Tomb Song

by Julián Herbert

  We were being put up not too far from the airport, at the Hotel Comodoro in Miramar. As soon as I’d gotten out of the minibus, Bobo said, by way of greeting:

  “We’ve had it up to the fucking back teeth with Habana Vieja. But don’t worry, dude, it’s real easy to get there. And I’ve worked out what to do if you haven’t the time to go that far: the Russian Embassy is just a stone’s throw away. No kidding, go see it, you’re such a leftist dude you can record just how pharaonic those frigging idiots were. But if you go, make it during the day: at night, no way. After dark, the whole of Quinta’s taken over by the most ass-hugging dresses in the Caribbean: sex on legs.”

  You could tell he’d already gotten through half a bottle of Stoli and—who knows—maybe as many as three or four lines. Putting an arm around my shoulder and pushing me gently toward the reception desk, he added:

  “Tomorrow we’re having dinner in the Barrio Chino, dude. And Thursday, we’re going to the Casa de la Música in downtown La Habana to meet NG La Banda themselves. Then I’m gonna take you to a family-run restaurant hidden away in Almendares. I’ve heard they do wonderful lobster. But don’t be downhearted, I’ve got plans for today too: go to your room and get dressed, I’m gonna show you something special.”

  Turning on his heels and addressing the tiny claque he’d already set up in the hotel (three little Mexican painters with contrite adolescent faces, who were looking at us warily from a comfortable leather sofa by the telephones in the lobby), one fist raised, he said:

  “To the Diablito Tuntún, dudes.”

  The kids nodded, smiling in what looked like terror.

  I’ve always been a fairly laid-back guy. With a generous dose of opium inside me, I’m a zombie.

  I checked in, went up to my room, unpacked, and took a shower. Given the climate and my surroundings (the Comodoro is a hotel dating from the forties, low-rise and sprawling, three bluer-than-blue pools and four restaurants, a ballroom with an orchestra, and, facing the sea, two hundred rooms with wide terraced balconies furnished with tables and chairs that remind you of Hyman Roth’s birthday party in The Godfather II), I chose a quasi-Yucatán outfit: linen pants, guayabera, and Reebok sneakers.

  A short while later, I went back down to the lobby and waited with the three little painters for almost an hour. Then I phoned Bobo’s room. Zilch. He must have fallen asleep.

  (That’s the only problem with my friend. He gets up at six in the morning, and by nine is ready for his first screwdriver. At noon, he insists, “Let’s go to a strip club!” But as soon as the sun sets, he’s down for the count. A couple of years back, he had his gallbladder removed, which severely diminished his tolerance for artificial paradises. Sometimes I think he’s the antithesis of a vampire.)

  As we were already excited, and dressed for the street, the three little painters and I decided to continue with Bobo Lafragua’s plans.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the Diablito Tuntún.”

  “What’s that?”

  None of the kids knew: they’d arrived in La Habana just a few hours before me. So we asked a cab driver, who took us to the Casa de la Música in Miramar and pointed to an external stairway.

  “Up there.”

  Before getting out of the cab, I administered a generous dose of opium from the Afrin Lub bottle. I realized I had only enough left for that night, and maybe the next.

  I don’t know about the others: I ascended the long staircase with the solemn sensation of walking in the alpargata-shod footsteps of Estrellita Rodríguez.

  The moment we entered the room, the spell was broken. It was a discolored gallery, with a high, beamed ceiling and elegant but decrepit furnishings, like something from a run-down bordello: Turkish armchairs with the foam hanging out, tiny stools made of poor-quality pine and decorated with rusty gold gargoyles, artificial plants, and clapped-out—but Polar-beer-filled—iceboxes, groaning like gorillas … The music was playing softly, and some chairs were still up on the tiny circular tables. I checked my watch: it was just before eleven.

  “No, compadre,” said the guy at the entrance, reading my thoughts. “The party doesn’t get going here until ’round three, or four. If you want something before that, make your way downstairs. Sur Caribe are starting their set.”

  So we had to pay twice. I calculated that in just six or seven hours I’d already forked out all the CUCs I’d thought would last a weekend.

