Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

  With much affection

  Delia Doce

  P.S. Gilberto says to send his best, also to your spouse.

  I let her go on and on and on and on just so she could get to an end and when she got tired of shootin off her big mouth and kinda breathless I told her but dahling you got it all wrong (those very words, yeah) youre an ole bag, I said, you know about life O.K., but you dont know nothin about living, but nothin dear, believe you me, thats what I said, what I really want is to go out and have me a ball, I said, cos Im not going to shut myself up like a mummy in a tomb like they say the Farouks and all those ancient people lived, so lemme ask you what do you take me for, dearie, a fassil? well I swear to God Im not goin to sit around here all cooped up and not go dancin in the streets, come on now honey, you must be jokin if you think I will: I rather be a virgin again, and then she said, she spoke like this, reachin her hand out like she was stopping a bus or somethin, Im tellin ya, she said, ya can go where the heck ya like, its all the same to me for aint gonna stop ya: Im not ya mother, but you lissen to me cause Im tellin you somethin not for today but for tomorrow, she said, puttin her tiny black hand all creased up and wrinkled over those fat nigger liverlips of hers, screaming fewchur right in my ear so loud she almost bust my drums, so I told her what it is madam (yeah, madam I said cause I can talk nicely if I have to) is that you dont know how to live for the moment cause thats somethin reel difficult and youre a little bit over ninety yousself to see what I mean, if you see what I mean, and she came back at me in that funny peculiar accent she has: you, you can go where ya damn well pleese, damnyou, I doan give the smallest goddam damn what ya do with ya life and with what ya got between your legs cause thats your business and I aint got no ticket in that sweetcake, so ya can get the heck outa here when ya like, and the sooner the better, so she told me and so I told her: lissen, lady, I said, youse sure got somethin mixedup here: who gave you the idea when I said ballin I meant makin it with men and all that, theres nothing to it and theres nothin wrong bout dancin neither, so she said to me O.K., O.K., one last word, Im not keeping ya here in chains and wearin a chastisy belt so ya can go where ya damn well please but she got me so mad almost blastin my head off with her yellin insults after me I had to tell her somethin to make her stop so I told her, all Im sayin is you only got one life, so you might as well live it dearie and you gotta know howta, like its a science somethin ya gotta learn, if you know what I mean, and she went after me and said saying, lissen lissen theres ya music and ya dancin and all that chachacha so ya can go where you like right now and have your damn ball but lissen now lissen to what Im saying cause I aint sayin it nomore, you go but you doan come back, youre not comin back here nomore, not in this house youre not cause if ya do come back ya gonna find the door wont open that nice and eesy and thats cause Ise gonna lock it from inside cause Ise gonna have a police lock put on it and if youse plannin to stay in the hallway Ill put the super onto ya, you hear, so now you know, thats how its gonna be, but just as Im bluein my cool I can hear the music all rite comin up the street with its varoom boom, varoom broom, boom boom varoom, with its onetwothree time percussion and its shake rattle and roll rhythm and as Im beginning to rock it up so much I barely can stop I gotta give it to her one more time, but honeychile youre reelly a case: just cool it, woman, or go get yousself some tranquilizers and what she did, the old witch, she says nothin but nothin more than—well, I rather not tell what she said but what she did was to turn her back on me the old bag so Im intitled now to do the same on her and so I pick up my stylish stole and my bitchy bag and I take one mean step, yeah, then two mean steps, yeah yeah, then one step more, yeah, and then I’m already at the door but instead of leavin I turn around suddenly like Beddy Davis in Now Voyeur and I say to her, lissen you carefully because Im gonna tell you somethin and you might learn a thin or two: youse only leave once and so you might as well live it to the hill while it lasts for when I die the carnival is gonna stop meanin its gonna die with me and the music will die and all the happiness will die too and so will life die, see what I mean, bein alive means bein alive here and now and this here chick, Magalena Crus, aint gonna bother herself nomore with the other side cause you dont see nothin there and you dont hear nothin neither from overthere and its nothin for it just happens that when the ball finishes its like finished, but esackly! and so she turns around reel dignifiant so I can see her black profile in the door frame and from there she says to me, you know somethin, girl, you dancin dotters are reel mean. The devils avocado, thats what you are, she said and thats all she ever said.

