Today the marvelous waitress at the August Moon, her hair even more riotous and redder than usual, with more colorful barrettes, fake flowers and fake rubies than ever, serves him the onion-and-Chinese-bean pizza with a smile and without being asked. But something unexpected happens. From the black depths where we imagine the ovens and cooks must lurk, a man’s voice shouts, “China, phone call for you,” and the marvelous waitress at the August Moon, the Chinatown pizzeria, disappears through a narrow door that Victorio had never noticed before. Taking the girl’s place is a toothless young man wearing a patch over one eye and a silk kimono. The changeover in the wait staff has caused a delay in service, and a small line has formed in front of the glass-lined lunch counter of the August Moon. The young man starts working quickly He serves food and collects payments without smiling, with expert, machinelike movements. And so he turns to Victorio with a tone of voice that attempts to be friendly without succeeding: “Fifteen pesos, buddy.”
“Right away,” says Victorio, startled. He puts the pizza down on the counter and starts rummaging through his pockets. He isn’t looking for money (he knows there isn’t any there); he does it to gain time, to see if the distantly Chinese, red-haired waitress might return.
Time goes by, the waitress doesn’t appear, and the toothless young man in the kimono looks at him through his single mistrustfully blinking eye. “Fifteen pesos, buddy,” he repeats in a more peremptory voice.
Victorio smiles the smile of an innocent or an idiot, sees a bicycle taxi ride by, has an urge to climb on board and run away, but what kind of explanation could he give to the bicycle taxi driver? To continue his strategy of gaining time, he asks, “What do you have to drink?”
The young man in the kimono rivets on Victorio’s eyes the steely stare of his uneven gaze, and unwillingly, reluctantly says, “Grape-flavored soda, and it isn’t cold, buddy,” and his voice comes out through his compressed lips in a furious hiss.
“Don’t you have any ice?”
“Of course not, where do you think you’re living? We’re not in Paris, buddy.” And he smiles a satisfied smile, for nothing excites a Cuban so much as reminding a fellow Cuban how bad life is and how far away Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, and New York are.
He isn’t really toothless, Victorio discovers; it’s just that his teeth are far too small. And he feels like explaining to the waiter that it should be easier to find ice in Cuba than enough grapes to make a soda. “Sure, give me a glass, what can you do! I’ve got to wash down this pizza.”
The young man dips the glass in a bucket of soapy green water, then rinses it in another green bucket of soapy water. From a bottle he serves the dark, purplish-brown drink. “Now it’ll be sixteen pesos, buddy.”
Victorio nods and makes a gesture with his hand that is intended to instill calm in the waiter; he sips the warm soda: sweet, very sweet, it tastes as much like peach as it does grape. “How’s La China?”
“Who’s China?”
“The waitress.”
“Her name isn’t China, her name is Tuti.”
“How’s Tuti?”
The waiter doesn’t answer. He is using a kind of bricklayers spatula to lift the pizzas from the pans and put them on pieces of paper — outdated bureaucratic forms that are being used as napkins — and begins to distribute them. An old man reproaches the waiter for not giving him a ham pizza. The waiter insults him and shouts that the old man asked for a Neapolitan. The old man demands respect, using the appropriate tone of voice, and tries to explain that he couldn’t have asked for a Neapolitan because he doesn’t know what a Neapolitan pizza is.
Victorio takes advantage of the confusion: he runs away. He has done it so quickly and unexpectedly that it is only when he reaches the corner that he hears the dreaded cry, “Stop, thief!”
