Page 45 of A Change of Skin


  “What is left of our dream?” and White Rabbit, sighing beside me, pushes away all the cold arms and replies:

  “The tragedy of the little tragedies. Tragedy without a tragic mask. Loss of illusion. Understanding at last what is really possible and what is not.”

  “The testimony of the witness is accepted,” whispers Judge Morgana. A pillow is over her face. I think to myself, Christ, what a bitch of a judge. She carries her ceremonial wig in her crotch, well soaked now. They stand her on her head in the courtroom of Old Bailey and she pronounces sentence with a wriggle of her umbilicus and no one understands her. And there she is, when Rose Ass turns on the light again and everyone cries out and covers his mouth and the whores leap from the bed and crouch on the floor and seize handfuls of toilet paper and wipe between their legs, take alcohol and begin to rub each other’s backs and thighs: the old show has ended now, this is the new show, and there is Morgana our judge with her legs high, propped against the mahogany head of the bed. Rose Ass says quietly: “I don’t know. I still don’t know.”

  White Rabbit is standing and Rose Ass reaches into the enormous pocket of her trench coat and takes out a lipstick. He begins to draw something on Morgana’s belly.

  “The witness is impertinent.”

  “No. ‘Avez-vous déjà giflé un mort?’ ‘Avez-vous déjà tué un juif?’”

  He draws on her belly the head of Cyclops Cyclon-B, the eyeball belly button of a clown with Tyrolean mustaches.

  “That was what I wanted to say…”

  The Capitana of the house, disappointed because for her nothing happened during the darkness, hands the attorney for the defense his charro pants and he puts them on, draws them up over his buttocks, stuffs in his balls, while he talks: “Love is good even when it’s sad. We love most those who hurt us most, for we know at least we matter to them.”

  “Words, words, sophistry,” Jakob growls. He pulls up his socks while White Rabbit moves among the whores, who are departing, who open the door, ask for towels, receive our clothing, now dry and ironed, and Elena is pushed out of the bed, for her the party is over and she must return to her duties, but White Rabbit closes the door, steps in front of her, takes her by the sloping shoulders and holds her, facing us, holding her by the hair, and says to her: “Why can’t they accept it? Why must they live with ghosts?” She puts a finger under Elena’s chin and lifts it. “Why don’t they prefer a living woman, despite the responsibilities she imposes, to the women of their imaginations?” Elena tries to smile. To close her eyes, to participate in this new show. “Is a flesh-and-body woman a chain around a man?” “A chain of flowers,” smiles Elena. White Rabbit Ligeia goes on, “Why do they give their love to creatures that are as unreal as dreams, the harems of their masturbation, the seraglios of their eunuch impotency?” All of us look at Elenita, short, crooked, dark. Like a good fighting cock, she raises her arms high and closes her eyes and begins to strut before us. She tries to dance. “Why don’t they prefer to love a woman, damn it, a woman who walks, sleeps, eats, pisses, menstruates?” But Elena’s dancing is that of a wooden doll or puppet. One two three, onetwothree, two small steps forward, one back, an ancient Indian ritual dance of beginnings, of terror placated. She is embarrassed as she shuffles before us in her buttoned sweater and her cotton stockings.

  White Rabbit has been holding Elena up. Now she gives her a push and the towel girl sprawls on the floor. “Goddamn it, won’t anyone love me? Must I always be the repetition of some adolescent nightmare or the preview of some senile dream in order to have a man make love to me?” Elena lies on the floor softly squealing like a hurt small pig. The whores have gathered around their madam like chicks around the hen and the madam stares at White Rabbit first suspiciously and then with hatred while the whores cry, “Shut her up! Get her out! Call Gladiolo! They’re all of them crazy! The police will come! She’s gone out of her head! See what happens when you let women in!” White Rabbit speaks as if she doesn’t hear them: “What have you given me? Where are my children?” And it is sure there will be an earthquake when there are so many omens and White Rabbit goes slowly to the great bed and we all watch her, our backs against the walls; sure it will rain in Sayula as she lies down and all of us see the bed become a stage: the four-poster throne-bed of this house of many beds, an ancient vast bed such as you never see these days, of heavy solid mahogany, its head high and varnished, and sure rain is falling in Yucatan as Rose Ass tries to leap into the bed after her and Brother Thomas and Jakob grab and hold him and he cries to her: “No, you promised!”

