A Change of Skin Read online

  You entered the chapel. I followed and waited in the door. You, Elizabeth, Dragoness, wet your fingers in one of the two baptismal fonts and I saw you smile as you realized the incongruity: those fonts are the ancient pagan urns into which the priests of Cholula used to cast the hearts of their human sacrifices. Pearl light filtered down from the Christo-Arabic arches and dulled the burned color of the tezontle-stone floor, giving to it an in-between tone, a middle tone of transition between the burning hell below and the opaque heaven above. The room is vast and almost empty. There is a Christ wearing mockery, a lace jacket and skirt and the crown of an emperor of thorns around a carefully frizzled wig, vinegar dripping from his lips, drops of blood clotted on his forehead, the absurd staff of his buffoon power between his hands: a figure of inglorious humiliation, far removed from the four polychrome angels who guard the altar, but very near the symbols of purgatory that are the chief elements within the chapel: an altarpiece in relief in which the Queen of Heaven, crowned by angels, presides over the sufferings of mustached gentlemen, ladies with nude torsos and rosy breasts, tonsured friars, king and bishop licked by flames of repentance; and before the altarpiece is the tomb of a bishop, a skeleton with fallen miter and open intestines, and above it a tapestry of tortured spirits consumed by fire:

  STATUM EST HOMINIBUS SE MELMORE & POST HOC IUDICIUM

  Indians seated in the great atrium smile as they watch the pageant portraying God’s judgment against the first mortals, the couple who had no umbilicus. Huge rocks, trees, the whole garden of man’s original felicity has been constructed between the chapel’s arches. Golden birds with real feathers perch among the branches. Parrots chatter, monkeys wink at the fields of Eden. In the center stands the tree of life with its golden apples. A paradise of April and May. Turkeys strut across the scene shaking their combs and red mantles. Children dressed as animals scamper. Adam and Eve appear in their pristine innocence. Eve alluringly fondles Adam, tries to make him respond to her, pleads, but he rejects her with exaggerated dread. She eats from the tree, offers him the apple, and he finally consents to bite it. For a moment the audience laugh, but their faces fill with terror as mighty God and his angels descend. God orders Adam and Eve clothed. The angels instruct Adam in cultivation of the earth and give Eve a spindle for spinning thread. Then the fallen pair are driven out into the world and the watching Indians weep while the angels face them and sing:

  Why did you eat,

  Thou first wife,

  Why did you taste

  The forbidden fruit?

  I’ll give you back

  Your time.

  An old Lincoln convertible stopped before the plaza arcade and its driver, a blond, bearded youth, set the hand brake and opened the door. Beside him a girl wearing black pants, black sweater, and black boots stretched and yawned and the Negro youth in a charro sombrero who was on the right kissed her neck and laughed. A tall boy wearing a leather jacket jumped from the back seat to the stone-paved street, his guitar in his hand. The second girl, almost hidden behind her mirror-opaque dark glasses, the turned-up lapels of her coat, and the wide brims of her hat, stood and removed her glasses and looked around at Cholula. She wore no makeup, her eyebrows were shaved, her lips were almost invisible under very pale lipstick. She wrinkled her eyes and offered a hand to the young man still seated. Unlike the others, he was dressed conventionally, a jacket of maroon tweed, gray flannel trousers. He closed the yellow portfolio on his knees and said quietly, “Some day I’ll have to persuade them.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said the girl in black. She shrugged her shoulders and stood there as if she already owned the arcade.

  “Oh, but it does,” said the youth with the portfolio. “Music is inside. There is no need to wear a disguise. The true rebel dresses as I do.”

  “Look, man, we’ll scare him more this way.” The tall youth ran a mussing hand through his lank hair.

  “Is he here?” said the girl with the shaved eyebrows. In the intense sunlight she was as defenseless as an albino.

  “You can bet your life,” said the Negro.

  In the street, the girl in black turned on her transistor radio and looked for a station.

  The bearded driver of the car took out a white crayon and wrote across the windshield: PROPERTY OF THE MONKS, and the girl in black found her station and the tall youth wiped sweat from his forehead and began to strum his guitar in accompaniment to the music from the radio. All six of them joined arms and walked away under the arcade, singing:

  I’ll give you back your time.

