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CHAPTER 5 The Threats of Collapse in Cambio de piel (or Fuentes the Frail) This boy, at once so powerful and so weak . . . The present volume is intended as a modest monument, a broken column, to commemorate [his] life. —HONORÉ DE BALZAC, LOUIS LAMBERT (170, 184) BORBORYGMUS—Rumbling or gurgling noises produced by the movement of gas, fluid or both in the alimentary canal, and audible at a distance. —STEDMAN’S CONCISE MEDICAL DICTIONARY (3RD ED.) By all accounts Carlos Fuentes is a monument of Mexican letters, and indeed this grandiosity has become an integral and deliberate part of an aesthetic agenda of monumentality: his Balzacian ‘‘La edad del tiempo’’ [The Age of Time], which encompasses virtually his entire novelistic work, seeks to represent nothing less than all of history. As many observers have remarked, some admiringly and some quite critically, the ‘‘afán totalizante’’ [totalizing eagerness] of his work speaks volumes about his personal ambitions. A good place to explore this ‘‘totalizing eagerness’’ is his 1967 novel Cambio de piel, which the Mexican novelist Gustavo Sainz praised at the time as ‘‘el más alto monumento literario de la historia de México’’ [the highest literary monument in the history of Mexico] (quoted in Volpi, La imaginación, 66). Indeed, when this work appeared it represented an attempt to change the scope of Mexican letters. It was certainly bigger than anything Fuentes had tried before and marked an ambitious departure from his inward-looking narratives of the previous decades. Cambio de piel lays out a mythology that engages with the notion of origins and its consequences as well as with the systems of belief that arise from an awareness of those origins. It is heavy with the language of violent renewal (hence the title) and full of references to Aztec rituals of sacrifice and renovation as well as to the Holocaust. This heavy subject matter is leavened with a cloying awareness of popular culture, a playful and highly ornate prose, repetitive and allusive. The frame narrative takes place in April 1965, on Palm Sunday: we see a group traveling on holiday by car from Mexico City to Veracruz. The group’s car breaks down in the ancient city of Cholula, an important religious site since pre-Hispanic times and also the site of Hernán Cortés’s massacre of 1519. The main character, Javier, is a middle-aged bureaucrat and failed writer who has been struggling for years to finish his grand opus, Pandora’s Box, and is now trapped in a deadening job. He is married to Elizabeth, an American Jew whom he met while studying in New York before the war. They are accompanied on their trip by Isabel, a young and liberated upper-class Mexican girl who is a student of Javier’s, and Franz, a Sudeten German who hides a Nazi past. The two couples have been engaged in some bedhopping, and the story line plays with the various symmetries thereof. The narrator, Freddy Lambert, is a questionably omniscient figure who appears to be privy to the foursome’s innermost thoughts and histories and has apparently been intimate with both female characters. He is currently stalking the foursome along with a ragtag group of international hipsters, possibly a rock band, called the Monks. Freddy writes his story from a mental institution , addressing his prose primarily to the two women but mostly to Elizabeth. In his account of the prehistories of each of the characters and of the setting, Freddy takes narrative excursions to Hernán Cortés’s massacre of the Cholulans in 1519, Argentina, the Greek island of Falaraki , prewar New York and Prague, and the Nazi death camp at Terezin. Toward the end of the story the Monks stage a mock trial for the travelers , acting out the parts of Javier, Elizabeth, and the others to humorous effect. In the process they accuse Javier of weakness but ultimately condemn Franz to death for his war crimes, for it appears that Franz was the chief architect of Terezin. Late that night the four travelers, on a dare, enter the tunnels that honeycomb the Pre-Columbian pyramid of Cholula, the largest pyramid in the world. From the outside the pyramid resembles a mountain topped by a Catholic church, and in Fuentes’s fiction it becomes an ominous metaphor for the overlapping structures that pervade the novel: a Catholic sanctuary on top of a preColumbian place of immolation, joined by a common function...

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