A Change of Skin Read online

  Franz laughed too and ran after her and caught her shoulder. Isabel held herself rigidly stiff. “Come touch me, Javier! Break the spell!”

  Javier grinned and approached her. “Good, but be sure you realize that beside you is a witch who is rotting with age but has painted over the decay of her living face with a white skull mask. And with her, waiting for you, is her husband, surrounded by owls and spiders. So.” He took her in his arms and kissed her as her arms tightened around his neck and Franz, smoking, watched them. Javier closed his eyes. “No,” said Isabel. “Don’t pull back.” They kissed again and Franz watched them. Finally they separated from their kiss. They looked at Franz. Isabel’s face was young and happy. Javier’s was cold with snotty pride.

  All three looked down and saw you far below making your way toward the ball court.

  They descended the stairs. Halfway down, Javier stopped. He stretched his arm out and in the air traced the convolutions of the serpent.

  “Are you talking to us?” Isabel smiled.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re really talking to us?” she repeated.

  “Yes, yes.”

  She went on smiling.

  “If I understand you, you’re a silly.”

  She caressed his arm.

  “Well, yes,” said Javier. He touched his fingers to the pleats of his shirt. “Perchè sì fuggo questo chiaro inganno?”

  * * *

  Δ And when Javier looked down at the pavement he told himself that the morning was going to be hot. He had just left behind the revolving door of his office building and now he was passing some fruit stands and he stopped and observed the heaped displays of fruit and moved closer and with a stiff little finger touched a slice of papaya and its cluster of black seeds. He watched the fruit vender cut into the heart of a watermelon with a single machete stroke. He looked at two dogs chewing discarded orange peels. Juices ran from the wooden table down upon the dusty ground where, squatting on their heels, old market women with wrinkled immobile faces from time to time called their wares.

