Also by Abilio Estévez
Thine Is the Kingdom
Copyright © 2002, 2011 by Abilio Estevez
English-language translation copyright © 2004, 2011 by Arcade Publishing, Inc.
“The Stage That Was Havana” copyright © by David Frye
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First published in Spain by Tusquets Editores under the title Los Paiacios Distantes
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-531-1
To the memory of my grandfather Ramon
and of my cousin Carlos
Contents
Note on the Translation
Distant Palaces
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Epilogue
“The Stage That Was Havana” by David Frye
Note on the Translation
In the Spanish, Distant Palaces is built from long, undivided sections with minimal punctuation. Dialogue is indicated only by the tone of voice and the lack of any punctuation other than the comma, even when a character speaks for pages at a time. In the end I decided that the differences between English and Spanish, especially regarding punctuation conventions, are such that it would be pointless or worse to imitate the original in this regard. Instead, I have translated Estévez’s very clear linguistic cues into English punctuation, adding quotation marks, dividing the paragraphs that are implicit in Estévez’s sections, and breaking apart run-on sentences wherever I have felt the need. I have kept the original sections, indicating them with a space between the paragraphs: to imagine how the Spanish looks, try to pretend that the other paragraph divisions and quotation marks do not exist. My guiding principle has always been to communicate the sense and feeling of the original, without binding myself unthinkingly to its outward form.
I have generally kept the names of people and places in the original Spanish, except of course for Havana itself, which is La Habana in Spanish. Calle means street; avenida is avenue;parque is park. Most of the neighborhoods mentioned are in “marginal” (that is, poor and working-class) areas far from the touristic center of the city, and most can be located on a good map of Havana, with the notable exception of Victorios fictional home neighborhood of Santa Felisa. Apart from Don Fuco’s mythic Pequeño Liceo (“Small Theater”) of Havana, the buildings, houses, department stores, museums, and so forth are also real places that can be viewed today (if they have not collapsed in the meantime) by anyone who has the fortune to visit that beautiful, haunting, and haunted city.
David Frye
The old Royal Palm Hotel on Calle Galiano and the aged palace of a noble family whose name no one now remembers are buildings united by the mutual fate of their support beams. A tangled web of struts and braces is strung between one structure and the other, appearing to offer some prospect of solidity. Blackened by the passage of so many days and nights, by the harshness of the sun and the squalls, by the ubiquity of salt sea spray, these boards aim to prevent a collapse that in any case seems imminent. The walls display the same earthy gray and black hues as any ancient wall in any devastated city, in a world that abounds in wars, earthquakes, and other less obvious catastrophes. At many points the stones are on naked display with their surprisingly ruddy tones. Gaping rifts in the walls nevertheless allow opulent green ferns to grow unexpectedly amid the ruins; blooming paradise shrubs, too, and zucchini vines heavy with large, bell-shaped yellow flowers.
The Royal Palm Hotel has lost its roof and many of its walls, so it is uninhabited, or at least that is the impression it gives: there are occasions, on dark and endless nights — too dark and too stifling — when you could swear that bright lights rise up inside as if bonfires were being lit, and you could declare, too, that you heard voices and even praise-songs, singing in tongues, even though you could never tell for sure whether the songs were what they call really-real, much less what they were trying to praise, or in what tongue they were singing.
The other building, the palace of an ancient lineage that no one remembers any longer, is still occupied. Two centuries ago, a single well-to-do family lived here: a married couple, two or three children, or perhaps four — boys in college, girls learning to embroider, to knit, to play piano, to get married; and also slaves, no doubt many more slaves than family members, twenty enslaved Mandingas, Yorubas, Lucumís. Today, of course, there are neither masters nor slaves, nor is the palace inhabited by a single peaceful and spacious clan, but by twenty, thirty, forty crowded families: the results of the lusts of masters and slaves in a land given to mixing, to letting off steam, and to lechery The mansion has been divided into meager rooms, and therefore should no longer be called a palace, but rather an apartment building, a tenement, a row house, a warren, a slum.
To stand before this pair of buildings united by a scaffold of blackened planks and to call them “the palace” and “the hotel” would be cynical, even perverse.
For some time Victorio has lived in one of the countless rooms in the once magnificent mansion. He himself could not corroborate how long. You couldn’t call him happy — or you could call him that, since happiness is apparently blurred and subjective, just like unhap-piness, and sometimes it rests upon just a few things, or upon nothing.
“After all, a roof is a roof,” he exclaims with some sarcasm, mocking his own phrase: you couldn’t say that Victorio is a fool, either, or that he doesn’t notice when he says something foolish. He would have liked to be the young student from the Seminary of San Carlos and San Ambrosio who lived here, as he imagines him, in pampered luxury, a hundred and fifty years ago or more. He will be satisfied, however, with the four walls, the roof, and the windows that he always keeps closed despite the heat. “It’s easier to put up with the heat than with the humid brightness of the sun, or the bright humidity of the moon,” he explains. Perhaps that is why Victorio’s room exudes the shadowy dimness and the smell of a museum closed for repairs.
