A Change of Skin (52 page)

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Δ   The men were still standing pressed against each other when I moved forward from the stairs to where you stood just inside the gallery. I took your hand, Isabel, so that you would know I was there. Javier did not notice me. Neither did Elizabeth. Only Franz saw me and asked who I was. But immediately the Monks arrived with their insane noise, the music of the electric guitars they had prepared earlier, during the afternoon, their singing voices as they moved toward the frieze from both ends of the gallery, and Javier suddenly collapsed in the dust and did not understand and Elizabeth knelt to hold him while Franz stared and the music pounded its defiance and challenge

Now the day has come

That day has come, oh, oh, oh

Judgment day, judgment daaaaay

They came in from the two ends of the gallery preceded by their two minstrels, the Negro wearing the charro sombrero and holding the guitar away from his chest, the tall youth with the long unkempt hair and the tight rose-colored pants and the leather jacket, carrying the other guitar tight in his arms, one from the left, the other from the right

Man, man, count your time

The minutes left, oh, oh, oh

and behind them the others: behind the Negro, the girl dressed all in black; behind the tall youth the girl with her eyes hidden behind dark glasses, wearing the Greta Garbo hat with its wide fallen brim, her trench coat with raised lapels, her face pale with pallid makeup that caused her features to disappear in the dim light: mouth and dark glasses, that was all that could be seen of her,

Pop your eyes, death and nature

Judgment day, oh, oh, oh

Let creation rise and shake

then the blond, bearded young man in corduroys and sandals, and behind him the youth conventionally dressed, but now incongruously, in a tweed jacket and flannel trousers. The Monks had arrived:

What did David tell the Sibyl?

Gonna be no getaway

The Monks had arrived, and as they passed us, they squeezed my arm, Isabel, and kissed you, and moved on with swaying hips and sliding feet to form a circle around Franz while Elizabeth, understanding nothing, her eyes wide with fear, went on kneeling beside Javier, who now had fainted or gotten drunk and passed out or simply crinkled up like tissue paper in the wind. They formed a circle around Franz and danced around him to the throbbing hum of their guitars, to the crazily echoing boom of their voices, twisting their supple hips, shaking their heads

For oh, oh, that day has come

Nobody hides forever

Then they stopped and were silent. Franz leaned back against the wall, his arms spread, his palms flat on the stone. They tightened their circle around him.

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Δ   Isabel brought the six Monks one afternoon so that they could meet me and we could get together on all this. Right from the first my young guests took over, settling themselves around my living room as if it had been theirs all their lives. They sprawled out on the floor on my old reed mats, charred by years of careless cigarette butts. They propped themselves comfortably against the walls that had once been two subtle tones of blue and now had aged and faded to many tones of gray and yellow. Their tequila glasses made new rings on my square coffee table—well, it's also a worktable, comrades—and they heaped their cigarette butts—when they first hit Mexico City they had discovered and taken to the brand called “Pharaohs” and two or three of them were smoking pot, from the smell I thought it was the Negro dressed up in the charro outfit and the albinolike girl with the shaved eyebrows whom I immediately, secretly nicknamed White Rabbit—in the Olmecan saucers that serve as my ashtrays. I told them a little about my castle called home. That originally it had been an outlying farm building on land that belonged to a Jesuit monastery. That by and by the Jesuits had been bumped on their devious way and the monastery was destroyed, and when I found it, the building belonged to no one, was lived in by no one, apparently had been entirely forgotten. So in I had moved, for I liked the privacy and saw the possibilities, and the rent a squatter pays can't be beat. Perhaps they had noticed that from the alley the house was concealed by the thick hedge of prickly briar. A good neighborhood, too, what Mexico City's political fathers usually call “proletarian.” But even the poorest and weariest of proletarians have not only chains but also refuse to get rid of, and for years everyone there had ditched his on my side of the hedge, creating the savory Dadaist garden my guests had observed as they entered: rotting garbage, rusting cans, broken bottles, disintegrating scraps of clothing, with here and there in the fly-swarmed stink, the languid arms of the old maguey plants. Groovy, eh? And immediately around the house, like a line of last defense, was my second hedge of intergrown high shrubs. Isabel, that little Pussycat, stood near the door listening and after a while said that she had to leave, she had a date to go with her Proffy to the magnificent motel where he always took her, so ciao, cats, and good luck. Exit Pussycat. But not the Monks. They spent the rest of the day and most of the night with me, concentrated and intense but at the same time swinging loose.

