We go on to the movies. On the corner there is a black pool of blood under the street light and a crowd has gathered around it, staring and making comments. I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the film we were going to see, which nothing would have stopped us from seeing, which we did see.
That you, Livia? It’s me—Beba. Beba who? Beba Longoria, that’s who! The one and only, yes! How are ya, darlin? Oh, I’m so pleased to hear it. Me? Couldn’t be fitter. A custard apple a day keep the bugger morticians away, you know. No, not so long ago, darling. But anyhow that’s how my twelveo’clockinthemorningtoneofvoice sound. You just do what you can when you pleases and all the rest is for the birds. You know what I’m like. I’m always been only half awake anyhow. All lazybones and high cheekbones. So now that I can take advantage of my vintage years, I do. Sure, darling, still in bed. As my granny used to say, the only place to drink coconut milk is right under the coconut tree. So, to give you a mint phrase, you should lie down and rest right there where you get tired. Yeh, same as ever. What should I change for? Or rather, who for? Not a girl like I, in any case. Lissen, Livia, hold on a minute willya, don’t hang up I won’t be a minute. What was I saying? Oh no, nothing of the kind, it’s just I left my Chanel Number Five with the top off. Where was I? Well, darling, it’s all the same to me. Completely immaterial. No, darling, I swear, it wasn’t that important. Well, if I’m getting it right you were asking me if I’d just got up and I told you, I think, the same as always or something or other, wasn’t it, just like I used to tell you when we were living together in that crappy boardinghouse. Just my midmorning slogan. Roger? Yeah, that comes from him. Natchurly it all come from him nowadays, that’s the way the fortune cookie crumbles, darling. You know what he’s like. Yeh, he imitates him in everything, but in everything. Well, cepting that. At least, I think so. They all talk like that, funny. But let me finish with this obstruct conversational piece, as my old man would say, by beginning telling you the story I was gonna tell you when I phoned. What I called you for, rather. You know they’re making my man Cipree a member of the club. But, darling, the only club on earth, the Yatch Club. Well, no, the Yatch or Yat is strickly for nonmembers, darling, we members call it simply the Club. How dya like that? Well, darling, to tellya the truth and nothing but, they simply couldn’t of done otherwise. The general shot the works and threatened two ministers, no names mentioned, who are founder members, that they were going to be shot for real if they didn’t comply. So they just don’t have any choice but to let him, us, in. Simple as that. Well, that’s not that simple. I think we gotta get married in church now. You know, that’s the trend. But it’s gonna be a gas anyway, what with the wedding gown and all, so I’ve already been seeing to the true so or whatever way you say it. What dya think of that? Me a bride after being Cipriano’s querida or kept woman as my granny loved to hate to say, balling in sin as long as I can remember, to start doing it same as always but with the bishop’s blessing this time. Ain’t it wild? Specially now I’m on my way to matchurity . . . Of course I’m not! Over thirty? I’m not even twenty-five yet, but that’s like an old bag nowadays, darling. And the same to you. I’m only kidding but I’m not kidding you about the bride bit and the white lace and all. Yeh, white but with some polka dots thrown in for good measure. Well, we’re in society now, baby, and it’s about this I called you. Last night the old bugger took me to the Tropicana to celebrate. No, you dumb blonde. Tropic not Toprick. What a filthy mind you got, darling, under all that platinum-blond hair! Whew! Well, anyway, we went to the Tropicana and had a simply incredible marvelous time there under the star-studded glass rooftop. But marvel-ous like you would say. Well, you know what Cipriano’s like. Wha-what, what was that? Don’t be silly, sweetie, it sure make me laugh too. But he get in a rage with me cos I cain’t stop laughing. Anyway, he say it’s a name that’s brought him his share of luck. Acksolutely. If the general can call himself Fulgencio and his brotherissimo Hermenegildo, why shouldn’t he be called Cipriano, the poor darling? Hein? He couldn’t be better off. In the top aichilongs as he says. I don’t know if you’ve heard but they given him a concession in the market La Lisa. Well, darling, not a stall, of course, the market intotal, as he say. Yes, about a month ago. That’s what we were celebrating really, as well as this thing with the club. Thanks a million, darling. Well, no, the service station will be looked after by his kid brother, Deogracias. Well, the name means thank God but he certainly didn’t have to thank anybody for it. You’re telling me! Off her rocker, the poor old lady. Completely out of her mind, baptizing her sons with such names. That’s not christening but name-calling. You ain’t heard nothing yet, honey. There’s another brother called Berenice and another who died like two hundred years ago who was called Metodio and another