A Change of Skin

by Carlos Fuentes

  The conversation was difficult. Herr von Schnepelbrücke seemed to have a fondness for very polished phrases and moreover he voiced them with a lofty certainty. They were able to learn nothing. There remained, however, the second statement on his visiting card. Ulrich asked him if he earned his living by his illustrations.

  “No. My paintings are for myself, although it is true that I have succeeded in placing several. I leave it to time to determine the destiny of my works. I have no dreams. Neither do I have patrons.”

  His pedantry was beginning to irritate them.

  He went on: “I live, I may say, by playthings. I repair dolls.” He extended his strong hands and moved the fingers. “My fingers have an astonishing flexibility. I can replace an eyelash, paint the tiniest lips, tie a wig together hair by hair. I have a certain clientele who bring me their little dolls bruised or broken by, usually, an excess of maternal love, and I put them right again with the same love. For to draw an eyebrow with the finest of brushes, to give back the blush to a faded cheek, these are labors of love and patience.”

  They looked at him and did not know what to say. His rather jumpy eyes observed them with good humor. “Are not we Germans a kind and good people?” he asked unexpectedly. “To the point sometimes that we find ourselves quite boring. It is because we are innocents. And for the same reason our behavior is sometimes disproportionate. We have not had the experience that could dictate to us the proper limits of our actions. That is why, after we have gone too far, we can claim the forgiveness and pity innocence merits. One cannot be very severe with a child who tears off the arm of his doll. Have you ever watched a child do that? His little face twitches with a momentary pleasure. Then he sees what he has done and he bursts into tears. And so we must pat his head and fondle him, and repair the damage.” Herr von Schnepelbrücke finished his beer. He slipped down to the floor with the same awkwardness and difficulty he had had seating himself. He bowed to them.

  “He was marvelous, Lizbeth. Marvelous. At any moment you expected the weight of his head to topple him over.”

  You both laughed.

  “He promised to return our hospitality at the earliest moment possible, and left us. To go back to his works of art and his dolls.”

  “Wait,” you said, stretching your arm out. “When I was little, they used to tell me the story of General Tom Thumb.” You stretched your arm with an effort and finally reached the shoe you had dropped beside the bed. “General Tom Thumb was with Barnum’s circus. Queen Victoria made him a general.” Picking up the shoe, you turned and rose to your knees on the bed. The fly on the wall was motionless and unsuspecting. “He was famous in New England, for he was from Bridgeport. And in our apartment Javier has a reproduction of that painting by Velásquez.” Calculating, aiming, you swatted the fly with the shoe. The fly fell to the pillow. “Antonio, el inglés. With a rose on his shoulder and a plumed hat in his hand.” Franz picked up the fly and flipped it to the floor. “He’s carrying a little sword and he’s in a little suit embroidered with gold.”

  “In Germany the dwarfs and gnomes used to live under the ground and were famous for goldsmithy,” said Franz, smiling. “They even had a king. Alberich.”

  “Yes,” you said. “Oberon.”

  * * *

  Δ Isabel was looking in the rearview mirror, trying to see Franz’s eyes. For a moment he glanced up. Her green eyes looked at him. Then her head moved out of sight and was replaced by the swift, receding landscape.

  You moved your head near Javier’s, Pussycat, and in his ear whispered: “Tell me again. I want to hear it again.”

  “What?” said Javier, whispering too.

  “What you told me yesterday. That I have two faces.”

  “You have two faces. Your nostrils separate them. One is the face of an angel, the other that of a demoness.”

  “Go on.”

  “When your eyes are innocent and clear, your smile is forced, almost a rictus.”

  “Go on.”

  “And when your mouth opens a little, with surprise or with sweetness, your eyes take their revenge.”

  “And what?”

  “They turn very hard and very cold.”

  You smiled at him, Pussycat, and whispered: “Javier, write it! Write it!”

  “Isn’t saying it enough?” he whispered dryly.

