A Change of Skin

  “Take it.”

  And many urns for the serpents. Yes, above all the serpent, the lion, and the bull. The three of them together.

  “I was remembering things today, Javier. At Xochicalco and again later when we were at the river.”

  “Damn, you’ve ruined my double-six.”

  “Two-six. I can run it alone. Double-six. Six-five. There, I’m out.”

  “I’ll mix them again.”

  “Careful. One of them is under the sheet.”

  “Yes. Ligeia.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve forgotten something.”

  “What?”

  “My medicine and a glass of water.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll go get them now.”

  “And something else.”

  “What?”

  “I wasn’t there, Ligeia. I wasn’t there.”

  Why did you insist on saying that he was too there and that he must recall the names of the white wine and the black olives? You went into the bathroom and turned on the light. All that he needed to know he could learn from looking at pictures in a book or reading a travel guide, couldn’t he? You looked among the medicines for the bottle of Maalox. That would be enough to tell him that the palace of Minos rises above olive orchards on a pale rocky mountain. You found the bottle and turned on the faucet to fill the glass. In the midst of cypress trees, ravines, vines, laurel shrubs. The water came out brown with rust and you emptied the glass. That all day long crickets can be heard, that at Knossos the earth is reddish and the bulls painted on the walls are the same color. You turned off the light and stopped just inside the door. That there are vineyards all around and in the palace storerooms are great many-handled urns that were used to store grain. That the entire palace is a beehive of rooms, cloisters, archives, shops, halls, bedrooms, sunken baths. You went back into the bedroom. Javier had just finished mixing the dominoes again. And a stage for theater.

  “Here, Javier. But you can’t drink this water.”

  “That’s all right. I can take the medicine straight.”

  “What were you saying to yourself just now?”

  “Nothing. Well … that the only thing living there was a pen where a single pig rooted and scared away the hens and then scratched himself against the stones of the wall.”

  “So you were there.”

  “No, Ligeia.”

  “And you were on Herakleion, too. And on Rhodes. And at Falaraki on the beach. Falaraki, Javier, Falaraki, don’t you remember? You have to remember…”

  “I have the double-six.”

  “Look, how long did we stay at Falaraki?”

  “I don’t know. Just as long as you please. We were never there in the first place. Go on and play.”

  “We stayed in a white cottage half buried in the sand. With narrow little windows. White with plaster. Yes, and it had … I don’t know. Forgive me, Javier.”

  Javier gathered up his dominoes. He deliberately tipped over those that you were holding upright.

  “Javier, I told you…”

  “Look, what I remember is a building black from coal smoke, a house where your mother served matzo balls and passed bitter gossip along to your brother and your father never understood anything that was happening, and if you want to remember something, remember that and not that silly cottage beside the sea.”

  You jumped up from the bed. “What difference does it make to you? You weren’t there.”

  “And I wasn’t in Greece, either.”

  “But I was.”

  You paced back and forth between the end of the bed and the wardrobe, thinking. That you had arrived at Falaraki in darkness, in a little boat that had brought you from the pier at Rhodes. And when you reached Falaraki, all you could see was the black loin of the mountain. The captain offered you glasses of ouzo with water and the boat rocked heavily. And since that moment you have always understood that Greece has always lived beside the sea because the sea is its promise, the mirage that never vanishes, a second earth visible all day to the eyes of those who would like to abandon their real earth, flat and dry, where only olive trees flourish and everything else, hyacinth, oleander, lilies, hibiscus, is a perfume, an intoxication, an alchemy created to reply to the sea’s beauty and give men a reason to remain on land. You thought that you asked Javier to write it down for you. But he …

  “Shit, Javier. I’m hungry. I’m going to order something to drink.”

  You put on your robe and went out in the hall.

  “He wasn’t there,” Javier said to himself as you, in the hall, shouted: “Clerk! Bellboy! Miss! Hey, whoever’s in charge here! What sort of a dump is this, anyhow?”

  “The Cholula-Hilton,” Javier murmured.

  A young Indian appeared.

  “What drinks do you have? Tequila? Do you have Damiana liqueur?”

