Distant Palaces

by Abilio Estevez

  The nightmarish nights in the collapsed building on the street formerly known as General Lee reveal to him how versatile human tastes and needs can be. He sees fragile lads possessed by grotesque truck drivers, as well as grotesque truck drivers possessed by fragile lads; underclass mulattos together with white policemen; black athletes mated with Nordic-looking business executives; ethereal dancers articulated with rough butchers; pole-vault champions joined with playwrights in decline. The ruin is frequented by men of every social status: widowers, married men, bachelors, sterile men, men with children, revolutionary workers, varicocele sufferers, electricians, habitual vagrants, lawyers, lunatics, opera singers, pop music singers, chess players, ambassadors, transvestites, construction workers, paraplegics, sculptors, journalists, musicians, sugarcane cutters, waiters, lifeguards, composers, HIV-positives, gardeners, aviators. Bit by bit, they all put in an appearance at the ruin: men of every size, age, race, taste, family background, habit, religion, culture, social extraction, political and philosophical tendency (some of them, the majority — being normal, after all — are happily free of any political or philosophical tendency).

  Victorio begins to infer from all this that sex may be the only form of true democracy that can exist in the world. Or perhaps he reasons that it would be best to conclude that any revolution that boasts of being democratic should begin with sex.

  One morning at daybreak Victorio is accosted by a blond marvel who must measure at least six foot three. He looks like a Yankee marine, in the best sense of the words marine and Yankee, which is in the aesthetic sense; anyone would say that a whole government department had been created to select these handsome, coarse fellows, all the more handsome, the coarser they are. The marvel’s eyes are gray, his hair is storybook-yellow, his body is a wonder, for it is muscular yet refined and elastic, devoid of the stupid artificiality that comes from working out in the gym. His hard expression, that of an outlaw or a policeman (two sides of the same coin, either capable of turning into the other) makes him even more interesting to someone with aristocratic tastes. As always happens in such cases, his only visible imperfection makes the rest of his perfections stand out: the absence of one of his front teeth lends his smile a hint of ingenuousness and the same time makes it menacing; innocence allied with pitilessness yields the most longed-for and effective of aphrodisiacs.

  He stands next to Victorio and opens his fly. What projects forth from it into the half-darkness of the ruins is not any old member, but the bodily image of human jubilation. He doesn’t pee and he doesn’t turn his fierce gaze in any particular direction. Nor does he need to. Luckily no one has arrived yet at the ruin. Emboldened by an attack of mysticism that has much in common with Spinoza’s philosophy Victorio approaches him resolutely, like someone going to a long-awaited encounter with the divinity. Except, when he is about to take that profusion into his hands, the bugger knowingly puts his prick away, flashes his broken smile (which is not broken, but admirable), and says, “Come with me.”

  “Where to?” asks Victorio, his hopes raised.

  Without answering, he pulls out his wallet and shows a badge (ostensible or real): National Police. “A word to the wise…,” the bugger insists with a whistle that escapes through the gap in his front teeth.

  “Well, I’m not wise, and I don’t have to go anywhere with you,” Victorio replies, frightened.

  “Cut the bullshit, faggot, you’re going wherever I take you.” He grabs Victorio by the arm and forces him to walk in front. “Who’s ever seen a faggot with a will of his own? You’re coming with me to the police station right now.”

  Victorio offers resistance, so the policeman twists his arm. A sharp pain rises along Victorio’s whole arm, up to his shoulder and the middle of his back.

  “What’s the matter, mamita, don’t wanna go?”

  Victorio cannot keep the tears from welling in his eyes.

  Solicitously, the bugger smiles again, “All right, then, what’ll you give me in exchange?”

  “Nothing that could be worth your while,” Victorio swears, and he’s telling the truth: he can’t think of anything he might own that would hold the slightest attraction for this good old boy.

  “So you don’t have anything? Really? And what about that ring?”

