A Change of Skin (58 page)

“Ninety kilometers an hour, señor. At the very least. Don't give me that innocent look.”

“No, no, Officer. I'm not innocent.”

“So? You admit it?”

“Everything, Officer. I admit everything.”

“Take it easy, young man. You're going to force me to haul you in.”

“I've nothing to hide. I'll confess everything.”

“And remember, the young ladies will have to go with you…”

“That makes no difference. I accept my responsibility. In reality I never wanted to find her. I was afraid.”

“If you're planning on spending the night in the bust, you have every reason to be afraid.”

“The truth is, I thought she was safe. They had told me that the musicians were going to be excepted, that they weren't going to touch them…”

“No one is safe in the
peni,
young man. No one.”

“I tell you, she wasn't really in danger. There was no need for me to do anything. Why should I? The danger would have been to draw attention to her.”

“In the
peni
they don't respect anyone. Not even grandmothers. Do you understand what I mean, young man?”

“Yes. In those places it's best to be invisible. If I had let anyone know I was looking for her, it would have been like pointing her out to them. They would have noticed her, while before they didn't. Do you see what I mean, Officer?”

“What I see is that on top of speeding and reckless driving, you're drunk. Polluted, if the young ladies will excuse the word. Stoned. Even your hands are shaking. Let me have a whiff of your breath.”

“If I found her, I hurt her. Not to find her was a favor to her. To see her only from the distance. And I would have put myself in danger, too. Well, I accept that. But I would have lost the confidence of my superiors. Maybe I would even have lost my job. And it was my first assignment. I had studied to build and now, in the midst of all the destruction, I had been given an opportunity to build. What more could I ask?”

“Look, señor, don't try my patience.”

“And one day she saw me and didn't recognize me or didn't want to recognize me, all she saw was my uniform. ‘Let me pass,' she said. That was all she said.”

“I don't think you have a very clear idea of Mexico City's
peni,
young man. Drug addicts and perverts. Not the best of company. And the cells are cold as tombs.”

“Then what, Officer, if it had turned out that she hated me? What if she had rejected me? Wasn't it better for both of us to remain apart in our separate worlds united only by our memories, Prague, the Karlsbrücke, that summer of concerts in the Wallenstein Gardens, the
Requiem?
The hope and the promise that we had been in those young days? Wouldn't that seem wiser, Officer, more rational?”

“They don't wear kid gloves in the
peni,
señor. They aren't exactly polite and well-mannered. Try to understand the situation you put me in. I don't
want
to force a night in the
peni
on anyone. But…”

“And escape? To try to escape?”

“Ah, just try it, young man, just try it. Plenty have tried and no one has made it yet.”

“To end up, both of us, electrocuted on that damn fence, trapped by the dogs of the Hundenkommando, executed by a volley against the death wall? Or simply caught and shipped off to the ovens of Auschwitz?”

“Look, my friend. I'm trying to do you a favor. Stop speaking Chinese to me. Show a little more respect for authority.”

“No, Officer, there was no way out. The only intelligent thing was to accept the situation and wait. She was one of the musicians and the musicians were safe. The war would end one day. Why risk our lives foolishly? And to top it all, she was pregnant.”

“You're one of the lippy kind, aren't you, buster?”

“To top it all, she was pregnant.”

“But lip won't help you now. Look, man, look…”

“She hadn't been faithful. She had promised to wait, that I should be the first. It wasn't my fault I couldn't return to her, Officer. Did I declare the war? I thought about trying to save her. I swear I did. I made plans, I thought about it night and day. But, in her condition, escape was out of the question. We would have had to wait until the child was born and leave it with someone. Then maybe we might be able to make it. And the war might end first and everything be forgotten and forgiven…”

“Christ, you people inside the car, isn't there a good God-fearing Mexican here who can explain the facts of life to this crazy gringo? You, señor, you with the mustache, you look like a Mexican, can't you tell this fool to shut up?”

“But they had to sing. They didn't know how to protect themselves. All they had to do was present a performance. Instead they presented mockery and a challenge. They were fools, Officer. Shouting, shouting Libera me…”

“You understand matters, señor. You don't want me to take you people to the station any more than I want to take you. But one good turn deserves another. And when you're dealing with a man who has authority on his side…”

“Li-be-ra meeee!”

“Señor, thank you, thank you. You understand things.”

