A Change of Skin (44 page)

“No, Javier, you always want to hang on to everything, don't you?”

“I've told you that…”

“I refused to admit that everything happened simply because I opened that letter of yours. That would have been ridiculous.”

You rested your chin on your fist, dampened by saliva, tasting of salt. You began to hum. Javier tried to guess the tune. You lowered your voice and leaned forward, letting your face drop until your forehead touched your knee. You rubbed your leg.

“I always thought you understood,” Javier whispered. He looked at the back of your head and reached out and took the wristwatch and turned the hands. “I had gone to see you, not only women younger than you but you too in paintings that had been done by a man who had died of tuberculosis God knows when. I took your hand and we walked out of the gallery, Ligeia. And for the second time you were my Greek stele…”

You raised your head from your knee. “No, I told myself it was my fault, because I hadn't been content with the passion we felt when we first met, I wanted more. That it should reveal us to each other, the things hidden.”

The watch skipped several hours and Javier laughed.

“My Attic stele. Distant. Motionless. At rest. Remote. One woman who could satisfy my hunger for many women.”

Again you looked at each other.

“We could have played games, Javier. Who did the girl in the window run away with? Miriam. Where did she go? Why didn't you go after her? So now you'll never know her name or hear her voice. Please…”

Javier finished his tequila with one swallow and poured his glass full again.

“It's going to hurt your stomach, Javier. Tomorrow you'll feel sick and you'll be complaining that now your vacation has been spoiled.”

“Take another drink yourself. If I could only be sure about it.”

“About what?”

“My stomach. If I could only say, operate on the duodenum, take out the gall bladder. But no one knows where the trouble is. Upset stomach. Tiredness. Cold hands. Gas pains. A longing never to open my eyes again. Insomnia. Shit. What were you humming?”

“Cannonball Adderley.
Lillie.
Sweet and slow. And listen to Yusef Lateef's flute. There's a Mephistopheles for you. A Negro one.”

Javier calmly threw his tequila glass at the bureau mirror. You watched him and went on quietly, “Their only way of communicating is their music.
Lillie.
It's a song of desperation. That's all.” The mirror shattered and the pieces fell, showing black paint on their backs, their sound covered that of the glass falling.

“Do you want to bet?” Javier said.

You got up and retrieved his unbroken glass and filled it with tequila again.

“I don't bet. You win, it's not broken.”

Javier looked at the glass. He rubbed it and smiled. “It's very simple. Mirrors break and glasses don't. But suppose it were the other way around? Suppose mirrors never shattered and glasses always did. Take your boyfriend German, for example.”

“What do you mean, my boyfriend German? He…”

“Yes, it may all be necessary. To do what you ought not do, to do it anyhow, saying so what. I, on the other hand, when I was a kid I used to shut myself up in the bathroom and write words I was afraid to speak. Do you understand that? On the walls of the toilet, the words I was afraid to say to the bullies at my school.”

“Gold butterfly. No, brass butterfly. God knows why I love you, knowing your defects so well.”

“Precisely because you do know. To be innocent is to be indecent. And the advantage in losing innocence is that at the same time you lose prejudice. N'est-ce pas?”

“Aye, aye, Gautama. Now sit cross-legged.”

Javier chuckled. “Maybe I ought to. And you, don't move now. Stay just the way you are with your hands at your sides and realize that light is slowly wasting you, Ligeia, slowly wearing you away. Light, not time. Or light because it is time. And time stops, but light doesn't. So time becomes light, and it's light that carries you away.”

“Write it, Javier, write it.”

He moved from the bed and knelt before you. He tied the belt of your robe tight around your waist. He opened the robe at your breasts and took your breasts in the cups of his hands, lifted them, dropped them. He stood and put his hand in your hair.

“Javier. You're hurting me.”

He put his face near yours.

“Now you can say it, if you will.”

“All right. It was only a dream. Just a dream. That's all.”

