The Orange Tree

Apollo and the Whores

17:45

AS the Delta DC-9 begins its descent into the Acapulco airport, the instructions are announced by a voice so peaceful and polite that it seems hypocritical. Why don’t they tell us this is the most dangerous part of the flight — the landing? Up above, there are never any accidents. Unless the increasing congestion ends up multiplying midair collisions. I’m from California, so I know that Ronald Reagan cut off aid to the mentally ill, who then wound up in jails, as they did during the Middle Ages. He also devastated the air traffic controllers’ union. Maybe we’ll go back to traveling in caravels, while the planes smash into each other in the skies.

The dangerous part is taking off and landing. But for once, I wish the plane would go into a nosedive, giving the lie to that sugar-pie voice caressing us like a glove and urging us not to smoke, to fasten our seat belts, and to straighten our seat backs. All the while, I long for a drama that would restore me, at least for an instant, to celebrity status and shout in every headline in every paper: FAMOUS HOLLYWOOD STAR DIES IN FATAL CRASH OVER ACAPULCO BAY.

Instead, the bay itself, as if it were sorry for me, unable even to laugh at me, flashes its afternoon postcard image up to the plane. The bad thing is that this glory of scattered gold, this cocktail of orange, lemon, and grape is identical to the immutable sunset waiting for me at the Universal set, always prepared to be a sunset, the background to a duel, a serenade, or a final kiss. I prefer a catnap, even if I know the recurring dream I’ve been having these past few months will return. In it, someone places a mask over my immobile face and a feminine voice whispers into my ear: This is the face of your ideal beauty.

18:30

All planes smell alike. Plastic, disinfectant, metal, stagnant air, reheated food, recycled microbes. Air in a tube. There must be an invisible factory worth millions dedicated to making airplane air, canning it, and selling it to all airlines. But now I’m the first at the locked door of the immobile machine, waiting to escape like an animal from a laboratory squirrel cage with all my baggage in one hand — an airline bag with the few shirts, underwear, sandals, and shaving kit I need, a comfortable airline bag I always carry with me, with two outside pockets where I can carelessly stick a copy of the Los Angeles Times, my plane tickets, my passport, and Yeats’s poems. The Times announces, to the relief of the entire world, the defeat of Bush the wimp in the presidential election; the tickets, roundtrip in first class, LAX-ACA-LAX; the passport, a name, Vincente Valera, born in Dublin, Irish Republic, on September 11, 1937, naturalized U.S. citizen at the age of seven, black hair, bushy brows, five feet ten inches tall, one hundred and fifty pounds, no scars. In case of death, notify Cindy Valera, 1321 Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA. And the underlined poem says:

… and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep

The door opens, and I am the first to receive the blast of blazing air, the contrast with the cold but stagnant air of the plane. The afflicted air of the cabin, an air that seems bereaved. A furnace blast in the face is Acapulco’s greeting as I walk down the gangway, an air that burns but is alive, that smells of mangrove, of rotten bananas, of melted tar. Everything the interior of the plane denies, isolates, renders aseptic. But this radical change of temperature, as I instinctively grab the metal handrail on the gangway in order not to trip, brings me another memory I’d like to avoid. My burning hand when I received the Oscar for best actor of the year. My burning hand and the frozen little doll, as if I were being handed a statuette made of ice that would never melt.

Ever since that Oscar presentation, my hand has been afraid of the cold; it seeks heat, touch, a moist, burning, hiding place. So it’s only natural I’m here this afternoon, in the tropics, eager for contact with everything that burns.

19:40

As I register in the hotel, I order a boat so I can go out fishing the next morning. The receptionist asks me if I will be sailing it alone, and I answer that I will. “At what time?” “I don’t know, sometime after 6:00 a.m. would be fine, the important thing is that I want a ketch or if you don’t have that then a small sloop or a yawl.” The receptionist is a dark-skinned little man with almost Oriental features. He looks as if he were dusted with coffee, but his high cheekbones shine, and in his slanty eyes there is a touch of doubt about his own mask. Should he be obsequious to the point of being vile or abjectly mocking? His mustache, as fine as the feet of a fly, gives him away. But his white, starched guayabera shirt hides a torso I judge to be strong, muscular, used to swimming. Maybe he’s an ex-Quebrada cliff diver. You don’t usually associate a man tied to a reception desk with adventures on the high seas. A hidden part of his nature overwhelms him. “Yes,” he says mellifluously, “there is a ketch, but its name is The Two Americas.”

“So what?”

“Well, many North Americans get annoyed.”

“It doesn’t matter to me what the boat’s name is.”

“It bothers them to know there is more than one America.”

“Just so it doesn’t sink.” I tried to be friendly, smiled.

“You aren’t the only Americans, see? All of us on this continent are Americans.”

“Okay, just give me my key. You’re right.”

“The United States of America. That’s a joke. You aren’t the only states, and you aren’t the only Americans.”

“If you’d just give me the key, please.”

“‘The United States of America’ isn’t a name; it’s a description, a false description … a joke.”

“The key,” I said, grabbing him violently by the shoulders.

“There are two Americas, yours and ours,” he stammered. “Would you like us to carry up your bags?”

I picked up my airline bag and smiled.

“Excuse me. I hope you won’t tell on me.” That was the last thing he said.

“I can’t contain myself,” I heard him say, like a refrain hanging in the heat of the reception area, as I walked away with the key in one hand and my bag in the other.

20:00

I’m up to my neck in a lighted pool more decked out with gardenias than a funeral parlor. I was tempted to call the desk: Get these gardenias out of the pool. But the idea of having to deal with the little man in the guayabera made me forget about it. Besides, what the hell, the maid who turned down my bed (scattering gardenia petals all over it, of course) stood staring at the illuminated pool and the flowers for quite a while. She hugged the towels against her pink apron, and her stare was so melancholy, so self-absorbed that it would have been a personal betrayal to ask them to take away what certainly delighted her.

“Don’t you have flowers in your house?”

She was a limp little Indian girl, a bit lost in the labyrinth of the hotel. She answered me in an Indian language, saying she was sorry. She turned away from me and quickly went to the bathroom to hang the towels. Then I heard how she softly closed the door to the room. By then I was already in the water, my chin leaning on the edge of the pool and the book of poems getting soaked by the little waves my body inevitably made. It upset me to read the continuation of Yeats’s poem: “How many loved your moments of glad grace, / And loved your beauty with love false or true.” I preferred to look at the nocturnal lights of Acapulco, which so cleverly disguise the double ugliness of this place. The façade of skyscrapers on the beach hides the poverty of the poor neighborhoods. The night hides both, returning everything to the firmament, the stars, and the beginning of the world. Who am I to talk, dreaming every night that someone puts a mask on me and says: This is your ideal beauty. You will never be more handsome than you are tonight. Never again?

20:30

Naked, I got out of the pool and threw myself onto the pink-sheeted bed. I fell asleep, but this time I didn’t dream that a woman came over to put a mask on me. My dream, unfortunately, was much more realistic, more biographical. Again and again, I walked up onto a speaker’s platform. Like a squirrel in a laboratory cage. A dream can be an endless staircase, nothing more. On the platform, Mister Smiles was waiting for me. Not Faces. Teeth. They smiled at me and congratulated me. They handed me the golden statuette. The Oscar. I don’t know what I said. The usual thing. I thanked everyone, from my first girlfriend to my dog. I forgot the pharmacist, the president of my bank, and the guy who sold me a used Porsche without ripping me off. The old German machine is still dominating California freeways, and if I weren’t in Acapulco, you’d probably find me searching for impossible answers at 120 m.p.h., heading toward the San Fernando Valley and an accident, physical or sexual. Which is to say, a worthwhile encounter. Instead, I came to Acapulco running away from a dream, and I’m calling the desk to tell them to have a ketch I can sail alone ready for me tomorrow. The receptionist did not exactly inspire my confidence. Did I want fishing tackle? I tell him yes, even if it’s not exactly true, just so everything will seem normal. Of course, fishing tackle. Tomorrow at 6:00 a.m. I’m going out fishing. That’s why I came. My ketch will be ready at the Yacht Club pier. Its name is The Two Americas. Everything should look normal.

22:05

I’m driving a pink jeep along the mountain highway. You can’t get lost, the hotel parking lot attendant tells me. There’s nothing until you get to the discotheque lights, you can’t miss it. He doesn’t know that the night is much more densely populated than the day, that it’s much more visual than the sun, because the night is like a gigantic Cinema-Scope screen on which you can project anything that comes into your mind.

I’m fighting the powerful breathing of the tropics, which at night becomes drunker and crazier as the rest of the world calms down. Apollo and his chariot of light have sunk into the sea. The jeep’s motor can’t drown out the cicadas, the frogs, the fireflies, or the mosquitoes. I make out other lights on the mountain that aren’t electric; they’re eyes — emerald, silver, and blood-colored eyes. Foxes, coyotes, solitary animals — like me — who feel the need for a little company — like me.

I accelerate and, thanks to the intermediary aid of my rearview mirror, project onto the screen of my mental night the picture that won me an Oscar, the first prize given by the academy to an American actor in a foreign film. I conquer the darkness with the unforgettable images of Leonello Padovani’s last film, in which I had the honor to have the lead. And the extraordinary thing is that the images of the film that I conjure up like something luminous are images of night and fog.

The film is set in northern Italy. Everything happens at night or on cloudy days. A poor man can’t stand his hardworking, good wife any longer. He doesn’t know what to do, but he’s convinced he should cut his ties with his routine life and expose himself to chance. One winter night, he abandons his wife. But he takes the only thing he really loves in his house, his nine-year-old daughter. He doesn’t take clothing or money. Only the girl. But along with her, unintentionally, he brings a past and a habit. The child follows naturally, as if any decision that affects her is neither good nor bad but natural. Especially if it’s her father who makes the decision. He wishes she would understand that he’s taken her along because he loves her. He doesn’t understand that it’s possible to love naturally, obediently. For him, love is a matter of will. He confuses the love of the heart with the love of the mind. The girl doesn’t. She loves and obeys her father without having to force herself.

