A Change of Skin

  “Elenita,” says the Capitana, “peel me a grape.”

  “When are you going to tell me the story of that monster of a bed, Capitana?”

  “Get them out of here, caifán. With a little order and dignity, please. Who’s paying, you? Gladiolo, make out his check and wait downstairs. When you go out, caifán, try not to attract the attention of every cop in the colonia. We have a little protection, but not very much. And God knows what would happen if anyone was to find out about this witches’ Sabbath you and your … The dough, caifán, let’s have the dough. That old bed? Bah, it came in handy, didn’t it? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  “But you’ve been here for years, Capitana. I know you know about it.”

  “Years, caifán, you said it. Long years and a few happy days.”

  “I believe you were here when the house first opened.”

  “Yeah. And I remember you, too. You were just a squirt kid who used to come in to have his horn sharpened every now and then. I remember, all right.”

  “Be careful with the step, Capitana.”

  “Always the gentleman, caifán. Thank you, I appreciate it. Look, please don’t bring these werewolves of yours back again. It’s indecent to have that many in one bed at the same time. The prestige of the house suffers.”

  “You heard the madam, werewolves. Move along. There’s blood in the streets.”

  “I suppose you’ve forgotten how I was in the old days.”

  “Forget, Capitana? How could I? A sugar dumpling. A ripe mango. Just to look at you was enough to make a man…”

  “Yeah, and today, a pot gut and double chins. But still lively, old man. And still smart.”

  “Tell me about that bed. I’m curious.”

  “Why not, if you want to know? I don’t mind telling you. It’s just that I hate to remember. I don’t like to go back to anything. It hurts, you know. Not always. But often, too goddamn often. Well, the bed. When we moved in, the house was empty except for the patio, where there were canaries in cages, and for that big bedroom, where the bed was. We let the canaries die. Who cared about canaries? There wasn’t another stick in the whole house. Oh, yes, the bead curtain that we still have between the bar and the living room. And a bottle of morphine tablets hidden away behind the bed. With a syringe and a needle or two. What do you think of that, eh? But I don’t know. Maybe she was dying of cancer or something. The señora who owned the house, I mean. And yes, there was a painting, a portrait of that honest lady. The head of a woman, but her face was the face of a little girl. So, she had died and her son had sold the house and everything in it except the canaries in the cages and the big bed and the painting and the bead curtain, and you know who was the buyer and what business began. They said that the son would be back to get the bed and the painting. He wanted them in memory of his mother. But he never showed. We didn’t complain. Beds like that aren’t made any more. It’s given us damn good service. Hah, just imagine, that gentle girl-faced lady passed her entire life in that bed. Slept there, fucked there, gave birth there, dreamed there, finally died there, all alone at the last with her Sacred Heart of Jesus hanging on the wall and her memories watching her from the shadows. A decent, Godfearing, well-bred lady, as proper as white gloves. And now in less than half a lifetime, how many thousands of broads have spread their legs on that old bed. Shit, caifán, what can you be sure about in this mess we call life? That saintly lady has been rolling in her grave, I suppose, while we were rolling on her mattress. Thanks for coming tonight. It’s good to see old friends sometimes. Come back again. It’s your own home, you know, any time you want it. Open the door for him, Gladiolo. Those kids, though … keep them out in the pasture where they can kick up their heels as they please. In the barn…” The six Monks filed past her silently. She squeezed my arm and pulled my ear down to her lips. “Listen, caifán, come back all by yourself some evening. Don’t forget your little mango. Shit, you can die crossing the goddamn street. Better to do it in bed, eh, fucking your fat old hot mama.”

