“Good afternoon,” says the clown. His voice has a lovely tenorino timbre that contradicts the centenarian age of his face, the emaciation of his tiny body, his wrinkled hands, like those of an aged child.
Victorio replies with a “Good afternoon” that almost sounds like a plea for help.
“You’ve had a good rest,” the old man states, “and you certainly needed a lot of rest. Listen, friend, you fell down when you got to the corner of San Rafael and Belascoaín, and if I hadn’t reached you in time I think you might have hit your head fatally against the curb. I though you were drunk at first, though your breath didn’t smell of alcohol.”
“I never drink, but I was worn out, or hungry.”
“Yes, your breath didn’t smell like alcohol, but it didn’t smell like anything else, either, except a cavern, an empty stomach; your mouth was like a cave that even bats wouldn’t dare to enter. I remember that I called you many times, and many times I heard the echo of my voice in the hidden corners of your innards.”
Victorio can’t help bursting out laughing. “How did I get here?” he asks as soon as his laughter allows him.
With outlandish seriousness, the old clown puts the oboe away in its case and asks, in studied tones, “Isn’t it enough for you to know that you did get here, that I let you sleep in the same recamier where Nijinsky, the greatest-enemy-of-the-law-of-gravity, once slept, that you traveled through your dreams for, I don’t know, eight, nine days, as long as you must have gone without sleeping?”
“I’m grateful to you,” replies Victorio.
The clown and the images that multiply him shake their heads. “No, no, son, there’s nothing to be grateful for. Never thank me, understand? But tell me, what is your name?”
“Victorio,” he replies, ashamed, as always.
The clown does not seem surprised by the odd name and asks no questions. “Mine is Fuco, Don Fuco. Well, you understand, my name isn’t Don Fuco, but Don Fuco is what I’m called.”
They walk past the screens. They head in among the remains of the orchestra seating. “How do you like it?” shouts the clown. “This is my kingdom, as you can see. Being a disciple of Baudelaire, after all, I like to surround myself with a lovable pestilence. I’ve been living here for years and I don’t think there’s anyone happier in the world.”
“I never thought there could be a place like this anywhere in Havana,” says Victorio.
“Because you don’t know Havana. You’re too young to know how many mysteries this terrifying city conceals.” He makes a face that could signify terror or disgust, either one.
“Do you believe that’s so?” and when he asks the question, Victorio involuntarily reproduces the clown’s grimace.
“Believe? Not at all, I don’t believe anything. I know it, I’m positive! There’s no city so deceptive, my friend, as this hell we inhabit.”
“What other cities do you know?” asks Victorio.
“None, just Havana, and if you want me to be sincere, that’s enough and more than enough for me.”
They’ve reached the stage. Don Fuco sits on the proscenium and looks around in satisfaction. Victorio remains standing, fascinated by the brilliant blue teardrop on the cheek of this aged Pierrot. “Didn’t you ever want to travel?”
“Never. Do you want to know why? Simple! God, Mother Nature, or that Who-knows-what out there, made me be born in Havana; if I had gone on to Paris or New York, and had strolled along the Champs-Elysées or Fifth Avenue, what would have become of me when I came back? Tell me: I would have found that I was living in a small, crude city of no great consequence, a city with little history and too many pretensions. Out there, you’ve got Rome or Florence, where travelers are left gaping at the sight of Renaissance or Baroque buildings; no one would stop to look at a nineteenth-century building, but Havana never had a Renaissance, and our stones were so hard that they didn’t allow for a very Baroque Baroque, so nineteenth-century is as far back as we go.”
He pauses, sighs sadly. “So what would have become of me when I came back? I would have realized that the gods hadn’t smiled on me; no, my friend, no, I think it’s much better to discover the beauty this poor city of mine has to offer, rather than set out to find the beauty that others before me have discovered in the great cities. If I go see a performance of Rigoletto in La Scala of Milan or in the Vienna Opera, how could I return to these ruins? How would I have the nerve? Tell me, my boy, how would I have the nerve?”
