“Do you think she has come because of us?”
The hawsers are thrown off. Elizabeth says farewell to Rhodes without daring to cry, letting Elena and the women of the island weep in her stead. Voices surge from the brown and rocky earth that is beautiful only because of the sea, the sea across which the ship is now moving. Elena is lost in the crowd, weeping, shouting again and again, fainter and fainter.
* * *
Δ So there we were, Dragoness, that last night which was also the first night, the six Monks, Isabel and myself, seated beneath the gray and green paint-flaking arcade in Cholula on brass chairs around two aluminum tables that belonged to an oyster bar which after darkness fell became a different kind of bar. The oysters lay still in their large jars of gray water. An alcohol-soaked worm hung suspended in my bottle of mescal. Only I was drinking. The others were taking a trip. They were floating, high, far away. “Groovy, groovy,” repeated, every little while, the girl who another night had been Judge Morgana and another year, perhaps, had been a child taken south by train carrying a doll whose head broke. Near us stood a small group of musicians, slick-varnished straw hats, white shirts, drill trousers, playing their guitars and singing, out of tune, the corrido “Benjamín Argumedo.” Lo bajaron por la sierra, todo liado como un cohete. Near us also were women with narrow foreheads, small teeth set in thick gums, hair in short braids or up in a knot, prematurely old, shawl-wrapped women whose bellies were big with the next child while the last held to their hand or slept in their arms or rode behind wrapped in the shawl. The women passed on bare feet, gathered near the wall, stared at us and laughed silently as they exchanged their joking secrets and their secret jokes in voices that could not be heard, words thinly inflected, fused chains of inaudible syllables. Tanto pelear y pelear con el máuser en la mano. I looked impatiently toward the plaza. Toward the street that climbs to the basilica atop the great pyramid which is really seven pyramids nested one within the other. The plaza was empty. It belonged now only to Cholula’s night-wandering dogs, some yellow, some black, all lost, listless, strengthless, hungry, scratching at their infestations of sores and fleas, crippled, emaciated. I looked, but not the Monks. They neither saw nor heard. They were flying high now. To their clothing they had pinned little tin badges, like the stars the sheriffs of the East wear. Make Marijuana Legal. Baby Scratch My Back. LSD NOT LBJ. Abolish Reality. They smoked their joints like black bats and did not see me as I looked toward the street to see if our friends had returned yet, while at the same time, good Mexican campaigner that I am, never say die and all that, under the table I stretched my foot, trying to touch the foot of the girl who another night was pale White Rabbit who was Jeanne Féry the nun who was Helen of Troy who was Mother Mary who was yourself, Dragoness. I reached for her with my toe but she paid me no attention. She and Jakob were holding hands. Para acabar fusilados en el panteón de Durango. I turned to you, beside me, Isabel, leaning against my shoulder with your eyes closed.
“Do you think they’re going to show?”
You didn’t answer me. The mariachi musicians went on playing and the dogs came to our table and looked at us with their large hopeful eyes, red and yellow eyes irritated and rheumy. And I drank my mescal and observed the faces of the six Monks and saw them as taking part in a masque, as wearing disguises the purpose of which was to testify to the ultimate nature of true energy, the energy that changes things, that is never wasted although after exertion it may be lost for a time and then return because it has not really been lost but has simply passed over into the hands of someone else who some other day may perhaps give it back. Their clothing was dusty and spotted with mud and they smoked their marijuana and listened to the musicians playing for them on an April night.
“My head aches,” you said, Pussycat.
“Are they going to show?”
“I don’t know.”
The six young Monks were smiling. For those passing us, their muddy clothing doubtless seemed another detail of their costumes, less obvious than their tin badges. Abolish Reality. Passers-by looked at us, at you and me and at the six Monks, and didn’t suspect us of anything. Why should we be suspected? The six Monks were merely comical, and who was to know that their comedy was that of Laurel and Hardy, who made us laugh and feel surprise and sense the endless possibilities open to man when they dismembered an old car or smashed up a very proper suburban home. Soldiers were watching us, too, leaning their shaved necks back against the columns of the arcade. Pistols in belt, caps-a-cock, cheek or temple or throat lividly scarred by a knife gash, toothpicks between their teeth, watching us and smiling mockingly. And Jakob went on embracing the girl whom I have called White Rabbit, looking at me simply that I should be able to tell myself that what to me might have seemed predestined was to him and in reality his freedom, and that if he could discover, twenty-one years later, its consequences, and convert his aspiration into act, then all of us can be equally free. What he had done, he was telling me in short, that I could tell myself, was that he had acted in the name of all mankind. But as he embraced the girl called White Rabbit, I asked myself what is the line that separates the model from the mere case, at what point does revenge cease to be private and become free and public, carried out to give a meaning that will splash in widening circles beyond the little pebble of existence that happens to be at its center, in this instance the life of Jakob Werner.
