Disoriented, not knowing what to do, Victorio thinks about the demolition of the old palace where he lives (or used to live), and he has an opportunity to feel in the flesh how Havana despises those who have no houses. Now he can learn the meaning of the destitution of the dark, desolate streets, the empty sidewalks, the dry fountains, the treeless gardens, the fruitless trees, where the accumulation of grime seems to have grown from the depths of time. He enjoys classifying the pallid bushes and sickly ferns that chose to sprout on ruins. He Imagines he can detect the unique color of filthy walls, the firm footsteps of the police, the no less firm steps of criminals, the distrustful, anguished clicking heels of whores, the unexpected openjackknife that someone hurls from a balcony, the sighs of relief or of pleasure, two people giving in to an embrace in which they each hope to recognize their own reality, to learn, perhaps, that they have not turned into ghosts. Victorio enjoys the sea breeze that blows the miasma up from the port, and the land wind that blows down from other rotting masses. He also deciphers the language of the beheaded statues, examines the feeble light of the streetlamps, watches the sewer water flowing down the broken sidewalks, learns to distinguish which screams arise from nightmares, learns that nothing explains the city so well as the desperate cries and songs that break the silence of the night, and feels certain that Havana loves to withdraw completely from the normal rhythms of the planet.
He wanders off toward the old church of San Francisco de Paula, that district of railroad tracks and train crossings, out past the Talla-piedra wharf where so many people were once killed in the explosion of a French ship. The reason why he has set out for this horrific part of the city is something he couldn’t explain. For days, the sky has been growing obstinately red at night, and the salty sea breeze, no less stubborn, has stirred the red clouds, or better, reddish-gray He hasn’t thought of rain as any kind of threat, so he hasn’t been frightened by the sight of scudding clouds, and he has observed that the sea breeze has stopped. He has also noticed the intense blackness of the blackened walls. When the walls of Havana become blacker than they should be, a thunderstorm is imminent. Victorio has observed that the doves, blackbirds, and sparrows have disappeared, and he has seen a desperate line of fire ants forming, just like rats fleeing a sinking ship.
He hasn’t let himself be intimidated. Does he really not care about the rain, even though it is the most terrible form of helplessness that the homeless face? Or is it that his fear of police and men, and his sense of loneliness, are more powerful than the looming tempest? Nonetheless, on stormy nights, Victorio always comes to see how alone he is. Where are all his friends? They’ve died, left, or ceased to be friends. In any case, the result is, all three amount to the same thing.
“A city where you no longer have any friends is a city that excludes you, forgets you, and doesn’t concern you,” Victorio thinks; “a city isn’t just made of buildings, banks, houses, parks, monuments, statues, covered walkways, bays. Without a house, without friends, a city becomes remote, alien, incomprehensible, and hostile.” So says Victorio to the blackened walls that announce the coming storm.
And since this city is the way it is, the walls are not always the only things listening. A woman in her sixties, whose presence Victorio hasn’t noticed, sweeps the sidewalk in front of her house and shouts in a rum-besotted voice, “Hey, kid, don’t get worked up about it, there’s another hundred years of this to go.”
*
Gods do not send their messages in vain. The clocks have just struck nine, and the thunderstorm has started. Victorio hears the firing of the cannons in the fortress of La Cabana. At first he mistakes the cannon fire for a thunderclap; then the reverse; and it begins to rain.
The deluge falls callously, as if it were no big deal. Victorio walks along the train tracks, balancing on the rails. Here and there the rain produces a beautiful effect when it passes through the spaces lit up by the flickering streetlamps, and he discovers two columns supporting a kind of half-demolished archway. Victorio sees the blurry figure of a woman.
“You’re gonna get sick, you,” she declares, smiling. He comes closer and she traces a quick gesture with her hand to indicate the archway, stating categorically, “It’s not bad under here.”
The girl is tall. Or looks it. She’s dressed in red, in an old-fashioned, clumsily altered evening dress that reveals two underdeveloped breasts. She wears her hair long, dripping wet, and black, with light blond, nearly white, highlights on the tips. The rain has smeared her overdone mascara. Her pale white cheeks are stained. In one of her hands she displays a high-heeled shoe with a pointed toe and laces, hardly the latest fashion. She shows Victorio the sole of the shoe, which has come unglued in the rain.