For a few days, the two of them wander aimlessly through that landscape of fog and cold, relying on charity but subjected to the father’s inability to tell the child why they’ve run away and why he loves her. What does she think? Will she abandon her father? Or will she go on with him to the end? What is solitude? The absence of company or a shared abandonment? Padovani provides no answers. Each member of the audience has to provide his own.

I felt that for the only time in my life my acting was in the hands of an artist. I felt that the film went along discovering itself at the same time that he, debilitated, suffering, and, ultimately, dying, filmed it. The difference between theater and film is that movies are made in a choppy way, without continuity. Padovani managed to turn that technique into artistic creation. He transformed the obligatory method in filming — the end at the beginning, the beginning at the end — into a means of searching out the picture. Besides, in each pause between scenes, in each take, in each save, and even in each coffee break, he forced me to search out myself. It wasn’t just a matter of memorizing lines and saying that tomorrow I’ve got to do from page such-and-such to this other page. It meant searching myself out as an actor and as a man, and what I discovered is that this is what a character is: someone who exists and who acts at the same time.

In my hand, I hold the hot hand of the girl who was my audience, free to decide to abandon me or to go on with me.

Then I held the Oscar statuette in my hand, and that was ice cold.

A Short Time Later

I’m dancing by myself surrounded by a thousand persons jamming the floor of this fantastic discotheque, which is floating over Acapulco Bay like one of the hanging gardens of Babylon in one of those extravaganzas that made Cecil B. deMille famous. I never saw anything like it, because European and American discotheques are usually enclosed, surrounded by cement and gasoline. They isolate you completely, but they can also turn into death traps. Here, on the other hand, the discotheque floats over the sea, a glass bubble with a roof of stars that segue into the real Pacific firmament.

I’m not dancing with anyone, and my solitude doesn’t matter to anyone. Most of the people here are between seventeen and twenty-five. I’m past fifty-five. I don’t have complexes anymore. I dance alone, not actively conscious, my eyes closed, smiling, unhappy that I don’t have fifteen-year-olds who would do me the favor of identifying the music I’m hearing and dancing to. However, I’m shamefully satisfied when some song from my own youth—“Michelle” by the Beatles, “Satisfaction” by the Stones, or “Monday Monday” by the Mamas and the Papas — sneaks into the endless rock tape whose energy spreads from the song you can dance to while hugging someone to acid rock, which demands individual, savage frenzy — the return to the tribe, the clan, the oldest and most forgotten blood ties.

An image of Ireland, the land of my fathers, crosses before my black eyes. A valley inundated with dew. A bay, which in reality is a valley flooded by the catastrophes of time. And in the center a white island where the wild ducks gather. A white chestnut forest, white, white, all smothered in its own whiteness.

I close my eyes in order to feel all that, and when I suddenly open them I’m no longer alone. My wife is dancing with me, created by my eyes (my eyes: my desire), staring at my outfit, my Gucci loafers, criticizing me for not wearing socks, and I’m telling her that in Italy no one wears socks in summer with loafers, to which she replies that I look sloppy. What? My beige slacks, my pink shirt that looks (I only realize it now) like an ad for the hotel where I’m staying? And she says to me:

“Everything you know you learned in Italy, right?”

“No, you taught me everything.”

I say it trying to be agreeable, knowing it’s just an illusion on my part.

“You’re right. With me, you had your Hollywood career. A good career at that. You know what I mean: I mean good. You had a personality, a secure place, audiences knew who you were. You know what I mean: they knew who you were.”

“Come on, all I ever made were B films, don’t try to put one over on me or on yourself. I was typed as a hood, a gangster, the guy who always loses the girl.”

“Stop complaining. You kissed Susan Hayward, Janet Leigh, Lizabeth Scott … You probably even slept with them.”

“Cindy, Italy got me out of a rut.”

“You know what I mean? Audiences knew who you were. That’s what counts in this business.”

“What you mean is that I was character-typed.”

“Did you really go to bed with Lizabeth Scott?”

“All I ever did was offer them my arm to walk down one of those marble stairways. Universal had its own ideas about what the mansions of rich Americans look like. Marble stairways.”

“You always liked blondes.”

“Like you.”

“No, husky-voiced blondes like Lizabeth Scott.”

“I offered them my arm. They might have slipped.”

“Husky-voiced, blond, and with thick, black eyebrows, like yours and Lizabeth’s.”

“They would wear incredibly high heels so they wouldn’t look like midgets next to me. Or they’d stay one step above me. Stairs are indispensable to create illusions in movies. Just tricks, sweetheart. Like the kisses. You’re kissing Lizabeth Scott, but you’re thinking about the rent. And you know it. So don’t get jealous.”

“Audiences want something they can rely on, stupid. Audiences don’t want to see you in realistic dramas with Italian dubbing, unshaven, walking through the mud in the dark with a nine-year-old girl. Audiences want to see you with Susan Hayward, kissing her or slapping her around, whatever, but with Susan Hayward!”

“I won the Oscar, Cindy.”

“You mean you lost the Oscar. You never got another good part. You got too important for gangster parts in B movies. No one ever called you again for a great movie. But you’ve got your Oscar on the mantel. Keep it. You won’t have any other company than that gold-plated statuette. I wasn’t born to live with a has-been. I want a man who will be.”

I suspect that Cindy knew the lines in my pictures better than I did because she would repeat them from memory long after I’d forgotten them. She had a surprising way of slipping them into our real-life conversations. I knew that a script that’s been filmed is worth about as much as used toilet paper. You toss it and flush it. And you don’t bend over to see what’s at the bottom of the toilet bowl. She didn’t know that. For her, those despicable, stupid words—“I wasn’t born to live with a has-been. I want a man who will be”—are part of her ridiculous, messy unconscious. That film was never even made! The script ended up in a drawer, and she, the jerk, knows it by heart and repeats it as if it were something like “Sleep no more, Macbeth has murdered sleep”! Cindy’s unconscious is like her periods: a filthy, uncontrollable bleeding (unless, God forbid, she was pregnant, which I never wanted with her). But she’s right about something, the bitch. The Oscar can be a curse, a perverse mascot, a bad omen. Just like Macbeth, which is supposed to put the evil eye on you. Instead of Oscar, why don’t they call it the Macbeth. I joined company with Luise Rainer and Louise Fletcher, both condemned by the Oscar. But my name’s not Louis. Louis Loser. My name’s Vince Valera.

You’re a black Irishman, Cindy told me when I fell in love with her. She was platinum-blond then and identical to everything I’ve seen today from the heavens. As if I were Apollo and she the firmament lit up and traversed by my light. Cindy, identical to the tropical nightfall. Cindy, identical to the pool filled with flowers. My wife identical to a hillside glittering with lights. My love like a crystal discotheque. My beloved Cindy from the starry sky. She loved me so much she wouldn’t let me see her. Your name is Vince Valera. You’re a black Irishman, which is to say, a shipwrecked sailor. A descendant of the Spanish sailors washed up on the coast of Ireland after the disaster of the Invincible Armada. A son of squalls and foam, offspring of the wind and the rocks. A Latin from the north, Vince, dark-skinned, with the blackest, thickest eyebrows in the world (they say they’re my main feature), your black, shiny hair, and the perfection of your body, Vince, as smooth as an Apollo, with no hair on your chest or legs, shiny as black marble or an ancient gladiator, strong as the breastplate of a Roman legionnaire, muscular as a Spanish guerrilla, but with more hair in your armpits and pubis than any man I’ve ever known before, we women notice those things, Vince, the hair that creeps down from your armpits and creeps up from your sex, and our hairs mix when we make love, yours black, mine blond, don’t be anything but my lover, Vince, don’t kiss anyone else, don’t screw anyone else, only belong to your Cindy, Cinderella, make me feel I’m in a fairy tale.

Then she said this to me:

“You can only be a hood, a gangster, at most a private eye, you’re part of film noir, don’t stop being the dark villain, Vince my love, go on being the cursed Apollo of B movies forever…”

I couldn’t stand her anymore. I opened my eyes and grabbed her by the arms the way I’d grabbed the receptionist in the guayabera, right there in the middle of the dancing and the colored lights I let my violence run wild when I saw how, no matter how tightly I shut my eyes, the lights gave Cindy a fluid face, now green, now red, as if her jealousy and rage were nothing more than descriptions of the play of lights in a discotheque, and I slapped her a few times while the woman screamed and I told her that picture was my salvation! Understand? That picture gave me a past, I don’t have any past that isn’t my Italian movie! Don’t take the only film that’s really mine away from me! Don’t you understand that only once in my life was I a dream with soft look and shadows deep, and millions of people loved me, loved my moments of glad grace and my beauty, false or true…?

The woman screamed, and the captains wearing blue blazers, white trousers, and white hair separated me from the fat, fiftyish woman wrapped in a sarong, shocked, who swore: “I was dancing alone, I don’t have any hang-ups, I came to have fun, it isn’t my fault I’m divorced, this man hit me, I just came over to him because I saw he was as lonely as I was!” And when the Acapulco maître d’s calmed everyone down and opened bottles of Dom Pérignon and arranged a lambada and the music and lights rapidly changed, I was led firmly out of the place, into the night, to my jeep, and my muttered excuses, first for these poor devils who didn’t deserve them, then immediately for myself, excuse me, excuse yourself, any question makes me crazy: don’t you see that I know nothing about myself, if someone asks me why I am what I am or do this or that, because I no longer am or do, I get mad, I punch reporters, I break their cameras. They don’t know that I have a past and that one single film gave it to me. They insist on giving me a future and blame me because I don’t look for it. I have no right to be what I was. In Hollywood that’s the worst sin, to have been, to be a has-been like Gertrude the Dinosaur or the dodo bird or the Edsel, a figure of fun, a wax figure. All that matters to them is what will be, the promise, the next project, the deals necessary to get the next picture shot.

Where is my Italian picture?

They’re right. It’s shown in art houses. At best it’s a videocassette that sells badly. Classic European film in black and white. Bargain: $5.45. Less than a ticket to a real movie. Cindy’s right.

