Carlos Fuentes - The Orange Tree

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.