“Just when you think you’ve got your life settled, boom! There comes life.” She underscores the pause with a movement of her head.
“Yes, three steps forward and five or six back, and start all over again,” Victorio notes.
She smiles and notes, “It’s like my mother says: if you’re born to make charcoal, heaven will shower you with firewood.”
Victorio looks at her with curiosity, and concludes, “The myth of Sisyphus!”
She pulls a face as if to say she doesn’t understand and couldn’t care less. “Today I made a little money and thought I could take a couple days off, and lookie here, Cinderella’s slipper went and broke, so what’s a Cinderella to do if there aren’t any more fairy godmothers, or Prince Charmings, or fucking anything, huh?, tell me, you.” And she looks at Victorio with a hint of anger, as if he knew the answer and was refusing to tell her.
He shrugs.
She mimics him. “Don’t worry about it, you. You look pretty screwed up yourself.”
They keep silent. Apparently they want to listen to the intensity of the rain. She closes her eyes and sighs. She looks tired, he thinks. She opens her eyes again and is gazing in some other direction. “I was hoping I could sleep in for a couple of nights, and look at this,” and she raises the shoe toward the rain as if it were some kind of trophy, a cup of champagne, and hurls it far away, turning suddenly and in all innocence into a deteriorated image of Violetta Valéry. She does the same with the other shoe, which is not broken. “I don’t know any one-legged woman I could give it to,” she explains. Then she leaves a languid arm lying on Victorio’s shoulder. “You like it when it rains?” And she puts her face in his, smiling, mellifluous. He perceives a faint breath of alcohol.
“I don’t have a cent on me,” he warns.
Her hand squeezes his shoulder, as if she needs to prop herself up while she laughs out loud. “Think I’m an idiot, you? You don’t have a cent, and you don’t like the ladies.”
Both of them laugh happily, both of them, finding shelter from the rain under the ruins of the ancient city wall.
“You’re going to love my boyfriend, what a man! A big mulatto from Sancti Spíritus, the models at La Maison only wish they could look like him,” and she caresses Victorio’s forehead, fixing a couple of dangling locks of wet hair. “He’s cheap,” she adds wickedly.
Victorio thinks he can see the Atarés fortress in the distance, through the curtain of rain; he can’t be sure because the storm is so intense now, and as everybody knows, thunderstorms can falsify reality, cast doubt on it, turn it into a mirage. A dog walks down the center of the street, head and tail tucked in. “He’s worse off than we are,” Victorio observes.
“Don’t believe it,” she insists, while she hugs Victorio and leans her forehead on his chest; she’s looking for warmth, the way a little girl looks for affection. After thinking it over (he has always been frightened of showing tenderness to any woman other than his mother), Victorio presses her head against his chest.
“Cold, isn’t it?”
Victorio doesn’t answer.
“Like it was snowing, not raining,” she persists.
Victorio doesn’t want to contradict her, point out to her that they’re in Havana, and that the only season in Hava
na is summer, everlasting summer, interrupted only by the squalls that take it upon themselves to raise even more steam from the ground. If she feels cold, it must be true. “Yes, girl, look how it’s snowing “
“And what’s your name?”
“Victorio.”
“Victorio?” She steps back to look at him, and sarcasm and surprise shine in her eyes. “Victorio? What, did your parents hate you?”
“No, they didn’t hate me,” he explains, “they loved the revolution. I was born in 1953, the year Fidel and his men assaulted the Moncada barracks.” This sentence, repeated so many times over so many years, no longer holds any meaning for him.
She allows a dramatically ironic “ah! ah!” to escape her lips, and goes back to resting her forehead on the man’s chest. She introduces herself: “My name is Salma.” The rain begins to slow. The dog has stopped at the corner, as if it doesn’t know which way to turn. Her voice becomes a whisper: “Well, my name isn’t really Salma, it’s Isabel, Isabelita, it’s just that Salma is prettier, don’t you think?”