This place is a jewel box, a fucked-up little jewel box filled with fucked-up jewels.

After midnight

Maggie’s, next to Condesa beach, is a tiny piece of England outside of England. The British flag, the Union Jack, is used to decorate everything, beginning at the entrance, which announces:

BRITONS!

THIS IS YOUR HOME AWAY FROM HOME!

even including the tablecloths, the napkins, and the beer mugs, although the mugs also have pictures of Charles and Diana painted on them. I’m sitting at the bar, and the bartender explains that there’s so much money in Europe that even bank employees can take a charter flight and spend a week in Acapulco.

That much is clear. They have the pallor of Devonshire cream melting on a scone. I remember, when I made a picture in London, that as soon as the first rays of sunlight appeared in May, bank employees would emerge from their banks and roll up their trousers so the sun would toast their skinny, pale calves, which for the preceding months had not known any light. London is a lake of shadows: darkness in the streets, the apartments, the offices, the train stations, the Underground tunnels, the malls … The Acapulco sun must seem a miracle to them, a blasphemy, and a temptation. Some of the girls drinking at Maggie’s haven’t even had time to change out of the dark clothing they wear when they do business in Barclays Bank or Marks & Spencer.

The barman stares at me, not knowing where I come from, and, since he sees I’m dark-skinned, he becomes suspiciously animated.

“How many Mexicans do we have here? One, two … counting you, there are five of us.”

He says he hopes there will be seven Mexicans in Maggie’s Bar, his seven dwarfs he says. He serves me an insipid margarita, then a sour bellini, and confesses (I’m drinking but he’s getting drunk) that the erotic dream of his childhood was Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Actually, he winks at me, it was more than erotic, it was a sadoerotic fantasy. He says he imagined himself as Snow White — he laughs insinuatingly — waiting for the little dwarfs to abuse her. All those leather belts, those boots, those nails and hammers, how I wanted to ask all those little people, Crucify me, little guys, or let’s play Saint Sebastian, wham!

I smiled and said that the good thing about Snow White is that we can talk about the movie without revealing our ages because they bring it out again every two or three years. He didn’t understand what I said, but he did get annoyed because I said it in English and fouled up his national arithmetic.

I went out for a stroll along the Costera, invaded now by bars, Polynesian restaurants, hamburger joints, Kentucky Frieds, and Tastee-Freeze. In the third world, people must think Colonel Sanders is a hero of the Civil War: his round face, white and bearded, his benevolent spectacles — you see his face more often around here than the Divine Face of Jesus Christ. More Colonel than Savior! I say to myself, a little drunk now because of the bad combo the sadomasochauvinist bartender at Maggie’s served me. I stop off for a minute at Carlos ‘n’ Charlie’s. It’s decorated with old movie posters, and on one of them I find my name, very tiny, very far down in the order of credits. This for sure is no fairy tale. This ages you for sure, bartender. I’m fifty-five and really in need of a fairy tale. Instead, I get a glass of warm tequila and think about a frozen Oscar.

1:22

The kid sitting next to me in the jeep told me how to get to the garden illuminated by Chinese lanterns and shook hands with me when we got out. Only then did I realize that my small guide looked like me: he had bushy brows, was smooth-faced, and had sharply delineated features despite the fact that he was ten or twelve years old. It’s hard to tell how old people are in the tropics: there are twelve-year-old mothers and grandmothers of thirty, old people without a single gray hair and children with no teeth left. In the case of my little companion, what was left of his baby fat had been sliced off long ago by a calendar whose pages were steel knives. In the eyes of that Acapulco baby, time went by with no respect for childhood, old age, or any other age.

In those black eyes, I saw a time that had no consideration for individuality. That’s a fear I have at times, when I escape from my own more or less protected singularity, which I’ve constructed, I think, carefully and patiently, when I face a bereft humanity whose circumstances neither differentiate nor respect anyone. That’s why I got so much out of being directed by Leonello Padovani. In my role, I found the proper balance, the exact quality that put me between this Mexican bereavement I fear so much and the American overprotection I despise so much. It was possible to be oneself with others, a myself with the themselves. I learned that then and don’t want to lose it. Cindy doesn’t understand. She associates success with protection; Latin Americans associate it with unhappiness. In Europe, it was possible to be something else, something like a collective subject in a shared intimacy.

The boy led me to the whorehouse where I’d asked him to bring me. This boy: How many tons of deodorant, refrigerators stuffed with frozen food, cereals with fiber, Jacuzzis, Porsches, and VHS systems would he need to protect himself from the hopeless fate devoid of individual handholds already in his eyes? If I could take him away, living in real life my screen character, take him by the hand to the roads of pure chance, freedom, encounters … The way things are, he’s going to need much more than the ten dollars I gave him at the entrance to the bordello named the Fairy Tale.

Immediately after

Palapa palms are the Gothic cathedrals of the tropics. Anything can take place beneath the protective umbrella of their dry, dusty leaves: protection from the sun, sanctuary from the night, subverted space. The palapa of the Fairy Tale is a perfect if overflowing circle of humanity (men only) around a dance floor where girls between fifteen and twenty years old are dancing naked, breasts exposed, with sometimes only a bikini bottom covering their sex. Sometimes even less than that: what they call a string bikini in Rio de Janeiro — dental floss. Sometimes nothing. And sometimes, at most, a coquettish silk shawl draped around their hips when they serve drinks to the throng of young men.

Few tourists. Almost all the customers look as though they come from Acapulco. I’ve been seeing them since I got to the airport. They’re almost like old friends. I saw them driving buses and taxis, loading luggage, loitering at the doors to pharmacies or the balconies of clinics devoted to venereal diseases. I saw them in bank offices and hotels. I will have to make Western man’s effort at differentiation when faced by third-world masses. Chinese, Africans, Mexicans, Iranians: they’re all the same for the gringos, hard to tell one from another. And I tell myself we must be the same for them. But not me. I’m a black Irishman, remember? The Apollo of B films. At the age of fifty-five, I can trick myself out to look forty-five. A real rejuvenator. That’s what everyone tells me, and I’ve ended up believing it. Besides, in movies my youth is preserved forever. I shouldn’t belie it, even if it brings me to an early grave.

I laugh, fix up my hair a bit, roll up my sleeves a bit, have a burning desire for a little mustache, even if it were as ridiculous as the one the hotel receptionist has; I try to imitate a look of oily lust so I can mix in, lose myself in the macho clientele shouting clothes, clothes, and ass, ass, and who stretch out their hands to touch the girls dancing to a salsa; but one voice dominates everything, the shouts, the music, the dancing of the naked girls on the dance floor: You can look, you can listen, you can even sniff, but around here you can’t touch anything.

I make out a woman sitting under a Count Dracula light opposite the sound equipment, protected by a shield of plastic and Plexiglas. She wears a pearl necklace and a velvet bustier with a white, raised collar, like a cloud or a parachute, behind her neck. She’s just like Snow White. She protects herself in front with the plastic shield and covers her back with the stiff, high collar. The fact is she dominates the scene the way she dominates her head, which is covered with hairpins and looks like a porcupine. She must be afraid that not every hair’s in place.

“Welcome to a night hotter than last night,” she declaims. “You can look, you can listen, you can even sniff, but around here you can’t touch anything.”

A drunken guffaw, and a potbellied man rushes out onto the dance floor expressly to touch a dancer. Everyone shouts in protest: the rules of the establishment — a gentlemen’s agreement — are being broken. All Snow White has to do is speak calmly into the microphone, “Security, security,” and a phalanx of bare-chested masked men in wrestling tights disposes of the drunk in two or three quick movements. He’s rushed out amid the laughter and wisecracks of the young men present.

Snow White invites a man to step out onto the floor and sit down on a little straw chair. The spotlight falls on me. Snow White shouts, Lights, lights on the guy in pink; The guy in pink they all shout, pushing me onto the floor, the too low chair where I sit down and receive instructions: You just look, listen, and sniff, but please don’t touch.

No one may touch the girl, as svelte and sinuous as a cobra, with traits of all races, Chinese, African, and Indian, and perhaps even Danish. Every movement of her undulating dance around me, my chair, my nervous hands, my open arms, my powerless legs (all movements I don’t know how to control) invites me to do that which is forbidden: touch her, give a face to this woman, distinguish her from her faces without face: Chinese, African, Indian, all the same among themselves but not her; she brings her hands closer with their long fingers, a diabolic extension of her small, slave-girl body, closer to my face, as if she were using her fingers to draw me new features, my unexpected face, my ideal mask …

I take her by the wrist, I bring her mouth to mine, the music stops, silence takes over, no one says anything, no one protests as they did before, the bouncers don’t grab me and throw me out on my ear, Snow White approaches slowly, abandoning her little platform, and slowly separates us, softly, almost like a tender mother who discovers the first kiss exchanged by an innocent brother and sister.

(Her getup is grotesque: she’s potbellied, and her miniskirt reveals fat knees and clear-plastic sandals. She has trouble getting the skirt to stay put on her gut; the same with the velvet bustier that squashes her tits flat. Only the white collar, like a cloud, detracts from her being anchored to the earth and creates the illusion that she’s floating.)

Just before dawn

I’m sitting next to Snow White. I try to convince her: “They should all come with me.” When she shakes her head, I’m afraid her hairpins are going to fly into my face, like the arrows in the face of Saint Sebastian, evoked by the gay bartender at Maggie’s. “No, my dancers aren’t for sale. If someone told you this was a whorehouse, they put one over on you.” “Are you telling me your girls don’t screw? What is this, the School of the Sacred Heart of Jesus?” “What do you know about nun schools when you’re a heretical gringo?” “I’m Irish: Do they fuck or don’t they?” “No, they get cocaine from their lover-boys, very late, when the party’s over and the sun’s coming up.” “How long does the pleasure last them?”

Snow White raises the volume of the music, and the men still there (quite a few) pay the girls to dance on their tables. The bids keep going higher, as if it were a Christie’s auction, to see a little more, but what the girls give most is their own supreme position: standing, but bent forward, the ass toward the customer, they reveal the slit between the cheeks but then suddenly shake them again, attracting toward their perfect smoothness the real attention, the real temptation, the promised pleasure.

