What a relief it is still daylight outside.
XIII
We had been drinking. We still were. Only that Cué had gone to the can a while ago, but there were six empty glasses of his already lined up on the counter and a seventh that was half empty coolly awaiting his comeback. What would Mayito Trinidad say? Trinidad Torregrosa el brujo, the African witch doctor, the Cuban sorcerer, Mayito! I had gone to his place one day with Jesse Fernández, to the first floor of the solar he lived in, to take some photos of him for Life and write a story on him for Carteles, and he had brought out The Shells to perform a secret ceremony for me, casting the white shells like dice in the dark, in his room with the blinds drawn at midday and a little candle on the floor to light the cowries in the Afro-Cuban version of an Orphic mystery, and I remember the three pieces of personal advice he gave me then as clearly as I remember the seven shells rattling in his African long bony hand and then rolling over the Spanish tiles of the floor—the secrets of the tribe as he called them. Three. Warnings more than secrets. Tres. 3. Periodista, he said (that is, journalist: in Cuba nobody can be a writer: That’s not a profession! the librarian at the National Library told me one day when I was filling in my card to take out a book and I wrote the twice four-lettered word escritor in the space where they ask for your profession), you’re a journalist so don’t let anybody write with your pen (I always write with a typewriter) nor on your maquinita in that case, he said. Never nunca jamás! Never let anybody comb his hair with your comb. And never leave a glass half empty and come back for it later. The three threats of Trinidad. However, there at the counter was his glass half empty or half full and Arsenio Cué wasn’t around to keep an eye on it. The only sorcery he believes in is the magic of numbers, his numeritos, adding them together and getting the final figure, a magic trick he was performing only a moment ago, just before he went to the john, adding the numbers of one thousand nine hundred and sixty-six once again and getting twenty-two as he sometimes does and then adding and adding again and again and getting the final solution, or the Definitive Quantity as he also calls it, which was seven—and there were seven letters in his name! I couldn’t resist telling him that I had never before seen a name that stretched as far as twenty-two letters on some occasions and contracted to seven on others, that this wasn’t a name but an accordion. He answered me by going to the juan.
He had been talking. We still were and we ordered a sixth round because the conversation had gotten around once more, of its own accordion, to what Cué called El Tema, and which was neither sex nor music nor even his incomplete Pandects this time. I believe we arrived there on the Gulf Stream of Consciousness, going around and around the subject of words without ever getting to the question, the one and only question, my question. But it was Cué who landed first, insisting that I follow him ashore.
—What would I be then? Just one more average reader? A translator, another traitor?
He interrupted me with a flashing signal, like a lighthouse of speech.
—Don’t let’s go into details, my God, and still less don’t start quoting names. Leave that to Salvador Bueno, to Invert Andersen, to Chansez or his blind surrogates like Seemore Fantoms. But I, Arsenio Cué, consider that all Cuban writers, but all (and he said the l’s in all with a trill, his tongue sticky with rum) with the possible exception of yourself and if I say that to you it’s not because you’re sitting in front of me, as you well know, but because (I’m not sitting behind you, I said) because I had a vague feeling that that’s how it is. (I said thank you.) You’re welcome. But wait a minute, like a parenthesis or better yet a musical term, with a half-note rest. All the rest of your generation are no better than secondhand readers of Faulkner and Hemingway and Dos Passos or, if they use just intonation, lip-readers of poor Scott and Salinger and Styron, to tune in on writers under S. (Under-S-timated writers? I asked, but he didn’t hear me.) There are also aweful readers of Borges and others who read Sartre but don’t understand him and who read and don’t understand Nabokov or even have any feeling for him, he said. —If you’d rather I talked about other generations you could read Hemingway and Faulkner where I read, I mean said Faulkner and Hemingway and you could throw in Huxley for good measure and Mann and Lawrence the Hetero, for excess, and to build once more this tower of Isaac Babel which is a national metaphor, to set up shop in a quincalla, you could then add Hermann Hesse to the list, and Guiraldes to boot (he pronounced Giiiraldes without the diaeresis, so it sounded: girlsalltheys) and Pio Baroja and Azorin and Unamuno and Ortega and maybe even Gorky! Though I may be landing now in the no-writer’s-land of the last republican generation. Who else is there? A handful of names like . . .
—But you said you weren’t going to mention any names.
—So I did. But that was in another context and besides my word is dead. He didn’t smile. In fact he didn’t even stop. —As for your contemporaries, there is Rene Jordan, I suppose. Or would be if he stopped making an idiot of himself with those frivolous film reviews and forgot about Fief’s Avenue and the Nude Jerker. Aside from that there is this Montenegro fellow: his Men Without Woman would be O.K. if his prose wasn’t so underdeveloped; then there are two or three short stories of Novás Calvo, who is a great translator.