  He put his hand into the inner pocket of his light gabardine jacket. He had chosen that gray jacket this morning because the paper had said that the day was going to be very warm and March in Mexico City can be warmer than warm, drier than dry, so dry that your skin and tongue feel that such liquids as fruit juices cannot exist, not even in the red heart of a melon. His hand touched the small leather carnet with its gold engraved letters, its properly sealed photograph, its very official, very important-looking ornate script: The bearer is an official of such and such center of studies of the Economic Commission for Latin America of the Organization of the United Nations. Which could be translated as a cubicle office behind gray-tinted glass that shut out the glare of the sun, a gray desk of steel with mountains of papers and reports printed in eight- and ten-point Bodoni, twenty-four quads, a well-fingered Charter of the United Nations—as if merely by touching it enough he could leave his personal imprint upon the world’s constitution—a matted, framed photograph of Dag Hammarskjöld on the wall, a revolving chair with black-leather cushion and back rest and armrests of some nickel-plated metal he did not know. That was what the little red-leather carnet said and he always kept it in his inner pocket, near his heart, so that when his fingers went there, where he thought his heart was, he could reassure himself twice with one touch. Now he pressed his fingers against his chest and attempted to discover whether his heart was beating evenly, regularly, properly, and then raised his hand to his collar—an Arrow shirt, Gordon type, Oxford cloth, button-down collar tabs, neck 15½, sleeves thirty-three inches—and felt the dry drops of sweat that undoubtedly were staining the collar, combining with the dust and the invisible but unclean, fumes-contaminated air to draw a dark circle there, and the cuffs too would be dirty and he would have no time to return to the apartment and change before going to that embassy cocktail party in the evening. But now at least he was free, he had gone out of his office without asking permission, had left his desk in disorder and had taken the elevator—Otis, automatic, smelling of chrome and leather—and had passed along the terrazzo hall and out the revolving door and without one backward glance had walked along the street to the market, imagining, as he always did, that it was a beach. For he enjoyed likening streets to a beach with towers and glass and doors and balconies, a beach that has no sea to spoil it, no tide to leave rotting fish and seaweed, no line of ocean meeting sky to distract the eye and entice it into voyaging too impossibly far. And if he was afraid now to look back—and he was afraid, the first conscious fear that morning—undoubtedly it was because he feared he would not see his footsteps in the sand of the sidewalk’s concrete. Why had he run away from his office? His heart, which a moment ago had been obedient and correct, began to thump with an alarming violence, and a sickening sensation moved down from it toward that center in his solar plexus from whence radiated a vegetative life that doubtless had been awakened by this, his fifth cigarette of the morning, ousted from hiding, set free to spread like fear or hope through the complex conduits and interconnections of his nervous system which now, like a stranger in a strange land, had become alien to the body containing it. No, his nerves were not good this morning. They were tense, trembling. And somewhere in his cerebrum lay a tiny all-powerful lobule that needed only to be nudged, touched, just lightly pricked or even just slightly numbed, and he would lose the vestige of freedom that still, after centuries of evolution and years of marriage, remained to him, become as mechanical as a Pavlovian pup, reacting with whatever terror or fury or submissiveness that destroying hand armed with a steel punch or a chicken feather might care to have him display: be dominated, dominated absolutely and helplessly, impotent to make use of the ideas he had acquired so laboriously, the personality he had defined and formed so hopefully during forty and more long years; helpless even to make use of his most primitive sensuality. Well, that was a nightmare, but one that he faced, thank God, only in his waking fantasies. Much worse was his sleeping nightmare of the ocean. A dream of fear, fear of going too near the ocean, of entering it and dying drowned with a kind of unconscious happiness and abandonment: he would be absolutely passive, he would move neither his arms nor his legs, the waves would surge over him and the black sand would suck him down, and he would not oppose them. A most terrible nightmare. Yet a fear that also was imaginary. Not imaginary was the violent beating of his heart. It might be bearable, however, if it were limited to itself, if it did not make cold sweat bead in his palms, bind his knees with a weight he could not carry, cause his head to whirl with a vertigo he could overcome only by stopping and bracing a hand against a green post and fixing his eyes steadily on the unlit tube of a neon sign. Maybe if he closed his eyes? No, for the darkness he would create would merely spin with mocking lights that would neither settle his vertigo nor distract his hearing from the shrill and discordant racket of the market crowd walking among the booths and stands, carrying naked chickens by the feathered head, weighing pigs’ feet on the palm of a hand, sniffing at white cheese, arguing over prices, blowing whistles, shaking matraca rattles, stuffing twenty-centavo coins into the incessant jukebox, popping open bottles of beer. He wanted peace and there was no peace, neither around nor within him, no silence, no calm, no hidden inner cloister where even his own voice would not be heard relating the terror of his nightmare about the sea; there was no door, no way out, he had to meet everything head on, as bluntly as a fist. That was why he had left the apartment so early this morning and gone early to the office and then escaped from it to the street: he had hoped that just to walk the sidewalks, to move one foot after the other, to see passing windows and faces might give him the calm he would need to get through one more day of the old tension, the old crises. But now the acids in his stomach had begun to move up and down again, up to give a bitter metallic taste to his mouth, down to gnaw the irritated labyrinthine coils in his belly where every X ray these days revealed clearly and unmistakably the zigzag of a spasm that re
