He also takes pains not to look like what he is already becoming: a bum. True, he goes for days without bathing, and he knows that his looks must have deteriorated. To sweat as little as possible, however, he avoids walking during the day, endeavoring to avoid exposure to the sun as much as he can. He looks for the shade of a tree, of a ruin, of a covered entrance, and tries to sit there as long as possible.
The book of Saint-Simon also comes in very handy Victorio knows that a man sitting under a tree enjoys an appearance of meekness; he knows, moreover, that a man sitting under a tree is never the same as a man with a book sitting under a tree. It is easy to see that the book endows the man with a more harmless look, a bold touch of innocence. He has no idea where he picked up this ridiculous and erroneous misconception. Victorio recognizes the danger of books perfectly well, and he knows that a man with a book is much, much more dangerous than a man without a book. The police lack the capacity or the subtlety they would need to understand such fine nuances. The police know nothing about books. So sitting ingenuously, simplemindedly under a tree with a book open on your lap is something that, for a policeman, doesn’t count as a threat.
He can master his fear with strong doses of patience and concentration. Long ago, Valéry taught men that everything can arise from endlessly waiting. Calm, humbleness, endurance: excellent weapons against the Hidden Enemy. His terror seems to disperse, thanks to The Princess of the Ursines, thanks to the poems and songs that he memorizes and repeats like obstinate prayers, and thanks to a slightly idiotic half-smile that he attempts to keep fixed on his lips.
Another good ruse is the false rhythm he forces on his body, a rhythm that is the opposite of the rhythm his body demands: utter slowness, a calculated slowness in his every gesture, since a fearful person can never be a calm person.
He also learns to run away from the police. In this case, the key is not to run away from them, but to face them. Victorio has discovered that a policeman’s poor temperament is only prepared to pursue someone who is running away, never someone who stays and faces him. Therefore, whenever he sees a pair of policemen (and in the Havana of the year 2000 this happens every minute, every second, every fraction of a second), he goes straight up to them and asks them what time it is, or asks for some complicated directions, or greets them — simply, calmly, amiably, not smiling too broadly, because any kind of excess is suspicious.
He thus becomes the man-who-has-nothing-to-fear.
Havana is not only the city of columns, or the city of palaces: it is also the city of collapsing buildings. It offers multiple, varied ways for buildings to collapse, and not precisely along the lines of Rome. Its ruins aren’t like the Coliseum, which announces man’s march through History; quite the contrary, these are ruins that announce History’s march over men.
Victorio would like to imagine that there is some essential difference between the ruins of the Thermae of Caracalla and the ruins of the Campoamor Theater, or the Hotel Trotcha, or the steam baths that existed, in Havana’s distant and glorious era, at the intersection of Águila and Neptuno.
If there is too much of anything in the city, it is collapsing buildings.
On Calle Salud, behind the Church of La Caridad del Cobre, there is something extraordinary. Years ago, they say, this was the headquarters of a Chinese association. No one who walks down the sidewalk or drives by in the street could tell, since the municipal authorities have managed to hide it conveniently behind enormous posters that surround it and that declare, in huge and elaborate red and black lettering, that the party (the communist and therefore the only party) is immortal. Nonetheless, if you walk around to the side that faces Calle Campanario, you can find a narrow little door, which you have to crawl through on hands and knees. During the day, the collapsed building is full of people searching for plumbing items, toilets, sinks, doors, windows, old furniture, iron fittings, tiles from Seville, and bricks that might come in handy.
On the walls that are still standing, you can see Chinese characters and melancholy drawings of lakes with seagulls flying overhead, as well as images of the Great Wall, Buddha, Confucius, and impossible visions of Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu. Victorio likes the rays of light, defined beautifully by the dust, that descend in every direction from the enormous holes in the ceiling, like in one of those affected, pretentious, “poetic” theater pieces that can still be seen in a few tiny theaters in Havana.
Despite the time that has passed since the ruin housed an association of former coolies, you can still find books here (in Chinese, of course), red paper lanterns, and torn photographs of the August Empress and the Forbidden City.