  The youth nodded yes, no, again and again, constantly smiling. He went away. You dropped on the bed.

  “Who was Alexander Hamilton?” Javier said idly. He was building a castle with the dominoes.

  “George Arliss, my love.”

  “Juárez?”

  “Paul Muni. He and Arliss split the biographical parts. Richelieu, Pasteur, Zola, Wellington. Voltaire, Rothschild.”

  “Good. Who invented the telephone?”

  “Don Ameche.”

  “The electric light?”

  “Spencer Tracy.”

  “The news services?”

  “Edward G. Robinson.”

  “Beau Geste, first and second?”

  “Ronald Colman, Ralph Forbes, Neil Hamilton. Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, and Robert Preston; Mary Brian or Susan Hayward; Noah Beery or Brian Donlevy; William Powell or J. Carrol Naish.”

  “Excellent, Ligeia. You pass.”

  “Oh, I used to see three or four movies a week. Sometimes more. All of us belonged to fan clubs. But you don’t remember. I bet you don’t remember James Cagney squeezing a grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face. Or Clark Gable on the hatch of the Bounty. Or Errol Flynn as Captain Blood dueling on the Spanish Main.” You laughed and drew your robe over your breasts. “Poor Olivia de Havilland was in all those movies. All of them, always pretty, sighing, her face deadly serious. The girl who was really elegant was Kay Francis. Very languid, very slender.”

  Javier yawned and his castle of dominoes collapsed.

  “We all tried to imitate Kay Francis. We would try to make our voices nasal like hers. We’d practice lying down on a sofa, sipping a cocktail. Of course her sofas were always covered with white fur. Then Carole Lombard came along with a new style. A woman’s spontaneity. Wackiness, comedy. We wanted to leave home forever and have careers in Manhattan, to be like Rosalind Russell and marry someone like Cary Grant. Ha, Javier. Garbo was something else again. She was simply divine. A woman who belonged to the gods. And John Garfield, John Garfield! He died fucking. Yes, I pass, all right!”

  The Indian youth entered carrying a tin tray with a bottle of tequila on it, two small glasses, a saucer of slices of lemon, and a salt shaker. Printed on the tray was Cerveza Corona la Rubia de Categoría. He put the tray on the night table and said he was sorry, they had no Damiana.

  “What a pity. It’s an aphrodisiac.” You gave the boy a peso. He smiled and hesitated. “Go on, take it.”

  You poured the two glasses and passed the salt shaker and the lemon slices to Javier. He squeezed lemon into his glass and sprinkled the rim of the glass with salt. “This won’t be good for my stomach, Ligeia. You know that.”

  You looked at each other as he slowly sipped his tequila.

  “John Garfield,” Javier sighed. He looked up at the ceiling, with his glass in his hand. “You know, when you witness death, it changes you. Cruelly, unnecessarily. You never want to think again of the man who died. John Garfield.”

  “Forget John Garfield. Never mind him. Forget him.” You drank the clear liquid squeezing the lemon into your lips and sucking the salt that you had on your fist.

  J
avier drank. He spat a lemon seed.

  “But you don’t want to forget anything, do you?” You took your wristwatch from the night table and stared at it for several minutes. Later you were going to tell me that once again you were thinking that when it first started, you hadn’t wanted to blame his attitude on something so simple as your having opened one of his letters. A letter you didn’t even read. You had preferred to blame it on yourself, on your slowness in responding to the immediate passion you had both felt when you first met. Or, rather, on your insistence that passion should be more than passion, that it should uncover his broken, hidden mask. You had told yourself that was the reason for the new silences, for the new kind of happiness which for you was indeed happiness, though different, for the behavior that was never decisive, for the long hours alone in the apartment while Javier went out to explore the streets of Mexico City. And you didn’t realize at the time that gradually your passion was becoming merely a feeling that went on calmly from day to day without moments of crisis or climax. A sentiment, a direction rather than movement in that direction. You told me that once, Dragoness. Or maybe it was I who told you. You went on to say that a sentiment locks us up inside ourselves, does not, like passion, throw us into the arms of others. Passion is shared; sentiment is not. And now as you sipped your drink you realized that twenty years ago you had sought to return to passion by finding it in Javier’s writing, not only the words but the act.

