A Change of Skin Read Online Free PDF

said slowly.
    â€œYes, isn’t it?” At last you turned and looked back at them. But Isabel’s head was not resting on your husband’s thighs now. She was sitting up powdering her nose.
    â€œHow much is the toll?”
    â€œI believe it’s five pesos.”
    â€œI don’t have change.”
    â€œI do. Here, take it.”
    â€œThen to the right?”
    â€œYes. I think there’s an arrow you follow.”
    â€œTurn on the radio again, Franz.”
    â€œThere, hold it, Franz. I like that.”
    â€œWhat waltz is it?”
    â€œThe Merry Widow,” said Franz.
    And while the four of you sped along a winding road exchanging your pleasantries, I was traveling the superhighway to Puebla leaning comfortably back and looking over certain tourists’ pamphlets that are not passed out by travel agencies because a visit to such places gives a commission to no one. Still, one has to be informed. To know for example that the little fortress is entered by a stone door above the arch of which hangs a single yellow electric bulb, and on either side of the door is a window. Grass grows above from a thin scab of earth, as if the fortress were a cellar or a tomb or the buried gallery of a mine, and chimneys emerge factorylike from the grass. First is the administrative section with its flat ceilings: a reception room, the guards’ room, a hall with racks for rifles, then the Commandant’s office. To one side, the room where clothing is stored. Beyond, the garage, then the first yard, and at last you enter the prison proper. A brick wall encloses the yard. Around everything is a deep ditch bottomed with mud.
    You move the mirror in front of your face and let your gray eyes study themselves and you notice that Javier is talking again, saying that perhaps simply to know that one loves is enough for the woman but it forces him, the man, to create something, a vision of the woman to correspond to his love. You turn and rest your arm on the back of the seat and stare fixedly at Javier, afraid of what he may say next, imploring him silently not to go on, not to repeat everything, to leave at least some of those words you know by heart well hidden, known only to himself and to you. You interrupt: “How many hours before we get to the sea?” and you try to think of some subject that may interest and divert him, a subject broad, deep, long enough to last all the way to the sea.
    A village is passing and deliberately you turn away from the window and lift a hand to your eyes because you do not want to see it. One more village exactly like every other you have seen. None of them different from the first you saw when you first came to Mexico: all motionless wretched moribund. And you fool yourself thinking that was why you came: to discover romantic Mexico, your husband’s homeland. If only he then, so handsome, so poetic, had resembled his country. Its misery, rags, sickness.
    That is one face of Mexico. The other is the tawdry face of a land that has given up its poverty in order to achieve only vulgarity, only to ape the lousy States. So that in coming here you escaped nothing. You remained a captive. No, Dragoness, I’m not telling you. I’m just asking.
    Isabel lies on Javier’s knees. He feels her warm moist breath through the thin cloth of his trousers and he is thinking, you can be sure, that in truth the appeal of this young woman is based on a catlike mimesis (Am I doing well, Dragoness? Have I caught him?) that may be her most significant charm as well as her most obvious one. He holds up his hands and passes his fingers through his gray, thinning hair and with a sigh reflects that the tenderness Isabel believes is enough for herself and for a lover too might, if he were younger, be enough even for him. And she does not understand that it isn’t enough. She does not know him.
    Isabel cries, thinking that you and Franz can’t hear her. What a childish,