8:00
They may have begun to see me differently when I showed them how much I knew about handling a beautiful ketch with fixed stabilizer, twin masts, boom, and two jibs. Thirty-six feet long, a beam of nine feet, and a thirty-foot displacement, it cut a fine figure leaving the docking area on its way to the bay, running on the auxiliary motor, with my firm hand on the tiller to take it out of Acapulco. Then, leaving control of the helm, I passed it to Snow White, who almost fainted with shock, amid the giggles of her ladies-in-waiting, so I could raise the mainsail and then the mizzen, all with precise movements, tying cables, setting bitts to wind other cables around them, tying down the boom with a clove hitch and the jibs with a couple of half hitches.
I clamped down a cable that looked loose.
I made everything fast and shipshape.
The ketch was ready for any adventure. A sensitive craft, faithful, that followed every movement of the person who loved her and sailed her well, it was the most beautiful ornament of a splendid day, the kind only the Mexican Pacific knows how to give. Like a poem I learned as a child, anyone who’s seen a sea like this and still wants to get married can only do it with someone like the sea itself.
Ireland boils in my veins. Even more the black Ireland of a descendant of Spain, a castaway it seems, Vincente Valera is my name, but my ambitions are much more modest than those in that poem of my childhood. Vincente Valera is my name, and the name of my ketch, to the boorish satisfaction of the hotel receptionist, is The Two Americas.
Snow White and her seven girl-dwarfs stare at me in admiration, and if I don’t marry the sea, I’ll have to settle for going to bed with them. All seven? Two Americas, one Apollo, and seven whores? What a salad!
9:16
I took the helm again. I think the girls had never seen one of their customers carry out maneuvers they’d only seen done by the boatmen in the port. The morning was cool and blazing hot at the same time: the brilliant, dry heat redeems everything in Acapulco — the ugliness of the buildings, the filth on the streets, the misery of the people amid the tourist boom, the blind pretense of the rich that there are no poor here, all inexplicable, all unjust, all, probably, after all is said and done, irredeemable.
In the eyes of the seven dwarfs, I saw something like an immediate admiration, which did not demand from the guy cast as the macho more than a series of strong, well-defined acts to take control of their feminine veneration. Of course, I tried much too hard. My head was splitting, I felt I needed a bath, an aspirin, and a bed more than I needed all this work; but when we were out to sea, far from the corrupt fingernail of the bay, the Sun and the Pacific, that glorious husband and wife team that overcomes all unfaithful storms and even the most hurricane-plagued divorces, embraced all of us, the eight women and me, in an irresistible way. I think we all had the same idea: if we don’t give ourselves over to the sea and the sun this morning, we don’t deserve to be alive.
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?