A Change of Skin

by Carlos Fuentes

  You never know which pebble to choose. There are so many and when they lie on the soft sand where the beach enters the sea they are all beautiful. They are of the sea and of the land also, and when brought ashore they become like the land. But within the sea they reproduce all its lights and shadows, all its colors. They are the gentle teeth of the sea fastened in the land to allow the sea to hold itself to the land, and without them the sea would be different, a different world, faith, dream, the promise of a different millennium. You sit on the beach entire hours fingering your pebbles, staring at them. You have found every color except blue.

  You sort your pebbles out. You know that each of them will change color as the sun moves. Noon’s yellow becomes orange as the afternoon lengthens, is red at twilight, beneath the moon is violet, a fusion of red and blue. But not beyond that: a clear and unmixed blue never appears. It is there, that blue, buried within the tight concentric circles of the little pebble, you believe. And every day the pebble must withstand the attack of the sun, which would like to force the blue out into sight. The pebble allows itself to be overcome and transformed, from yellow through orange to violet, then to white at dawn and at noon back to yellow again. But only darkness is permitted to see the secret blue.

  So much for your pebble hunting, Elizabeth. You were young and idle in those days and it was indeed an innocent enough pastime, harmless, in a vague way poetic. Now I must quote you a classic: What you say to me is not true but nevertheless, simply because you say it, it reveals your being.

  Okay, Dragoness?

  Okay.

  * * *

  Δ You had changed clothes, Isabel, and now were wearing tight black stretch pants and an open-throated white blouse. Your breasts danced as you whirled on your toes, frowning with dissatisfaction and concentration, biting the nail of your little finger, with your long hair loose and your feet bare. A João Gilberto recording.

  “No, damn it, that’s not how it goes.”

  You moved your right leg forward and whirled again. You placed your arms in the pose of a Hindu goddess and bit your fingernail.

  “Watch me now. Tell me if I get it right this time.”

  “But, Isabel…”

  “I know you can’t dance, Proffy. But you can give an opinion, can’t you? Sing out, darling. Look, the trick of the bossa nova is to hold the rhythm of the samba against the cross rhythm of the jazz. Like this, see?”

  You whirled again, laughing. You walked toward Javier, who was lying on the bed smoking and watching you. You smiled and half narrowed your eyes.

  … não pode ser, não pode ser …

  You fell on Javier’s chest and kissed his forehead.

  “Proffy, I love you.”

  Then you hopped up again and ran to your open bottle of Coke and belted it down. Javier placed his notebook on his knees and chewed the eraser of his pencil. You went near him again and caressed—yes, Pussycat, caressed—his thinning hair.

  “Like the way I’ve fixed up my room?”

  “Of course I like it. It’s amazing. You should see ours.”

  “What do you mean, ‘ours’?”

  “Mine and Elizabeth’s, across the corridor. There were even two snails on the wall.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “She’s taking a nap. It looks as if you’ve been here for days.”

  “That’s the record player, Proffy. Have phonograph, can travel. And Coke for those who think young. What are you writing?”

  “Oh, just some thoughts I want to remember.”

  “Like maybe the day we met?”

  “It does seem a long time ago.”

  “Four months, Proffy, darling. You had just flunked me in Classical Literature. I told you I didn’t care, because now I could take it over and have you for my proffy again.”

  “And I asked you out to dinner. Immediately.”

  “From sheer narcissism, sweetheart. I built you up.”

  “You did that, all right, just by being with me. Maybe that’s why I teach, to keep in touch with kids who are kind enough to build me up sometimes.”

  “Don’t lie, Proffy. I had you hanging on the ropes.”

  “Well,” Javier smiled, “you were quite a discovery. And it continued in the taxi and in the restaurant you picked out. The discovery of the two halves of your face, one half angel, the other demon. Your face framed by your straight dark hair.”

  “Keep going, darling. You’re doing great.”

  “Your green eyes. The eyes of a child, without malice, when your mouth is in repose. Brilliant and cold eyes when your mouth laughs so innocently and you talk about the simplicities of your life as a well-reared young lady.”

  “Well-reared? Hah! A discovery?” You got up and turned the record. Once more you began to dance, smiling. “You know, someone told me once that he liked me so much he was afraid to come near me. Really! And for a whole year, until you flunked me and I spoke to you, I was just another of your students. I wasn’t even a rabbit to trap. And at home no one ever made any fuss about my looks. God, no! Now, darling, watch this step. Then you told me I was beautiful and you turned me on. You’re still a lively old Proffy.”

  “Still lively? Thanks.”

  “You’re very welcome, darling. My man of distinction whose hair has begun to gray, though you know, you are getting to be a bit bald. I like your complexion, too. That paleness.”

  “So you attend the university only to observe the good looks of fortyish professors.”

  “No, darling, I go to splash in culture. That’s you too.” You balanced on your toes and laughed. “Really, when you talk, my wheels begin to go around. I get ideas. Imagine! And it’s relaxing, too. As if I were floating. What it comes down to is that I like you. Just that.”