  * * *

  Δ Here, Elizabeth, is a clipping for you. Torn from today’s paper, so that you can show it to your husband. Dated Boonville, Missouri, April 11, 1965. No, I won’t leave this day yet. If I did, you’d stop believing me. This old scribbler knows his tricks, Dragoness, and does not act the crazy monk, not even for chuckles. Boonville: a mother and her son, driving in opposite directions, collided last night and both were killed. Mrs. Bertha Bowen, fifty-seven, was returning to Blackwater, Missouri, after visiting her daughter-in-law and newborn grandson in the hospital. Her son, Ronald Wayne Bowen, aged twenty-two, was on his way from Blackwater to Boonville to see his wife and their child. Mrs. Bowen, according to the police, apparently lost control of her car, swerved, and crashed head on into her son’s car. Speak of coincidences, eh? But there it is, right in the paper, so we see that Dickens and Dumas knew the score after all, and Norman Mailer is as hip as the ordaining stars. And Albee may not be off in making Tiny Alice the wide and sticky road to heaven. Ream it anyway you will, my troublesome one, the business is Gothic.

  Now consider this little item. Mexico City. Consagración Carranza de Gómez, white-haired and grandmotherly, having recently decided to do away with her husband, prepared a careful plan which came to its culmination during the early hours of April 9, near the end of a dinner at which the said husband, Abundio Gómez Loza, was the guest of honor. The murder itself was carried out with the assistance of a son by the good señora’s first marriage, one Rubén Darío, and of her brother, Ubillado Carranza, and his son, her nephew, Venustiano Carranza Amarillas. It was effected by blows with clubs and fists, and by kicking, and Doña Consagración even went so far as to dance upon her dying husband’s face, in order to disfigure him and prevent recognition of the corpse. During the meal many toasts were drunk in his honor and he became quite intoxicated. Earlier, his wife had disarmed him. These events took place in an impoverished hut, Number 54 on Los Cóndores Street, Colonia Las Aguilas, and the police succeeded in rounding up the perpetrators of the crime only yesterday. Reconstructing the story for the police, Doña Consagración stated: “I killed my husband because he was jealous of me. Moreover, he had bewitched me. He knew black magic well and every little while he would tell me that the cards told him I was being unfaithful to him.” Her brother, Ubillado Carranza, declared: “My sister gave me two hundred pesos to carry the body of her husband three blocks from the house and throw it into the Barranca del Muerto, but I swear that I had no part in the murder.” “Neither did we kill the old man,” claimed young Venustiano and Rubén Darío. “We were only playing a game with him, to see who was strongest.” But these statements were made in the police station when they were questioned by reporters, and a few minutes later, when they were taken to the scene of the murder, their guilt overcame them and they confessed freely. Ubillado explained: “For two months my sister had wanted to get rid of her husband. She said that she could stand him no longer and she asked me to kill him. I refused, but suggested that we go together to Salvatierra, where we are from, and there hire someone to carry out the little job. My sister did not want to do this, for she had departed from Salvatierra with a bad reputation and didn’t care to go back. She invited all of us to dine with them Saturday evening. All afternoon she was busy preparing the feast, buying beer, and so on. When Abundio came home, we were there waiting for him, my sister, myself, Rubén Darío, and my son Venustiano. We sat down and ate dinner and began to drink. By dawn Abundio was very drunk. At that point we proposed elbow-wrestling to see who was the strongest. Everything went according to plan, and finally Rubén Darío, my nephew, hit Abundio in the face with his fist and the old
man fell backward and lay still. Rubén went on hitting him, and…” Here good Doña Consagración interrupted angrily: “No, you all hit him, you damned bastards, not just my son Rubén!” Unperturbed, Ubillado continued: “At any rate, we beat him up thoroughly. As he was still breathing, however, my sister proposed that we hang him. Then she danced on his body and face, to disfigure him, and we bound him with wire and put him into a carton that Consagración had bought specifically for this purpose. All of us refused to carry the carton. In the end, she offered me two hundred pesos, so I agreed to do it.” The macabre cortege left the hut and a few minutes later arrived at the Barranca del Muerto, and the cardboard box containing the cadaver was there abandoned. It was found the following day by several people of the neighborhood and they notified the police. One by one, the nearby homes were checked, but no one could identify the body, the face of which was indeed entirely beyond recognition. But day before yesterday the police turned up a clue that led directly to the widow. During her interrogation yesterday, Consagración was friendly and good-humored. When a photographer unintentionally knocked a religious image from its place, she rushed to protect it, crying in anguish: “Stop! Don’t step on her! Don’t step on my poor little saint!”