  The door closes behind us and we are alone and exhausted. Once we are in the ancient Lincoln convertible, no one will speak. No one will know where we are going, why we are going there. I will know nothing except that I want to write what they have told me, that they have told me enough and more than enough, and to put it down on paper well, cleanly, truly, will be to face all the sand of an endless desert. I will betray them. I’ll have to, for as my cousin Pepe Bianco shut up among his books in his place on Cerrito in Buenos Aires puts it, every novel is a betrayal, an act of bad faith, an abuse of confidence. For at bottom we are most contented with what appears to be, with what goes on monotonously day after day and by its repetitiveness earns, and perhaps deserves, the name of reality. I don’t give a damn in the drugstores on Broadway. Fiche moi la paix in the cafés on the Boulevard St-Germain, Andate a fare un culo in the restaurants of Piazza Campitelli, Me importa madre in the supermarkets along Insurgentes, Me importa un corno in the movie houses of Lavalle, and who knows how the hell they say it but we can be sure that they say the same damn thing in the hotels of Mayakovsky Square, at the camp grounds of the Tatra, in the shops on Carnaby Street. So why do we wear ourselves to less than shadows writing books that say only that the reality that matters is a false one and that death awaits us unless we protect ourselves with lies, with appearances put on like wigs, with lunatic aspirations, the aspirant lunacy, to be precise, of a book. Truth bares its teeth at us from every side. Our lie isn’t what threatens us. What threatens is truth, which waits as patient as a diamond and makes us drowsy and satisfied, conquers us with contentment so that it can overcome us as we were first overcome in the beginning of everything. If we were to let it, truth would annihilate us. For “truth” is the same as the beginning and the beginning was nothingness and nothingness is death and death is the enemy, so let us all lie together, or surely we shall all lie alone. Truth would like to offer us a vision of the beginning, of life before it learned to doubt, before it was contaminated by idea. And that vision is precisely the vision of the end: the other face of creation is apocalypse. And the “lies” we spinners of tales tell betray “the true” simply in order to hold away from us, from all of us, that day of judgment when the beginning and the end shall be one. Yet nevertheless literature pays its homage to original, mortal, entirely unacceptable might; we recognize it because we must if we are to control and limit it. Not to recognize it, not to limit it, is to open the door on the fanged wolf of assassinating purity. And if that happens, all of us end up very small brown turds, Daddy-oh and Big Mama, desiccated and scentless.

  The Monks understand me. Sure, they understand. That’s why bearded Boston Boy has his foot against the floorboard and we are whirling along Insurgentes like a projectile that knows it has a target. I would like to know what that target is, to learn if it is the one I suspect. But we are all too tired. I look at their faces, carried beside and around my own in the illusory immobility of togetherness, and I see that I don’t really know who they are or who they were a moment ago, much less who they may be an hour from now. April’s night wind, Mexican wind of dust blown from the dry lake beds of the flat valley, twists and disfigures those young faces, and perhaps among them there is someone I have never known: may not this same wind, born of land that once was water, may it not whip the muffler worn by a German student who takes the 7:15 tram, toss the hair of a pair of young lovers on a Greek island of goats and pebbles, drift golden fog around the heads of the baroque statues of a Karlsbrücke, beneath the Tropic of Cancer throb the lost polyphony of a great requiem, dissipate the gaseous warmth of a Jewish block in Manhattan, touch closed the eyes of an old man seated in the sun on a bench in Mexico City’s Alameda Park? I confess I don’t know. There are many things I don’t know. Ask me some other day. Maybe I’ll be wiser then. Now, at this moment, seated within this night-hurtling ancient Lincoln, I refuse to admit that if I should relax my will and my imagination, the six young faces and bodies traveli
ng with me would be carried away into darkness like so many tiny sparks from a dying fire, that they, like the wind, the car, the night itself, are my creatures, and if I should cease to sustain them with my creative love, they would disappear in a whirl of transparent circles, vanish even from memory. Yes, I speak of loving you, my six Monks, for you are my six Monks, my six Monkkin, Monkkernels, Monkkites, Monkkings, Monkknights, Monkkittens, Monkknaves, and as with me you race through this April night at something near a hundred kilometers an hour, we see together my compatriots pushing their carts down the aisles of open supermarkets bright with light, buying canned goods that bombs may fall a little sooner on Peking, the world be saved a little sooner for freedom and Palmolive soap, standing before rotisseries that slowly turn with chickens under the arm that the helmeted Marines may cross the Rio Grande in the north and the Bío-Βíο in the south and we ourselves become the last Vietnamites; we see them emerging from Sears carrying a new aspirator that the world may become one wide field of burning napalm, see them climb into their Chryslers and Plymouths and Dodges that the universe may achieve the New Order of peace and tranquillity and decency sans all upsetting spectra, yellows, blacks, reds, and all unsettling specters like you, my Monkkeeners, my Monkkreatans, my Monkkristers, my Monkkillers. But now it isn’t my wind I hear. I never huffed and puffed up a wind that wails like that, that blinks its red light and waves its gauntleted hand for us to pull over and stop in front of the illuminated glass box of the Comercial Mexicana, where pleasant families, we can see them from our car through glass and more glass, an aquarium of a market, pass along shoving their carts and baby carriages, carrying their wire baskets and their children drowning among bottles of catsup and heads of lettuce and boxes of Kleenex provided to wipe away their snot as they wail. And the boxes of Kleenex and the files of artichoke militia (dry beneath their scales, Pablo) suffocate with so many children heaped on top of them and the man in brown raises his goggles and swings off his stilled wheels and swaggers toward us on shining boots as he takes out his ticket book and his pencil and Boston Boy assumes an expression of innocence. Play it cool, now, Boston Boy. Just play it cool. The cop wants fifty pesos and that’s all he wants. Viva the Emperor President seated upon the Great Pyramid. Si haut que l’on soit placé, on n’est jamais plus haut que sur son cul, quoth Cousin Michel, the Old Man of the Mountain.

