A Change of Skin

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgment

  1. An Impossible Feast

  2. In Body and Soul

  3. Visit Our Cellars

  Books by Carlos Fuentes

  Copyright

  To

  Aurora and Julio Cortázar

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  I wish to express my gratitude to the Society of Czech Writers and the Ministry of Foreign Relations of the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia for their assistance in arranging my visits—in 1961 and 1963—to the city of Terezin, and my conversations with survivors of the concentration camp and the old ghetto of Theresienstadt, as well as with the rabbis of the Jewish community of Prague.

  Carlos Fuentes

  1

  AN IMPOSSIBLE FEAST

  The Narrator ends his narration one September night in La Coupole and decides to employ the moth-eaten device of the epigraph. Seated at the next table, Alain Jouffroy hands him a copy of Le Temps d’un Livre:

  … comme si nous nous trouvions à la

  veille d’une improbable catastrophe ou

  au lendemain d’une impossible fête …

  That finished, the book begins. An impossible feast. And the Narrator, like the character of the ballad, before beginning to sing, first asks permission.

  Δ When the four of you entered today all you saw was the narrow filthy streets and the packed houses that are all alike, all of one story, all a blind wall with a too wide door of cracking wood, all daubed yellow and blue. Sure, I know, now and again you passed a dwelling that crowed money, an elegant home with windows that watch the street and boast those touches Mexicans find so irresistible, fancy wrought-iron grilles, projecting awnings of cross-ribbed canvas. But where, Isabel, were the good citizens who live behind those windows? Did they come out to welcome you to town, or did they leave that office to the dust and the filth, the misery crowded around you, the barefoot women with dark faces wrapped in shawls, the heavy pregnant bellies, the naked children, the packs of street dogs. Packs of mongrels that drift everywhere, go nowhere. Some yellow, some black, all lost, listless, strengthless, hungry, scratching at their infestations of sores and fleas, poking along gutters for garbage scraps, crippled, emaciated, with the slanted red and yellow eyes, dripping infection, that betray their coyote ancestry; white-nosed, hair worn off, bare hides splotched with scabs, torpid and purposeless as they whine the slow rhythm of this torpid purposeless town that once upon a time was the pantheon of an ancient Mexican world. Cholula, town of misery today, festering today, this Sabbath the eleventh of April, 1965, with diseased dogs and women with swollen wombs who pad the dust barefoot and laugh silently as they exchange their joking secrets and their secret jokes in voices that cannot be heard, words thinly inflected, fused chains of inaudible syllables.

  Hernán Cortés, man of Spain, observes the four Macehuale messengers who have come from Cholula bearing not provender but a dry reply: our caciques regret they’re unable to attend you today, Teul. They find themselves ailing, too unwell to travel here and present their gifts. Cortés listens while the four Macehuales mock him and the men of Tlaxcala, formerly his enemy, now his allies, frown and mutter. Beware of Cholula and the power of the city of Mexico, they warn. They offer ten thousand men at arms to accompany him. Cortés smiles. Only a thousand are needed. He will march echoing peace.

  Echoing peace, the Spaniards march, making camp at the end of the day beside the river only a short league from Cholula. Their Indians throw up huts for them and join them in standing watch. Sounds in the darkness, the rustle of invisible movement through brush. The cold night. And during the night, emissaries come out from the city with chickens and corn bread that they heap around the fire before Cortés’s hut. His hair rumpled and his shirt open at the collar, Cortés directs his interpreters to express thanks. Jerónimo de Aguilar: low boots, cotton trousers. Malinche, who is the captain’s mistress and guide as well as his interpreter, with her black tresses and ironic smile.

