Carlos Fuentes - The Orange Tree

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.