Free A Change of Skin by Carlos Fuentes Page B

bathroom and walk across the squeaky boards of the bedroom, he rises again. You fall on the bed. You have been in that cheap room only two hours and yet you have already found two fleas fat with blood. The two splotches where you crushed them smear the wall above the bed.
    â€œWe should have gone straight through to Veracruz, Javier.”
    â€œIt wasn’t I who insisted on seeing the ruins. For my part…”
    â€œAnd that story of yours bores me terribly.”
    He watches you stretch across the bed, and he thinks that, despite everything, your waist is still as flexible as a reed. What reed? It would be a pedantry, he tells himself, to remember its scientific name. Nevertheless, he murmurs, hoping that you do not hear him, “Phragmites communis.” Well, Dragoness, man does not live by bread alone, and especially Javier doesn’t. He commands himself again to be silent but already and automatically is giving the old definition: “Un roseau pensant…”
    â€œI could tell some stories too, if I wanted to,” you go on. You are face down across the bed and you let your head hang over one side, your feet over the other. The coverlet is white, here and there stained with yellow.
    â€œJavier, please take a Kleenex and wipe away those two fleas I squashed.”
    Blood runs toward your head and swells the veins of your temples and forehead and neck. You let your shoes fall from your tired feet. You wriggle your toes as if they were fingers on a keyboard.
    â€œOh, if I wanted to, I could tell stories that would bore you too.”
    Javier fiddles with the bronze curtain rod from which hang the muslin curtains that cover the glass-paned door.
    â€œJavier, it’s smelly in here. Haven’t you noticed? Doesn’t it bother you? Why don’t you go and complain to the manager.”
    â€œThe picturesque usually smells a bit. Don’t worry. Some day there will be a Cholula-Hilton.”
    The pressure of blood in your head begins to make you dizzy. And the squashed fleas are still there on the wall. Again you close your eyes. “For example, I could tell the story of Elena.”
    â€œElena?”
    You raise your head and look at him as if surprised.
    â€œElena, of course. Elena. Don’t you remember the beach at Falaraki? The colored pebbles? The figs Elena sold? The hot, sun-rotted figs that she brought in a bucket and sold to sunbathers sprawled out on the sand under the sun that would end by rotting them too, the…”
    â€œThe sun, always the sun.” While you are speaking, he closes the shutters of the door. “Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve always been looking for more sun.”
    â€œWhy close the shutters at six in the afternoon?”
    â€œBecause it is a public hall and you are lying there with your skirt up to your ass.”
    You laugh a bubbling laugh and Javier closes his eyes in the darkness. He is wrong about the hall, Dragoness. It is not open to the public. It’s a closed gallery that surrounds the four sides of a patio roofed with glass panes set in an iron spider web with dust gathered in its angles and crotches.
    Javier folds down the coverlet and the sheets and in silence lies on his stomach. You are seated with your legs drawn up, your knees holding the covers high. Although Javier tries to keep his face turned away, your woman’s smells come to him: cologne water, menstruation, fatigue. With a fold of the sheet over his face, he murmurs: “Men from the States are more sensitive to smells than we are. They are aseptic. Every odor seems aggressive to them. Offends them, irritates them. Here, we’re immune.”
    He removes the sheet from his face and out of the corner of his eye peeks at you as you sit smoking with open eyes that are pensive and distant. He covers his face again and again smells your smells.
    Just a deterioratin’ little boy, Mama-Dragoness.
    He believes, when he wakes, that he