A Change of Skin

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I wish to express my gratitude to the Society of Czech Writers and the Ministry of Foreign Relations of the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia for their assistance in arranging my visits — in 1961 and 1963—to the city of Terezin, and my conversations with survivors of the concentration camp and the old ghetto of Theresienstadt, as well as with the rabbis of the Jewish community of Prague.

Carlos Fuentes

The Narrator ends his narration one September night in La Coupole and decides to employ the moth-eaten device of the epigraph. Seated at the next table, Alain Jouffroy hands him a copy of Le Temps d’un Livre:

… comme si nous nous trouvions à la

veille d’une improbable catastrophe ou

au lendemain d’une impossible fête …

That finished, the book begins. An impossible feast. And the Narrator, like the character of the ballad, before beginning to sing, first asks permission.

Δ When the four of you entered today all you saw was the narrow filthy streets and the packed houses that are all alike, all of one story, all a blind wall with a too wide door of cracking wood, all daubed yellow and blue. Sure, I know, now and again you passed a dwelling that crowed money, an elegant home with windows that watch the street and boast those touches Mexicans find so irresistible, fancy wrought-iron grilles, projecting awnings of cross-ribbed canvas. But where, Isabel, were the good citizens who live behind those windows? Did they come out to welcome you to town, or did they leave that office to the dust and the filth, the misery crowded around you, the barefoot women with dark faces wrapped in shawls, the heavy pregnant bellies, the naked children, the packs of street dogs. Packs of mongrels that drift everywhere, go nowhere.

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