Read Online A Change of Skin by Carlos Fuentes - Free Book Online

you say to him?”
    â€œAfterward? I thanked him. I told him not to worry about it, just to try to let himself go as much as he could. That only by giving could he take, by spending, save. Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”
    â€œSure, very true. How did he answer you?”
    â€œOh, quietly and with complicated words. But very sincerely. He told me that he loved me because I wasn’t an echo from his past, from his childhood or his teen years. That our relationship was authentic, not a parody. Something like that. Probably he had read it somewhere. But at the time he seemed very moved and very sincere.”
    â€œWhat did you say then?”
    â€œI asked him how he could know he wasn’t lying when he said he loved me.”
    â€œA proper question.”
    â€œHe didn’t answer it. We made love again and we went on feeling that we were joined together deeply. A couple now.”
    â€œThat pretty couple. Self-sacramented. Stealing from each other.”
    â€œI suppose. But I think I sensed even then that he wanted a problem, something to worry about, to be disturbed, troubled by. And that maybe that was what I was for him. The troublante, the difficulty. Lord, I forget what language I’m speaking.”
    â€œYou’re speaking pop language, Dragoness. Pop literature, you know. The big sign in the background:
    POP LIT
    â€œWhat, caifán? Slow down. Sometimes you buzz like a neon light.”
    â€œSorry, Pussycat. I was carried away. You say it was in Flushing Meadows?”
    â€œWhat, Flushing Meadows? God, no. It was right here in Mexico. In a tourists’ court on the road to Toluca. He took me there in a broken-down taxi.”
    â€œOff of it, Pussycat. No cracks about cabs. Cabs mean a lot to me. They bail me out. They keep me going. They’re one of my trades. By my cab alone…”
    â€œSometime you’re going to choke on pure air, caifán. Drowned by words.”
    â€œWell, words are another of my trades. What did he say to you?”
    â€œAt the court? Oh, you know. That he loved me. That he loved me because with me everything was new and fresh, he wasn’t repeating anything from the past. You know the way he talks. That we weren’t living out a parody. Jazz like that.”
    â€œAnd did you believe him?”
    â€œWell, Proffy’s sweet, you know. I liked it that after we made love he got up and went to the bathroom with no dignity at all, half groggy, half out of it, nothing hip. Do you know what I mean?”
    â€œSure, Isabel, I always know what you mean.”
    â€œHe had brought along some panties and he made me put them on. Then he made me put on his trench coat and get in the shower and he turned on the water until I was soaked and laughing. He asked me to go outside and knock and come in again and look at him pretending to be asleep on the bed. I went to the bed and knelt beside him and he very slowly unbuttoned me and took the trench coat off. And there I was in those borrowed panties, so we made love and then we went to sleep. It was nice, caifán. Different.”
    â€œYou went to sleep and the dreams began? Thought became a dream that whittled itself down?”
    â€œMan, how did you know?”
    â€œArtaud said: We believe in the absolute power of contradiction.”
    â€œWho are you?”
    â€œWho are you? Let’s keep it a secret.”
    *   *   *
    Î”   You walked down the path to the Volkswagen thinking, Elizabeth, remembering. You were seated in a café in Herakleion. Javier was reciting a poem by Gaspara Stampa and looking at you while you watched the men passing in their gold-embroidered trousers and then he alluded to the Duino Elegies and asked if you hadn’t been struck by the restraint of gesture and expression in the Greek stelae and you replied, sipping your Turkish coffee, that in Greece everything seemed to have its name while at home in the States