Victorio forces speed from his legs, which are not very fast, but are very hard-pressed by fear. Instead of continuing along Zanja, he turns into one of the bordering streets, which is darker and, fortunately, more desolate. He enters one of the buildings that are so plentiful here, one of those constructed by the Catalan master builders. He runs precipitously up the stairs two steps at a time (the elevator, one of those ancient models that looks like a cage or a confessional, undoubtedly stopped working years ago). If his intuition hasn’t failed him, there should be a door leading to the rooftop terrace. A perfect silence accompanies him, and his feet barely touch the staircase steps, so as not to break the perfection of the silence. There is no light. On the last flight he stops running, since he now feels the power of invisibility. He discovers that he has lost the primitive bag with the photo of El Moro, the volume of Saint-Simon, the colored beach towel, in other words, the little bit of his history that he had kept. Only the key remains hanging around his neck. He climbs up slowly, terrified that all Havana will hear his pounding heart. His heart isn’t where it should be, but scattered among his temples, Adam’s apple, head, and the soles of his feet. The door to the terrace is closed with the wire of an undone clothes hanger. Victorio stands motionless, all his concentration on his ears: he is trying to decipher secrets and dangers from the silence that surrounds him. Apparently no one has followed him. No one could know where he is. He unties the wire and steps out into the night.
The indifferent calm of the breeze, the dark blue sky, the stubbornness of all these stars, the rooftops with their water tanks and weathered wooden shacks, the whole useless system of water pipes, and the other quite functional system of television antennas for entering into the world of soap operas and of having the world slip away with sweet swiftness. Victorio marches across the roofs, jumping from one building to the next. The rooftop path is another among the possible paths through Havana.
He climbs down the fire escape of a furniture store. He is standing in front of the funeral parlor on Zanja and Belascoaín, formerly Marcos Abreu. He is thinking that he’ll continue walking rapidly to the covered entrance of the Reina church, and just then he sees the clown appear, the same one he had watched dancing that distant morning on the wooden scaffolding that had barely supported the building where he once lived. It isn’t hard to recognize him, and it isn’t hard to figure out that this is the same clown: there couldn’t be two harlequins like this in the whole city of Havana. He’s wearing tails again, a top hat, except this time the color of the suit is a luminous silken yellow, and his hair, his wig, is jet-black. His makeup, very nicely done, seems immune to the night’s heat. His round nose is not red but black, creating an amusing contrast with his clothes.
The clown enters the funeral parlor.
Victorio follows him. In the vestibule he becomes disoriented. He has lost sight of the clown.
As luck would have it, there is only one chapel being used, and it is crowded. With some embarrassment, wrapped up in a timidity that gives him away, Victorio enters the chapel. Against the back wall, under the usual bronze crucifix, between two huge, theatrical candles (actually two electric bulbs in the form of candles dripping fake wax), he sees the gray coffin — poor-quality, decorated with flimsy little metal keys that open nothing and close nothing. By the coffin there is a line of armchairs, occupied by weepy women. A woman advanced in years, wearing an apron with a reproduction of a map of Sicily, serves coffee to another old woman, who is vigorously shaking her head no, and who takes the cup and drinks the coffee without ever ceasing to shake her head. Victorio is surprised by the old woman’s gray hair, snared in one of those sequin-studded nets that no one wears anymore.
The hum of conversation rises like a pagan chant; you can even hear inappropriate words. The heat is so sweltering you can’t tell if the people are crying or sweating. Most likely, they are crying and sweating with equal abandon.
Leaning against the glass window of the coffin, a young soldier weeps. Victorio thinks it ennobling to see a soldier weep, since it demonstrates the triumph of pain over impiety, the triumph of vulnerability over arrogance. A man, ready to kill, weeps before a woman who has died. Victorio com
es closer, realizing that you couldn’t call him a soldier yet. He’s just a cadet. Despite his youth, his features already show the hardness, or perhaps better said, the inevitable intransigence of the future soldier. There is something severe in the high form of his eyes, in his beautiful nose, in his straight mouth, in his large manicured hands, in his wide shoulders. The truth is, not even his sobs can distance him from the image he gives of fanaticism and intolerance. Victorio feels tempted to assert that he is crying for a dead man or woman (his mother, he supposes), and that he will put the same ardor into killing his fellow man.
Victorio looks at the corpse. It is a woman, a little over forty years of age, tactfully made up, tranquil, about to smile. She looks beautiful, despite the way dead people have of seeming like inconvenient objects. Through her half-closed eyelids shine two pale amber crystals. Her mouth splits open beneath the incapable coquetry of rouge lipstick. From her nose, thinks Victorio, any second now, a thin stream of blood will flow.