  “Ninety kilometers an hour, señor. At the very least. Don’t give me that innocent look.”

  “No, no, Officer. I’m not innocent.”

  “So? You admit it?”

  “Everything, Officer. I admit everything.”

  “Take it easy, young man. You’re going to force me to haul you in.”

  “I’ve nothing to hide. I’ll confess everything.”

  “And remember, the young ladies will have to go with you…”

  “That makes no difference. I accept my responsibility. In reality I never wanted to find her. I was afraid.”

  “If you’re planning on spending the night in the bust, you have every reason to be afraid.”

  “The truth is, I thought she was safe. They had told me that the musicians were going to be excepted, that they weren’t going to touch them…”

  “No one is safe in the peni, young man. No one.”

  “I tell you, she wasn’t really in danger. There was no need for me to do anything. Why should I? The danger would have been to draw attention to her.”

  “In the peni they don’t respect anyone. Not even grandmothers. Do you understand what I mean, young man?”

  “Yes. In those places it’s best to be invisible. If I had let anyone know I was looking for her, it would have been like pointing her out to them. They would have noticed her, while before they didn’t. Do you see what I mean, Officer?”

  “What I see is that on top of speeding and reckless driving, you’re drunk. Polluted, if the young ladies will excuse the word. Stoned. Even your hands are shaking. Let me have a whiff of your breath.”

  “If I found her, I hurt her. Not to find her was a favor to her. To see her only from the distance. And I would have put myself in danger, too. Well, I accept that. But I would have lost the confidence of my superiors. Maybe I would even have lost my job. And it was my first assignment. I had studied to build and now, in the midst of all the destruction, I had been given an opportunity to build. What more could I ask?”

  “Look, señor, don’t try my patience.”

  “And one day she saw me and didn’t recognize me or didn’t want to recognize me, all she saw was my uniform. ‘Let me pass,’ she said. That was all she said.”

  “I don’t think you have a very clear idea of Mexico City’s peni, young man. Drug addicts and perverts. Not the best of company. And the cells are cold as tombs.”

  “Then what, Officer, if it had turned out that she hated me? What if she had rejected me? Wasn’t it better for both of us to remain apart in our separate worlds united only by our memories, Prague, the Karlsbrücke, that summer of concerts in the Wallenstein Gardens, the Requiem? The hope and the promise that we had been in those young days? Wouldn’t that seem wiser, Officer, more rational?”

  “They don’t wear kid gloves in the peni, señor. They aren’t exactly polite and well-mannered. Try to understand the situation you put me in. I don’t want to force a night in the peni on anyone. But…”

  “And escape? To try to escape?”

  “Ah, just try it, young man, just try it. Plenty have tried and no one has made it yet.”

  “To end up, both of us, electrocuted on that damn fence, trapped by the dogs of the Hundenkommando, executed by a volley against the death wall? Or simply caught and shipped off to the ovens of Auschwitz?”