  My brother and I had discovered a new way of getting into the movie house, patent pending. We were no longer able to get into the Esmeralda the way we used to because we were too big: we used to get in by keeping the attendant talking or pretending to fight with each other or calling the attendant for help so one of us could slip past and then the other would go and ask permission to go in and look for his missing brother and give him an urgent message from his mother and this way we would both succeed in getting through—but this was no longer possible. Now we got in through the Santa Fe trail. First of all we’d collect all the used paper bags we could and then we’d sell them at a cent for every ten at the. fruit stand on Calle Bernaza (where the owner had told me once he’d give me twenty-five centavos for every hundred paper bags and when, still dazzled by the discovery I’d just made—a gold mine; an idiot, a man who couldn’t even count up to ten; an unprospected vein to exploit—I went back with twenty paper bags at full speed, caught up by the momentum of my own gold rush, and demanded my five centavos and all I got for my pains was a smile, then a laugh, then a guffaw, then he said, “Do ya think Im outa my mind,” and concluded to my utter confusion, “Don’t come bothering me with your bags again, you jerk!” for the first time in my life I knew I’d been conned twice over), and if the day went badly for bag-hunting, we would see how many old newspapers we could collect, we would go round the whole neighborhood asking for them or we would look wherever we could and then we would go with our precious cargo to the fish store, where newspapers were worth less than paper bags. (I never tried to make a tip running errands because I would do those for free: they were so poor on the solar and already Lesbia Lamont, the kindhearted fifteen-year-old whore and spendthrift, Max Urquíola, our friendly neighborhoodlum, and Lala, the generous, old, almost venerable widow of the triple hero: aviator, colonel and politician—they were all personae, so you shouldn’t disdain as poor characterization this kind of writing coming from an epic cure—they had all moved or gone away or died: we had lost them together with the innocence of childhood when we could accept a tip without blushing: now we were growing up and we knew already what it meant to sell a favor—it’s easier to sell used paper bags, old newspapers or . . .)

  Our last and best resort was books: my father’s or his uncle’s or his great-uncle’s: we sold off the family’s literary inheritance. First there was a collection—or rather a row—of dreadful plays by Carlos Montenegro, which he had given my father so as to get money (from my father) and fame (for himself) and publicity (for the book), which was called The Hounds of the Radiziwills. Nobody would ever read it: what’s more, nobody had ever read it, because the books sat there in their original uncut virginity. There was also another present from the same author but a different book, Six Months with the Loyalist Shock Troops. Both collections took the Santa Fe trail, as immaculate as the conception: we sold them by the pound in weight not in money—because all we got for them was fifty centavos: booksellers have never had any respect for literature. Other books followed, illustrious but not illustrated (they didn’t say much to us), via the same secret passage. Sometimes they went (taken along by my brother and myself: merchandise doesn’t go to the market of its own free will) in bundles of five by five, sometimes ten by ten, or three by seven or four by two. (I will spare the reader any cries of protest, explosions of anger or Damoclean threats from my father; I will not spare you any obscenities: the
fact is I never heard him utter any. I will also pass over my mother’s weak but very effective arguments, which, goodness knows how, succeeded in neutralizing my father’s love for that library which every day became more like the memory of a library: the shelves lying empty, the piles of books tilting too far over to left or right, missing the intimate touch of their fellow volumes sacrificed on the altars of the cinema . . . because it should be emphasized that every book that was given the final solution of the secondhand bookshop—and what a ghetto this was for secondhand bookshops: how many of them there were to beguile the passerby on the trail . . . to Santa Fe—was transmuted from literary lead into a silver screen, the titles that memory imagined it could still conjure up but which a close acquaintance denied, were proof that the Fox had entered the bookyard. What image could be more fabulous: would it be better to say the MGM Lion and the Unicorny?)

