Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

  —Good, he said and closed the door.

  He went back to his seat and stared at me again. This time I saw that there was something odd about the way he looked at me. Not so much odd as furtive. I tried to bring him back to the point where the subject had changed from biographical notes to music criticism.

  —Well, that’s how it is! I need some advice.

  —What kind of advice? he said, lowering his voice again and speaking monotonously.

  —I don’t know. Frankly, I don’t know what to do. With my life. I can’t carry on any longer in my home town. There’s no future for anyone there.

  —So what are you going to do?

  That’s what I want to find out. I hoped you’d be able to help me. I’d like to study. He didn’t reflect long on the idea.

  —Where? There are schools everywhere. What do you want to study?

  Theater.

  —You want to be an actor?

  —No, I want to write for the theater, for TV.

  TV—that’s how I said it. I swung like a pendulum between hunger and the ridiculous.

  —But you know what it involves, this kind of life. It’s rotten through and through. It wouldn’t do for a country boy like you.

  —You might not think so but I’ve seen a lot. I’ve written a lot too. I should have told him that the lots I had seen were those which passed by my window on the bus from my home town to Havana and that Havana was as far as I could go. Also that I had written a book of sonnets and some stories, so far unpublished. But I couldn’t go on: my hunger wouldn’t let me. I had borne with it well until now, had forgotten it in the heat of the day, which became more stifling every minute in that closed room. I looked at the angel again and my hunger increased. If only the book of marzipan had really been edible, if it had been made of millefeuilles, layers instead of leaves. I stared my angel in the face. He seemed to be offering me his open book. Then I turned to my interviewer and I thought I saw the aura of a smile about him. Does hunger radiate saintliness?

  —O-of c-course, he said and I was surprised that he stammered over the two words. He had talked all this time without doing so. He was speaking to me in the familiar form. He had used the tú before, but I only noticed it now because the tone of his voice had changed.

  —Yes. Didn’t you see my note? It was written in blank verse. In actual fact he hadn’t seen or heard anything.

  —What do you think? He was asking me a direct question at last.

  —What of? I thought vaguely that he must have been talking about the poem.

  He smiled for the first time.

  —Of her.

  —Who?

  —Magalena.

  He was asking me about the girl who had been blasting off rocks ‘n’ rolls from upstairs, the one who had been bathing in the swimming pool in the patio and who had been looking for someone called Gabriel, probably the man in uniform. I was on the point of asking him if she was his daughter, out of malice, but he didn’t give me time.

  —Not bad, is she?

  I didn’t know what to say and answered as simply as possible.

  —No.

  —You like her?

  —Me?

  Who else could he have meant? But I had to say something. That was what I said, I’m ashamed to admit.

  —You, of course. As for me, I like her very much, naturally.

  —I don’t know. I didn’t see her very well, hardly at all.

  —But she was here talking to you.

  —No, she opened the door, looked in, asked for someone called Gabriel and went out again without closing the door. And I added something, to die laughing, which is better than dying of hunger: She was drenched in water, but -he took it seriously.

  —Yes, and she left water all over the room and the staircase and upstairs as well.

  He seemed to sink into a meditation on hydraulics but, suddenly, surfaced, to his favorite subject.

  —Well, do you or don’t you like her?

  —Perhaps, yes, I said timidly. I’m from the country. He got up. Something was bothering him.

  —O.K., let’s get on with it. What is it you w-wanted?

  —Someone to give me a start in life. Was I dramatizing?—I feel cooped up. I can’t go on any longer, in the town I mean. I haven’t any money left now, here, in the city, whole days spent with nothing more than a cup of coffee. If nobody helps me there’s nothing left for me but to kill myself. I can’t go home again.

  —Your name is Antonio.

  —I thought it was a question.

  —No, Arsenio.

  —No, I’m saying that your real name is Anthony, that you are Saint Anthony.

  —I don’t understand. Why?

  —You’ll soon understand. You want a start in life.

  —Yes, I said.