When they finish dancing, the girls wash up in four transparent shower stalls, strategically placed so the public can watch them comfortably, Snow White explains to me in the most precise terms. Four glass shower stalls, four svelte girls, gorgeous, perfect, soaping themselves up, rinsing themselves off, like Venus from the sea. The foam bubbles up and concentrates in their hair; the water runs between their breasts in two streams, the lather pausing on their nipples before pouring down toward their navel, then, in one rush, gathering, captured and happy, in the pubis. A fat guy, asleep against the glass partition, is missing the best part of the show. Everyone laughs, and Snow White proclaims from her plastic and Plexiglas cage: “NO TO PROSTITUTION, NO TO SEX FOR MONEY. MY MAIDS CAN GET AIDS.”

In Los Angeles, I’d just read García Márquez’s bestseller. Now I’m thinking about love in the times of AIDS. No matter. I didn’t come here to take precautions.

6:47

I told them I wanted nothing from them, that I was just offering them a little pleasure sail. Get a little sun, Snow White told them, let a little light into the place where the sun doesn’t shine, assholes. No one said anything about money. I only asked that there be seven, including Snow White. But she wasn’t going for it. I’m the Wicked Stepmother, she said with an ineffable smile, I’m the one who offers the poisoned apple. But I, generous to a fault, insist on assigning her the role of heroine.

The day began gloriously, and the seven I picked (Snow White insisted on being the Wicked Stepmother and not giving up her own role; I insisted on calling her Snow White) were delighted to go out for a sail, with no demands, just to get a little tan, to kick back a little, practice napping, be somewhere else … That’s what Snow White told them to bring them around. I only asked for a minute to pick up my things at the hotel. I didn’t give up my room. I threw the few things I brought with me in my bag, making sure I had my shaving kit, my toothpaste and toothbrush, deodorant. The girls would look divine in the sunlight, despite a sleepless night and the dancing. I could tell I looked gray, unshaven, bloodshot, dry skin. The different drinks I’d had gathered into a fist inside my head, hammering at it. The girls saw me and probably said to themselves, We won’t have any problems with this wreck. I barely had time to look at myself in the mirror. With repulsion, I thought about the coffee-colored receptionist in his guayabera. He wasn’t there. How right they were to let him out only at night; sunlight would destroy him.

8:00

They may have begun to see me differently when I showed them how much I knew about handling a beautiful ketch with fixed stabilizer, twin masts, boom, and two jibs. Thirty-six feet long, a beam of nine feet, and a thirty-foot displacement, it cut a fine figure leaving the docking area on its way to the bay, running on the auxiliary motor, with my firm hand on the tiller to take it out of Acapulco. Then, leaving control of the helm, I passed it to Snow White, who almost fainted with shock, amid the giggles of her ladies-in-waiting, so I could raise the mainsail and then the mizzen, all with precise movements, tying cables, setting bitts to wind other cables around them, tying down the boom with a clove hitch and the jibs with a couple of half hitches.

I clamped down a cable that looked loose.

I made everything fast and shipshape.

The ketch was ready for any adventure. A sensitive craft, faithful, that followed every movement of the person who loved her and sailed her well, it was the most beautiful ornament of a splendid day, the kind only the Mexican Pacific knows how to give. Like a poem I learned as a child, anyone who’s seen a sea like this and still wants to get married can only do it with someone like the sea itself.

Ireland boils in my veins. Even more the black Ireland of a descendant of Spain, a castaway it seems, Vincente Valera is my name, but my ambitions are much more modest than those in that poem of my childhood. Vincente Valera is my name, and the name of my ketch, to the boorish satisfaction of the hotel receptionist, is The Two Americas.

Snow White and her seven girl-dwarfs stare at me in admiration, and if I don’t marry the sea, I’ll have to settle for going to bed with them. All seven? Two Americas, one Apollo, and seven whores? What a salad!

9:16

I took the helm again. I think the girls had never seen one of their customers carry out maneuvers they’d only seen done by the boatmen in the port. The morning was cool and blazing hot at the same time: the brilliant, dry heat redeems everything in Acapulco — the ugliness of the buildings, the filth on the streets, the misery of the people amid the tourist boom, the blind pretense of the rich that there are no poor here, all inexplicable, all unjust, all, probably, after all is said and done, irredeemable.

In the eyes of the seven dwarfs, I saw something like an immediate admiration, which did not demand from the guy cast as the macho more than a series of strong, well-defined acts to take control of their feminine veneration. Of course, I tried much too hard. My head was splitting, I felt I needed a bath, an aspirin, and a bed more than I needed all this work; but when we were out to sea, far from the corrupt fingernail of the bay, the Sun and the Pacific, that glorious husband and wife team that overcomes all unfaithful storms and even the most hurricane-plagued divorces, embraced all of us, the eight women and me, in an irresistible way. I think we all had the same idea: if we don’t give ourselves over to the sea and the sun this morning, we don’t deserve to be alive.

The minibar on The Two Americas was well stocked, and there were also some platters of Manchego cheese and Spanish ham along with sliced jicamas covered with powdered chile. No sooner did the girls discover them than they devoured them, all feeding each other, while Snow White shrugged her shoulders and poured some drinks. She came over to me, holding out a glass. I should have said no, but she insisted on drawing a face in the air, on top of my own, as if she’d guessed what my dream was, as if she were trying to hypnotize me. So I left her with the tiller again, whereupon she again became nervous. “Just keep going straight ahead. There are no trees on the road,” I said laughing, both of us laughing, creating a strange link between the two of us.

I had an idea. I wanted to teach the girls something. I thanked my lucky stars that the hotel people had put a rod and reel on the ketch. I announced to them that I was going to teach them to fish. They all laughed out loud and began to make jokes. One after the other, they played word games, the custom in both Mexico City and Los Angeles, sister cities where language is used more for self-defense than for communication, more to conceal than to reveal. The wordplay digresses, camouflages, hides: from an innocent word you try to squeeze a filthy word, so that everything comes to have a double meaning or, if you’re lucky, a triple meaning.

I say they laughed a lot and that their collective voice was like the sound of birds. But their jokes were crude, physiological, more suitable for vultures than for nightingales. The fishing rod was the object of myriad phallic metaphors; the hook became a dick, the bait a pussy, flying fish became flying fucks, and soon every squid, ray, oyster, or snapper in the vast sea metamorphosed into every imaginable sexual object and word. After a night of giving themselves over to the energy of their bodies, it was as if the girls had sweated out all their corporeal juices. Now their heads were lubricated, and they could dedicate themselves to the art of language. But it was foul language, which produced a chain reaction of hilarity among them and, at the same time, seemed to affirm the fact that they were in some way superior beings, owners of language as opposed to the owners of money, castrators of the “decent” language of the master, the boss, the millionaire, the tourist, the customer.

I should probably confess that my poor Anglo-Saxon similes, extremely brutal, were no competition for the metaphoric pyrotechnics of the gang of seven girls, loosened up in their collective giggle. Their camaraderie and their instant commitment to joking were contagious, but I stopped listening to them, oh my sad condition, your sad cuntdition? cunt, runt, grunt, cuntinue please, yes give me a hand here, a handjob here? a handkerchief? you need a fingerbowl, no, a fingerfuck, Dallas, Texas, not Dullass but good ass, good as gold, no Gold Finger, oooh! not a Cold Finger, oh oh seven, you mean up up six, six is a lot for a teeny little twat, well I give tit for twat. Not one pun unturned.

While they fooled around, I copped a few feels. The pretext, as I said, was to teach them how to fish, to use the rod and hook, and to do it, I stood behind each one and taught her to cast, carefully, so no one would get hurt. I hugged each one, sitting each of them on my lap, teaching them to fish, my hands around each waist, on each thigh, and on each and every sex, feeling in short order the excitement of my own when I dared to rub their nipples and then to slide my hand under their bikini top, or into the bikini bottom and put my finger full of their juices into the mouth of …

I began to sort them out, my seven dwarfs, as they began to get hot and asked me to teach them to fish: Now it’s my turn; No it’s mine, you cut in, bitch.

No. This one must be Grumpy because she resisted my advances, saying No, I’m not like them, now you’ve got me pissed off, get your hands off me. Another had to be Dopey because she only laughed nervously when I felt her up and pretended not to notice, without being able to control the comic movement of her ears. The third must be Sleepy because she pretended I wasn’t touching her and acted the part of the tourist while I stuck my finger up her wet, excited vagina, as if that could tell me the temperature of the other six and announce the tidal wave of sex that was rolling in.

I had identified Doc, who simply looked very serious, while Bashful wouldn’t come close, as if she was afraid of me, as if she’d met me before.

Sneezy was the one who drove me crazy, the first one to sink her nose into my pubic hair and begin to sneeze as if she were coming down with hay fever. And the seventh, who would be the most hardworking and careful, unbuttoned my shirt and stretched me out naked on the deck of the ketch that Snow White was steering in complete ignorance, without daring to ask: What do I do, now what do I do?

Without even daring to admonish her wards: You can look, you can listen, you can even sniff, but around here you can’t touch anything.

They touched everything I had, the seven demonic dwarfs of Acapulco. The seven whores of the marvelous Apollo who had outdone himself, who had completely realized his capabilities in that moment when I lost the notion, which I’d just attained, of the individuality of each one of them. They were only what I had said they were: dopey, dreamy, sneezy, diligent, and wise, enterprise and sensuality. They were obscure angers and palpitating desires, all together. They lacked faces, and I imagined my own under the sun, under the shadows that covered me, naked on a ketch that was heading straight for the middle of the ocean, farther and farther (Snow White never changes course, doesn’t protest, doesn’t say a word, an argonaut, a whoronaut, an argoinvalid paralyzed by the sea, the breeze, the sun, the adventure, the danger, our increasing distance from terra firma), and I only know that seven eighteen-year-olds (on the average) are making love to me.