  On my way on the trail to Santa Fe

  (1st variation:

  I’m on my way

  Yes on my way

  on the trail to Santa Fe)

  (2nd variation:

  I’m on my on my on my way

  on the trail to Santa Fe)

  (3rd variation:

  I’m a goin’

  I’m a goin’ on my way

  I’m a goin’

  (I’m a gayin’ on my woe)

  on the trail/the trail/the trail/the trail

  to Saaaantaaaaaaaa Feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee)

  This tune (together with its Goldwyn Variations) was sung with the appropriate music, which is the malady of the Santa Fe Trail—only we didn’t know that at the time. Where could we have got it from, me and my brother? Without a shadow of doubt from a film—from a Western.

  That day, that Thursday (films cost less on Thursday) I am talking about, we had already completed the first stage of the journey to Santa Fe (because Santa Fe, as the reader will have guessed already, was Arcadia, the glory and panacea of all the sorrows of adolescence: the movies), and before my father returned from work we had taken a bath, selected the program or to be more precise selected the movie house, the Verdun, which in spite of bearing the name of a battle was very peaceable, popular and cool with its iron roof and its tin plating, which opened onto the hot night with all kinds of whirrings and whinings and which it was never possible to close quickly enough on rainy days (nights, rather): it felt good there, in the gallery facing the screen, especially if the second-balcony front row was free (which we nicknamed paradise: a place for princes, the equal of the royal box of other times, other spectacles) and directly under the stars: it was almost better even than my memory of it—and we were climbing the stairs when we encountered none other than Tiny Tina, who was, like so many of our neighbors, not so much a person as a personality. But, sad to say, Tiny Tina (a misshapen, toothless and dirty old dwarf with an insatiable appetite for sex) was also a bird of ill omen. “So you’re going to the movies?” I think that was what she said. My brother and I answered in the affirmative, without stopping on our way down the suddenly dirty, twisting staircase. “Have a good time, boys,” she said, the poor old midget, as she climbed the stairs with some difficulty. We didn’t stop to say thank you: the only thing to do was to knock on wood, cross our fingers and keep our eyes open for oncoming cars.

  We continued on our way to the cinema. As we crossed Central Park it was already getting dark. We went through the Centro Gallego colonnade to take a look at the photos of Spanish bailaoras and maybe a rumba dancer in tights. Then we followed the sidewalk of the Louvre, where the people who come here to talk every night were already beginning to show up and the regular coffee drinkers, in the café on the corner, and we stopped at the newsstand, drawn like so many moths by the colored covers of the American magazines, and we fluttered around and around without buying or touching anything. The sidewalk of the Louvre seems endless: now we are passing another café with more people and a group of men who have stopped in front of the huge oil portraits of the candidates for mayor, or councillor, or for the senate, looking like so many nominees for an Oscar, if you could believe the artist who had painted them larger than life—and touched them up considerably. Now we are at the shooting gallery with six flippers and a mechanical punching bag. Target shots are heard over the ring of the pinball tables and just over the cussing of the cheater who made a tilt. The last bit is to knock out the tattered punching-bag machine—whose mechanism would certainly be punch-drunk in a short time. Someone (the boy who operates the flicker, the sailor of the shooting gallery, the Negro at the punching bag) hits the bull’s-eye. We move on and fall prey to the aroma of fritas and hamburgers and steak sandwiches you can buy at the hot-dog stand. We haven’t eaten, nor are we going to eat. Who would think of eating when the road is so long and patience so short—or was the reverse more true—and when in Santa Fe we would find adventure, freedom and dreams fulfilled? A few more steps take us across three streets—a piece of Prado, Neptuno and San Miguel—in this crumbling, noisy, malodorous, brilliantly colored, densely peopled triangle of crossroads where one day in the future La Engañadora herself would pass, deceitful and lascivious, walking sweet and gentle with all the harmony of a cha-cha step. We reach one of the stages of the trail, the Rialto. Tonight they are showing The Razor’s Edge, but (we suspected) wasn’t this title a little bit metaphysical? We decided it was, only we said so in different words. Better to wait till next week or the next section of the library, and have the good fortune to see The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. The title is very long and complicated and there’s this woman in it, the one who looks so much like Hedy Lamarr, to spoil our pleasure. But, and a big but, there are lions and safaris and big-game hunters: all Africa will be there, which is the same as saying the heart of Santa Fe. Vendremos.

