—In reverse?
—Yes.
He did so. So fast we shot back something like fifty yards.
—Whoa! Now go forward. Slowly. Slow as you can.
He did so and I closed one eye. I saw the canals, the roadsteads and the sea filing slowly past and finally I saw that the bar and the swamp and the vegetation all merged in one dimension and although there was a variety of color and I remembered everything as I had seen it just before, in depth, the light vibrated over the landscape and I felt I was in a movie. Like Philip Marlowe in a Raymond Chandler novel. Or rather, Robert Montgomery-Marlowe-Chandler in the few unforgettable moments of The Lady in the Lake, which I saw in the Alkazar on September 7, 1946. I told Cué. I had to let him know.
—Jesus Christ, you are completely nuts! he said and got out. —Nuts nuts (he was walking away). You’ve got the movies, that’s what! he said as a parting diagnosis. But I followed him closely. Lumière & Son. We walked under a trellis of honeysuckle and past a lawn not of grass but of sea moss. We went into the bar. It was a dark room and I saw a dark rectangular strip of rough water at the far end which I realized afterward was a fish tank. At the back there were some doors which opened onto the still blinding light from which we’d come. Someone behind us, a woman’s voice, said, —He who has ears to hear let him hear, and an invisible crowd of men and women, voices with no flesh on them, laughed. Cué greeted the barman or owner, who returned his greeting as though he hadn’t seen him for ages or as though he had just left him in his house, with affectionate astonishment. Cué explained to me who he was, but I wasn’t listening, so fascinated was I by the fish tank where there was a horny ray swimming around in circles eternally. It was what we call an obispo, a bishop, and you—yes, you!—call a devilfish. Cué told me that they always had one and that it was always dying so they always changed it for another, but that he couldn’t distinguish them, and that this one could be either the earlier model or a stand-in.
We were drinking. Cué ordered a daiquiri without sugar and lots of lemon. Actor’s diet, I said. No, he said, just doing what you should be doing: following the Gran Maestro. I ordered a mojito and amused myself looking at it, jiggling it, holding in my hands this Cuban mint julep which is a metaphor of Cuba. Water, vegetation, sugar (brown), rum and artificial cold. Mix and strain, stir till glass frosts, spin rim in sugar (white). Serves seven (million) people. Should I tell Cué? It would unleash his wit. Hughes says that a bound man is much more frightening than a free man and maybe it’s because he can free himself at any moment. I was equally afraid of Cué’s wit. But my name is Fearless Fosdick: I told him. After calling the waiter or his friend and asking him to bring us another round (first warning him, as he always did, not to take away his glasses even if they were empty), Cué untied himself, no: he burst free to juggle with life and man and the eternal: PromisCuétheus Unbound. I’ll spare the reader the explicit crap of Cué’s dialogues and offer instead his complete works. Or rather, his pandects. I don’t know if they are worth anything. In any case they will serve to kill what Cué hates most: time.
XI
CONFESSIONS OF A CUBAN OPINION EATER
On opium:[60]
Quotation from the Monk of the Six Fingers (Si-tse Fing-ah; Fu-kyu-tuh dynasty):
“Opium is the religion of the Chinese.”
From Marx (he asked me if Marx had read Hegel? Groucho. Groucho Marx, not Groucho Hegel):
“Work is the opiate of the people.”
From Berkeley (the non-U, Busby):
“Movies are the opiate of the audience.”
From your servant Silvestre (Mu-vee dynasty):
“Opium is the cinema of the blind.”
Four centuries before Sartre, Christopher Marlowe:
Faustrus (he pronounced it like that, then in earnest):
FAUSTUS: Where are you damned?
MEPHISTOPHELES: In hell.
FAUSTUS: How comes it then thou art out of hell?
MEPHISTOPHELES: Why, this is hell!
Dies Faustae:
There are many exegeses on The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde: some of them intelligent (Borges), some popular (Victor Fleming), and still others disconcerting (Jean Renoir). Note that I am talking to you about fiction, film and television. In other words present-day culture. There must have been many other interpretations which have escaped my notice, but I don’t believe any of them—either the magical or the psychoanalytical or the rationalist—succeeds in unveiling the original mystery. (Pause. Arsenius Wolfgang Guéthe was giving dramatic stress to his words, a second glass in his hand.) Stevenson’s short novel, Silvestre, is, let it be carefully understood, another version of the myth of Faust.