  “No, Javier, you always want to hang on to everything, don’t you?”

  “I’ve told you that…”

  “I refused to admit that everything happened simply because I opened that letter of yours. That would have been ridiculous.”

  You rested your chin on your fist, dampened by saliva, tasting of salt. You began to hum. Javier tried to guess the tune. You lowered your voice and leaned forward, letting your face drop until your forehead touched your knee. You rubbed your leg.

  “I always thought you understood,” Javier whispered. He looked at the back of your head and reached out and took the wristwatch and turned the hands. “I had gone to see you, not only women younger than you but you too in paintings that had been done by a man who had died of tuberculosis God knows when. I took your hand and we walked out of the gallery, Ligeia. And for the second time you were my Greek stele…”

  You raised your head from your knee. “No, I told myself it was my fault, because I hadn’t been content with the passion we felt when we first met, I wanted more. That it should reveal us to each other, the things hidden.”

  The watch skipped several hours and Javier laughed.

  “My Attic stele. Distant. Motionless. At rest. Remote. One woman who could satisfy my hunger for many women.”

  Again you looked at each other.

  “We could have played games, Javier. Who did the girl in the window run away with? Miriam. Where did she go? Why didn’t you go after her? So now you’ll never know her name or hear her voice. Please…”

  Javier finished his tequila with one swallow and poured his glass full again.

  “It’s going to hurt your stomach, Javier. Tomorrow you’ll feel sick and you’ll be complaining that now your vacation has been spoiled.”

  “Take another drink yourself. If I could only be sure about it.”

  “About what?”

  “My stomach. If I could only say, operate on the duodenum, take out the gall bladder. But no one knows where the trouble is. Upset stomach. Tiredness. Cold hands. Gas pains. A longing never to open my eyes again. Insomnia. Shit. What were you humming?”

  “Cannonball Adderley. Lillie. Sweet and slow. And listen to Yusef Lateef’s flute. There’s a Mephistopheles for you. A Negro one.”

  Javier calmly threw his tequila glass at the bureau mirror. You watched him and went on quietly, “Their only way of communicating is their music. Lillie. It’s a song of desperation. That’s all.” The mirror shattered and the pieces fell, showing black paint on their backs, their sound covered that of the glass falling.

  “Do you want to bet?” Javier said.

  You got up and retrieved his unbroken glass and filled it with tequila again.

  “I don’t bet. You win, it’s not broken.”

  Javier looked at the glass. He rubbed it and smiled. “It’s very simple. Mirrors break and glasses don’t. But suppose it were the other way around? Suppose mirrors never shattered and glasses always did. Take your boyfriend German, for example.”

  “What do you mean, my boyfriend German? He…”

  “Yes, it may all be necessary. To do what you ought not do, to do it anyhow, saying so what. I, on the other hand, when I was a kid I used to shut myself up in the bathroom and write words I was afraid to speak. Do you understand that? On the walls of the toilet, the words I was afraid to say to the bullies at my school.”

  “Gold butterfly. No, brass butterfly. God knows why I love you, knowing your defects so well.”

  “Precisely because you do know. To be innocent is to be indecent. And the advantage in losing innocence is that at the same time you lose prejudice. N’est-ce pas?”

  “Aye, aye, Gautama. Now sit cross-legged.”

  Javier chuckled. “Maybe I ought to. And you, don’t move now. Stay just the way you are with your hands at your sides and realize that light is slowly wasting you, Ligeia, slowly wearing you away. Light, not time. Or light because it is time. And time stops, but light doesn’t. So time becomes light, and it’s light that carries you away.”

  “Write it, Javier, write it.”

  He moved from the bed and knelt before you. He tied the belt of your robe tight around your waist. He opened the robe at your breasts and took your breasts in the cups of his hands, lifted them, dropped them. He stood and put his hand in your hair.

  “Javier. You’re hurting me.”

  He put his face near yours.

  “Now you can say it, if you will.”

  “All right. It was only a dream. Just a dream. That’s all.”