I see seven asses that sit on my face and offer themselves to my touch and my mouth. I want to be honored and to notice differences, to individualize. I want to glorify them in that culminating moment. I don’t want them to feel bought. I don’t want them to think they’re part of a pack. I want them to feel the way I felt when I got the Oscar, king of the world, and they, my seven dwarfs, my queens. Asses as hard as medlars and smooth as peaches. Asses as vibrant as eels and as patient as squid. Asses that protect the dark essence, the smooth, slight hair of the Indian woman. The impossible protection of the wide hips, the impossibly slim waists, the thighs of water and oil that surround, defend, and protect the sacred place, the sanctuary of the vagina, my seven asses this morning which I smell, touch, desire, and individualize.

Seven cunts seven. Cunt the flesh of a freshly peeled papaya, rose-colored, untouched, like a carnivorous, perfumed pearl. Palpitating cunt of a wounded pup, just separated from its mother, pierced by the damned arrow of an intrusive hunter. Cunt of a pure spring, water that flows, without obstacles, without remorse, without concern for its destiny in the sea that will drown it like a salt gallows. Night cunt poised to spring in full daylight, kept in reserve for the weakness of the day, vaginal night in reserve for the day when the sun no longer shines and the woman’s sex should occupy the center of the universe. Fourth cunt of the Acapulco girls, fourth, fortress, cunt like a furnished fortress, warm, inviting, expecting its perfect guest. Fifth cunt, the fifth the best, a metallic cunt with veins that refuse to be mined and give up their gold, asking the miner that he first die of suffocation in the heart of the tunnel. Glorious cunt of eucharistic libations, sixth, sexth, religious cunt, Irish, black, what would my waspish WASP wife Cindy say, whiteanglosaxonprotestant who tries to hand me her boring genealogical charts: You don’t know how to enjoy yourself, Vince, unless you think you’re sinning, miserable celluloid Apollo, inflammable, perishable, take me as a woman, as a human being, as your equal, not as a symbol of your spiritual odyssey, son of a bitch, I’m not your communion or your confession, I’m your woman, I’m another human being, why the hell did I ever marry an Irish Catholic who believes in the freedom of sin and not in the predestination of the flesh!

I flee from that: I want to enjoy the final cunt, the seventh seal, the cunt without qualities, the sexual purgatory without heaven or hell, but with my name tattooed on the entrance to the vagina, Vince Valera, conquered Apollo: the seven on my dick, the seven sucking me, one after another, one sucks, the next sticks her finger up my ass, the third kisses my balls, the fourth shoves her cunt in my mouth, the fifth sucks my tits, the sixth licks my toes; the seventh, the seventh rubs her huge tits all over my body, tells the others what to do, bounces her breasts in my eyes, drips them on my balls, glides a nipple over the head of my dick, and then each one sucks me. But not only them: the sun, the sea, the motor of The Two Americas—they all suck me.

The impassive stare of Snow White sucks me as she continues in her useless pose with her hands on the tiller. Uselessly, because all the rules of her kingdom are being broken and she can do nothing but stare at us with an indifferent absence which must be that of God Himself when He sees us revert to the condemned but indispensable condition of beasts.

Uselessly, because The Two Americas has already attained its inertia and only goes farther into the sea, just as my sex goes farther into just one, just one of the seven holes offered this morning to my absolute surrender, the demand that I be given everything, that nothing be held back, that I not find a single pretext to be here or flee, marry or divorce, sign a contract or aspire to a prize, impress a boss, smile to a banker, seduce a columnist as we have dinner at Spago’s, nothing, nothing more than this: the simultaneous ascent to hell and heaven, the unleashed palpitation of my chest, the awareness that I drank too much, that I idiotically did not sleep, my heart gallops and my stomach twists, I haven’t shaved, my cheeks scrape the divine ass of Dopey as the thorns scrape Christ’s face, the sun falls on us like lead rain, the breeze stops, my pain becomes ubiquitous, the sound of the motor disappears, the sun goes out, my body runs out like water, the laughter of the seven dissipates, there are no longer seven holes, there is only one hole into which I weightlessly fall, there are not seven nights, there is only one night, I softly enter it without vacillation, predestined as my wife, Cindy, wanted, without a heart or a head now, pure erect penis, pure phallus of Apollo in the mouth of a bordello muse who caresses my face and whispers in my ear: “This is your ideal face. You’ll never have a better one. This is the face for your death, Daddy-o.”

12:01

I just died, when the sun passed its zenith. I just died screwing. I was just killed, aboard The Two Americas, by the biggest blow job in the history of sex.

12:05

“What are we going to do?” asks Snow White, her hands wrapped tightly around the tiller, as if our not capsizing really depended on it, not daring to sweat, her hands more rigid than my sex, which refuses to die with me.

My dick is still stiff, expecting the second coming, but in reality, I realize, it only predicts, with its excessive hardness, the total stiffness, the rigor mortis that will soon take control of my body, which is still limp, tanned, and unshaven. Is every man’s secret dream to have a permanent erection, the thing doctors call priapism? Well, God’s just given me one, as much an act of grace as giving military genius to a conquistador, a poetic star to a writer, a good ear to a musician, language to a translator …

The dream into which I sink tells me many things, and one of them is this: Vince Valera, you no longer have to prove your masculinity on screen. You’ve proven it in life. And now, in death, you are going to be the hardest, most unbendable slice of cold cuts that ever descended from an Irish mother. Only the worms from County Tyrone will be able to deal with you!

Shit, I tell myself, I’m talking about my body from the outside. The voice of the Lord is right. Inside, what’s going to happen to me inside? Everything that happens to me is passive, a final consequence, a last sigh. My nails and hair keep on growing. This is the first thing I know for a fact: I listen to it. The gastric juices flow, but the blood begins to stagnate, finding its eternal inlets and ponds. They are the puddles of eternity. I fear postmortem flatulence. I fear it, and, of course, I convoke it. There’s nothing like thinking about a fart to make you fart. My dead body farts.

The seven dwarfs laugh, some openly, some in sorrow, with a hand over their mouths, others holding their noses, whew! anybody know what’s wrong with this roughrider, his cattleprod’s ready but his saddle’s sure smelly, and you-know-who just sneezes and Sleepy stretches out next to me, cuddles with me awhile, and asks me if I’m sleepy, and another starts to play games, lullaby is fuckaby, gootchy-gootchy-coo is stick your fingers in my goo, maybe your baby needs a nice meat pacifier, well, cuddle or curdle, look at this guy, he gets it up even when he’s sleeping, so what’s so weird about that? Who says he’s sleeping anyway, look at those big old eyes of his, he looks like an owl, he licks and you howl? No, sticks in a hole, is there room for one more? There’s room for seven whores, get on the stick, Doris, they all shout at the one I called Doc, trot along my pony, up the prick and down, upupupupdowndowndown, I think when the Divine Doris got on my prick I came posthumously.

They all laughed when Doris dismounted, and their jokes chorused the contraction of my penis, the disinflation. “That match won’t set off any dynamite now, looks like he’s shot his wad.” Then Doris started singing a belated reveille: “There’s a monkey in the grass / with a bullet up his ass / getitoutgetitoutgetitout,” provoking another chorus of laughter, except for the boss lady, Snow White, who looked at me and at them very seriously.

“What are we going to do?” she repeated, a look of controlled fear on her face.

“Let him take his siesta,” laughed Doris Doc sympathetically.

“He’s all tuckered out because he worked overtime,” said Sleepy.

“Let’s see if I can make him sneeze,” said Sneezy, brushing her bush over my nose.

“My tickles are better, they can raise the dead,” said big-eared Dopey, scratching the soles of my feet.

They all laughed and started scratching my ribs, my knees, my sex, and under my chin.

I didn’t laugh. I swear I didn’t. I didn’t tremble.

The laughs and jokes began to fade.

Their hands got hotter and hotter. But they were touching a body that got colder and colder despite the midday sun burning through my open eyes.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Doris.

“No, what are we going to do?” repeated Snow White, as she had at the beginning.

12:20

As long as they don’t throw me into the water. That’s all I ask. That they don’t toss me to the sharks.

12:39

“Never saw a dead man before?” Snow White shouted to them. And as if her words convoked all the powers in the world in order to make up for my sudden absence from life, the sun redoubled its energy and flowed over our heads like melted gold. The wind fell until it simply disappeared, forcing the women to pant instead of sigh as they assessed, awkwardly and with difficulty, their situation.

But if it was hard for them to breathe because the breeze died down, I gave thanks that the winds weren’t threatening the ketch, although, as I already said, all nature underwent a brusque change the moment I died of ecstasy. The wind may have died with me, but in the far distance thunderheads were gathering. And the ocean, just when Snow White in a reaction of pure fear cut off the motor with a nervous movement, suddenly grew rough. I told myself that this was the natural result of a rapid suspension of movement. The boat began to roll with each new wave: the sea’s turmoil seemed to rise from the deepest part of the Pacific, which is where we were, four hours after leaving the Yacht Club. We were surrounded by solitude but anchored in a turbulence that seemed dedicated only to us, to The Two Americas and her crew.

“Never saw a dead man before?” repeated Snow White with an exasperated tremor. “Think we’re never going to die, that we’ll always live happily ever after, that we, just because we’re us, are the only ones who will never die?”

Captured in a silence and a calm more terrifying than any squall, the seven women said nothing, became pensive, and I, stretched out on the deck, really began to tell them apart. Did I have to die in order to individualize them, de-Mexicanize them, de-thirdworldize them?

I stared at them fixedly and almost came back to life in surprise: in death, I could clearly see the images that passed through the minds of the living. I understood it this way, directly and simply: This was my new, my real power. This was death’s gift to me. Was its name immortality? Snow White asked her question—“Never saw a dead man before?”—and Sleepy metamorphosed into what her real name was when she awoke to life, María de la Gracia. And I, thanks to my new powers, saw in her eyes a dead child in a little box painted white in a shack where the candles were stuck into Coca-Cola bottles.

Bashful’s real name was Soledad, and the death that passed through her eyes was that of an old man with open eyes who thanked her for accompanying him to the end, because dying alone is the most terrible thing in the world.