ached all the way to the top of the colon. He left the market and raised his eyes to the blue unclean sky. A dust storm was imminent, the sky was trembling with it. And he had gone out of the office without telling anyone where he would be or when he would return. Slowly, dawdling, he walked along looking at shop windows. Those that were opaque with reflected glare he passed. Those that were transparent he examined, standing near the glass with his brows knitted: shoes of black patent leather, of alligator, of buckskin. Socks of nylon, silk, wool. Short-sleeved sports shirts decorated with colored piping. Dress shirts with labels guaranteeing that they would not shrink when laundered. Shirts with round collars, shirts with wide collars, striped shirts, colored shirts, white shirts yellowed by too long exposure to the sunlight. Behind them, smiling varnished manikins with blond wool hair and painted dark eyes and gleaming teeth, dressed in leather jackets, in gabardine business jackets, in pleated guayaberas. And one window farther down the street their female companions wearing black silk bras and lilac panties and garter belts. Multilated legs of crystalline plastic sheathed in nylons. Now he was before the window of a sweets shop. Mounds of chocolates. Domes of gumdrops. Pyramids of crystallized fruit. Boxes of pineapple compote. His saliva began to flow and his gastric juices redoubled their damned attack and he felt the sharp pain that his doctors had informed him was only a reflex and did not come from the site of the ulceration, the raw mouth of his stomach, but was some echo from the vicinity of his liver, as if the ulceration had dispatched a flaming arrow that he would have liked to blunt and damp out with a protective coating of sugar, except that he knew that if he ate a piece of candy the relief would last only a few minutes, the devouring sulfurous acids would be satiated for a little but only at the expense of a nervous indigestion from his intestines, that spasm which had already begun would run its course and end by refusing passage to the innocent candy but on the contrary would assault it viciously, agitate it violently, bombard it from all sides with the gases that would swell his belly tight and assure either prolonged obstruction or equally prolonged diarrhea; and the first, because laxatives irritated him even more than his own bitter secretions, would have to be resolved by the indignity of a glycerine suppository, one of those they sell in striated transparent bottles with black caps, or by the worse indignity of an enema, at which he would have to ask his wife to assist and hold the can high while he would lie naked on the bed, partially covered by a sheet, with his legs raised and open, and with his own hand take the tube and search for his tense, apprehensive anus and insert the damn thing, feeling that that black nozzle was entering him in a most equivocal way, that it was exceeding its legitimate function and reaming him as high as his gullet, where he would be able to taste the warm liquid that would flow toward the center of his compacted guts and make them hurt and then flow out again carrying with it the intestinal flora he needed to digest anything, so that he would have to remind his wife to buy some yoghurt—today they have it in strawberry flavor—and put it in the icebox; yes, either a miserable obstruction or a diarrhea that at first he would blame on one of those infections so common in Mexico, as if he did not know that since childhood he had been well protected by his own amoebae against those outside him, by his own antibodies against the swarming microbes that come in the whitewash milk, the trichinotic meat, the sewage-contaminated drinking water; and he would have to take those Entero-Vioform tablets which always, curiously, calmed his nerves but had no effect whatsoever on his bowels. For a moment longer he looked in at the candies and the swarm of black flies hovering and crawling over them. Then he walked on, his hands cold with sweat. Several doors down the street he came to a small fruit-juice bar and he went in and ordered a tamarind water and watched the fat proprietor of the bar thrust a spoon into an aluminum container and then empty it into an opaque blue glass and add water and stir. He held the glass near his nostrils. He asked for another and the fat proprietor mixed it and handed it to him and he drank again and paid a peso, which the proprietor took wordlessly and stuck in his shirt pocket. He walked out. Factory whistles were blowing. He had not the faintest notion what time they indicated, nor did he want to look at his watch. He walked very slowly, holding to the left side of the sidewalk, against traffic, jostling elbows and shoulders and taking advantage of these encounters to beg pardon, examine faces, touch hands, perhaps force those he bumped against to become aware of him. His fingers brushed the cropped hair of a small boy