  But I could hear only the whimpering and sobbing, soft, fused, that I knew came from the trunk of their car.

  2

  IN BODY AND SOUL

  Both are absent. “I wasn’t there”: quotation from a letter directed by the Narrator to his German grandfather, dead in 1880, a Lassalle socialist expelled from the Reich by the Iron Chancellor. The letter is not received. A change of skin. Mutating genes. “I wasn’t there.” Therefore the Narrator quotes Tristan Tzara: “Tout ce qu’on regarde est faux,” in order to save himself from the Museum, from Perfection, and to participate in a personal Happening, a novel written for immediate consumption: recreation. Michel Foucault speaks:

  “Et puisque cette magie a été prévue et

  décrite dans les livres, la différence

  illusoire qu’elle introduit ne sera jamais

  qu’une solitude enchantée.”

  Les Mots et les Choses

  Δ You were going to tell me some day, Elizabeth, that the snail was moving across the wall and you, lying on the bed, lifted your head and saw first the silver track and followed it so slowly that several seconds passed before your eyes reached the dark shell. You felt drowsy and there you were on the bed in the second-rate hotel with your neck stretching out and your hands in your armpits and all you saw was a snail on a wall of peeling green paint. Javier had worked the cord of the drapes and the room was in shadow. Now he was unpacking, and you turned your head and watched him release the catches of the blue leather suitcase and pull the zipper and raise the top. Just then, Javier looked up and saw a second snail, this one gray-striped and motionless within its shell. The first snail approached the second and Javier looked down and admired the perfect order with which he had packed his clothing for this trip. You bent your knees and drew your heels back until they touched your buttocks and now you too observed that there was a second snail on the wall, that the first had stopped beside the second and was showing its head with the four tentacles. With one hand you smoothed your skirt while you studied the mouth of the snail, an open gap right in the middle of the wet horned head. Now the head of the second snail appeared too. Their shells were like small spirals pasted on the wall. Their sticky slaver dripped beneath them. The two sets of tentacles touched. You spread your eyes wider and wished that you could hear more acutely, microscopically as it were. The two soft driveling bodies slowly emerged from their shells and immediately, with a suave vigor, embraced. Javier, standing, was watching them. You, on the bed, spread your arms. The snails trembled lightly. Slowly they separated. They observed each other for a few seconds and then returned to their shells. You stretched a hand out and found your package of cigarettes on the table beside the bed. You lit a cigarette and wrinkled your eyebrows. Javier began to lift his trousers from the suitcase: the blue linen slacks, the cream linen slacks, the gray silk slacks. He laid them on the bed and smoothed them, passing his hand over the wrinkles. He went to the ancient wardrobe and got some coat hangers, carefully selected the least bent ones, returned to the suitcase on the bed. You observed every movement and you laughed with your cigarette resting against your cheek.

  “You act like you’re thinking of living here.” You looked around the room, its damp walls, its broken windowpanes. Some pad.

  With both hands Javier removed the socks he had chosen to match his slacks and shirts. “This was quite a modern hotel ten years ago, I believe,” he said. “It has been erod
ed by all the unfortunate travelers forced to stop over, as we are, involuntarily.”

  That’s how he talks, Dragoness. Yes, that’s how your husband talks. You can bet all you have on it. You ask him. “When will the car be ready?” simply to hear him reply, very subtly, “You should ask Franz.” He presses his socks to his chest while you exhale smoke.

  “But really, why put your things in the drawers when we’ll be here only one night?”

  He carried his socks to the dresser as if they were a dozen fragile eggs.

  “One night, one month, the principle is the same. We should take advantage of what time we have.”

  “Advantage?” You curled up in the bed, resting on your elbows. “In this miserable dump of a town?”

  Javier arranged his socks all in a row in the top drawer. You began to laugh. You drew your legs up again and laughed and pushed out your breasts and watched him putting his shirts in the pine dresser one by one, very neatly, the blue cotton shirt, the black knit wool, the yellow silk, the pleated guayabera, the terry-cloth shirt to be used after swimming in the sea. You slapped your hands on your open thighs and laughed.