Art and its disciples:
Neither the lunar nor the solar spheres,
Nor the dry land nor the waters over earth,
Nor the air nor the moving winds in the limitless spaces
Shall endure ever:
Thou alone art! Thou alone!
RAG MAJH KI VAR
The Sacred Writings of the Sighs
Cuévafy:
“And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.”
Mansportret:
“The condom is a mechanical barrier used by the male.”
ELIZABETH PARKER, M.D.
The Seven Ages of Women
What would the authoress of Caoba, the Guerilla Chief say?
A question I always hear ringing in my ears late at night, said in an Italianate voice: Wasa there ever sucha a person as Vittorio Campolo?
The English in their bath:
The Eureka bathtub (Shanks & Co., Ltd., Barnhead, Scotland: see the Siracusa Hotel on El Caney beach) would have considerably facilitated the creative labors of Archimedes. Or is this merely one more example of the unpluggable humor of English plumbers? (Videlicet: a toilet nicknamed Shark, a bowl labeled Niagara, a urinal called Adamant, et cacaetera, faecetera.)
Nothingness is the other name of Eternity:
There is more nothing than anything. Nothingness is always here, in latent nonform. Being has to manifest itself expressly. Something comes out of nothing, struggles to become manifest and then disappears again, into nothing.
We do not live in nothing, but nothing lives in us, in a sense.
Nothingness is not the opposite of being. Being is nothingness expressed in other terms.
Musa paradisiaca or what cut Cué’s knotted knot:
The discoverers mistook our manatee (order Sirenia, genus manatus: a siren with hands) for a mermaid: their breasts, their almost human face and their method of coitus (a two-backed beast), all contributed to the analogy. But other more Cuban symbols escaped attention because they were of a vegetal order.
The palm tree, with its feminine trunk and the green tresses of its leaves, is our Medusa.
The cigar (a Havana, also called panatela, breva, corona or cheroot) is an avatar of the phoenix: when it seems to be extinguished, dead, the fire of life rises from its ashes.
The banana tree (muse of paradise) is the tropical Hydra: if one cuts off its head of fruit another rises to replace it and the plant acquires a new life.
Cantata to tea, Coffee concerto, Maté motet:
Coffee is a sexual stimulant. Tea is intellectual. Maté is the bitter primitive residue of a hungover dawn in New York circa 1955. (I am speaking for myself and also for you, Silvestre. I don’t care what the scientists say. For this reason my example should be seen as both personal and remote.)
A coffee sipped on the corner of 12th and 23rd, at dawn, or just before, the morning wind from the Malecón still on my face, stinging my senses and the speed (the thing about speed that is so intoxicating is that it turns a physical action into a metaphysical experience: speed turns time into space—I, Silvestre, told him that the movies turn space into time and Cué answered, That is another experience that physics cannot comprehend), the speed, I myself, buffeted head-on and
in profile by this dawn wind, exhaustion and an empty stomach making you conscious of your body, with that beauteous lucidity of insomnia after a night session cutting endless bars of soap operas, cut in your mind, it is then that a coffee—a simple coffee costing three centavos—a strong black coffee drunk when El Flaco, that long thin shadow, leaves his night shift, after scandalizing the workers going early to their work, the nightwalkers, the exhausted night watchmen, the night whores standing drenched in dew and sperm, all these, all this fauna of the night zoo you find at the gates of the Colón cemetery, all these people hit by his Tchaikovsky his Prokoviev his Stravinsky (and let his megamelomania go as far as Webern and Schonberg and—but, my God, they’d lynch him!—Edgar Varese), names which El Flaco, flaccidly, would hardly be able to pronounce, playing them on 23rd and 12th (and note that 23 and 12 make 35 and 3 and 5 make 8 while the sums of 2 and 3 and 1 and 2 respectively make 5 and 3, which also make 8: this street corner is perpetually condemned to traffic with the dead: 8 means death in the charada, as you know: this explains why the cemetery being on 12th and Zapata, a very long block away from 12th and 23rd, 23rd and 12th is a common synonym in Havana for cemetery), playing them on that pitiful portable phonograph of his which scratches all his records—this half cup of water and aroma and blackness is transformed (in me) into an urgent need to go in search, Eribó of the actresses, of them, call them N or M or M or N, or whatever her name is, call on them, on her, and wake her from her dreams of scenic grandeur and what with her heavy somnolence and my keen-edged wakefulness and the tumescent heat of this eternal summer’s morning, to make love to make love to make love to, her to make to.