who was living in darkest Oriente, still is if I’m not wrong and he’s not gone, because he’s a gourmet. . . . Well, you know, one of those people who don’t want to have anything to do with the family or anybody else, not even with women, mind you! . . . Yes? Yes . . . Well, gourmet, hermet, it’s all the same to me. The thing is he lives in a bohío, palm-leaf roof and dirt floor and all that filth somewhere in the jungle and he’s called Dio Gene Leerso or something like that. . . . Where? Moa or Toa or Baracoa, where they’re all from, in the heart of the bush or rough or whatever it’s called. Well, darling, as a matter of fag I’m not acksolutely certain but he used to know the general in an outpost in that fart east cos they entered the army together and became officers . . . yeh, from sargents to kernels in two weeks and all that crap. . . . Same thing I tell him but he says he’s quite satisfied being just a kernel and I should look at Genovevo and Gómez-Gómez and right after he begin reciting me all those names of deposed C-in-C’s as he says just to shut my fucking mouth. What’s good for the goose, etc. Well, he say that what’s best for yourself is not to be noticed very much or not at all so you can keep your hands free to go catchascatchcaning here and there and everywhere. That’s what he say. No, sweetiepie, nothing doing. They tried to send him on garrison overthere but he managed to get away from that too. My old fucker is a vivo, very bright and on the ball all the time. He went straight to the horse’s mouth which amount to saying to the general hisself and told him his talents, meaning his wits, were needed on the general stuff what with his knowledge of military strategy and the history of trench warfare he was best needed in the HQ’s or whatever plus so many other unpronounceable namethings he drove me crazy with. So they left him right there where lie is and quite quiet. No, that’s cool for now but could flare up any minute, you know how it is. You probably know about Kernel Curbelo already. At least what they say about him. Well, number one, about the way he took all the moneys for vitchels and all that, so that’s no mean bonus. Number two . . . But what about the gorillas? the gor-il-las, darling, what else? Well, guerrillas, gorillas: it’s all the same to me. Not King Kong, you dumbbell! You know perfeckly well what I mean: Natcherly, yes, certainly, but of course I mean them! Yes! Anyway, that’s all very rough and tough and besides he know I’m not going to live in the bush, not for all the china in China. I don’t wanna have anything to do with mosquitoes or gnats and ticks and bush ulcers. Well, yes, in Santiago but as far as I’m concerned, darling, the jungle begin on the other bank of the Almendares. Well, that’s one reason we’re not moving, what with all the houses they’ve offered Cipriano in the Cuntryclub and the Biltmor cartier and all those places. You know, he’s always following my scent close behind. That’s right, you just said it: he’s mad about me. Crazy he is. Give ‘em? Me? I didn’t give him anything that’s not in the book. Nothing but nothing of the kind. You know perfeckly well I wouldn’t have anything to do with that kinda thing. I wouldn’t waste my time on any filters—I don’t even smoke filtertips, now you mention it. I know you don’t mean the Big C, you big cunt! I know what you mean. But lemme tell you I make no them bones about it. I prefer to akcentchuate the positive. So you give ‘im what you got plus experience. It balances out perfeckly: the
more you got of one thing the less of another. It’s all in the mind, darling. Everything is on the mind. Not only everything that exist but everything that’s existed or is going to. Everything’s on the mind first. But anyways, something I must of had about me because he’s very much stuck, sticking like long hairs on a rainy day. A torch? Darling, it’s a bonfire he’s carrying! Yeh, that he is, fifty if he’s a day. God forbid! Lissen, don’t even tell me about strokes or love-strokes or whatever you call it or any kind of heart sickness. I get very but very upset. But, darling, didn’t you ever hear what happened to John Garfeel? No, that’s right, the film actor. Garfeldt, yes. Same man. He died on his wife on the couch. Bed or couch or bedcouch, it’s the same thing, sweetie. And you know what happened to a friend of a girl friend of mine? More or less the same thing, yes. This girl killed a fellow she was going with. She just pulled her cunt on him right there in the hotel on 11th and 24th streets. C’mon, baby, don’t pretend to be so innocent! The posada yes, but exackly! The night hotel near the river on your way to Miramar. Yeah, that’s the one. Of course I know it. You’re trying to tell me you don’t? Who’re you kidding? Good, that’s better. Never try to con a cunt, kiddo. Well, as I was saying, this girl friend of my girl friend went thataway but when she’s in there and at it next thing she knows her man’s going from swinger to stiff before you can say cock and then he’s lying dead right there on the bed. On the bed, darling! How d’you like that for a postcoitem? At two o’clock in the morning! It gives me the creeps just to tell it. But not her. You know what