There’s no place left to settle here. The only space that has miraculously kept its ceiling intact is the property of Fung the Chinaman. Victorio guesses that Fung must be a centenarian: any Chinaman who’s a little bit old looks like a centenarian. At night few people venture into the destruction, and it is fairly easy to find the Chinaman, due to the fact that he uses an oil lamp for lighting, and it is the only light among those shadows. Fung is accustomed to reading old newspapers that disappeared long ago — ancient, yellowed papers that he later discusses with anyone who dares enter his hideaway. “I think Thiers is the man that France needs,” he declares in his awful, comically accented Spanish, full of L’s and spoken in a tone signifying humbleness and self-satisfaction in equal measures, an odd tone in this year 2000 of our era, the year of the one hundred twenty-third anniversary of the death of Thiers. Then he smiles, perhaps apologetically, and exclaims, “Anna Pavlova will be in Havana next month.”
On some occasions, he sings the virtues of the cannon Big Bertha; on others, he laments these same virtues. He complains about how the August Empress has forgotten her people in Cuba, and he expresses his sorrow over the death of Madero, “the good Mexican,” he says, and the death of that poor woman, María Guerrero, an excellent actress, yes, sir, an excellent actress, though I’ve never seen her acting. He is excited by the apparition of the Virgin of Fatima, insisting, If the Virgin appears it is for a reason. He raises a professorial finger and continues: “On one hand, a group of heretics, the devils known as Bolsheviks, have taken power in a barbarous country; on the other, and to counteract the devil’s determined action, in a small city in Portugal — a barbarous country, like all the countries of Europe, and at the same time one of the most beautiful and saddest countries in the world — She appears, all goodness and love.”
Evidently Fung the Chinaman is no longer a Confucian or a Taoist, but has converted to Catholicism.
Old newspapers are all you can see in Fung’s room. The old man sleeps over them, cooks over them, becomes sad or desperate or calm over them, and pisses and craps over them. Newspapers, fragile and yellowed, that can fall to pieces if you look at them too hard. And crumble they will; but the strange odor of old paper, of sadness, of rancid soup, of dejection, of urine and shit, does not dissipate, nor will it ever dissipate, even if the building comes crashing down with the first passing hurricane, as very soon it no doubt shall.
The only door that leads to the rest of the ruined building is likewise lined with newspapers. There are no windows. There never were: the Chinese who mistakenly came to Cuba have always felt cold. Victorio looks into every corner and wonders how he can breathe in that cavern.
As if he could read his thoughts, Fung the Chinaman explains: “I’m so old that just a bit of oxygen is enough to keep me from dying completely; I’m so old that my sweat glands have dried up; I can’t tell hot from cold; and besides, son, you should bear in mind that old age is called the winter of life, so if you are idiotic enough to live a hundred years, if you are capable of such pointlessness, you will understand what I mean: you will think you are walking through Siberia or some such place, exposed to wind and weather and snowstorms. Old age is the only winter that comes with no hope of spring.” And, perhaps to give his words legitimacy, he wraps himself in blankets, pulls down his straw hat, rubs his hands and holds them to his cheeks, whic
h are as old and yellowed as the newspapers, and much smoother.
There is something about Fung the Chinaman that attracts Victorio, and that, perhaps for the same reason, frightens him. The Chinaman seems as crazy as he is wise. Victorio cannot deny it: nothing scares him more than the wisdom born from having lived too long, maybe because that kind of wisdom cannot be debated.
The Chinaman’s voice rises sadly in the night and the ruins to prophesy: “There’s going to be war, son, don’t you doubt it, there’s going to be war,” and he displays a photograph of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife surrounded by strict protocol, leaving the city hall of Sarajevo.
Word is out that one day recently an asylum for the mentally handicapped has fallen down on the street formerly called General Lee, today known as Calle 114, near the Military Hospital in Marianao. Victorio runs there as if by command. Fortunately there were no victims to mourn. Alerted to the dire state of the construction, the public health authorities had time to evacuate the patients. At the moment Victorio arrives, columns of dust are still rising. One of the most relevant traits of a building collapse (as anyone who has occasion can and should confirm) is the length of time that columns of dust continue to rise. The stones take seconds to hit ground; the rising dust lasts for weeks, months, years. Dust, which veils one’s vision, blurs buildings and objects, and transforms reality with charming decadence, is something to be very thankful for in a city where the sun is a crude divinity.
