I have resolved to visit Havana only on Saturdays and Sundays after leaving the clinic. The day before yesterday was our first Saturday, I went with Paz to the Museo de Bellas Artes to see the superb collection of Wifredo Lam, we went by the the hotel Meliá to buy El País, toured the heart of Havana, where in the bookstalls I found some wonders: the complete poetry of Gastón Baquero and Emilio Ballagas, the almost complete narrative work of Lino Novás Calvo, about whom I was unconditional in my youth, and a Mexican edition, which I have never seen in the bookstores in Mexico, of that book considered blasphemous for many years, Hombres sin mujer [Men without a Woman] by Carlos Montenegro, which César Aira compared to the most provocative Genet in his Diccionario de autores latinoamericanos [Dictionary of Latin American Authors]. Old Havana is a marvel; it adds to tourist cosmopolitanism the popular force of the Caribbean. It’s teeming with musicians. When I came to Havana the first time, tourists came from the United States; today those who speak English in the plazas and restaurants are Canadian; but one can also hear French, Italian, a lot of German, and the Spanish of Spain in abundance. The language of the blacks and mulatos is almost unintelligible to me, an extraordinarily melodious Papiamento, as if extracted from the poems of the young Guillén, from Ballagas, and the stories of Lydia Cabrera. It could be that during my first visit to Cuba, before the Revolution, mulatos didn’t circulate through the streets of Old Havana in such numbers, or that at the time they endeavored to speak Spanish with a standard Cuban accent so not to be despised by whites, or perhaps my memory has retained other aspects of the city more attractive to me than the kind of popular speech.
Suddenly I found myself in front of El Floridita, the bar where Hemingway, as is known, would go to drink his daiquiris upon arriving in Havana; beside it is La Zaragozana, the best restaurant in Cuba and one of the oldest in the city, opened in the mid-nineteenth century. I entered as if summoned to decipher a part of my past, to play the accused, the prosecutor, and the judge all in one person. The décor of La Zaragozana when I entered on Saturday was unknown to me. It seems that, the first time, its interior architecture was in the style of the thirties or forties, with an echo of Alvar Aalto, the Finn, or even Adolf Loos, the Austrian. But I don’t trust my memory, which is why I’ve come to lock myself away in La Pradera. The restaurant’s walls are painted with the façades of old Spanish taverns, and that unsettled me; on the other hand, the furniture, the uniforms, and the waiters’ style of service had all the taste of the past, as in Lubitsch’s best films. The kitchen of La Zaragozana maintains the same high standard as before. “When did you come here the first time?” Paz asks. I counted, and was petrified: fifty-one years ago! It must have been in late February or early March of 1953. I was a young man who was about to turn twenty, I remember it well because I needed my guardian’s permission to leave Mexico.
A group of university friends and I had planned a South American tour for the holidays. Our project was to cross the Andean countries horizontally; possibly to emulate a remarkable journey, perhaps that of Francisco de Orellana. We were to depart Veracruz on a boat belonging to an Italian shipping line to reach La Guaira; we would immediately go up to Caracas and from there we would quickly cross Colombia, Ecuador, and Perú, from where we would sail the Pacific until reaching Manzanillo. I got the money from my family; obtaining a passport was the only difficulty; the age of majority was twenty-one at the time. I was an orphan, so my guardian would have to give me permission to travel abroad, but he lived in Córdoba and couldn’t travel to the capital; I had to complete some rather complicated procedures so that an aunt, Elena Pitol, could become my guardian and accompany me to the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs. When we were before the functionaries she began to tell outrageous anecdotes about my childhood whims, and rumors of my more recent ones, which rankled me. By the last month, one by one my comrades began to back out of the trip, some for lack of money, others because of sickness and alleged sudden accidents, another, the nephew of an admiral, insisted that the trip would be a disaster, that it was the season for the Atlantic’s worst storms, and that traveling by boat would would mean descending into hell. Someone suggested that we go instead to Guatemala for a few days, another to San Antonio, Texas, another to Pachuca, where the barbacoa was first-rate. Long story short, I embarked on the journey alone. I had lost several days due to the red tape involving my guardianship and passport. Upon arriving at the customs office in Veracruz, between a terrible squall and gale, I received some dreadful news: the Francesco Morosini56 had left a few hours earlier. The representative of the Italian ship line told me that the storm was about to make land and the boat was in danger as long as it was anchored at dock, so it had to leave four hours earlier bound for New Orleans, the first leg of the trip. It couldn’t be expected to wait for just two people. I and an elderly Italian man who looked like he had consumption were left ashore, but when the representative saw my ticket and learned that I was going to Venezuela, he told me that it might still be possible to reach the Francesco Morosini in Havana. Another employee added that a Brazilian cargo ship the company managed would be leaving the next day for Cuba. “If you dare travel on that freighter lacking even the slightest comforts, you could reach the Morosini, we’ll foot the passage. What do you say?” he asked. “Count me in!” I blurted out enthusiastically. The old man, however, refused. He shouted that they didn’t know whom they were dealing with, that he would sue the company and the customs agents, then suddenly burst into tears.
