Distant Palaces

by Abilio Estevez

  To avoid having to climb constantly up and down from the terrace, Victorio has furnished himself with a metal water tank, which he has attempted to ennoble, on the visible side, with a phrase from Bergson: “But society does not simply want to live. It aspires to live well.”

  He washes up in a pail. Without drying his face, his mouth fresh with toothpaste, he begins the ritual of the window. It isn’t a very complicated ritual: it consists of shutting his eyes, shutting them tight, no peeking, opening one of the shutters, and contemplating a certain figure that humidity has formed on the walls of the Royal Palm. Depending on what figure he discovers at that instant — a flower, a child, an elephant, a ballerina, a car, a devil, a palm tree, a cloud, a butterfly — he guesses what his life will be for the next few hours. He can’t help being superstitious, ruled by obsessive habits, so he feels obliged to think and repeat the phrase May God’s grace enter, just as La Pucha, Hortensia, his mother, taught him many years ago. He opens the window, and with his eyes still closed acknowledges the purity of the early morning breeze, which smells of sea salt, of sargasso, of garbage, of a city asleep, of a city that dreams and perishes by the sea. May God’s grace enter, he repeats the spell, and when he opens his eyes he looks out toward the framework of trusses that holds up the old Royal Palm Hotel and conjoins it to the building of the ancient noble family, the building where he lives, at the corner of Calle Águila.

  Today he sees something he has never seen before.

  It isn’t the figure on the wall.

  There, way up there, almost at the level of the rooftops, an adolescent is balancing on the lumber. He realizes that it is the same person he had seen contemplating himself in a hand mirror on the Flogar terrace. And this time he notices immediately that it isn’t an adolescent, that if he had paid better attention, as he is doing now, he would have been able to see that it isn’t a boy at all but a tiny old man, practically a dwarf, covered in makeup: an old man who looks like a boy is balancing on the lumber. His hair is inconceivably red, topped by a stovepipe hat made of Scottish plaid, and he is dressed like a circus piano player, or to be precise, like an ideal piano player from an ideal circus, in a multicolored tailcoat spangled with blue stars, a mauve shirt, a green tie, and red-and-black-striped pants that spill over his white slippers. By his side dances a marionette that reproduces his figure with prodigious fidelity A magnificent wooden marionette, moved by invisible strings, is an exact copy of the clown. The dexterity with which the clown dances and makes the marionette dance is surprising; much more so, the balance he manages to keep on the worn and blackened beams, along which he is strutting to the beat of music that doesn’t exist, yet can still be heard. No one knows where the silence has come from on this Havana dawn, a total silence turned into music by the movements of a clown and his marionette. All Havana seems to have fallen quiet to let the clown and his puppet dance. He lifts one leg, lifts the other, and the marionette repeats his every movement, the two of them in perfect equilibrium; their red mouths, their great red mouths never lose the pair of smiles that not only make you want to laugh, but to kiss and hug and sing and dance on other beams to the beat of other silences, or what amounts to the same thing, to other music.

  The old clown advances from the terrace of the old uninhabited hotel toward the former house of the noble family that is still inhabited. Victorio breaks the spell for a moment and stops looking at the old clown and his puppet, and he turns his grateful eyes down toward the street and sidewalk. A small crowd has gathered down there, stopped in their tracks by their astonishment. They don’t move, don’t applaud, don’t laugh. The old man and his puppet reach the terrace of the aged palace and vanish along the pathways of the rooftops, pathways of filthy water tanks, junk, improvised housing, television antennas, and mysteries.

  Silence continues its tenacious, and for the moment, victorious battle against the clamorous awakening of the city. All that can be seen of Havana is a scaffolding of blackened beams that, like the timbers of a grounded sailboat, suddenly lack any purpose, an inert street, and a bewitched crowd that refuses to be disenchanted.

