In the afternoon
These memories took more time than you might imagine. The chronology of memory in death is different from what it is in life, and the communication between the two consumes hours and (I still don’t know this) days. I’ll miss, I’m sure of it, this pause in memory. Because now practical problems take precedence over everything else.
I’m dead.
They admit it.
The first item then is what to do with me.
Dulces Nombres de Cristo reveals her dopiness when she asks that I be tossed overboard. “That way,” the savage says, “there won’t be any evidence of what happened.” I hate her and put a curse on her: I hope you’re locked up in an English asylum and fed porridge until you rot, bitch.
Otilia agrees energetically. “What happens if they catch us with this dead guy? We’re in the clinker, my dears. Nobody’s going to ask how it happened. We’re guilty. We were born guilty, don’t be jerks.”
A terrible murmur of approval grows. Dulces and Otilia grab my arms, and Nicha helps them out, taking hold of my ankles. Soledad joins in to speed up the operation. I feel the foam of the waves caressing my ankles.
Doris saves me. “Are you dumbbells or what? In a little while another boat’s going to pick us up. They’ll ask us what we’re doing alone in a yacht. Then they’ll ask if any of us know how to drive it. None of us does, right? Then they bring us back to Acapulco. They find out that the gringo hired this thing and hired us at the same time. Seven whores and their madam and a disappeared gringo, murdered or who knows what. That’s about when they’ll put us on ice, Otilia.”
They don’t drop me, either into the sea or back onto the hard deck, let it be said to their honor. They make me comfortable, with all due respect, on the bench that runs along the gunwale.
Snow White says Doris is right. Does anyone know how to drive one of these boats? Dolores asks if it’s the same as driving a car.
Later on
No, it isn’t the same. Stretched out on the bench, staring at the sky, I also see the trapeze of the boom sail set between the triangular sails of the jibs, properly raised, but which, because they’re not receiving either attention or (more important) nautical intention, will soon sag and fall, prematurely aged, wrinkled. Because a good sail knows the intentions of the sailor. A good hull is ready to obey even the slightest wish of a wise sailor. The absence of that seems to discourage the sails, which communicate it to the mast, which in turn trembles down to its base, where it joins the keel.
In other words, they don’t know what to do. The gasoline will run out. The boom sail and the jibs will be pushed by a soft tropical breeze. Each cough of the motor makes them shake with fear. Finally, when the sun disappears, the seven of them will huddle together. They will form a kind of medieval galliard dance (I made a costume movie in Italy about the plague in the thirteenth century), which will culminate with them hugging Snow White’s fat legs. With her eyes fixed on the darkened horizon, the owner of the Fairy Tale will not release the tiller of The Two Americas. Then the sun will sink into the sea, and the seven will whimper together, a deep, almost religious, wail.
I appropriate it. It’s my responsory, my requiem.
The night fell
Now, at night, I think about the fact that barely twenty-four hours ago I was swimming in a pool filled with flowers in a luxury hotel, thinking about where to go to have some fun. With my chin leaning on the edge of the pool, I read and tried to memorize a poem by William Butler Yeats that evokes past softness and the deep shadows of my eyes. And if the great modern poet of my homeland were to see me now, would he weep? I actually think he foresaw my fate (according to Leonello Padovani, a great poem is prophetic and communicates what we are going to be) when he wondered about those who loved my moments of glad grace and my beauty, with love false or true, and added: How many were they, how many? How many eyes, how many platonic lovers does appearing on screen grant you, when you stand in for Apollo in the modern mythology proffered by movies? Does the poet answer? Does he say something more? I try to recall the end of the poem, but in death my memory doesn’t respond. It’s stubbornly silent. I’m encouraged. Does it mean that with the poem unfinished, I still have a destiny to live out, an unfinished margin of my own life in death?
I’ve fornicated. I’ve died. I’ve discovered that dying means reading the minds of the living.
But my professional (not to say artistic) appetite is not so easily satisfied. Is this my stellar role? My seven producers here will decide that for me. The night scares them. They’re adrift. Both they and I know it. They’re afraid that if they start the motor it will hurl them on an uncontrollable, catastrophic course. They could, as Doris suggested, start it and dash off into the four points of the compass. Which one — north, south, east, west — brings them to shore first?
I don’t think that’s their problem. I may spend the night floating and staring at the stars, but what they’d like is to disappear from the night: the women, the stars. Solitude adrift gives them an absolute night without a roof, one that doesn’t belong to them, their usual lives. This night returns them to the helplessness they’ve only managed to escape through self-deception all through their short lives. Young and dumb. With just enough intelligence not to throw me to the fish. But without enough intelligence to let themselves be guided — not by the instruments that horrify them or the words of which they are ignorant (I look at them and think that thanks to these women technology once again becomes magic) — but by the stars they’ve never known anything about. Perhaps in immobility they may find their only security.
As if she’d heard me, Dolores says out loud: “We sure don’t have a lucky star.”
I’d like to know what species they really are. Machines and nature are equally alien to them. So for what purpose, for whom have they been created? Thinking about them from the perspective of death, I recognize and reconcile them. They are the children of artifice, neither nature nor technology. Do they have the power to re-enchant the world? Maybe they are only the energy of the artificial. How little there is of it, how intense it is, how useless is everything that happens to us.
Sunrise
Well, at least the sea behaved like a mirror. The ketch has the wind in its sails and is heading farther out to sea. The motor is still turned off. There are no birds in the sky. The women wake up. They shake off their sleep with sensual movements that I recognize and am thankful for. Sexy until death. They’re hungry. It’s written all over their faces. All that’s left are bits of olives, cheese, and slices of jicama. Dulces Nombres grabs the platter as if it belonged to her and starts eating. The morning breeze arouses their appetites. Otilia pulls the platter out of her hands. The olives, uniformly perforated so the anchovy can be inserted, bounce over the deck. One of them falls, absurdly, between my lips. The two girls steal bits of the antipasto from each other, but their avid hands stop, confused and repelled, over my lips and the olive which now adorns them.