They began by asking me about myself. I made it brief: I write when I feel like it and also when I don't, and now and then I drive a cab to get with it again, back in it again, and that was how I met our friends Javier and Elizabeth. In a word, I have a kind of independent income. They laughed and said sure you do, and we all laughed because we all knew that no one can live beat or Viet very long without some hardworking old bourgeois paterfamilias behind him to pick up the check for the ass he sacks and the glass houses he cracks, and all that. And already White Rabbit had found my last bottle of Poire William's, worth a small fortune at the Minimax supermarket, and was gulping it down like so much water, and now she waved the bottle at me and said, “Okay, writer or cabby, whichever you prefer, we read you but do you read us? Are you with us?” I told her yes, of course, why the hell not, sure I was with them … in principle. Not that I intended to take an active part in it. No, my role would be strictly Vergilian: their observer now and later, when I came to write about it, their amiable Narrator. But for that I needed to know even more than if I were to be one of the actors. I had to have everything scribbled down neatly in my notebooks, and because I didn't know everything now, not by a long shot, just what reasons they might have, I would like them to persuade me a little. As for approving or disapproving, to hell with it. I was simply glad to have them there with me for a while.

They listened as I told them what I knew. Then we agreed, except that they refused to give me their real names, that would be taking too much of a chance. So I gave them nicknames based partly on their physical appearances and partly on the roles they played that evening. White Rabbit. Brother Thomas for the Negro. Morgana for the bewitchingly sexy girl dressed all in black, black sweater, black pants, black boots. Two names for the youth in the pink mountebank's trousers: Rose Ass and Long Dong, according, as you will see after a little, to the situation. For the yellow-haired bearded young man who drove their car, an old Lincoln convertible, a good stout Mexican nickname, El Güero, which means, for those of you who don't know us as well as we know you, something between Fair-Haired Childe Christ and Blond Bastard. And finally, Werner, Jakob Werner, the one who wore the tweed jacket and flannels and carried a briefcase: Jakob I gave no nickname because he gave me his own name, even offered me a card. Brother Thomas opened the window presently and tossed out the roach of the joint he had been stinking up my house with, a little crime I had already forgiven, for as you know I am pushing forty and look upon youth with a genial toleration, and besides I enjoy marijuana myself, and he said worriedly: “The trouble is that we don't know how to answer questions. What we do is ask questions. And these people we have to talk about now belong to the Stone Age. They play with pretty words. They spout speeches. I don't think it's going to be easy.”

I rested my head back against the copy of
Hopscotch
I was using as a pillow and told them that in that case maybe we better switch roles. I, like every Latin American intellectual who is worth his salt and his sinecure, knew nothing at all except how to wax grandiloquent. To rock with rhetoric, as it were. So … But White Rabbit, waving her bottle around like a club (and she didn't have to do that; when she shook it, it looked like a miserable lemon pop. Ah, appearances and reality) and taking an enormous slug of it that made her tremble, said, “Children, let's stop wasting time. I have a very simple idea.” She waved the bottle again. “Our Vergilian friend has told us about Javier and Elizabeth or Bette or Ligeia or whatever she calls herself.” I closed my eyes and touched the tip of my tongue to my teeth. “Now, let's get moving. Let's come to some conclusions. Let's go ahead and hold the trial.”

The little pear inside White Rabbit's bottle bobbed around like a bewhiskered, wrinkled fetus. As if it were trying with its reborn roots to grip the glass, to change the glass and the alcohol back into earth and benevolent rain. Morgana put on a Beatles record and suddenly they were all dancing and the light was fading and I understood nothing, nothing at all, but decided to ride with them very patiently. The electricity had been disconnected because for four or five months I hadn't paid, and I had made a pleasant virtue of dark necessity: I lived, I told them, by pale candlelight alone, like a demented monk. And the record player, then? Why, batteries, obviously. Anyhow, the record player wasn't going around. Only I was going around, for I had asked White Rabbit (and I was beginning to like that little gringa) to teach me how to frug and all of them were laughing at me and for a moment I really thought that they had put on a record but actually it was Rose Ass-Long Dong and his guitar playing “Yesterdays,” a song I was sure the Monks had known long before the music was published or the Beatles recorded it. Hey, brethren. So back we go to the jungle of beginnings and I twist my sluggish behind without moving my feet, trying as hard as I can to imitate White Rabbit, but try as I may, I can't keep up with the movement, at once elegant and savage, of her beautiful young arms. “Good,” says Brother Thomas. “We'll hold the trial and I will be the attorney for the defense.” He jerks his head like a wound-up toy turtle, keeping his hands fast in the pockets of his charro pants. “And I'll take on Franz,” mumbles El Güero, whose face has disappeared behind a waterfall of long yellow hair as he shakes, clicking his heels, to the almost visible rhythm. It is White Rabbit's turn. Dramatically, now motionless, fixed in an arch pose of heavy espionage, the collar of her trench coat up, the brim of her floppy Garbo hat drooping around her ears, she announces, “I'll be Elizabeth, Ligeia, Lisbeth, whatever her name is.”