Don Fuco massages his bare feet. “I’m tired, by God and all the devils. I don’t think I can keep on going. I need a little Chinese ointment for my poor feet.” He touches his chest with a gesture of helplessness and whispers, “Today I did the wicker basket routine. For me it’s a tour de force now to curl myself up in a ball, turn myself into nothing, get into the basket, and make it dance to the ‘Polovtsian Dances’ from Prince Igor. I get out of breath, my heart stops, my blood suspends its circulation, my kidneys jump up all the way into my throat, and I am constantly overcome by the certainty that this will be the last time I’ll be able to make myself so small that I can get into a basket made for storing vegetables. I’m old, my boy: very, very old. How old am I? A thousand, two thousand years, I think I must be at least that old. There are some days, like today, when I think I’m a survivor of infinite disasters, and it seems to me that I’m already returning along every road, that I’ve already experienced everything there is to experience, that I’ve seen and understood everything there is to see and understand, and everything there isn’t to see or understand. I know my fate has been to live to see the triumph of mediocrity and bureaucrats, and to outlive the failure of the great enterprises of men, and there’s nothing else, let me tell you, there’s nothing else but that, the rest is silent. A long time ago I came to an incredibly important conclusion, I concluded that…”
The muttering dies down, turning into total silence. Victorio continues to be obsessed by the blue teardrop on the Pierrot’s cheek. The light filtering down through the ceiling forms rings on the boards of the stage; and it softens, you can almost measure the way the light is losing intensity.
The clown doesn’t seem to care about the arrival of night. “Today I went too far, I never should have danced inside that basket. It was too much, I overdid it.”
Sitting on the proscenium, next to the motionless clown, like a marionette, Victorio inquires, “Why did you do it? Why did you dance inside the basket?”
Silence settles on the ruins of the Pequeño Liceo of Havana, with that special character that silence has amid ruins. Victorio comes to realize how far away, how far apart, how separate he is from the city. None of its endless rude noises reach them, nothing that is happening out there disturbs the peace of the devastated theater, as if the theater, and those within it, were floating in a spaceless space, an illusory dimension on top of the illusory island in the illusory continent on the illusory planet.
The lights work (twelve bulbs total) around the dressing-room mirror. The clown, minus his Pierrot outfit, dressed now in a green plush bathrobe and an ancient, ridiculous cap (from a production of The Merchant of Venice, he says, in which, he explains with a smile, he played an extraordinary Shylock), sits down before the illuminated mirror. He takes a long look at himself, concentrating on his old face, on his faded, watery eyes, and perhaps on the blue teardrop on his cheek. With a rapid gesture he tears off the Shylock cap: uncovering a gleaming bald pate, with a few sparse locks of indefinite color. His head is large and pear-shaped. He has the wide, domed forehead of someone who thinks and remembers much, the head of someone who has lived longer than expected.
He sticks his fingers into a jar of cold cream and, massaging his face with his fingers, uses it to remove the makeup. The labyrinth of wrinkles becomes more and more visible with each layer of makeup the cold cream takes away, until all that remains in the mirror is a corrugated, pathetic little face with miniscule eyes blurred by opaque clouds, and thin, colorless lips that betray his body’s an
emia and the lack of calcium in his yellow-green teeth.
“Time,” he exclaims, “what’s happening to me is time,” and he makes a face at the mirror that cannot help but make you laugh. “I’m eternal, Victorio. Can you imagine what a horror it is to live forever? I don’t know if anyone has ever been punished so hard.” He rests his chin on his interlaced hands, leaning his elbows on the makeup table, and asserts, in his lovely tenorino voice, “Sometimes memories of the Roman Empire come to me, of the spread of the Goths, the French Revolution, the War of the Roses; I could swear I’ve met Galileo somewhere, and Mazarino, and Goethe, and I know I enjoyed myself in the brothels of Byzantium and the joints of New Orleans, and suffered under Napoleon, Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin, Machado: they’re all one and the same, because, even though we thought that Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Machado died years ago, that’s not true, they didn’t die, that’s just a supposition — it’s what you think and what I understand, ingenuous as we are. We refuse to understand that the Tyrant is immortal, the Tyrant is reincarnated whenever he wants, in whatever body and voice he wants, that wizard, that dog, that Malignant One: he’s reincarnated in every man who loves power, and when I suffer from these attacks of eternity, like today, and start thinking that I’ll never find any rest, I get an urge to lie down on the ground like that character in Melville, and shout to everybody, to each and every one, ‘I would prefer not to!’”