  He closes the window. He goes back to enjoying the shadowy dimness of his room. He stretches out on the bed. He doesn’t care that it’s getting late for going to work. He gazes once more at the photograph of El Moro, smiling from his plane, and gazes as well at the key to the palace that doesn’t exist. In the photograph, El Moro is climbing happily into his plane, his chest bare: he’s saying goodbye. He can still hear him: “Come on, boy, let’s go fly,” and he can see himself, a fearful and fascinated child who would have loved to climb into the plane and hug the pilot, a child who longs for the heights that El Moro knows how to reach better than anybody.

  After seeing the dancing clown with the puppet, balancing on the beams, he has thought about El Moro. He doesn’t know if it’s logical, but who would dare to spell out the laws of such a logic.

  He gets up, goes to his Crown record player, which in the sixties was the envy of the whole neighborhood of Santa Felisa, and puts down a worn-out acetate, Sindo Garay as interpreted by Ela Calvo. The music induces the opposite of the effect he had expected: it overwhelms him with an unwonted sensation of heaviness.

  Ya yo no soy tan sensible

  como lo era en otro tiempo,

  la costumbre de las penas

  me ha robado el sentimiento…

  My feelings aren’t so sensitive,

  not the way they used to be.

  Sorrow’s a habit for me now,

  it’s stolen my feelings from me…

  The song serves as background while he makes coffee. Since the coffee that they sell in the bodega comes mixed with a thousand other things and tends to clog up the espresso filter, he long ago decided to return to tradition, to the cloth filter, yielding a lighter coffee that tastes of dirty laundry, which, in spite of everything, saves Victorio from his ill humor and from the risk of having an accident. He takes a piece of day-old bread and sits down at the table, which also serves as the desk, which also is the nightstand, which also serves as the place where he keeps the electric hotplate and cooks; the table whose principal decoration is a cannonball, no telling whether iron or bronze, a little bigger than an orange, which he stole from one of the excavations in the castles that stand in the oldest sections of Havana. Someone assured him that the ball is harmless, containing no gunpowder, and Victorio has decided that, since life is an everyday war, it should sit at the center of his house, that is, in the center of his table, as a paperweight: what better decoration, what better souvenir, he repeats over and over, than a symbol of the constant strife among men.

  He dips the stale bread in the watery coffee that tastes of rags. His palate registers the sorry mix. He closes his eyes and reaches the same conclusion as always: there can’t be anyone in the world more wretched. Not even the princess of Monaco, nor the Dalai Lama, despite the generous smile he offers at every appearance, nor Mother Teresa of Calcutta, recently deceased, the lucky woman, nor even the pope, nor the calamitous queen of England with her stern expression. Yes, it’s true, it’s so true: the coffee tastes like stale bread, with a touch of cardboard. He is thinking once more that no satisfaction will ever come from this room, nor from the street, nor even from Havana. He picks up and moves to a house in Majorca on the Mediterranean coast. Of course, Victorio has never been to Majorca. He has never left Cuban territory. So he can’t explain the reason why he has come to see himself in a Majorcan house with a discreet iron gate and an enormous adobe fence surrounding pine trees that lead to a garden, a little cobblestone path that leads up to the front door. It’s a mansion, a palace: broad, spacious, filled with light, decorated with such good taste that he pays no notice to how expensive the furniture is, for Jean Cocteau’s mot juste had been purposely followed to the letter, to the effect that invisibility is the highest form of elegance. At the back of the main drawing room, a glass door gives access to a terrace that opens onto the Mediterranean. Victorio sees hi
mself stepping up onto the terrace, where a table is set for him with an outstanding breakfast: fruit juices, blueberry jam, fresh-baked croissants, Jabugo ham, Colombian coffee, strong, black, not too much sugar. Aware of the superb breakfast that awaits, he delays the moment of pleasure; he looks out to sea; the morning shines above the Mediterranean. In the distance, a few yachts are floating palaces. Three old men are strolling along the beach. “They’re philosophers,” he exclaims, and then immediately corrects himself, “No, they’re not philosophers, they’re the three forms of God, the one true God.” And just when he is about to turn himself into another God strolling on the Majorcan beach, a knock at the door returns him to Sindo Garay, to Ela Calvo, to the all-purpose table, to the coffee and bread that taste like old rags, to the windows of his room in a building that once upon a time was sumptuous.

