The House of Rumour

by Jake Arnott

  I like to think that my voice will float up through space into the heavens. That one day, a million years from now, somebody might hear this story and remember me.

  But that is for the future. Right now we have great plans. A new community has been set up in Guyana, the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project. We’re calling it Jonestown and it will be a chance to make a utopia, to go back to Eden. Me and Martin are going to live there real soon.

  Jim Jones is already there. I remember the last time I saw him preach, talking about the Cause and how we have to free ourselves from bondage. The choir was singing: Soon, yes, very soon, we are going to the Promised Land. Jim Jones was burning with a fierce light and calling out: ‘We can’t wait for it to come out of the sky! We’ve got to make heaven down here!’ He has this maniacal charisma. And I had a strange vision of his impish face transformed. The dark lenses of his shades like empty eye sockets, rounded by high Cherokee cheekbones and the bright white teeth in his wide mouth smiling like the skull. I saw the death’s head grinning at me, at the whole congregation. It should have been frightening but it wasn’t. I know now. And I fear no evil. Even if I cannot escape the devil, he cannot escape either. Angels bright or angels dark, all are messengers of God and the great astral purpose. Though the devil may will forever evil, he does forever good. I don’t have to fear him any more.

  14

  art

  Although I should feel honoured to find myself described in a recent essay as the first and foremost of the post-utopian Cuban artists, I am duty bound to defer to the greater accomplishments of my contemporaries. Of the many exponents of this beleagued aesthetic that emerged from the Special Period, I could point to the work of Carlos Garaicoa, particularly in his use of architectural models; Kcho’s installation Regatta that caused so much controversy at the Fifth Havana Biennial; and the video performances of Alejandro López. All these artists (and many more) have engaged with themes and forms attributed to me with more intelligence and wit than I could ever muster.

  It is not false modesty that seeks to assert a diminution of my talents or reputation but a desire for clarity. My ambitions have always been, quite deliberately, on a smaller scale. My only real desire in artifice was to make models of things. And though critics have insisted that my sculptures reflect a millennial anxiety, the impulse behind them was a futile attempt to achieve a sense of calm. As a child with his toys, I wished to impose an infantile theology on my surroundings and, in imagining absolute control over a miniature world, avoid engagement in the real one. What has been called art was merely my wish to exert this sense of moderation on my surroundings.

  But even before my work gained recognition, my friend Nemo Carvajal insisted that I was part of a tradition; that Havana has always nurtured elements of a temperate culture amid its tropical climate. He also suggested that my calling as a miniaturist had a political context. That our little island was like one of the dots in the yin-yang sign surrounded by the capitalist empire, just as the other dot, West Berlin, was engulfed by the communist bloc. This was one of his favourite analogies back when the Cold War was still coldly raging: of a Taoism that determined that neither system was entirely separate from the other, each containing its opposite in diminished form. These dots are jonbar points, he explained to me. When I asked him what he meant, he told me this was a science-fiction term, that a jonbar point is where history is finely balanced and can go in many directions. Apocalyptic, he said with a wistful smile, remembering the Missile Crisis he had lived through in the early 1960s. I remember nodding with anxiety at this, hoping then and always for a focal point that would reduce rather than escalate.

  As a child I had been making models out of wood and Styrofoam for as long as I could remember, my most treasured possession being a Chinese plastic kit of a MiG 19 fighter plane (a present for my ninth birthday), but my epiphany came on a school trip to the Havana Marqueta in Miramar. I remember gazing in calm awe at the 1:1,000 scale replica of our native city spread out over 144 square metres, my known universe reduced to dimensions that allowed me a childish omniscience. I mistook a gasp of delight for my own, and turned only when I heard the word that followed. Incredible. It was softly muttered on the lips of Lydia Flores, a tall and intimidating girl with cropped hair and thick eyebrows, standing transfixed beside me. Had I not been in a partial trance myself, I probably would have kept quiet. Lydia scared me (and most of our class for that matter). But her wide-eyed stare seemed benign and beatific. I imagined, quite wrongly, that we were sharing a moment and I whispered some inane praise of the diorama before us.

