Distant Palaces

by Abilio Estevez

  The woman who sweeps the street, dressed in a filth-green jumpsuit, has stopped to listen in on the conversation; she looks at the well-dressed newspaper hawker with inordinate outrage and refutes him categorically: “Don’t talk if you don’t know what you’re talking about, comrade: that’s why this country’s in the shape it’s in, because of people running their mouths off They’re filming a movie, a movie about the first Cuban who got lost among the stars, about Marias Perez.”

  Night is falling with the sadness of all pointless and foredoomed events. The pointlessness and doom are aggravated, he feels, by the absence of streetlights. He has walked through El Vedado and along the Calle Cien to the library of Marianao, in whose window-lined reading rooms he once studied and conversed with his friend Marta, the young blind woman from the art department, the one who had died at the age of twenty-eight with too many aspirations. Near the library, during the forties, in the perfidious century just drawing to a close, they built a Romanesque castle. Havana can engender that kind of insanity. Frenzies of Greek temples, Roman amphitheaters, Florentine palaces, Gothic churches, rococo pavilions. Places for showing off. The capital of the Island even flaunts a Napoleonic Museum, where objects belonging to Josephine de Beauharnais and the emperor of the French are on display; even a tooth, which, they say, was extracted from Napoleon during the campaign in Egypt, is displayed in a crystal urn that sits on a piece of crimson velvet.

  Victorio wanders past the gloriously reconstructed government palaces as if he were walking in some other era, the time of Julian del Casal, the great decadent poet. He knows full well — no one has to tell him — that the poet’s era was not exactly fascinating; quite the contrary those were years of horror, of material and moral poverty; yet he gladly gives in to the whim of the imagination which treacherously and frivolously enough deems that “any time in the past was better.”

  He approaches the gardens, inhales the aroma of all that un-tended vegetation, hears the water falling into the fountains, which are now dry, and catches a glimpse of stone walls through distant gates. He thinks he can hear music from old dances, just as he can imagine sumptuous interiors. Night ennobles Havana. The shadows’ spell hides its coarseness, corrects its imperfections, disguises its corrosion and squalor. Havana in the evening and at night (and night in Havana is crushingly absolute) has little or nothing in common with Havana in its harsh mornings, at its unbearable, damp, demanding middays.

  Up ahead, here and there, are windows and lights. The anonymous windows of daytime have nothing in common with the omen-filled windows of night. How lucky to discover the certainty of a little light during Havana’s definitive night. At night there are no houses, no collapsing buildings, no palaces; just light. Light, and all that it signifies: lights that exalt balconies and doorways, tall windows, early lights, yellow lights, cheerful, sad, insinuating, sullen lights, light escaping through lace curtains, through windowpanes, through stained-glass window sashes, through arched skylights… That’s all it is, light; yet he has to admit that any light refers to other realities. A light always proposes something else, hides different messages, multiple suggestions, infinite meanings, and anyone who has ever been outside and exposed on any night will know how many messages can be deciphered in the glow of a light.

  *

  He has walked beyond Jaimanitas to the beach at Mayanima, the Marina Hemingway This place holds a peculiar attraction for him: the houses (bungalows, their owners like to call them) overlooking the canal, contemplating the yachts as they sail in from all over the world, facing a sea breeze with its strong smell of salt, algae, dead fish, rotting wood, and shipwrecks. He walks along the gutters at a slow pace, staring at the wooden walls of the houses, their quality, their colors, admiring their pitched roofs of tiles blackened by sea and rain. He imagines what it would be like to sit in a comfortable corner on one of these terraces with their happy vistas, the line of the horizon stretching before him, the breeze, in a cool armchair with its footstool and its floor lamp.

  He reaches a restaurant, the Laurel, named after an enormous tree that grows in front of it, decorated with colored lights as if it were Christmas. He doesn’t have a single dollar in his pocket. He greets the waiter at the door and enters. All the tables are set in the tree-lined patio overlooking the sea. This would be an earthly paradise if it weren’t for the tyrannical presence of music, the horrid mania of Cubans to crank up dance music full volume, as if they were living under a permanent obligation to appear cheerful: joy as decree, edict, ukase, the tyrannical duty to cheer up everyone else, as if joy could only be expressed in laughter, hullabaloo, and deafening guarachas.