  We go on immersed in the noise of the city and at this point also in the smell of fruit (mammee, mangoes, custard apples naturally: that sinister fruit, green like a chameleon on the outside and gray like gray matter inside, with pulp like a brain disease, black dots of seeds enveloped in their viscous skins, but such a fragrant fruit is found only on the tree of knowledge, with the aroma of the hanging gardens of Babylon and the savor of ambrosia, whatever that may be) and the smell of milk shakes, of melon and tamarind juices and coconut milk, and in the mixture another smell, shoe polish and cobbler’s last, coming from the heel bar right next to the corner which is the stage where we would change horses, Los Parados, a name which means that the customers never sit down but implies an obscenity, though it actually is the place where for five centavos (for a collection of Nueva Generación magazine, rather) we will be able to buy two coffee sodas, before entering on the desert, with all its perils and hazards. Death Valley!

  Hitting the dusty trail again. Now, right in front of us, we have the temptation of the Alcazar, where they always show good movies. But last week they had a singer there who made such a noise she could be heard in the street—although the film, Battleground, was, would you believe it, a war movie. It’s not her fault, but the live performers’ union that’s forcing these shows on moviegoers. Farther on, very close to Santa Fe, is the Majestic, with such good programs, double, triple and even quadruple features, though they’re often not suitable for children and we must beg the usher to let us in or buy him a coffee first only to find out that (after all) it was only sick people and a woman (and a very skinny one at that) taking a bubble bath plus a young couple eloping by night and then there is a storm and next they take shelter in an old barn and the next morning she is in labor. All crap, really.

  Suddenly order is thrown into chaos. People start running, someone crashes into my shoulder, a woman is screaming and hides behind a car and my brother pulls and pulls at me by the hand, by my arm, by my shirt, as if in a persistent dream, shouting, “Silvestre look out they’ll kill you !” and I feel myself being propelled toward a place which I discover later is a fonda or Chinese restaurant and tumble under a table, where there is already a couple sharing the precarious refuge of a woo
d-and-straw chair and a palm tree in a pot and I hear my brother’s voice calling me from the ground asking whether I’m wounded or not and it’s then I hear shots far off/very close and I get up (to escape? to run farther into the restaurant? to face the danger? no, only to have a peep) and I look out through the door and already the street is deserted and half a block away or at the end of the street or just a few yards away (I don’t remember) I see a fat old mulatto (to this day I don’t know how I knew he was a mulatto) stretched out on the ground, gripping another man’s legs, who in his turn is trying to shake him off with his feet again and again and as he can see no other way of getting rid of him he fires at his head twice in succession and I can’t hear the shots, I can only see a spark followed by a white red and green orange flash coming from the hand of the man who is standing on his feet and lighting up the face of the dead—because there is no doubt that he’s dead—mulatto now and the man loosens one of his thighs from his grip, then the other, and then he starts running, firing his pistol in the air, not to frighten anybody, nor to cut a passage for himself, but to announce his victory, I think, like a cock crowing in the pit after the kill, or like Tarzan of the Jungle, and the street fills again with people and they start screaming and calling for help or the police and the women begin weeping and howling and someone says very softly, “They’ve killed him!” as though the dead man had been a celebrity and not just a carcass stretched out in the street—no: just now four men are lifting it and carrying it off to disappear around the corner, in a car, maybe, into the night for sure. My brother returns from somewhere and stands there looking dazed. I tell him, “If you could see yourself in the mirror now.” He answers, “If you could see yourself!” . . .