Havana Year Zero

by Karla Suárez

  In terms of Meucci, I only knew what Euclid had told me, but Leonardo had a great deal more information. We talked long and hard that night until he finally offered me a lift to Capitolio, where I could find a taxi. On the way, he said, we’ll pass the Teatro Tacón or the Gran Teatro, as it’s now called, and maybe we’ll encounter Meucci’s ghost still haunting the streets. As he pedalled, Leonardo told me stories about the theatre from its opening to the present day, and I could see the sweat drenching his shirt. Take my word for it, he was a really likeable guy, and the better I got to know him, the more comfortable I felt about my mission to become his friend. He was the sort of person you might not notice at first, but just let him open his mouth and you were all ears. He was a snake charmer. And, of course, he knew it.

  6

  A few days later, I went to see Euclid to report on my meeting with the author, but he was busy teaching when I arrived. His son, who was paying him a visit, opened the door to me and announced that the family had a new member. He led me to the bathroom, where I found Euclid’s mother on her knees by the tub in which I saw a poor, scrawny, grey excuse for a dog, its coat soaked and its eyes wide open. The young man, who they called Chichí, had found it near a rubbish bin, but according to him, it was a poodle that had been abandoned and, just as soon as it was dry and groomed, would show its true lineage. That year the streets were full of stray dogs with frightened faces.

  After the bath, Chichí carried the dog out into the sun and began to towel it down. The animal appeared to be grateful, shook itself and contorted its body to scratch all over. It was a pitiful sight, but one that also made me laugh. That poor animal is a blot on the landscape, I said, and as if by magic it raised its head and barked for the first time since its arrival. Chichí smiled at me and, turning again to the dog, putting a hand on its head, pronounced: That’s what we’ll call him. Blot. So I was responsible for naming the dog, and Blot really was its name; I’m not inventing that one. But as the dog is dead now, no one’s going to recognise its owner. Or at least that’s what I hope.

  In relation to dog’s owner, it was, in theory, Chichí, but as his mother was allergic to animal hair he’d decided to bring it to his father’s home. He knew that Euclid would initially protest but end up adopting the animal. Which is exactly what did happen. Chichí was Euclid’s youngest son, the only one remaining in the country and, although his father was sometimes annoyed with him, he inevitably came to understand his son’s decisions. Children are a headache you don’t want to go away, he used to say. Chichí had dropped out of university because he wanted to write and, according to him, university was a dead loss. So, while he was trying to become a writer he earned a living selling foodstuffs. He’d managed to hide this activity, which of course was illegal, from Euclid until the night two steaks were served up for dinner. Beef was a luxury and, although Euclid had devoured his like someone who’s just survived a famine, it didn’t sit well with him. Imagine, a retired university teacher who gave private classes to support his mother, with a son involved in illegal trade and, to top it all, whom he had to thank for the food. Chichí’s grandmother claimed that he was only trying to help his father. Euclid maintained that the boy was already a man but had no sense of responsibility. Chichí, for his part, never said a word, but continued to supply food, which his father eventually came to accept without protest.

  The day Chichí turned up with Blot, Euclid was unsurprised to find his son no longer in the house and the dog sleeping placidly on a cushion. Children are a headache you don’t want to go away, he repeated before inviting me into his room so we could discuss our business undisturbed. He knew I had a great deal to tell him.

  Settled in his bedroom, I started to recount everything Leonardo had told me about Meucci. Euclid already knew some of it but, following our research methodology, no detail was to be omitted. I therefore began at the beginning. Antonio Meucci was born in 1808 in Florence and studied design and mechanical engineering there at the Academy of Fine Arts. But given that he was interested in everything, he also expanded his knowledge of chemistry, physics, acoustics and what was then known about electricity. Euclid confirmed each datum with a nod of the head. As a young man, with all that study behind him, Meucci began working as a stage engineer at the Teatro de la Pérgola where, among other things, he built machines to assist in everyday operations. According to Leonardo, the theatre still possessed, at least until lately, one of his inventions: a sort of speaking tube connecting the stage with the upper levels, where the scenery-shifters worked. An apparatus like that might seem very basic nowadays, but you have to bear in mind that we’re talking about the early nineteenth century. An inventor’s genius sometimes lies in discovering the simplest use for a very basic object. Don’t you agree?

