Carlos Fuentes - The Orange Tree

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!