—Lino? Excuse me! Have you ever read his version of The Old Man and the Sea? There are at least three serious mistranslations on the first page alone and it’s a very short page. Man, did I feel sorry for him, so I didn’t look for more. I hate disappointments but just out of curiosity I looked at the last page. I found that he managed to transform the African lions in the memory of Santiago into sea lions! Morsas, which is not a morsel but a mouthful of shit!
—If you’ll let me finish. You’re acting like a minority whip, coño! I know all that and I also remember that in the book on pirates by Gosse which he translated he thought the word vessels meant glasses, not ships, so that now for the Spanish reader there are two hundred glasses at the bar of Algiers harbor waiting for the Barbary pirates.
—The most vicious bout of drinking in naval history. What do pirates toast with, Bloody Maria?
—Enough’s enough. Don’t forget that he’s your forerunner in the use of the vernacular. When I said translator I meant it ironically, meaning that as a writer he is a very good translator of Faulkner and Hemingway into Spanish.
—Into Cuban.
—All right, into Cuban then. Following an order that one might call disorder and early sorrow, apart from Lino and Montenegro and bits of Carrion, frankly I can’t think of anybody else. Piñera? I don’t want to talk about the theater. For obvious reasons, which are always the most obnoxious.
—And Alejo? I said, carried away by the literary game and gossip.
—Carpentier?
—Is there another Alejo?
—Yes, Antonio Alejo, a painter who is also a friend.
—There is also Georges Carpentier, the violet or orchid or rose of the ring. Yes, I mean Alejo Carpentier.
—He is the last of the French, who wrote in Spanish in retaliation against Heredia (he pronounced it Herediá). A trophy.
I laughed.
—You’re laughing. Just like a Cuban. People here always have to turn anything that’s true into a joke. To extract truth with laughing gas.
He fell silent. Then he swallowed his daiquiri in one gulp, a period to what he had said. Can you drink a period? Only with alphabet soup, maybe. I decided to tie up the end and the beginning, to make the conversation happy.
—What are you going to do then?
—I don’t know. But don’t you bother yourself about that. Something will turn up. I can do anything. Anything but writing.
—What I meant was what are you going to do for a living?
That’s another question. For the moment I am living, to take a leaf out of your dictionary, off a physical and economic phenomenon called pecuniary inertia. But get this straight, my money will last me past countdown and long after blastoff, as long as my pocket and I
can stand up to the pressure of three G-notes, notwithstanding the period of metal fatigue which is particularly severe in the case of silver. But I’ll resist the journey through vacuum if I then change all my money into nickels, because it’s a well-known fact that nickel is heat-resistant. If all systems go, then I’ll have to tighten my Van Allen belt.
I smiled. The drinks had restored Cué to his dialectal origins.
—I know where you want to get to, he said. —You want to know where I’m heading for.
—Not only in your career.
—You can mean it in any sense you want. I know. But I’m going to give you one more quotation. Remember (he was telling me, not asking): “Ce qu’il y a de tragique dans la Mort, c’est qu’elle transforme notre vie en destin.”
—It’s well known, I said with Cunning. In situations like this I always manage not to be alone.
—Actually, Silvestre, there’s no such thing as a career. All there is is inertia. Many inertias or a single repeated inertia. Inertia and propaganda plus, in some cases, a percentage. That’s life. Death isn’t a destiny, but it makes a destiny of our lives. C’est a dire, en las diez de última, when it’s all added up, it is a destiny. Is it not so?
I nodded with my head, which was lolling to one side. From alcohol, not emphasis.
—En las diez de última. Or when it comes to the last ten. 0 wisdom of the folk! Continuing with these methylated majeutics I could ask you whether death or Death, to use these great Words a la Malraux, is not some kind of destiny?
He paused and said please viejito repeat it to the waiter. Or the boss.
—It’s curious how a photo transforms reality at the precise moment that it freezes it.
It was at the end of the sentence, as though he was speaking German, that I realized what he was talking about, because I followed his eyes fast and was able to splice up his speech by drawing a zigzag line between his eyesight and a photomural at the back of the room. He, Eve’s novelty, Fall. Vale of all Vanity. The valley of Viñales.
—Please note that there is a balcony in the foreground. Also note that the term foreground is a convention of Códac e gli altri. But now, precisely at this moment, balcony and palms and hills and distant clouds and the sky in the background are one and the same. A single reality. A photographic reality that refers to the reality of Viñales. Another reality. An unreality. Or to use a term that you cherish, a metareality. Don’t you see how a photo can become a metaphysical happening?