  No, no, she murmured absently. Not down there. Up here. It was then I realised that she was far above it all. Some of our party marvelled at the baroque wedding cake that was the old city; some followed the broad swoop of the Malecón or picked out the prosaic honeycomb of blocks that marked out our own neighbourhood of Playa. Meanwhile, I tracked down a network of streets to find the effigy of the very building we were in, a tiny box in which, I mused, another even more microscopic simulacrum of the city might reside. But, with outstretched arms, Lydia looked beyond, to the painted horizon behind the panorama.

  You’re flying? I asked her and her absent smile gave me the courage to carry on asking stupid questions. You want to fly? To be a pilot?

  Well, she replied nonchalantly, I’ll have to do that first.

  First? I retorted.

  If I want to become a cosmonaut of course, she declared, turning to me with those magnificently frightening eyebrows. I’m going to be the first Latin-American woman in space.

  It had been the year before, in 1980, that Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, our first cosmonaut, had blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome and spent eight days orbiting the earth. Not only the first Cuban in space but the first from any country in the Western Hemisphere other than the United States, and the first cosmonaut of African descent. A street kid orphaned at thirteen, who had worked as a shoeshine before the Triumph of the Revolution had given him an education and trained him as a pilot, Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez was living proof that almost anything was possible under socialism. We have gone from fiction, announced Fidel Castro, our Maximum Leader, in his celebratory address, because space flights were fiction when many of us who are not so old now were still children.

  It was a brave kid who openly challenged Lydia’s ambition, but, even so, she had learnt to detect doubt on the faces in the schoolyard. I decided that it was my mission to have absolute belief in her aspirations, to be ground control to her soaring dreams. And with my encouragement she confided in me. Her plan was to be a straight-A student in science and sport. She would take a degree in physics at the University of Havana, train as a pilot with the Cuban Air Force Academy, then apply to join the Intercosmos Programme at Star City in the Soviet Union. She would have to be a good communist too, of course. My first gesture was to make her a model of the Soyuz 38 that had taken Méndez up beyond the stratosphere. It looked like a huge insect: a spheroid module head with a docking proboscis, cylindrical body and filmy solar panel wings. She took me under her wing, me, the geekiest kid in the class. We constructed balsa-wood gliders and launched home-made rockets. I was entranced by her adventurous obsession with flight and followed doggedly when she suggested that we go investigate the Space-Man.

  The Space-Man was one of those legends that gets passed around by kids in any neighbourhood. There were many stories about the eccentric Nemo Carvajal who lived in a run-down Art-Deco house on the corner of Ninth Avenue and Calle 19, the most absurd and intriguing being that he had come from another planet. Lydia and I dared each other to take a closer look at this alien’s habitat, a decrepit shell with its strange curves and ziggurats styled in the 1920s version of the future, a relic of ancient modernism that indeed had the air of a fossilised spacecraft. Through a partly taped-up window we spied his study by the dim glow of bare neon strip lights. Posters of American science-fiction films and lithographs of mystical symbols lined the walls. There was a desk clutte
red with papers and arcane electrical equipment, a bookshelf crammed with gaudy paperbacks and, hanging from the ceiling, a silver model of a flying saucer.

  Where’s the Space-Man? whispered Lydia.

  Here’s the Space-Man, came a soft voice behind us.

  We turned and there he was. Tall and thin in a Hawaiian shirt, long grey hair swept back in a ponytail, a gaunt face framed by a goatee beard and green bug-eyed sunglasses. I shrieked the loudest and moved the slowest, and the Space-Man grabbed me by the arm.

  What do you want? he demanded, his voice still soft, calm.

  With my free arm I pointed at Lydia. She, I began, implicating my companion with a combination of cowardice and ingenuity, she wants to be a cosmonaut.

  The Space-Man’s laugh was a deep rumble. So, he went on, so you want to find out how it’s done? He let go of me and started up the front steps. He turned and gave us a casual cock of the head. Come on then.