What a complicated labyrinth to reach La Zaragozana in 1953! I’m dumbfounded by the young man I was. It’s almost impossible for me to believe that young man is now an old man who struggles to remember such a distant chapter of his life. It’s easier for me to create some distance to recount his exploits in Havana; I’ll use the third person as if I were someone else. The Brazilian freighter arrived in Havana two days later, at dusk; customs and port services had already closed. That young man contemplates the city from afar, fascinated by the prodigious panorama; he lingers on the deck watching as twilight envelops the city. Suddenly, almost instantly, night falls, and at that moment a blanket of light suddenly emerges from the ground. The city has lit up violently, and its beauty grows stronger. All of a sudden, a motorboat arrives and approaches the boat’s hull; from the deck someone throws down a rope ladder by which the Cuban representatives of the shipping company that owns the Francesco Morosini board the boat, along with some employees from health and customs. Someone calls out his name, and he reports to the officials. They tell him that he can board the boat and report to the office early the next morning to pick up his suitcase. The company will take care of his accommodations until the boat arrives. He hands his passport to a functionary, which they will return to him the following day. An Italian sailor teases him for having missed the boat, and suggests jokingly that he should stay alert so as not to be left ashore when the Francesco Morosini leaves Cuba.
Now, fifty-some years later, as I walk the streets of this city, I find traces of that stay, some shreds of memory begin to activate, but others are reluctant to rise to the surface. He can’t remember, for example, where he slept during those days, if in a room in the shipping company or somewhere else, he was sure it wasn’t in a hotel; however, he does remember that he roamed the city day and night, the most laidback parts and the most boisterous, and that during those wanderings he compared Mexico City to the city he was discovering, and his seemed like an immense monastery inhabited by a multitude of Trappist monks, a desert, an infinite silence, a genteel greyness; whereas in the other he sensed a storm, an Eden, the apotheosis of the body, vertigo, absolute bliss.
The first night the Italian sailor and two young Cubans, employees of the company, invited him to walk around Havana. They stopped in every class of bar before arriving in the barrio chino, where they entered a cabaret with shows so excessively obscene that he had never conceived possible: El Shanghai. The sailor began to feel sorry for himself because he was unable to do wha
t he wanted; he had remained in Havana for a week due to a nasty case of the clap and an eruption of rather suspicious red blisters on his chest; the doctor cured the rash with ointments, assuring him that they were not overly dangerous and that his torrential clap had begun to dry up. He cursed a female passenger, a piece of shit compatriot with whom he had slept several times on the trip, who had also been frequented by other sailors and various passengers, whose vaginal fury no one had been able to satisfy; the doctor advised him to be careful not to relapse because that indeed would be dangerous. He declared loudly that he was a martyr for visiting the places he most enjoyed, and he greeted everyone, telling whomever bothered to listen that his penis was in fact recovering, that he was at least able to get it up now, but that he had to be careful, he repeated, extremely careful, so that the bloody mess didn’t become chronic. He also said he’d sailed the same route for seven years and that of all the ports Havana was his favorite, above all because he was able to wander the barrio chino, listen to musicians, and screw mulatas. He had just turned twenty-eight and was cursing the devil for having given him such a blow as a gift.
To the young Mexican, the sailor’s reiteration of his venereal diseases, his inflated gestures, his triumphant oratory, seemed overly theatrical, an ostentatious celebration of virility, an introduction to the world of medals and trophies earned in bed, but little by little he began to grow accustomed to and even have fun with him. The sailor, like the company’s young employees, knew and said hello to everyone. Some pedestrians came up to talk to the patient; they asked him how his clap was coming along, was it getting better, was pus still oozing from his caso, to which the sailor rejoined, “What do you mean caso? What I have between my legs is a cazzo, you want to see it?” Each one recommended a home remedy better than the last: ointments, teas, ground seeds, tobacco leaf smoke, vinegars, a santera’s farts, toad slime; women teased him: “What a pity the poor little fella won’t get up again!” and smiled devilishly. The curtains that covered the doors surrounding the Shanghai were made of strands packed with tiny shells and cheap bijoux; he pulled them aside with his hand and inside saw gambling rooms or opium dens. Music covered everything, singers of both sexes, of all ages, mulatos dressed in intensely bright colors, like the musicians who surrounded them in bars and on the street.
The young man was happy; he had never experienced such an intense communication with his senses, with his skin, throughout his whole body. Entranced, he was living in a dream from which he never wanted to awaken.
