Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

  At the Capri there were the same people as always, maybe a little more crowded than usual because it was Friday and an opening night, but I managed to find a good table. I was with Irenita who always likes to pay visits to fame even if she has to go by the way of hate to get there and we sat down and waited for the stellar moment when La Estrella would ascend to her musical heaven which was the stage and I kept myself busy looking around at the women in their satin dresses and the men who looked from their faces like they wore long underpants and the old women who would go crazy over a bunch of plastic flowers. There was a rolling of drums and then the emcee had the pleasure to introduce to the charming audience the discovery of the century, the greatest Cuban singer since Rita Montaner, the only singer in the world who could be compared with the greatest of the great in the world of international song like Ella Fitzgerald and Katyna Ranieri and Libertad Lamarque, which was like a salad for all seasons to be had with a soupcon of seltzer. Lights out and a searchlight tore a white hole in the purple backdrop and between the folds salami fingers were groping their way in and behind them there appeared a thigh in the shape of an arm and at the end of the arm La Estrella arrived with the black hand mike lost in her hand like a metal finger between those five nipples full of fat that are her actual fingers. Finally every inch of her sprawled on stage singing “Noche de Ronda” as she expanded forward in the general direction of a little round black table with a tiny black chair beside it, both shaking with more than stage fright as they waited for her freight to crash-land on them, and La Estrella spread out toward this suggestion of café chantant precariously balancing on her head a coiffure that Madame de Pompadour would have judged too much. She sat down and chair and table and La Estrella were within a thin inch of falling together to the ground and offstage, but she went on singing as though nothing had happened, steadying the tumbling table, silencing the creaking chair and drowning the loudsy band, all done with her voice, recovering from time to time her sound of yesteryear and filling the whole of that great hall with her incredible voce e mezza and for a minute I forgot her strange makeup, her face which was no longer ugly but simply grotesque up there, a purple mask with great scarlet-painted lips and the same defoliated eyebrows as before painted across in straight thin lines over the slitty eyes: all the ugliness the darkness of Las Vegas had always concealed. But a minute can only last a minute. If I stayed on until she had finished it was only out of solidarity and pity but all through the show I couldn’t help thinking Alex Bayer would be doubly happy at this star-struck moment later known as the apotheosis of La Estrella.

  When the show was over we went backstage to congratulate her and of course she didn’t allow Irenita into her dressing room with its great silver star pasted on the door, the edges still sticky. I remember it well because I had time to study it in detail while I was waiting for La Estrella: I was the last person she deigned to receive. I went in and the dressing room was full of flowers and fairies and two little mulatto acolytes who were combing her pompous pompadour and arranging her clothes. I greeted her and told her how much I had enjoyed her singing and how good she looked on stage and what a great singer she was, and then she offered me her hand, the left one, as though it was the Pope’s hand, and I shook it limply and she answered with a sidewinding smile and didn’t say a thing, but nothing, nothing, nothing, not a word: all she did was to smile her frozen lopsided smile and preen herself in the mirror on the wall and demand constant attention from her sycophants with a megalomania which like her voice, like her hands, like herself, was simply monstrous. I left the dressing room as best I could telling her I would come and see her again some other time when she wasn’t so tired or nervous or busy, I can’t remember which, and she smiled her lopsidewinding smile at me like a period or like a full stop.

  Later I knew her Capri show had folded and that she moved to the Saint John, with only a guitar for backing, but the guitarist was not Niño Nené but somebody else. She had a genuine success there and she even cut a record (I know: I bought it and listened to it), and after that she went to San Juan, P.R., and to Caracas and to Mexico City and everywhere she went people were talking about her voice more than listening to it. She went to Mexico against the advice of her private doctor (no, not Alex Bayer’s private doctor) who told her the altitude would kill her and she went in spite of his advice and in spite of everything she overstayed herself until one evening she ate a huge dinner and the next morning she had acute indigestion and called a doctor and the indigestion became a heart attack and she spent three days in an oversize oxygen tent and on the fourth day she got worse and on the fifth day she died. There ensued a legal battle between the Mexican impresarios and their Cuban colleagues about the cost of transport to take her back to Cuba for burial and they wanted to ship her as general freight and the air company said that a coffin wasn’t general freight but came under special transport and then they wanted to put her in a frozen-goods container and have her sent the same way they fly lobsters to Miami and her faithful acolytes protested, outraged by this ultimate insult, but finally they had no other alternative than to leave her in Mexico to be buried there.