  That little saint must have been the blessed Jeanne Féry, who was exorcised yesterday in Mons. Her story is told in the paper today by the present archbishop of Cambrai, M. François Buiseret. Between 1573 and 1585 Jeanne was possessed by no fewer than eight demons. She declared that she had been seduced by the devil himself at the age of fourteen. From that time on she suffered seizures that resembled epilepsy and was tormented by spirits of evil named Heresie, Treeson, Wytchcrafte, Belial, True Libertee, Namon, Bludthyrstee, and Homicide. During her convulsion and delirium they make love to her. And as Jeanne does not care to make love with these spirits, she has her relatives and the priests immerse her in baths of holy water, during which treatments she vomits, from her mouth and nostrils, the testicles of a male goat and various animals transformed into hairy worms. Her attacks generally occur at night and she has visions of hell that verify what she has been told in sermons, “Fyre, Sulfure, Darkness and a most Abominable Stink.” The pains in her belly are unbearable: it is as if a serpent is devouring her alive, and it is because of this torture that she agrees to meet willingly with her demons and shout the obscene words they dictate. She alternates between “les douleurs continuelles” and “la grand joye.” In her moments of ecstasy she cannot eat, speak, or feel the pain of the lacerations which at other times with the help of the demons she inflicts upon herself. Sometimes she returns to the simplicity of small childhood and forgets all she knows about God. She behaves like a spoiled little girl, plays with a figurine of Mary Magdalene as if it were a doll, offers it her breast to suck. One day following communion she utters a shrill cry and a priest finds her on her knees, her body rigid, her face pale, and her eyes open very wide. A little later she begins to laugh sweetly, as though to herself, and to sway her shoulders from side to side. Her heart is pounding and she trembles violently. She cannot speak, but with her hands she makes signs. A nun sits beside her and rubs her hands and legs. She is conducted to her cell and there made comfortable before a fire, and soon she expires.

  So, Dragoness, Sister Jeanne Féry. And we see why instead of playing the usual and tired game and putting together our belly-buttons, we should take out our peashooters and force ourselves and others, Javier, for example, to face a little truth. Ah, Elizabeth. Between participation and escape there remain to us only our individual maladies, our personal cancers, our parodies of the great synthesis.

  * * *

  Δ Javier folds down the coverlet and the sheets and in silence lies on his stomach. You are seated with your legs drawn up, your knees holding the covers high. Although he tries to keep his face turned away, your woman’s smells come to him: cologne water, menstruation, fatigue. With a corner of the sheet over his face, he murmurs:

  “I finally saw her and went near her because I could see that she had been crying. I thought to myself, a woman cries to attract, to show off her tears and share them. She would never cry in solitude. Or, if she did, it would be in the belief that her tears could be felt by someone even though he was not present, that they could charm him at a distance, move him, be heard by an ear that was out of sight but not out of reach. There are no tears in vain. I think that was what I thought. She went on crying and around us the party went on. We were in darkness again. Perhaps only by chance I was the only person who noticed, the only one tuned to her wave length, open at that instant to her tears and the thread of silence that had led me to her, past the couples dancing and kissing in the dark room.”

  He removes the sheet from his face and out of the corner of his eye peeks at you as you sit smoking with your eyes pensive and distant. He covers his face again and again smells your smells.

  “The music was pointing out that it was just one of those crazy flings,” he says with his voice slightly muffled by the sheet. “Yes, for to go to a party is always to venture an encounter only chance controls. But not to venture it unarmed. No. Always with the breastplate of an attitude, the shield of words, the lance of memory. Always with a mockery ready, should the need for it come. A game to play. And what a laugh if the girl should play the game too.