  Meucci lived in Florence for many years, but eventually left the city because his interests weren’t limited to the world of science. It seems that his liberal, republican ideas proved problematic and that led him to accept the offer of a job in Havana. He was already married to Ester, who worked in the costume department of the Teatro de la Pérgola, and the two of them reached this island in 1835, alongside an Italian opera company. The Teatro Tacón had yet to open its doors to the public, but the couple had been offered contracts in what would become the continent’s most important theatre: Ester in charge of costume and Antonio as technical director.

  I stopped for breath. Euclid heaved a sigh and after a few nods, shakes of the head and various barely audible sounds, finally said: So where the hell did that guy get so much information? My friend was surprised and, I believe, also a little irritated. It was as if it pained him to discover that someone shared his obsession. But Leonardo was an author and his interest in Meucci wasn’t purely scientific; he was fascinated by the personage and his biography, his childhood, his love life, the milieux he’d moved in, and so it was natural that his research would cover so many areas. While, for instance, he was telling me about the Teatro Tacón – him pedalling his bicycle, me observing the sweat on his back – I’d been gradually transported to the location he evoked, a place so beautiful, so elegant that it would have dragged words of praise from our first female author, the Condesa de Merlín. I knew the theatre in its present-day incarnation, but Leonardo’s words had the yellowing tinge of old paper. Do you get me? In my mind’s eye, I was able to contemplate the nineteenth-century opulence of a newly opened theatre and admire the brilliance of the crystal chandelier suspended over the stalls. Leonardo said that the chandelier, which had been imported from Paris, became an iconic symbol of the place, but sadly, some years later, had been broken during a botched restoration job. He told me about the masked balls held there during the Carnival festivities that coincided with the inauguration of the theatre in 1838, injecting his speech with such gusto that you could almost believe he’d been present to enjoy them. He didn’t know what Meucci and his wife had been doing before that date, but he’d discovered that, once the Tacón was up and running, the couple had moved into a suite of rooms in the theatre itself, which served as both their living space and laboratories. It was there that Meucci set his ingenuity to the task of improving the acoustics and stage machinery.

  While Leonardo was speaking, I attended performances of Italian opera, listened to Enrico Caruso, watched Sarah Bernhardt, heard the sound of Brindis de Salas’s violin. I witnessed the tribute to the Cuban-born author, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and it was as if I were the person crowning her with the laurels. Leonardo spoke and I regretted never having even once attended a performance by our National Ballet, not even to see Alicia Alonso, who is part of the contemporary history of the theatre, but the author had indeed seen her dance and I could almost hear him applaud her Giselle. So while I travelled on the back carrier of a bicycle, dodging potholes in the darkened city of 1993, I learned of the transformations and name-changes that the theatre underwent before becoming the Gran Teatro de La Habana. It was a journey through time that took us to
the actual front of the building, where Leonardo stopped pedalling; we dismounted, me with my butt shredded by the metal tubes of the carrier, him wiping the sweat from his face with his forearm. Just look at it, Julia. It’s as beautiful as ever, he said. And yes, even though the dim light scarcely allowed a glimpse of the architecture, the Teatro Tacón was still very beautiful.

  Euclid scratched his head when I recounted all this and gave another sigh before stating that the importance of the theatre lay in the fact that Meucci had invented the telephone there. He wasn’t the least interested in the history of the place or any of the stuff Leonardo evoked in his portrait. What he cared about was that right there, in that location, Meucci had written the document that we now had to find. All that history, all those fancy words might impress me but they were nothing more than stage props, the froth on the coffee. In short, information available to anyone who wanted to find it. The details of Meucci’s life were another matter, and the realisation that Leonardo knew more than he did sparked his curiosity.