  Victorio instinctively hides his hand. The sonofabitch is talking about the engagement ring that belonged to La Pucha, Hortensia, his mother: a massive gold betrothal ring studded with tiny legitimate diamonds, which she gave to him shortly before she died, begging him never to lose it. The ring has become so much a part of Victorio that he has forgotten about it, the way you might forget about your organs or your breath. “I can’t give it to you,” he says, or begs, imploringly, “it’s a keepsake of my mother, who’s dead.”

  “You don’t say? Fuck, you’re gonna make me cry!” taking up the hard tone again, he shoves Victorio. “Come on, you little shit of a queer, I’m gonna give you a keepsake of your dead mamita.”

  He pushes and shoves Victorio out of the collapsed building. The faggots begin arriving, but when they see the bugger shoving the poor fairy into the street they all disappear like shadows among the shadows of the ruins, transforming themselves into statues, into half-demolished walls, into cracked columns and broken doors. “Ah,” thinks Victorio, “the lack of solidarity of all queers in every ruin!”

  Victorio resists until he finds himself coming dangerously close to the police station. Then he yanks off the ring and hands it to the glorious delinquent. His beautiful smile, made more beautiful by the absence of his front tooth, is all the payment he gets for handing over his mother’s ring. Victorio then decides to collect his volume of Saint-Simon, his crude black bag, and whatever is left of his life, and move away from the ruins on Calle 114, the street formerly known as General Lee.

  Slowly Havana is cloaked by that dirty, dusty, diffuse veil of dejection, lethargy, and dismay that is dusk. The dark night (of the body and of the soul). Every time dusk falls, Havana begins its rapid process of disappearance. The electricity is cut off. Life seems to float suspended, or it really is suspended; it halts in time. All there is left to do is to wait.

  Voices are heard: “When will the lights come on?” and people’s spirits close up like withered flowers in a dry vase. Illusions flee — the few that still remain.

  The lights go out, and for a few seconds Victorio has the sensation that he has gone blind, until his pupils adapt. The darkness torments him and makes him happy. These are the times when he enjoys his greatest freedom. Since every single person in Havana suffers from the blackout, Victorio loses any particularity, any personal traits; he ceases to be who he is, transformed into a shadow puppet.

  However, he says that blackouts are the best times to pee and shit. In the middle of the shadowy thickness, out come the old newspaper, the invariable bushes, the abandoned building where some of the most peremptory and basic needs of the body are carried out.

  On many occasions he goes to urinate in an empty lawn or a demolished building, and he experiences the succinct happiness of a sudden humid sea breeze that caresses and awakens his sleeping prick. Fantasy immediately begins its onslaught. That is when torsos, thighs, hands, feet, mouths, necks begin their parade: a parade of images that does not have to be exotic, for it could be a dance movement from Baryshnikov’s best years, a close-up shot of a Catalan soccer star, the smile of a Mexican singer, the airborne body of a famous jumper, or perhaps nothing more (and this is already enough, perhaps too much) than a chest half-glimpsed through one of the windows that so abound in this city, impotently open to let in a breeze that refuses to circulate.

  His hand shakes out the last drops of urine; and it keeps on going, shaking it more than the case demands, moving into a search for a rhythm, back-and-forth-and-back-and-forth, slowly, very slowly, because, like all pleasures, this one has its torturous aspect, and because going slowly yields more opportunity for fantasy. His hand languidly moves his root. His other hand also moves la
nguidly, from nipples to neck, from mouth to testicles. One of his fingers, the middle one, slips down his ass and makes circles, circles, and pushes inside, opens the anus, continuing the circles, circles, more circles. Scenes of great tenderness come into his imagination, in which his body is not only being pleasured, but at the same time being loved.