Bullshit, I told myself, cut it, drop it, dry up. You’re merely jealous of his youth and the girl he holds in his arms. You’re merely tired and irritated that it should have ended this way, without your having the guts to prevent a crime, a murder, which you did not approve, and at the same time without your having been accepted by the criminals as their comrade, as one of them. You neither prevented it nor participated in it. You merely served as their guide into a strange pyramid which has at its heart a wall painted with crickets. Their guide, not their mentor, all the long length of a lazaret where, thanks to our vital love of cruelty, the isolation lepers live can create the illusion that they are really alive.
“Will they show?” I said again to Isabel.
“I don’t know. I doubt it. They were just sitting there, holding hands.”
“What were they saying?”
“Betty was talking, not Javier. She was telling him that it didn’t matter. That life had to go on.”
The girl called White Rabbit withdrew her foot from mine and looked at me with amusement and scorn. Very slowly she kissed Jakob.
I stroked Isabel’s hair. “If we leave right away, we can be in Veracruz by dawn.”
“No. I don’t want to see the sea now.”
“Would you rather go back to Mexico City?”
“Yes.” She stood up and opened her purse and looked for her comb, her lipstick, her mirror. “Yes. There’s nothing left to do here. Let’s go back. I’m exhausted.”
And the faces of the six Monks observed us with mockery. The black-skinned face. The face veiled by the straw-colored hair of the youth wearing pink pants. The Gothic face, erect over the sharpness of the cheekbones, of the girl in black sweater, black pants, black boots, black everything. Jakob Werner’s half-closed eyes. The divine pallid face without eyebrows and with orange lips, the face of young Elizabeth of the eternally intolerable life that nevertheless is eternally worth being lived. The blond and bearded face of all agonies. They looked at me as I stood beside Isabel. The dark-skinned women with swollen bellies and bare feet looked, and the slobbering drowsy dogs, the sardonic-eyed soldiers.
“Yes, let’s go back. I’m exhausted, too.”
They all looked, smiled, crossed their arms. Ya no vivan tan engreídos con este mundo traidor. I picked up a fistful of peanuts and tossed them at the face of one of the musicians.
“Hey, you! Take it easy there.”
He put down his guitar. A man with thick mustaches. He stepped over his guitar and with the movement of a black panther advanced toward our table.
“Knock it off, drunk.
Knock it off fast. Show some respect for…”
I threw another handful of peanuts at his face and the soldiers leaning against the columns of the arcade straightened and put their hands to the butts of their pistols and the big-bellied women covered their children’s heads with their shawls and stepped out of the way as the dogs ran off limping, one foot lifted, hanging in the air, or perhaps only the stump where a foot had been, their bare hides splotched with dry stains, and the soldiers took out their pistols and ran toward us along the arcade where the four musicians were preparing to jump us, beat the hell out of us.
Jakob stood up quickly and quietly and calmly removed a bloody knife from his portfolio.
* * *
Δ You told me all this that afternoon, Dragoness, when they let you visit me.
These places are always far from the usual human walks, from towns and cities. They have to be far, otherwise they would lose their meaning. I don’t know what you had to pay before they would let you in, what you had to do; I don’t want to try to guess. But you had always said, Some day I’ll tell you everything, and I had no reason to doubt your word.
Of course, they made you stay outside my door. Even there you were running risk enough. Your voice reached me very feebly, very low, but then the walls of my room caught it and amplified it. That was why I didn’t move nearer you. I stood facing the part of the wall that pretends to be a window and I caught your voice before it fled from everything, before it died.
You have to do much before you can understand what they say. This tightrope walking is my daily bread, which I eat to understand. As they have never lived, any life that can be called living, they know nothing, not even the secrets of this their place. They have created isolation and believe that four walls can contain it. But nothing is utterly isolated. Nothing, Dragoness.
They would be surprised if they lived here with me and discovered that the absolute silence of the first days is merely the announcement of a universe of sounds which at first are heard one by one, then fused into a pattern, an order. When one of us to his shame tells them, they laugh and say it is all imagination. Be it known it is evil: to live imprisoned. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, the screws tighten. They themselves begin to imagine what we imagine and then we are no longer alone: they also are living imprisoned. They know it and they know that it is contrary to the principle of authority that they themselves attempt to impose. And then they stop your food, Dragoness, so that you won’t have pangs of indigestion. Or they stuff a viscous pap into you because they believe that your imagination is the result of your hunger, which sharpens it. Or they cover the floor with cotton mattresses to shut the sounds away.
So I tell them nothing. I play the mute idiot and keep all I hear to myself. All the voices that come through the stone. The panting of love-making, the shouts of a quarrel. The snapped commands, the fall of clods of earth. The volleys of rifle shots, the crack of a rubber-hose lash. The whining of animals and the crying of children. The night music of an eternal repose and the million footsteps that drag past. The moaning I hear every night when I put my ear to the floor to communicate somehow with someone who must be buried beneath the soles of my feet.
