I went off at a quick walk looking for a taxi stop and rounded the corner again and stopped and looked in front of me and behind and then I saw a look of astonishment on Mrs. Campbell’s face, an astonishment which was a mirror of my own. There, in a narrow alley was an old colored man walking with my walking stick. On closer inspection I saw that he was not so much old as ageless, obviously a mongoloid moron. There was no question of reaching an understatement with him either in English or in Mrs. Campbell’s precarious Spanish. The man couldn’t comprehend any idiom and this, dear reader, is Nemesis for the foreign traveler. Now he was shipwreckedly gripping onto the stick with both hands.
I feared that a slapstick[25] situation would develop if I resolved myself finally to grab hold of the stick, as Mrs. Campbell advised me to do, as I was afraid of the beggar (he was one of those professional beggars whom you can find anywhere abroad, even in Paris) who was a very strong man. I tried to make him comprehend by using signs that the stick was mine, but I failed miserably and he answered me with some strange growling sounds which were as foreign to me as human speech was to him. I was reminded of those native singers and their lyrical throats. He also disproved the current scientific notion that claims that every mongol is cheerful, affectionate and a lover of music. Somewhere or other a radio was playing at full blast some even fuller Cuban songs. Above all the (noise) Mrs. Campbell, now completely Cubanized, was shouting the suggestion that I should buy the stick from him, which of course I refused to do. “Darling”, I howled in exasperation, holding up ground as I tried to block the dark passage of the beggar with my enormous skeleton, “it is a matter of principle, that stick he belongs to me”, and I didn’t feel how quietly I was conveying my meaning since a shouted principle immediately ceases to be one. In any case, I wasn’t going to let it go with him just because he was a moron and I was not going to surely buy it, thus robbing myself. “I’m not a man for blackmailing”, I told Mrs. Campbell now in a lower tone, stepping below the sidewalk as the beggar was threatening to cross the street. “I know, little dear”, she said.
But the nightmares of Savannah are the exact facts in Havana. As it is a custom, we soon had a small crowd of local inhabitants surrounding us and I got very nervous as I didn’t want to be the victim of any outbreak of lynching. To all appearances I was a foreign tourist grabbing advantage of a defenseless native and I saw more than one face of dark skin in the circle of Cubans. In the center this Lutheran[26] stood firm, a solitary Maximalist combating the irrational with alien reasons.
The people however behaved very well considering (the circumstances). Mrs. Campbell explained the situation in her best possible manner and there was even one of the spectators who spoke a fractioned English and who offered in his primitive manner to act as mediator. This self-made Hammarskjold tried without any evident success to communicate with the mongol, moron or Martian. All he did was to retreat a couple of steps, grasping, holding onto, embracing the walking stick and muttering some story in an unknown idiom full of sounds and fury—signifying, of course, nothing. Or rather meaning, always inferring that the walking stick was his private property. The crowd, like all mobs, was on our side some of the time, and other times on the side of the beggar. My wife was still insisting on my rights. “It is a material of principle”, she said, in her broken Spanish. “señor Campbell here is the legitimate owner of the stick of walking. He bought it yesterday and abandoned it this morning in an old café. This gentleman”, she was referring to the moron, pointing at him with her left index, “took it from where my husband”, pointing at me with her right index, “left it in spite of not belonging to him”, shaking her currently blonde head to and fro, “no, no, amigos”. A dubious suggestion of theft, by means of amphibology, the equivocal suggestion, the ambiguous phrase (who did what to who?), but the oratory of this female Portia won the support of the sidewalk court and the jury was now decidedly on our side.
Soon we were a public nuisance and a policeman arrived. We were doubly fortunate in that he was a policeman who spoke English. I explained everything to him. He tried in vain to disperse the rabble but the people were as interested as we were interested in finding a solution to the problem. He spoke to the mongol, but there was no way of communicating with this Mr. Nobody, as I’ve already said. Of course the policeman lost his temper and took out his gun to compel the beggar. The multitude grew, suddenly silent and I feared the worst. But the moron seemed, finally, to comprehend and gave me the walking stick back with a gesture that I didn’t like one bit. The policeman put his gun back in its holster and made the suggestion of me giving the beggar some money. “Not as a recompense but in as a gift to the poor man”, to quote his own words. I opposed. This would be truly accepting a social blackmail, because the stick was certainly mine. I said as much to the officer. Mrs. Campbell tried to intercede, but I saw no reason to give in. The stick was mine and the beggar took it without it belonging to him. To give him money for its return was to lend my endorsement to a robbery. I refused, absolutely to placate him.
