—What d’you mean hopefully?
—All I did was to take Rine’s translation and put the adjectives that were in front of the nouns after them.
—And vice version.
I only smiled. I picked up the slips of paper from the table, crumpled them in a ball again and threw them into a corner.
—Down with them.
—That’s up to you, Cué said.
I pulled out one of the bills and laid it on the table.
—What’s that? Cué asked.
—A peso.
—I know that, you bum. What are you trying to do with it?
—Paying for the drinks.
He laughed his phony actor’s laugh.
—You’re still a poetical prisoner.
—How do you mean?
—Didn’t you hear what the waiter said?
—No.
—You’ve just been drinking free hemlock. It’s on the house.
—I didn’t hear him.
—Either you were dreaming memories or thinking of Rine’s treason, or tradition or translation and how he managed to keep to the letter of the lawyal.
—It’s stopped raining, I answered. We got up leaving.
XXII
Ain’t gonna rain nomore tonite.
It isn’t going to rain any more tonight.
—The passing of time’s proved Brillat-Savarin right, Cué said, walking talking waving his arms. —It’s more important today to discover a new recipe than a new star. (Pointing to the cosmos) There are so many stars already.
The sky had cleared and we walked under its leisure dome toward the Nacional.
—I should have brought my bailing pump. I invite you to take a ride in my boat, caro.
Swin’ low, sweet Charon. I didn’t answer. Everything was dark and silent. Even the drunken doll was dark and still. Shrunk not drunk. Cué didn’t say anything either and our footsteps sounded more like footprints. In the skies there was a silence that lasted for light-minutes. When we got to the car, before we got to it because the light in the parking lot was still on, we saw that someone had put up the top and closed the windows.
—Well done, Cué said as he got in. —We’re haigh and dry. A sober boat.
I sat in my seat, suicide as usual. We started up and he stopped at the gate, got out and woke the night watchman to give him a tip. He wouldn’t take it. It was the other Ramón still. The friends of my friends are my friends too, he said. Cué thanked him and wished him good night. Tiltomorro. Habla Versalles. We drove off. He dropped me off five minutes later although El Nacional is only four blocks away from my home. The shortest line between two points is the curve of the Malecón for Arsenio Einstein Cué. Torporlogy.
—I’m dead tired, he told me as he yawned and stretched. —Stone dead.
—Still stone gathers all moss.
—As your Marx says, Better rusty than missing.
—Consider him the Marx Bros. Companion to Soulitude. From here own you are on your on.
—You’re forgetting the Old Man, old boy.
—The Old Man and the Seer?
—Le vieux M, the one who said that le vrai néant ne se peut ni sentir ni penser. Still less communicate.
—What a con man! He’s the Great Cuntradictory, that’s who.
He pulled on the hand brake and half turned to me, moved by inertia. Cué was alive and living in outer space and neither gravity nor friction nor the coriolis force could lessen his momentum de la verdad.
—You’re in a state of herror, he Cuéoted.
I remembered Ingrid Bergamo, poor girl, who thought that Bustrófedon, poor son of a bitch, said good when he said you are miss taking. Ingrid Moe, bald, with Irenita Curly, the one we saw last night permanently waving good-bye and saying which twin has the Toni (not knowing that one was “Tony”) together with Edith Cabell, doubly poor with her starry eyes and her hairdos a la page: they formed a threesome that could easily be taken for Curly, Larry, Moe. The Three Stooges. Poor dolls. Poor guys. All of them. All of oz. We .two, we are poor too. Two hard-boiled eggos. Why wasn’t Bustrófedon with us to make it three? The Three Mocksteers. It’s better that He isn’t. He wouldn’t understand. There are no signs. Only sounds and, perhaps, furies.
—Really! You were talking about Sartre, the Saint Augustine of the Third Millennium, your Third Coming, weren’t you?
—No, no. I’m not even talking about myself. I’m talking about you, chico. Groucho, I mean. Or rather, Harpooned Marx.
