Only two of us keep our distance while the tears swell, the hands are joined, the hugs go around, the tremors, the sweats.
Snow White, because she knows them all too well and simply, says, “Bunch of assholes.”
And I, I envy them because I don’t remember in my profession or my life a comparable fraternal experience.
What time is it?
The boat follows its own whims; it’s uncontrolled, and responds to the heavy seas we’ve encountered. The current drags us along like a magnet toward the Sea of Cortés, whose very name the women are ignorant of, but which I imagine transparent and sown with jewels: Didn’t the poor conquistador scatter all his wealth on the bottom of lakes and seas — Moctezuma’s gold in the swamps of the Sad Night when he fled Mexico City losing almost everything, the emeralds of the conquest in a naval battle at Algiers? What kind of treasure does an adventurer like that leave to his posterity, the conqueror of an empire equal to the sun? My sister the Moon answers me tonight, this dawn, this afternoon of a moon appeared out of time, I no longer know, but the Moon answers me that perhaps he leaves nothing more than the name of a sea, a testament of water, a fame of salt and wind. I’m dead, and I see only a gigantic, trembling spiderweb at the bottom of the sea.
The ketch luffs again, the prow rises and the jib boom hangs to one side, sinks and begins to drag the boat. There is no hand on the tiller; the amount of sail dragged by the boom overwhelms the tiller. We are adrift, and in that precise instant all appetites, memories, and fears fuse into one fearsome object, which is I myself. What remains of me understands and trembles in knowing it. I am to blame for the situation, guilty of having abused them, guilty of being an American, rich, famous, of being everything but what they don’t know, because I already said it, they know nothing about the stars and don’t know how to read the heavens or, for that matter, the compass. I am an actor, goddamn it, I’m a frustrated actor, doomed equally for habitual mediocrity and exceptional success. Yes, I’m guilty of many things, of my profession, my wife, my associates, my fellow workers, who are the people I remember. And suddenly, dead here and rotting under the Pacific sun, losing my features little by little but instantly, I think about the statues of Apollo that only count old age in terms of centuries and never count death. I try to save my responsibility by assimilating myself like the statues, joining with the poets and artists, embracing my vanished sister the Moon, draping over my temples the laurels of the names that are the princes of languages and vision: Yeats, Rilke, Padovani, Turner and the sea, Géricault and the raft of the Medusa, everything I learned in my childhood and didn’t find again until a certain afternoon on the Lido in Venice. But I am guilty about an Indian housemaid who stopped to look at me in the gardenia-filled pool with the bottles in her hand; I am guilty that a boy resembling me guided me to the garden illuminated by Chinese lanterns where I found these women. I am guilty for another boy I didn’t know who saved himself from death because an orange tree in bloom perfumed the bedroom where his mother screwed with men she didn’t know. I am, finally, guilty for a poor sixtyish gringa I offended by confusing her with my wife, Cindy, and slapping her in public …
In all of their eyes, I saw a time which disregarded my individuality. Above all, I saw those Mexican children and felt afraid of escaping from my own more or less protected individuality, constructed with a certain care and lots of patience so I could face a helpless humanity in which circumstances neither respect nor distinguish anyone.
I realized what had happened. In death, I had become a Mexican.
At noon
The coast guard boarded us amid the confused joy and fear of Snow White and her seven dwarfs. We’d reached Barra de Navidad, a good distance from the Sea of Cortés. Well, death is a disorienting experience. Excuse me. The nearest port was Manzanillo. The sailors covered their noses with handkerchiefs before coming aboard. The captain quickly inspected and quickly questioned them. “He died of a heart attack,” said Snow White. The girls said nothing. “So who castrated him?” asked the captain, pointing to my fly. “All of us,” shouted María de la Gracia. Dolores was about to shout, I was hungry. Snow White spoke up. “He was a pervert. He was a gringo. He tried to take advantage of my girls.” The coastguardsmen laughed at her. “All right then,” said Snow White. “I did it. I was hungry. Don’t you like to eat mountain oysters? That’s how you get started. But anyway, we’re Catholics and Mexicans.”
The next day, every day
They towed the ketch back to Acapulco. No one could identify me. There was nothing left of my more or less famous features. The Yacht Club said I paid in cash and in advance without leaving my name. That wasn’t true. The hotel arranged for the service. But no one wanted to get involved in such a strange case or involve anyone else, the hotel didn’t want to involve the club, and the club didn’t want to involve the hotel. While the investigation went forward, María de la Gracia confessed I was her boyfriend and the father of her child. She claimed the body. Just to get rid of it (I mean of me), they gave it to her. I mean, they handed me over.
She put me in a box and spoke to me very softly, thanking me because thanks to me, she said, she’d remembered the name of her hometown and her son’s grave.
They carried me in a bus to a nameless village along the Costa Chica in the state of Guerrero. My presence was celebrated by the other passengers.
When we got to the town, the carpenter recognized María de la Gracia and gave her a coffin.
She thanked him and buried me next to her son, in a cemetery where the crosses are painted indigo blue, vermilion, yellow, and black, like birds, like fish. The grave is next to a tall orange tree, about eighteen or twenty feet tall, which seems to have achieved its full height. Who could have planted it? How long ago? I wish I could know how much history will protect me from now on. Do I lie in the shadow of history?
When the hotel receptionist, the little man covered with coffee powder and sporting a thin mustache, said he was the only person to see me, he lied. The Indian chambermaid saw me floating in the pool reading a wet book of poems. Only now do I remember that line: “But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, / And loved the sorrows of your changing face.” Now I remember that verse when I think about a young illiterate Indian girl who didn’t even speak Spanish. The little man in the guayabera wanted to save his skin but follow the story in the conspiracy. He said that it was true, he had registered me, that he had seen me, but that I’d walked away without leaving my name. The bill had been put down to the name on my American Express card.
The investigation centered on me and if in fact some people did deduce that I was the corpse found drifting with seven Acapulco whores and their madam in the Pacific near Barra de Navidad in a ketch named The Two Americas, no one would think of following a poor being as humble as María de la Gracia to her small village on the Costa Chica. And besides, Snow White was nervous about having cut off my balls but proud as well for having saved the girls. Everything is forgotten. Clues disappear. The possibility of my strange death merited a small obit in the Los Angeles Times. Time magazine didn’t even bother to note it. In the transitions column of Newsweek, this is all they printed:
PRESUMED DEAD. Vince Valera, 55, bushy-browed hero of B movies, graced with a certain Irish charm, winner of the only Oscar given to an American actor for a European film (The Long Night, directed by Leonello Padovani, 1972). Disappeared in Acapulco.