  I don’t know if all this is true or false but what is true is that she’s dead and that soon nobody will remember her and that she was very much alive when I knew her and that now nothing remains of that fabulous freak, that enormous vitality, that unique human being but a skeleton like the hundreds, thousands, millions of true and false skeletons there are in Mexico, a country peopled by skeletons, once the worms have gorged themselves on the three hundred and fifty pounds of living flesh she bequeathed them. It is God’s truth that she is gone with the wind which is the same as saying she’s fucked and farted and that nothing remains of her but a lousy record with a shitty sleeve in obscenely bad taste on which the ugliest woman in the world appears in full sepia color: eyes slitting and mouth wide open between liver-colored lips and cradling a microphone in her hand very close to an avid muzzle, and although we who knew her know damn well this is not her, this is definitely not La Estrella, and the dead voice of that godawful record has nothing to do with her own live voice, this is all that remains of her and within six months or a year when all the dirty jokes about her photo finish and the micockphone she is about to blow in it are past and gone and forgotten, within two years at the most she will be completely forgotten herself—and this is the most terrible thing of all because the one thing I feel a mortal hatred for is oblivion.

  But not even I can do anything, because you can’t give a stop bath to life, so life must go on. Not so long ago, just before they transferred me to the front page, I went to Las Vegas on leave (yes, the nightclub has reopened and is continuing with its grand show of the evening and its chowcito and the same people go there every night and every dawn and on into the morning as before familia) and there were two girls singing there, new ones, two pretty little Negro girls singing and swinging without any backing. I instantly thought of La Estrella and her voice revolution in Cuban music and of her style which is a thing that lasts longer than a person and a voice and a revolution. La Estrella lives in these girls who call themselves Las Capellas in a homage that doesn’t dare disclose its name, and they sing very well and in pluperfect pitch and what is more, they have a lot of success. I took them out, along with this critic friend of mine I don’t know if you remember him, Rine Leal, to drive them home that same evening. On the way, right at the corner of Aguadulce, when I stopped at the red lights, we saw a boy playing the guitar and anybody who had eyes for music could see he was a kid from the sticks, a poor lonely kid who liked music and wanted to make it himself instead of having it canned or slaughtered on the premises. Rine made me park the car then and there and compelled us to go down under the May drizzle and into the bodegabar where the boy was, and I introduced him to Las Capellas though I didn’t know him from anywhere and then told him the girls were crazy about music and that they sang but only in the shower because they hadn’t yet dared to sing with accompa
niment, and the kid with the guitar from the sticks was very humble and naïve and goodhearted and he said, Come on, let’s try and don’t be shy because I’ll follow you and if you make a mistake I’ll cover up for you and if you stray I’ll go after you and bring you back to the bar, and he repeated, Come on, why don’t you try for once, come on. So Las Capellas sang with him and he followed them as best he could and I think the two beautiful Negro singers had never sung better than at Aguadulce which once meant fresh water but not anymore, and Rineleal and I applauded and the owner of the place and the other people who were there applauded too, and then we went off running under the drizzle which had suddenly become a shower and the kid with the guitar followed us with his voice, shouting at Las Capellas, Don’t be shy because you’re very good and you’ll go a long way if you want to, and we left Aguadulce running and got into my car and drove up to their house because Las Capellas are detentes but we stayed in the car waiting for the rain to stop or merely as a pretext for staying because after it had stopped raining we went on talking and laughing and so on and so forth until there was an intimate silence in the car and it was then we heard outside, quite distinctly, someone knocking on a door. Las Capellas thought it was their mother trying to attract their attention to order but they were surprised beyond belief because, as one of them said, their mother was very sensible and we heard the knocking again and we stood still and we heard it again and we got out of the car and the girls went into the house to find their mother sound asleep and nobody else lived with them and we could see the neighborhood was very quiet and orderly at that early or late hour. It was real spooky. Las Capellas began talking about dead people and the living dead and ghosts and Rine played some verbal games with the Bustrophantoms so I said I must split because I had to get to bed early, which was true, and we returned, Rine and I, to Havana and on my way back I thought of La Estrella but I didn’t say anything not because it was uncanny but because it was unnecessary. Anyhow, when we got to the center of town which is La Rampa of course and we got out to have a coffee and so to bed, we met Irenita plus some nameless friend of hers who were just leaving Fernando’s Hideaway and straight to bed so we invited them to go to Las Vegas where there wasn’t a show or a chowcito or anything by now, only the jukebox and some very distant relatives so we only stayed there for about a half hour drinking and talking and laughing and listening to some unknown records till it was almost dawn, when we took them both to a hotel on the beach.