The next day, around noon, without having bathed or changed clothes, more than likely stinking, with an atrocious headache, not knowing for sure where he had slept, except that it was in a multistory building not far from Chinatown, he walked to the main avenue and, upon seeing in daylight the places he had frequented the night before, concluded that he had dreamt everything. The street was not at all the same, full of launderettes, small shops of Chinese takeout. He arrived at the Shanghai, which of course was closed, and foolishly asked a passerby what time the establishment opened; the person wanted to know where he was from and the young man answered, Mexico, of course, adding that he had just arrived in Havana. The Cuban let out a guffaw: “So the little Mexican wants to know the Shanghai, eh? You just barely arrived, and you’re already asking about the place, is that right? It opens at night around ten o’clock, but the best time is after midnight, and it doesn’t close until sunrise. But, listen, don’t come alone and don’t bring a lot of money, because there are lots of dangerous people around here, very, very dangerous. So, now you know…” The young man became alarmed; he looked down and noticed that he was wearing shoes that were not his; he was gobsmacked. He put his hand in his right pants pocket, felt for his wallet, but didn’t want to take it out on the street; he walked up to a policeman and asked for directions to the port; the shipping company was in front of him, he broke into a run, began asking people, he was sure someone had stolen his money, he had his wallet, but someone could have taken it out, removed the dollars, and put it back in his pocket; he felt like vomiting, his stomach was hurting, his shirt was soaked with sweat, he ran with his right hand clutching his wallet, he didn’t even dare enter a toilet in a café. His head was pounding. During the race he attempted to remember what had happened the night before, but he couldn’t recall what time his companions took off. Suddenly, he began to piece together confusing fragments from bars, women singing, getting in and out of taxis, sometimes he was alone, other times he was talking to groups that embraced him and made him laugh, there were musicians everywhere, singers, rumba, bolero, the groove, a kid…
Once at the office he went straight to the restroom, closed the door, counted the money and found it all there. He vowed not to repeat a nocturnal escapade like the night before, he would have to be responsible, to whom could he go if he lost his money along the way? One of the employees with whom he toured the underworld was waiting for him in his office; he was short with him, even rude. He handed him his passport that had been left in his custody, berated him for arriving so late; they had arranged to meet at nine to take care of the customs paperwork and pick up his suitcase, and it was already after 12. When he arrived at customs, a rather surly officer reprimanded him as well; he reminded him that the company had allowed him to leave the ship the night before as a courtesy on the condition that he report first thing in the morning to stamp his passport and go through customs. The young man who had been so affable the night before repeated his insults, this time with excessive violence in front of the customs officials and other employees. Afterward they did not see each other again until the departure of the Francesco Morosini; there as he boarded the ship he accused him before the Italian official of being a scoundrel, irresponsible, a shithead, and other more violent adjectives that caused the young Mexican to turn red. “You’ll see,” he said, “he’ll make trouble for you just as he did for us when the very night he arrived he ditched us as we were showing him the city.”
19 May
The young man arrived at his room. He took a long bath, shaved, dressed in an elegant lightweight cotton suit, put on the shoes that did not belong to him, which were superb. The fresh water and body cleansing relaxed him. He set the alarm, lay on the bed and slept soundly for a couple of hours. Later, hungry as a dog, he entered La Zaragozana and ate a lobster much better than the few he had eaten in his life. There he read the newspaper and learned that Catalina Bárcena was touring Cuba and would present that afternoon Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw; also that night at a place called the Lyceum Lawn Tennis Club there would be a tribute to Mariano Brull, the author of the jitanjáforas about which Alfonso Reyes had written so enthusiastically. He made note of the addresses of the theater and the club, and attended both events. Shaw’s play was well directed and performed, but it annoyed him that the two characters speaking Cockney in the first act, Eliza Doolittle and her father, spoke abominable Spanish. Bárcena was an enchanting woman, of light and graceful movements; but when she opened her mouth she spoiled everything, speaking an untranslatable cant, like some tootsie from the lowest barrios in Madrid. Had he not read the play in English and seen the film by Anthony Asquith, with Wendy Hiller as the original Eliza, he wouldn’t have understood anything. He almost left during the first intermission, but he stayed, and was happy. In the following acts, when Eliza improves her language and manners, she was splendid, on par with all the Elizas from the many Pygmalions he saw later in better productions under superb directors in England, Italy, and Poland, all of which seemed bland in comparison to the Spanish actress. He flew in a taxi later to Vedado for the tribute to the poet Brull; they asked for his invitation, which, of course, he didn’t have. He said he was Mexican, that he had read the announcement of the literary event in the newspaper and mentioned Alfonso Reyes, a friend and admirer of Brull, and so he was ushered to an elegant room, with elegantly dressed and bejeweled women and overly stiff and solemn men, and in the back rows a few young people, next to those who had seated him. No
t long after being seated he noticed that the nap had not refreshed him completely, he was exhausted due to the few hours of sleep, the morning’s long march, the impressive bender, the squabble at customs, the theater; he couldn’t concentrate, he applauded when everyone applauded; what interested him most was the audience, its refinement, and a latent and dark sensuality that was obliquely connected to Chinatown; at the end there was wine, which cleared his head; he spoke first to the young people nearby and then with almost everyone as if he had always lived in that city. As he was leaving, a woman and her son chauffeured him in their luxury automobile to where he was staying.
The Magician of Vienna Page 25