  “The point is not that the town is miserable,” said Javier, “but that whatever you see, you never really observe.”

  “I saw their benighted children, didn’t I?”

  His underwear was at the bottom of the suitcase. He lifted it out and on his open palms carried it to the dresser. There he counted: six jockey shorts, six undershirts. He made a face. You knew it: as usual he had forgotten his handkerchiefs.

  “The beggars came out of the city at dawn and went from dwelling to dwelling, marketplace to marketplace…”

  Abruptly you got up from the bed.

  “You can’t hear what they say here, Javier. You can’t hear a damn word they say.” And with both hands you struck Javier’s hands, sending his underwear flying around the room. You laughed again.

  “… a barefoot multitude of rags and outstretched arms…”

  You will tell me about it many times, Dragoness. You know that the first time will be hard, that you will expect too much of the second, and that only the third time will everything seem right to you. So. You panted for a moment against Javier’s face. Then you let yourself fall face down on the bed. “They were then just what they are today. Things with neither eyes nor ears nor voice. To hell with them, they bore me. Let me sleep now.”

  Javier knelt and retrieved his jockey shorts and undershirts. He placed them in the drawer.

  “Don’t you want to bathe, change clothes?”

  “What for? To stroll in that withered-up park and listen to cha-cha-cha?”

  You hid your face in the pillow again. Javier closed the drawer. You rolled over, shut your eyes. Javier looked at you, at the fatigue just faintly showing on a face that with the eyes closed seemed to disengage itself from the world as if its voice would never be heard again, as if its body were no longer there. He walked toward the bathroom carrying the small leather case in which his medicines and pomades travel. At the door he stopped and you said slowly, laughing quietly: “Abandon human sacrifices. Stop worshipping idols. Well, why not? No longer eat the flesh of your fellow man. Give up sodomy and your other stupid degeneracies. Hah, hah. Sure. Graduate and join the Navy and see the sea. Ship ahoy.”

  You rose and looked at your husband as you sat down before the broken-paned window that opened on a sour interior patio. You sat in a rocker beside the drapes and began to rock back and forth, awaiting the moment when you could say: “We walked along the arcade, silent, infected by the living death…”

  You jerked the cord violently and the drapes swirled open and the afternoon sun poured in. Viciously you went on: “… by the dead life of this goddam funereal town. Javier! Javier, are you satisfied?”

  You opened your eyes. He was no longer in the room.

  “Javier! Javier! Don’t you understand I’m doing it all for you?”

  You heard a gush of water into the washbowl, then the voice of your husband: “The battle lasted only five hours. Three thousand lay dead in the streets, in the ashes of the destroyed temples.”

  You waited with your hands resting against the sides of the bathroom door and in a very slow voice you said quietly: “Oh, yes, they are gods. They divine treachery in advance and in advance they take their vengeance. Who can oppose them?”

  You went into the bathroom. At its farther end, half hidden by the shower curtain, Javier sat on the throne with his naked knees showing, his trousers down around his ankles and shoes. You approached him without haste, even with a certain professional air. You pulled back the curtain and lifted him from the seat and offered him the roll of paper. He took it. Mechanically, yet precisely—oh, yes—he tore off exactly three segments. His hand went to his buttocks. Then he pulled the chain and hoisted his trousers. You smiled with a twisted mouth. Thus, good Father, would I like to stand before Thy final judgment.

  “Rest now, Javier.”

  “But I don’t believe I’m sleepy.”

  “Take one of your sleeping pills.”

  You embraced his waist, rested your chin on his shoulder.

  “I haven’t unpacked my medicines yet.” He was motionless in your arms. “Elizabeth?”

  “What, old man?”

  “Why are we here?”

  “Because we’re on our way to the sea. Because once in a while we have to get away from the city. And you feel better for it, don’t you? Isn’t the lower altitude better? Come on now, lie down and rest. Get your sleeping pill.”

  “I forget its name. It’s yellow, I think. A capsule. Good Lord, Ligeia. How well I used to know my medicines! What’s coming over me?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Look for the pill and rest.”