A drum roll. All in yellow, the clown appears. A dizzying apparition. In one hand, the top hat; with the other, he pulls roses from the hat. There’s no imagining how he can pull so many roses out of this little hat, much less how he is able to cover the gray coffin with flowers. And no telling whether the lights have really grown brighter or whether this is just a matter of suggestion. Everyone present presses back against the walls. The old clown looks like the caricature of an adolescent. He tosses roses. It is just a question of a few seconds, but it seems like an eternity; his presence lasts two, three seconds; then he disappears. The cadet, standing by his dead mothers coffin, manages to maintain his composure.
He is standing on the sidewalk, on the lookout for the clown, not really knowing why he is waiting for him or what he wants to do. He sees the clown leave the funeral parlor, sees him walk down the steps. He gets the impression that he is witnessing the apparition of some defeated divinity. The fellow leaving the funeral parlor in top hat and yellow tails isn’t the one who, an instant ago, looked like an adolescent, laughing, dancing, capering about and handing out flowers. He looks different. Smaller, thin as a reed, gnarled, sinewy, wrinkled, his back bent double as if he were carrying a great weight, worn down by his years, the clown walks down the sidewalk in short, exhausted steps. You’d almost say he wasn’t moving: that he couldn’t move forward.
Tuscan columns, Doric columns, Corinthian columns, Ionic columns. Made-up orders of columns. Smiling caryatids, frowning caryatids (comedy, tragedy). More columns, with art nouveau, art deco motifs. Solomonic columns. The remains of opera boxes with manneristic iron banisters and wooden hand railings with Greek, Roman, Byzantine decorations. Modernist scrolls. In the proscenium arch, the mixture of lion, goat, and serpent that form the Chimera, symbol of the glorious passions of the imagination. Next to the monster, beautiful Oshún levitates above her storm-tossed boat. The nine Muses hold the Virgin’s mantle aloft, while black footmen lift the Muses’ tunics. Busts of satyrs coexist with Isis and Buddha. A tiny gargoyle joins an angel. A nymph holds the noose for the Hanged Man of the Tarot deck. A mandrake is used in the birth of a small Belial.
Decorations by Tiffany and Lalique. Landscapes by Chartrand, Sanz Carta. Portraits by Romañach. Languid siesta scenes by Collazo. Portraits by Valderrama. In the friezes, grape leaves and olive branches alongside guava and chirimoya leaves, yagrumas, and palm trees. The lamps, the remains of lamps, range from the grand chandelier to unadorned lamps with solitary blue bulbs. Bowls in the form of mosques, with Islamic motifs. Six-candled candelabras, gigantic candlesticks.
Amid the destruction of the orchestra seating, a few seats can still be found in good order. No two chairs are alike. The upholstery is an intensely red moire, though its darkness might, perhaps, be a result of the years, the dust, the fly droppings, and the other catastrophes to which all things constructed by man are prone. The backs of the chairs are in the form of crowns, masks, triumphal arches, while the chair arms are lions’ claws simulating human arms, and human arms simulating lions’ claws. The only thing that all the chairs have in common is the carved initials M and V, interlaced.
Plain, somber, italianate, the stage may be much larger than it appears to the naked eye; you might say the boards of the stage have shown the greatest courage in withstanding the calamities of the climate, the years, and so many maggots. The tatters of the curtain reveal that it was made from the same moire as the seats. At the foot of the stage, a wooden pedestal supports a bronze bust of Jose Marti. Next to him: a set of century-old chains, like the ones the Spanish authorities once used in slave holds. Some backdrops and footlights are also still there, and you know that the lights exist only because of an excess of optimism; all that remains of them is their rusted skeletons.
Best of all, Victorio thinks, are the lavatories — perfectly preserved, with silvered mirrors, spotless glasses framed in bronze, unscathed stalls, luminous porcelain, and delicately embossed signs saying ladies, gentlemen, carved by some unknown artist, above doors made of pieces of precious wood, so precious that they still have the colors that pieces of wood have when they are precious. Behind the stage are the four dressing rooms, with their metal stars fixed to the doors, still able to reveal the glitter of sequins and glass beads.