who was tossing three chipped marbles from palm to palm, the docile shoulders of a girl with a permanent and dark glasses and a cheap silk blouse that to the touch was what the sound of a blade scraping across a metal plate is to the hearing. He jostled them, elbowed them, bumped them like a blind man, but all the while he was sharply alert to their responses, gestures, expressions, their eyes, questioning, irritated, black, unprotected, accusing, wary, their full or linear mouths clamped or half open to suck in air, breathe it out, run the tongue across the lower lip. Presently he stopped and looked up and down the street and frowned. Where was he? He hadn’t the least idea. He was lost. Yes, he was lost: he was a child again and had left the house to follow his mother, to try to learn where it was she disappeared to every afternoon, and had fallen too far behind her and now was lost because he knew only the familiar coordinates and the customary routes, from home on Calzada del Niño Perdido to the candy store at the corner or to the Parque de Ajusco or to the school of the Marist Fathers on Morelos. Lost he was all right, and they, those passing him as he stood on the sidewalk, did not know or care, he mattered not at all to any of them, had not the slightest importance except that standing there, motionless and puzzled, he was something of an obstacle, like a misplaced lamppost, perhaps, or an errant mail pillar that they had to avoid a little, dodge, walk around. They did not know him or want to know him. They could not feel the burning juices in his belly, the irregular beating of his heart, the dead heaviness of his legs, the cold and sticky sweat in his palms, the protesting twitch of his nervous system as he put his fingers to his pack of cigarettes. They knew nothing about him, nothing at all, neither who he was nor what he was nor why he was, nothing except the accidental and transient datum he happened to share with them at the moment but did not know himself, where he was. To hell with them. He would move out of their scurrying way, turn his back on the street and touch his wet palms to a wall of old carved stone, squint his eyes and shut off the dust-dissolved morning sun. He would lean against the wall for a few seconds and then pass through a doorway, partially blocked by fallen stone, and carefully make his way along a dark gallery that led to a wide and empty patio with a waterless fountain flowing over with yellowed newspapers and forgotten parcels wrappings. He sat on the edge of the fountain and immediately smelled an overwhelming stench. He stretched out his hand and tugged on the tail of the fly-covered, worm-infested cadaver of a yellow dog, its hide crusted brown and black with dried blood, its mouth open. A wave of nausea swept up from his stomach and he jerked his hand away and the dog fell soundlessly back among its newspapers and the worms in the rotting flesh wriggled and squirmed and then made themselves at home again. He stood and took out a Stelabid and tried to swallow it with saliva but the capsule stuck in his throat and choked him and he began to cough, cough until he had to pound the back of his neck with his fist. When he recovered his breath, he crossed his arms on his chest and looked about. It was one of the very old, very early colonial palaces, constructed by Indian masons under the direction of Spanish architects. Probably they had had to flatten a still earlier structure to create the site, one of their stone temples, perhaps; had broken it up and dumped its heavy fragments into the lake and then had brought boatloads and cartloads of the new stone, rose-colored volcanic tezontle, and had laid new foundations and raised the great thick walls and in the patio had built an ornate portal that now was almost invisible behind the faded signs of the shops and businesses that used to be housed here, a portal of two sinuous ductile stone columns resting on the large claws of some jungle animal, a tig
er or a lion, and rising wound about with vines and clustered with grapes to join at the top, where the vines twined and interlaced in a mazy network that supported the crown, the black stone cross. Far above, the small panes of the skylight patio roof and drains of lead that during the rainy season, not now, would empty gushing through the mouths of the cast gargoyles. The dry fountain in the center and in the center of the fountain the two tritons that once, painted gold, had spouted water but that now were scaling, greenish, dry, their open mouths blocked with dust and cobwebs. On either side, great ornate stone doors gave entrance to the old great chambers which long since had been subdivided, partitioned into many small rooms walled off from each other and reached from the abandoned patio by small doors of splintered wood and broken glass. He lifted his head and looked again at the intricate web of vines woven over the high portal and he could think only of the even more intricate web of small and great vessels and nerves that threaded through his own flesh. The Stelabid already was making him a little dizzy, a little drowsy, but it had not freed him from the pain near his liver. Slowly he walked out. He took his cigarettes from his pocket and put one of them between his lips, wetting the paper and sucking in air, holding the box of matches—Talismans: Imperial Quality, a golden scorpion on a red ground and unrolled papyrus with the admonition, Do not be distrusting. No, for mistrust and doubt and suspicion are invitations to betrayal. Distrust him who counsels you to distrust—knowing that there was no need to light the cigarette. Then he returned both cigarettes and matches to his pocket and heard the motors of cars, the sounds of radios, jukeboxes, shrill whistles, a