Doc in reality was Doris, and I recognized her death because it took place in the Mexican part of Los Angeles. Doris, a knapsack on her back, was walking along with a little girl more beautiful than a Diego Rivera drawing. She was holding the little girl’s hand as they walked down a street lined with stone walls. Suddenly two street gangs started shooting at each other from opposite sides of the street. The knapsack and the books inside it saved Doris. The little sister — Lupe, Lupita, nobody sweeter — died instantly. In tears, Doris went down on her knees, and because of that the last bullet didn’t blow her brains out.

Never saw a dead man before? Sneezy’s name was Nicha (Dionisia). She grew up at her mother’s side in a whorehouse in the port of Acapulco. There was a big, central dance floor, crummy little lights, and neon beer signs. All that passes through her eyes when Snow White asks them if they’ve never seen a dead man before. Nicha pushes the sight of death aside with a vision of tangled mangroves and burned-out lights. She relives a long wait in one of the rooms surrounding the dance floor. There are three smells. The natural smell of the tropics, which are eternally rotting, and the disinfectant spray used to clean the floors, bed, and lavatory. But the third aroma is that of an orange tree that miraculously grows outside the little room and tries to poke a branch, a perfume, a flower, occasionally a fruit through the window to overwhelm the smells of rotting and disinfectant. She already knows she has to hide under the bed when her mom comes in with a man. She hears everything. That is her image of death. The memory of the orange tree saves her.

On the other hand, big-eared Dopey from time to time recalls a girl with the improbable name Dulces Nombres de Cristo — Sweet Names of Christ — which is she at the age of ten. She’s walking among unsleeping dogs and potholes filled with muddy water, among hundreds of buses standing like elephants in front of a river of cement, among hundreds of taxis that seem to besiege downtown Acapulco, duplicating the city with a squadron of motors. The taxi drivers wash their cabs at night for the next day’s work, while Dulces’s mother, drunk, her legs spread, laughs, sings, shrieks, and fans her cunt at the door to the cabaret.

What haven’t they seen? No, Grumpy’s mind is a blank. Through it pass only deaths in Technicolor, deaths I recognize. Movie dead men, gangsters, cowboys, dead men covered with ketchup. Her name’s Otilia, and she doesn’t allow a single real dead man into her head. But the last one, Happy, the hardest-working, whose name is Dolores, offers me a long vision of rivalries, always two men killing each other over her, killing each other over her with pistols, knives, clubs … These rivals for Dolores’s favor are buried up to the knees in the hard, imprisoning earth, the way the two men are in a famous picture by Goya. Where could Dolores have seen that picture? It seems inconceivable to me that she would have a Goya in her head. Could my vision be tricking me, am I fooling myself with everything I see? As if she obeyed an impulse from death (mine), the girl lights a cigarette with a match taken from a matchbox with the label “Classics” on it. She protects the flame with the box in order to light her cigarette. And there’s Goya’s terrible, black painting: on a matchbox. It’s the portrait of the bitterest fatality.

In the afternoon

These memories took more time than you might imagine. The chronology of memory in death is different from what it is in life, and the communication between the two consumes hours and (I still don’t know this) days. I’ll miss, I’m sure of it, this pause in memory. Because now practical problems take precedence over everything else.

I’m dead.

They admit it.

The first item then is what to do with me.

Dulces Nombres de Cristo reveals her dopiness when she asks that I be tossed overboard. “That way,” the savage says, “there won’t be any evidence of what happened.” I hate her and put a curse on her: I hope you’re locked up in an English asylum and fed porridge until you rot, bitch.

Otilia agrees energetically. “What happens if they catch us with this dead guy? We’re in the clinker, my dears. Nobody’s going to ask how it happened. We’re guilty. We were born guilty, don’t be jerks.”

A terrible murmur of approval grows. Dulces and Otilia grab my arms, and Nicha helps them out, taking hold of my ankles. Soledad joins in to speed up the operation. I feel the foam of the waves caressing my ankles.

Doris saves me. “Are you dumbbells or what? In a little while another boat’s going to pick us up. They’ll ask us what we’re doing alone in a yacht. Then they’ll ask if any of us know how to drive it. None of us does, right? Then they bring us back to Acapulco. They find out that the gringo hired this thing and hired us at the same time. Seven whores and their madam and a disappeared gringo, murdered or who knows what. That’s about when they’ll put us on ice, Otilia.”

They don’t drop me, either into the sea or back onto the hard deck, let it be said to their honor. They make me comfortable, with all due respect, on the bench that runs along the gunwale.

Snow White says Doris is right. Does anyone know how to drive one of these boats? Dolores asks if it’s the same as driving a car.

Later on

No, it isn’t the same. Stretched out on the bench, staring at the sky, I also see the trapeze of the boom sail set between the triangular sails of the jibs, properly raised, but which, because they’re not receiving either attention or (more important) nautical intention, will soon sag and fall, prematurely aged, wrinkled. Because a good sail knows the intentions of the sailor. A good hull is ready to obey even the slightest wish of a wise sailor. The absence of that seems to discourage the sails, which communicate it to the mast, which in turn trembles down to its base, where it joins the keel.

In other words, they don’t know what to do. The gasoline will run out. The boom sail and the jibs will be pushed by a soft tropical breeze. Each cough of the motor makes them shake with fear. Finally, when the sun disappears, the seven of them will huddle together. They will form a kind of medieval galliard dance (I made a costume movie in Italy about the plague in the thirteenth century), which will culminate with them hugging Snow White’s fat legs. With her eyes fixed on the darkened horizon, the owner of the Fairy Tale will not release the tiller of The Two Americas. Then the sun will sink into the sea, and the seven will whimper together, a deep, almost religious, wail.

I appropriate it. It’s my responsory, my requiem.

The night fell

Now, at night, I think about the fact that barely twenty-four hours ago I was swimming in a pool filled with flowers in a luxury hotel, thinking about where to go to have some fun. With my chin leaning on the edge of the pool, I read and tried to memorize a poem by William Butler Yeats that evokes past softness and the deep shadows of my eyes. And if the great modern poet of my homeland were to see me now, would he weep? I actually think he foresaw my fate (according to Leonello Padovani, a great poem is prophetic and communicates what we are going to be) when he wondered about those who loved my moments of glad grace and my beauty, with love false or true, and added: How many were they, how many? How many eyes, how many platonic lovers does appearing on screen grant you, when you stand in for Apollo in the modern mythology proffered by movies? Does the poet answer? Does he say something more? I try to recall the end of the poem, but in death my memory doesn’t respond. It’s stubbornly silent. I’m encouraged. Does it mean that with the poem unfinished, I still have a destiny to live out, an unfinished margin of my own life in death?

I’ve fornicated. I’ve died. I’ve discovered that dying means reading the minds of the living.

But my professional (not to say artistic) appetite is not so easily satisfied. Is this my stellar role? My seven producers here will decide that for me. The night scares them. They’re adrift. Both they and I know it. They’re afraid that if they start the motor it will hurl them on an uncontrollable, catastrophic course. They could, as Doris suggested, start it and dash off into the four points of the compass. Which one — north, south, east, west — brings them to shore first?

I don’t think that’s their problem. I may spend the night floating and staring at the stars, but what they’d like is to disappear from the night: the women, the stars. Solitude adrift gives them an absolute night without a roof, one that doesn’t belong to them, their usual lives. This night returns them to the helplessness they’ve only managed to escape through self-deception all through their short lives. Young and dumb. With just enough intelligence not to throw me to the fish. But without enough intelligence to let themselves be guided — not by the instruments that horrify them or the words of which they are ignorant (I look at them and think that thanks to these women technology once again becomes magic) — but by the stars they’ve never known anything about. Perhaps in immobility they may find their only security.

As if she’d heard me, Dolores says out loud: “We sure don’t have a lucky star.”

I’d like to know what species they really are. Machines and nature are equally alien to them. So for what purpose, for whom have they been created? Thinking about them from the perspective of death, I recognize and reconcile them. They are the children of artifice, neither nature nor technology. Do they have the power to re-enchant the world? Maybe they are only the energy of the artificial. How little there is of it, how intense it is, how useless is everything that happens to us.

Sunrise

Well, at least the sea behaved like a mirror. The ketch has the wind in its sails and is heading farther out to sea. The motor is still turned off. There are no birds in the sky. The women wake up. They shake off their sleep with sensual movements that I recognize and am thankful for. Sexy until death. They’re hungry. It’s written all over their faces. All that’s left are bits of olives, cheese, and slices of jicama. Dulces Nombres grabs the platter as if it belonged to her and starts eating. The morning breeze arouses their appetites. Otilia pulls the platter out of her hands. The olives, uniformly perforated so the anchovy can be inserted, bounce over the deck. One of them falls, absurdly, between my lips. The two girls steal bits of the antipasto from each other, but their avid hands stop, confused and repelled, over my lips and the olive which now adorns them.

The base of the mainmast creeks in the mast hole. Doris quickly steps in and arranges things so that what’s left of the platter is distributed equally. “Is there anything else to eat?” “Sure,” laughs Nicha the sneezy. “The olive in handsome’s mug.” No one else laughs. No, there’s nothing else but the platter. But there’s stuff to drink: bottles of Campari, Beefeater, Johnnie Walker, Bacardi, ice, and mineral water. You won’t die of thirst. Besides, I taught them to fish. I know it was only a pretext. I hope they think of it. There are bonito and hake to be had here.

They don’t think about any of that. Two things happen. The dawn heightens the senses, especially smell. The night seems to stock up the smells of the world in order to set them free at daybreak, loaded with dew or sage, with mist and moist earth, with puppy skin and the sweetness of the beehive, with coffee beans and tobacco smoke, with cumin and wallflower. All that evokes daybreak, associating it with different places on earth. The Pacific, the sea of Balboa and Cortés, should yield its own strong, marvelous aromas torn from the bottom of the ocean and from nostalgia for the land. But grumpy Otilia can only evoke oranges; she says that ever since she was a little girl she’s drunk orange juice as soon as she awakens. It was the only luxury in her home, in all the American movies they drank orange juice before going to work or school, but in this damn boat there is no orange juice, not even the smell of an orange. She begins to cry.