  “And I you, Isabel. From the first day of class last year.”

  “At home everything was ‘Chabela, don’t do this, Chabela, don’t do that. Don’t wear your hair loose, you look like an existentialist or a straw broom. Chabela, don’t pick your nose, you’ll make your nostrils even bigger than they are already.’ You can imagine what I felt. Am I boring you?”

  Javier shook his head.

  “I like to get rid of my complexes talking about them.”

  “But above all…”

  “Above all, my dear parents. Did you know my father has made a mountain of money higher than the Matterhorn, which is where he keeps it, by the way.”

  “How?”

  “Gas stations. You do it like this. They give you a concession and you rake in thousands and let a little trickle back to Pemex. And the next thing we knew we had our house in the Lomas de Chapultepec. And God, talk about houses! You remember that plantation house in the movie we saw together?”

  “Gone with the Wind?”

  “Yes. There you have it. Doric-Ionic or Ionic-Doric columns or whatever they are. Green slate roof. French windows with louvers, darling. Everything! And inside! God only knows where they found that furniture. Authentic Chippendale, Mother says. What a blast! She’s off two centuries and one continent. Don’t you believe me?”

  “I always believe you.”

  “Some of the chairs have leather backs with copper tacks. Some have blue embroidering and skinny legs, and some have lilac brocade and enormous fat legs. And don’t even mention my bedroom.”

  “I’d never dare to.”

  “Silly. When I turned fifteen and became a young lady, they bought everything new for me. A bed with a canopy, you know, and some prints that Mother said were French. Rosy-cheeked girls carrying parasols. A dressing table that would make you upchuck, darling, all cambric and tulle. Everything for a very well-bred young lady.”

  The record stopped and you stood with your legs apart and your arms akimbo and tossed your head to throw your hair back.

  “Don’t you want a Coke?”

  “No, Isabel. You know that I can’t drink soda.”

  “Ay, tú. You and your precious stomach.” You opened another bottle and drank it q
uickly. “Then the old man pulled another little deal. Remember the last devaluation?”

  “Yes, I do, but you don’t. You were still a baby then.”

  “Well, I found out about it later. Father knew ahead of time and bought dollars like a lunatic.”

  “I suppose he cries when they play the national anthem.”

  “Oh, at least. It was on a Friday. Saturday the news broke and dear Papa had made I don’t know how many millions without turning a finger. What do you think of that?”

  “A man of great ability, Isabel. He’s got it. He’s…”

  “I’ve never heard of anyone who’s made so much doing so little. He’s a genius. And he believes it, too. He talks the livelong day about work and struggle and hardship and how we manage to skimp by, only thanks to his sweat. Shall I go on?”

  “If I may go on listening.”

  “Listen, then. Then there’s Mother. She’s an antique herself. From the time I started kindergarten, I had to study with the nuns. Everything always just so. Confession and communion every first Friday. Don’t step outside the house during Holy Week. And what ideas. ‘Chabela, don’t dance. Don’t go to the movies. Watch out for boys. Don’t wear makeup. Chabela, be careful, you are a lily the devil would like to pluck.’ Ay, that old debbil devil! He plays the clarinet at dances. He waits to pick you up outside movie houses. He drives by in a convertible whistling at you. And Mother, always the contritest of the contrite, with all her hopes in me.”

  “I can believe that.”

  “Yes. I had to be a saint who would out-virgin the Virgin of Fatima. And I had to cry by the bucketful, so that my tears could wash away poor Mother’s sins. But what sins, darling? I would puzzle and puzzle and still couldn’t think of a single one. But there was one. Oh, yes!”

  “A terrible sin,” Javier smiled.

  “Can you guess? One day I went to steal a cigarette from Father’s night table and there they were. Their condoms. That was her great sin. Violins, please. She couldn’t accept the stream of brats the good Lord might want to send through her, so they used rubbers and that was why she felt somewhat less holy than the Magdalene and never went to confession even though she attended Mass every morning. I laughed and laughed and after that I was never able to take them seriously again. I asked her, you know. She broke into tears. How could an innocent girl like Chabela know about such things? So, I graduated from the nuns’ school and entered the university, and the end of the story is that now they just give me my allowance and leave me alone. Now and then they come to the end of the rope and they jump me and ask how I can ever hope to become engaged to a decent young man with a good future when I spend all my time hanging around those university good-for-nothings, who are all Reds and troublemakers. So, Proffy! Sweet and lovely, tra-la-la-la, the girl with the Ipana smile. Now stop writing. That’s enough.”

  “But I haven’t even started yet.”

  “Don’t start yet. You have plenty of time. All the time in the world.”

  “Isabel, Isabel.”

  Javier kissed the hands that went around his neck.

