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

so many things were nameless, undefined or very vaguely defined and therefore hard to talk about, even to think about, and that was one of the reasons that you had been glad to come here and sit in a café and look at the leathered faces of men who knew the names and the meanings of things. Javier smiled and pressed your hand and said that he had come to see the living embodiments of the restraint to be found in the stelae, the memory of those gestures still maintained, the way they moved, extended an arm, held their heads. From reading books, he went on, one could deduce a way of thinking or speaking. But not physical movement. He had wanted to try to discover how such restraint could nevertheless hold such passion. While he was still young enough he wanted to learn the lesson that was first of all in their architecture, where the form is its own content with no need for ornament or commentary. Just as their tragedy is architectonic, so their architecture is their theater enacted in stone. Everything is exactly what it appears to be. Gray-haired women with paunches and double chins and fat arms called back and forth from their balconies and then you and Javier left to look at the golden Mycenaean masks, those funerary suns that provide a third face, one that lies between the faces of life and death and is the only face that we can receive from others, the only possible homage to death: to understand that beyond life but this side of death can lie a visage containing both. You went to see the dead children covered with beaten gold, the sketches in marble of the Cycladic women with their high breasts, their very simple figures, slender, angular, yet soft, a sharp contrast to the broad-buttocked women in the statues at Aegina whose strong hands rest upon their heavy knees, an equal contrast to the Athenian caryatids placed by their builders in stances of support but transcending that destiny thanks to their blind distant eyes looking forever far away, far beyond their setting of eternal fixation, beyond the Acropolis and beyond the step their motionless legs are about to take into another time, having outlived the time of their creation.
    â€œTwice I made love to you, because I thought you understood.”
    Understand? You spent your days in Falaraki that summer and on into the soft Mediterranean autumn looking for beach pebbles. You became almost a tradition: the blond American girl who sought colored stones: Klondike Lizzie, the Pebble Rush.
    And one day the sun did not come out. One day in November the little bay ran its waves agitated and cold against the shore and the sea became slate-gray and saltier than usual—you could taste it on your lips—stirred up, threatening. The fishermen decided not to go out. There was only one old man who stood far away on the rocks, flaying, under the rain, a dead octopus. You went to the empty beach because you wanted to swim. Javier trailed along some distance behind you. The rain wet his turtle-neck sweater and his corduroy pants and his bare feet sank into the once golden, now dark sand. You swam to the rock where the old man was flaying the octopus. You stretched your arms up from the water and the old fisherman grinned and threw the octopus down to you. Slowly you swam back. Everything seemed predetermined
    â€œâ€¦ as though you were living out a pact, Ligeia…”
    and the white cat came from the house buried in the sand and waited for you, drenched and shivering on the sand
    â€œâ€¦ and you came out of the sea, Ligeia…”
    out of the cold water, Elizabeth, with the black arms of the octopus twined around your own arms and your nude breasts. You stretched a hand and the cat moved to you and you lifted it up and placed it on top of your head and slowly, illuminated by a rose and ocher light that revealed all of the serene, almost static contours of your brown and blond figure crowned by a cat, you walked to