—Wordswordsworth.
—You’re about to make the first really irreparable mistake in your life. You’ve had it coming to you. The other mistakes will all come under their own weight.
—Net or gross?
—I’m talking about gravity. With gravity. I’m being serious. Perfectly, terribly serious.
—Deadly serious. With a net, then. But Arsenio, viejo, who’s going to take us seriously when we’re so high-phalluting?
—We’ll take ourselves seriously then. We’re aerialists more than materialists. Can you imagine a trapeze artiste, in midair, doing a double or trouble summersault, asking himself: Am I serious? or Why am I doing these useless acrobathics instead of something serious? It’s not possible. He’d fall. And he’d make the other fellows fall with him.
—Same with errors. Newton’s Fig Law. Apples, like doubting trappists, tend to fall.
—O.K., but don’t say I haven’t tried to warn you. If you get married your life’s as good as over. I mean, the life you lead now, you know. It’s another destiny, a double death.
—I know quite well what you mean.
I can be Silvestre Innuendo when I want to. He looked at me squinting waving his arms making his mouth into an I.
—I’m just advising you. Without interest.
No percentage either: the rest is missionary silence. Lost in the junkie. Send Stanley Laurels. Dr. Dyingstone, I exhume.
—It’s your mistake, not mine, he said. My Miss Take. Missed ache. Mistquote. Mixed Cué. Shall I miss Cué? Miscue. My missed cue. A cue line. Cuénard.
—I could tell you what Clark Gable said at the banquet or symposium on board, where they wouldn’t admit the ghost of Jean Harlow because it’s Plotinum blond, and Gable decided to go off with her and sail out on a low boat to China, saying, to quote the condemned man as they put the rope round his neck, “I’ll never forget this lesson.” I tell you: I’ll take it, I’ll swallow your advice in bed before breakfast and I’ll lie on my right side.
He let go of the brake. I got out.
I’ll bet your wife, or Cuéntame tu Viuda, as we say in Spanish. Spellbound. B,o,u,n,d.
—I thought you were talking seriously.
—I’m jestingly in earnest.
In Ernest. Seriousian. The Doring Jungray in the frying trapiscis. Sometimes called Orsini Cué. Free falling as. He let go of the brake. I got out.
—Abyssinia.
I walked around to the other side of the car, almost sliding against it. As I reached his side he said, John Sebastian Cavotte, que le vent du bonheur te souffle au cul and please end well your trip around the underworld, and sleep well, bitter prince, and marry then, sweet wag, which was a prophetic Queote. For the benefit of my dying tongue he added:
—Muchas gracias por el culo, Sir Caca.
So I shouted back the blessure’s mine, lord Shit-land! E. M. Forster was wrong, he thought that London was the swinging world and the Thames the Seven Seasons and saw his friends as the hole of humanity. Who would betray his fatherland or his motherland (Sumatriarchy is the father cuntry of us humaliars) to keep a friend, when he knows he can betray his friends and still preserve them like candid fruits, in a humanidor? Arsenio DelMonte and also Silvestre Libbys. But why shouldn’t I say it truly amigos Havana is a cigar and not the capital of Cuéba. Call us Ismailiya. Small isle. The Assassinners. Sevener Elevener. Imam/Mami. Like Boustrophedon I decided to join the Silent Majority. Mymajority.
He let go of the brake. I got o
ut.
—When you know who is the veiled contradictory, drop me a tarot card, he shouted over the cuécuécué of the engine revving up. —Write to me poste restante. That’s my last resting place. And the echo of the narrow street split up his Cué-bid: —Marry Charistmas and Harpy New Yeats!