  And now the Chontalpa is flooding and roses of the Virgin are growing in winter and White Rabbit is joined by Witch-Judge Morgana, who leans on one of the vine-twined corner posts and seems to be waiting. “Yes, I promised. Never to mention it.” White Rabbit spreads her legs and Morgana throws aside the huge pillows and draws back the blankets and her hand, day’s white spider, moves limping across the red sheet and the whores know that now the show has started, the real show, and Morgana understands how to build her suspense, like Peter Lorre, Dragoness, when he played the Hairless Mexican Porfirio Montezuma Count of Ombú, her hand is the day’s spider and it moves slowly across the red silk searching, seeking, smelling out milk and stars while the Capitana and her whores avidly eat peanuts and crush the empty hulls and throw them to the floor where Elenita the towel girl still lies, the forgotten forgetful one. I want to ask the good Capitana how she came by that bed. But the Capitana is the Capitana and she is peeling grapes with an air mixed of sensuality and boredom while her eyes fasten on the white spider that walks upon Morgana’s fingernails, drunk, alone, as if it carried with it lost but recoverable greatness, such greatness that no mere immediate and transitory pleasure is possible. So inch by inch the spider of the day advances toward the waiting, motionles, pink and silver fly of the day, an immobile fly fixed by the gold pins of a collector of insects between White Rabbit Ligeia’s spread legs.

  “Capitana, may I ask where…”

  “Be quiet, caifán, be quiet. Would you like a grape?”

  The slow sobbing of the forgotten towel girl on the floor is the wind that spreads the sails of the criminal hand now leaping, turning, advancing, retreating across the red silk, scratching the air, rolling, mimicking, chatting, commanding, movement that has become as agile and clear as spoken words and just as loud; and Elena lies on the floor among wads of sperm-smeared toilet paper and puddles of alcohol and heaps of empty peanut shells and the pile of shoes, the laces of which are sleeping worms that Morgana’s moving claw with only a tiny slip, an infinitesimal imprecision, can change into the guardian serpents of the pyramid.

  “Tell me where you got that bed, Capitana, or I’ll make them stop.”

  “Go ahead, caifán, make them stop. Who cares?”

  Laces, worms, snakes. The fingers are suddenly still. They are near the prey but they do not tremble. It is within reach, but they don’t seek to touch it. The crimson fingernails are the knives of a ritual slaughter, but they do not cut. The fly has been hypnotized. Or maybe it knows how to metamorphose itself, when the moment comes, into hollow air filled only with the trills of crickets, into a chameleon mist that will blow away, leaving only naked transparent emptiness between White Rabbit’s open legs. The fly is not afraid. Its own love requires humiliation and it knows that all true violence is motionless, that all authentic chaos is a mirror held before order and clarity, that virtue is a summation of individual sins. White Rabbit lifts her open legs like a rabbit that moves one of its ears in order to hear better the step of the hunter and thereby reveals its hiding place. Her thighs tremble. The fly is prepared for the attack, for it knows that attack will finally bring peace, that it must inevitably become a victim, and it insists that its sacrifice be voluntary and free: they will devour me alive, but I shall have accepted death before they impose it. And so White Rabbit’s vagina trembles, pulses while the whores chomp their peanuts and Elena sobs, and the spider fingers of Morgana enter an
d spread, rotate, vibrate, grind chocolate or coffee or meal or spume or oil or hops or sand or mud, mix the fruit of the ocean, slide in and out and from side to side and the whores moan and fall on their knees and with one hand over their mouths and the other in their crotches begin to masturbate beside the heap of shoes, beside forgotten forgetful sobbing Elena: flies swarm into the comb of rich honey, a coyote leaps upon the throat of a lamb, salamanders give birth to man-dragons, and in the remote and secret lairs of the world women breed with wolves and men with hyenas that new races of creatures may be created which will never be known by the ants who live in the anthills of the cities: the whores cover their mouths and their cunts that the juices of their pleasure may not leak away, and Brother Thomas, masturbating as fast as he can, shouts almost incoherently that the great labor of destruction requires all the strength and patience of life, and Rose Ass moans: “You promised, Ligeia, you promised! Did you want me to be no more than Raúl was? Dead one Sunday after having lived every Sunday buried in the pages of the newspaper, the gossip columns or the bullfight advertisements, or in the pages of his account books or his Missal? Did you want me to wear forever the shroud that I fled from, escaped from with you? Was that why we lived together?”

