A Change of Skin (56 page)

“I'll put the light out now.”

“
Ay,
señor, señor!”

“Good, Elenita? Deep enough?”

“Oh, my God. Everybody fuck everybody.”

“Do you smell my Negro friend, Elena? Who ever made up that lie that Negroes smell different from the rest of us, worse? Touch the blond señor's whiskers. Rub the back of our girlfriend who has no eyebrows. Jakob, what the hell are you doing with your socks on in bed? Listen, Elena, while I ask Jakob a few silly questions. Are you trying to shape up by making love, Jake? Don't you know that while we forget it the world goes its own way? Don't you see that in your battle, which is exactly like mine, my first dream, that dream of far away, of rebellion, you have been defeated too?”

And I am among, beneath, between the tangle of bodies, half suffocated. The absence of laughter frightens me. The cadaverous solemnity in which none of us touches any of the others, in which we are all kept secure by the mask of the language we are speaking, English, English too in the mouths of these dark Mexican whores with their
joneybonch
and
foqui-foqui,
and when Rose Ass puts out the light, every hand is withdrawn from the skin it was touching, darkness snatches our pleasure away from us, our hands flee to refuge against their own bodies, and the lingua franca of young, beardless Rose Ass forces isolation upon all of us who understand his Germanic English … “The destroyers of idols have now become the idolizers of idols…” and Rose Ass lies like a thin sardine on the edge of the silent, creaking bed, pressed against Elena the towel girl … “… Triumphant rebellion becomes the new institution, the law of the new oppression imposes respectability upon all until we must flee to imagine an untouchable madness, to feel the new sickness that has come to infect us…” and the foreign tongue immobilizes the whores, restrains their mockery, protects us from them, and in their own way they are part of our game too, listening without understanding as he says in English:

“What is left of our dream?” and White Rabbit, sighing beside me, pushes away all the cold arms and replies:

“The tragedy of the little tragedies. Tragedy without a tragic mask. Loss of illusion. Understanding at last what is really possible and what is not.”

“The testimony of the witness is accepted,” whispers Judge Morgana. A pillow is over her face. I think to myself, Christ, what a bitch of a judge. She carries her ceremonial wig in her crotch, well soaked now. They stand her on her head in the courtroom of Old Bailey and she pronounces sentence with a wriggle of her umbilicus and no one understands her. And there she is, when Rose Ass turns on the light again and everyone cries out and covers his mouth and the whores leap from the bed and crouch on the floor and seize handfuls of toilet paper and wipe between their legs, take alcohol and begin to rub each other's backs and thighs: the old show has ended now, this is the new show, and there is Morgana our judge with her legs high, propped against the mahogany head of the bed. Rose Ass says quietly: “I don't know. I still don't know.”

White Rabbit is standing and Rose Ass reaches into the enormous pocket of her trench coat and takes out a lipstick. He begins to draw something on Morgana's belly.

“The witness is impertinent.”

“No. ‘Avez-vous déjà giflé un mort?' ‘Avez-vous déjà tué un juif?'”

He draws on her belly the head of Cyclops Cyclon-B, the eyeball belly button of a clown with Tyrolean mustaches.

“That was what I wanted to say…”

The Capitana of the house, disappointed because for her nothing happened during the darkness, hands the attorney for the defense his charro pants and he puts them on, draws them up over his buttocks, stuffs in his balls, while he talks: “Love is good even when it's sad. We love most those who hurt us most, for we know at least we matter to them.”

“Words, words, sophistry,” Jakob growls. He pulls up his socks while White Rabbit moves among the whores, who are departing, who open the door, ask for towels, receive our clothing, now dry and ironed, and Elena is pushed out of the bed, for her the party is over and she must return to her duties, but White Rabbit closes the door, steps in front of her, takes her by the sloping shoulders and holds her, facing us, holding her by the hair, and says to her: “Why can't they accept it? Why must they live with ghosts?” She puts a finger under Elena's chin and lifts it. “Why don't they prefer a living woman, despite the responsibilities she imposes, to the women of their imaginations?” Elena tries to smile. To close her eyes, to participate in this new show. “Is a flesh-and-body woman a chain around a man?” “A chain of flowers,” smiles Elena. White Rabbit Ligeia goes on, “Why do they give their love to creatures that are as unreal as dreams, the harems of their masturbation, the seraglios of their eunuch impotency?” All of us look at Elenita, short, crooked, dark. Like a good fighting cock, she raises her arms high and closes her eyes and begins to strut before us. She tries to dance. “Why don't they prefer to love a woman, damn it, a woman who walks, sleeps, eats, pisses, menstruates?” But Elena's dancing is that of a wooden doll or puppet. One two three, onetwothree, two small steps forward, one back, an ancient Indian ritual dance of beginnings, of terror placated. She is embarrassed as she shuffles before us in her buttoned sweater and her cotton stockings.