  Nemo Carvajal was a writer of speculative fiction whose work had mostly been banned since the mid-sixties. He had finally been expelled from the Cuban Fantasy and Science-Fiction Union after he distributed a story titled ‘The Hive’ in 1971. Featuring ant-like visitors from another planet addicted to sugar for which they trade for an energy source, it was seen as a vulgar satire both on our Soviet allies and on our economic dependence on them. In his defence Nemo Cavajal insisted that earth had been visited by aliens and claimed to have seen evidence of it himself. He told us that he had often spotted UFOs hovering over the Florida Straits.

  It could be the launches from Cape Canaveral, Lydia suggested, re-entry flare from discarded rocket stages. Nemo Carvajal smiled and nodded, obviously happy to have a guest so knowledgeable on space exploration. But he urged us to consider the importance of finding out about extraterrestrial activity, and would do so again during the further visits we made to his house. We soon learnt that he had once been a member of the Revolutionary Workers Party, a Trotskyist group that followed the teachings of the charismatic Argentinean, Juan Posadas. Central to the doctrine of Posadas was the necessity of making contact with UFOs. If such things exist, it was argued, they must be piloted by socialists since only the most advanced form of society would be capable of interstellar flight. These beings should be called upon to intervene and assist in building a world revolution, Nemo Carvajal declared. I was captivated by such cosmic imaginings but Lydia grew cautious. The Posadists were a prohibited organisation, denounced by the Maximum Leader at the Tricontinental Congress of 1966 as a pestilential influence. Lydia had joined the Union of Communist Youth and hoped to be accepted by the Young Pioneers Air Cadet Force. She didn’t want any association with subversive elements to get in the way of her application. Eventually I went to see Nemo Carvajal on my own.

  Counter-revolutionary? he retorted indignantly when I explained the reason for my solitary presence. They tell her that I’m a counter-revolutionary? The Revolutionary Workers Party called for an attack on Guantánamo, to get rid of the Yankees for good! He shrugged and bemoaned how the Stalinists had betrayed the Revolution. I don’t think he ever felt betrayed by Lydia, though. He continued to enquire after her, curious about her ambitions for space travel. And she would ask after the Space-Man too, on the now much less regular occasions that I would see her.

  So it was Nemo Carvajal who inspired in me the determination to become an artist. Without him I might still have come across this perfect alibi for my unsociable obsession, but he certainly gave it form. Artists and cosmonauts, he insisted, both seek to conquer deep space. He sought to tutor me, finding Spanish translations of the classic science fiction of H.G. Wells and Arthur C. Clarke, and citing the work of Alejo Carpentier and Jorge Luis Borges as proof that fantasy was at the heart of the Latin-American literary tradition. But the imagination is the biggest threat to the state, he told me. The state wants a monopoly on utopia; it cannot accept any competition in creating new worlds. And it demands an earthbound idealism. He quoted Carpentier at me: by creating the marvellous at all costs, the thaumaturgists become bureaucrats.

  Thaumaturgists? I asked, not knowing the word.

  Magicians, he replied.

  You believe in magic? I demanded incredulously.

  No more than I believe in realism, he declared with a sigh.

  But it was clear that it would be the plastic arts, not literature, that would be the discipline I would follow. I had already shown great interest in the silver model that hung from his ceiling, a trophy of a flying saucer film he had worked on when he had lived in California in the forties and fifties. And when I told him about the moment I had looked at the Havana Marqueta and imagined a model within the model, he nodded sagely and went to his bookshelf. The abyss, he muttered, yes, yes, the abyss. He found a passage in an essay by Borges titled Partial Magic in the Quixote that made reference to the mapmaker Josiah Royce, and he read it out to me. I remember the vertiginous sense of recursion, of continuous regression, of echoes as he spoke, quoting a writer quoting another writer, and so on. Let us imagine that a portion of England has been levelled off perfectly, he droned. And on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect: there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain the map of the map, and so on to infinity.

