A Change of Skin

  For oh, oh, that day has come

  Nobody hides forever

  Then they stopped and were silent. Franz leaned back against the wall, his arms spread, his palms flat on the stone. They tightened their circle around him.

  * * *

  Δ Isabel brought the six Monks one afternoon so that they could meet me and we could get together on all this. Right from the first my young guests took over, settling themselves around my living room as if it had been theirs all their lives. They sprawled out on the floor on my old reed mats, charred by years of careless cigarette butts. They propped themselves comfortably against the walls that had once been two subtle tones of blue and now had aged and faded to many tones of gray and yellow. Their tequila glasses made new rings on my square coffee table—well, it’s also a worktable, comrades—and they heaped their cigarette butts—when they first hit Mexico City they had discovered and taken to the brand called “Pharaohs” and two or three of them were smoking pot, from the smell I thought it was the Negro dressed up in the charro outfit and the albinolike girl with the shaved eyebrows whom I immediately, secretly nicknamed White Rabbit—in the Olmecan saucers that serve as my ashtrays. I told them a little about my castle called home. That originally it had been an outlying farm building on land that belonged to a Jesuit monastery. That by and by the Jesuits had been bumped on their devious way and the monastery was destroyed, and when I found it, the building belonged to no one, was lived in by no one, apparently had been entirely forgotten. So in I had moved, for I liked the privacy and saw the possibilities, and the rent a squatter pays can’t be beat. Perhaps they had noticed that from the alley the house was concealed by the thick hedge of prickly briar. A good neighborhood, too, what Mexico City’s political fathers usually call “proletarian.” But even the poorest and weariest of proletarians have not only chains but also refuse to get rid of, and for years everyone there had ditched his on my side of the hedge, creating the savory Dadaist garden my guests had observed as they entered: rotting garbage, rusting cans, broken bottles, disintegrating scraps of clothing, with here and there in the fly-swarmed stink, the languid arms of the old maguey plants. Groovy, eh? And immediately around the house, like a line of last defense, was my second hedge of intergrown high shrubs. Isabel, that little Pussycat, stood near the door listening and after a while said that she had to leave, she had a date to go with her Proffy to the magnificent motel where he always took her, so ciao, cats, and good luck. Exit Pussycat. But not the Monks. They spent the rest of the day and most of the night with me, concentrated and intense but at the same time swinging loose.

  They began by asking me about myself. I made it brief: I write when I feel like it and also when I don’t, and now and then I drive a cab to get with it again, back in it again, and that was how I met our friends Javier and Elizabeth. In a word, I have a kind of independent income. They laughed and said sure you do, and we all laughed because we all knew that no one can live beat or Viet very long without some hardworking old bourgeois paterfamilias behind him to pick up the check for the ass he sacks and the glass houses he cracks, and all that. And already White Rabbit had found my last bottle of Poire William’s, worth a small fortune at the Minimax supermarket, and was gulping it down like so much water, and now she waved the bottle at me and said, “Okay, writer or cabby, whichever you prefer, we read you but do you read us? Are you with us?” I told her yes, of course, why the hell not, sure I was with them … in principle. Not that I intended to take an active part in it. No, my role would be strictly Vergilian: their observer now and later, when I came to write about it, their amiable Narrator. But for that I needed to know even more than if I were to be one of the actors. I had to have everything scribbled down neatly in my notebooks, and because I didn’t know everything now, not by a long shot, just what reasons they might have, I would like them to persuade me a little. As for approving or disapproving, to hell with it. I was simply glad to have them there with me for a while.