she did? She just got up cool as hell, got dressed very calmly, made herself up and all, then got him dressed, calls the manager and tells the guy to bring his car—not the manager’s, you jerk, but the dead man’s car—and they both put him in the car, quiet as possible so as not to alarm the clientell, that’s the manager, and not to create any fuss with the police, this girl friend of my girl friend cos she’s a society girl and the dead man is, was, a big shot. Well, to make a tall tale short, they both put him in the car and she starts it up—Yeh, right you are! That’s why I’m learning to drive myself—and she drives off to the first-aid hospital and say the person in question as they say in the papers has died of a cardiac infaction while driving his car and no foul play is suspected. How does that catch you? The perfect murder, darling! You don’t even need an alibi or being on the other side of town at the time of the murder because you’re right there with the stiff and you’re his next of skin. Yes, yes, of course, natchurly, I’ll be very careful, don’tcha worry. . . . No, no complaints about that. On the contrary, Mary, he leaves me alone a lot because he know he can’t keep me on a short rein. And between you and I, darling, in the strickest confidence of course, I believe he likes it, perhaps a little tiny weeny bit but he likes it, if you know what I mean. Yes, love, they’re all like that at his age. An old ledger . . . well, lecher, ledger—it’s all the same to me. D.O.M.s. Yes yes. Acksolutely. So let ‘em stop the carnival, after I’ve had my ball, of course. You can’t take it with you. Or you can take it but then again you can’t, not it. Fine, find another word for it if you want but please don’t Frenchkiss and tell. You just keep it to yousself. . . . Well, about that, whenever you feel like it, darling. I don’t need to tell you that this house is not a house, it’s my house and you’re more than welcome to it. Also I’ll invite you to the club any day now, just to scare the fucking hell out of all those socialits. . . . Lits, lights, it’s all the same to me. Well, catch you later, darling. I’m just going to take a bath and wash my hair because I’m going to the hairdresser’s. No, he’s no lady but a Frenchie queenie. So I should be saying I’m going to the lay coffure instead. Right? He’s very young and very cute and very very good. He works miracles with my hair. Wait till you see it. Okey-dokey, darling, I’ll see you sooner than soon. Bye for now. Or like my man say, over and out.
Incredible! A math lesson was what it was. I stood stock still looking at the wall. Not at the wall but at a lithograph behind behind the man, not behind the wall: I am Supermouse more than Superman. It was a romantic drawing in which some capricious sharks (and therefore buggers, Códac would say) were surrounding a raft running adrift, with two or three daring young men on board who were so well-built and handsome they looked more like male models than castaways, all of them leaning over languidly to port. I thought the sharks in the print were sissy sardines compared to this shark of everyday life who was seeking out my eyes without blushing or embarrassment, no doubt assuming it would be me who would do the blushing. I remember I looked from the picture to the desk, from the teas of roubles (or is it the sea of troubles?) which ended in distant waves on the Malecón—because, at the back, yes, I know, it seems incredible, in the background of the gravure the gray Havana of the nineteenth century could be seen—I leaped onto the firm or black land of his negative answer, passed from. the engraved wavy gray to the billiard-cloth green of the desk pad, to the aggressive-looking paper knife—a long tusk with a gold-plated gum for handle—to the burnished brown humidor with its rococo monogram, perhaps designed by the same artist of fish and fairies, to the black leather baroque writing case with its gold stitching, and my eyes traveled trembling all the way up his charcoal-gray Italian silk tie (my pupils stopping in disbelief at the enormous cipollina pearl he wore as a tie pin under the exactly triangular knot, outlining on my reluctant retina the perfectly drawn neck of his shirt, made to measure in Mieres) to discover his head—hard work he would have been for the guillotine, this eighteenth-century shark: he didn’t have a neck—unexpectedly, like those Hokusai-like full moons which rise in the summer astonishingly orange so at first one thinks it’s a globe lamp then the moon and ends up convinced it’s a suddenly lit street light before finally settling for certain that it is in fact the moon of the Caribees and not a ripe tropical fruit, invisibly suspended so as to hang up Newton. His well-groomed, plump, almost shiny face was on the edge of a smile while his blue European eyes stared at me with that frank open gaze which converted him almost at once from a penniless immigrant into a tycoon, and his mouth, his thin bloodless lips, his expensive teeth, his tongue which had long used the familiar form to with all the delicacies of the kitchen moved in unison to ask me softly: “Do you see?” smiling so that his lampion head disappeared but the grin lingered on.