Someone in the crowd, so Mrs. Campbell explained, had suggested a voluntary contribution all around. Mrs. Campbell, who is so foolworthy and gold-hearted, wanted to help him out of her pocket. However it was, I had to put an end to a situation so ridiculous and I relented, which I shouldn’t have done. I offered the moron a few pieces of change (I can’t remember exactly how much, but I’m sure it was more than I had originally paid for the stick) and I wanted to give it to him, without any hard, feelings, but the beggar didn’t want even to touch it. Now it was his moment to play the character of Human Being Offended. Mrs. Campbell interceded once again. The man appeared to accept it but then he had second . . . thoughts and rejected the money making more of his ancient guttural noises. It was only when the policeman put it in his hand that he clenched it with a rapid gesture. I didn’t like the look on his face one bit, because he stood there looking (fixedly) at the stick when I took it away with me like a dog abandoning a bone he has buried/unburied. The disagreeable incident was now over and we took a cab on the spot, product of the policeman, courteous as it was his duty to be. One of the crowd cheered when we went off and someone waved goodbye, benevolently. Mrs. Campbell (for the first and only time in the whole trip) didn’t say a word and she seemed to be busying herself making a mental reckoning of her many gifts—those man-made ones, not the one Nature had given her. I felt well about the company of my recovered walking stick for it was now a souvenir with a tale interesting to tell, much more valuable than all the things that Mrs. Campbell had bought by the dozen.
We returned to the hotel. I told the clerk in the lobby that we were leaving early in the afternoon, and asked him to have the check ready for us when we came down, I told him also that we were going to have lunch in the hotel and that we would pay for it at the cash-desk in the restaurant. Then we went upstairs.
As always, I opened the door to let Mrs. Campbell go in first and she switched on the lights, since the blinds were down. She went into the sitting room and proceeded through to the bedroom and I went to raise the blinds, praising the peace and quiet of the Tropical sunday as I went. When she switched on the bedroom light, she let out a high penetrating scream. I thought she might have received an electric shock, knowing how dangerous the currents are abroad. I was also afraid there might be a poisonous snake. Or perhaps another robber caught in fragranti.[27] I ran into the bedroom. Sra. Campbell seemed stiff, rigid, unable to speak, almost on the point of hysteria. I couldn’t understand what could have happened seeing her standing there in the middle of the room in a state of catalepsy. She pulled herself together and with some strange guttural sounds, pointed with her little finger to the bed. The bed was empty. There was no mapanare, or robber, or facsimile of Superman on it. Then I looked at the night-table. There, resting upon the glass top, black on the surface painted green, conspicuous, relevant, incriminating, ultimately disgusting, was the other walking stick.
Mrs. Campbell’s Corrections
Havana looked dazzlingly beautiful from the boat. The sea was calmed, and its surface was a clear blue, almost cobalt at times and criss-crossed with a broad deep blue belt which someone explained was the Golf Stream. There were a few diminutive waves, like seagulls made of foam skimming peacefully across an inverted sky. The city appeared suddenly, completely white and vertiginous. I saw a few dirty clouds above it but the sun was shining outside of them and Havana wasn’t a city but the mirage of a city, a specter. Then it opened up on both sides and began to define itself in fixed colors that dissolved instantaneously in the whiteness of the sun. It was a panorama, a real Cinemascope, the Cinerama of life! I say this to please Mr. Campbell who is excessively fond of the movies. We continued to navegate between buildings of mirrors, like flashes of light, like gaseliers,[29] scintillating inside the eye, past a park where the grass was either burned or a brilliant green, towards another town—old, dark, and even more beautiful. Irrevocably a dock came up to us.