  And luminous and patient, she who is mortally wounded, wounded by her own wounding, shows us the scar of her hurt, the tired, vitiated splendor of seasons long gone by, the damp, opaque heat of what Morgana’s wet and glacially cold hand finds and draws forth from between White Rabbit’s spread legs while the room becomes silent: a cross of wires and a blood-smeared little puppet, a tiny doll of thread and porcelain and hard crusts of bread with eyes of black fish eggs: she draws it forth and suspends it from one finger and moves it as we, her audience, stare, a little living pendulum the swinging of which makes our eyes roll, our shoulders tilt, the walls of the whorehouse room swing back and forth also. We stand with open mouths and narrowed lids, seeing, disbelieving, whores and Monks alike hypnotized by the tiny doll that has emerged from a phony labor in order to challenge and dismay our long-nailed hands, our anal copulation, our putrefying bodies swarmed over with clouds of black flies, our grotesquely smiling severed heads of bulls and wild boars, savage and stuporous, while the miniature figure of a man is carried high by the gigantic claw of an insane falcon and Morgana watches us and calmly makes the puppet sway back and forth, back and forth.

  “Some show, eh?”

  “Oy, Capitana, is this for real?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, the bitch had it hidden somewhere.”

  “You’re letting that gringa make a monkey of you. Of course it didn’t happen.”

  The Capitana is the Capitana and merely peels and eats her grapes. I, on the floor on my knees, listen to the whores’ mockery: children of servitude, daughters of eternal serfdom, toilers and carriers, dwellers in the cabins of labor and the whorehouses of bitterness, how can you answer us except with venom, what weapon against us is left to you? How can you survive except by scurrility and vulgarity? How except with mocking obscenities can you hatchet the air and cut yourselves free from a world you detest and create a world you may be able to love? I hear them, their jokes, their curses, but I don’t look at them. I stare at the rumpled bed with its carved posts and its huge pillows among which lies White Rabbit who says that she is Elizabeth who is known as Ligeia who is famed as Helen who is visited by men because she is known to be the prostitute of the temple who is adored as Holy Mary, Mother of our Savior. Morgana’s hand is a white pigeon and you, White Rabbit Dragoness, are yourself alone and at your feet, which are our foreheads, lies the doll of wire and clay smeared with clots of blood and semen, and Brother Thomas is standing with an open mouth that for once has nothing to say, nothing to defend, while Jakob stares transfixed at the false fetus and Rose Ass who now is not Long Dong covers his eyes and turns away and only Boston Boy is unaffected, self-possessed, observing everything with the dispassionate calm of a touring Oriental potentate. Across the flat sky of the room the Capitana tosses the butt of her cigarette, the guiding star that will cross the courses of the planets swings into its trajectory and traces a curve to the chamber pot where the sun will consume the earth and the times of the sea will be put back.

  Boston Boy seats himself on the floor next to the manikin. He throws several coppers down beside it. He sucks on his joint of marijuana and exhales a thick mouthful of smoke above the holy little infant. I stare at him with surprise. Son of a bitch, you can never be sure of anything with these Monks. Now he wraps the doll in toilet paper and hands it to Elena, who has been watching, waiting, crouching and hoping with an old desire that she has never forgotten. She accepts the small bundle. She holds it to her breasts and begins to croon to it. She looks at us with pride, with hauteur. And you, Dragoness, standing now and feeling only curiosity, ask: “So you saved it, Elena?”

  Elena the towel girl does not understand but smiles and goes on crooning.

  “Protect it. Hide it. Don’t let them chop off its head. Don’t let them throw it out with the trash. Don’t let them put it into their death ovens. Hold tight to your lost child.”

  “The statistics on those ovens are grossly exaggerated,” says Boston Boy Franz.

  “If there had been only one child alone, that would have been too many.” Your voice is cold, Dragoness. You spread your arms.