  A handsome young man (handsome? God, he’s beautiful!) in Bermuda shorts and uncovered torso asks, “Would monsieur care to dine? Today’s specials are excellent.” Though he talks like a European who has just learned Spanish, the young man cannot hide, try as he might, his Cuban accent; no matter why and no matter how, he yearns to sound European, and because of that, he only ends up sounding even more Cuban. A certain gleam in his eyes singles him out as the most Cuban of Cubans. Perhaps it is the radiance of so many unsatisfied yearnings, so many frustrated embraces, so many vain insinuations.

  Haughtily, Victorio marches toward the sea’s edge; he has quickly and rather slyly noticed that the tables closest to the sea are all occupied. “Do you have any spots by the sea?” he asks in a capricious tone.

  The handsome Cuban god puts on a graceful and false expression of disappointment and replies, “Not at this very moment, sir, if you would like to wait a few minutes.” He no longer sounds like a European but rather like an Asian who has barely learned the rudiments of Spanish, but there it is, giving him away: the gleam in his eyes.

  A brief, fabulous silence follows. The guaracha record has apparently reached the end, and Victorio takes advantage of these seconds of silence to feel the sea, to hear its rumbling, to watch how other people eat, drink, talk, laugh, apparently without a worry in the world, apparently happy, under the trees, at the edge of the sea, facing the Strait of Florida. Handsome and Cuban, the young god returns to the attack: he is in no mood to lose a client. “Shall I set you a table right here?”

  Victorio realizes that he has run out of alternatives, that he quickly has to think up a lightning solution; he reflects for a second and remembers that private restaurants are forbidden to serve lobster. “I’ll have the lobster,” he says.

  The Cuban pulls another grimace. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  Victorio sighs, feigns disappointment, turns his back, walks away, goes back to the street. He conceals from himself the humiliation of knowing that he doesn’t have a dollar, not one single dollar, and that the waiter-youth-wiseman-Cuban-god was able to find him out. The worst part: his stroll among the tables at the restaurant has awakened his appetite. Not exactly hunger, but something much more refined. A hunger for flavor, for delicacies. A yearning, a need to appease his palate.

  *

  Furtively, hesitantly, he enters his room. He is almost ready to believe that he has opened the wrong door. He looks around as if he were an intruder. He examines each piece of furniture, each painting, twice, three times, four times, as if he has to make sure that he isn’t walking in on someone else’s privacy There are the walls stained by humidity, the worm-eaten all-purpose table, the mattress on the floor, the porcelain chamber pot, the basin, the Crown record player, the reproduction of The Embarkation for Cythera by Antoine Watteau. His cautious gaze halts there. This painting, in any of its versions, has always held a special fascination for him. Watteau, like Fragonard, attracts him because of the joie de vivre that radiates from his paintings. Both were able to paint the joy of the dolce far niente, just as Mozart was able to turn happiness into sounds.

  “No doubt about it,” he exclaims out loud, talking with the travelers in the painting, “art has charms that reality has never heard of.”

  He opens the window. He picks up the metal basin, pours alcohol into it, and lights it.
He meticulously yanks the photographs from the wall and rips them up one by one before letting them fall into the fire. The only photograph that is saved is the one of El Moro in his plane.

  Then it’s time for the books. There aren’t many of them, fortunately. A minor outburst of sentimentality keeps him from looking at them, not that it matters whether he looks or not, because Victorio knows them so well, he can tell which book he is holding by the feel of it, which author, which epoch, which part of the world it is from; for books are like people, each with their own traits and dignities and elegance and foolishness and whims. Each book has a body and soul. Sometimes, on innumerable occasions, they have even more soul than the very authors who gave them life. And Victorio thinks he could cite multiple examples. Only an old and cherished volume from the memoirs of the due de Saint-Simon, The Princess of the Ursines, is saved from the flames. Why this volume and no others?