  They listened as I told them what I knew. Then we agreed, except that they refused to give me their real names, that would be taking too much of a chance. So I gave them nicknames based partly on their physical appearances and partly on the roles they played that evening. White Rabbit. Brother Thomas for the Negro. Morgana for the bewitchingly sexy girl dressed all in black, black sweater, black pants, black boots. Two names for the youth in the pink mountebank’s trousers: Rose Ass and Long Dong, according, as you will see after a little, to the situation. For the yellow-haired bearded young man who drove their car, an old Lincoln convertible, a good stout Mexican nickname, El Güero, which means, for those of you who don’t know us as well as we know you, something between Fair-Haired Childe Christ and Blond Bastard. And finally, Werner, Jakob Werner, the one who wore the tweed jacket and flannels and carried a briefcase: Jakob I gave no nickname because he gave me his own name, even offered me a card. Brother Thomas opened the window presently and tossed out the roach of the joint he had been stinking up my house with, a little crime I had already forgiven, for as you know I am pushing forty and look upon youth with a genial toleration, and besides I enjoy marijuana myself, and he said worriedly: “The trouble is that we don’t know how to answer questions. What we do is ask questions. And these people we have to talk about now belong to the Stone Age. They play with pretty words. They spout speeches. I don’t think it’s going to be easy.”

  I rested my head back against the copy of Hopscotch I was using as a pillow and told them that in that case maybe we better switch roles. I, like every Latin American intellectual who is worth his salt and his sinecure, knew nothing at all except how to wax grandiloquent. To rock with rhetoric, as it were. So … But White Rabbit, waving her bottle around like a club (and she didn’t have to do that; when she shook it, it looked like a miserable lemon pop. Ah, appearances and reality) and taking an enormous slug of it that made her tremble, said, “Children, let’s stop wasting time. I have a very simple idea.” She waved the bottle again. “Our Vergilian friend has told us about Javier and Elizabeth or Bette or Ligeia or whatever she calls herself.” I closed my eyes and touched the tip of my tongue to my teeth. “Now, let’s get moving. Let’s come to some conclusions. Let’s go ahead and hold the trial.”

  The little pear inside White Rabbit’s bottle bobbed around like a bewhiskered, wrinkled fetus. As if it were trying with its reborn roots to grip the glass, to change the glass and the alcohol back into earth and benevolent rain. Morgana put on a Beatles record and suddenly they were all dancing and the light was fading and I understood nothing, nothing at all, but decided to ride with them very patiently. The electricity had been disconnected because for four or five months I hadn’t paid, and I had made a pleasant virtue of dark necessity: I lived, I told them, by pale candlelight alone, like a demented monk. And the record player, then? Why, batteries, obviously. Anyhow, the record player wasn’t going around. Only I was going around, for I had asked White Rabbit (and I was beginning to like that little gringa) to teach me how to frug and all of them were laughing at me and for a moment I really thought that they had put on a record but actually it was Rose Ass-Long Dong and his guitar playing “Yesterdays,” a song I was sure the Monks had known long before the music was published or the Beatles recorded it. Hey, brethren. So back we go to the jungle of beginnings and I twist my sluggish behind without moving my feet, trying as hard as I can to imitate White Rabbit, but try as I may, I can’t keep up with the movement, at once elegant and savage, of her beautiful young arms. “Good,” says Brother Thomas. “We’ll hold the trial and I will be the attorney for the defense.” He jerks his head like a wound-up toy turtle, keeping his hands fast in the pockets of his charro pants. “And I’ll take on Franz,” mumbles El Güero, whose face has disappeared behind a waterfall of long yellow hair as he shakes, clicking his heels, to the almost visible rhythm. It is White Rabbit’s turn. Dramatically, now motionless, fixed in an arch pose of heavy espionage, the collar of her trench coat up, the brim of her floppy Garb
o hat drooping around her ears, she announces, “I’ll be Elizabeth, Ligeia, Lisbeth, whatever her name is.”

  I observe that they are all observing me and laughing at me for the clumsy absurdity I am making of a dance that is entirely improvisation, yet at the same time, and this is the rub, completely a rite. The need to display a bit of rhetoric comes over me and I begin to point out to them that one by one, nation by nation, people by people, we are all of us returning to our original prototypes. The Yankees are becoming an army of Edgar Allan Poseurs complete with the Gothic castles and the dripping dungeons that Pollyanna and Horatio Alger preferred to conceal beneath marmalade and Wall Streets paved with silver dollars; the English are going back as fast as they can to Tommy Jones and Mollucky Flanders and all the belching and bawding that Victoria and Gladstone wanted to screen away behind cricket and croquet. And as for the doughty Germans, they have been and will always be …

  “I’ll take the bench and be judge,” Morgana interrupts. She is sliding gracefully through a series of steps that beyond doubt began as part of some puberty ritual. “I am Javier!” cries Rose Ass (not at this moment Long Dong. His guitar is weary and sad. Jakob clasps him by the shoulder and forces him, Javier be nimble, Javier be quick, Javier hop over your stick, to jump over his guitar). “And I,” says Jakob, “the prosecuting attorney.”