  —Good, I’m going to give you one, he said, raising his pistol and leveling it at me. He fired from a distance of less than two yards. I felt a blow in my chest, a violent jolt in my shoulder and a savage kick in the pit of my stomach. Then I heard the three shots, which sounded like someone banging on the door. My body went limp and I fell forward, already blinded, my head hitting hard the hard shoulder, the mouth of a well instantly dug in the floor. I fell into.

  I HEARD HER SING

  I knew La Estrella when she was only Estrella Rodriguez, a poor drunk incredibly fat Negro maid, long before she became famous and even longer before she died, when none of those who knew her well had the vaguest idea she was capable of killing herself but then of course nobody would have been sorry if she did.

  I am a press photographer and my work at that time involved taking shots of singers and people of the farándula, which means not only show business but limelights and night life as well. So I spent all my time in cabarets, nightclubs, strip joints, bars, barras, boîtes, dives, saloons, cantinas, cuevas, caves or caves. And I spent my time of there too. My job took me right through the night and into dawn and often the whole morning. But sometimes, when I had nothing to do after work at three or four in the morning I would make my way to El Sierra or Las Vegas or El Nacional, the nightclub I mean not the hotel, to talk to a friend who’s the emcee there or look at the chorus flesh or listen to the singers but also to poison my lungs with smoke and stale air and alcohol fumes and be blinded forever by the darkness. That’s how I used to live and love that life and there was nobody or nothing that could change me because time passed so fast by my time that the days were only the waiting room of evening and evenings became as short as appointments and the years turned into a thin picture spread, and I went on my way, which means preferring nights to evenings, choosing night instead of day, living by night and squeezing my night, I mean my life, into a glass with ice or into a negative or into memory.

  One of those nights I arrived at Las Vegas and I met up with all those people who like me had nobody who could change them and suddenly a voice came up to me from the darkness and said, Fotógrafo, pull up a seat please. Let me buy you a drink, and it was no longer just a voice but none other than Vítor Perla. Vítor has a magazine entirely devoted to half-naked girls or naked half-girls and captions like: A model with a future in sight—or rather two! Or: The persuasive arguments of Sonia Somethin, or: The Cuban BB says it’s Brigitte who is her look-alike, and so on and so forth, so much so that I don’t know where the hell they get their ideas from, they must have a shit factory in their heads to be able to talk like that about a girl or girls who only yesterday were or was probably just a manejadora, that is half maid and half baby-sitter, and now is half mermaid and half baby doll, or a part-time waitress who is now a full-time temptress, or who only yesterday worked in the garment center in Calle Muralla and who today is hustling her way to the top with all she’s got. (Fuck, here I am, already talking like those people.) But for some mysterious reason (and if I were a gossip columnist I would spell it my$terious) Vítor had fallen into the deep, which was why it surprised me to find him in shallow waters and such spirits. I’m lying, of course.
The first thing that surprised me was that he wasn’t in the clink. So I told myself, He’s loaded with shit but still manages to keep afloat: that’s grace under morass, and I said it to him too but what I really said was, You keep afloat like good Spanish cork, and he burst out laughing. You’re right, he said, but it’s loaded cork! Confidentially, I must have a bit of lead somewhere inside—I’m keeling over. And so we began talking and he told me many things confidentially, he told me all his troubles, confidentially, and many other things, always confidentially, but I’m not going to repeat them because I’m a photographer not a press gossip, as I’ve