It is still night; dawn seems a long way off. Victorio opens his eyes and turns on the draftsman’s lamp that allows him to read during his frequent nights of insomnia. Very early, at daybreak, his shaded room does not smell of a closed museum, but of coffee, of gas, of candles burning, of dreams not yet vanished.
Victorio gets up the same way he gets up every morning: with difficulty, as if he found his own body too much to manage, too heavy, too alien, or as if the act of getting out of bed were burdened with more responsibility than merely being awake and still alive. If he doesn’t find the passage from wakefulness to sleep easy, sometimes the passage from sleep to wakefulness is even harder. He slips his feet into canvas sandals that have been broken in by long use, and puts on a long silk robe that must have been elegant in eras other than this one, and
cities other than this one. In Havana, a man’s house robe, whether made of silk or not, has always been the pretentious garment of the nouveau riche. Maybe he didn’t sleep well. Sleep is not one of the blessings that God has bestowed on him. “And what are the blessings that God has bestowed on me?” he wonders, while shuffling toward the chamber pot to relieve his swollen bladder. Since all the apartments in the building have to share a single toilet, when he gets up he usually urinates in the porcelain chamber pot that once belonged to his grandmother — though for greater needs, of course, he is obliged to turn to the communal bathroom.
A clumsy rose is painted at the bottom of the chamber pot. He does not urinate right away; in fact, it takes him some time, because Victorio is not so old yet as to wake up with the humiliation of being flaccid. When his member has quieted down he urinates in abundance, listening to the joyous ringing of the jet against the porcelain and enjoying the foam that the liquid produces: his eyes redden with pleasure. He looks at himself in the mirror, and as always, he thinks he is younger than he really is. He smiles, screws up his face, winks, picks up the empty metal bucket, and leaves the room.
The hallways of the building are still empty, devoid of the clamor and commotion that will fill them shortly. The neighbors are sleeping, or perhaps just beginning to wake up, and Victorio has to hurry, ascend the spiral staircase that was built from costly timbers carved elegantly in the days when people had the patience to work. He reaches the rooftop terrace and as soon as he steps through the broken door, which turns like a weathercock to every passing breeze, he can see the spectacle of dawn, an event that despite its daily occurrence never ceases to bring some new surprise.
The rooftops of Havana: at the first flash of daylight. The terraces, inoffensive for now, don’t assault you yet with glaring reflections, but allow your eyes to pass peacefully over them. They seem nothing like the terraces that they will become by noon, at the moment when the sun will cruelly mount the tiles, the metal roofs, the slate shingles, and hinder you from looking directly at them. The perpetual flame of the oil refinery. The Bacardi Building. The Capitol dome. The bell tower of the Church of Espíritu Santo. A bit to the left and in the distance, the other dome of the Lonja del Comercio, minus the statue of Mercury, who has been dashed to the ground and deprived of his errand-running mission by the indifferent ire of hurricanes. The sea cannot be seen, but its presence is felt. That is why a ship entering the bay at this very minute passes between buildings and monuments, looking like a cheap prop for a poor zarzuela production. Toward that invisible but present sea, in the same instant, a flock of doves, herons, or gulls fly, and you cannot tell whether they are white, gray, or black. And, since Havana has always been an astonishing city, a few roosters crow.
The city makes two impressions on Victorio at once: that of having been bombarded, of a city that is only waiting for the lightest thunderstorm, the slightest gust of wind, to tumble into a pile of stones; and that of a sumptuous and everlasting city, one that has just been built, erected as a concession to future immortality. Havana is never the same and is always the same. Dawn in Havana has infinite ways of seeming always identical, diverse and exact, with the blurred color of the sky, dubious tonalities wandering behind low white clouds that fly quickly and precisely; and the dawn breeze, always scant, but opening up regardless over the city like an enormous and beneficent bird.
The breeze seems to be escaping from an old leather suitcase that is held open by a boy on the terrace of what in another era was Flogar, one of the celebrated department stores from the vanished days of Havana’s glamour. Victorio sees this rare image as if he were still caught up in an odd eddy of a dream. It’s a young boy, or an adolescent, with red hair and colorful clothes. He has opened a suitcase and is looking at himself in a hand mirror and putting on makeup. And the boy, or the adolescent, stands up and opens an umbrella, flips it in the air, looks closely at it, tries out a few dance steps, and then, holding the suitcase in one hand and the umbrella in the other, leaps to another terrace and then another, until he is out of sight.
Victorio goes to one of the huge fiberglass tanks where they store the water trucked in from the aqueduct, fills his bucket, and goes back down, balancing on the staircase built with patience and precious timbers.
The light from the draftsman’s lamp transforms the room into a deceptive scene. The bed is covered with untidy sheets that don’t look white, even though that is what they must have been in some not-too-distant past. The bed is not a bed but a mattress, worn out by years of long use, set on the floor. The shadowy dimness cannot disguise the room’s small size, its mildewed walls, the worm-eaten furniture; it cannot hide the dust-covered photos of idols who, thanks to the art of photography, have remained fixed in eternal beauty: Rudolph Valentino, Johnny Weissmuller, Freddie Mercury. Nor does it dull the scintillation of the only reproduction (and a good one, too) of a famous painting hanging on the wall, The Embarkation for Cythera by Antoine Watteau. Above all, you can see the photograph of El Moro waving good-bye from his tiny plane, next to the great, ornate iron key that El Moro claimed could open the doors to the palace.
