A Change of Skin Read Online Free PDF Page B

transparent act, you say silently. Well, let her cry until his pants are soaked, if she wants to. God knows who can understand her. And now he, just as transparent, is touching my neck and trying to tease me into looking back, but I won’t do it. He wants me to turn and see him pawing her, letting her embrace him, kiss him, young, weak, young with the intuitive perversity of innocence, another woman, his little Isabel. I won’t look back at them. I will keep my eyes straight ahead on the white line that separates traffic and proclaims that if you cross it you risk an accident, you chance death itself. A white line that will not end until we reach the sea.
    â€œHave a cookie, Franz?”
    He shook his head. You took one of the cookies and it crunched in your mouth. You held the small cellophane-wrapped package behind your head. “Want a cookie back there?”
    â€œWhat are they?” said Javier.
    â€œChocolate. Don’t be afraid, they’re from Sanborns. Especially baked for gringo stomachs.” You laughed and waved the package around.
    â€œHow nicely Yankees offer everything,” said Javier. “Crumbs for beggars.”
    â€œNow, now, please.” You made a face of mock disapproval. “Please don’t start your Yankee-baiting. Javier is like all Mexicans. They speak badly of gringos but they imitate us in everything. Pure envy.” You tapped his hand lightly and withdrew the package. “Are you sure, Franz?”
    Franz shook his head. The Merry Widow Waltz ended and the announcer began a commercial about a new subdivision. You snapped off the radio. All of you were silent for a time as the Volkswagen passed fields cultivated with rice and the other cereals that grow in the shadows of Mexico’s volcanoes. But soon fertility, always isolated and unconvincing in this dry land, was left behind. The car began to climb a graveled road with small thirsty trees on both sides. Franz braked and stopped near the edge of a great cliff. You all got out and stretched your cramped, twitchy legs and brushed off crumbs and smoothed your wrinkled clothing. Before you lay the undulating immensity of the valley. Every tone of green from the pale washed green of young corn to the intense chrome-green of sugar cane and the dry, dead, straw-brown green of land that has been worn out or forgotten. And above, quick clouds in the Mexican sky that is and has to be incredibly beautiful as a kind of compensation for the waste and hopelessness of the earth it arches. Like your famous Greek sea, Elizabeth. There are lands that left to themselves would not endure a day: they must have the mirror of the sky—Mexico—or the sea—Greece. Quick eye-blinks of light and shadow as the small clouds now concealed, now revealed Mexico’s sun. Sun and shadow and silence combined to pattern the valley in moving checks of light and darkness, to sculpture the hills and depressions, to end by defining, at the jagged mountainous limit of the horizon, the reciprocity between a land that thrusts itself up in walls and peaks, and a sky that sags upon those natural accidents. Rotund small hills. High volcanoes. Dry craters. And surrounding everything the mass and violence of the mountains, which at this hour were clear, not far from the eye and the hand but already, in the farthest distance, beginning to haze toward the transparency of afternoon.
    Isabel stood beside your husband. Her bare arm was just touching his arm. She was trembling slightly and in that faint movement Javier, always subtle and wary, could detect her woman’s urge to fuse her beauty with the natural beauty spread before you, to make nature her accomplice first in love, then in possessiveness, and finally in her need to dominate. Javier, who forever walks the wrong way, turned his back on the scene and on Isabel too and she crossed her arm below her breasts and let the other arm hang, the fingers moving nervously on her thigh