  His fingernails were digging into your scalp and you wanted to free yourself. He, not realizing that he was hurting you, was saying, “When we opened the window in Falaraki that morning, just to be there was to believe in what we had never seen…” Slowly he released you.

  “Okay. We could believe only what we had never seen or said. Sure. Go join the Navy, Javier, join the Navy.”

  “It was there and like this that I loved you,” Javier murmured.

  You put your hands to his and your fingers interlaced. Then, you told him softly, when you woke, the curtain of the summer was a crown of poisonous flowers and you looked beyond them at the sun still resting on the bed of the transparent Aegean. And you had knelt as you were kneeling now and had whispered his name and looked for him and as you repeated his name over and over the very sound of your voice became thick. And now as then he was standing before you, you were kneeling before him with your arms around first his legs and then his buttocks and your hands in the small of his back. Then you released him and fell back to the floor and he stood tall before you with his penis rising and stiffening, and you got up and led him to the bed, then, in Falaraki, to see day born of night’s placation of the silver sea, the last darkness fading, and now far away you heard cars and the horns of cars on the Mexico City-Puebla highway as you both leaned backward and joined with no need for kisses or caresses, joined and supported each other until Javier fell back and you fell with him, on him, unable to separate from him, above him in his position imitating him, doing to him what he did to you, tied together at the genitals, your damp and long pubic hair against his dry curly hair, you thinking that now you were possessing him as he usually possessed you, that your pleasure in imitation of his was entering his thighs as he, prone under you, was entering yours, and time counted its own seconds and minutes, words spoke themselves in an effort to prolong the dark and vibrating sensations of your intercourse, he transformed into your woman and you into his man in shared desire that was a fruit falling from but still hanging t
o a single tree; you and Javier, Javier and you on the hot stone floor of the cabin, on the cold wooden floor of the hotel room, you and he, father and mother, mother and son, father and daughter, brothers, brother and sister, sisters, two women, two men, you and he making love now with your mouths while the first pleasure ebbed, seeking a different way that it might be sustained, your buttocks, your armpits, his hands in your hair, your feet covering his eyes, your teeth at his ear, his face near your navel, your thighs spread above his head, his fingernails digging your neck, your knee doubled upon his belly. And it could not end. You hid yourselves in the sheets in order to discover yourselves again. Slowly, Javier walking toward you from afar, you moving toward him until you both stretched your hands and as in a dream removed the veils that concealed you, slowly, expectantly as in a dream, and saw yourselves naked again and again felt passion. You lay down and he took your feet and pulled you, your head down, until he had your body at the height he wanted and you looked up at him with your eyes, your forehead, your lips, while a double pleasure flowed through you, one from what he was giving you, the other from what he was taking from you, flowed and fused somewhere between your crotch and your breasts. You kiss and join again and you fall face down as he turns your body over and opens your buttocks and tears you apart and asks for your sweat, your smell, your breath, your farts while you lie with your face against the floor and your thighs gripping his chest. You don’t know how to stop. You don’t want to stop. You grab your bra and wrap it around Javier’s dark chest covering his nipples, put his shirt on, smell and kiss the inside of his shoes. Sitting side by side on the bed you masturbate, each watching the other, he with his penis wrapped in your stocking, you with your hands wet with his eau de cologne, finding now the only pleasure that had been lacking, that of a child alone; and you don’t want to stop, you want it never to end: to die in this moment renouncing life if the pleasure can only go on. Trembling you let him rub your nipples with his shaving brush and then offer him your belt and fall on the bed as he lashes your legs and buttocks and back while you beg him to go on, go on, leave nothing undone, speak the secret names of the girls he had wanted but never been able to take, of the adolescent boys he had liked, and you in turn will speak your names, not only the men you have wanted but those who have wanted you, and now in making love with each other, you will make love with all of them, the rabbi who once sat you on his lap when your mother took you to see him, the priest who took Javier by the hand during confession, the nun he caught peeking at him while he bathed, his mother the first time he saw her naked, all the names, all the bodies and faces, until at last you fall asleep not to awaken until the day is as warm as your skin and Elena knocks on the door …