  Tenth session

  Doctor, I can’t eat meat again. It’s not like the last time, when I saw in every steak a cow I once saw in my village that didn’t want to go into the slaughterhouse and dug its hoofs into the ground and got its horns stuck in the door of the slaughterhouse, and struggled so hard that in the end the man came out and gave it a blow with his knife right there in the street and the blood flowed in the gutter like water when it’s raining only soiled with a different hue of red. No, and the cook has orders to fry my meat until it’s charred black. But do you know what happens: I chew and chew and chew but I can’t swallow it. I simply can’t. It won’t go down. Did you know, doctor, that when I was a girl and went out on dates I had to go on an empty stomach, otherwise I would vomit?

  “I make this explanation for the reason

  that without it many readers would suppose

  that all these characters were trying to

  talk alike and not succeeding.”

  MARK TWAIN

  BACHATA

  I

  It will be a pity Bustrófedon didn’t come with us because we were going along El Malecón at forty, fifty, eighty miles an hour coming from the Almendares, that Ganges of the West Indian, as Cué called the river, and on the left was a double horizon: the jetty and the piece of invisible stitching that must be the scar left by the division of the waters, that illusory blue line at exactly two point six miles offshore. It was a pity Bustrófedon won’t come with us to see, when the twin horizons of cement and sunlight allow it, the motley ocean: the green blue indigo violet deep purple bands of the Stream, so well blended that not even Pym’s knife could separate them. It is indeed a pity Bustrófedon isn’t coming with us along the Malecón this evening with Arsenio Cué and me in his car which glides along like a travel shot from the fort of La Chorrera to the frontis of the Vedado Tennis Club, the continuous sea wall of the jetty now flanking us on the left but only until we turn around and go back (as we always do). On the right our boundary line is as of now the Hotel Riviera (a square soap dish with an oval bar of soap on one side: the veined egg of a roc: the gambling saloon’s pleasure dome) and seconds later the service station opposite the often murderous roundabout, this bleached gas station which becomes an oasis of light in the black desert of the Malecón-by-night, and in the background the sea forever enacting a fallen backdrop. Over it all there is another dome: the never-ending vault, an infinite bar of blue soap, the egg of a cosmic roc. The shimmering sky.

  To travel with Cué means to talk, think, free-associate like Cué, but as he is silent I take advantage of this fleeting moment to be myself for just a second and look around: I watch the ferry from Miami head toward the channel of the bay evidently pilotless because it is cruising along the jetty: visibly mistaking the wall for the sea after emerging blind drunk from horizontal clouds that form a natural atomic growth, a drinkable mushroom the salty, thirsty Gulf Stream will gulp down, then seeing how that evening sun turns every single window on the thirty-story Focsa building into a nugget of gold, alchemically changing the obscene pile of masonry into an Eldorado by putting gold fillings in the cavities of that mammoth inhabited tooth: gazing at it all with that unique pleasure you get from approaching a given point at a uniform and constant speed: the secret of the movies since Griffith, a sensation hightened now by listening to a melody that could be our soundtrack, and Cué’s voice, his actor’s delivery completes the illusion, destroying it at the same time:

  —What do you think of Bach at sixty? he says.

  —What?

  —Bach, Johann Sebastian, the baroque bang-up husband of the revealing Anna Magdalena B., the contrapuntal father of a harmonious son, the blind man of Bonn, the deaf man of Lepanto, the one-handed wonder, the author of that instruction emanuel for every spiritual prisoner, The Art of the Fugue, he says. —What would the old boy Bach say if he knew that his own music was speeding along the Malecón of Havana, in the heart of the tropics, at sixty miles an hour? What do you think would scare him more? What would he find most shocking? The time not the tempo over which his basso continuo has traveled? Or space, the far places his organized sound waves have reached?

  —I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it—and it was true I never thought about it, then or now.

  —I do, he says. —It has occurred to me that this music, this elegantly gross concerto (and he leaves an empty space between his pedantically dramatic phrases for the music to fill) was created to be listened to in Weimar, in the eighteenth century, in a German palace, in the baroque music room, by candelabra, in a silence that was not physical but historical: a music for eternity, in other words, for the ducal court.

  The Malecón slid away under the car and became an asphalt plain bordered by houses pitted with brine and the interminable sea wall, and the overcast or partly overcast sky above and the domed doomed sun itself sinking irresistibly but unnoticed, just like Icarus, toward the sea. (Why this mimesis? I always end up by being like the others: tell me how I speak and I’ll tell you who I am, which is like saying whom I’ve been seeing.) I was listening to Bach now in the intervals of Cué’s notes to the program but in fact thinking about the verbal games Bustrófedon would have made if he’d been alive, that is with us now: Bach, Bachata, Bachanal, Bachelor, Bachillus (which are found in the air interrupting the spatial continuum of a Bacuum), Bachalaureat, Bacharat, Bacations—and I was actually hearing him make a dictionary out of a single word.