  Ricardo Leyva was gently pounding the floorboards with “El Patatum” (if she’s going to have it, let her have it, let her have it, look at the chorus I brought you), the three painters—indistinguishable in the bruised light of the Habana night, some kind of young masculine Graeae the object of whose single eye and only tooth was to see the rum disappear—ordered a bottle we finished off in a flash—the heat!—and it was easy to see, by the general lack of dancing skills, that nearly all the men there were foreigners, lots of Venezuelans playing at being communists with no sense of rhythm—forget it—and as for the Mexicans, better not say another word, we have a fascophile president and exceptionally timid syntax (except those who don’t miss, at this point of the discourse, a period or semicolon) and we dance salsa with two left feet and our legs so wide apart we have all the appearance of Manuel Capetillo fighting bulls in black and white. The women, by contrast, were mostly natives of the island; they were as likely to quote Lenin to you in Russian as to put the maquinita into action without the pistons giving a groan, blam blam they had their souls in the feet softly brushing boards (give me more give me lots so my cylinder bursts), and it was difficult for a pair of greenhorns like me and the three Graeae of young Mexican painting to distinguish—given the good dancing and good posture—morals from politeness: between the loyal defenders of the party come to celebrate with the comrades visiting from the sister republic of Venezuela, and the easy girls whose thinking had been distorted by watching imperialist television (I don’t care if you’re collectivist and friendly: I’m Cuban, I’m of the People), and which, finally, were the licentious and openly negotiable hookers—or as Gente de Zona say: she-don’t-give-her-salsa-to-me-she-gives-it-to-the-to-totality.

  (May the Decent Comrades Committed to the Struggle forgive me, but when we’re playing a beat we’re all the same: up yours, Communist Party.)

  Around three in the morning Ricardo Leyva and Sur Caribe finished off the show with a number many there were waiting for (I know because, when the brass section began the opening bars, the waiters passing around me smiled and gave me hearty slaps on the shoulder). “Longing for the Conga”: Micaela went away and now there’s nothing but tears, they say it’s the conga that’s tugging at her heartstrings, they say she’s wanting what she don’t have no more, and that’s rolling out Chagó; a danceable blues to cast aspersions on the boat people. Criminal. As if the heroes of the nation had the right to brag about having expropriated our music, the dumbasses. But oh, oh, OOOH, that Shakespearean conga: suddenly we were all jumping. An incendiary percussion section, tamed from the street, wild beasts on the bonfire: some phony told me I was a rocker. We were the Walt Disney version of the May Day line dance in Revolution Square, the keep rolling on and stop at the corner, purely frivolous, whoring tourist trying to bargain for a piece of proletarian ass that will help him to experience, just for once, the erotic elevation—historical, Marxistleninist, and dialectical—of the masses. If you can’t join the heroism, fuck it.

  The music came to a halt.

  We stayed on at the bar awhile longer, finishing off in two rounds a second bottle of Havana Club. Sometime after four, we went back up to the Diablito Tuntún. It was packed and sounded amazing, at full volume. Among the crowd we found a revived Bobo Lafragua.

  “Why did you go out so early, you dumb dudes?” he asked, giving us his best smile.

  Comrade Lafragua is notable for, among other things, his impeccable taste in clothes. He was wearing a white raw-silk shirt, comfortable Berrendo shoes, Montblanc shades, and a pair of
cream-colored Dockers with a Ferriono belt. He’d tied back his shoulder-length, straggling, wavy hair with a silver clasp. He had a bottle of Stolichnaya in front of him, another of Famous Grouse, and several cans of Red Bull.

  “You’re just in time: I’m making kamikazes for our lady friends here,” referring to the three hookers accompanying him.

  We sat at his table. Without giving it a second thought, the three painters started downing the poisonous mixture Bobo was preparing: one part vodka, another of scotch, and two of Red Bull. I’d decided to stop: the alcohol was blocking the effects of the opium. Better to go on administering generous nasal streams of the drug.

  El Diablito Tuntún must be the best “after” in La Habana.