said. Besides, Perla’s problems are his own and if he solves them so much the better and if not it’s curtains for Vítor. Anyway, I was fed up listening to his troubles and the way he twisted his face right and twitched his mouth left and as I had no wish to look at such ugly curly lips I changed the subject and we started talking about nicer things, namely women, and suddenly he said, Let me introduce you to Irena, and out of nowhere he produced the cutest little blonde, a doll who’d have looked like Marilyn Monroe if the Jívaros had abducted her and cut her down to size, not just shrinking her head but all the rest—and I mean all the rest, tits and all. So he hauled her by the arm like fishing her up from the sea of darkness and he said to me or rather to her, Irena, I want you to meet the best photographer in the world, only he didn’t say the world but el mundo, meaning that I work for El Mundo, and the cutest little blonde, this incredible shrinking version of Marilyn Monroe smiled eagerly, turning up her lips and flashing her teeth like she was raising her skirt to show her thighs and her teeth gleaming in the darkness were the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen: perfectly even, well-formed and sensual like a row of thighs, and we started talking and every so often she would show off her teeth without blushing and I liked them so much that after a while I was meaning to ask her to let me touch her teeth or at least fondle her gums, and we were sitting at the table talking when Vítor called the waiter with this Cuban sucking sound we use to call waiters that is exactly like an inverted kiss and the drinks came as if by themselves but actually via an invisible waiter, his swarthy face and dirty hands lost in the darkness, and we started drinking and talking some more and in next to no time I’d very delicately as if I hadn’t meant to place my foot on top of hers and I swear I almost didn’t notice it myself, her foot was so tiny, but she smiled when I said sorry and I knew instantly that she noticed it and in the next next to no time I was holding her hand, which by now she couldn’t help noticing that I meant it but I lost one fucking hour looking for it because her hand disappeared into my hand, playing hide and seek in between my yellow fingers that are permanently smeared with these hypo spots I pretend are nicotine stains, after Charles Boyer, naturally, and now already after I had finally found her hand I started caressing it without saying excuse me or anything because I was calling her Irenita, the name was just her size, and in next to next to no time we were kissing and all that, and when I happened to look around, Vítor had already got up to leave, tactful as ever, very discreetly, and so there we were on our own for a long time alone touching each other, feeling each other up, oblivious to everybody and everything, even to the show, which was over now anyway, to the orchestra playing a dance rhythm, to the people who were dancing in and out of the dark and getting tired of dancing, to the musicians packing up their instruments across the dance hall and into the dark, going home, and not noticing the fact that we were left alone there, very deep in the darkness now, no longer in the misty shadows as Cuba Venegas sings but in the deep darkness now, in darkness fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty fathoms under the edge of light swimming in darkness, in the lower depths, wet kissing, wet all over, wet in the dark and wet, forgotten, kissing and kissing and kissing all night long, oblivious to ourselves, bodiless except for mouths and tongues and teeth reflected in a wet mirror, two mouths and two tongues and four rows of teeth and gums occasionally, lost in saliva of kisses, silent now, keeping silent silently kissing, moist all over, dribbling, smelling of saliva, not noticing, tongues skin-diving in mouths, our lips swollen, kissing humidly each other, kissing, kissing before countdown and after blastoff, in orbit, man, out of this world, lost. Suddenly we were leaving the cabaret. It was then that I saw her for the first time.