In the silence that the car left behind he climbed the steps with their dated palms in flower on either side and crossed the dark corridor alone and in silence fearing neither werewolf nor panther-woman and he took the elevator in silence and switched on the light in the car and turned it off again so I could go up in the dark and in silence he went into my apartment and in silence I took off my shirt and my shoes in silence and in silence I went to the escusado and pissed and I took out my smile in still more silence and in silence and secrecy he put the bridge in a vessel and in silence I hid this false truth high up behind the medicine cabinet and I went to the kitchen in silence and swallowed water in silence three glasses three in silence and he was still thirsty and I went off in silence with my stomach swollen and I massaged myself gently all over the Hemingsphere of his belly and in silence I goes out to the balcony but all I saw was the bay windows of the funeral parlor lit up in silence and the ad saying Funeraria of silence Caballeros where in silence they also underwake señoritas in silence and in silence I drew the blinds in silence and I went back in silence to my room and stripped myself naked in silence and I opened the window in silence and the silence of the last night came in through it in silence and also what they call dead of night that silent phrase and in silence I heard water dripping silently from the balcony above which was also silent and in silence I smoked my universal peace pipe and like Mortaldi-Bach I saw how silently the dead Havana rose in spiritual silence in something more than nothing in smoke of silence through the silent lighted hole of my port window which I looked at and looked in and looked through till it became round and disappeared, in complete silence, and I looked out there beyond the other side of the heaviside at the great dark prairies of the heavens and farther than that and farther than farther and farther still toward where there becomes here and all directions are the same and there is no place or a place which is no place with no up or down or east or west, ever-ever land, and I could see with these eyes of mine that the worms will eat, wicked wisdom of the West, I saw, the stars again, a few of them: seven grains of sand on a beach: a beach which is itself a grain of sand on another beach: a beach which is a grain of sand on another beach which is a grain of sand on agnother beach, just a tiny beach, the beach of a roadstead or pond or puddle that forms one of the infinite seas that swim in a bubble of a phenomenal ocean where there are no longer any stars because the stars have lost their name: the nulliverse, and wondering if Bustrófedon’s sentity was expanding multiversally, the non-signs of his specter now on the rosy shift, moving like a Doppelgänger in my memory and thinking how a light year also converts space into a limited time while it makes time into infinite space, a velocity, a Pascalian veryour mother should have told you yesterday not to lean over this bottomless well you will ask her again tonight repeatedly why it has no bottom and she’ll repeat again because it comes out on the other side of the world and again you’ll want to know and what is there on the other side of the world your other mother will be telling you always a bottomless welltigo which waswillbe more terrifying even than the idea of the Martians infiltrating my own body, carrying the vampire in my blood vessels or nursing in my body an unknown microbe, which was the fear that in reality there are no Marxians or Martíans or any UFOs, that there is simply nothing or perhaps only nothingness, and in a state of terror in hemisfear afraid of staying awake more than of sleeping and vice universa, I fell asleep and I slept, the whole night and the whole of the next day as well and a good bit of the next night since it was already sunrise, when I woke up in a state of error and everything was silent and I was the creature of the sleeping blackgoon and I took off my glasses and my pipe out of my mouth and brushed the ash off my lipstray and he let go of the brake, I got out and I went once more down the long vertical corridor in a state of coma and I said, then it was then was it, a word, I think, a girl’s name (I didn’t understand it: Clue’s Ravel at Dawn) or perhaps something about women being actually the men of Wo, a queendome by the sea, and I went back to where I was sleeping dreamiendo soñing of the sea lions on page a hundred and a one in the Spannish varsion: Morsas: re-Morsas: Sea morsels. Tradittori.