  And there, of course, stands Mema Turné, who else? It’s her, the omniscient, omnipresent Havana image of God, sticking her nose in the door, her bald head, her thin mustache, her suction-cup eyes, despite the fact that Victorio, trying to avoid those eyes, head, and mustache, barely cracks open the door. After all, how could a more or less worm-eaten door stack up against the energy of higher powers? It has come to be said of Mema Turné that, among the vast number of things she has stolen, two of the most important, the two that she has put to greatest use, are the wisdom and the power of an unwary babalawo named Nolo. Others deny this, such as Yaya the Quadriplegic, the neighbor on the right, who maintains that the poor, bald old woman is merely a miserable megalomaniac who doesn’t have the good sense to know that she’s already dead.

  Mema Turné doesn’t say good morning. She never says hello. She contends that wishing someone a good morning is the most flagrant example of bourgeois hypocrisy “I heard music and I thought it was odd,” she declaims in her outrageous baritone martin voice, while displaying her blackened tongue, covered with white spots. Many people attribute Mema’s evil, along with her domineering halitosis, to her blackened tongue and its white spots. Others, less benevolent, argue that these are malignant diseases. In any case, she seems to be proud of her tongue. She understands the value of pauses, when silence allows her to inspect the room’s darkness while her diseased tongue flicks ceaselessly in and out. “You should be at work by now,” she adds, sure of herself as always.

  “What the fuck do you care, you old lesbian” (they also say that hiding behind Mema is a man disguised as a woman), “shameless hag, old bastard,” Victorio would like to tell her, red with indignation; he quickly recalls that this woman, famed as a witch, is also the local deputy of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, and that her soul is as poisoned as her tongue, so he limits himself to whispering, “I’m sick.”

  Mema Turné turns her suction-cup eyes and fastens them, expertly, on Victorio’s face, while her baritone voice rises to attack an aria with bravura: “We should never allow weakness to keep us from carrying out the duties imposed on us by the society in which we live,” and she moves both arms to make her bracelets jingle. She has said the entire sentence without a pause. Mema can be a prodigy at times; you might say that, like the bronze busts of national heroes, she doesn’t need to breathe.

  Victorio searches unsuccessfully for a rejoinder. He sighs as if he wishes to make patent the truth of his illness, and it occurs to him that this might be the perfect occasion to look for a hatchet and split her head in two. Many nights Victorio relaxes with a fantasy in which, like a second Raskolnikov, he obliterates this harpy with hatchet blows, saving himself and saving humanity from that viperous tongue, that baneful model. He is certain that humanity — that is, the twenty or so families living in the building — would applaud him. Some people seem not to deserve to live. Besides, since Mema’s room adjoins his own, Victorio would be in a good (legal) position to cut a doorway and enjoy two rooms just for himself.

  Mema stares at him as if she could read his mind: evil beings have that gift. Despite her necklaces for Changó and Obbatalá, she is dressed all in black like a pious sister on Good Friday. He imagines it must be her constant spying that has irritated her eyes. And her lips, scarcely a scrawled line under the thin mustache, flecked with rancid saliva, disgustingly rancid, smile and with remarkable malice insist, “Ay, son, have I got bad news for you, listen up and get ready: next week, the demolition brigade is coming.”

  And she turns around and leaves without saying good-bye, because good-byes, comrade, are typical of wicked bourgeois hypocrisy

  So the demolition brigade is finally coming. Since he has been expecting it for more than a month, he has forgotten that the building can be razed at any moment. Defensive mechanisms of the mind. Now the destruction has a precise time. He doesn’t notice that Ela Calvo stopped singing a while back. He doesn’t remember that the crust of bread, the measured cup of coffee, and the antique cannon-ball are awaiting him on the all-purpose table. He sits in a corner of the room, his back leaning against the wall, and contemplates the hazy tiles that slope toward the center of the room in a menacing depression. A depression, he thinks, is a sad and unstable form to be associated with a floor: it is important for a man to know that he’s standing on solid ground.