  Victorio does not know why he has never felt loved. Since the time he woke up to sexuality he has known that his body served to relieve needs, to satisfy instincts, but never to awaken passions. Mirrors have never been able to explain to him the reason for such a conclusive fact. He has looked long at himself in them, but the damned mirrors have never sent him any message. Victorio cannot be characterized as beautiful, but he isn’t what you would call an ugly man either, making him, in this most important aspect of life, like the majority of people: that is, he stays on the mediocre sidelines where no one stands out. He even believes that some parts of his body are frankly beautiful, like his fleshy, feminine, rosy lips, which look like those of La Pucha, Hortensia, his mother; or his hands, which have always looked like an adolescent’s. He knows he has a dainty, shapely back. Of course he also has some ugly parts. His eyes, for example: small, dark, skittish; or his thighs and calves, which are too skinny. And how many ordinary, everyday people, who haven’t partaken of either ugliness or beauty, have conquered the love of another and experienced the supreme good of a meaningful caress?

  Victorio has never had the good fortune of going to bed with anyone. No man has bothered to tell him he loves him, or to give him the kiss that would tell him he needs him, he desires him, he loves him. No one has shown an interest in passing the back of his hand over Victorio’s cheeks. No one has gone to the trouble of dedicating an affectionate, desirous smile to him. No one has given him a flower, a compass, a sprig of orange jasmine. On the gloom-shrouded nights of the poor quarters of Havana, he carries on the lot of the lonely. He caresses himself, imagines great passions. He tells himself how much he loves him, and searches for pleasure at his own hand, in unfamiliar gardens and furtive nooks. He has no idea on how many walls and trees he has left the whitish marks of futile offerings.

  He does not know and could not have explained whether Havana has more windows than other cities; but he is tempted to maintain that no other place has so many windows left so audaciously open. Here is one of the characteristics, he deduces, that no one should overlook in this city: the omnipotence of windows, the brazenness of windows. No blinds, no shades, no curtains. The windows are genially open to the street, to the midsummer heat, to the slightest breeze, to the lack of any breeze, to the hope of a breeze, to the faith that a possible thunderstorm might mitigate the persistently sultry weather for some short time. Windows open to the impertinence of glances: not only the shameless glances thrown by passersby, but the no less shameless gazes of those who, from dark interiors, spy on those passersby.

  These windows are the best way the people of Havana have found to be ubiquitous, to live in several places at the same time. Your house shelters you, the walls support you, the roof protects you, doors and windows provide the necessary separation, distance, and independence. A house seeks privacy, the needed seclusion; but who ever said that the people of Havana want to close themselves off? They don’t like isolation, and they detest privacy. Some say, rightly or wrongly, that the sea provides more than enough exclusion and withdrawal. Anchored in the Gulf of Mexico, they explain until they tire of explaining, the Island itself symbolizes confinement on a grand scale, the sea as imprisonment and as disease.

  Yet, true as it is that one tires, one collapses in exhaustion from all this talk about the sea, seclusion, and insularity, others must be onto something as well when they insist that the people of Havana do not live in the world, that for the people of Havana, the world does not exist. The people of Havana live in Havana. Not even in Havana: they live in the four streets that make up their little neighborhood, and humanity is composed of fifty or sixty neighbors, and fifty or sixty more who occasionally walk through those broken streets, worn away by sea, sun, and cyclones, by the humiliations of time. These incandescent streets are enough to make your eyes burn.

  But wouldn’t it be better to abandon all these fruitless explanations? The truth is that the people of Havana are as avid for gazes as they are for wind and weather, and if they take shelter under a roof and behind walls, it is because the sun loves to torment Havana more than any other city. The house flees toward the street, or the street takes over the house. Windows have been one of the ways the people of Havana have found to be sure that they possess a space on the map made by cartographers.

  Victorio is also certain that there is no other city where you can see so many bodies through the windows. Men and women loll about naked, voluptuous, in front of windows thrown wide open. You walk innocently along the street and your eyes stray to the interiors. You observe the secrets of the houses and of everything that goes on in them. Not only the parade of naked and generally beautiful, gorgeous bodies, but also arguments, intimate conversations, adoring looks, painful moments, weeping, eating dinner, basic needs, festivity, mourning, cleansings with scented water, white flowers, powdered eggshell, and chinaberry branches.