  He also smashes the records. Quickly, not to see what he is destroying, though this undoubtedly does not prevent him from being conscious how much Mozart, Bach, Tartini, Matamoros, Garay, Vivaldi, Marta Valdés is scattered in smithereens across the floor.

  The mattress burns feebly, reluctantly, in fruitless licks of flame that rise up already half-extinguished, and that, half-extinguished, smother themselves, as is only proper for a mattress so far past its time, one that has given much more of itself than any similar mattress would have to give anywhere else on the planet.

  In a primitive black bag he gathers his toothbrush, soap, a few clothes, and the copy of Saint-Simon. He keeps the photograph of El Moro. He ties the key to the palace on to a cord and wears it around his neck. Although he is not sure why, he also keeps a lovely beach towel, in vivid colors.

  He lies down on the floor. He would have liked his sleep to bring a long dream, a happy dream, in which he would have seen beaches, palm trees, and picnics. He sees himself as a child in the sand on the Havana beach at Baracoa, under the seagrapes, at the edge of the greenish, grimy, sargasso-laced water. Nearby, his family, the comings and goings of his riotous family. They are preparing yuca, using lots of oil and garlic to make the mojo for it. The suckling pig was roasted the day before, which is how suckling pig ought to be eaten if you want it to taste the way it’s supposed to. Grandmother dips the skimmer, glistening with pork grease, into the rice and beans, the congrí. They are improvising baseball games, domino games. They are talking with each other at the tops of their lungs, you’d almost say they are arguing, and drinking beer, listing to music (boleros sung by Ñico Membiela, Orlando Contreras, Rolando Laserie, Olga Guillot). Singing along.

  Victorio, a child, sitting at the edge of the filthy sea on the Havana beach, in Baracoa. He has returned to that territory of childhood, of happy irresponsibility, in which there are no collapsing buildings, no diseases, no torture, no growing old, no death. He deduces that, in this blessed region, there is no room for evil. Victorio-as-a-child can see himself at the water’s edge. He’s about six or seven years old. No older. He moves away from the family hubbub. It seems his family has already eaten lunch, had a few drinks, and the inevitable lethargy is descending on them. Games, songs, dips in the sea have all been suspended for a time. A few uncles, a few cousins have stretched out under the seagrapes for a snooze. Married couples embrace. Sleeping bodies take on the look of sand statues. The afternoon has turned into an immense, transparent dome. The few clouds highlight the clean blue of the sky. The sun is reflected in the trees, in the sand, in the water, in the breeze, in the eyes of this boy at the edge of the sea whose name is Victorio.

  He walks along the beach. The sea, the gentle lapping of the waves, an attractive sound that completes the afternoon’s blissfulness. Victorio-as-a-child enters the water—just a few steps; he’s been warned, “Don’t you ever go swimming on a full stomach, boy, you’ll get an obstruction…” And his mother has told him stories about children who have died from obstructions, because La Pucha, Hortensia, his mother, always has disastrous examples at hand whenever it is time to give an example. Victorio-as-a-child takes a few steps, just a few steps, so the sea can at least cover his feet, his ankles. He feels the breeze blow through him, that is, that his body isn’t his body but something that joins with the breeze, that becomes breeze. Discovering the relation between the sky, the sea, the breeze, and himself. Or what amounts to the same thing, the certainty that no one else in this world, or any other, could occupy the marvelous place that he is occupying. “Me, a unique and singular being,” Victorio-as-a-child says through his adult mouth. “I am the light, the sea, the afternoon, the landscape, and I am also the god who not only creates but who enjoys what he has created.”

  Victorio-as-an-adult remembers Victorio-as-a-child walking along the beach. The adult, who no longer lives this experience, can, however, explain it, while the child, who possesses the same certainty, is nonetheless unable to put it into words, into something clear, something explicable. And that is why, later that night, at home, after a hot shower has removed the salt from his body and left each muscle delightfully exhausted, he, the boy named Victorio, tries to explain to his mother, “Today I realized,” except that sleep overcomes him, and he never, so far as he can recall, manages to finish the sentence.