The truth is that only one smell takes possession of The Two Americas. It’s the smell of my body. I’ve been dead for eighteen hours. I’m beginning to stink. Eight women with my rotting body. I read their eyes. What are they going to do with me? The waves begin to get rough. They don’t know what to do. Snow White saves my life. Excuse me: she saves my death. She sees the same thing I do. The eyes of the seven dwarfs reflect more hunger than disgust. Snow White makes her play. She quickly starts the motor. They all turn to look at the new captain. The motor coughs, sneezes, spits, but doesn’t start. Nicha catches the sneezes from the motor. We all look up at the spars to see if the mast and the booms are keeping the boom sail and the jibs tight and swollen.

Noon

I can’t stand the heat. I beg them to do something, cover me with a canvas, for pity’s sake, carry me down to the cabin and lay me out there. I’m good and stiff. Soon they won’t be able to move me. I stink and I’m hot. I almost wish they would throw me overboard. I long for the coolness of a bath, the orange juice desired by Otilia. But the women think only about hunger, which is now surfacing in the looks they exchange among themselves and sometimes turn on me. They try to drown their hunger with rum and whiskey. They begin to get sick. Drunk and dizzy, Soledad and Nicha end up vomiting. Doris grabs them by the hair, pulls them around, and scolds them. Bashful and Sneezy cry in despair, “What are we going to do now? Everything was going so nice, the heat, the sailing around, the sex. Now just look, it’s all fucked up.” “Same as always,” says Dolores. “Same as always. Damned life.”

It must be three in the afternoon

The heat is unbearable. The sea is possessed by a calm that presages something bad. They don’t know what to do with me. They don’t want to touch me, true enough. I fill them with terror, disgust, compassion. They don’t even dare to close my eyes. They haven’t recognized my death. I’ve discovered that to die is to acquire, in a single instant, the ability to see the images that pass through the heads of the living. Through the heads of these women, like a movie running nonstop, run the same images of a little girl shot to death in Los Angeles or of a dead whore at the entrance to a nightclub with a fan between her legs. An old man thankful for the presence of a girl when he dies. Or a girl thankful that the branch of an orange tree defers the certainty of death. Should I be satisfied with last night’s unconscious, spontaneous response provoked more by the end of the day than by my death? A little white box and four candles stuck into Coca-Cola bottles. To whom can I commend myself? María de le Gracia, all by herself, quickly pulls my pants up.

Now they don’t look at me. They don’t touch me. María de la Gracia falls asleep easily. She went into the cabin warning the others, “Girls, if we don’t get out of the sun, it’s going to peel our skin off. Who’s going to hire us if we look burned, damn it.” There are no hats. Some of them have draped their bikini tops over their heads. Others, the more offensive ones, have stuffed Kleenex into their nostrils. Only Snow White, uselessly, doesn’t abandon her post. Like me, she’s lived enough to know that this calm is not natural. She looks at the sails. Without real control, they’re beginning to loosen, to snap against the wind, to give up …

Another sunset

Everything’s going badly. Without proper control. The Two Americas is smashing her prow through the growing waves and is beginning to roll sharply. The girls scream and huddle in the back of the lavatory and the cabin. The wind gets stronger and then weakens; periodic gusts give way to sudden calm. The wind begins to blow from the stern, steadily now. The immediate reaction of the ketch to run with the speed of the waves forces the screw and the rudder to rise out of the water at the crest of the wave. I shout from the far shore of death, Tie back those sails, the jib has to go on the side opposite the boom, if it doesn’t it will block the boom, tie it down with the jib boom, why aren’t the sails reefed, why aren’t the others stiff in the wind?

I’m talking to the wind. I’m speaking to the onset of night. Naturally the boat begins to luff, the angle of the prow goes into the wind. The girls scream. The mainsail begins to bend, parallel to the direction of the wind. It snaps back and forth, so hard that it almost throws me off the deck where, slowly but surely, I’m rotting, silent and hungry for the night to refresh my skin and, soon, my guts. I give up the olive resting between my purple lips. The boat is completely out of control. It goes where it pleases. It luffs more and more. The prow rises up and the jib boom extends along the boat’s flank. Then comes a sudden calm, the wind stops blowing and the danger ceases.

I hear sobs. I read water, thirst, images of water flooding the previous images of death. Everything begins to calm down. Long nails begin to claw me in the darkness.

Another Dawn

The sun strikes me in the eyes, but I need something. Something I miss because it was part of my body. I don’t want to imagine it. I look for the women’s eyes. First I see their faces, more and more peeled by the sun. I try to penetrate their minds. This is the privilege of my mortality. Doris is thinking about a man I don’t know. María de la Gracia is a void; she’s still asleep. Soledad has a swimming pool filled with blue, clean, fresh water in her head. Nicha thinks only about bottles and more bottles of sunscreen. Otilia has a big orange dripping sweet juice in her mind. A man other than myself has gotten into Snow White’s head. Otilia imagines a mirror. And in Dolores’s head I find my testicles.

Noon?

They exchange looks. The sun addles their wits. They can’t think. They can’t act. Have to wait for afternoon to come. I would like to touch the place where my balls used to be. Snow White takes the rod and casts the hook into the sea.

4:33

They’ve come to an agreement without speaking. María de la Gracia is still taking refuge in sleep. There she is neither thirsty nor hungry. She always dreams of a child who died of diphtheria at the age of three. She thinks that if he’d lived, her little boy would have saved her from this life she doesn’t love. Why? she asks herself. Wouldn’t the kid have been just one more burden, one more mouth, forcing me to do something worse than what I do innocently, which is to dance naked, protected by the lady who doesn’t let anyone touch us? It isn’t bad. The thing is, I have no one to go home to. Nobody’s waiting for me when I get back. So I sleep, I sleep a lot so I don’t remember that I could be cooking his food or sending him to school, scolding him if he gets bad grades, helping him with his homework, learning with my son what I never learned by myself. That’s what I need. To go home and find something. Where is my son buried? What’s the name of the town I left dead with grief and as beautiful as a wounded jaguar at the age of fifteen, no threat to anyone? Oh God, I just sleep. And I want to dream about my son and can’t because I sense that something bad’s going to happen to me, that all my friends here are closing in on me, saying All she does is sleep all the time, she won’t even know when …

“Who’s going to touch her first?”

Snow White shouted: “A fish bit the hook, a nice hake, isn’t there anything to cook with on the boat, no kitchen? Okay then, grouchy Otilia, damn you, get out your box of Classics, take off your panties if that’s all we have, set them on fire, and be careful not to burn down this goddam thing ’cause then we’ll really be fucked up.”

Warm silent night

From the shore of death, you can see the stars better. They’re the map of heaven and their lines tell me we’re being dragged north after drifting out of control to the west. Maybe we’re getting close to land, but these women don’t know it. If we continue in this direction, we’ll hit the tip of Baja California, Cabo San Lucas, entering the Sea of Cortés between the coasts of Sonora and the peninsula, which is longer than Italy, where the desert and the sea meet: huge cactuses and the transparent sea, the sun as round as an orange. What the conquistador told his sons, if he had time to talk to them, I don’t know.

Columbus never knew he’d discovered America, and Cortés never knew Baja California was a peninsula. He thought it was an island that led to the prodigious land of El Dorado. If the women don’t die of hunger and thirst, we’ll enter the Sea of Cortés like helpless explorers, but soon we’ll reach Mexico’s armpit, the salty mouth of the Colorado River, Terra Firma …

How far away we are. At the same time, on this warm, quiet night a ship in full regalia, full of lights and noises, from which the insistent rhythms of mambos and guarachas reach us, passes in the distance. Its lights shine, more than in the night, in the eyes of Snow White and her seven dwarfs. They all wave their arms, call out, scream while the white cruise ship goes off without seeing us. Not reluctantly, Dulces Nombres sings the tune the night is broadcasting:

Mexican girls dance the mambo

so very pretty and tasty

and the others join in, united in hope, fear, and frivolous joy, all at once:

like Cuban girls they shake their hips

they’re gonna drive me crazy.

A different dawn

They’ve eaten. They wake up María de la Gracia to offer her a slice of half-raw hake, what can we do. Dolores is just about to make a joke about a dish of mountain oysters, but she stops herself just in time. She laughs; at least it’s something to sink your teeth into. She goes on laughing like a fool, and her laughter spreads to the others, just like last night when they all sang the mambo together, just like that, the way it happens sometimes, you laugh, I laugh, we all laugh, even if we don’t know why. Maybe it has something to do with that old saying: A full stomach means a happy heart. They laugh, their mouths stuffed with half-chewed fish. But they don’t see the shoreline. They look at Snow White who uselessly scans the horizon, and their joy fades. The mambo ship was an illusion, its lights a mirage.

But since their energy’s been renewed, they decide to use it. It’s as if they have to live the morning that each one of them lives — and I die — because of my presence. They have to live it with more fury, more intensity, more defiance than ever. They start making puns again to lighten up the situation, then they start to exchange recriminations, men one stole from another, clothes they stole from each other, Why did you copy my hairstyle, shitass? and Who wore that red skirt first, huh? Who gets more money stuffed into her shoe when she dances, and who’s got more in the bank, and which one is going to quit this life first, who’s going to have her own house, who’s going to have things turn out for her like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, bring on my Richard Gere, here Dick, who’s going to get married and with what kind of macho, macho, macho …

Suddenly they all repel me. I try to close the curtain of my death over their vulgar film, their vile mess, so I can enter my own film again, the film Italy and Leonello Padovani gave me, far from my own messes made in California, near the Sea of Cortés … Padovani didn’t hide, in fact he exaggerated his status as aristocrat and homosexual. It was a splendid defiance of his heritage while fashionable at the same time. Member of the Communist Party, he would dare anybody to say that a person’s social origins determine his political participation. Not all rich people are reactionaries; not all workers are progressives. Sometimes the bourgeoisie carries out the revolution, while the poor support fascism …

Supremely knowledgeable about the female heart on the movie screen — Alida Valli, Silvana Mangano, Anna Magnani were brighter stars than ever when he directed them — he challenged every convention by understanding the souls of women without ever touching their bodies. They said he transposed and sublimated in his heroines his own sordid adventures with low-class masculine lovers, in whom he found, often to excess, the characteristics of sexiness and ingratitude, cheap self-interest and bestial passion. He treated me with the utmost respect. He was the first to see me and deal with me as a human being. With him, I dared to talk about things that were forbidden in Hollywood … How could I remember an Ireland I abandoned in childhood but that returned, violent and beautiful, perfumed and savage, to my dreams? Why, in my unconscious memory, did there appear so many tall reeds, so many hazel forests, so many silver trout and white butterflies which only fluttered around at night? Why so much dew drowned in dew? Did I know all that, did I remember it and live it only because I’d read Yeats?