  You saw their children today, Isabel. The women with narrow foreheads, small teeth set in thick gums, hair in short braids, the prematurely old, shawl-wrapped young women whose bellies are big with the next child while the last holds to their hand or sleeps in their arms or rides behind wrapped in the shawl. The men who wear white shirts and drill pants and stiff varnished straw hats and pass slowly on bicycles or walk by with the tools of their labor in their hands. Youths whose skin is smooth chocolate but whose dark hair bristles. Fat men with thin ragged mustaches and worn boots and starched shirts. Soldiers with pistol in belt, cap acock, cheek or temple or throat lividly scarred by a knife gash, toothpick between teeth as they lean their shaved necks back against the columns of the arcade that faces the wide, empty, decaying plaza. The four of you visited that plaza, but you didn’t stay long. A garden gone dry. A cacophonic band in the arbor interminably grinding out cha-cha-chas. Didn’t you dig that cheerful little band, Pussycat? And when the band rested, didn’t you dig the plaza loudspeaker that was tuned in on a local radio disc jockey who played one twist record after another, dedicating each to a local señorita? You moved away past the dreadful statues that stand before the arcade: bronze Hidalgo with the standard of Guadalupe and the legend, Remember posterity; Juárez bathed in gold, his face solemn: He was shepherd, seer, and deliverer.

  At dawn the sacred city’s forty thousand white houses gleam. They move toward them, crossing the band of rich tillage land, densely populated, that lies around the city. Cortés, on horseback, observes water and pasture that might support great herds of cattle, but he also sees the army of beggars who have come out of the city and troop from dwelling to dwelling, marketplace to marketplace, a barefoot ragged multitude of deformities and outstretched hands, of mouths munching rotten ears of corn. The Spaniards leave behind the plots of chile peppers, corn and vegetables, agave plants, and approach the high-towered city. They are welcomed by packs of starving dogs. Cholula, pantheon city of four hundred towers, oratories, pyramids. From the towers and the esplanades and the plazas rise the sounds of trumpets and kettledrums. They are met now by a procession of caciques and priests wearing embroidered cotton robes cut like tunics and waving censers of fragrant copal. The censers are dropped when the priests see the thousand Tlaxcalans. No, they protest, we cannot allow our enemies to enter. Cortés orders the men from Tlaxcala to camp in the fields and proceeds with only his Spaniards, his guard of Cempoaltecans, and the artillery. The people of Cholula look down from the flat rooftops with amazement and laughter. The horses, those gray and sorrel monsters. The crossbows, the cannon, the firelocks. Kettledrums go on booming.

  Now, within the city, Cortés addresses them. They must abandon the worship of idols. They must cease human sacrifice. They must no longer eat the flesh of their fellow man. They must give up sodomy and their other degeneracies, and they must swear obedience to the King of Spain, as have so many other powerful caciques. The Cholulans reply: we will obey your king but we will not forsake our gods. Smiling, they conduct the captain and his tiny arm to great lodging halls.

  You walked the length of the paint-flaking arcade, Isabel, Franz beside you, Elizabeth and Javier following. Green, gray, pallid yellow. From a small grocery came smells of soap and stale cheese. Next door was an oyster bar where the owner had placed two aluminum tables and seven wicker chairs out in the open air
. But no one sat to eat the oysters in the wide tall jars of gray water. Officialdom occupies the central part of the arcade. The town hall, the treasury, the headquarters of the Third Battalion. Shyster fixers and go-betweens dressed in black. The distant, unworried, coldly smiling faces of the soldiers. Police headquarters behind a red mosaic. Then the general store of the Brothers García: brooms and brushes, sacks, cables, wire, mats, willow baskets, and a placard over the door: Without exception of persons, we do not want gossip.

  For two days there is peace. But on the third day food is no longer supplied. Old men come bringing only water and firewood and stating that no food is left. Montezuma’s latest envoy arrives and is conducted to Cortés, whom he advises, “Do not come to the city of Mexico.” There are throttled screams, a faint stench of blood as the Cholulans make sacrifices for victory; during the night seven children have been killed on the altar of Huitzilopochtli. Cortés orders continuous alert and has two priests from the great pyramid brought before him. Wearing robes of black-dyed cotton, the priests converse with Malinche, the princess whom the Spaniards call Doña Marina. They reveal Montezuma’s orders and the Cholulans’ secret plans. The Spaniards are to be seized and twenty are to be sacrificed on the pyramid by Montezuma’s direct command; he has sent the caciques promises, jewels, garments, a drum of purest gold. He has dispatched twenty thousand of his Aztecan warriors and they lie concealed in the brushy thickets and ravines around the city, even in houses within the city, their arms ready. Parapets have been raised to protect those who will fight from the rooftops. Deep holes have been dug in the streets and covered over with matting, to impede the Spaniards’ horses. Other streets have been barricaded.

