Carlos Fuentes - The Orange Tree

“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.