  * * *

  Δ The girl appeared when autumn came. Your apartment had a small balcony, hardly large enough for the awning-shaded coaster. During the heat of summer you both stayed inside, for the apartment was air-conditioned. Now, however, as cooler weather came on, you began to use the balcony. Several linden trees grew as high as the story above you and during the summer their thick-leaved branches hung over the balcony. Now the leaves gradually disappeared, first turning golden, then floating down in the silent breeze. You and Javier would sit swinging gently in the coaster watching the leaves fall, he in his old turtle-neck sweater, you hugging yourself with your arms, and every day the sunlight was weaker and cooler. Sometimes Javier would precede you outside. He would put a mixture of blues and fox-trot records on the phonograph and go out to rock in the coaster and you would throw a sweater over your shoulders and follow him and sit beside him. You would talk a little, with long intervals of silence. He told you about happenings at the embassy, about invitations to dinners and cocktail parties. You made plans to go to Bariloche, in the south, or across the river to Carrasco, if Javier could get ten days off in June or November. And you would watch summer’s curtain of leaves drift down and reveal the pastel-colored building across the street, a building neither of you had noticed before.

  Javier discovered the girl first. You never knew just what he saw then, though you imagined that her behavior had been no different than it was later. You always saw her cut in half by the window, invisible below the torso, and sometimes, when the wind blew the curtain across the window, she was concealed entirely. In no way was she different from the girls who walked along Santa Fe or Florida in the afternoon. If it had been that important, you could have waited and seen her enter or leave the building dressed for the street. But you never did. You saw her only in the window with her arms raised as she tied her hair up with a ribbon, arms that were as bare and brown as her face. From the front sometimes, her armpit curly and her pectoral muscles standing out. Sometimes in profile, her bust small but erect. Sometimes from behind, the muscles of her back tense as she held her arms high to tie her hair, place her combs. You saw her in snapshot glimpses, snapshots of a turning statue. She would rub cream on her face, pluck her eyebrows, apply eye shadow and lipstick. Always alone: no one else ever entered that bedroom, although in the adjacent windows could be seen servants with feather dusters, students with open books, men grabbing a meal between their regular and their moonlight jobs. There surrounded by those conventional sights, a turning statue making herself up or combing her hair, every afternoon exactly at three. Sometimes she would put her head out the window and look down at the street. Sometimes her lips would move as if she were singing. Little by little, day by day, her skin lost the deep tan she had acquired at Punta del Este or Mar del Plata. She never smoked. Apparently she slept all day and got up at three. One day she drew back her blue curtain and had a glass in her hand. Immediately she disappeared. A little later she was seated as usual at her dressing table.

  “I remember her partly because I discovered, when I tried to see her face clearly, that my eyes were bad.”

  Really, Dragoness? Oh, come on, now!

  You had to wrinkle your eyes in order to make out her thick eyebrows, her small precise mouth with its small full lips bright with lipstick, her almond eyes, her tipped-up nose, her slightly forward chin. So one day you went to an oculist and learned that your left eye was off one diopter and a half. You thought that Javier would laugh when he came home to lunch and saw you wearing your tortoiseshell glasses. He didn’t laugh. He was shocked. He requested you, with an ill-humor that was not well concealed, not to wear the glasses on the street.

  “And when I go to a movie?”

  “No. Not there either.”

  “And to see the girl in the window across the street better?”

  He looked at you as if you had violated one of his most intimate secrets, Dragoness, and you went on sharply: Did he think that he had been the only one aware of her all these weeks? Did he believe that she was his private property? What were you supposed to look at, the bare branches of the trees, passing buses, maybe the Polish doorman? So that to see the unknown girl might be his privilege and not yours? And you understood: he would like to say to her all the words he had never dared to write and that he had spoken to you only silently. The secret, untouchable girl across the street. His in something more than just his imagination. Ship ahoy! His in the reverse of desire, his famous desire-without-desire. You laughed and put on your yellow sweater and went out on the balcony and Javier, who had not said a word, followed you. You proposed that you play games about the girl. That you try to guess her name, her education, whether she had ever been married, her hopes. She was a heroine, let her have the name of a heroine: Ulalume, Berenice, or perhaps even Ligeia? Aurelia, Myrto, Paquita of the golden eyes? Or, trying another tradition, Becky, perhaps, or Jane or Te
ss? And she had to have her hero: shadowy Heathcliff? Ridiculous Colonel Crawley? Frivolus de Marsay? How about Javier for the name of her hero? Or … Superman! Yes, let Superman fly to her window and discover whether she was a prostitute or a mezzo-soprano at the Maipo theater, a student of chemistry, a governess, a teacher of Yiddish. Yes, Yiddish: she was Rebecca or Sarah or Miriam, a Jewess despite her tipped-up nose, a beautiful dark Jewess, for with your new glasses you could see the drops of blue sweat on her temples, in her armpits, at the division of her breasts. A brunette Jewess, that he might have a contrasting pair: yourself the blond Saxon Jewess, Miriam the dark Eastern one, a woman of slow speech, of black prolonged orgasms, a woman who was married, who was having an affair, a virgin girl, a spinster, a widow.

  “She’s America just discovered, Javier. Bullshit. Why don’t you go closer to her? There are only the sidewalk and the street between you. A bell, an elevator, and land ho! Go and get her and bring her back. Or don’t bring her back. Just tell me about her. Tell me how you make love to a woman today.”