  But he’s always got his head in a book, I pointed out. According to Leonardo, he’s been researching Meucci for years and can’t even count the hours he’s spent in the National Library scouring the contemporary newspapers – Diario de La Habana, Diario de La Marina, El Noticioso, Lucero – until he finally found references to Meucci. Thanks to those old newspapers, Leonardo had been able to build up a reasonable idea of Meucci’s years in the Teatro Tacón and also of his departure from Havana; but those articles were insufficient, they were barely a chapter in the research, a tiny pearl indicating that it was worth continuing. Other information, as he told me, had come from different sources: articles published in Cuba or abroad... Euclid interrupted me to comment: Abroad? Yes, abroad. Leonardo had mentioned reading some articles written outside Cuba and although I’d enquired where, his response had been: Here and there.

  Here and there. I agreed with Euclid that it was a pretty vague answer, but I honestly hadn’t had the impression that Leonardo was trying to hide anything; it was more as if he was unwilling to stray from the main topic. That’s what I said to Euclid, and he shook his head, telling me that my reasoning was incredibly naive.

  From his point of view, the fact that Leonardo had access to information from outside the island was dangerous, to say the least. As you know, things are different now; we have tourism, Cubans travel overseas, many live in other countries and come back on holiday. But in 1993, that kind of coming and going was in its infancy. Words like ‘abroad’ and ‘foreign’ signified something strange, beyond our experience. What’s more, a sort of spectre that haunted society, from the highest to the lowest spheres, triggered a sense of reserve or wariness in relation to anything that came from outside. And that was particularly true in those years, when the friends from overseas, the Soviet Union and almost the whole socialist bloc, had disappeared off the map, leaving us practically alone, floating in mid-ocean, and with the United States just ninety miles away. So those words were never neutral, although their meanings might vary with the age of the person who spoke them. For some of us, ‘abroad’ was the Devil incarnate; for others, it was salvation. For my friend Euclid the word was undoubtedly closer to the Devil than to salvation. His sons had gone abroad and he would never see them again: abroad was an unknown, foreign land, a place located in some distant, inaccessible part of the planet.

  I understood all that and completely agreed that Leonardo’s access to information was strange, even suspicious, but what I couldn’t tolerate was Euclid saying that my reasoning was naive just because I claimed that the author didn’t seem to be trying to hide anything. If his aim had been to conceal information, he could have just failed to mention where the articles came from. Right? But, in fact, he made no fuss about mentioning them. Which meant he felt comfortable talking with me and, therefore, I’d gradually learn more details, find out where the articles came from and if he knew anything about our document. My objective was to squeeze the lemon dry; I just had to do it in my own way. I swear, I can put up with a lot, but one thing I’ll never allow is to have my intelligence undervalued. Never ever.

  I remember that I stood up and, making it clear that I was annoyed, looked my friend straight in the eyes and told him that if he thought my reasoning was naive, maybe he should find someone else to help him, someone capable of reasoning more effectively. Euclid first gazed at me with a very serious expression, but then a smile slowly began to break across his face, a twitch in one corner of his lips that broadened to take in his whole mouth: You know something? I adore you, was what he said, his eyes fixed on mine. He then added that he hadn’t meant to offend me, even if the way I behaved when I was offended was incredibly sexy; he knew he was getting old, but that didn’t mean he’d stopped admiring my intelligence and my flesh. That’s exactly how he put it: my flesh. And he begged my forgiveness if he’d treated me like an innocent.