The clown is now an insignificant little old man staring at himself in the mirror. And then, as if he were making fun of himself, of this deplorable image, he lights up the mirror with another mocking grimace, and stands up with difficulty, bent over, taking short steps, like someone who can no longer bear the weight of life.
The clown lights a thick taper of yellow wax, stuck in a metal candlestick. He asks, “Would you like to drink some orange juice?”
Night is beginning to fall. The dressing room has tall, narrow, elongated windows with blue panes, thanks to which the sifted light of dusk creates a fictional atmosphere.
“The only value to be desired is that of artifice,” says the clown, while reaching into a cabinet for a crude glass with red lettering that reads el ron de cuba, and setting it down on the small makeup table. Then he takes out two glasses made of amber crystal, perhaps from Murano. “Well, of course, it’s Murano; it isn’t likely you could find any other crystal like this. It comes from the glass furnaces on that island, that lagoon and those marshes,’ and he takes out a pitcher, too, which he fills with cool water. While he pours the water into the crude glass with the lettering, he sings in his well-timbered tenorino voice,
Anywhere out of the world…
and he hands Victorio the ugly glass that holds the water, and orders, “Drink!”
And Victorio drinks the cool water.
Then the clown pours the water from the crude glass into one of the elaborate amber crystals that seem to be from Murano, and again orders, “Drink!”
And Victorio drinks the water, which now, in the new, ornate, elegant glass, is no longer water, but luscious, thick, delicate orange juice. Without realizing that he is trying to get all the enjoyment he can from the freshness and sweetness of the oranges, Victorio cannot help closing his eyes. For one brief moment he forgets about the clown, about Nijinsky’s dressing room, and about the theater. The moment is brief, but no less intense, for all that. He forgets about himself. The great reality, or rather, the great truth is the juice of the orange.
The clown places the empty glass on the makeup table. He asks, he orders, “Come with me!”
Is it night already? The stage looks like a black cage. It is transformed by the light from the taper in the candlestick.
“There are not many people who know that this theater existed, exists, in Havana, and even fewer know who might have been its owner — what man, or woman, had the idea of constructing this hidden wonder. You, my boy, must no doubt be thinking of one of the great Cuban families, Gómez-Mena, Falla-Bonet, Bacardí-Bosch… A crass mistake! Those distinguished lineages had nothing to do with the whimsical little theater. What happened was much stranger, more like a fairy tale, to tell you the truth. At the turn of this century, on a pleasure trip to Havana — which wasn’t really a pleasure trip, but a journey of star-crossed love — a Russian beauty arrived here: the young, wealthy princess Marina Volkhovskoy, part poetess, part painter, part violinist, and all adventurer, who dedicated long hours to writing romantic verses, or painting in pastels, or playing the Tyrolean Steiner that her father had given her for a birthday present. I mentioned star-crossed love, and I think all great loves are star-crossed, no? Because, ay! my boy, what happened was that, on one birthday, the princess met a god. The god appeared in a concert hall in the unexpected form of a forty-year-old black dandy, timid yet arrogant, who could handle a violin like no one else. He was a god who came from Cuba, named Claudio, married to a German noblewoman, and employed as a chamber musician by Wilhelm II.