Victorio thinks he has at last found a ruin where he can shelter himself. He has reached it ahead of the rest, he has the privilege of surveying it before the other bums, and he gets the advantage of seeing the architraves that have managed to hold up, the obstinate columns that no longer support anything, the cracked, stained walls painted in two tones, two shades of gray, as is appropriate in an asylum for the mentally ill. He finds chamber pots, sheets in earthy hues, first-aid tools, torn pajamas, soup pots, framed photographs of heroes who look grim (like all heroes), false teeth, coins, pillows, tools, chains, hammers, axes, and Cuban flags. One of the rest rooms has escaped the catastrophe. Nearby, he discovers a room, also intact, with the remains of an iron bed. Victorio comes to believe that this is his room, that the divinity (whoever that may be) has at last granted him a place to stay. At least he won’t have to sleep in the open.
He would rather not use the iron bed, for he is revolted by the urine-stained mattress, the fiendish smell of so many things given off by the visible cotton batting. That is why he spreads out the brightly colored beach towel, the very one that his intuition made him grab on the day he set fire to all his possessions. He clasps the key that dangles around his neck. He is happy, utterly happy. He could swear to it.
For a few days and a few nights, he is the king of the rubble. His happiness wakes him up and gets him outside every day before sunrise.
He makes sure no one discovers that he is living in the collapsed building. He strolls far away from the Military Hospital, because he hates hospitals, hates doctors and nurses, as well as cotton balls and the smell of chloroform. He hates anything that reminds him of illness and death.
He walks towards the San Alejandro Art Academy. He lingers on the benches around the Finlay obelisk. He played here as a child. Near the place where the ninety-year-old Doña Juana caused a devastating fire on the thirty-first of December in 1958. This is the same spot where, days later, Papa Robespierre brought him to see the rebels entering the Columbia barracks. “I want you to see the beginning of History,” exclaimed Papa Robespierre, lifting him onto his shoulders, brimming with joy. “You, son, you’re being called to be a protagonist in this new, immortal chapter of our country.”
Victorio never saw the rebels. He saw nothing, no one. He remembers briefly, very briefly, seeing the water reservoir of the main barracks turned into flames by the light of the sun. The street was swarming. Crowds ran and shouted, and light, so much light, seemed to be escaping from the enormous water tank, forming luminous waves that erased reality. Gathered into the metal walls of the cistern, the sun dazzled him. He closed his eyes then, so that if you talk with Victorio about the first two or three days of January, the days when Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos entered the Columbia barracks, all he can recall is the kaleidoscope of light, the burst of fireworks that the sun creates in your eyes when it forces you to close your lids quickly.
He goes to watch the kids playing baseball on the playing fields of the Marianao institute; later, at lunchtime, he passes by the courtyard of a fat black woman, who is always smiling, always enjoying herself, and who goes by the name Alhelí, with whom he never exchanges a word. Alhelí usually leaves him a plate of food on the courtyard wall, and then disappears, while she discreetly sings,
Dicen que no es vida
ésta que yo vivo…
They say this life I’m living
ain’t no life at all…
in an excellent, mannish, extremely subtle voice, like some Freddy escaped from the remote past, from some distant cemetery or the pages of a wonderful novel. On the plate, which Victorio’s voracity licks clean, he leaves behind a slip of paper with the word “Thanks.”
*
He strolls past the houses in the Buen Retiro neighborhood, where social climbers once lived and where you can still see Gothic castles and Venetian palaces in ludicrously small scales. Nevertheless, the truth be told, Victorio loves wandering through these streets and passing by the gardens of these architectonic monstrosities. This neighborhood has been sanctified by his childhood memories. As a little boy he thought that the house of Maxima the Doctor Lady — an awful reproduction of the palace of Sans Souci that Frederick II of Prussia had built for himself in Potsdam — was the very height of elegance. Victorio’s innocence kept him from noticing the poor quality of the chinaware, the scant virtue of the imitation rooms. He did not realize what horrors were committed by the fatuous tapestries that covered the walls, and he was dazzled by the cheap Imitations of palace furniture that were crammed Into miniscule salons lined with fictitious marble.