  He may have gone back to sleep. It is easier than it would seem to go to sleep at difficult times. Maybe he wakes up hours later. Perhaps he leaves the hoary palace of the family whose patrician name no one now has any interest in recalling; perhaps he joins the commotion in the Fe del Valle park (where long ago stood El Encanto, the most chic store in the city), and finds a midafternoon sun that proclaims the definitive disappearance of Havana from the maps of the world.

  At five in the afternoon, with exquisite exactitude — that is to say, at quitting time in his bureaucratic post at the Albear aqueduct in Palatino — Victorio feels a sudden desire to gaze at the enormous holding ponds. This attitude is surprising: the holding ponds were constructed in the 1880s, about a hundred and twenty years earlier; Victorio has been working at the aqueduct for a long time; so he has seen them, day after day, year after year, and from having them in front of his eyes for so long he must not even notice them any longer. Hence the oddity of his impulse. The strangest thing is what happens next: after shutting the windows, he opens them again, stares once more at the reservoirs, at the frogs carved in dark stone that crouch at each corner; he lingers to view the sumptuous gate built by the genius of the distinguished Havana engineer, Don Francisco de Albear y Lara, perfectly engineered, still functioning, without any need for energy other than what the force of gravity provides, because of which it was awarded a prize in the Paris Exposition of 1889.

  He leaves the office without shutting the windows. The door, however, he shuts and locks, and checks to see that it is properly closed. A second impulse, no less capricious, makes him toss the key down a drain.

  *

  He does not walk up Palatino as he should, then taking the Calzada del Cerro and continuing along Monte until, after a few twists and turns, returning to Galiano, the street where he lives; he finds himself instead in Fomento Park, one of the loveliest and most tree-filled parks in the city, fortunately still undiscovered by the marauding troops of tourists. He is standing next to the Ciudad Deportiva. He has no idea what he is doing there. Nor does he care. A group of athletes is resting under the acacias, drinking coconut milk, laughing and making obscene jokes that, when they say them, do not sound obscene. He thinks that a group of athletes drinking coconut milk under the shade of acacia trees is as sublime as any fresco in the Sistine Chapel, perhaps more so, because the bodies before him now are alive, alive, alive, breathing, sweating, smelling, tensing, laughing, talking, shouting, and the coconut milk is spilling over the corners of their mouths, dripping, running down their necks to their naked chests, drenching their training shorts.

  Could anything be more beautiful than the human body, when it is a beautiful body? On the other hand, a living body always evokes the nostalgia of the ephemeral, Victorio tells himself; isn’t the glory of hu
man beauty based in its fleeting nature?

  In the center of the sports complex there are ten or twelve hot-air balloons: immense, graceful, with imitation wicker baskets and endless colors, brilliant colors and flags. This is the first time Victorio has ever seen hot-air balloons. He is overwhelmed by nostalgia for the years when he delighted in reading Jules Verne. He thinks it must be fascinating to climb into one of those baskets and rise up and up, through the sky, to the outermost limits, to get to see the elegant yellow of the Schönbrunn, the exotic palace of Dolmabache, the Porter’s Lodge on the Lake of Love in Bruges, the Great Golden Palace of Bangkok.

  An old man in suit and tie, his hair dyed an intense black and gleaming with brilliantine, who is selling newspapers on the corner of Calle Primelles, explains to Victorio, without waiting to be asked, that the balloons are there for a sports competition that will take place on the last night of the year 2000. “That’ll be a tough event!” he reasons. “Don’t you know, the winds on the Island are like the Island itself: variable, capricious, totally unfit for aerial competitions. It’s crazy, just like everything else, truly crazy.”