Carlos Fuentes - The Orange Tree

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.