Carlos Fuentes - The Orange Tree

The next day, every day

They towed the ketch back to Acapulco. No one could identify me. There was nothing left of my more or less famous features. The Yacht Club said I paid in cash and in advance without leaving my name. That wasn’t true. The hotel arranged for the service. But no one wanted to get involved in such a strange case or involve anyone else, the hotel didn’t want to involve the club, and the club didn’t want to involve the hotel. While the investigation went forward, María de la Gracia confessed I was her boyfriend and the father of her child. She claimed the body. Just to get rid of it (I mean of me), they gave it to her. I mean, they handed me over.

She put me in a box and spoke to me very softly, thanking me because thanks to me, she said, she’d remembered the name of her hometown and her son’s grave.

They carried me in a bus to a nameless village along the Costa Chica in the state of Guerrero. My presence was celebrated by the other passengers.

When we got to the town, the carpenter recognized María de la Gracia and gave her a coffin.

She thanked him and buried me next to her son, in a cemetery where the crosses are painted indigo blue, vermilion, yellow, and black, like birds, like fish. The grave is next to a tall orange tree, about eighteen or twenty feet tall, which seems to have achieved its full height. Who could have planted it? How long ago? I wish I could know how much history will protect me from now on. Do I lie in the shadow of history?

When the hotel receptionist, the little man covered with coffee powder and sporting a thin mustache, said he was the only person to see me, he lied. The Indian chambermaid saw me floating in the pool reading a wet book of poems. Only now do I remember that line: “But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, / And loved the sorrows of your changing face.” Now I remember that verse when I think about a young illiterate Indian girl who didn’t even speak Spanish. The little man in the guayabera wanted to save his skin but follow the story in the conspiracy. He said that it was true, he had registered me, that he had seen me, but that I’d walked away without leaving my name. The bill had been put down to the name on my American Express card.

The investigation centered on me and if in fact some people did deduce that I was the corpse found drifting with seven Acapulco whores and their madam in the Pacific near Barra de Navidad in a ketch named The Two Americas, no one would think of following a poor being as humble as María de la Gracia to her small village on the Costa Chica. And besides, Snow White was nervous about having cut off my balls but proud as well for having saved the girls. Everything is forgotten. Clues disappear. The possibility of my strange death merited a small obit in the Los Angeles Times. Time magazine didn’t even bother to note it. In the transitions column of Newsweek, this is all they printed:

PRESUMED DEAD. Vince Valera, 55, bushy-browed hero of B movies, graced with a certain Irish charm, winner of the only Oscar given to an American actor for a European film ( The Long Night, directed by Leonello Padovani, 1972). Disappeared in Acapulco.

Cindy inherited everything and no longer wanted to find out anything.

Dead, I would like to add something, much more, to that brief biography. I dream of other destinies that could have been mine. I imagine myself in Mexico conquering Great Tenochtitlán, loving an Indian princess. I imagine myself in jail, dreaming about my dead, abandoned mother. I imagine myself in another century, amused, organizing toasts and serenades in a baroque city I don’t recognize. Opposite another unknown but ancient city, I imagine myself dressed in black standing before an army in mourning, determined to win in a battle against pure, invisible space. In a long night of fog and mud, I see myself walking along a river holding a child by the hand. I’ve saved her from prostitution, sickness, death …

I dream about the orange tree and try to imagine who planted it, a Mediterranean, Oriental, Arabian, Chinese tree, in this distant coast of the Americas.

Since my face disappeared because of the seawater, the sun, and death, María de la Gracia took a papier-mâché mask she bought in the village market and put it over my face before burying me.

“This is your face. Your face for death.”

That’s what the girl said, as if she were intoning an ancient rite.

I’ve never been able to see that mask. I don’t know what or whom it represents. You see: I’ve closed my eyes forever.

Acapulco — London, May 1991–September 1992

Fragments from the Diary of a Genoese Sailor

TODAY I landed on the enchanted beach. It was hot and the sun rose at an early hour. The radiance of the water was brighter than the light in the sky. No sea is more translucent, as green as the lemon juice my sailors craved, ravaged as they were by scurvy during the long voyage from the port of Palos. You can see all the way to the bottom, as if the surface of the water were a sheet of glass. The bottom is white sand, crisscrossed by fish of every color.

The storms shredded my sails. On August 3, we crossed the Saltes bar, and on September 6, we saw land for the last time when we left the port of Gomera in the Canaries. There were three caravels, but all that remains is the ship’s boat I managed to save after the mutiny and massacre. I am the only survivor.

Only my eyes see this shore, only my feet walk it. I do what habit orders me to do. I get down on my knee and give thanks to a God who is certainly too busy with more important matters to think about me. I cross two old branches and invoke the sacrifice and benediction. I claim this land in the name of the Catholic Kings who will never set foot on it, and understand why they showed such magnanimity when they granted me possession of everything I might discover. They knew very well that without resources I couldn’t dominate anything. I’ve reached these shores naked and poor. But what will they or I possess? What land is this? Where the hell am I?

* * *

Back in Genoa, my mother would say to me while I helped her stretch the huge sheets out to dry — while I imagined myself, even then, carried along by great sails to the far edges of the universe—“Son, stop dreaming. Why can’t you be happy with what you can see and touch? Why do you always talk about things that don’t exist?”

She was right. The pleasure of what I’m looking at should satisfy me. The white shore. The abrupt silence, so different from the deafening clamor of Genoa or Lisbon. The mild breezes and weather like Andalusia’s in April. The purity of the air, with not one of the foul odors that plague the thronged ports of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Here only flocks of parrots darken the sky. And on the beaches I don’t find the shit, the garbage, the bloody rags, the flies, and the rats of all the European cities. Here I find the snowy white horizons of purity, pearls as plentiful as the sand itself, turtles laying eggs, and beyond the beach, in successive ranks, a thick forest: palm trees near the beach and then, rising toward the mountains, thick groves of pine, oak, and strawberry trees. It’s bliss just to look at them. And, on the highest peak in the world, an extremely high mountain crowned with snow, dominating the universe and exempted — I dare say it — from the furies of the universal flood. I have reached — can there be any doubt? — Paradise.