Victorio has fallen asleep in one of the theater’s dressing rooms, the first on the left, the only one that is unlocked. The other three have been sealed with massive padlocks linked to strong chains.
He has slept like an angel, one of those total sleeps that one imagines are so like death must be, sleeps in which there are no vicissitudes, or colors, or people, or memories, or residues of the day, in which there is nothing at all but the very act of sleeping, of leaving your body and all it contains, soul and spirit, abandoned to such an utter rest that you are only blessed with two or three sleeps like this in your entire life.
He doesn’t know how long he has been sleeping: here’s another special trait of this beneficial sleep. When he wakes up and finds himself in a room full of mirrors and light bulbs, flowers and masks, walking sticks and hats, and clothes of many colors, he doesn’t think he has awakened but that he is just getting to the next stage of sleep, the most jubilant, no doubt. One of the pleasures of dreaming comes from its kinship with reality, just as one of the pleasures of reality derives from its kinship with dreams.
Music is what has awakened him, the playing of a flute. It sounds like a version for flute of “The Swan” by Saint-Saëns.
He has gotten up from the bed, actually a comfortable little antique recamier, and has walked around the ruins of the small, exquisite theater. He hasn’t found anyone playing a flute yet, and he has come to think that there are two separate places, which are, at the same time, the same identical place: Havana and the ruins of the theater. And he has concluded that, like most paradoxes, that of the separation between city and ruined theater is a paradox only in appearance. There is no real contradiction. In the most intimate truth about reality, isn’t this how things are, confused and unintelligible? You might argue that Havana derives from the ruins of the theater. Havana: a simple and enigmatic prolongation of this theater, known in an earlier era as the Pequeño Liceo of Havana, according to the spattered sign that is posted next to the dressing rooms. This impression seems to be the most mysterious and perhaps the most moving thing about it, for, given that it is nothing but the ruins of a theater, and a rather tiny one at that, probably built eighty or ninety years ago when the city had already been around for four centuries of epidemics, famines, ravages, and hardships, how can he possibly conclude that the city might have grown from the theater, around the theater, thinking of the theater, reproducing it in its street corners, walls, streets, parks, and buildings? Once you gain access to the ruins, you will inevitably imagine that you have entered the very heart of Havana. Victorio thinks of a hypothetical Genesis of the city in which it is written: In the beginning was the theater.
The sun’s rays penetrate the cracks in the peaked roof above the
stage. The sunbeams fall on the boards and stand out sharply, in varied, mysterious hues, incredible modulations that create varied zones onstage, circles and rings, well-defined spaces that no one would dare doubt were the work of expert lighting technicians.
From the orchestra seating, Victorio notices only two decorative items: a tomb on the far left, with a wreath of sepia-toned paper flowers and a wooden cross that reads Giselle; on the right, a white grand piano, which is not, properly speaking, a decorative item. In one leap, one single, agile leap, Victorio hops onto the stage. He doesn’t know whether his body is cutting through the sunbeams or being cut by them.
The music again. The same Saint-Saëns air, except that this time the music has dropped the polished agility of the flute, resounding instead with the blue stateliness of the oboe. The music seems to emanate from the old vestibule, back there, behind the frayed screens with country motifs.
Four clowns are playing four oboes. Clowns with curly mops of red hair, faces covered in white makeup, and a painted blue tear shining on each one’s cheek. The four clowns have concentrated expressions that imply nothing but exhaustion. Seeing Victorio through the mirrors, the four elderly men stop playing and raise their weary heads. Victorio experiences a sense of joy that seems much like comfort and trust. These aren’t four clowns or four elderly men, but a single old man dressed as Pierrot. An old man multiplied by the witchcraft of three glasses in three mirrors. The four are one, this one, the one and only clown. The same one who had danced across the timbers that once supported and united the old Royal Palm Hotel and the former palace on Calle Galiano; the one from the Military Hospital; the one he had encountered in the funeral parlor after running away when he stole a pizza in Chinatown.
Distant Palaces Page 8