Eleventh session
I had an awful quarrel with my husband because I woke him up crying. I was crying, he was sleeping. I didn’t want to wake him up, but he woke up. He’d been sleeping for some time but I hadn’t been able to get to sleep, because I was thinking about a little girl from my village who was very poor. You remember the girl who was a cook in Ricardo’s parents’ house, don’t you? I can’t quite remember if it was her or her sister or someone who looked a lot like her. The thing is that this little girl was very poor, but really poor, and she was an orphan too. She’d been adopted by the baker and she used to sleep in his store and worked very hard and she was the same age as me, but she was so skinny and so shy she walked all hunched up and timid to the point she’d speak to nobody except me and another girl who used to play with us too. Well, this girl used to work in the bakery and at night she slept in the store and the baker who’d adopted her slept with his wife in one of the rooms of the house. The baker had just got married and it was his wife who’d adopted the girl before she was married and one night there was a big uproar in the bakery because the wife woke up and heard a noise and went into the store and found that the baker had climbed into the cot where my little friend was sleeping. He was
stark naked and had grabbed hold of her and pulled up the slip she wore in bed and he was trying to rape her or else he had raped her. The thing is he’d threatened to kill her if she said a word but to make sure she didn’t scream he’d stuffed a roll in her mouth and that’s when his wife came in and caught him. The whole village rushed out and they wanted to lynch him and two of the local police took him away and the man went off crying and his wife and daughter went with him (because the other little girl who used to play with us was the baker’s daughter, he was a widower and he had this child ten years ago and she used to sleep in the other room in the house) and they went along shouting things at him and his daughter said, “You ain’t my daddy anymore” and the woman insulted him and yelled at him that he deserved to be hanged. They gave him something like ten years in jail and then the woman and the daughter moved to another village and the little girl, my friend, that is, was taken in by another family and I used to go over there to play with her, it was about ten blocks away from my house, but in the same village. For a long time the kids used to make fun of her and even the grownups would say she’d let the man touch her and fool around with her and rape her (they didn’t say rape but other things that meant the same, you know what I mean) and she used to cry and cry and I would shout insults at these kids and throw stones at them and I told my little friend that they were all liars, that they were just saying it to make a joke and she would cry and cry and say, “It’s not a joke,” and it wasn’t, so every time I saw her she was more and more withdrawn. Finally we left and came to Havana.
I told my husband this story. I told it to him many times, but he always contradicts me, and says that he thinks this all happened to me and not to my friend. All I know, doctor, is that I don’t know anymore if it happened to me or to my friend or whether I made it up all by myself. But I’m sure I didn’t invent it. But there are times when I think that I am really my little friend.
EPILOGUE
fresh air I love fresh air thats why Im here I love perfumes thats what he thinks he makes faces at me faces faces faces Im going crazy with all his facemaking I love sweet perfumes thats what he thinks that Im going to kiss his putrid ass theres nothing better than fresh air the fresh air of nature I love the sun and sweet perfumes he makes faces faces faces and then he shove the seat of his dirty pants up
my nose with so much water around us they have to shove their stinking ass-prints in your nose yessir people are like that filth and immoral Im with the Germans the ape punishes you the ape human flesh whats he grabbing my hand for Im sure hes gonna eat it hes gonna cook it and then hell eat it this ape he follows me around just follows me and follows tell me your moral principles Im protestant I protest against you all youre just savages powder of snakes of crocodiles of toads and you go crazycrazycrazy tell me your morals your moral principles your religion why dont you tell me Im not a witch or a sorceress or a santera all my family are protestants and they protest youre getting me mixedup now why are you trying to stick your law on me your dirty law you get race mixedup religion mixedup you mixup everything moral principles of catholics not tiatiigos or spiritualist the air dont belong to you this aint your house you shove your nose in everything this stink is rotting my eardrums and the bells and the sane cells of my brain I cant go on like this anymore you push and push and push here comes the ape now with his knife hes shoving it in hes rummaging in my belly and pulling my guts out he wants to see what color they are for sure cant go no further
Notes
* * *
[1] “Requiem Rumba”—Music & lyrics by Ignacio Piñeiro, copyright 1929 (reproduced by kind permission of Musica Ficta, Inc.).
[2] Spanish. The bay.
[3] Spanish. Street. Road in a city.
[4] An instance of hyperbole, presumably. White hot, originally.
[5] French. In the context the word means background or context.
[6] Italian. All the fruits.
[7] French. Memories.
Three Trapped Tigers Page 48