His fingernails were digging into your scalp and you wanted to free yourself. He, not realizing that he was hurting you, was saying, “When we opened the window in Falaraki that morning, just to be there was to believe in what we had never seen…” Slowly he released you.

“Okay. We could believe only what we had never seen or said. Sure. Go join the Navy, Javier, join the Navy.”

“It was there and like this that I loved you,” Javier murmured.

You put your hands to his and your fingers interlaced. Then, you told him softly, when you woke, the curtain of the summer was a crown of poisonous flowers and you looked beyond them at the sun still resting on the bed of the transparent Aegean. And you had knelt as you were kneeling now and had whispered his name and looked for him and as you repeated his name over and over the very sound of your voice became thick. And now as then he was standing before you, you were kneeling before him with your arms around first his legs and then his buttocks and your hands in the small of his back. Then you released him and fell back to the floor and he stood tall before you with his penis rising and stiffening, and you got up and led him to the bed, then, in Falaraki, to see day born of night's placation of the silver sea, the last darkness fading, and now far away you heard cars and the horns of cars on the Mexico City-Puebla highway as you both leaned backward and joined with no need for kisses or caresses, joined and supported each other until Javier fell back and you fell with him, on him, unable to separate from him, above him in his position imitating him, doing to him what he did to you, tied together at the genitals, your damp and long pubic hair against his dry curly hair, you thinking that now you were possessing him as he usually possessed you, that your pleasure in imitation of his was entering his thighs as he, prone under you, was entering yours, and time counted its own seconds and minutes, words spoke themselves in an effort to prolong the dark and vibrating sensations of your intercourse, he transformed into your woman and you into his man in shared desire that was a fruit falling from but still hanging to a single tree; you and Javier, Javier and you on the hot stone floor of the cabin, on the cold wooden floor of the hotel room, you and he, father and mother, mother and son, father and daughter, brothers, brother and sister, sisters, two women, two men, you and he making love now with your mouths while the first pleasure ebbed, seeking a different way that it might be sustained, your buttocks, your armpits, his hands in your hair, your feet covering his eyes, your teeth at his ear, his face near your navel, your thighs spread above his head, his fingernails digging your neck, your knee doubled upon his belly. And it could not end. You hid yourselves in the sheets in order to discover yourselves again. Slowly, Javier walking toward you from afar, you moving toward him until you both stretched your hands and as in a dream removed the veils that concealed you, slowly, expectantly as in a dream, and saw yourselves naked again and again felt passion. You lay down and he took your feet and pulled you, your head down, until he had your body at the height he wanted and you looked up at him with your eyes, your forehead, your lips, while a double pleasure flowed through you, one from what he was giving you, the other from what he was taking from you, flowed and fused somewhere between your crotch and your breasts. You kiss and join again and you fall face down as he turns your body over and opens your buttocks and tears you apart and asks for your sweat, your smell, your breath, your farts while you lie with your face against the floor and your thighs gripping his chest. You don't know how to stop. You don't want to stop. You grab your bra and wrap it around Javier's dark chest covering his nipples, put his shirt on, smell and kiss the inside of his shoes. Sitting side by side on the bed you masturbate, each watching the other, he with his penis wrapped in your stocking, you with your hands wet with his eau de cologne, finding now the only pleasure that had been lacking, that of a child alone; and you don't want to stop, you want it never to end: to die in this moment renouncing life if the pleasure can only go on. Trembling you let him rub your nipples with his shaving brush and then offer him your belt and fall on the bed as he lashes your legs and buttocks and back while you beg him to go on, go on, leave nothing undone, speak the secret names of the girls he had wanted but never been able to take, of the adolescent boys he had liked, and you in turn will speak your names, not only the men you have wanted but those who have wanted you, and now in making love with each other, you will make love with all of them, the rabbi who once sat you on his lap when your mother took you to see him, the priest who took Javier by the hand during confession, the nun he caught peeking at him while he bathed, his mother the first time he saw her naked, all the names, all the bodies and faces, until at last you fall asleep not to awaken until the day is as warm as your skin and Elena knocks on the door …

“May I pick up the tray?”

