“Who’s going to touch her first?”
Snow White shouted: “A fish bit the hook, a nice hake, isn’t there anything to cook with on the boat, no kitchen? Okay then, grouchy Otilia, damn you, get out your box of Classics, take off your panties if that’s all we have, set them on fire, and be careful not to burn down this goddam thing ’cause then we’ll really be fucked up.”
Warm silent night
From the shore of death, you can see the stars better. They’re the map of heaven and their lines tell me we’re being dragged north after drifting out of control to the west. Maybe we’re getting close to land, but these women don’t know it. If we continue in this direction, we’ll hit the tip of Baja California, Cabo San Lucas, entering the Sea of Cortés between the coasts of Sonora and the peninsula, which is longer than Italy, where the desert and the sea meet: huge cactuses and the transparent sea, the sun as round as an orange. What the conquistador told his sons, if he had time to talk to them, I don’t know.
Columbus never knew he’d discovered America, and Cortés never knew Baja California was a peninsula. He thought it was an island that led to the prodigious land of El Dorado. If the women don’t die of hunger and thirst, we’ll enter the Sea of Cortés like helpless explorers, but soon we’ll reach Mexico’s armpit, the salty mouth of the Colorado River, Terra Firma …
How far away we are. At the same time, on this warm, quiet night a ship in full regalia, full of lights and noises, from which the insistent rhythms of mambos and guarachas reach us, passes in the distance. Its lights shine, more than in the night, in the eyes of Snow White and her seven dwarfs. They all wave their arms, call out, scream while the white cruise ship goes off without seeing us. Not reluctantly, Dulces Nombres sings the tune the night is broadcasting:
Mexican girls dance the mambo
so very pretty and tasty
and the others join in, united in hope, fear, and frivolous joy, all at once:
like Cuban girls they shake their hips
they’re gonna drive me crazy.
A different dawn
They’ve eaten. They wake up María de la Gracia to offer her a slice of half-raw hake, what can we do. Dolores is just about to make a joke about a dish of mountain oysters, but she stops herself just in time. She laughs; at least it’s something to sink your teeth into. She goes on laughing like a fool, and her laughter spreads to the others, just like last night when they all sang the mambo together, just like that, the way it happens sometimes, you laugh, I laugh, we all laugh, even if we don’t know why. Maybe it has something to do with that old saying: A full stomach means a happy heart. They laugh, their mouths stuffed with half-chewed fish. But they don’t see the shoreline. They look at Snow White who uselessly scans the horizon, and their joy fades. The mambo ship was an illusion, its lights a mirage.
But since their energy’s been renewed, they decide to use it. It’s as if they have to live the morning that each one of them lives — and I die — because of my presence. They have to live it with more fury, more intensity, more defiance than ever. They start making puns again to lighten up the situation, then they start to exchange recriminations, men one stole from another, clothes they stole from each other, Why did you copy my hairstyle, shitass? and Who wore that red skirt first, huh? Who gets more money stuffed into her shoe when she dances, and who’s got more in the bank, and which one is going to quit this life first, who’s going to have her own house, who’s going to have things turn out for her like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, bring on my Richard Gere, here Dick, who’s going to get married and with what kind of macho, macho, macho …
Suddenly they all repel me. I try to close the curtain of my death over their vulgar film, their vile mess, so I can enter my own film again, the film Italy and Leonello Padovani gave me, far from my own messes made in California, near the Sea of Cortés … Padovani didn’t hide, in fact he exaggerated his status as aristocrat and homosexual. It was a splendid defiance of his heritage while fashionable at the same time. Member of the Communist Party, he would dare anybody to say that a person’s social origins determine his political participation. Not all rich people are reactionaries; not all workers are progressives. Sometimes the bourgeoisie carries out the revolution, while the poor support fascism …
Supremely knowledgeable about the female heart on the movie screen — Alida Valli, Silvana Mangano, Anna Magnani were brighter stars than ever when he directed them — he challenged every convention by understanding the souls of women without ever touching their bodies. They said he transposed and sublimated in his heroines his own sordid adventures with low-class masculine lovers, in whom he found, often to excess, the characteristics of sexiness and ingratitude, cheap self-interest and bestial passion. He treated me with the utmost respect. He was the first to see me and deal with me as a human being. With him, I dared to talk about things that were forbidden in Hollywood … How could I remember an Ireland I abandoned in childhood but that returned, violent and beautiful, perfumed and savage, to my dreams? Why, in my unconscious memory, did there appear so many tall reeds, so many hazel forests, so many silver trout and white butterflies which only fluttered around at night? Why so much dew drowned in dew? Did I know all that, did I remember it and live it only because I’d read Yeats?
“No.” Padovani smiled. “Perhaps you know it because before you read a poet you were one.”
I told him I was barely the Apollo of B movies, as my wife calls me.
“Apollo is light,” Padovani told me, he and I sitting in the solitary Lido in Venice one November afternoon. “He’s associated with prophecy, archery, medicine, and flocks. His sister is the Moon. Thanks to her, he triumphs over the deities of the dark night.
“I love Yeats’s poem where a man grows old and dreams about the soft look your eyes had once. He asks himself how many loved his moments of glad grace, how many loved his beauty with love false or true…”
Padovani’s eyes abandoned mine to look for a sign of life in the Venetian afternoon. He admitted that at times he felt lonely and missed the kind of company that all the caprices and all the glory in the world couldn’t get him. If I read Yeats, he knew Rilke well and recalled the verses about an Apollo with a shadowless gaze, a mouth that was mute because it had still not been useful for anything but had insinuated the first smile.
“Someone,” Padovani concluded, “is transmitting him his own song.”
Then the light reveals the stain of dry blood around my open fly. The women all look at each other. Suddenly they love each other, Oh sister, look we’re together in everything, just like we are on this boat, how are we ever going to be apart, guys? Sisters to the death, they hug each other, cry, remember — the man, the son, the parents — they share a past they invent in order to be sisters. Now they invent a future in which each one helps the others, things will be terrific because the first to make it will scatter her gold and share her success with the others, of course, of course …