  None of you spoke as you walked. You had been infected by the living death of the town, a deadness accentuated rather than opposed by the paradoxical racket of the loudspeaker in the plaza. In a bicycle shop three youths naked to the waist and smeared with grease exchanged whispered cracks and presented idiotic smiles as you passed. A smell of sulfur floated from the bathhouse where in the shadow a woman showed her rosy flanks while her open hand paddled a little boy who refused to step into the water. At the register of elections a painter was sweeping his brush across the façade, back and forth, back and forth, slowly erasing stroke by stroke the slogan of the old election, CROM WITH ADOLFO LÓPEZ MATEOS, and that of the recent one, CROM WITH GUSTAVO DÍAZ ORDAZ. The billiard parlor “Mother’s Day” empty behind its swinging doors with the notice: Minors prohibited. An old man in a collarless striped shirt and an unbuttoned vest slowly rubbed chalk on the tip of his cue and yawned, showing the black gaps in his teeth. At the corner, a man sat in a cane chair before the doctor’s office where silver letters on a black ground announce: Diseases of childhood, of the skin, venereal infections. Analyses of blood, urine, sputum, and feces.

  Cortés calls a council. One voice suggests that they take another route, proceed to the city of Mexico, only twenty leagues distant by way of Huejotzingo. Another advises coming to terms with the Cholulans, then return to Tlaxcala. A third points out that if the treachery of the Cholulans is countenanced, more treachery will follow. We must fight them, destroy them. Square-jawed Cortés decides to make a show of departure tomorrow. They pass the night armed and alert. The slow watches succeed one another, the torches burn out. Late at night, a toothless old woman creeps in and draws Doña Marina aside: Montezuma is bent on vengeance but Malinche can escape, if she will. The old woman will give her a son to marry and she will be safe. As for the Spaniards, they are doomed, everything has been prepared for their death. Malinche thanks her. She asks the old woman to wait while she collects her jewels and clothing. Instead, she goes to Cortés and tells him.

  At dawn the next morning the Spaniards are awakened by the echoing laughter of Cholula. The trap is ready; now it will be sprung. But Cortés and his lieutenants calmly make their way to the Great Pyramid, accompanied by part of the artillery. There he confronts the caciques and priests in the central patio of the temple. Kettles of salt, chile, and tomatoes have already been made ready for the flesh of the twenty Spaniards whose sacrifice has been ordered by Montezuma, Emperor of the Golden Chair. On horseback, Cortés quietly gives a command and the guns explode. Cholula’s caciques fall, their cotton tunics turning red; the black-clad priests fall. It is the signal for general battle. Whinnying horses charge. Plumed headdresses rise from the brush outside the city and advance running. A din of drums, whistles, conch horns, trumpets, kettledrums, cannon fire. The twang of crossbows. The crash of ballista stones. Screaming, armed with two-handed swords, protected by shields matted over with cotton, the thousand Tlaxcalans enter the city and advance smashing doors, setting fires, climbing to the rooftops to rape women while in the streets below the battle goes on man to man, hand to hand, feathered headdresses and iron helmets, humming arrows and darts, brown flesh and white flesh, cotton doublets and steel breastplates, ripped chinchilla cloaks and sweat-soaked wool, slings whirling fist-sized rocks, the cannon depressed to fire level across the flat ground, trumpets and whistles, copal incense burning in the temples, smashed casks of pulque drenching the streets with sticky alcohol that mixes with flowing blood, bags of grain slashed and spilling, dogs running swiftly and quietly, their muzzles greasy from bacon and white from cassava, burned arrow shafts in dark flesh, crash and shout, finally the red and white standards fall, the Tlaxcalans trot through burdened with captured gold, garments, cotton, salt, freed slaves swarm in naked crowds, Cholula reeks of fresh blood and eternal copal, of bacon, pulque, of guts. Cortés orders the towers and fortresses put to the torch. The Spaniards overturn and destroy the idols. In a shrine they hurriedly purify with a splatter of whitewash, they set up a cross. They free those the Cholulans had destined for sacrifice. The battle has lasted only five hours. Three thousand lie dead in the streets, in the ashes of the temples.