  Could it be that the sun is entering through the slits in the blinds and forming cheerful patterns on the worn old floor tiles? Is he really hearing sounds from neighboring rooms, shouts from the park, the neighbor women singing along with some salsa singer’s hit:

  La chica del son

  es una gata insatiable,

  la chica del son…

  The girl who dances son

  is a cat who can’t be satisfied

  the girl who dances son…

  Victorio wants to look at himself in the mirror. There are no mirrors left in the house. He persists; he has to look at himself in some mirror, perhaps to be certain that he is really there — that’s what mirrors were invented for, so that a man can believe he’s woken up from his dreams, so that he can imagine compiling enough evidence, no matter how inverted and distorted, that he is himself, one certainty among all the certainties in the world.

  There is nothing in the house: it doesn’t even look like his house, or like anybody’s house. It’s more like a gloomy, empty, dark room, where footsteps echo and the songs that reach in from the park and from the street lose their levity, acquiring the tonalities of ancient chants. All that remains is the reproduction of The Embarkation for Cythera. He observes the characters in the painting: serene, tranquil, gallant, distinguished, happy, noble, ready (without making a fuss of it) for good fortune, genteelly blissful; he discerns the trees, the garden with the feel and color of all idyllic gardens, the pink sails on the boat, the playful cherubs, the marble Venus who supervises, sanctifies, and approves of them; and Victorio experiences the sudden, fierce sensation of someone who has been deceived. He doesn’t know what corner of his resentment is exuding the wrath that now invades his body like a wave of corrupted blood. He picks up the primitive bag in which he has gathered all his belongings, and leaves the building that will be demolished. Like some Eugene de Rasti-gnac, he walks out into the beloved and abhorred city. The difference is noteworthy: he isn’t in nineteenth-century Paris, but in Havana on a common sort of day at the tail end of the twentieth century, yet that does not keep him from passionately shouting, “We’ll soon see about this!” to which the city, as might have been expected, makes no reply. Or perhaps its reply comes in the voice of a mulatta in makeup, perfume, and a tight-fitting dress, who upon bumping into him replies, “Watch out, boy, what’s up with you?”

  They say that in other more contented times, Havana could be fairly liberal toward the homeless. Sometimes the wide covered entrance-ways, the broad, roofed sidewalks in the City of Columns, served as refuges for hundreds upon hundreds of bums. On stormy days and on days of unforgiving sun, on nights of humidity and of cold bearing no relationship to the supposed truth told by the thermometer, many indigents found
refuge in the maternal nobility of Havana’s many galleries. They say that not only did covered and columned passageways abound, but the fountains also flowed with fresh, healthy water, the gardens were filled with trees, there was fruit on the trees in the gardens, bread and soup were distributed in the church sacristies, and there were fish, lots of fish, in the sea. It is said that there was shade on the sidewalks and a permanent breeze under the colonnades.

  Despite all this generosity, bit by bit Havana ceased to tolerate the beggars: it denied them the charity of covered entranceways, the blessing of breezes, and protections from the savage night dews. Some have gone so far as to claim (it is well-known how novelistic the popular imagination can be) that the change began to be noticed the day that Havana allowed one of its most famous vagrants, El Ca-ballero de París, to be locked up in an asylum. On that unlucky day, night fell in Havana at four in the afternoon, and the early dusk astonished the people of the city. Since they know nothing of seasons, since they have never expected the season to change, the skeptical people of Havana have never believed the sun could come at the wrong time or that the moon might rise prematurely. It was, they say, a true catastrophe. Confused, tormented, the city came unhinged: it felt different, as if it were at a different latitude, as If Havana (in a manner of speaking) had thought it were Brussels, and the people of Havana, the poor inhabitants of the confused city, had no space in a world of such tremendous metamorphoses. True or false (more true than false), it is a proven fact: Havana turned Its back on the needy.