  I exaggerate: there are very many more. But they all come down to pretty much the same thing, sexual preference. The majority are underground dives, and what a pain to have to find a cab to go to Parque Lenin just before dawn to attend a gay rave, or how sordid to have to swig aguardiente from a bottle on the Malecón with twelve-year-old girls, or how expensive shelling out what they charge for a room in the Vedado to rub shoulders with ultrafamous reggaetoneros who seem to you to be yet more anonymous pretentious Cubans with gringo T-shirts and crazy Mexican-union-boss ideas, and how great it would be to move on to Marianao just to meet up again with the same mythical and common-or-garden scrubbers of the tropical dawn, with their scents, cloyingly identical to those of a strip joint in Paris or Reynosa, and after all that to end up fucking, drunker than a bartender’s rag, fast and bad, in the same poky rooms with peeling walls in Centro Habana all the other tourists use, coming to the rhythm of the voice of the bad-tempered old woman in the room next door, slagging off you and the regime while secretly watching Telemundo.

  El Diablito Tuntún is a duty-free whorestore where musicians hang out after the shows. Although prostitution is still illegal (which is why there are so many and such varied ways of practicing the trade in Cuba), in the Diablito the standards for judging legality are even more relaxed than in “legitimate” Habana clubs. The girls arrive in droves, wrecked from hours doing the rounds, but tougher than ever: greedy, fucked up, on the point of gagging from having sucked so many tiny, soft dicks. Sleepy, arrogant, grouchy (depending on how many CUCs they’ve made that night), raunchy. And though they would never confess it, with a desire to come, just once; horny as hell, a Santero of the Order would say. El Diablito Tuntún is a nightmare paradise where the music becomes unbearable and five or six girls dance around you, trying to get you into bed. You can’t look a pretty woman in the eye here: they’re more dangerous than jailbirds. If you look them in the eye, they undo your fly. It’s the perfect place for a night on the town when you’re a monogamous man, anaesthetized by opium and tortured by the fact that you’re the son of a prostitute.

  Before leaving Mexico, I spoke with Mónica: out of the blue, during a monster binge, I promised such solemn levels of fidelity that her hair must have stood on end. I confessed that my mother had worked as a prostitute for many years, and then informed her I was, for that reason, completely incapable of exchanging money for sex.

  “So, no worries there,” I concluded, without taking too much notice of the mixture of tenderness and horror in her eyes.

  It occurred to me to tell Bobo Lafragua about this. Paraphrasing Silvio, I said:

  “I’m happy, I’m a happy man, and I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t go whoring with you.”

  Analytically, Bobo replied:

  “Don’t beat yourself up. The paradise of the Special Period is a thing of the past. Nowadays they’re more expensive than a Vegas showgirl. Those European assholes—always ruining everything they touch—made them fashionable.”

  The conversation left me disconcerted: for the first time I was conscious of how menacing and oppressive the sexuality of a nation you admire and know nothing about can be.

  That night, in El Diablito Tuntún, Lafragua, in his clumsy way, admitted I was right. Edging away from the girls he was supposedly getting drunk (in fact, they were more interested in closing a deal with the little Graeae painters), he whispered:

  “Just when do you think these people fuck? They spend the whole day talking about sex in the streets, and at night they’re drinking and negotiating sex in bars … Seems to me they never have time to fuck.”

  I wanted to respond with some platitude: all this is a ghost, a duty-free store; this isn’t Cuba, we’ve never been to Cuba, I’ve never seen Cuba, it’s a lie. I couldn’t. The opium had elevated me to vaguely autistic beatitude. I thought: What are we doing here …? I made an effort, and asked my friend that question.

  “You,” he replied, “almost nothing. You’re already pumped up to your fucking eyeballs. Me, I’m waiting for a lady.”

  I must have been looking at him strangely, because he added:

  “Not just any lady: I’ve got a special selection system going tonight.”

  The Graeae kids and the kamikaze girls stood up simultaneously from their third-rate pine chairs with rusty gold gargoyles. The kids felt for their wallets to leave a few CUCs on the table while the girls hung around their necks, touching their crotches, murmuring almost in unison:

  “Well, if you’re ready …”

  It was a scene worthy of a sex factory, trading under the name of Plato’s Symposium.

  The three couples left. As different transactions were closed in various corners of the establishment, the crowd thinned. El Diablito Tuntún is a one-two-three-for-me-and-for-all-my-friends kind of place: it’s full for no more than a couple of hours, and then everyone runs off like crazy to screw. For a few moments, Bobo Lafragua and I looked into each other’s eyes so intently that two handsome mulatto guys came up to offer us their company. Bobo went on drinking his kamikazes. I snorted the last drops of my opium soup.

