A Change of Skin (62 page)

“Oberscharführer Heinrich Kruger. Organizer of the transportation of the three thousand Jews whose lives were taken in revenge for the murder of the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.”

“Ruby Richter, SS guard in charge of the women's baths at Auschwitz.”

“Lieutenant Malaquias von Dehm. Participant in the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto.”

“Lisbeth Fröhlich, trained nurse. The preparation of poisoned marmalade for the physically and mentally defective children sent to Treblinka.”

“Lorenz Kemper. Factory machinist. The manufacture of cylinders for the gas known as Cyclon-B.”

Who these people were, I don't know. You'll find out for me, Isabel. You will make Franz talk and tell you, and then you will tell me. You will help me fill out the file. But I do know that these people are dead, and I know who killed them. Maybe it would be better not to know who they were. Just to forget those hazy years, years of my childhood and adolescence that are fused together in a mosaic, still strangely unfaded, of movies and newspaper headlines and radio reports and crime stories and cracked phonograph records, the written and heard debris of which half our lives is composed. No, I want to know. So you will learn and tell me, Pussycat. I still have you, despite your insistence that you were psychoanalyzed in your nitwit mother's womb. Yes, I still have you. And somewhere out of sight a distant voice is singing, and far away out of sight on the other side of the fat round world, dawn is rising. Not so far, perhaps, after all, though I have no idea what time it is. The six Monks surround me and we gaze somberly at the swastikas on the door of the Lincoln, the five that bear X's, the one that remains unmarked. And I say to myself: Of sand water is born, and of water, fish.

“He found out the house of life and destroyed it.”

Did he? Well, maybe he did, maybe he did.

His stand-in, blond Boston Boy, opens the trunk of the old car and quickly slips the bundle he has carried inside his coat into a nest of clothing and rags, a small bundle as alive as I am, moaning, wriggling, resisting. He slams the lid down so that whatever the bundle is cannot escape, cannot attack him. And I had thought, unimaginative shell of the old that I am, that the contents of my prize steamer trunk were rather unusual. I haven't the slightest idea what Boston Boy is up to. Why should I? The irrational is not to be explained. I shrug. Everyone has relaxed now. The last act has ended. We return now to our real names, whatever they are, to our real being, whatever that is. Brother Thomas smiles and drags a match across his buttocks, across the embroidered silver eagle and serpent. His joint glows. And now we will take another trip, man. We're going to fly high, cats. High and far, swinging loose, swinging crazy, casting spells, shaking demons, rocking and twisting and always going, going, going, man, going. Let's hit it, man, let's split. The road is very long.

*   *   *

Δ   Elizabeth and Javier remained facing the wall of locust gods. They did not look at Franz. They looked at each other, into each other's eyes. Javier started to say something but Elizabeth closed his lips with her hand and they went on looking at each other. The sea took the light of the sun and reflected and filtered it and sent it back transformed to the sun. The sea of green and blue and violet stripes, colors of the water of life. It overpowers the land of hazy mountains that are like shoulders thrown up from the depth of the sea, pale and blue, that are the backbones of the tired old monster of the sea. And in the harbor of Rhodes, the ship is about to leave. Elena, wrapped in a black shawl, Elena, wrinkled and brown as a nut, but with shining eyes and teeth, stands among the women shouting up at the sky and now and again praying. The women weep, yet laugh between their sobs. Their men are sailing away from them today. Leaving the island to find work in Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, wherever laborers are needed. They will cease to be peasants and become servants and mechanics. Black-clad wives weep, old grandmothers, wrinkled and white-haired, thin-lipped, young cousins. All of them have their pictures taken in a group. They stop crying at once, smile for the photographer, curse the clumsy old woman who at that instant crosses in front of the camera. All of Rhodes laughs and cries and makes jokes and shouts farewells. Venders of sesame bread and meat pies. Old women wearing black turbans. Shrieking children. Whistles and shouts of stevedores loading and unloading. The jostling of the porters.

“Is Elena seeing a relative off?”

