Carlos Fuentes - The Orange Tree

Now they don’t look at me. They don’t touch me. María de la Gracia falls asleep easily. She went into the cabin warning the others, “Girls, if we don’t get out of the sun, it’s going to peel our skin off. Who’s going to hire us if we look burned, damn it.” There are no hats. Some of them have draped their bikini tops over their heads. Others, the more offensive ones, have stuffed Kleenex into their nostrils. Only Snow White, uselessly, doesn’t abandon her post. Like me, she’s lived enough to know that this calm is not natural. She looks at the sails. Without real control, they’re beginning to loosen, to snap against the wind, to give up …

Another sunset

Everything’s going badly. Without proper control. The Two Americas is smashing her prow through the growing waves and is beginning to roll sharply. The girls scream and huddle in the back of the lavatory and the cabin. The wind gets stronger and then weakens; periodic gusts give way to sudden calm. The wind begins to blow from the stern, steadily now. The immediate reaction of the ketch to run with the speed of the waves forces the screw and the rudder to rise out of the water at the crest of the wave. I shout from the far shore of death, Tie back those sails, the jib has to go on the side opposite the boom, if it doesn’t it will block the boom, tie it down with the jib boom, why aren’t the sails reefed, why aren’t the others stiff in the wind?

I’m talking to the wind. I’m speaking to the onset of night. Naturally the boat begins to luff, the angle of the prow goes into the wind. The girls scream. The mainsail begins to bend, parallel to the direction of the wind. It snaps back and forth, so hard that it almost throws me off the deck where, slowly but surely, I’m rotting, silent and hungry for the night to refresh my skin and, soon, my guts. I give up the olive resting between my purple lips. The boat is completely out of control. It goes where it pleases. It luffs more and more. The prow rises up and the jib boom extends along the boat’s flank. Then comes a sudden calm, the wind stops blowing and the danger ceases.

I hear sobs. I read water, thirst, images of water flooding the previous images of death. Everything begins to calm down. Long nails begin to claw me in the darkness.

Another Dawn

The sun strikes me in the eyes, but I need something. Something I miss because it was part of my body. I don’t want to imagine it. I look for the women’s eyes. First I see their faces, more and more peeled by the sun. I try to penetrate their minds. This is the privilege of my mortality. Doris is thinking about a man I don’t know. María de la Gracia is a void; she’s still asleep. Soledad has a swimming pool filled with blue, clean, fresh water in her head. Nicha thinks only about bottles and more bottles of sunscreen. Otilia has a big orange dripping sweet juice in her mind. A man other than myself has gotten into Snow White’s head. Otilia imagines a mirror. And in Dolores’s head I find my testicles.

Noon?

They exchange looks. The sun addles their wits. They can’t think. They can’t act. Have to wait for afternoon to come. I would like to touch the place where my balls used to be. Snow White takes the rod and casts the hook into the sea.

4:33

They’ve come to an agreement without speaking. María de la Gracia is still taking refuge in sleep. There she is neither thirsty nor hungry. She always dreams of a child who died of diphtheria at the age of three. She thinks that if he’d lived, her little boy would have saved her from this life she doesn’t love. Why? she asks herself. Wouldn’t the kid have been just one more burden, one more mouth, forcing me to do something worse than what I do innocently, which is to dance naked, protected by the lady who doesn’t let anyone touch us? It isn’t bad. The thing is, I have no one to go home to. Nobody’s waiting for me when I get back. So I sleep, I sleep a lot so I don’t remember that I could be cooking his food or sending him to school, scolding him if he gets bad grades, helping him with his homework, learning with my son what I never learned by myself. That’s what I need. To go home and find something. Where is my son buried? What’s the name of the town I left dead with grief and as beautiful as a wounded jaguar at the age of fifteen, no threat to anyone? Oh God, I just sleep. And I want to dream about my son and can’t because I sense that something bad’s going to happen to me, that all my friends here are closing in on me, saying All she does is sleep all the time, she won’t even know when …

“Who’s going to touch her first?”

Snow White shouted: “A fish bit the hook, a nice hake, isn’t there anything to cook with on the boat, no kitchen? Okay then, grouchy Otilia, damn you, get out your box of Classics, take off your panties if that’s all we have, set them on fire, and be careful not to burn down this goddam thing ’cause then we’ll really be fucked up.”

Warm silent night

From the shore of death, you can see the stars better. They’re the map of heaven and their lines tell me we’re being dragged north after drifting out of control to the west. Maybe we’re getting close to land, but these women don’t know it. If we continue in this direction, we’ll hit the tip of Baja California, Cabo San Lucas, entering the Sea of Cortés between the coasts of Sonora and the peninsula, which is longer than Italy, where the desert and the sea meet: huge cactuses and the transparent sea, the sun as round as an orange. What the conquistador told his sons, if he had time to talk to them, I don’t know.

Columbus never knew he’d discovered America, and Cortés never knew Baja California was a peninsula. He thought it was an island that led to the prodigious land of El Dorado. If the women don’t die of hunger and thirst, we’ll enter the Sea of Cortés like helpless explorers, but soon we’ll reach Mexico’s armpit, the salty mouth of the Colorado River, Terra Firma …

How far away we are. At the same time, on this warm, quiet night a ship in full regalia, full of lights and noises, from which the insistent rhythms of mambos and guarachas reach us, passes in the distance. Its lights shine, more than in the night, in the eyes of Snow White and her seven dwarfs. They all wave their arms, call out, scream while the white cruise ship goes off without seeing us. Not reluctantly, Dulces Nombres sings the tune the night is broadcasting:

Mexican girls dance the mambo

so very pretty and tasty

and the others join in, united in hope, fear, and frivolous joy, all at once:

like Cuban girls they shake their hips

they’re gonna drive me crazy.

A different dawn

They’ve eaten. They wake up María de la Gracia to offer her a slice of half-raw hake, what can we do. Dolores is just about to make a joke about a dish of mountain oysters, but she stops herself just in time. She laughs; at least it’s something to sink your teeth into. She goes on laughing like a fool, and her laughter spreads to the others, just like last night when they all sang the mambo together, just like that, the way it happens sometimes, you laugh, I laugh, we all laugh, even if we don’t know why. Maybe it has something to do with that old saying: A full stomach means a happy heart. They laugh, their mouths stuffed with half-chewed fish. But they don’t see the shoreline. They look at Snow White who uselessly scans the horizon, and their joy fades. The mambo ship was an illusion, its lights a mirage.

But since their energy’s been renewed, they decide to use it. It’s as if they have to live the morning that each one of them lives — and I die — because of my presence. They have to live it with more fury, more intensity, more defiance than ever. They start making puns again to lighten up the situation, then they start to exchange recriminations, men one stole from another, clothes they stole from each other, Why did you copy my hairstyle, shitass? and Who wore that red skirt first, huh? Who gets more money stuffed into her shoe when she dances, and who’s got more in the bank, and which one is going to quit this life first, who’s going to have her own house, who’s going to have things turn out for her like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, bring on my Richard Gere, here Dick, who’s going to get married and with what kind of macho, macho, macho …