“Besides, it’s the name of an actress,” he observes with a smile.
“Yeah, I know, Salma, Salma Hayek.”
This time Victorio doesn’t respond. He supposes it wouldn’t make much sense to point out to her that Isabel is also a lovely name, and in any case it’s more authentic, since she’s Isabel, not Salma.
“Know what?” she suddenly reveals, squeezing even closer to him. “I’d love to be a rock singer, or an actress. A Hollywood actress, of course.”
“What for?” he asks, almost mechanically, still stroking the girl’s head.
She stares into distances foreign to the reality where they both find themselves. Her eyes have obviously gone away, somewhere else. Then she blinks repeatedly, as if trying to erase what she just saw. “I dunno, to sing, I guess, to stand on the stage in a crowded theater and wear clothes by some famous designer, like Miyake, maybe, and I’ll have colored lights pointed at me, and my own band’ll play Likavirgin, and I’ll sing and sing, all glamorous, you know, and my voice all pretty, all sexy, and there I am moving from one side of the stage to the other and singing Likavirgin and the audience is screaming, they’re amazed, they’re applauding, what a thrill, you! Can’t you hear the applause?”
“No, that’s the rain.”
She pays no attention. “Working in the movies! Fixed on film forever! I’ll play the wicked Abigail, and Daniel Day-Lewis will be my supporting actor — he’s a great actor and he’s hot, too. Don’t you think I’d make a great Abigail? And there I’d be at the Academy Awards, walking up to the stage, you bet, you, because I won one of them, and I’m so choked up I can’t speak, I’m crying, opening my arms wide and holding up the little statue in the air, telling my adoring, applauding public, Thankyuverimoch, iluvyoo, I dedicate this award to my mother and to Chichi, my brother.”
Silence returns. It must have stopped raining, Victorio thinks. He says nothing. He doesn’t want to interrupt her.
She explains that the concert and the Oscar ceremony have left her exhausted, so exhausted! “I’m dead, I’m so dead, I can’t tell you how tired I am, Victorio! But the lucky thing is, Andy’s waiting for me outside, Andy Garcia, my boyfriend, I hope you know my boyfriend Andy Garcia, Victorio, what an actor! He was born in Bejucal, I think, and now he’s like a total star there in Beverly Hills.”
“Yes,” he agrees. “Who doesn’t know Andy Garcia? And he’s waiting for you with his bodyguard, and they’ve also had to set up a police barricade to let you through, and there’s your limousine, your Porsche, or Mercedes-Benz, they’ve taken better care of it than they’d do for a head of state, because actors are always more charming than heads of state, aren’t they? And you come out all happy, running, laughing, holding up the little statue, saying good-bye to your public, and you shout iluvyoo and get into your Porsche or your Mercedes-Benz, and you kiss your actor and he kisses you, full of passion because you’re so in love with each other, and you kiss him and kiss him and tell him —”
Smiling, happy, she lifts her face from Victorio’s chest and finishes his sentence with an exaggerated elegance in her voice and gestures: “Ay, my darling, I am very tired, can’t we go faster to our mansion on the coast?”
They laugh. It’s let up, yes, it has stopped raining. “It stopped raining a while ago,” he points out.
Very serious for a brief instant, she says, “Dreaming doesn’t cost anything, you. It’s the only thing that doesn’t cost anything and that nobody can catch you doing, it’s the greatest thing you can have, don’t you think?” And after a pause, “Listen, Triumpho, wouldn’t you like a little soup?”
Victorio doesn’t bother to point out that his name isn’t Triumpho. The prospect of some soup makes moot any attempted rectification or any other plan. “Soup? Right now a bit of soup is worth a lot more than any Oscar, with or without Andy Garcia. And where is the soup?”
“At my house, I live close to here, real close, on Calle Apodaca near the train station. My mother knows how hard I work, and whenever I get home, at five or six in the morning, she has a little hot soup waiting for me that she makes from whatever she can find, anything, because even stone soup tastes good if you add a little salt, garlic, onion, and soy sauce — this job is hard, hard, it’s so hard, you.”