  “Look, my friend. I’m trying to do you a favor. Stop speaking Chinese to me. Show a little more respect for authority.”

  “No, Officer, there was no way out. The only intelligent thing was to accept the situation and wait. She was one of the musicians and the musicians were safe. The war would end one day. Why risk our lives foolishly? And to top it all, she was pregnant.”

  “You’re one of the lippy kind, aren’t you, buster?”

  “To top it all, she was pregnant.”

  “But lip won’t help you now. Look, man, look…”

  “She hadn’t been faithful. She had promised to wait, that I should be the first. It wasn’t my fault I couldn’t return to her, Officer. Did I declare the war? I thought about trying to save her. I swear I did. I made plans, I thought about it night and day. But, in her condition, escape was out of the question. We would have had to wait until the child was born and leave it with someone. Then maybe we might be able to make it. And the war might end first and everything be forgotten and forgiven…”

  “Christ, you people inside the car, isn’t there a good God-fearing Mexican here who can explain the facts of life to this crazy gringo? You, señor, you with the mustache, you look like a Mexican, can’t you tell this fool to shut up?”

  “But they had to sing. They didn’t know how to protect themselves. All they had to do was present a performance. Instead they presented mockery and a challenge. They were fools, Officer. Shouting, shouting Libera me…”

  “You understand matters, señor. You don’t want me to take you people to the station any more than I want to take you. But one good turn deserves another. And when you’re dealing with a man who has authority on his side…”

  “Li-be-ra meeee!”

  “Señor, thank you, thank you. You understand things.”

  “And after that, what could I have done? They themselves had condemned themselves to death. They themselves, all alone, when they could have been safe. Who was I to try to intervene now? I, the young architect assigned to the camp, a minor functionary, a Sudeten at that, not even a German, maybe a man whose loyalty was none too sure, just a young man who knew how to do what he was ordered to do, was I going to go to the Commandant and beg that Hanna Werner be excepted from the shipment of the musicians to Auschwitz? I?
I was going to beg that her newborn baby not be sent off to Treblinka? A baby who was not even my son? Doesn’t that make you laugh? I was going to intervene? Lift my hand and condemn myself too without helping her, who was already condemned beyond hope? I? I could have been that crazy? Write that down, Officer. It’s a good joke. Write it down to laugh over with your comrades.”

  “Look, young man, don’t tempt me now.”

  “Write it down. I would cross the course of the stars, I would put back the times of the sea…”

  “I tell you, there’s no problem now. Don’t let your foot get so heavy, that’s all. Shake. We’ll part friends.”

  And Jakob, immutable at the side of blond Boston Boy Franz Jellinek, looks at the cop and possibly says something that we cannot hear, something that is carried off into the night by the wind of the Valley of Mexico, jugular wind, wind of the palaces of the albinos, wind of the hunchbacks and the peacocks, while the man in brown walks back to his wheeled pony pocketing the fifty pesos that was all he wanted in the first place and that I finally handed him, and now we have to rest, to unwind, to go home to my squatter’s castle and have a drink and a smoke, but Boston Boy, wearier than any of us, lets his head drop forward upon the steering wheel and obviously is going to take us nowhere. Silently Jakob gets down and comes around the car and opens the door and shoves Boston Boy out of the way and starts the car and with a grinding of gears we move off while I look a last time at the parents with their children and their baby carriages and their market carts and I ask myself if a terrible mixup may not happen at any moment, any Sunday dinner, if the artichokes may not be given the breast to suck while the babies are boiled in oil. So we move away under the stars and the wind, and Morgana, coming back to life as if after a long sleep, yawns and asks White Rabbit if she remembers the games she and Javier used to play in the evenings after supper and Rose Ass says that he remembers, they played war games, made riddles, for example, about the tonnage of the British destroyers in the battle of the Río de la Plata, or quizzed each other: who is von Rundstedt, Ligeia, have you ever heard of him? Or Timoshenko or Gamelin or Wavell. Brother Thomas has quietly found a little placard among the confusion beneath our feet and with adhesive tape is affixing it to the side window, and the placard reads