Tea always makes me work, think, want to get things done—intellectually, that is.
There must be some scientific explanation, something connected with excitation of the lobes or the circulation of the blood or what the phrenologists would call a perfusion under the cranial cortex and also with the titillation, out of sympathy, of the solar plexus. But I don’t want to admit it, I don’t want to have anything to do with it, I don’t want to know this hypothesis. Don’t tell me, Silvestre. Please, no. Ay! Que no quiero saberla!
I commiserate with Macedonio Fernández, with Borges and maybe also with Bioy Casares, although I’m quite prepared to congratulate Queen Victoria Ocampo: you can’t grow a culture on maté. It will still be a hybrid—Biorges, Borgasares, Defeata Ocampo. A Matedonio.
Godspeed:
The idea of listening to Palestrina in a jet made you laugh. Yes, Padre Vitoria is my copilot and all that mass. But have you thought what effect speed might have on literature? Just focus your two point eight attention on this phenomenon alone: a plane flying between London and Paris arrives five minutes before it left when the jet makes the return flight from London to Paris. What will happen when man can travel at five or six thousand kilometers an hour and finds that he thinks less quickly than he moves? Is such a man the same thinking reed that Pascal thought he was? (Man, that is, not Pascal.) And yet, it often seems to you that I drive fast.
Why I am not a writer:
You often ask me why I don’t write. I could answer you by saying that I have no sense of history. It costs me an entire day’s effort to think about the next day. I could never say, following Stendhal, People will be reading me in the year 2058. (Which adds up to 15 or 33, because they both add up to 6, an even number which has an odd number imaging it in the mirror: a 9.) Domani è troppo tardi.
Besides, I haven’t the slightest reverence either for Marcel Proust (which he rhymed, distinctly, with pooh), or for James Joyce (Cué pronounced it Shame’s Choice) or for Kafka (it sounded like caca in his otherwise well-behaved voice). This is the Holy Trinity, whom you must adore if you are to write in the twentieth century—and as I wouldn’t be able to write in the twenty-first . . .
Is it my fault if Bay City moves me more than Combray? Yes, I suppose it is. How about you? You should call this Chandler’s Syndrome.
Speaking of Laura Cton?
Flowers corrupt. But corruption deflowers.
Way of livink:
I live between the provisory and disorder, in a state of anarchy. This chaos must be come what may another metaphor for life.
Who could be my ventriloquist?
Somebody up there Cués me.
The Time Killer:
The Duchess of Malfi pardoned her executioners because they did no more than catarrh would have done. Why so much hatred for Hitler, then? The majority of the people whom he killed would be dead now anyway. A campaign should be launched in the UN, and everywhere else as well, to declare Time a genocide.
(EICHMANN, showing Hitler the gas ovens, etc.: Now, Meine Führer, vad do you zink of my final solution?
FÜHRER: It’s a gas, Adolf!)
Example of metaphoric or vital chaos:
A tale of Helius and Caballus: I was engaged in dubious battle with Juan Blanco, alias Jan DeWitte, the composer of “Canción Triste,” who writes music under the nom de flute of Giovanni Bianchi. We leave his house at eight in the evening and go to the corner of Paseo and Zapata. Juan orders a chocolate milk shake, I a tomato juice. He, a custard apple ice cream, Arsenio Cué: strawberries and cream. JB: a pineapple juice and then a V-8—me, a hamburger. Juan eats a steak sandwich: he knows that the Era of Solid Commodities is dawning. I order a rice pudding: there is a time to live and a time to die, a time for entrées and a time for dessert. Juan Blanco devours a bread pudding, I peck at a cheeseburger. Job orders a masarreal, moi a guava pie. (Shit, we’ve exhausted both list and lust!) Ivan a pinta milka, Siberianly chilled, sybaritically sipped. As I watch him I make signs of Gangway!, and go out at a run, pale and cerulean, to the white john. It’s all too clear that I’ve lost the battle. My kingdom for a cow! When I return, Juan, Sean, Johannes, John, Joâo and this buncha guys are taking the Alkaseltzer of Segovia. But the pint is empty, hélas! et j’ai bu sous les litres! They will preserve the bottle cast in platinum and iridium in the museum of moderate pinting. Ave Ioannis Vomituri Te Salutant. SPQIB.