  She was an enormous mulatto, fat-fat, with arms like thighs, with thighs like tree trunks propping up the water tank that was her body. I told Irenita, I asked Irenita, I said, who’s the fat one? because the fat woman seemed to dominate the chowcito —and fuck! now I must explain what the chowcito is. (The chowcito was the group of people who got together to get lost in the bar and hang around the jukebox after the last show was out to do their own descarga, this Afro-Cuban jam session which they so completely and utterly lost themselves in that once they went down they simply never knew it was daylight somewhere up there and that the rest of the world’s already working or going to work right now, all the world except this world of people who plunged into the night and swam into any rock pool large enough to sustain night life, no matter if it’s artificial, in this underwater of the frogmen of the night.) So there she was in the center of the chowcito, this enormous fat woman dressed in a very cheap dress made of caramel-colored cotton, dirty caramel confused fused with the fudge judged with her chocolate skin wearing an old pair of even cheaper sandals, holding a glass in her hand, keeping time to the music, moving her fat hips, moving all her fat body in a monstrously beautiful way, not obscene but sexual and lovely as she swayed to the rhythm, crooning beautifully, scat-singing the song between her plump purple lips, wiggling to the rhythm, shaking her glass in rhythm, rhythmically, beautifully, artistically now and the total effect was of a beauty so different, so horrible, so new, so unique and terrifying that I bitterly regretted I didn’t have my camera along to catch alive this elephant who danced ballet, that hippopotamus toe-dancing, a building moved by music, and I said to Irenita, before asking what her name was, as I was on the point of asking what her name was, interrupting myself as I was asking what her name was, to say, She’s the savage beauty of life, without Irenita hearing me, naturally, not that she would have understood if she had heard me, I said, I asked her, I said to her, to Irenita, Tell me, tú, who is it? And she said to me in a very nasty tone of voice, she said, She’s the singing galapagos, the only turtle who sings boleros, and she laughed and Vítor slipped up beside me from the side of darkness just then to whisper in my ear, Careful, that’s Moby Dick’s kid sister, the Black Whale, and as I was getting high on being high I was able to grab Vítor by his sharkskin sleeve and tell him, You’re a faggot, you’re full of shit, you’re a shitlicking bigot, you’re a snot Gallego, a racist cunt and asshole: that’s what you are, you hear me? un culo, and he said to me, calmly, I’ll let it pass because you’re my guest and you’re drunk, that’s all he said and then he plunged, like someone slipping behind curtains, into darkness. And I drew up closer and asked her who she was and she said to me, La Estrella, and I thought she meant the star so I said, No, no, I want to know your name, and she said, La Estrella, I am La Estrella, sonny boy, and she let go a deep baritone laugh or whatever you call the woman voice that corresponds to basso but sounds like baritone—cuntralto or something like that—and she smiled and said, My name is Estrella, Estrella Rodríguez if you want to know, Estrella Rodríguez Martínez Vidal y Ruiz, para servirle, your humble servant, she said and I said to myself, She’s black, black, black utterly and finally eternally black and we began talking and I thought what a boring country this would be if Friar Bartolomé de las Casas had never lived and I said to him wherever he is, I bless you, padre, for having brought nigrahs from Africa as slaves to ease the slavery of the Injuns, who were dying off anyhow what with the mass suicides and the massacres, and I said to him, I repeated, I said, Bless you, padre, for having founded this country, and after making the sign of the cross with my right hand I grabbed La Estrella with my left hand and I said to her, I love you. La Estrella, I love you! and she laughed bucke
tloads and said to me, You’re plastered, por mi madre, you’re completely plastered! and I protested, saying to her, I said, No I’m not, I’m ferpectly so ber, and she interrupted me to say, You’re drunk like an old cunt, she said and I said to her, But you’re a lady and ladies don’t say cunt, and she said to me, I’m not a lady, I’m an artista and youse drunk coño and I said to her, I said, You are La Estrella, and she said, And youse drunk, and I said to her, All right, drunk as a bottle, I said to her, I said, I’m full of quote methylated spirits unquote but I’m not drunk, and I asked her, Are bottles drunk? and she said, No, qué va! and she laughed and I said, So please consider me a bottle, and she laughed again. But above everything, I said to her, consider me in love with you, La Estrella, I’m bottle-full of love for you. I like the Estrella better than I love the estrus, also called heat or rut, and she laughed again in bucketloads, lurching back and forward with laughter and finally slapping one of her infinite thighs with one of her never-ending hands so hard and loud the slap bounced back off the wall as if outside the cabaret and across the bay and in La Cabaña fortress they had just fired the nine-o’clock-sharp salvo like they do every evening at five past nine, and when the report or its echo ceased fire she asked me, she said to me, she said, You love me? and I said, Uh-huh but she went on, Kinkily? and I said, Kinkily, passionately, maddeningly, meaninglessly, foreverly but she cut me short, No, no, I meant, you love me with my kink, kinky hair and all, and she lifted a hand to her head meaning, grabbing more than meaning her fuzzy hair with her full-fat fingers, and I said to her, Every bit and piece of you—and suddenly she looked like the happiest whale in the whole world. It was then that I made my great, one and only, impossible proposition. I came closer to her to whisper in her ear and I said to her, I said, La Estrella, I want to make you a dishonorable proposal, that’s what I said, La Estrella, let’s do it, let’s have a drink together, and she said to me, De-light-ed! she said, gulping down the one she had in her hand and already chachachaing to the counter and saying to the bartender, Hey, Beefpie, make it mind, and I asked her, What’s mind and she answered, Not mind, baby, mind you I said mine, m-i-n-e, make it mine and mine is La Estrella’s drink: no one can have what she has, not open to the public, see what I mean. Make it mine then, and she started laughing again in bucketfuls so that her enormous breasts began shaking like the fenders of a Mack truck when the engine revs up.