  And listening. The pleasure of listening in. Victorio walks down the street hearing the music that blasts from the open windows. Turned up all the way, mixing in with the voices of conversations, arguments, prayers, jeers, incantations, and jokes. Laughter, riotous belly laughs. Any childishness is motive enough for a laugh.

  And not just watching and listening; smelling, too. The aroma of flowers wafts through the windows, of so many flowers, set out to please the saints and spirits (good and bad); the cheap perfumes used in cleansings; shrill colognes (Sietepotencias, Florida Water); buckets fall of ice water. And the smell of cooking.

  All that is missing is the touch. To caress the extraordinary surface of a person’s back, lustrous with sweat, to kiss those avid lips, lips trying to form words they never come to utter. You have to listen to conversations, enter the dance, sleep on the riverbank under a night white with stars, “make love” (a French metaphor — that is, a rational and therefore inadequate one), screw, shaft, get it on (Caribbean metaphors — irrational, that is, on target) on the Malecón seawall, facing the immense sea, with the horizon laden with hope; you have to live in the here and now, because tomorrow…

  Does anyone know anything about tomorrow? In a city where History has eliminated pleasures of every sort (with the dreadful solemnity that History always displays), could it be that anything — the slightest, the most puerile, the stupidest, the rudest thing — might finally turn into a delicate, urgent pleasure?

  *

  And then, there’s hunger. If Victorio is wandering in some distant district and can’t get to the lunchroom of the Military Hospital or to the courtyard of the black woman, Alhelí, where he can listen to Arsenio Rodriguez songs and Marta Valdés boleros and enjoy well-prepared, providentially seasoned food, he can spend whole days en bianco, without a bite to eat, “in Blanco and Trocadero,” as he says — and he is not far from the truth, since he has been hanging out around that famous street corner in recent days, walking around Colon (the neighborhood where whores used to live), around Prado, looking for anything he can put in his mouth. Sometimes he goes to a bakery on Calle O’Reilly, and the baker, a cheerful, jovial, fat mulatto who goes by the name Hierbabuena, gives him two or three loaves of bread. Victorio doesn’t know why Hierbabuena hands him a bag full of loaves, on sight, without his having to ask for anything or put on a face like he’s starving or start begging, he does it just like that.

  There is also a pizzeria in Chinatown. Properly speaking, it isn’t a pizzeria, just an improvised lunch counter: the august moon, Chinese pizza take-out, says the sign. The waitress, a young mestiza woman with a hint of Chinese ancestry, pretty, expressive, talkative, with curly red hair filled with colorful barrettes, fake flowers, and fake rubies, serves him the onion-and-Chinese-bean pizza with
a smile and without being asked, and she turns her back without waiting to be paid, forgetting about Victorio (pretending to forget him?). He hangs around for a few minutes: he doesn’t want to get carried away by his hopes, and then out of nowhere have somebody jab a finger at him and demand payment for the pizza. Victorio slowly saunters away, carefree, just in case, and puts on a “Who, me?” face, walking down Calle Zanja or up Calle Zanja (depending on your point of view), until the August Moon and its distantly Chinese waitress are lost to view. Sitting on one of the benches in the Parque de la Fraternidad, he makes short work of the onion-and-Chinese-bean pizza. His pleasure is not a whit different from what he would feel if he were to eat a fillet Chateaubriand accompanied by a good bottle of Ribera del Duero.

  The sensation that Victorio experiences when he crosses the hellholes known as Calle Dragones, Manrique, Campanario, Rayo, and San Nicolas to reach the Chinese restaurants is the same you would feel if you were to rise up from the depths of the sea. Sick and tired of darkness, what he needs is a bit of light. He takes Calle Zanja — wider, with a bit more traffic on it, and better lit than the rest. His objective would be to reach Calle Belascoaín, go up it to Calzada de la Reina, and sleep in the covered entrance to the Church of the Sacred Heart. Its excellent colonnade is very well protected, as if its boastful neo-Gothic architect had been benevolent enough to think of the homeless.