She weeps and shouts. She throws herself against the side of the ship. She tears off her shawl and kneels on the ground. Elizabeth waves to her, takes out her handkerchief and waves again. Elena sees them and raises her arms toward the sky, her knuckles knotted and brown. She spreads her fingers to send a long kiss with her eyes closed.

“Do you think she has come because of us?”

The hawsers are thrown off. Elizabeth says farewell to Rhodes without daring to cry, letting Elena and the women of the island weep in her stead. Voices surge from the brown and rocky earth that is beautiful only because of the sea, the sea across which the ship is now moving. Elena is lost in the crowd, weeping, shouting again and again, fainter and fainter.

*   *   *

Δ   So there we were, Dragoness, that last night which was also the first night, the six Monks, Isabel and myself, seated beneath the gray and green paint-flaking arcade in Cholula on brass chairs around two aluminum tables that belonged to an oyster bar which after darkness fell became a different kind of bar. The oysters lay still in their large jars of gray water. An alcohol-soaked worm hung suspended in my bottle of mescal. Only I was drinking. The others were taking a trip. They were floating, high, far away. “Groovy, groovy,” repeated, every little while, the girl who another night had been Judge Morgana and another year, perhaps, had been a child taken south by train carrying a doll whose head broke. Near us stood a small group of musicians, slick-varnished straw hats, white shirts, drill trousers, playing their guitars and singing, out of tune, the corrido “Benjamín Argumedo.”
Lo bajaron por la sierra, todo liado como un cohete.
Near us also were women with narrow foreheads, small teeth set in thick gums, hair in short braids or up in a knot, prematurely old, shawl-wrapped women whose bellies were big with the next child while the last held to their hand or slept in their arms or rode behind wrapped in the shawl. The women passed on bare feet, gathered near the wall, stared at us and laughed silently as they exchanged their joking secrets and their secret jokes in voices that could not be heard, words thinly inflected, fused chains of inaudible syllables.
Tanto pelear y pelear con el máuser en la mano.
I looked impatiently toward the plaza. Toward the street that climbs to the basilica atop the great pyramid which is really seven pyramids nested one within the other. The plaza was empty. It belonged now only to Cholula's night-wandering dogs, some yellow, some black, all lost, listless, strengthless, hungry, scratching at their infestations of sores and fleas, crippled, emaciated. I looked, but not the Monks. They neither saw nor heard. They were flying high now. To their clothing they had pinned little tin badges, like the stars the sheriffs of the East wear.
Make Marijuana Legal. Baby Scratch My Back.
LSD NOT LBJ.
Abolish Reality.
They smoked their joints like black bats and did not see me as I looked toward the street to see if our friends had returned yet, while at the same time, good Mexican campaigner that I am, never say die and all that, under the table I stretched my foot, trying to touch the foot of the girl who another night was pale White Rabbit who was Jeanne Féry the nun who was Helen of Troy who was Mother Mary who was yourself, Dragoness. I reached for her with my toe but she paid me no attention. She and Jakob were holding hands.
Para acabar fusilados en el panteón de Durango.
I turned to you, beside me, Isabel, leaning against my shoulder with your eyes closed.

“Do you think they're going to show?”

You didn't answer me. The mariachi musicians went on playing and the dogs came to our table and looked at us with their large hopeful eyes, red and yellow eyes irritated and rheumy. And I drank my mescal and observed the faces of the six Monks and saw them as taking part in a masque, as wearing disguises the purpose of which was to testify to the ultimate nature of true energy, the energy that changes things, that is never wasted although after exertion it may be lost for a time and then return because it has not really been lost but has simply passed over into the hands of someone else who some other day may perhaps give it back. Their clothing was dusty and spotted with mud and they smoked their marijuana and listened to the musicians playing for them on an April night.

“My head aches,” you said, Pussycat.

“Are they going to show?”

“I don't know.”