White Rabbit has been holding Elena up. Now she gives her a push and the towel girl sprawls on the floor. “Goddamn it, won't anyone love
me?
Must I always be the repetition of some adolescent nightmare or the preview of some senile dream in order to have a man make love to me?” Elena lies on the floor softly squealing like a hurt small pig. The whores have gathered around their madam like chicks around the hen and the madam stares at White Rabbit first suspiciously and then with hatred while the whores cry, “Shut her up! Get her out! Call Gladiolo! They're all of them crazy! The police will come! She's gone out of her head! See what happens when you let women in!” White Rabbit speaks as if she doesn't hear them: “What have you given me? Where are my children?” And it is sure there will be an earthquake when there are so many omens and White Rabbit goes slowly to the great bed and we all watch her, our backs against the walls; sure it will rain in Sayula as she lies down and all of us see the bed become a stage: the four-poster throne-bed of this house of many beds, an ancient vast bed such as you never see these days, of heavy solid mahogany, its head high and varnished, and sure rain is falling in Yucatan as Rose Ass tries to leap into the bed after her and Brother Thomas and Jakob grab and hold him and he cries to her: “No, you promised!”

And now the Chontalpa is flooding and roses of the Virgin are growing in winter and White Rabbit is joined by Witch-Judge Morgana, who leans on one of the vine-twined corner posts and seems to be waiting. “Yes, I promised. Never to mention it.” White Rabbit spreads her legs and Morgana throws aside the huge pillows and draws back the blankets and her hand, day's white spider, moves limping across the red sheet and the whores know that now the show has started, the real show, and Morgana understands how to build her suspense, like Peter Lorre, Dragoness, when he played the Hairless Mexican Porfirio Montezuma Count of Ombú, her hand is the day's spider and it moves slowly across the red silk searching, seeking, smelling out milk and stars while the Capitana and her whores avidly eat peanuts and crush the empty hulls and throw them to the floor where Elenita the towel girl still lies, the forgotten forgetful one. I want to ask the good Capitana how she came by that bed. But the Capitana is the Capitana and she is peeling grapes with an air mixed of sensuality and boredom while her eyes fasten on the white spider that walks upon Morgana's fingernails, drunk, alone, as if it carried with it lost but recoverable greatness, such greatness that no mere immediate and transitory pleasure is possible. So inch by inch the spider of the day advances toward the waiting, motionles, pink and silver fly of the day, an immobile fly fixed by the gold pins of a collector of insects between White Rabbit Ligeia's spread legs.

“Capitana, may I ask where…”

“Be quiet,
caifán,
be quiet. Would you like a grape?”

The slow sobbing of the forgotten towel girl on the floor is the wind that spreads the sails of the criminal hand now leaping, turning, advancing, retreating across the red silk, scratching the air, rolling, mimicking, chatting, commanding, movement that has become as agile and clear as spoken words and just as loud; and Elena lies on the floor among wads of sperm-smeared toilet paper and puddles of alcohol and heaps of empty peanut shells and the pile of shoes, the laces of which are sleeping worms that Morgana's moving claw with only a tiny slip, an infinitesimal imprecision, can change into the guardian serpents of the pyramid.

“Tell me where you got that bed, Capitana, or I'll make them stop.”

“Go ahead,
caifán,
make them stop. Who cares?”