It makes me happy that you have come to see me. You are going to tell me that you and Javier came out of the pyramid dragging the body behind you. The first thing you saw was the parked Lincoln. You left the body lying across the iron rails and took advantage of the sad Cholula night, as silent as falling dust, so dark there at the foot of the pyramid and the church, near the insane asylum, in order to get rid of your burden. You opened the trunk of the Lincoln and he dragged the body up. But inside the trunk you found something you couldn’t have expected. It was something alive, wrapped up like a mummy, a little bundle that stirred and whimpered. You felt afraid. Behind those bandage-like wrappings there was life, perhaps there was even more than one life. Javier was also afraid but with him fear showed itself as action. He went back and got the body and dragged it to the car through the sad silent darkness, the darkness as secret as the deepest recesses of the earth. He took the body by the armpits and made you take it by the feet and between you, with difficulty, you raised it and dropped it into the trunk. Javier wanted to put down the lid at once. You hesitated. When the body of the dead man had fallen, you had heard a soft cry, one that for a moment you let yourself pretend you couldn’t identify, it might have been the cry of a nun in the church on top of the hill pyramid, it might have been the cry of a patient in the nearby insane asylum, it might even have been only the cry of a cricket. But you knew all the time that the cry had come from within the trunk of the car. You reached beneath the dead body and took out the small living bundle and held it in your arms without knowing what it was. Javier wanted you to leave it there. He told you that it wasn’t yours, that it wasn’t any of your business, that he had better put the lid of the trunk down and both of you get the hell out. But you cradled the bundle in your arms and accepted it, accepted everything, knowing that whatever was within those tight wrappings was both yours and not yours, and that the world has many riddles and enigmas that must not be too closely looked into except at the risk of catastrophic destruction. And whom could you ask about it, anyhow? You began to run, Dragoness, not sure where you were going. You could have gone up the steep road to the church, or down the street into Cholula. Or around the pyramid to the asylum. You chose the last, knowing that there would be doctors and nurses at the asylum. You ran to the wide gate of its spacious grounds and put down the bundle where it would be found. Then you went back to your husband, Dragoness, as you always go back to him, to Javier waiting beside the closed trunk inside which lay a new skin to rot in the stead of the skin you had saved from rotting. You will always know whom you have to care for and protect, Dragoness. And let no one say anything about fear.
Now you have to go. I think you have come a long way just to be with me these few minutes, for, as I said, these places are always far removed from civilization. I would like to believe that in order to reach me you had to call upon the influence of important acquaintances, to pay large bribes. Yet I also know that it’s possible you may be locked up here too, just like me. For your parents were as infected, or at least as suspected of infection, as those of any of us. I shan’t say that you have come from the contaminated soil of Nazareth to this earth where live the dead who resuscitate themselves, this palace of Our Lord Lazarus. Yes, Lazarus lives here too. He of the resurrections. He who has given his name to our dwelling place and also to the pyramid and also to the church atop the pyramid. If you stand on tiptoe at the window, sometimes, not always but sometimes, the pyramid and the church can be seen, or at least can seem to be seen.
It’s time for you to go now, Dragoness. Caesar the Sleepwalker serves his immortal master well and if he should suspect I have listened to you he might murder me with a cold in the head, a touch of indigestion, perhaps a twinge of hunger. It’s mealtime, Dragoness. The yellow dog is feeding on the bones of the masked child and will soon be finished with them. I can’t recognize the face of the child, but I am sure it isn’t laughing. Our children never laugh except when they wear comic masks, funny faces of sugar, sweet skeletons and death’s heads that laugh for them. And death is the puppet theater where the sad eyes of our children look and see their own faces on the white skull because they know that, long before their childhood ends, their heads will be white skulls too.
Go, Dragoness, go. The yellow dog is turning from the bones of the child. He is tied only by dirty rags that at any moment may break, and then … I know that his hunger is far from sated.
So long, Dragoness. Take it easy. Stay loose. And don’t forget your ever lovin’
Tonantzintla, March 1962
New York, October 1965
Paris, September 1966
BOOKS BY CARLOS FUENTES
Where the Air Is Clear
The Good Conscience
Aura
The Death of Artemio Cruz
A Change
of Skin
Terra Nostra
The Hydra Head
Burnt Water
Distant Relations
The Old Gringo
Copyright © 1968 by Carlos Fuentes
All rights reserved
Originally published in Spanish under the title
Cambio de piel, © 1967 by Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, S.A.
First published in hardcover by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1968
First published in paperback, 1978
Library of Congress catalog card number: 67-15015
eISBN 9781466840089
First eBook edition: February 2013
*Who said MAILER, brethren? If we were born to die!
Carlos Fuentes, A Change of Skin
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