“And after that, what could I have done? They themselves had condemned themselves to death. They themselves, all alone, when they could have been safe. Who was I to try to intervene now? I, the young architect assigned to the camp, a minor functionary, a Sudeten at that, not even a German, maybe a man whose loyalty was none too sure, just a young man who knew how to do what he was ordered to do, was I going to go to the Commandant and beg that Hanna Werner be excepted from the shipment of the musicians to Auschwitz? I? I was going to beg that her newborn baby not be sent off to Treblinka? A baby who was not even my son? Doesn't that make you laugh? I was going to intervene? Lift my hand and condemn myself too without helping her, who was already condemned beyond hope? I? I could have been that crazy? Write that down, Officer. It's a good joke. Write it down to laugh over with your comrades.”

“Look, young man, don't tempt me now.”

“Write it down. I would cross the course of the stars, I would put back the times of the sea…”

“I tell you, there's no problem now. Don't let your foot get so heavy, that's all. Shake. We'll part friends.”

And Jakob, immutable at the side of blond Boston Boy Franz Jellinek, looks at the cop and possibly says something that we cannot hear, something that is carried off into the night by the wind of the Valley of Mexico, jugular wind, wind of the palaces of the albinos, wind of the hunchbacks and the peacocks, while the man in brown walks back to his wheeled pony pocketing the fifty pesos that was all he wanted in the first place and that I finally handed him, and now we have to rest, to unwind, to go home to my squatter's castle and have a drink and a smoke, but Boston Boy, wearier than any of us, lets his head drop forward upon the steering wheel and obviously is going to take us nowhere. Silently Jakob gets down and comes around the car and opens the door and shoves Boston Boy out of the way and starts the car and with a grinding of gears we move off while I look a last time at the parents with their children and their baby carriages and their market carts and I ask myself if a terrible mixup may not happen at any moment, any Sunday dinner, if the artichokes may not be given the breast to suck while the babies are boiled in oil. So we move away under the stars and the wind, and Morgana, coming back to life as if after a long sleep, yawns and asks White Rabbit if she remembers the games she and Javier used to play in the evenings after supper and Rose Ass says that he remembers, they played war games, made riddles, for example, about the tonnage of the British destroyers in the battle of the Río de la Plata, or quizzed each other: who is von Rundstedt, Ligeia, have you ever heard of him? Or Timoshenko or Gamelin or Wavell. Brother Thomas has quietly found a little placard among the confusion beneath our feet and with adhesive tape is affixing it to the side window, and the placard reads

FATE L'AMORE NON LA GUERRA

and Rose Ass throws a tube of toothpaste out on Avenida de la Paz, for we are on our way to San Angel now, and Morgana finds other tubes and bottles for him to throw away as he laughs, and everyone begins to sing popular songs:
Goodness hides behind its gates but even the President of the United States must sometimes stand naked. Là dove c'era l'erba ora c'è una citàààà, I need a place to lie down,
and they comment, Bob Dylan, Celantano, Il ragazzo della Via Gluck,
It's all right, ma, I'm only bleeding. Yester-days,
they shout in chorus, cheerfully. And this morning, the morning that I shall write about some day, will be a waif dawn that does not know its name. Midnight has sounded and beyond the alley that leads to my old house the crickets are trilling and Jakob swings off the Beltway and parks on a side street and we all get out with a feeling of reluctance. Brother Thomas will sing without words now, that sweet basso humming, that violent gentleness which is natural to those of us who live at the extremes of life in order that others may live in its golden midriff. Bearded Boston Boy will open the lid of the trunk and take out his now inert little bundle and once again conceal it under his long-skirted frock coat, his coat that flaps like the eyelashes of an English Romantic poet's most sensitive hero: and Ezekiel has told us that cities are the heads of Goliath but I say that David is the knight who wanders the plains of the world's streets, from David Rastignac to David Herzog, while Morgana our judge and White Rabbit my love who refuses to be my love walk arm in arm squeezing each other around the waist and Rose Ass, hopelessly tied to their apron strings, follows strumming his guitar and asking:

“Did we go together to Greece, Ligeia?”

He strums his guitar and accompanies Brother Thomas's humming and awaits White Rabbit's reply. But she has well learned the cunning cleverness of the Aztec mysteries and now is offering our judge a bribe, winking at her as we troop across the Beltway, saying, finally: “That I'll never reveal to anyone. It's my secret and I'm going to hold to it. What difference does it make now, anyhow? I've stopped lying. From now on my testimony will be very simple: just the truth.”