  Out of sheer perversity, out of sheer self-loathing, out of pure idleness, I scanned the leftover girls of the night, trying to decide which one reminded me most of my mother. They all, of course, had something in common: they were slightly older than the average Habanero, and that was why they hadn’t yet paired off. First, I discounted the blonds. Then a couple of dark-haired girls with big boobs. I also put to one side a black girl with an ugly cackle: Mamá always described herself as a very cool female during working hours. In the end, there wasn’t much left: a girl with a shaved head, very fine features, and a slightly chubby face, sitting alone at the bar; a tall woman with long black hair whom I’d seen leaving with a client an hour earlier, and who had just that minute returned to the bar (very fresh); two gym types who must have been sisters, and who were whispering to each other two tables from ours …

  “That one,” said Bobo Lafragua, pointing to the tall woman with long black hair I’d looked at for the third time.

  “Yes,” I replied distractedly.

  “Right: if you like her, I’ll take her.”

  He stood and approached the woman.

  That was when I understood his method of selection.

  I didn’t even manage to feel shocked: I was so drugged up, all I wanted was to muster enough energy to get up from my seat, go back down the stairs, and take a cab to the hotel and the rest of my opium. For a moment, I thought it would be polite to explain to Bobo that he’d gotten it wrong, tell him the woman didn’t excite me in the least, it was just that her worn face had vaguely reminded me of my mother’s old age. Explain that the harm he was intending to cause me wasn’t kinky, but simply bitter, and I wasn’t going to run to the hotel bathroom to masturbate, imagining how he was screwing the girl, but I was, the following afternoon, going to get up without a trace of jealousy or curiosity, without salacious questions or the desire to hear the details, feeling myself simply a conned whore: a sense of shame and desperation from which, in any case, I rarely manage to escape when I awake each day …

  I didn’t get that far.

  I didn’t say anything.

  9

  Ten years ago, I met a really beautiful
girl. I’ll call her Renata. She was (and I say this without boasting or with any desire to offend the feminist academics who scorn male Mexican writers, considering us incapable of including plain women in our erotic tales) the living image of Botticelli’s Venus coming out from the water. Renata accepted me sexually on one condition: I could only fuck her anally. She said it was out of respect for her partner. I believe she enjoyed being penetrated that way but was embarrassed to request such a service from her lover. I, in contrast, was crazy about her and went along with her proposal. In the beginning, I suffered. She was small and narrow, my prick is thick and I’m uncircumcised; on a couple of occasions, there was blood. I was more inhibited then than I am now: due to the mockery and innuendos of the workingmen I grew up with, I was convinced the only people who did it from behind were soldiers, capitalist oppressors of the people, and whores.

  Renata’s rectum cured me, at least partially, of that atavism. Embedded in her buttocks, so desired by hundreds of television viewers (Renata did the weather forecast on a Monterrey channel), I’d say, “I love it.” She was excited about the possibility of changing roles. She’d twist herself around and try to get her index finger between my buttocks. While I’d have liked that, I was never able to let her do it.

  “Forget it, you fag,” she’d say a while later, calmly staring at the ceiling.

  I didn’t respond.

  For over two years we met fairly regularly in hotels, never going out together, and only rarely talking. Our friendship was purely tactile. I enjoyed those encounters in a perversely platonic way: rather than the orgasm, what seduced me was the secret pride of soiling my crotch with excretions of the ghost of Botticelli’s retina. I’m not saying the sex wasn’t fun. It was remote. A fiction.

  The anus is a sign I haven’t so far managed to decipher. In the abstract (as I learned much later in the poems of Luis Felipe Fabre, what makes this black flower so subversive is the status of the abominable imposed on it by the Eurocentric tradition: something unspeakable: a non-place) I’ve managed to idealize it. But, unlike any other zone of the body, I’m unable to address it directly: I can talk of it only in the third person. I don’t sense it as a living beast, but as an animal I killed. I know this hunter-like perception should produce meaning in itself. Pleasure and possession need no outer splendor to be transcendent. I can verbalize it, but not feel it. And for that reason I admire in bisexuality a lost purity, a Neolithic spirit I lack. Judeo-Christianly speaking, I condemn the fact that the tastes and tremblings of eroticism don’t culminate in a stubborn, irrational fantasy of reproduction. I’m a wannabe patriarch and a closet Opus Dei.