It is perfectly true that Cuban music is primitive but it has an enchanting gaiety, an unexpected violence which is always kept in reserve and something poetic about it which is not possible to define and which soars high on the maracas and the guitar and the falsetto[30] voices of the males or—from time to time and with a harsh oscillation, similar to the blue[31] singers, a repetition of the harmony as valid for Cuba and Brazil as it is in the South because it is a tradition that comes from Africa, while the bongó and conga drums tether it to the ground and the claves—the mysterious “banging bits of wood together” of Mr. Campbell’s narrative, is neither a superstitious liturgy nor a secret code but two little batons not to conduct but for to make music, delicate percussion instruments beaten one against the other cot legno[32] —c.f. the notes on the sleeve of John Caged’s LP[33] Percutante percusión AG0690—these “musical sticks” are always stable, like the horizon.
Why all this dramatization of his leg which was in a bad state but hardly at all useless? Perhaps he wants to sound like a disabled veteran of war. In actual fact, Sr. Campbell is a victim of rheumatism.
Strictly speaking the walking stick was just a stick for walking ordinary. It was made of a dark and probably hard wood but not unless I’m much mistaken of ebony. There was no rich carving on it nor an androgynous head on the hilt. It was a walking stick like thousands of others you find sticking[34] around the earth, a little crude, but with a certain picturesque appeal: nothing out of the ordinary. I imagine that many Cubans have had an identical walking stick. I never said that the walking stick was exciting: this is a vulgar Freudian innuendo. Moreover I wouldn’t buy obscenity from a walking stick, never.
The stick costs a few centavos. The Cuban peso is equivalent to the American dollar. I should mention in passing that abanico is the Spanish word for a fan, not habanico. Probably a confusion because of his sympathy for the word La Habana. You never say haveneros for the same reason as you don’t write Havena. The adjective mucho is always shortened to muy when it is used as an adverb. And he should have said las mujeres, not los, las being the feminine form of the definitive article. But you wouldn’t expect finesse[35] from Mr. Campbell when it is a question of mujeres. Women, that is.[36] By the way of the beach you say Varadero not Varydero and much less to pronounce it, as he did, Verydearo—in the sense of expensive. There were many things in the city I thought were enchanting but I have never been embarrassed by sentiment and I can say exactly what they were. I liked—no, I loved the character, or rather the temperament of the people of Havana and of everywhere else. I was very much in love with Cuban Music, spelt like this, with capitals. It was love at first sight between the Tropicana and myself. In spite of the fact that it is a tourist attraction which everyone has heard of, it is genuinely beautiful and exuberant and vegetal, a perfect image of the island. The food is edible which is the only quality that food needs and the drinks are the same as drinks everywhere. But the music and the beauty of the chorus girls and the sylvan unbridled imagination of the choreographer I think of these things as unforgettables.
The master of ceremonies was a typical Latin very elegant tall and dark with green eyes and a black moustache and a dazzling white smile. A true professional, with a deep baritone voice and an attractive American accent—there was nothing of a maricón about him, contrary to what Mr. Campbell wrote, running the risk of libel suits as the word means queer or queen in English.
With the best will in the world Mr. Campbell entangles himself in his own verbal gymnastics—the only kind he is capable of—in trying to make me into a prototype: the only kind: the common female of the species. In other words a mental invalid with the IQ[37] of a simpleton, a cretinous Girl Friday,[38] a moronic Straight-Woman,[39] a female Doctor not Pangloss but Wattson, with the extra quality of being like a merciless loanshark at the deathbed of a client. I’m more Shylock than Portia. He might just as well have called me Mrs. Camp toute courte.[40] I never said things like Little dear this is the Tropic or They are souvenirs darling or any other petty snaps. He has been reading too many “Blondie” comic books or he has seen all the Lucille Ball shows on television. I wouldn’t mind in the least being Lucille if only he had the glances of Desy Arnass[41]—and the same age as well.