  “I found her again. A warm damp hand that I couldn’t see took my hand, which apparently had reached toward her. It was she who took my hand. I didn’t take hers, I swear it. She found me more than I found her. We stood in the darkness of the room, for the lights had been turned off now, and the contrast between her warm fingers and my cold ones must have seemed strange. Then it had to happen, I had to move close to her, let my skin feel the nearness of hers. Still not looking at her. And now I took her hand as she had taken mine. We embraced, we pasted our bodies together and began to dance again, discovering ourselves to each other little by little and gropingly, the softness of her skin, its fine golden hairs, her smooth blond hair combed to the side of her head. Her warm neck. Her breasts firm and free under her dress. Her thighs tight, hard.

  “I said to her, ‘So you came alone?’”

  And you, Dragoness, sitting on the bed smoking, remember and say quietly: “The girl nodded yes.”

  “I asked her, ‘Did they leave you all alone?’”

  “She nodded yes again. Her hands were like yours. They were giving names to the parts of your body without her imagining that you were both thinking the same thing.”

  “‘And the man you gave the drink to?’ I said to her. ‘Why didn’t he say something to you?’”

  “The girl shrugged her shoulders,” you say, repeating the action with the words. For if he wants it this way now, Dragoness, you are willing, for a time at least, just as you were willing then. You go on: “In a low voice she sang along with Ella Fitzgerald, ‘Too hot not to cool down.’”

  “‘Maybe,’ I suggested, ‘he had been worried by the mystery of your absence?’”

  “She raised her face to you, Javier, and looked at you.”

  “And I went on, ‘Maybe he wanted to avoid giving you pain. Perhaps he knew you would not have been happy if he had told you his thoughts.’”

  “The girl answered that it’s worse to live not knowing what someone is thinking, only imagining.”

  “‘No,’ I told her. ‘Often it’s worse to know. Maybe when he found you there in the dim light and you gave him his drink, he loved you so much that he decided to say nothing.’”

  “The girl said that she would have preferred that he not be so solicitous of her.”

  “That he be the partner of her intelligence as well as her passions?”

  “Maybe, something like that, I suppose.”

  “But I replied, ‘He would have had to give up his pride, and you would have stopped loving him. He knows that you love him only so long as you have his pride before you to overcome and defeat. That once you succeed in that, there will be no reason for love.’”

  “
‘Well, you know him if anyone does,’ the girl said.”

  “I laughed. I laughed because she was playing my game so marvelously. I stopped and took a glass from a low table without releasing her waist. She had accepted the game, the parody. But at the same time it was beginning to be a little shaky, she was beginning to take it seriously. I decided not to let her know how it might end. I said to her, ‘Do you think he has exhausted all his surprises?’”

  You put out your cigarette and light another, Elizabeth, and exhale slowly, then say quietly, “‘Oh, don’t say that!’”

  “‘Why?’”

  “‘Because,’ the girl told you, ‘this time you are going to repeat yourself.’”

  “‘Want some of this drink?’”

  “‘Thanks.’”

  “‘De l’amour j’ai toutes les fureurs…’”

  “‘Yes, de l’amour…’ Then she stopped. ‘No, let me think about it.’”

  “She thought for a moment. Finally she took the glass, snatched it away from my hand, and drained it while shaking her head no.”

  “She was saying no, that she would not drink to that tonight.”

  “Why? What was she concerned about, I thought. What did tonight mean to her? Did it mean the two of us together and alone in bed? Or with other people? No, I couldn’t understand her.”

  “It meant labyrinth,” you say, straightening your legs for a moment and then raising them again. You are restless with the day’s fatigue. You are tired of this complicated game-within-a-game. “A worn-out labyrinth,” you repeat a little wearily.

  “‘No,’ I told her.” Javier’s head is still covered by the sheet.

  “‘Yes, oh yes,’ the girl said. ‘Theseus and the Minotaur.’”

  “‘No,’ I repeated. But she went on…”

  “‘Ariadne’s thread.’”

  “‘No. Not that either.’”

  “‘The Cyclops’s cave,’ said the girl.”

  “‘Nor that.’”

  “‘Charybdis opens its devouring snout and vomits black waves and swallows them again. On the island of Trinacria the herds of the sun are grazing. Orion pursues the summer Pleiades and they rush into the sea. Ulysses no longer recognizes his homeland! Between Scylla and Charybdis the doves drop dead. There’s no suspense, Javier. The myth is known in advance and is known by all.’”