He tries to justify himself to himself; he tells himself that everything in life is relative, that for someone who does not have the good fortune to walk by a legitimate Gothic castle, an ersatz grotesquerie may suffice. Holding on to the hand of his sister Victoria, who in turn held the hand of La Pucha, Hortensia, his mother, he used to walk through the Buen Retiro neighborhood on the way to the house of Maxima the Doctor Lady so that she could auscultate his lungs, which were inflamed by the dust, the humidity, and the perverse sea breezes of Havana. Victorio-as-a-child thought, ingenuously, that he was being given access to elegance. He passed through exclusive areas that were forbidden to him, that he was only allowed to glimpse, for a limited time, on mornings of asthma attacks, allergies, fevers, and illnesses.
The laughable palaces of Marianao possess a noble side for Victorio. The feeble columns, the ill-formed lions at the doors, the sad pointed arches, the deceitfully studded doors, the garages in which it is doubtful any car could fit: all this, as deceptive as it may have been, sends him back to unknown pleasures, to a way, to a quality of life that plunges him for several days into melancholy.
He hates hospitals, but he has discovered that the Military Hospital is another good place to get fed. Near the new apartment buildings that look out over the Zamora neighborhood, they have constructed a new emergency clinic. There you will also find the custodians’ cafeteria, a large gray hall — gray because of the color it is painted, but also because of its squalor, its filth, its foul odors. It has long gray granite tables, rows of gray granite benches, and in the door, the rusty rim of a truck wheel, which is used as a bell to let the workers know lunch is served. Around noontime the wheel rim, or bell, is tolled, and the hospital sweepers form a line. Victorio has managed to blend in with them, and the woman at the door, a blond with ribbons in her hair who weighs in at four hundred pounds and makes up her face with a vengeance, fans herself and sweats, sweats and fans herself, talks about
herself incessantly, and never notices (or prefers not to notice) that he doesn’t have a lunch coupon.
Not that the food is any good; it is, rather, a horror: rice with small black pebbles, unseasoned porridge that hasn’t been heated properly, boiled plantains served cold, and on holidays, greenish scrambled eggs.
“It’s true,” Victorio tells himself, “better bad than nothing; this is no time for daintiness; it’s a matter of survival, of keeping myself on my feet as long as I can manage.”
Around eleven in the morning Victorio is walking across the large park of this stony, unmerciful Mussolinian hospital, built by Fulgencio Batista (one of the incarnations of the Eternal Tyrant) during his term as commander-in-chief of the army after the coup of September 4, 1933. The edifices built by tyrants endeavor to be as solid and everlasting as their notions of themselves. Victorio cuts through bushes that have been given military haircuts, and suddenly he sees a man dressed in many colors, riding a bicycle with a single wheel, some kind of celeripede constructed of crude aluminum. Victorio remembers him immediately it is the bizarre clown he saw dancing on the props that shored up and united the old Royal Palm Hotel and the building where he used to live, there on Calle Galiano. Here comes the clown again, balancing on a one-wheeled bicycle while singing in a tenorino voice.
The peace and quiet of his improvised room in the old mental asylum prove ephemeral, as is always the case with happiness. Victorio’s problem is not with the days but the nights, and of all the mortal sins, lust is definitely the one that has put its mark on those nights. As soon as the sun’s weak rays begin to retreat back toward the crevices through which they have managed to filter, the ruins start filling with the comings and goings of anxious shades. The collapsed building is peopled with blurred human figures — errant, desperate figures that search yearningly for one another, as if the body were the only possible cause for so great a disturbance. The voices do not matter, the gazes do not matter, it matters even less what is behind them: all that matter are the bodies.
Distant Palaces Page 6