  The guitar is silent. With one movement they all fall to their knees in a circle, holding hands.

  They begin to howl like coyotes, at first softly, then louder.

  I stand alone, stopped in an awkward movement of my hips. There is no light now and outside the mongrel dogs of the neighborhood are replying to the howling of my six young guests. At the same time you can hear the termites gnawing the beams beneath the old floor, sifting their eternal dust, and the scampering through the walls of rats who are as terrified by silence as by racket.

  “What is the plea?” Jakob asks sharply. “Guilty or not guilty?”

  I have my matches in my hand and am looking for a candle.

  “Guilty, but with extenuating circumstances, I suppose,” speaks Brother Thomas in the darkness. “Good God, wasn’t his soul his own to do with as he damn well pleased?” Brother T.’s voice mocks itself. It is deep as Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River,” yet as shrill as Butterfly McQueen begging Scarlett O’Hara to forgive her. The voice of a slave and rebel crawling up from the slime. Of a bird just loosed and still bewildered. Of sweaty torches winking through a night of fog. “He had a dream, man. He wanted to make it come true. The same as all of us. Just the same.”

  “Will the attorney for the defense specify precisely what dream?” Judge Morgana asks.

  And now we are leaving. In the darkness the flies that during daylight hang like clouds in my garden of refuse have departed. The smell is sweet, rotten, sticky. Broken glass, rags, vomit, excrement. And here and there something that might be used again, for even the poor have their moments of luxurious denial: that bicycle wheel, for example. Brother Thomas, picking his way through with enormous grace, is still speaking, and I can’t tell from his accent whether he comes from a ghetto in the North or a sharecropper’s cabin in the South. “The dream precisely? Precisely the dream of long-frustrated desire finally confessed and fulfilled. Of lost unity in life recovered again. Of complete power put to the final proof, to the test, man, make or break. He had one chance. His only chance. He had to take it and do with it what he could.” The stench of the rottenness around us is a little dizzying, a little like sweet wine. “But no one understood. Really, you know, quite a great dream. Merely a hopeless one. For he dared to believe that a life of heroism was still possible.” None of us pays Brother Thomas the least attention. We let him rattle on and don’t listen, for the attorney for the defense is expected to lie, that’s his function and duty. Or isn’t it?

  I lead them through the narrow way out and now we are in the alley in front of the tiny neighborhood store. For twelve years the storekeeper has known that I was squatting here but he has never squealed on me. A scholar and a gentleman. “The accused,” Brother Thomas is going on, “because he lived that dream, could comprehend its poetic and mystic greatness.” Brother T. is the Invisible Man. He is Uncle Thomas now, not Brother Thomas. I greet the storekeeper with a nod and we all crowd in to buy cigarettes and Pepsis. The storekeeper’s daughter, a girl of thirteen, straight-haired and pallidly green, like a willow, puts our purchases on the glass-top counter and holds out her open hand for us to pay and Brother Thomas is saying in his tenor-basso voice, “You may ask, what did the accused abandon for the sake of his dream? Music and architecture? Yes, but remember, music and architecture without the possibility of greatness.” We tilt our Pepsis back and White Rabbit steps in front of a votive candle that casts flickering light on a print of a Black Virgin who weeps wax tears and wears tinsel and satin clothing. White Rabbit crosses herself. “A world in which he could not be a musician or an architect without accepting beforehand that society would not honor his occupation but would regard it as something at most to be tolerated, basically useless, such a world,” Brother Thomas is saying, “seemed to the accused to be a world that ought to be destroyed. Music. Architecture. Mere pastimes not related to the basic business of living, the getting…” The green-skinned daughter of the storekeeper listens and laughs and covers her mouth with her hands, their fingers rose-nailed, dark hands adorned with sick but happy roses. She cannot understand Thomas, for he is speaking English, his voice booming low, squealing high. But she laughs. She senses that she is watching a performance. Yes, it’s a minstrel show and Brother Thomas is Al Jolson, saying, “… the getting together of money so that you could live high on the hog down in Alabammy.” The storekeeper sits outside with his chair tilted against the wall. A small chair with a painted back, red and yellow flowers and blue one-eyed ducks, and he is very dark and very fat and breathes audibly, heavy as a burro, as an ocean. “To live high on the hog with a fat bank account and an easy conscience, using all the old familiar words to stay on top and to keep those not also on top jumping through the hoop just as always: be patient, brothers, be patient, your time will come. Oh, yes. Turn the other cheek. Be loving. Yes, oh yes, be charitable. The meek shall inherit the earth. By and by. By and by.” Brother Thomas is on his way now. He is on his pony, jogging rhythmically, chanting while the others clap their hands to his beat and sing out the proper responses: amen, say it, brother, say it. In the alley a dog begins to whimper and the storekeeper kicks at it and suddenly a crowd of ragged children appear from nowhere, barefoot urchins in gray overalls who throw stones at piles of dust in the alley and then give their attention to chasing after the dog, which now is howling, running away while Brother Thomas in his charro costume goes on with his star-touching, earth-rooted chant, cold, fleshless, yet as compelling as the beat of a tomtom:

  “For all men are created equal…”

  “Tell, us man, tell us.”

  “Oh, yes, equal. And ought to be free to vote now and then.”

  “Vote, brothers, vote.”

  “Amen! Forty acres of your own.”

  “Nobody else!”

  “Forty acres and your soul. But be nice, baby, be nice.”

  It’s a litany and neither the children in the alley nor the fat storekeeper can understand, but they feel the rhythm and they listen intently. They too clap their hands and out into the alley we march, like General Booth on his way to heaven, led by a black-faced captain of saints in the costume of a charro, surrounded now by the children. Behind us, smells of licorice and cinnamon and teaberry and Mimi suckers and chlorophyllic chewing gum. We are on our way too, now, to see where our legs will take us.

  Brother Thomas ends his singsong abruptly and wipes his fingers on the loose-hanging tails of his charro shirt and with one hand on my shoulder for balance tugs at his fly to piss. “Hey, man, how do you want me to do it? A cowboy there, a charro here. That’s the answer, eh?”

  I offer him a pair of white gloves I have in my j
acket pocket. The children level the barrels of their index fingers at Thomas and, pow-pow-pow, shoot him and then the rest of us. “Charros, charros, charros! Drop dead, you phonies! Give us a quinto, blackman! A quinto to buy a pop! Come on, don’t be like that, give us a quinto!” Brother Thomas has his fly open and calmly pisses and resumes his defense-attorney speech: “The accused claimed the right to take what he had never posssessed, neither strength nor wealth nor even life. He made his own right. The right to wipe away that old world and build a new one.”

  El Güero hangs his head and surprises us with his voice: faint, hopeless, the cultivated accent of a very proper Bostonian. “No, it wasn’t like that. No. It was … destiny, I think. I was caught up in my times. And … I was used to obeying, that was my habit, more than my habit, my duty. And I didn’t want…”

  The children turn and stare at him and nudge each other with their elbows. He shines a little in the darkness. His yellow hair lights up his face. He is almost iridescent. “A güero,” the children are whispering. “A gringo güero.”

  “I didn’t know what was really happening. I just went on doing, being what I had always done and been. Nothing changed for me. Nothing has ever changed. I’m still today just what I was then. I swear it … I thought I was doing the right thing. Others were fighting and dying for my sake. They were heroes in my name. Maybe I felt grateful to them for letting me go on being the same as always, for allowing me to feel heroic without having to be heroic. Maybe … maybe…”

  The children grin at him and form a ring around him and begin to dance.

  Mistress Morgana, our honorable judge, plants her black boots in the dust. She is just out of a comic strip, but she doesn’t know it. “The accused will remain silent while the attorney for the defense tries to save his skin for him,” she pronounces rather grimly.