell him who he was; it was useless. He admitted that he was not ready to accept others’ pain or joy and he refused to pity anyone. He told her that he was giving her notice that he intended to leave, to go away and leave her as soon as he had the means. From time to time she nodded and caressed the back of his head as it leaned on her shoulder, and said to him words that were entirely irrelevant: first get your degree, you need a profession, you’re not going to sell electric cords like your father, you’re not going to talk about money all day. Are you? Are you, Javier? And Javier, who had no other hold by which to grip the memory of his father, read over Raúl’s journals and account books, the memorials he had left of his life of additions and subtractions, credits and debits, his correspondence with Montgomery Ward, the names with which he had walked through the world, brokers, commission agents, traveling salesmen, clerks, the books collated and sewn together like a gospel: the Ordinary Expenditures and the Capital Expenditures, the Inventory Book, the Book of Balances and the imperatives of Yahweh: a guilty bankrupt, a fraudulent bankrupt: was that the reason, Mama? Was that why? Don’t you know? Aren’t you ever going to tell me?
And the old man sits on an iron bench in the Alameda and looks tired. The afternoon is damp and sultry, the air is hazy with dust. Passers-by do not turn to glance at him. Nevertheless, he resembles only himself. Maybe his curly gray hair is not unusual. But between his forehead and his eyelashes lies a message that no casual observer could understand. His eyes are dark, veiled like the dusty air. Inspecting them from close enough, one might suspect, though one would never state it, that he is dreaming awake, calmly dreaming his private nightmare, which is simply everyone’s nightmare. That is why he holds his eyes open. No one asks him about his dream. Probably he would not tell. But it is also true that he waits now, and has long waited, seated in the Alameda, for someone to discover that dream with no assistance beyond the veiled look in his eyes. That is why he is sitting there. Around his eyes is a fine net of wrinkles which if they were deeper would disappear. Two deep nervous lines cross his cheeks and join on his chin. And it is all a mask: the body is hidden by a cheap, shapeless, nondescript suit, gray, bulky around the shoulders and the lapels, old, not too worn, too large for the emaciated figure within it. A Sunday suit, old Sundays, few Sundays. He raises his finger to the collar of his checked red shirt—he is wearing no tie—and feels that he is suffocating silently and without need to. Near him, a fountain drips; above, trees interlace. The dust thickens, a vertical mirror of frosted glass that thickens the shadows at the corners of the park, the shadows of the surrounding buildings. The old man sits looking toward Avenida Hidalgo. Toward the domes and the red stone façades and high towers of San Hipólito, toward the Plaza Morelos, freshened by a fountain of frogs, cherubim, and tritons, toward the market where funeral crowns and wreaths are sold, horseshoes of white and violet flowers, toward the tilting tezontle front of Santa Veracruz. Now he looks down at his shoes. Beside his shoes is the same cardboard suitcase of the old journeys by train. He wants to shut his eyes. In the darkness of his closed eyes liquid trills and murmurs will pass. And what if in this moment that his eyes are shut there should pass also the one person who is capable of understanding his look? His expression becomes more intense. He offers his dream; he even makes an involuntary gesture of imploration. His eyes search eagerly for what they must remember: the bronze of the fountain, the painted iron of the bench, dried foam, the black cloth of the park photographer, brown trunks of trees, the fleeting flight of wings. He studies the sides of the Alameda a long time, and finally, tired, shuts his eyes.
Javier stops in the distance and looks at him. He can’t be sure. If the old man would only open his eyes. No, no, it’s merely another of the city’s paupers. That’s all. Doubtless burdened with some melodramatic, sordid story: a bore. But the suitcase? No, no. And the old man does not open his eyes and Javier walks on to Bolívar and buys his train ticket to New York, his ticket away from the flat, dark, incomprehensible world of his home, away from this city that lets itself be loved only from afar, that exacts sacrifice from all who are near.
* * *
Δ And you, Elizabeth, perhaps were already awaiting his arrival as you listened to the dry sound of the little cards falling on the paved path. Jake smiled as he tossed them down. If they landed face up, he smiled again. If instead they showed their backs, printed with the story of some last-century soldier or Indian chief, he said, “Oh, shucks.”
A card landed with the face of Sitting Bull looking up at the sky. Jake laughed and said to his playmate, “I win. Give me a Crazy Horse.”
You were seated on a bench near your brother’s wheelchair, reading, preparing for your first year’s finals at City College. Now and then you looked at Jake playing with the boy who picked the cards up for him. The cards came with bubble gum. There were other series: baseball, boxing, airplanes. But those with the Indian chiefs were the most coveted. They were larger, shinier, and more durable.
“Let’s see now, I’m missing Rain-in-the-Face,” said Jake. “And I have two too many Thunderclouds.”
“Oh, pick them up yourself,” said the boy who kept losing. He walked away into the park, slouching his shoulders.
You shut your book and ran to Jake and picked up the cards. You knelt before him and handed them to him one by one. He shuffled the cards and said, “I’m still missing Rain-in-the-Face.”
“You’ve played long enough, Jake.”
“All right.”
He sat in his wheelchair and fingered and admired the cards he had won that Saturday afternoon. You returned to your bench and went on reading without understanding the words you read. You were thinking that what you feared every time you brought Jake to the park had not happened today: nobody had yelled at him. He had added to his collection of cards, and when you went home, he would sit on the floor and spread them out on the couch and examine them for hour
s, arrange them chronologically, with a serious face read the stories printed on the back. You interrupted him:
“Jake, do you want to go to City College when you’re old enough?”