I was going to tell him that not only was I able to draw the numbers, I was also able to add them up, but it wasn’t my mouth that opened but the door which had etavirP (or is it etariP?) painted on its glass panel. Ten—no, five, perhaps three minutes earlier I had also been outside in the hall which I’d come to now because there was nothing left for me to do in there but say good-bye not see you soon and to exit closing the door silently behind me.
Then earlier, I had imagined he wouldn’t see me, that was what I was thinking at the moment when Yosi or Yossi or Jossie told me, “Señor Solaún will see you, in a minute, Ribot.” “Citizen Maximilian Robespierre Ribot,” I said to Jossie or Yossi or Yosi, but she wasn’t listening. That’s the story of my life: not a few cartridges have I wasted in a good many salvos. I could have told her as I had done on other occasions when I was equally little listened to or even heard, Giambattista Bodoni Ribotto or William Caslon Rybot or Silvio Griffo di Bologna. I was no longer the printer of genius or the famous popular musician (Sergio Krupa or Chanopozo Ribó) but a notorious revolutionary, a villain about to stalk through the palace seeking revenge. Overlapping over my public parts and private fantasies her voice servile to her superiors, superior when talking to me—asked me, “What did you say?” But by now I was thinking that the Lord of Solaún was going to admit me to his castle and grant me a private audience, although he knew I was going to ask him for a raise, if only because of what happened yesterday. So I answered, “Nothing.”
It had been more than a month since I’d tried to get the Guild of Printers to give me a raise appropriate to my job, but nothing had come of it, and this was exactly what I might have expected of the union for graphic arts, because
I wasn’t a worker. I wasn’t an artist either or even an artisan. I was a professional (should I write it in capitals and have it printed in Stymie Bold typeface?) and I found myself a refugee in no-man’s-land, in this black hole of malformation: neither artist nor technician nor artisan nor worker nor scientist nor lumpenproletariat nor prostitute: a hybrid, a half-caste, an abortion, a parturiunt montes (as you would say, Silvestre, speaking Latin with a Cuban accent) nascetur ridiculus mus. A copy writer, come on! Now, today, actually for a week, I had decided upon the personal approach, which means sailing minus a rudder through hostile or indifferent seas, like the messenger bottle from a shipwreck. Because I, on my heterosexual raft, was also running adrift.
Then came the flying-trapeze act. Since yesterday morning I had seen a swarthy man, his clothes dirty and full of patches, in the outside waiting room. He didn’t smoke or talk with the others who were waiting, nor did he carry a briefcase or portfolio or vademecum. Could he be an exotic anarchist, a desperate latter-day reader of Bakunin with his bomb a fortiori, a domestic regicide? I asked myself this triple question three times. I saw him when I came in the morning, he was there at lunchtime, I came back to find him in the afternoon. In the evening when I was leaving, he got up, all six feet of him, and we left together. At that moment Senator Solaún turned up, feudal lord, administrator, ruler from birth, all in one little, plump man. Agilely he leaped from his Cadillac, dressed in 100-percent-white drill, his custom-made Panama hat tilting over his bald head. Distant rolling of drums. A voice announcing, “Ladies and gentlemen, Senator Solaún is now ascending the staircase! No net, ladies and gentlemen! No net! Silence, please! The slightest noise could cost the capitaliste his life!” The visitor and I both saw him at exactly the same moment but I’m certain we weren’t thinking the same thought. The man hunched his shoulders, lowered his head and, without looking at the Great Solaúni, climbed back up the monumental stairs, almost made a gesture of stretching out his hand, or rather made the absence of such gesture, in a metaphysical petition: the beggar’s operation.
Three Trapped Tigers Page 4