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.
“Never saw a dead man before?” repeated Snow White with an exasperated tremor. “Think we’re never going to die, that we’ll always live happily ever after, that we, just because we’re us, are the only ones who will never die?”
Captured in a silence and a calm more terrifying than any squall, the seven women said nothing, became pensive, and I, stretched out on the deck, really began to tell them apart. Did I have to die in order to individualize them, de-Mexicanize them, de-thirdworldize them?
I stared at them fixedly and almost came back to life in surprise: in death, I could clearly see the images that passed through the minds of the living. I understood it this way, directly and simply: This was my new, my real power. This was death’s gift to me. Was its name immortality? Snow White asked her question—“Never saw a dead man before?”—and Sleepy metamorphosed into what her real name was when she awoke to life, María de la Gracia. And I, thanks to my new powers, saw in her eyes a dead child in a little box painted white in a shack where the candles were stuck into Coca-Cola bottles.
Bashful’s real name was Soledad, and the death that passed through her eyes was that of an old man with open eyes who thanked her for accompanying him to the end, because dying alone is the most terrible thing in the world.
Doc in reality was Doris, and I recognized her death because it took place in the Mexican part of Los Angeles. Doris, a knapsack on her back, was walking along with a little girl more beautiful than a Diego Rivera drawing. She was holding the little girl’s hand as they walked down a street lined with stone walls. Suddenly two street gangs started shooting at each other from opposite sides of the street. The knapsack and the books inside it saved Doris. The little sister — Lupe, Lupita, nobody sweeter — died instantly. In tears, Doris went down on her knees, and because of that the last bullet didn’t blow her brains out.
Never saw a dead man before? Sneezy’s name was Nicha (Dionisia). She grew up at her mother’s side in a whorehouse in the port of Acapulco. There was a big, central dance floor, crummy little lights, and neon beer signs. All that passes through her eyes when Snow White asks them if they’ve never seen a dead man before. Nicha pushes the sight of death aside with a vision of tangled mangroves and burned-out lights. She relives a long wait in one of the rooms surrounding the dance floor. There are three smells. The natural smell of the tropics, which are eternally rotting, and the disinfectant spray used to clean the floors, bed, and lavatory. But the third aroma is that of an orange tree that miraculously grows outside the little room and tries to poke a branch, a perfume, a flower, occasionally a fruit through the window to overwhelm the smells of rotting and disinfectant. She already knows she has to hide under the bed when her mom comes in with a man. She hears everything. That is her image of death. The memory of the orange tree saves her.
On the other hand, big-eared Dopey from time to time recalls a girl with the improbable name Dulces Nombres de Cristo — Sweet Names of Christ — which is she at the age of ten. She’s walking among unsleeping dogs and potholes filled with muddy water, among hundreds of buses standing like elephants in front of a river of cement, among hundreds of taxis that seem to besiege downtown Acapulco, duplicating the city with a squadron of motors. The taxi drivers wash their cabs at night for the next day’s work, while Dulces’s mother, drunk, her legs spread, laughs, sings, shrieks, and fans her cunt at the door to the cabaret.
What haven’t they seen? No, Grumpy’s mind is a blank. Through it pass only deaths in Technicolor, deaths I recognize. Movie dead men, gangsters, cowboys, dead men covered with ketchup. Her name’s Otilia, and she doesn’t allow a single real dead man into her head. But the last one, Happy, the hardest-working, whose name is Dolores, offers me a long vision of rivalries, always two men killing each other over her, killing each other over her with pistols, knives, clubs … These rivals for Dolores’s favor are buried up to the knees in the hard, imprisoning earth, the way the two men are in a famous picture by Goya. Where could Dolores have seen that picture? It seems inconceivable to me that she would have a Goya in her head. Could my vision be tricking me, am I fooling myself with everything I see? As if she obeyed an impulse from death (mine), the girl lights a cigarette with a match taken from a matchbox with the label “Classics” on it. She protects the flame with the box in order to light her cigarette. And there’s Goya’s terrible, black painting: on a matchbox. It’s the portrait of the bitterest fatality.