Immediately you felt bad. It was a clumsy question, for Jake had already missed one year of school because of his sickness. He shrugged his shoulders and without looking at you said, “I don’t know.” He stopped playing with his cards. He gathered them together, slowly, into a stack. His eyelids were dark and drooping. You bit your lip.
“What pretty cards you won today.”
But Jake didn’t smile. And when he did, merely to thank you, it was already too late and you knew you couldn’t believe his smile. You rubbed his curly hair and regretted that too and Jake remained motionless and you went to your room, nervous and sad, and tried to read, following the words mechanically: The Dream Life of Balso Snell, by Nathanael West. You were tempted to go back to the living room and say something. But what should you say? Maybe it was better to leave things as they were and to resolve never to make another mistake with your brother. You put the book aside. How were you supposed to act with him? You didn’t know. Which attitudes seemed merely condescending, which hurt him, which seemed natural to him? You went to your door and cracked it and listened, but Jake was silent.
Before the paralysis when you had used to say, “When we grow up, we’ll go to the university together,” it had been understood that your dream, and his too, was that you would both leave the world of your parents behind and do things, simple, natural things, actions that would be entirely your own, not inherited, not bound to the past. And then he would laugh and accept it as if you were stating the only possibility. Now everything was again as it used to be when you were small and would hide in the closet and listen to your mother Becky looking for you, saying that she was afraid, please you should both of you come out and turn on the lights, except that now Jake was not in the closet with you but outside in the living room with Becky, you were alone and did not know who hid in this game, you or Jake and your mother, and it was you who had to ask them to come out and not frighten you.
“Who is he?”
“He’s a Mexican. He has a scholarship and is going to spend the semester here.”
* * *
Δ The newspaper again, Dragoness, for a final time. The story is datelined San Luis Potosí and I read it as I walk under the arcades of the Cholula plaza. At the Rancho de los Humos, which belongs to the Municipal District of Valles, a young woman, assisted by her husband and his friend, murdered her three newborn children and buried them. Her name is Delia Alvarado Olguín, her husband-accomplice is Emiliano Hernández Lucio, and the friend is one Gabriel García. Mere ignorance was the principal element in the triple infanticide. Poverty was an important consideration. Three babies had been born when only one was expected. Delia couldn’t cut it. She asked her husband if he agreed and when he gave his consent, she suffocated the three babies and her husband and Gabriel García buried them. That was several days ago. The neighbors found it strange that a woman who had been about to give birth was from one day to the next no longer pregnant, yet there was no newborn child in the house, and they notified the police, who yesterday investigated. Delia and her husband and their friend are now in jail. The neighborhood is in a uproar, the hue and cry is that the unnatural mother must be killed. And she, Delia, if she had a chronicler beside her, would exclaim: “Receive me into the home of your different land, into your halls, and I will do away with your sterility, I will give you children of your seed, such enchantments do I know.” And the chronicler, tired, tempted to change his role to one of participation in the game, would reply sententiously: “Yes, my name will die with me, so come with me, be my woman. But you yourself must make your own escape from this land, for I must be innocent, innocent even in the eyes of strangers.” And Delia, before the act, would whisper: “Don’t exile me. I am a woman and there is nothing more brutal. I will be brave. I will not doubt you. But a woman is only a woman and is born to weep.” And then the chorus of all the women of Los Humos, a chorus of black witches, would remember and screech, “You are man’s fate, less than a shadow. You may kill but the dead will love you and you will love the dead. Your children have departed. They live no longer. Think about your children.” Delia would console herself quietly: “Pain itself is good. Oh, children, children, destroyed by the lasciviousness of a father. For it was your lust, your hunger for new loves, that killed them.”
So I finish reading and throw the newspaper aside, Elizabeth, Dragoness. I have read it from cover to cover, beginning to end, and now know all the news of this Sunday, April 11, 1965.
* * *
Δ The world has surrendered to insistent sleep when you wake, Elizabeth, alone in the night in Cholula, alone in a hotel bedroom, awake remembering a nightmare you would like to go on dreaming. In the darkness you look for the body of your man but it is not there beside you. You put on your robe and run into the corridor to Franz’s room at the same moment that Isabel moves away from Javier and he lies on her bed face down.
“So now there’s nothing left, eh?”
“What do you mean?”
“That was all that was missing.”
“When it’s all over, anything that is left is surprising.”
“I tell you that if you think you’re tired of me, then you better damn well let me go my way and you go yours.”
“Little girl. Silly little girl. Come here.”
“Leave me alone. Let me think about this. Don’t touch me. Let me tell you straight to your face that whatever you have to do, Proffy, you have to do with your bourgeois family and your stupid drugs and your busy little prick and your sinecure with the United Nations, with your violence, with everything else you are. Sure, anything can be used for a book. But you’ve got it backwards. You don’t use everything for writing. You use it for doing nothing. So split, seagulls, split.”
“And my indifference to everything? The nothingness? The no one?”
“You mean your self-centered narcissism, that’s all. You don’t want to risk the knockout, that’s all. Listen, Javier, the point is that my generation was born psychoanalyzed while yours hasn’t even made an appointment to see the doctor yet. You want me to tell you something? For me there’s no waiting. Do you understand that? No waiting! If I want something, I take it, do it, or drop it. You’ve really made me laugh, you know. Courting me a whole year, little by little, always strictly by the old-fashioned rules. You behaved with me like a Freddy Ainsworth-Hill. Ay, those pretty formalities. The long preparation. The holy conventions to be observed before the final beginning lay. Well, please yourself, Prof, but it’s top much for me. Neither of us has to render his account to anyone. So bang, you go your way and I’ll go mine. Goodbye, sayonara, ciao. As a friend of mine puts it, rape unto others as they would rape unto you.”