  Now both Judge Morgana and Elena the towel girl know what they must do. Elena covers the doll and holds it between her breasts as she hurries to fetch White Rabbit’s clothing. Morgana goes to the trench coat and searches through its voluminous pockets for tubes and bottles of beauty creams and lotions. You stand rigid, White Rabbit Ligeia, like a statue, white-skinned Ligeia who, thanks to the debility of your will, still belongs neither to the angels nor to the damned; you wait, pale Mother Mary of the temple and the brothels, and allow Elena the forgotten forgetful one to put your stockings on you, to stroke her hands of burned stone the long smooth length of your legs.

  “Don’t let them force you into a taxi in the middle of the night, Elena. Don’t let them take you to the factories where angels are made, don’t let them abandon you in the black palace of Herod. Watch over what you yourself carry hidden. Watch over it, little Elena with your body of a grape, don’t let them scratch it out of you, don’t let them make it disappear, don’t let them make it become invisible. Your child may be the last child ever to be born in all the world, Elena.”

  Morgana, fraud as a judge, as a maid not much better, with both hands dabs an astringent fluid pat pat pat on White Rabbit’s face. Yes, you must use your beauty, enjoy and display it, my Pepsicoatl. And you, our patient looker-on, our observer who has followed us on our twisted journey through this long night and will, I trust, continue with us until dawn breaks, you, my kind, my generous, my all-necessary reader, are you aware that the women of the great United States of America spend more each year on cosmetics than the entire national income of the Estados Unidos de … México? Elena snaps the yellow garters around your thighs, Dragoness White Rabbit, and Morgana anoints your slender neck with lotion. And your eyes are accusing, damning fingers as you look from Boston Boy to Rose Ass and say bitterly:

  “Where are my children, damn you? And do you think that you’ve won now, simply because my children are dead? Do you think I’m all alone now, that my life ended with the lives of my babies? Shit! You’re fools. You think it’s so easy to destroy a woman’s life. But the life of a woman doesn’t let itself be destroyed except by the woman herself, and she must act from her marrow, her core. You outside her can’t touch it. Haven’t you seen them, imbeciles? Haven’t you seen them this very night, selling pop in that little store, playing hopscotch in the dirt? Won’t you see them again tomorrow, silent, half naked, rolling around in the dust beside the highways and the rice fields, on the land where battles are fought? They’re the life of a woman, you idiots. Of all women.”

  Morgana’s fingers work upon the blank white lime-washed skin and form a new face. Elena is fasten
ing the garter belt with two copper hooks. Morgana offers lipsticks: flamenco pink, icy coral, skeletal smoke, lunatic livid. White Rabbit chooses a subdued red.

  “You’ve been able to exhaust and destroy my sensations, to tire my touch, to offend my smell. But that was all. No more. Not my life. And today my senses hate and condemn you and my hatred is a long patient waiting that is far from its end. And just as long-lived as my hatred will be the love that sustains my hatred.”

  She caresses your cheeks, Dragoness. She prepares your lips. Elena offers you your panties with their copper-colored lace and you lift one leg and then the other, crying, “Becky, Becky, wait for me! I’m coming back now! I’ll believe everything you taught me, even if it costs me the sanity it cost you. I’m coming back, Becky, Mamma. We’ll settle our accounts with these damn men once and for all.”

  Morgana is finishing. The last touches: eyebrows, eyelids, the lips again. And now we know this woman who formerly was faceless. She raises her naked arms and fastens her hair at the back of her neck with a copper-rusted ribbon. Her naked arms, bronzed from the sun, then the tossing movement with both hands. That is how we always see her, her arms raised while she ties up her hair with a ribbon. Sometimes in profile, sometimes from behind, sometimes in front as if she were a turning statue with a windblown blue curtain for her grape-leaf garment. From in front, in profile, from behind, as Morgana slowly turns her, makes her drop her hands. We inspect Morgana’s work. Kneeling, Elena looks on. “Yes, Becky,” the woman with the new face says quietly, “the God of Israel exists and lives, though far from us. He is not merely one more fantasy created by these mock men who love women as if they were dreams and dreams as if they were women, who murder innocent childen with abortions before birth and gas chambers after birth. No, Becky. God is real.” She is a beautiful Jewess. A beautiful dark-skinned Jewess whose beaded sweat we can see on her temples, in her armpits, on her upper lip, at the division of her breasts. A dark-haired Jewess of black prolonged orgasms. The discovery of America. Land-ho. Bullshit. “I’ll come home, Becky. I’ll make one more voyage and come home.” Elena covers her with the damp trench coat and her arms drop.