voice singing, mortar slapping against bricks, the burrr-brrr of a handsaw, a tinkle of piano keys, the steps of a rag vender crying his wares, a clatter of dominoes spilled out on a tabletop, a sigh, a cry, the cackle of chickens passing in a cage carried on their owner’s back. He opened his eyes. Black-clad mourners were walking out of a church. A hunchback was shining someone’s shoes, his brushes and waxes and clothes in a small wooden box festooned with bits of glass and copper centavos. A kitchen with its nested kettles and its smells of boiled chicken, white rice, garbanzo soup. A bakery with trays outside on the sidewalk showing large and small loaves and rolls, twists, puffs, muffins, coils, an endless variety. Across the street, a telegraph office. He moved toward it, dodging cars, and entered and propped his elbows on the marble counter and held his face between his hands. Now he was relaxed with the lassitude that was his compensation for the pain the barbital had subdued. But in an hour or two the lassitude would depart to be followed by its rebound, banal, sterile tension, and his nerves would be taut wires again and he would feel afraid, his fear of death by water or the absurd fear, the ridiculousness of which he would recognize but he would feel it just the same, of sudden death in the street. His fear would concentrate itself in the spastic pit of his belly and he would close his eyes and see himself laid out cold and colorless with a beard that like his fingernails and toenails would go on growing, with his guts distended by gases as if there were still life in him, as if the glassy eyes could still see, the gray-lipped mouth, hanging brutishly open, could still breathe. His hands cradled his face and became tactile mirrors reflecting its protruberances and declivities, its hairs, its orifices, its greases and oils, its dryness and dampness, its weight. They smelled of cologne still, his hands. He put them down. Scattered over the marble countertop were fresh telegraph forms and crumbled, wadded, discarded ones that he smoothed out and read: Please return home everything forgiven. Happy birthday dearest mother. Arriving bus from Acapulco tonight. Freddy passed examinations all well kisses. Papa died yesterday please come. Rorra my life how long will you resist your big daddy. Reference our conversation bales ordered shipped. Intended no offense will you forgive remember nights of love. Baby boy Alicia fine all happy. Book required for thesis out of print. Wonderful time keys to the city wish you were here mother stop. Stop, when perhaps the only way to ensure the permanence of a pleasure was to repeat it until simply that permanence became pleasurable no matter how jaded the repetition. Remember nights of love. The tachycardia had started again and his legs were leaden and the jerking in his chest would spread downward and excite the spasm and release the burning juices upon the duodenal ulcer and in spite of everything he would have to return to the radiologist and sit for an hour in that room ineffectually disguised as a room for reading, surrounded by others who would be waiting just as wearily, all sitting like stiff wax dolls on the foam-rubber cushions, no one daring to begin a conversation, to say anything more than to ask for a light or an ashtray, all hungry for consolation that would be inappropriate and undeserved because it was not pain they were going to have to endure but simply an experience lacking all dignity. And when the dark-skinned nurse wearing spectacles came and called his name he would rise and leave behind their curious looks and follow her to the cramped dressing room, where, after removing his jacket, tie, and shirt, he would bump his elbows and knees against the walls trying to get out of his trousers and underwear and for a moment after he took off his shorts he would stand naked looking down at his feet in their red socks and black shoes and then he would put on the white robe, ragged from many launderings, that is open behind and must be fastened with ties. And when he came out the nurse would open the door and he would enter a dim room and stretch out on the colorless surface of a table and when he was prone there the doctor would appear and turn lights on and off and press buttons and the X-ray camera would first nudge his belly and then push hard all the way through to his backbone and they would order him to breathe, stop breathing, breathe, stop breathing, breathe while he would be thinking that no compassion so cold and objective as that of a doctor deserves the name of compassion. Then the table would be elevated and he would be vertical again, feeling afresh the coldness of the nickel and mica pressed against his skin. The nurse would give him a glass of that miserable mud to drink, that white clayey liquid still clogged with lumps. And they say that X rays can produce cancer, yet every time he felt the spasm he told himself that he had to go for more, a cure that might be worse than the sickness. After the second glass of barium they would let him rest and then they would order him to assume indecent postures so that the ultimate kink of his intestines could be photographed and he would twist his body and raise a shoulder and tilt a hip, press his buttocks together and spread his feet, lie on one side and then the other and presently they would say that it was all over and he must take a laxative because barium can harden like stone in your belly. And the irritation would be worse because of the combination of barium and castor oil and X rays and heightened tension and one night he would wake vomiting blood, weak, frightened, and an ambulance would have to come and take him to the hospital hemorrhaging, dissolving, helpless, too late, too soon, too …