“So what happened to Marina when she saw and heard him? Just what should have happened: Princess Volkhovskoy was overcome, paralyzed, couldn’t even applaud his brilliant execution of the Paganini theme. That night she couldn’t sleep, nor any of the following nights. Every night the unlucky princess would go to the concert hall and take the same seat, the last one on the far left of the first row, ready to contemplate the black violinist’s profile, perfect in so many ways, and listen to his execution of the concerts, perfect in every way. Then she would return to her palace, lock herself in her studio, and rehearse and rehearse again polished pieces by Tartini, Francoeur, Wieniawski, and even Johann Sebastian Bach’s Chaconne. Dawn always found her with rings under her eyes, trembling, still playing.
“The next-to-the-last night, she did something daring: she stood through his entire concert, applauded the violinists own Barcarolle without discretion, and after the final chord, she went up to him, presented herself: I am Princess Volkhovskoy, speaking timidly yet arrogantly. She passed him a note and went back to her palace to wait, in the certainty that he would come. And indeed, the following afternoon the butler opened the great front door to let in the surprisingly black dandy, whom he led down a long corridor to the princess’s studio. The violinist Claudio Brindis de Salas, black, from Havana, baron and cavalier of the Legion of Honor, at home in the houses of kings, entered with a distinguished gait, but he could not conserve his elegant indifference for long, for there stood the Russian beauty completely nude, executing the Barcarolle without committing the slightest error. Amazed, without wasting a second, Brindis de Salas took off his own clothes, graciously picked up his violin, and accompanied the young woman in what must, beyond any doubt, have constituted (pity no critic was there; even more of a pity, there was no photographer) one of the most impassioned duets in the history of the violin.”
Don Fuco looks around with half-closed eyes and lifts the candlestick, which projects gigantic shadows.
“Brindis returned to the Weimar kingdom. Princess Volkhovskoy packed her bags and went to Moscow, crossed the fields of Poland, the Black Forest, entered Switzerland, slept in Lugano, and arrived in Genoa, where she booked passage on a Greek schooner bound for the Antilles, reaching Havana several weeks later, where, horrified, she rented a room in the Plaza Hotel, amazed at the omnipresent heat, the intermingling of riches and putrefaction, the surprising sizes and colors of the flies and mosquitoes, the number of black dandies walking around the streets (she had come to believe that she was the only lucky woman), the kinds of stench that almost seemed like perfume, as well as the perfumes that smelled more like foul odors, the good and bad effluences that flowed from houses, from sewers, from coaches, from markets; she was surprised by that mixture of sumptu-ousness and destitution, the exquisiteness always bordering on fright-fulness, the frightful quality that always surrounds splendor like a flock of vultures. She learned Spanish (a tender, divine language, a language of prayer, full of nuances) as quickly as she could, and set herself to finding out about that city, which she
didn’t understand, which she never understood, and which revolted and seduced her with equal delirium. She returned to Cuba every year, finally buying a lordly palace in El Vedado, around La Chorrera, near the sea (neither the Malecón seawall nor the avenue existed then, just the coral reefs and the sea), between the Hotel Trotcha and the Loynaz mansion. And in 1917, the year the Bolsheviks seized power, Princess Volkhovskoy, a White Russian after all, a cultured woman of good taste, a close friend of Nabokov, decided never to return to her homeland, and she gave thanks every day to Havana and to the Lord for the horrors from which she had been saved.”
The clown moves the candlestick, passing it in front of Victorio’s face. Staring with a long, deliberate look, he observes the vacillation of the flame.
“And so, my friend, in honor of her passion for the arts in general and for Brindis de Salas in particular, my friend Marina Volkhovskoy gratified her desire to build this shrine, where she and I were the only audience, together with an occasional guest, an occasional niece, the occasional ten or twelve Oblate nuns (her favorites), and, years later, with Monsignor Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, who at the time was not yet a monsignor but an educated young man, a voracious reader, a music lover, and a kindhearted student at the Seminary of San Carlos and San Ambrosio. Since the princess didn’t like sharing her interests with anyone except for me (being her best friend) and Monsignor de Céspedes, she preferred not to let anyone know about her flow of riches, and she arranged it so that this theater never had a theatrical facade — no marquee, no outward showiness, no grandiose entrance hall; a long hallway, an unassuming door, half-hidden steps,… and heaven!
Distant Palaces Page 9