  By the late 1980s there seemed a world of possibilities for Lydia and me. I had started studying sculpture at the Juan Pablo Duarte Elementary College of Art. Lydia was taking her degree in physics at Havana University and had been accepted by the School of Military Aviation at San Julián. The Mir space station became operational, the first consistently inhabited, long-term research base in orbit, offering even wider opportunities for the participation of guest cosmonauts from countries friendly to the Soviet Union. But everything was about to change.

  The crisis in Russia and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc at the end of the decade was greeted first with indignation, then with bafflement by most of us in Cuba. Nemo Carvajal was at first enthusiastic, declaring that Stalinism was being overturned and a true revolution was taking place. He got particularly excited when, in an apparently overzealous moment of glasnost, the Soviet news agency TASS authorised a report of an alien spacecraft landing in the town of Voronezh in October 1989. However, his great Posadist expectations were never substantiated. Then the Soviet Union cancelled its economic obligations to Cuba, the Maximum Leader announced the Special Period in a Time of Peace, the shortages and power cuts began, and before long Nemo Carvajal became as gloomy as the rest of us.

  It was hardest for Lydia; just at the moment that she was due to take her first pilot exams, all flight training was suspended owing to fuel scarcity. But my world of symbols, of shadows and representation, was strangely enriched by our new circumstances. Perhaps there was a desire to find hidden meanings in an age of uncertainty, a desire for some kind of divination. Maybe the sense of artistic freedom was merely a mirage allowed by the authorities in a time of drought. There was certainly a surge of interest in Cuban art from the outside world during this period but we did not know the reason for this curiosity. More than anyone, I was utterly unconscious of what can now be seen as trends or greater influences, but that is what made my work possible.

  I had my first major show in the winter of 1991, as part of the Fourth Havana Biennial: a series of sculptures, assemblages made from found objects glued or welded together to form model spacecraft, prototypes of a deranged imagination, effigies of a lost futurism. They were constructed in a bricolage of Soviet memorabilia, revolutionary propaganda, Catholic iconography and Santería fetishes. A tail fin of a 1950s Chevrolet jutted out from one like the sleek wing of a jet fighter. It is entirely possible that the phrase ‘post-utopian’ was first used to describe this exhibition, a term that later came to describe a whole movement of Cuban art, but I had then no awareness of such a concept. I merely carved out these clumsily gr
aven images from the transcendent hope of Lydia Flores and the mad dreams of Nemo Carvajal.

  The exhibitions of the Biennial were taken down just as the great edifice of the USSR was finally being dismantled. For Lydia, bemused by the meagre scale of my vision, a more pertinent symbol was the fate of Sergei Krikalev, the remaining member of the last Soviet mission to Mir, marooned in orbit as the last citizen of the communist motherland. He would re-enter the atmosphere to a newly fractured earth, to a federation of independent states. He was the first interplanetary traveller, insisted Nemo Carvajal; he has voyaged through space from one absurd world to another.

  Yet as so many fortunes seemed in decline, mine was in the ascendant. I had my first success. The renowned Catalan art dealer Gonçal Figueras bought my entire show and invited me to exhibit it in Barcelona the following spring. And so it was I, not Lydia, who ended up taking their first flight. I arrived in Barcelona to find the city in a great burst of renewal; so much was being built and renovated for the Olympics they were hosting that summer. Perhaps it is a city under constant construction, the great unfinished Cathedral of the Sacred Family its symbol, with ballistic spires poking up through scaffolding like stone rockets pointing at heaven.

  On Nemo Carvajal’s instructions I visited the replica of Narcís Monturiol’s nineteenth-century submarine on display in Barcelona harbour. He was the first post-utopian, Nemo assured me. Having given up on experiments in communal living, Monturiol had turned to technological dreams and built strange prototypes for underwater travel. The model looked like some artefact of early science fiction. Nemo Carvajal said that Monturiol had inspired a motto that he and an American writer had once used: ‘If you can’t change the world, build a spaceship.’

  I loved walking around the city. I felt sophisticated, cosmopolitan. But for all its triumphs of architecture, nothing in Barcelona inspired me as much as what I found in the concourse of the Estació de França.