“Does the witness swear that all she has said is not the truth?” Morgana asks, kissing White Rabbit's ear. “We shall overcome,” sings Brother Thomas. White Rabbit nestles in Judge Morgana's arms: “No, it was true, in a way, God and Perry Mason willing.”

Yes, we shall overcome … some day. What difference did it make now? Anything. And what he had never understood was that her lie was simply in answer to his lie. Joshua will fight the battle of Jericho and the children of the street will sleep wrapped in newspapers on sidewalks near the modern, indispensable Beltway that permits us to whirl from our residences in the Pedregal and Coyoacán and San Angel to the center of town in fifteen minutes or better. He had loved her only because he could disguise her as other women. She had retorted to that insult in the same way. The lies they had told each other came together and added up to speak one lonely truth. The walls will come a-tumblin' down. And Juan Soriano has said that his father fought in the cavalry in the revolution precisely so that gentlemen of means might ride the wonderful Beltway in their Cadillacs. “The truth? What's the truth? I could just as well have told you that I was born right here in Mexico City, not in New York, the daughter of a family of immigrant Russian Jews. Is there anything so strange about that? There were many such immigrants and today they are bankers and movie producers and mathematicians and biologists and owners of department stores. And what's wrong with them for being those things? I could have told you that I was raised in Mexico City, not in New York. Therefore I admit that everything I have said is false, in a certain sense. The places and names were false. But not the people.” We'll look over Jordan and what will we see? The lights of the San Angel Inn Restaurant, brothers. Fifty gleaming new and expensive very large and very small cars parked outside. And what shall we hear? Silver and glass tinkling against silver and glass, and the whirring wings of a covey of mariachi musicians. “Not the people, I didn't change them. My mother was exactly as I said she was … but in Colonia Hipódromo, or in the Bronx? And my father, too, but did he sell his sharp razors of excellent steel in a stall in La Merced Market or in a market in New York? What's truth … you pays your dream and you takes your reality. And Jake my brother was murdered not in Central Park but in the Parque España, killed not by Harlem Negroes but by some goddamn Mexican kid bastards.” A band of angels will be comin' after me and after you also, brothers. A-comin' for to carry us along that long long trail that forever keeps winding into the land of our graves where if our dream boats ever come in we'll have it made for at least one more cup of coffee and one last piece of ass. So she fled also. And studied there, and they met. That much I believe is probably true. “Do you believe me now?” Do we believe her, brothers? Why not? Liars are the easiest of all to believe.

White Rabbit continues speaking to our good judge, Morgana, but Boston Boy, moving in on her like a crab on a clam, kisses her dull red lips. Damn him, damn her, damn their kiss, damn the bitter envy I feel. The only answer fate permits us is such bitterness. Two young people, kissing in front of the prickly-pear hedge that walls my decayed garden. That's all. It's common enough. It happens all the time. Yet it makes me lose my virginal and precious cool for a moment during which I become Javier, Elizabeth, and Franz, and in their names surge with a deeper bitterness. Yonder damned kiss is a bird I shall never wing again. It's impossible. And neither will they, ever again, put their lips together quite that same way, in the street, young, hot with hostility they don't even pretend to conceal, exposing themselves most innocently to loss of freedom in the discovery of love, without the fear and anger we have learned to hide behind our boredom, our lack of curiosity: ahhh, so what, so what? So we have passed the line, brothers, and they have not even come to it yet, that's so what. And to have gone beyond everything is not to have gone at all. Except home again to this thick and bristly hedge whose secret entrances and exits I believe I know, gentle home sweet home, Eden subverted by outcast sons who prefer to march off across the deserts of the world armed with the jawbones of asses to being shut up in safety, who march forth wearing boots and return home on stretchers bleeding with the prodigal open wound of that subtle whore Malinche, traitoress mother who fucked the enemy that you and I, my compatriots, might some day be born. Or do you really think it would have been better if the Spaniards had been defeated and we had gone on living under the Aztec fascism? Who was Cuauhtémoc? Baldur von Schirach, brothers, leader of the Tenochtitlán Jugend. And wiser far than he, the Mexican women let it happen. Eternal bitterness in return for a lasting destiny that I have to admit we haven't quite found yet. But we shall, man. We shall.