Carlos Fuentes: The Orange Tree

Thousands and thousands of tourists came, and on October 12, dressed in my fifteenth-century clothes, I was paraded around on a float brought from the Carnival of Nice, surrounded by naked Indians (male and female). Now, it’s hardly worth saying, all my clothing comes from Banana Republic. No one bothers me. I’m an institution.

But my nose vainly tries to sniff the invisible highways of the night, when thousands of hidden organisms used to perfume the air to guide the tapir, the deer, the ocelot, and the ounce. But I don’t hear them anymore, don’t smell them either. Only my gray-brown fox with pointy ears stays close to me. The heat of the tropics escapes through those palpitating white ears. The two of us look toward the orange groves that surround us. I wish the fox would understand: the grove, the animal, and I are survivors …

They don’t let anyone near me. They’ve forced me to become fearful. From time to time, I exchange glances with a lanky, dark-skinned Indian girl who fixes my pink-sheeted bed and waters the orchids before leaving. Her eyes are not only wary but hostile and something worse: resentful.

One night, the young Indian maid doesn’t show up. Annoyed, I’m just about to protest. I realize a change has taken place. I become intolerant, comfortable, old … I open the netting that protects my hammock (I’ve retained that delightful custom from my original astonishment) and find stretched out in it a slim young woman the color of honey: stiff as a pencil, only the swaying of the hammock softens her. She introduces herself with verbal and gestural intensity as Ute Pinkernail, native of Darmstadt, Germany. She tells me she’s managed to sneak in by taking the maid’s place, that I’m very protected and don’t know the truth. She stretches out her arms, wraps them around me, and whispers breathlessly, nervously into my ear: “There are six billion people on the planet, the big cities in the East and the West are about to disappear. Asphyxiation, garbage, and plague are burying them. They’ve fooled you. Your paradise is the last sewer for our narrow, packed, beggarly cities without light, without roofs, through which wander thieves, madmen, crowds that talk to themselves, skulking rats, dogs in savage packs, migraines, fevers, vertigoes: a city in ruins, submerged in its own sewage, for the majority; for the smallest minority, there is another, inaccessible city on the heights. Your island is the last sewer, you’ve carried out your destiny, you’ve enslaved and exterminated your people…”

She was unable to go on. The samurai came in shouting, jumping, brandishing submachine guns, violently pulling me away. My veranda was shrouded in dust and noise; everything was bathed in white light, and in one vast, simultaneous instant, the flamethrowers burned up my orange grove, a bayonet pierced the heart of my trained wolf, and Ute Pinkernail’s breasts appeared before my astonished, desiring eyes. The girl’s blood dripped through the weaving in the hammock …

* * *

To live in paradise is to live without consequences. Now I know I’m going to die, and ask permission to return to Spain. First, Mr. Nomura berated me: “You didn’t act like a member of the team, Cristóbal-san. Well, what did you think, that you were going to be able to keep your paradise away from the laws of progress forever? You’ve got to realize that by preserving a paradise you were only magnifying a universal desire to invade it and enjoy it. Try to understand once and for all: there is no paradise without a Jacuzzi, champagne, a Porsche, and a discotheque. No paradise without french fries, hamburgers, sodas, and Neapolitan pizza. Something for everyone. You can’t go around believing in the symbolism of your name, ’Christ-bearer, dove of the Holy Spirit.’ Come back, fly away little dove, and carry your message: Sayonara, Christ; Paradise, Banzai! Wa! Wa! Wa! Conformity! The nail that sticks out will soon be hammered down.”

On the Iberia flight, I’m treated like what I am, a venerable relic: Cristóbal Colón returning to Spain after a five-hundred-year absence. I’d lost all notion of time and space. Now, up in the sky, I recover them. Oh, how I enjoy seeing from up here the trace of my first voyage — in reverse: the oak-covered hills, the strawberry trees, the incredibly fertile soil all under cultivation, the canoes plying the gulf into which seven rivers empty, one of them in a smooth, milk-colored cascade. I look at the sea and the sirens, the leviathans and the amazons shooting their arrows at the sun. And flying over my burned-out orchard, I begin to sense the beaches with shit tides, bloody rags, flies and rats, the acrid sky, and the poisoned water. Will they put the blame for all this on the Jews and the Arabs before expelling them or exterminating them again?

I observe the flight of ducks and ravens, and I feel that our own ship is pushed along by soft trade winds on a variable sea — here it’s as smooth as glass; there, when we’re anchored in the sargasso, it’s sometimes as stormy as it was in the worst moments of the first voyage. I fly near the stars and yet I see only one constellation as night falls. It’s made up of Ute Pinkernail’s magnificent breasts, the teats I was never to touch …

They serve me Freixenet champagne and they give me the magazine Hola to read. I don’t get the drift of the articles. They don’t mean anything to me. I’m on my way back to Spain. I’m going home. In each hand I carry the proof of my origin. In one hand, I clutch the orange seeds. I want this fruit to survive the implacable exploitation of the island. In the other, I carry the frozen key to my ancestral house in Toledo. I’ll go back there to die: a stone house with a sagging roof, a door made of creaking boards that hasn’t been opened since the time of my ancestors, the Jews expelled by pogroms and plagues, fear and death, lies and hatred …

I silently recite the prayer nailed to my chest like a scapulary. I recite it in the language the Jews of Spain kept alive during all eternity, so we would not renounce our home and house:

You, beloved Spain, we call Mother, and during all our lives we will not abandon your sweet language. Even though you exiled us like a stepmother from your breast, we will not cease to love you as a most holy land, the land where our fathers left their families buried and the ashes of thousands of their loved ones. For you we save our filial love, glorious nation; therefore we send you our glorious greeting.

I repeat the prayer, I squeeze the key, I caress the seeds, and I give myself up to a vast sleep over the sea where time circulates like the currents, uniting and relating everything, yesterday’s conquistadors and today’s, reconquests and counterconquests, besieged paradises, pinnacles and decadences, arrivals and departures, appearances and disappearances, utopias of memory and desire … The constant element in this going back and forth is the painful movement of peoples, immigration, escape, hope, yesterday and today.

What shall I find when I return to Spain?

I shall open the door of my home again.

I shall plant the orange seed again.

London, November 11, 1992