“What? Who? What…?”

Knuckles rapped the door again.

“May I pick up…”

Finally you realized that it was the voice of the hotel waiter.

“No, please, not now. Later, please.”

You covered yourself with the sheet. Javier, clenching his teeth, put his hands over his eyes.

“You've done it again, Ligeia. Exhausted me. Worn me out. I'm empty. And it was the same thing in Falaraki. Your love kept demanding of me, demanding, demanding. Again and again, never satisfied, simply to exhaust me. And I wanted you to be remote. Distant. Ready to answer and come to me whenever I might call. An image I could summon up when I needed it.”

“Do you think I've been anything else, Javier? Do you think I'm still Elizabeth Jonas, the girl you met in New York? Don't you see that I've become you yourself? What you've wanted me to become. That I speak and think now not as myself but as you? That my own being has vanished?”

“I know that you're confused. That you have always wanted to exhaust me. That you never understood me.”

“No, Javier, that's not true.” You sat on the edge of the bed, hollow with tiredness. “I've understood you, all right. I wanted to join your Miriam game in Buenos Aires. But you refused to let me, you wanted to play alone. Always alone. And when I understood that, that you would never share, and you knew that I did, the coldness and scorn began. Oh, I understand. To you love and the new, the undiscovered, are the same thing. Do you admit that?”

“I won't talk like this, Ligeia.”

You wrapped the sheet around you and went into the bathroom. You shut the door. Behind you, Javier was saying harshly: “You'll never understand the ways you destroyed me!”

And you, hearing him without hearing him, knowing without hearing, repeated it: he would never understand how you had destroyed him, yet become the victim yourself. And had it really begun that first morning in Delos?

Running water could be heard in the bathroom. Javier hid his face in the pillow.

“You had no right, Ligeia. No right, no right.”

You looked at your naked body in the bathroom mirror. He would be saying that the ruins you had visited today could belong to you only if they did not belong to you. You went to the tub and dipped your fingers.

“Look, at night they do have hot water.”

“I know now that it's impossible. I've stopped blaming you…”

“Hey! There's hot water.”

And later you would believe and tell yourself that with you out of the bedroom he said dryly that the Greek ruins are not really ruins, because man has issued from them, descended from them, and that you had understood this and that was why today you had insisted on returning to Xochicalco …

“You're missing a good chance to shave.”

“Do you think I'm blind? That I didn't notice you hiding at the foot of the pyramid trying to wrap the stone serpent around you? What do you think you were doing? What were you looking for?”

You sat in the tub and sighed.

“No, it isn't possible any longer. It can't go on. Why do you think we went back to Xochicalco?”

You bit your finger and smiled.

“Those ruins,” he would be saying, and you would not hear, “are not like the Greek ruins.”

Silently you got out of the tub. He would be saying now that the ancient Mexican ruins belonged to no one, were isolated from everything, everyone, had no echo. Without drying off, you went to the medicine cabinet. They never decay, he would be going on, because decay can be detected only by a point of reference and the Mexican ruins have none. They have never been part of life or of man. You began to laugh. You took the bottle of tranquilizers and opened it. Covering your laughter with the palm of your hand, you dumped the capsules into the toilet and watched them lose their layer of green gelatine and become soft and then sink, loosing their white dust as they disintegrated.

“But be careful. They're going to snatch your damn myths away from you.”

You returned to the medicine cabinet and got the stomach pills and dumped them into the toilet too.

“What did you do with my collection of pebbles, Javier?” you shouted, laughing.

You stuck your head into the bedroom.

“Why don't you answer me? You're so damned exasperating with your silence.”

Javier heard your voice and rose from the bed. He walked toward you, pulling on his jockey shorts. You watched him through the cracked door.