The six young Monks were smiling. For those passing us, their muddy clothing doubtless seemed another detail of their costumes, less obvious than their tin badges.
Abolish Reality.
Passers-by looked at us, at you and me and at the six Monks, and didn't suspect us of anything. Why should we be suspected? The six Monks were merely comical, and who was to know that their comedy was that of Laurel and Hardy, who made us laugh and feel surprise and sense the endless possibilities open to man when they dismembered an old car or smashed up a very proper suburban home. Soldiers were watching us, too, leaning their shaved necks back against the columns of the arcade. Pistols in belt, caps-a-cock, cheek or temple or throat lividly scarred by a knife gash, toothpicks between their teeth, watching us and smiling mockingly. And Jakob went on embracing the girl whom I have called White Rabbit, looking at me simply that I should be able to tell myself that what to me might have seemed predestined was to him and in reality his freedom, and that if he could discover, twenty-one years later, its consequences, and convert his aspiration into act, then all of us can be equally free. What he had done, he was telling me in short, that I could tell myself, was that he had acted in the name of all mankind. But as he embraced the girl called White Rabbit, I asked myself what is the line that separates the model from the mere case, at what point does revenge cease to be private and become free and public, carried out to give a meaning that will splash in widening circles beyond the little pebble of existence that happens to be at its center, in this instance the life of Jakob Werner.

Bullshit, I told myself, cut it, drop it, dry up. You're merely jealous of his youth and the girl he holds in his arms. You're merely tired and irritated that it should have ended this way, without your having the guts to prevent a crime, a murder, which you did not approve, and at the same time without your having been accepted by the criminals as their comrade, as one of them. You neither prevented it nor participated in it. You merely served as their guide into a strange pyramid which has at its heart a wall painted with crickets. Their guide, not their mentor, all the long length of a lazaret where, thanks to our vital love of cruelty, the isolation lepers live can create the illusion that they are really alive.

“Will they show?” I said again to Isabel.

“I don't know. I doubt it. They were just sitting there, holding hands.”

“What were they saying?”

“Betty was talking, not Javier. She was telling him that it didn't matter. That life had to go on.”

The girl called White Rabbit withdrew her foot from mine and looked at me with amusement and scorn. Very slowly she kissed Jakob.

I stroked Isabel's hair. “If we leave right away, we can be in Veracruz by dawn.”

“No. I don't want to see the sea now.”

“Would you rather go back to Mexico City?”

“Yes.” She stood up and opened her purse and looked for her comb, her lipstick, her mirror. “Yes. There's nothing left to do here. Let's go back. I'm exhausted.”

And the faces of the six Monks observed us with mockery. The black-skinned face. The face veiled by the straw-colored hair of the youth wearing pink pants. The Gothic face, erect over the sharpness of the cheekbones, of the girl in black sweater, black pants, black boots, black everything. Jakob Werner's half-closed eyes. The divine pallid face without eyebrows and with orange lips, the face of young Elizabeth of the eternally intolerable life that nevertheless is eternally worth being lived. The blond and bearded face of all agonies. They looked at me as I stood beside Isabel. The dark-skinned women with swollen bellies and bare feet looked, and the slobbering drowsy dogs, the sardonic-eyed soldiers.

“Yes, let's go back. I'm exhausted, too.”

They all looked, smiled, crossed their arms.
Ya no vivan tan engreídos con este mundo traidor.
I picked up a fistful of peanuts and tossed them at the face of one of the musicians.

“Hey, you! Take it easy there.”

He put down his guitar. A man with thick mustaches. He stepped over his guitar and with the movement of a black panther advanced toward our table.

“Knock it off, drunk. Knock it off fast. Show some respect for…”

I threw another handful of peanuts at his face and the soldiers leaning against the columns of the arcade straightened and put their hands to the butts of their pistols and the big-bellied women covered their children's heads with their shawls and stepped out of the way as the dogs ran off limping, one foot lifted, hanging in the air, or perhaps only the stump where a foot had been, their bare hides splotched with dry stains, and the soldiers took out their pistols and ran toward us along the arcade where the four musicians were preparing to jump us, beat the hell out of us.

Jakob stood up quickly and quietly and calmly removed a bloody knife from his portfolio.

*   *   *

Δ   You told me all this that afternoon, Dragoness, when they let you visit me.