Is there ever a morning when Victorio does not think about El Moro? He owes him so many things. Thanks to him, he became (and remains) certain that a proud palace exists somewhere, waiting for him. El Moro talked to him about the palace on the merciless afternoon that Victorio would never forget. The two of them were alone, resting in the footloose shade of a guanabana tree laden with small green guanabana fruit, close by the airplane in which El Moro had just finished his morning’s work, fumigating banana trees over there around Güira de Melena. Through his unbuttoned shirt you could see his hairless chest, heaving and sweaty. Around him the sun transformed the solidity of the earth into a luminous sea. They were enfolded in the watery light, typical of that time of day and of the country in which fate had forced them to survive. El Moro was hugging the boy in his delicately rough way. The boy smelled El Moro’s sweat, more intense than the smell of earth.
“Tell me, what do you see from the sky?”
Before smiling, the man spat on the ground and wiped his mouth clean with the back of his hand.
“There’s no place like the sky, boy,” he said, as if thinking out loud. Then he sat silent, pensive, for several seconds, before adding, “God created the Earth so that we could look at it from the sky. Climbing into the sky in a plane is like going into a mirror and looking at yourself from the other side.”
“Have you gone really far in the plane?”
He made a gesture with his hand as if to say that he had been in lots and lots of places, and then he smiled maliciously and commented, “In this little junk bucket, I’ve gone around the world.”
“Around the world?”
He nodded emphatically before exclaiming, “You heard it.”
“And have you seen Paris and Bogota and Seville?”
“And Nairobi and Rome and Bangkok, and let me tell you something, boy, when you’re up in the sky you realize that all those places are just one place.” Though he didn’t glance at the boy, he must have understood his bewilderment. “Yes, listen, understand what I’m saying, one place is every place, don’t you doubt it. You’re up in the sky, you’re flying over Venice, which is a city without streets, instead people get around in little boats on rivers of dirty water, and you realize that it’s all the same, just the same. People have the same desires, identical dreams, the same hopes, the same sort of needs that they do in Bombay. The forms, the fashions, the wealth changes, but the rest, what you don’t see, is all the same, boy. Their hunger, their grief, their loneliness, their disappointments, their struggles are all the same, don’t forget it.” With his eyes half closed, he seemed to be admiring the waves of light that all but drowned out the landscape there on the outskirts of Havana. “The important thing, Victorio, is to find your palace.”
The boy moved away from his embrace, stood up, and under his tiny hand felt the strength of the aviator’s st
rong biceps.
“What palace, Moro?”
The man smiled, leaned toward the boy as if he were about to reveal the greatest secret. “This is important, boy! Don’t you know that each of us has a palace somewhere?” He squeezed his nose without ceasing to smile. “Yes, don’t look at me with that face, like you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about! Everybody’s born with a palace assigned to them, so they can live there and do whatever they want or desire or aspire to do . . .”
“Every everybody?”
The man wiped his hand across his sweaty brow, spat once again, wiped his mouth clean again. He smiled, as if he were having a great time. “Right now I’ve got to get back to fumigating the banana trees in Güira de Melena,” he said in a tone that implied the conversation was over.
“Where’s my mama’s palace, and my papa’s?” the boy insisted.
“They’ve got palaces, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve found them. You have to search for your palace, search good and hard. Maybe lots of people never find theirs.”
“Have you seen yours?”
“When my plane flies off toward the fields, I take a little spin first around my palace to make sure it’s still there, see how it’s doing.”
“And what’s it like?”
“Don’t ask so many questions, Victorio, boy.”
“Moro, where will I find mine?”
“Listen to you, all you ever do is ask. Don’t ask so much. Shit, whoever said it takes so many questions to find something? Look for it, and you’ll find it.”
More than before, the afternoon had turned into bright light that annihilated the appearances of things, and the trees, the landscape, seemed immersed in water.
“Every day I take a spin around my palace. It isn’t big, just a little house up on a hill, surrounded by mangos, sapodillas, mameys, lemon trees, orange trees, mamoncillos, and a cow and a horse — oh, and a well, and a pool with colored fish, and nearby there’s a pond where the cattle and the wild ducks drink. The grass and the trees are green green green, and the flowers are red as red, and there’s also yellow, pink, mauve flowers, roses, lots of roses, sunflowers, piscualas, orchids, forget-me-nots, pansies. My palace is built of wood, redwood, red as the flowers, and white as the clouds. The kind of clouds that are white, I mean, not the other ones that mean a storm is brewing. Some days it does rain, of course, it rains on my palace, except the rain is never violent, it rains to make the green of the trees and grass even greener. To get to the house, the palace, you have to go down a long highway all lined with royal palms, and that’s no problem, that’s why there’s a gypsy wagon pulled by Nero the burro.”
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