  “They are gods,” the word passes through the city. “They divine treachery and take their vengeance. No power can oppose them.”

  Thus the way to the city of Mexico, Great Tenochtitlán, is opened. Upon the ruins of Cholula are built four hundred churches, their foundations the razed cues, the platforms of the pyramids.

  I watched the four of you cross the plaza toward the church of San Francisco. The convent. The fortress surrounded by a wall that in olden times turned back Indian attacks. You, Elizabeth, saw me as you passed, but you pretended not to see me. But you, Pussycat, little Isabel, abruptly stopped, staring nervously. Fortunately the others were looking across the wide expanse of the esplanade and no one noticed. Three ash trees, two pines, and a stone cross. The church has a series of arches and a walled-up porter’s lodge. Like the wall of the surrounding fortress, it is battlemented. A yellow façade, the buttresses brown stone sprinkled with black. Javier pointed to the center of the façade: the favorite motif of the native sculptors, a serpent—the serpent, always the serpent, Elizabeth thought for the second time today—worked in stone surrounds the high window. The inscription is above the stone urns in relief over the entrance. Javier read it aloud:

  IHS

  SPORTAHECAPERTAIPECATORIBUSPENITENCIA

  Indians fill the atrium on the Day of Resurrection. They move forward slowly carrying their offerings: folded cloaks of rabbit skin and cotton embroidered with the names of Jesus and Mary, fringed, decorated with flowers and crosses. Before the wide steps they spread the garments and kneel. They lift the cloaks to their foreheads and bow. Silently they pray. They push their children forward so that they may show their offerings also and learn how to kneel. A great multitude, each patiently waiting his turn. They wait in silence, their faces dark, dressed in the remnants of their old ceremonial robes, many in everyday work clothing carefully washed and mended. Their feet are bare. Above their heads float the fumes of burning copal, the scent of roses.

  I lit a cigarette and followed your movements. You tried to avoid my eyes, Isabel. With your companions you studied the three yellow-painted bell-chapels along the length
of the old rampart. The simplicity of those chapels contrasts starkly with the rich ornamentation of the side entrance to the church. Innovation imposed upon the severity of the sixteenth century: the portal born again with mortised columns that are like sumptuous vines, born again in the Romantic spirit of the tombs which a century ago were ordered placed in this sacred ground by Cholula’s wealthy: crosses of stone made to look like wood, false garlands of stone, stone missives addressed to the departed. And behind, the dark buttresses and the high grille-protected windows and a file of children passing with their ruler-armed Catechists, shrill vioces repeating, “Three separate Persons, one true God.”

  The children learn to kneel. They offer copal and small crosses covered with gold, silver, feathers. They offer thick candles ornamented with green feathers and silver tracery, and they offer the stewed food they have brought in plates and bowls. Their parents lead forward living animals, pigs and lambs bound to poles. When they ascend to receive the benediction, they take the animals up in their arms and a wave of laughter spreads as one worshipper tries vainly to hold his piglet’s feet, squelch its squeals.

  You moved toward the royal chapel and I ground out my cigarette on the sole of my shoe. You turned, Isabel, pretending to admire the chapel but in reality looking to see if I was following; we both hid behind our dark glasses. In style the chapel originally was Arabic, with open arches in its seven naves where in olden times pageants were presented to the Indians gathered in the atrium, to teach them the myths of their new religion. Now the naves have been closed and the chapel has battlements, Gothic spires, gargoyle waterspouts, and all that remains of the original Arabic line, from the outside, is the mushroom cupolas set with square panes of old glass to illuminate the interior. The long chapel ends in a final tower, a yellow bell tower, which is entered by a door with two escutcheons: one portrays St. Francis’s arm crossed with the arm of an Indian, while the other gives a native view of the five wounds of Christ, strange wounds of blood and feathers, the largest like a fist of mulberry leaves and berries.