“No.” Padovani smiled. “Perhaps you know it because before you read a poet you were one.”

I told him I was barely the Apollo of B movies, as my wife calls me.

“Apollo is light,” Padovani told me, he and I sitting in the solitary Lido in Venice one November afternoon. “He’s associated with prophecy, archery, medicine, and flocks. His sister is the Moon. Thanks to her, he triumphs over the deities of the dark night.

“I love Yeats’s poem where a man grows old and dreams about the soft look your eyes had once. He asks himself how many loved his moments of glad grace, how many loved his beauty with love false or true…”

Padovani’s eyes abandoned mine to look for a sign of life in the Venetian afternoon. He admitted that at times he felt lonely and missed the kind of company that all the caprices and all the glory in the world couldn’t get him. If I read Yeats, he knew Rilke well and recalled the verses about an Apollo with a shadowless gaze, a mouth that was mute because it had still not been useful for anything but had insinuated the first smile.

“Someone,” Padovani concluded, “is transmitting him his own song.”

Then the light reveals the stain of dry blood around my open fly. The women all look at each other. Suddenly they love each other, Oh sister, look we’re together in everything, just like we are on this boat, how are we ever going to be apart, guys? Sisters to the death, they hug each other, cry, remember — the man, the son, the parents — they share a past they invent in order to be sisters. Now they invent a future in which each one helps the others, things will be terrific because the first to make it will scatter her gold and share her success with the others, of course, of course …

Only two of us keep our distance while the tears swell, the hands are joined, the hugs go around, the tremors, the sweats.

Snow White, because she knows them all too well and simply, says, “Bunch of assholes.”

And I, I envy them because I don’t remember in my profession or my life a comparable fraternal experience.

What time is it?

The boat follows its own whims; it’s uncontrolled, and responds to the heavy seas we’ve encountered. The current drags us along like a magnet toward the Sea of Cortés, whose very name the women are ignorant of, but which I imagine transparent and sown with jewels: Didn’t the poor conquistador scatter all his wealth on the bottom of lakes and seas — Moctezuma’s gold in the swamps of the Sad Night when he fled Mexico City losing almost everything, the emeralds of the conquest in a naval battle at Algiers? What kind of treasure does an adventurer like that leave to his posterity, the conqueror of an empire equal to the sun? My sister the Moon answers me tonight, this dawn, this afternoon of a moon appeared out of time, I no longer know, but the Moon answers me that perhaps he leaves nothing more than the name of a sea, a testament of water, a fame of salt and wind. I’m dead, and I see only a gigantic, trembling spiderweb at the bottom of the sea.

The ketch luffs again, the prow rises and the jib boom hangs to one side, sinks and begins to drag the boat. There is no hand on the tiller; the amount of sail dragged by the boom overwhelms the tiller. We are adrift, and in that precise instant all appetites, memories, and fears fuse into one fearsome object, which is I myself. What remains of me understands and trembles in knowing it. I am to blame for the situation, guilty of having abused them, guilty of being an American, rich, famous, of being everything but what they don’t know, because I already said it, they know nothing about the stars and don’t know how to read the heavens or, for that matter, the compass. I am an actor, goddamn it, I’m a frustrated actor, doomed equally for habitual mediocrity and exceptional success. Yes, I’m guilty of many things, of my profession, my wife, my associates, my fellow workers, who are the people I remember. And suddenly, dead here and rotting under the Pacific sun, losing my features little by little but instantly, I think about the statues of Apollo that only count old age in terms of centuries and never count death. I try to save my responsibility by assimilating myself like the statues, joining with the poets and artists, embracing my vanished sister the Moon, draping over my temples the laurels of the names that are the princes of languages and vision: Yeats, Rilke, Padovani, Turner and the sea, Géricault and the raft of the Medusa, everything I learned in my childhood and didn’t find again until a certain afternoon on the Lido in Venice. But I am guilty about an Indian housemaid who stopped to look at me in the gardenia-filled pool with the bottles in her hand; I am guilty that a boy resembling me guided me to the garden illuminated by Chinese lanterns where I found these women. I am guilty for another boy I didn’t know who saved himself from death because an orange tree in bloom perfumed the bedroom where his mother screwed with men she didn’t know. I am, finally, guilty for a poor sixtyish gringa I offended by confusing her with my wife, Cindy, and slapping her in public …

In all of their eyes, I saw a time which disregarded my individuality. Above all, I saw those Mexican children and felt afraid of escaping from my own more or less protected individuality, constructed with a certain care and lots of patience so I could face a helpless humanity in which circumstances neither respect nor distinguish anyone.

I realized what had happened. In death, I had become a Mexican.

At noon

The coast guard boarded us amid the confused joy and fear of Snow White and her seven dwarfs. We’d reached Barra de Navidad, a good distance from the Sea of Cortés. Well, death is a disorienting experience. Excuse me. The nearest port was Manzanillo. The sailors covered their noses with handkerchiefs before coming aboard. The captain quickly inspected and quickly questioned them. “He died of a heart attack,” said Snow White. The girls said nothing. “So who castrated him?” asked the captain, pointing to my fly. “All of us,” shouted María de la Gracia. Dolores was about to shout, I was hungry. Snow White spoke up. “He was a pervert. He was a gringo. He tried to take advantage of my girls.” The coastguardsmen laughed at her. “All right then,” said Snow White. “I did it. I was hungry. Don’t you like to eat mountain oysters? That’s how you get started. But anyway, we’re Catholics and Mexicans.”

The next day, every day

They towed the ketch back to Acapulco. No one could identify me. There was nothing left of my more or less famous features. The Yacht Club said I paid in cash and in advance without leaving my name. That wasn’t true. The hotel arranged for the service. But no one wanted to get involved in such a strange case or involve anyone else, the hotel didn’t want to involve the club, and the club didn’t want to involve the hotel. While the investigation went forward, María de la Gracia confessed I was her boyfriend and the father of her child. She claimed the body. Just to get rid of it (I mean of me), they gave it to her. I mean, they handed me over.

She put me in a box and spoke to me very softly, thanking me because thanks to me, she said, she’d remembered the name of her hometown and her son’s grave.

They carried me in a bus to a nameless village along the Costa Chica in the state of Guerrero. My presence was celebrated by the other passengers.

When we got to the town, the carpenter recognized María de la Gracia and gave her a coffin.

She thanked him and buried me next to her son, in a cemetery where the crosses are painted indigo blue, vermilion, yellow, and black, like birds, like fish. The grave is next to a tall orange tree, about eighteen or twenty feet tall, which seems to have achieved its full height. Who could have planted it? How long ago? I wish I could know how much history will protect me from now on. Do I lie in the shadow of history?

When the hotel receptionist, the little man covered with coffee powder and sporting a thin mustache, said he was the only person to see me, he lied. The Indian chambermaid saw me floating in the pool reading a wet book of poems. Only now do I remember that line: “But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, / And loved the sorrows of your changing face.” Now I remember that verse when I think about a young illiterate Indian girl who didn’t even speak Spanish. The little man in the guayabera wanted to save his skin but follow the story in the conspiracy. He said that it was true, he had registered me, that he had seen me, but that I’d walked away without leaving my name. The bill had been put down to the name on my American Express card.

The investigation centered on me and if in fact some people did deduce that I was the corpse found drifting with seven Acapulco whores and their madam in the Pacific near Barra de Navidad in a ketch named The Two Americas, no one would think of following a poor being as humble as María de la Gracia to her small village on the Costa Chica. And besides, Snow White was nervous about having cut off my balls but proud as well for having saved the girls. Everything is forgotten. Clues disappear. The possibility of my strange death merited a small obit in the Los Angeles Times. Time magazine didn’t even bother to note it. In the transitions column of Newsweek, this is all they printed:

PRESUMED DEAD. Vince Valera, 55, bushy-browed hero of B movies, graced with a certain Irish charm, winner of the only Oscar given to an American actor for a European film (The Long Night, directed by Leonello Padovani, 1972). Disappeared in Acapulco.

Cindy inherited everything and no longer wanted to find out anything.

Dead, I would like to add something, much more, to that brief biography. I dream of other destinies that could have been mine. I imagine myself in Mexico conquering Great Tenochtitlán, loving an Indian princess. I imagine myself in jail, dreaming about my dead, abandoned mother. I imagine myself in another century, amused, organizing toasts and serenades in a baroque city I don’t recognize. Opposite another unknown but ancient city, I imagine myself dressed in black standing before an army in mourning, determined to win in a battle against pure, invisible space. In a long night of fog and mud, I see myself walking along a river holding a child by the hand. I’ve saved her from prostitution, sickness, death …

I dream about the orange tree and try to imagine who planted it, a Mediterranean, Oriental, Arabian, Chinese tree, in this distant coast of the Americas.

Since my face disappeared because of the seawater, the sun, and death, María de la Gracia took a papier-mâché mask she bought in the village market and put it over my face before burying me.

“This is your face. Your face for death.”

That’s what the girl said, as if she were intoning an ancient rite.

I’ve never been able to see that mask. I don’t know what or whom it represents. You see: I’ve closed my eyes forever.

Acapulco — London, May 1991–September 1992