In what was once a photography studio, formerly called Van Dyck, Salma lives with her mother. The aging sign still hangs, faded from lack of use and too much sun and rain, and letters are etched in the window of the door: empuje / push. English spoken. It is a small and solitary space, strewn about with three unmade beds, doorless wardrobes, cardboard boxes piled on top of each other, and a primitive Singer sewing machine, and Victorio thinks, if the Singer company could see that museum piece, they’d feel so proud, so incredibly proud, and they’d give a prize to whoever could make it work. Victorio also discovers a kerosene stove and a lampshade held aloft by a porcelain Buddha, fat, festive, and contented, who smiles and touches his belly, and when he reflects the light off his forehead and stomach, he projects it over the rest of the room, creating gigantic shadows and blurring the outlines of things. On the walls, papered with luminous photographs, hang portraits of people decked out in outlandish scarves, nonsensical leather overcoats, capes, kerchiefs, hats with flowers and without, or with black hatbands in the case of men; people wearing the makeup, gazes, and smiles of the forties and fifties, and the false security with which people look and smile at the ephemeral interval that is concealed in the illusion of “forever.”
There are also chinaberry branches on the walls. “To keep the mosquitoes away,” Salma explains. The old photography studio, now converted into living quarters, is pervaded with the smell of onions, urine, chinaberry leaves, kerosene, and jasmine, which comes from a corner shelf that stands in as an altar dedicated to Obbatalá, the white, immaculate Virgin of Mercy.
Salma’s mother looks more like her grandmother. She is wearing an old housecoat of some odd indefinable color, with equally imprecise decorations, and she is sitting on the edge of one of the beds, her eyes bleary, her gaze fixed, her hands clasped in her lap. She looks like a woman who, tired of marching, has decided to let herself fall down by the roadside. On her forehead she has plastered a cross of sage leaves, a very old-fashioned home remedy for insomnia and headache. She is going blind. “Cataracts,” Salma explains to Victorio in an undertone.
“I’ve brought company, Mama.”
“I know.”
Salma smiles and winks. “And Chichi? Not home yet?”
“Your brother’s with some friends, off to Viñales.”
“My brother lives the life… !”
“Your brother works hard, girl.”
“I work hard, too, Mamá, what do you think? I work and work, and nobody ever invites me off to Varadero or Soroa or Viñales, not even to their own stinking house …”
“Not everybody is born with the same kind of luck.”
“That’s just what I mea
n, Mama.”
“Your brother is good-looking, Isabel.”
“I’m not all that ugly myself.”
“Your brother is more than good-looking, Isabel.”
Salma turns to Victorio with an uncomprehending look on her face. “Don’t you think beauty is one of the greatest injustices, you? Don’t you? So, how can you demand equality from men, from governments, from North American imperialism, from the United Nations, from the European Community, if the first in injustice was God? No less than Him, God Almighty, yes, He’s unjust, and after Him all the men started dreaming about building communism — ha! Communism! Everybody equal! Baloney, Triumpho, lies! Marx and Engels were so ugly that they invented communism, and what can you tell me about that bald Russian named Vladimir Ilyich? Ugly, spiteful people, people who got enraged when they saw how beautiful other people were. You know why the Berlin Wall fell? Simple: because there were, and are, good-looking Germans and ugly Germans, and that’s where you’ll find all the differences you could want! The first in injustice is God.”
“If He exists,” adds Victorio, amused.
“Sweet Jesus save us!” Salma’s mother screams in terror, raising her hands energetically; she keeps her gaze as fixed and severe as ever. “In this house we don’t allow heresy, sir, whoever you might be. We believe in God and respect Him, we revere Him as He deserves, sir, keep that in mind: with God, everything; without God, nothing.”
“And Country or Death, Venceremos,” Salma concludes gaily, and immediately adds, “He’s a friend, Mama, his name is Triumpho, and despite the stuff he says, he’s very devout, so devout, Mama, that he studied to be a priest, and he’s one of my best friends — what am I saying? my very best friend, one of the people I love most in this world, after you, Mother Dear, and after my brother Chichi.”
Distant Palaces Page 4