I didn’t say anything but pondered over his pandects (cont’d) and over the popularity of the word metaphysics. I thought that all we need is for Códac to come in and sit down and nod his head approvingly. Códac whom Bustro called Cádóc. Let Bustro come instead of Códac. Let Him come, for He must come if only to make our silence pregnant. Will there be a limbo for jokers? Or will He be in Bustroferno? If not, where is He? In heaven? In those particles of dust that fix, like Códac’s chemicals, the blue of the sky, yet still a prisoner of earthly gravity? Or would he be beyond Roche’s Limit, where a console coming from earth would break into a thousand pieces. But Bustrófedon is not a console. What about his con’s soul? The soul of a con man would break into a thousand peaces beyond Roche’s Limit? Would Bustrófedon become a ball of soulid gas rolling and smouldering around in that siberial, sidereal cold? I think a great deal. (Not now, but on other occasions.) I have thought a great deal about the province of souls, by which I mean the demesne of spirits and ghosts in the blue yonder. Ghostronomy. Would I be able to resoulve the enigma by modern physics and astronomy? It isn’t the first time that physics has been food for metaphysics—cf., Aristhotels, the alchimeraests, Raymond Lullaby, Talehard du Jardin—but the phenomenon doesn’t cease to astonish me; if anything, the reverse. (The non emone h P.) I knew where this province of Ultimate Tulip could be found, this Nether-never-land, this Lethe, from an article about astrophysics in Carteles, which talked about the velocity of light and relativity and made mention of a zone near the earth, a gaseous magma where light achieves extraordinary speeds well above its normal level: its last frontier, absolute speed, metaphysic’s absolute, discovered by the physicists. (C’est a dire, the materialists.) This article and a fact that has almost no importance coincided in Cué’s automobile a while ago. I was riding beside him and thinking about the article and I saw a bubble being formed in the glass on the windshield (we were doing about eighty and because Cué had said something then or a little earlier about going at the speed of a tortoise compared with the speed of sound I had said that for somebody traveling at the speed of light we were standing still and the idea appealed to him) and I looked at the bubble and then thought about light traveling at speeds greater than itself, then I thought that the molecules traveling at such a speed would think that their colleagues of the slow light ray were going at a tortoise’s pace, then I thought that perhaps there were other even greater speeds than these speeds of light and that contrasted with those these molecules would be traveling at zero velocity, and thinking this way, in telescopical Chinese boxes, I felt such a vertigo that I might have been falling into the void at a greater speed than the idea of falling. It was then, precisely at that moment (which I will never forget and to make sure that I didn’t I took these notes when I went home), that I saw the bubble in the glass. I don’t know if you know, you who live on the other side of the page, that the glass panes in automobiles, the windshield pane at least, is made of two hyaline sheets separated by an invisible strip of plastic. The three sheets are then forced together by a pressure ten times greater than that reckoned as the safety limit for the final plate of glass. On one side, then, of this apparently and effectively homogeneous surface a little air had gotten in—a puff, a breath, the thousandth part of a sigh—and it had turned into a bubble before my eyes. I thought, for the love of Craft, of H.P. and his anterior anthropoids and of the gaseous magma and once again of the speeds of light. Couldn’t the ether be peopled with ghosts, bubbles of a man’s last breath in the great bubble of the cipher? Wouldn’t it be on funereal bubbles such as these that the molecules of light would ride? It seems there is as much food for thought here as there is lack of substance for belief. Final hypothesis: the magma must be composed of the last breath of souls while the void, the cosmic ether, not so long ago called cipher, must accommodate all the former spirits, which had been shot into its confines through a sort of metaphysical Roche’s Limit. Would our Bustrófedon, Bourtrophedon, the Nostrofedon be there, in the comic ether? In the serious half of the hypothesis, in the hypo or spectrum (good word, that), in the grave spectrum I see the gaseous remains of Julius Caesar Cué looking for the invisible nose of She, of Cleopatrayesha, of Plato, that essential spirit, presiding over another symposium, not of ghosts but of Socratic air bubbles, of a Joan of Arc made of pale smoke burning in an ignis that would be less than fatuous, of Shakespeare unBowbblerized but wrapped up in a pomp of rhetoric named The Globe, Cervantes minus his airy arm or subtle limb, as Góngora would say, Góngora who is sitting gaseously beside him and both of them plus Lope surround the weightless hand of Velázquez who is trying, with the aid of black light, to paint the passionate stardust of Quevedo, and farther off, much farther off, almost this side of the limit, who is that I see? It is not a plane it is not a ghost-bird it is Superbustrofedon! traveling on his own starlight and telling me, in my ear, my telescopic ear, my soundscope: Come on, when are you going to come over here and he makes all kinds of obscene gestures and whispers in his ultrasonic voice, There’s so much to see .here, it’s better than the aleph, almost better than the movies, and I’m just about to jump, balancing as I am on the diving board of time, when I hear the earthly voice of Cué bringing me back alive to the present.
Three Trapped Tigers Page 36