Laces, worms, snakes. The fingers are suddenly still. They are near the prey but they do not tremble. It is within reach, but they don't seek to touch it. The crimson fingernails are the knives of a ritual slaughter, but they do not cut. The fly has been hypnotized. Or maybe it knows how to metamorphose itself, when the moment comes, into hollow air filled only with the trills of crickets, into a chameleon mist that will blow away, leaving only naked transparent emptiness between White Rabbit's open legs. The fly is not afraid. Its own love requires humiliation and it knows that all true violence is motionless, that all authentic chaos is a mirror held before order and clarity, that virtue is a summation of individual sins. White Rabbit lifts her open legs like a rabbit that moves one of its ears in order to hear better the step of the hunter and thereby reveals its hiding place. Her thighs tremble. The fly is prepared for the attack, for it knows that attack will finally bring peace, that it must inevitably become a victim, and it insists that its sacrifice be voluntary and free: they will devour me alive, but I shall have accepted death before they impose it. And so White Rabbit's vagina trembles, pulses while the whores chomp their peanuts and Elena sobs, and the spider fingers of Morgana enter and spread, rotate, vibrate, grind chocolate or coffee or meal or spume or oil or hops or sand or mud, mix the fruit of the ocean, slide in and out and from side to side and the whores moan and fall on their knees and with one hand over their mouths and the other in their crotches begin to masturbate beside the heap of shoes, beside forgotten forgetful sobbing Elena: flies swarm into the comb of rich honey, a coyote leaps upon the throat of a lamb, salamanders give birth to man-dragons, and in the remote and secret lairs of the world women breed with wolves and men with hyenas that new races of creatures may be created which will never be known by the ants who live in the anthills of the cities: the whores cover their mouths and their cunts that the juices of their pleasure may not leak away, and Brother Thomas, masturbating as fast as he can, shouts almost incoherently that the great labor of destruction requires all the strength and patience of life, and Rose Ass moans: “You promised, Ligeia, you promised! Did you want me to be no more than Raúl was? Dead one Sunday after having lived every Sunday buried in the pages of the newspaper, the gossip columns or the bullfight advertisements, or in the pages of his account books or his Missal? Did you want me to wear forever the shroud that I fled from, escaped from with you? Was that why we lived together?”

And luminous and patient, she who is mortally wounded, wounded by her own wounding, shows us the scar of her hurt, the tired, vitiated splendor of seasons long gone by, the damp, opaque heat of what Morgana's wet and glacially cold hand finds and draws forth from between White Rabbit's spread legs while the room becomes silent: a cross of wires and a blood-smeared little puppet, a tiny doll of thread and porcelain and hard crusts of bread with eyes of black fish eggs: she draws it forth and suspends it from one finger and moves it as we, her audience, stare, a little living pendulum the swinging of which makes our eyes roll, our shoulders tilt, the walls of the whorehouse room swing back and forth also. We stand with open mouths and narrowed lids, seeing, disbelieving, whores and Monks alike hypnotized by the tiny doll that has emerged from a phony labor in order to challenge and dismay our long-nailed hands, our anal copulation, our putrefying bodies swarmed over with clouds of black flies, our grotesquely smiling severed heads of bulls and wild boars, savage and stuporous, while the miniature figure of a man is carried high by the gigantic claw of an insane falcon and Morgana watches us and calmly makes the puppet sway back and forth, back and forth.

“Some show, eh?”

“Oy, Capitana, is this for real?”

“Oh, for God's sake, the bitch had it hidden somewhere.”

“You're letting that gringa make a monkey of you. Of course it didn't happen.”

The Capitana is the Capitana and merely peels and eats her grapes. I, on the floor on my knees, listen to the whores' mockery: children of servitude, daughters of eternal serfdom, toilers and carriers, dwellers in the cabins of labor and the whorehouses of bitterness, how can you answer us except with venom, what weapon against us is left to you? How can you survive except by scurrility and vulgarity? How except with mocking obscenities can you hatchet the air and cut yourselves free from a world you detest and create a world you may be able to love? I hear them, their jokes, their curses, but I don't look at them. I stare at the rumpled bed with its carved posts and its huge pillows among which lies White Rabbit who says that she is Elizabeth who is known as Ligeia who is famed as Helen who is visited by men because she is known to be the prostitute of the temple who is adored as Holy Mary, Mother of our Savior. Morgana's hand is a white pigeon and you, White Rabbit Dragoness, are yourself alone and at your feet, which are our foreheads, lies the doll of wire and clay smeared with clots of blood and semen, and Brother Thomas is standing with an open mouth that for once has nothing to say, nothing to defend, while Jakob stares transfixed at the false fetus and Rose Ass who now is not Long Dong covers his eyes and turns away and only Boston Boy is unaffected, self-possessed, observing everything with the dispassionate calm of a touring Oriental potentate. Across the flat sky of the room the Capitana tosses the butt of her cigarette, the guiding star that will cross the courses of the planets swings into its trajectory and traces a curve to the chamber pot where the sun will consume the earth and the times of the sea will be put back.