I observe that they are all observing me and laughing at me for the clumsy absurdity I am making of a dance that is entirely improvisation, yet at the same time, and this is the rub, completely a rite. The need to display a bit of rhetoric comes over me and I begin to point out to them that one by one, nation by nation, people by people, we are all of us returning to our original prototypes. The Yankees are becoming an army of Edgar Allan Poseurs complete with the Gothic castles and the dripping dungeons that Pollyanna and Horatio Alger preferred to conceal beneath marmalade and Wall Streets paved with silver dollars; the English are going back as fast as they can to Tommy Jones and Mollucky Flanders and all the belching and bawding that Victoria and Gladstone wanted to screen away behind cricket and croquet. And as for the doughty Germans, they have been and will always be …

“I'll take the bench and be judge,” Morgana interrupts. She is sliding gracefully through a series of steps that beyond doubt began as part of some puberty ritual. “I am Javier!” cries Rose Ass (not at this moment Long Dong. His guitar is weary and sad. Jakob clasps him by the shoulder and forces him, Javier be nimble, Javier be quick, Javier hop over your stick, to jump over his guitar). “And I,” says Jakob, “the prosecuting attorney.”

The guitar is silent. With one movement they all fall to their knees in a circle, holding hands.

They begin to howl like coyotes, at first softly, then louder.

I stand alone, stopped in an awkward movement of my hips. There is no light now and outside the mongrel dogs of the neighborhood are replying to the howling of my six young guests. At the same time you can hear the termites gnawing the beams beneath the old floor, sifting their eternal dust, and the scampering through the walls of rats who are as terrified by silence as by racket.

“What is the plea?” Jakob asks sharply. “Guilty or not guilty?”

I have my matches in my hand and am looking for a candle.

“Guilty, but with extenuating circumstances, I suppose,” speaks Brother Thomas in the darkness. “Good God, wasn't his soul his own to do with as he damn well pleased?” Brother T.'s voice mocks itself. It is deep as Paul Robeson singing “Ol' Man River,” yet as shrill as Butterfly McQueen begging Scarlett O'Hara to forgive her. The voice of a slave and rebel crawling up from the slime. Of a bird just loosed and still bewildered. Of sweaty torches winking through a night of fog. “He had a dream, man. He wanted to make it come true. The same as all of us. Just the same.”

“Will the attorney for the defense specify precisely what dream?” Judge Morgana asks.

And now we are leaving. In the darkness the flies that during daylight hang like clouds in my garden of refuse have departed. The smell is sweet, rotten, sticky. Broken glass, rags, vomit, excrement. And here and there something that might be used again, for even the poor have their moments of luxurious denial: that bicycle wheel, for example. Brother Thomas, picking his way through with enormous grace, is still speaking, and I can't tell from his accent whether he comes from a ghetto in the North or a sharecropper's cabin in the South. “The dream precisely? Precisely the dream of long-frustrated desire finally confessed and fulfilled. Of lost unity in life recovered again. Of complete power put to the final proof, to the test, man, make or break. He had one chance. His only chance. He had to take it and do with it what he could.” The stench of the rottenness around us is a little dizzying, a little like sweet wine. “But no one understood. Really, you know, quite a great dream. Merely a hopeless one. For he dared to believe that a life of heroism was still possible.” None of us pays Brother Thomas the least attention. We let him rattle on and don't listen, for the attorney for the defense is expected to lie, that's his function and duty. Or isn't it?