  I smiled back, ducking my head to avoid his eyes. There are things we only become conscious of with the passage of time. The body changes, loses its firmness, signs of ageing appear, but what puzzles me is that inside, or at least inside that increasingly less hairy thing we call a man’s head, it’s as if nothing’s altered, as if he were still the same person. It’s my belief that if there were no mirrors, the verb ‘to age’ wouldn’t exist either. True, you might notice a decrease in stamina, but if it weren’t for mirrors, that would be hard to explain and you’d go to the psychologist and say: I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I often feel tired. And the psychologist, who has never heard the verb either, would look you over, note that you’re not physically the same as a twenty-year-old patient, and conclude that the change is undoubtedly due to relationship problems. That would be it; something wasn’t as it should be in the patient’s love life, hence the fatigue. There was no other explanation. A middle-aged man, moved by this reasoning, would return home happy, thinking that it wasn’t really anything to worry about, that those sorts of problems have solutions, and to prove, or attempt to prove it, he’d start flirting with younger women. Funny, right? The body ages and thought is trapped inside it. The risk is that sometimes, what with being locked up for so long, thought becomes its own trap, begins to rot, and then, as a logical reaction, the process is reversed. Aged thought takes control of the body. To my way of thinking, that must be the start of death, which of course isn’t necessarily linked to physical age.

  Euclid had always been pretty seductive, and there was no reason why he shouldn’t continue that way because both his mind and his eyes kept carnal desire alive. That day my annoyance was short-lived. As Euclid gazed at me, I felt a sort of tenderness. How can I explain it? I felt as if something were moving in waves through my chest. Do you get the idea? It was years since he’d been male eye candy for me, but it wasn’t a matter of age; it was a habit, the friendship that united us; yet for him, in addition to being his friend, I was still a body worth looking at.

  I raised my eyes, saw Euclid standing there gazing at me and realised that he desired me, but also that, in some way, he was alone and I was important to him. Many of his illusions had gone down the drain, he had no partner, was retired, living with his mother and slowly but inexorably sliding towards a state of inertia in which dreams have no place. But Euclid wasn’t going to take it lying down. My Euclid was clinging tightly to the walls so the slippage would be as slow as possible. And for that task he had his science books and one great dream: finding Meucci’s document. Another thing I understood that day was that he needed me; he was depending on me to get to Leonardo, I was the linchpin connecting him to the writer, and he wasn’t going to learn everything Leonardo knew without my help.

  I gave a heavy sigh and finally said that if Leonardo knew anything about the document, he’d tell me in his own time, that there was no need to worry, I knew what I was doing. Euclid smiled without adding another word and then, faced with his silence, and for absolutely no other reason, I placed my lips on his and ki
ssed him. It was a short kiss, more of a peck, but still a kiss. When I pulled away, he was still silent and it was me who grinned and said: You know I adore you too, don’t you?

  7

  I didn’t meet my Ángel again until a few days after his return from Cienfuegos because my work schedule was crazy. He told me over the phone that he was longing to see me and proposed that we spend Friday night at his place because he wanted to take me to a marvellous, ‘mystical’ plance on Saturday. Naturally, I accepted the invitation. Ángel had a gift for inventing alternative realities: slap-up dinners in the middle of the crisis; evenings spent lying on the floor, things that helped me escape from everyday reality.

  On the Saturday, we left the house very early, and no matter how hard I insisted he refused to tell me where we were going. After crossing half the city in packed buses, cursing the public transport and the long waits, we finally reached the Botanical Gardens and walked to the Japanese Gardens. They’re miraculous, out of this world, mystical, exactly as he’d said. We arrived around noon, just in time for lunch in the eco restaurant. That was another surprise for me because when Ángel told me it served vegetarian food, I had my doubts. I’ve always been a second-generation veggie, by which I mean that the cow eats the grass and I eat the cow, but at that time cows were only to be found in the same place as dinosaurs: books. Considering that my daily fare consisted of rice with split peas or beans, cabbage and soya, the restaurant’s speciality didn’t at first appeal. But there was my guardian angel ready to explain that all those wonderfully colourful vegetarian dishes weren’t just grass but natural, balanced foodstuffs, combinations of flavours, with no preservatives and brimming with healthful qualities.