We go back again to his apartment. This night is filled with pupils from the conservatory. They are coming to hear for the third time, my God, the Ninth Symphony of that “monster in chains,” as a musical nymph said the other day in this very place, meaning Beethoven. Don’t be upset, Silver Tray, because another she-pupil insisted on describing LVB as the Blind Man of Bonn. And as it is still very early for Bonn and too late for the goils, there was yet another (they function by a process of internal convulsion) musical gal who carried me off to the balcony—I rubbing my venereal hands. But all we did was to confirm, yet again, the theory of relativity. She pointed to a light. Venus, she told me, the Morning Star. What made me unhappy was not that it was night and not morning nor that I was engaged in an erotic fiasco, only that I looked and could see neither Venus nor Mars but a brilliant yellow ordinary light bulb lighting up somebody’s terrace. My tower of lust came tumbling down but I didn’t say a word, believing with Brecht that truth shouldn’t be told to everybody.
That night of the navel battle we went out again at midnight, all of us, to eat something after the Muses were silent. The girls insisted, melomaniacally, that we shouldn’t eat anything solid after the spiritual nourishment that the tortured soul of Ludwig van and the well-salaried technicians of RCA Victor had provided. We put on an appearance of being convinced and hummed to cover up our belches.
Ah Oscarwilderness:
“There is a land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes . . . a land where all things are perfect and poisonous.”
The charge of the night brigade:
He returned to his numbers which were his charge of the 666. Arsenio Cué was as much enamored of numbers as he was of himself. Or vice-roy.
The 3 was the Great Number, almost Number One, because it was the first of the prime numbers which can be divided only by themselves or by unity. (Cué said Unity.)
Doesn’t it seem strange to you that 5 and 2 are numbers that are
so different and yet so similar? (I didn’t disagree with him and he didn’t tell me why.)
The number 8 is another of the keys to the Mystery. It is made out of two zeros and is the first number to contain a cube. The Big Step, that is to say the 2, is its cube root and 8 is at the same time 2 times 4, which is the geometric or Pythagorean number par excellence. All this & more it is vertically and in the Cuban charada it spells death, and 64, in the Chinese charada, is the Great Dead, Muerto Grande. 8 x 8 = 64 as you should know. (I told him I did, nodding the head of my tail.) In antiquity it was the number dedicated to Poseidon, that god Neptune who has streets and statues and lighthouses named after him here in Cuba, and whom you love so much. Calle Neptuno, if you remember, begins in Central Park.
It is this number that when it gets tired and lies down, stretches itself, has no end, it is infinity. (Or its symbol, which is the only finite thing we know about infinity, I told him. He didn’t hear me.) Space is a Procrustean bed.
The five (sorry, Cué, my boy, the 5) is a magic number in Chinese numerical mythology: it was they who invented the five senses, the five organs of the body, etc.
The 9 is another number that behaves “strangely.” It is, of course, the square of 3, which is the first true odd number, given that the 1 is unity, the base of all things, our mother. (And the zero? I asked him.) It is an Arabic convention, he said. It isn’t a number. (But it is our infinite, I said. We begin from it and we end in it. He smiled. He also made a zero sign with his fingers, that popular mudrá which indicates besides that everything is going or has gone well—or that there isn’t anything.) 9 added to itself makes 18 and multiplied by itself makes 81. Back to front and counting from the right, the same number in a mirror. As you can see, if you add each one of its digits you find a 9 again.
Do you know that the prime numbers are strange compared with the even and odd numbers? (No, I didn’t.) Yes, their series is discontinuous and arbitrary and it is still not complete. It will never be completed. Only the great mathematicians and the great magicians discover prime numbers—or are able to discover them.
Three Trapped Tigers Page 34