A Change of Skin by Carlos Fuentes

ship, and once you were there, if you needed words, you left them for daylight or the ocean or books. Words were not for night when you lay together very simply in the plain white room with the white beams and the white chimney. And you could think with great clarity then, clearly and subtly because wrapped in each other’s arms in that fishermen’s bed you believed that together you were holding, forming, the parts of a very brief past. Today you find yourselves carrying the empty yet heavy shell of many years together, yet these years seem briefer than that little past you were discovering and creating together then, a past that taught you how simple love can be, yet how difficult. Like certain poems in which the words are not veiled and have meaning in themselves, yet at the same time are bridges to a hidden and deeper meaning, so your nights then were a story that told a second story, silent and concealed, in the background, and everything, your life in the cabin on the beach, like the writing Javier was beginning to do—and his writing was why you had come there—had two realities. There is a moment, and for you and Javier it came then perhaps, in the warm white room scented with hyacinth and ocean salt and old wine soaked into wood, a moment when we can act for ourselves and in concert with others because what we are doing is both meaningless and meaningful, not so much significant in itself as in its revelation to us of the second reality that is sustained and concealed by what we do. Then we go back to fundamentals, and then only can we know that, like art, life is a struggle with what appears to be real, the stubborn world that makes demands upon us and restrains and represses us, a struggle to deform, reform, affirm, and negate reality until it becomes a truer reality, what we want and need. You and Javier came to Rhodes worn out by your struggle with the world, that was all. Perhaps you realized as you lay in his arms caressing his skin that never again would you possess the time and the clarity, the solitude and the closeness, to recover what each of you had lost in childhood in the great obligatory fusion of life lived with your families. And now you were alone together, yet joined. And it was that and not the mere sex, the commonplace of the century, not the physical communion alone, although that was full and complete, it was that which the two of you experienced in the heat and coolness of skin touching skin, hands interlaced, kisses endlessly prolonged and repeated. Alone and together, Elizabeth and Javier, in the night you made love to cease to be what you had been as children in your homes, what you had been hidden in the closet with your brother while your mother Becky looked for you to take you to dinner with the Mendelssohns, what Javier had been reading in the rainy patio under a naked light bulb buzzing with mosquitoes while Ofelia his mother spied upon him from the cracked bedroom door; what you had been mounted on your father’s shoulders to ride along Manhattan’s summer-blue streets to the Hudson; what he had been holding Raúl’s hand and walking a Mexico City that on Sunday was thronged with organ-grinders and bored servant women. To cease to be what you had been, to become what you were. And you would never be sure, although those nights you had lived that certainty, whether like you Javier was denying the appearances of love that make it a semblant echo of the relationships we have with everyone. You told yourself that he was, for he never kissed you in public, never showed you off to others, never moved close to you simply to be close to you, never took advantage of an idle moment to hold you in his arms and make love. Yet neither had he deformed your relationship by insisting, either in words or in his attitude, that it should have more meaning or value than it had sufficiently in itself. That was why your kisses could cover his body with full freedom and you