  Javier stood in the bathroom door and stared down at the woman who had not had time or inclination to change the wrinkled skirt and blouse in which she had traveled from Mexico City to Cholula. At you, Elizabeth. Liz, Lizzie, Lisbeth. At you, Beth, Bette. He blew his nose on a Kleenex and drew up the zipper of his fly.

  “Ligeia, do you know something?”

  Oh boy, you thought. Here it comes.

  “Do I know what?”

  “The snail is androgynous. What was the point of those two snails coming out of their shells on the wall? I mean, if both are bisexual, what was the point of it? Can you tell me, Ligeia?”

  * * *

  Δ And this morning, Dragoness, I also traveled from Mexico City to Cholula. I rode turning the pages of the Sunday paper and marking certain interesting items with a red pencil. For example: Linda Darnell and La Belle Otero died yesterday. Carolina Otero, of pure old age, ninety-seven. Ninety-seven long years with her fat clitoris always fighting the stout good fight. She died in a room beside the tracks, not a cent to her name, several years behind in the rent, nothing except some yellowed bonds from the time of the Tsar that a Russian noble once gave her, face value, one million rubles, but then came the revolution. The revolution always comes and goodbye bonds. And that was back when it was easy enough to predict your revolutions. Just the same, nowadays no one gives away bonds worth a million rubles, before the revolution or after it. La Belle Otero. And think of it, Dragoness, she left us just as we are moving into our own Belle Époque: she saw the age whooping back to art noveau, to Gaudí, to Oscar Wilde and Beardsley and Firbank and Radiguet and Baron Corvo, and out she bowed. It says that she was born in Cádiz. The daughter of a gypsy girl who was seduced by a Greek officer vacationing in Andalusia. Knowing gypsies and the Greeks, I suspect it may have been the other way around. At the age of thirteen she ran away from school with a lover and went to Portugal and danced in a cabaret. Resolved: the profession of lover. She granted D’Annunzio her favors. Yes, her favors. Look at the picture of the old girl: some favors, eh? So D’Annunzio discovered that to write well a man must screw hard, and there he was, hooked and wriggling inside the sour cave of La Belle Otero, baffled by shadows, confounding observant asceticism with the hot b
alls of the stud. Well, for all that, something worked. Pure sexotherapy. No. The best was the night she dined with five crowned heads: Edward VII of England, Nicholas II of Russia, Alfonso XIII of Spain, Wilhelm II of Germany, and Leopold II of Belgium. At the Café de Paris. Oh, the royal cocks! Now I understand it. Imagine the coolness, the disengagement and intelligence it took for her to give herself to them and yet preserve her essential virginity, that virginity born of absolute indifference and absolute sexual virtuosity. You must be very optimistic to make love in that way, neither hurried nor hopeless. Just as we do, La Belle Otero believed that her age would never end. Except that we disguise our conviction by putting on a pessimism that is really no more than an attempt to preserve psychological health: we tell ourselves that the world will die not with a cry but with a whimper, that Doctor Strangeloves are on the loose, that Big Brother is watching. The future is cloudy, we insist, we accept, we even enjoy. Mere psychotherapy. Our pessimism is hygiene for our invincible optimism. We use the condom provided by Thomas Stearns Orwell. In contrast, La Belle Otero and the Belle Époque knew very well that they could not last. Their cheerfulness actually expressed a profound despair, as sinister as the gingerbread castles of Barcelona, the flabby breasts of Beardsley’s Salome. And then she went on the dole. She died yesterday, in the morning; they found her body. So I read my newspaper, Elizabeth, while you rode in the front seat of the Volkswagen beside your blond, sunburned German and Isabel and your husband rode side by side in the back seat and you turned the knob and the radio faded with the voices of the Beatles floating on for an instant, and then you looked ahead and saw the curve and said sharply, “Watch it!” and in one movement grabbed Franz’s arm and pushed your foot down hard on an imaginary brake. In the seat behind Franz, Javier touched his handkerchief to his lips and smiled and said that the drawback to winding roads is that they make conversation difficult and Franz said that soon the worst of it would be behind and you were aware that Isabel had not grabbed Javier as you had Franz and that she was looking at you fixedly as you moved your hand from Franz’s arm and said: “Ten years ago this was all unbroken forest. But Mexicans don’t know how to preserve their riches.”