A Change of Skin Read Free Page A

atrium smile as they watch the pageant portraying God’s judgment against the first mortals, the couple who had no umbilicus. Huge rocks, trees, the whole garden of man’s original felicity has been constructed between the chapel’s arches. Golden birds with real feathers perch among the branches. Parrots chatter, monkeys wink at the fields of Eden. In the center stands the tree of life with its golden apples. A paradise of April and May. Turkeys strut across the scene shaking their combs and red mantles. Children dressed as animals scamper. Adam and Eve appear in their pristine innocence. Eve alluringly fondles Adam, tries to make him respond to her, pleads, but he rejects her with exaggerated dread. She eats from the tree, offers him the apple, and he finally consents to bite it. For a moment the audience laugh, but their faces fill with terror as mighty God and his angels descend. God orders Adam and Eve clothed. The angels instruct Adam in cultivation of the earth and give Eve a spindle for spinning thread. Then the fallen pair are driven out into the world and the watching Indians weep while the angels face them and sing:
    Why did you eat,
    Thou first wife,
    Why did you taste
    The forbidden fruit?
    I’ll give you back
    Your time.
    An old Lincoln convertible stopped before the plaza arcade and its driver, a blond, bearded youth, set the hand brake and opened the door. Beside him a girl wearing black pants, black sweater, and black boots stretched and yawned and the Negro youth in a charro sombrero who was on the right kissed her neck and laughed. A tall boy wearing a leather jacket jumped from the back seat to the stone-paved street, his guitar in his hand. The second girl, almost hidden behind her mirror-opaque dark glasses, the turned-up lapels of her coat, and the wide brims of her hat, stood and removed her glasses and looked around at Cholula. She wore no makeup, her eyebrows were shaved, her lips were almost invisible under very pale lipstick. She wrinkled her eyes and offered a hand to the young man still seated. Unlike the others, he was dressed conventionally, a jacket of maroon tweed, gray flannel trousers. He closed the yellow portfolio on his knees and said quietly, “Some day I’ll have to persuade them.”
    â€œIt doesn’t matter,” said the girl in black. She shrugged her shoulders and stood there as if she already owned the arcade.
    â€œOh, but it does,” said the youth with the portfolio. “Music is inside. There is no need to wear a disguise. The true rebel dresses as I do.”
    â€œLook, man, we’ll scare him more this way.” The tall youth ran a mussing hand through his lank hair.
    â€œIs he here?” said the girl with the shaved eyebrows. In the intense sunlight she was as defenseless as an albino.
    â€œYou can bet your life,” said the Negro.
    In the street, the girl in black turned on her transistor radio and looked for a station.
    The bearded driver of the car took out a white crayon and wrote across the windshield: PROPERTY OF THE MONKS , and the girl in black found her station and the tall youth wiped sweat from his forehead and began to strum his guitar in accompaniment to the music from the radio. All six of them joined arms and walked away under the arcade, singing:
    I’ll give you back your time.
    But I could hear only the whimpering and sobbing, soft, fused, that I knew came from the trunk of their car.

2
    IN BODY AND SOUL
    Both are absent. “I wasn’t there”: quotation from a letter directed by the Narrator to his German grandfather, dead in 1880, a Lassalle socialist expelled from the Reich by the Iron Chancellor. The letter is not received. A change of skin. Mutating genes. “I wasn’t there.” Therefore the Narrator quotes Tristan Tzara: “Tout ce qu’on regarde est faux,” in order to save himself from the Museum, from Perfection, and to participate in a personal Happening, a