In the (under) development of the narrative you can read on many occasions the word “native” used in a derrogatory sense. Please don’t blame El Viejo Mr. Campbell and his tautologies. It is inevitable, I suppose. When Mr.—he, that is, this Mister Comma Mister Period Mister Hyphen who is so enamored of punctuation marks that he gets really distressed every deliberate time I leave out the period after his title, Mr “there you are”— Mr. Rudyard Kipling Campbell heard that the management of the hotel was “ours” as he called it meaning they were Americans, he smiled the broad smile of a conoisseur[42] in a museum. For him the hoi polloi[43] of the Tropics are always a crowd of loafers, inescapably so, people who take siestas all the time. Also they are arduous to tell apart. The cab-driver said perfectly clearly that his name was Ramón Garsia.[44]
I didn’t find funny his goings and comings all over the place walking stick in hand all the time. In the Tropicana, when we were leaving the dining room not i,n,t,o,x,i,c,a,t,e,d but helpless drunks yes, with his walking stick falling to the ground one and another time in the course of crossing the short well-lit crowded space of the entrance-hall and his precarious balance when he picked it up it was he who was—really and truly this time—a “public nuisance.”
He simple adores being mistaken for one of the Campbell millionaires. He always does. He even insists that they are narrow relations of his. I didn’t laugh the title of Playboy International, but I had nothing but contempt for his phony disgust when he heard them calling him the millionaire in soups. He’s such a lousy actor.
His exaggerated and sometimes completely fictional custom of drinking which he makes such a fanfare of and many other literary characteristics, these are all copied from Hemingway, Fitzgerald et al.[45]
There was no sexual abduction. What is true is that Ramón—I had to give up in the end and call him that—offered to take us to see the live demonstrations, but only after Mister Campbell’s multiple doubles entendres.[46] He has never mentioned the fact that he bought books of the Obelisk and Olympia Presses,[47] by a cer the dozen in a bookstore in calle Belga,[48] and that he showed me the notes which said that they were not for sale in the UK[49] or in the USA, and he even insisted on buying a costous and voluminous French novel, Prelude Charnel,[50] illustrated throughout in color and which I would be able to translate for him at some future date in the bedroom. He didn’t mention the title of the film we saw, Baby Doll.[51] He didn’t propose the tableaux vivants[52] and the exhibitions of sexual prowess, but he certainly did make one or two dubious remarks about the Marines and the red light district around Barrio de Colón. No comment on his version of Lust’s Labors Lost or on the tropical Sexe, Son et Lumieres.
[53] I will say that it weren’t this poor little depraved one of me who enjoyed alone the show of Lothario/Othello/Superman to borrow Mr. Campbell’s use of names and punctuation. And I will add, to finalize, that he is the one man on this earth since the days of No Eyelids Sing[54] who is capable of sleeping with both his eyes wide open.
He didn’t “find” the stick on the street, wandering along with a stranger like Gogol’s nose,[55] a literary Person-Thing, a genuine walking walking-stick.[56] The walking stick never left the cafe, which was without any doubt at all called Lucero Bar. We had both been sitting in a crowded room. When Mr. Campbell got up to leave quite simply and naturally he took a stick from the next table: a dark stick knotted exactly like his own. We were standing in the door when we heard someone running after us and uttering the strange then and familiar now noises.
We looked behind and saw the real owner of the stick only of course we didn’t know that at that time. Mr. Campbell made a gesture as though he was going to return it, but it was I who opposed. I told him that he bought the stick with his own good money and just because the beggar was an idiot we weren’t going to let him go outside with it, as though his mental malformation was an excuse for the robbery. It is quite true that we soon had a mob around us, for the most part customers of the “café”, and that a number of debates broke out. But there were always arguments on our side: the beggar, if you remember, was unable to speak. The policeman—who came from the tourist division—turned up and intervened through pure chance. Inevitably he was always for us, decidedly thus, and he took the beggar toward jail without ulterior discussion. Nobody suggested a collection and Mr. Campbell didn’t pay any compensation because there wasn’t any. However if it had been, I wouldn’t have let him. The way he tells the story he makes it sound as though the walking stick was a magic wand which suddenly converting me from witch to saint.[57] Nothing like this happened. In actual fact it was I who was the most insistent that he shouldn’t let the walking stick go away just like that. I detest idiots, Mr. Campbell is the only one for whom I have the slightest patience, which wears itself out as he wanes crasser through the years. I never suggested he take the stick as an end and the whole scene is told as though Sr. Campbell was a script writer for the Italian screen of the late forties.
Three Trapped Tigers Page 21