The base of the mainmast creeks in the mast hole. Doris quickly steps in and arranges things so that what’s left of the platter is distributed equally. “Is there anything else to eat?” “Sure,” laughs Nicha the sneezy. “The olive in handsome’s mug.” No one else laughs. No, there’s nothing else but the platter. But there’s stuff to drink: bottles of Campari, Beefeater, Johnnie Walker, Bacardi, ice, and mineral water. You won’t die of thirst. Besides, I taught them to fish. I know it was only a pretext. I hope they think of it. There are bonito and hake to be had here.
They don’t think about any of that. Two things happen. The dawn heightens the senses, especially smell. The night seems to stock up the smells of the world in order to set them free at daybreak, loaded with dew or sage, with mist and moist earth, with puppy skin and the sweetness of the beehive, with coffee beans and tobacco smoke, with cumin and wallflower. All that evokes daybreak, associating it with different places on earth. The Pacific, the sea of Balboa and Cortés, should yield its own strong, marvelous aromas torn from the bottom of the ocean and from nostalgia for the land. But grumpy Otilia can only evoke oranges; she says that ever since she was a little girl she’s drunk orange juice as soon as she awakens. It was the only luxury in her home, in all the American movies they drank orange juice before going to work or school, but in this damn boat there is no orange juice, not even the smell of an orange. She begins to cry.
The truth is that only one smell takes possession of The Two Americas. It’s the smell of my body. I’ve been dead for eighteen hours. I’m beginning to stink. Eight women with my rotting body. I read their eyes. What are they going to do with me? The waves begin to get rough. They don’t know what to do. Snow White saves my life. Excuse me: she saves my death. She sees the same thing I do. The eyes of the seven dwarfs reflect more hunger than disgust. Snow White makes her play. She quickly starts the motor. They all turn to look at the new captain. The motor coughs, sneezes, spits, but doesn’t start. Nicha catches the sneezes from the motor. We all look up at the spars to see if the mast and the booms are keeping the boom sail and the jibs tight and swollen.
Noon
I can’t stand the heat. I beg them to do something, cover me with a canvas, for pity’s sake, carry me down to the cabin and lay me out there. I’m good and stiff. Soon they won’t be able to move me. I stink and I’m hot. I almost wish they would throw me overboard. I long for the coolness of a bath, the orange juice desired by Otilia. But the women think only about hunger, which is now surfacing in the looks they exchange among themselves and sometimes turn on me. They try to drown their hunger with rum and whiskey. They begin to get sick. Drunk and dizzy, Soledad and Nicha end up vomiting. Doris grabs them by the hair, pulls them around, and scolds them. Bashful and Sneezy cry in despair, “What are we going to do now? Everything was going so nice, the heat, the sailing around, the sex. Now just look, it’s all fucked up.” “Same as always,” says Dolores. “Same as always. Damned life.”
It must be three in the afternoon
The heat is unbearable. The sea is possessed by a calm that presages something bad. They don’t know what to do with me. They don’t want to touch me, true enough. I fill them with terror, disgust, compassion. They don’t even dare to close my eyes. They haven’t recognized my death. I’ve discovered that to die is to acquire, in a single instant, the ability to see the images that pass through the heads of the living. Through the heads of these women, like a movie running nonstop, run the same images of a little girl shot to death in Los Angeles or of a dead whore at the entrance to a nightclub with a fan between her legs. An old man thankful for the presence of a girl when he dies. Or a girl thankful that the branch of an orange tree defers the certainty of death. Should I be satisfied with last night’s unconscious, spontaneous response provoked more by the end of the day than by my death? A little white box and four candles stuck into Coca-Cola bottles. To whom can I commend myself? María de le Gracia, all by herself, quickly pulls my pants up.
Now they don’t look at me. They don’t touch me. María de la Gracia falls asleep easily. She went into the cabin warning the others, “Girls, if we don’t get out of the sun, it’s going to peel our skin off. Who’s going to hire us if we look burned, damn it.” There are no hats. Some of them have draped their bikini tops over their heads. Others, the more offensive ones, have stuffed Kleenex into their nostrils. Only Snow White, uselessly, doesn’t abandon her post. Like me, she’s lived enough to know that this calm is not natural. She looks at the sails. Without real control, they’re beginning to loosen, to snap against the wind, to give up …
Another sunset
Everything’s going badly. Without proper control. The Two Americas is smashing her prow through the growing waves and is beginning to roll sharply. The girls scream and huddle in the back of the lavatory and the cabin. The wind gets stronger and then weakens; periodic gusts give way to sudden calm. The wind begins to blow from the stern, steadily now. The immediate reaction of the ketch to run with the speed of the waves forces the screw and the rudder to rise out of the water at the crest of the wave. I shout from the far shore of death, Tie back those sails, the jib has to go on the side opposite the boom, if it doesn’t it will block the boom, tie it down with the jib boom, why aren’t the sails reefed, why aren’t the others stiff in the wind?
I’m talking to the wind. I’m speaking to the onset of night. Naturally the boat begins to luff, the angle of the prow goes into the wind. The girls scream. The mainsail begins to bend, parallel to the direction of the wind. It snaps back and forth, so hard that it almost throws me off the deck where, slowly but surely, I’m rotting, silent and hungry for the night to refresh my skin and, soon, my guts. I give up the olive resting between my purple lips. The boat is completely out of control. It goes where it pleases. It luffs more and more. The prow rises up and the jib boom extends along the boat’s flank. Then comes a sudden calm, the wind stops blowing and the danger ceases.
I hear sobs. I read water, thirst, images of water flooding the previous images of death. Everything begins to calm down. Long nails begin to claw me in the darkness.
Another Dawn
The sun strikes me in the eyes, but I need something. Something I miss because it was part of my body. I don’t want to imagine it. I look for the women’s eyes. First I see their faces, more and more peeled by the sun. I try to penetrate their minds. This is the privilege of my mortality. Doris is thinking about a man I don’t know. María de la Gracia is a void; she’s still asleep. Soledad has a swimming pool filled with blue, clean, fresh water in her head. Nicha thinks only about bottles and more bottles of sunscreen. Otilia has a big orange dripping sweet juice in her mind. A man other than myself has gotten into Snow White’s head. Otilia imagines a mirror. And in Dolores’s head I find my testicles.
Noon?
They exchange looks. The sun addles their wits. They can’t think. They can’t act. Have to wait for afternoon to come. I would like to touch the place where my balls used to be. Snow White takes the rod and casts the hook into the sea.
4:33
They’ve come to an agreement without speaking. María de la Gracia is still taking refuge in sleep. There she is neither thirsty nor hungry. She always dreams of a child who died of diphtheria at the age of three. She thinks that if he’d lived, her little boy would have saved her from this life she doesn’t love. Why? she asks herself. Wouldn’t the kid have been just one more burden, one more mouth, forcing me to do something worse than what I do innocently, which is to dance naked, protected by the lady who doesn’t let anyone touch us? It isn’t bad. The thing is, I have no one to go home to. Nobody’s waiting for me when I get back. So I sleep, I sleep a lot so I don’t remember that I could be cooking his food or sending him to school, scolding him if he gets bad grades, helping him with his homework, learning with my son what I never learned by myself. That’s what I need. To go home and find something. Where is my son buried? What’s the name of the town I left dead with grief and as beautiful as a wounded jaguar at the age of fifteen, no threat to anyone? Oh God, I just sleep. And I want to dream about my son and can’t because I sense that something bad’s going to happen to me, that all my friends here are closing in on me, saying All she does is sleep all the time, she won’t even know when …