Distant Palaces

by Abilio Estevez

  “Yes, heaven, because Anna Pavlova, the Great One, danced The Dying Swan here for her fellow countrywoman, the bishop, and me (Monsignor Céspedes hadn’t yet begun to think about being born), just as Enrico Caruso sang the most outstanding pieces in his repertoire; and let me tell you, it turns out to be true what they say: ‘Hear Caruso and then die.’ And Sarah Bernhardt, that Frenchwoman who was so French, so very French, that she dared to insinuate that we Cubans were Indians in frock-coats’ just because we didn’t applaud her as loudly as she had expected: hysterical, like any good actress, and French to top it off! That Frenchwoman, as I was saying, performed a selection of her best roles for an audience composed of the princess and your humble servant, and the truth is, she was an excellent actress, with a style that would be considered old-fashioned nowadays, but very convincing, very convincing, which proves once more that true art is neither old nor young, neither old-fashioned nor modern nor postmodern nor transmodern nor cutting-edge nor post-cutting-edge, in the words of the syphilitic rhetoric of critics who have nothing to say It’s art, period. Did you know, Victorio, that Maria Callas did visit Havana?

  “Every version you might hear will tell you that the Diva never set foot on Cuban soil: since Havana belonged, as operatic territory, to her great rival Renata Tebaldi, the Cuban impresarios abstained from mortifying the latter by offering a contract to Callas, yet it is known that a beautiful, modest yacht anchored one morning in the Santa Fe moorage, where they’ve lately built what they call the ‘Hemingway Marina.’ The yacht was the Tosca, and it belonged to the fleet of the famous Greek shipowner, and the only passengers who disembarked were a young lady and a very elegant woman in a discreet, fresh blue dress, black kerchief on her head, dark glasses. A tugboat pilot who loved opera — don’t look surprised, that’s what life is like, my friend, a great confusion of paradoxes — the tugboat pilot and bel canto lover thought he recognized Callas in the goddess who was disembarking from the yacht, and he shouted ‘Maria!’ and she didn’t look at him. ‘Maria!’ the pilot shouted again, and she turned an undaunted mask towards him. ‘Maria?’ asked Maria with an ingenuous look, ‘Non, non, monsieur, vous vous êtes trompé…’

  “And she didn’t stay in any hotel: the enormous Cadillac that was waiting for her took her to a lovely chalet built of precious wood at a villa near the Baracoa beach, northwest of Havana. The villa belonged to Princess Volkhovskoy. Two days later, Maria, the Diva, the great Callas, gave a recital for the princess, and the princess had invited your humble servant, and Monsignor Carlos Manuel de Cés-pedes, and the Oblate Sisters, to accompany her in the Pequeño Liceo of Havana. The Cuban press never found out; the ridiculous world of society gossip never found out; we even hid the singer’s name from Huberal Herrera himself, the pianist who accompanied her. He guessed, of course; nobody else could have a soprano with that timbre, a voice that came out of no part of her body, a voice that could only escape from her soul: it had to be her voice. Her voice! Callas! Good old Huberal Herrera preferred to keep his mouth shut out of fear that no one would believe him, and except for the people who arranged her trip and the people who heard her in the theater, the only one who knew about Maria Callas’s Havana adventure was the great playwright and greater poet and storyteller, the magnificent giant of letters, Virgilio Piñera, who met her while she was walking along the Paseo del Prado, and without letting himself be impressed by her imperturbable expression and her vous vous êtes trompé — Piñera was as strong-willed as the Diva — he replied in his excellent French (which he pronounced, however, like a Haitian), Oui, madame, moi aussi, je me suis trompé, je ne suis pas Virgilio Piñera, le poète cubain, je suis Alfred Germont. . . , and, as Piñera told the story, Callas kept a serious look on her face but the Violetta Valéry hidden inside her awarded him with a smile.”

  The clown laughs. Uproariously.

  Victorio thinks, What odd teeth: yellow, or green, eaten away by time; they look like underwater fossils.

  The clown’s eyes disappear. His body shakes with laughter.

  “That wasn’t the only case, my boy, not even the most flagrant. Diaghilev, Karsavina, and Nijinsky also stayed in the chalet built of precious wood at the Baracoa beach (not the First City of Cuba, but the other Baracoa, that little collection of shacks on the outskirts of Bauta). Karsavina and Nijinsky put on two unforgettable perfor-mances of The Spectre of the Rose, and Princess Marina Volkhovskoy and I had both begged so fervently for two (two!) performances of Nijinsky’s classic piece. We watched the first one from front row center, but we were able to observe the second while hiding on the stage among the ropes, curtains, and decorations, because we both wanted to see how the genius, the greatest-enemy-of-the-law-of-gravity, made his great leap from a different perspective; and we wanted to see how the smile that the audience saw, the triumphant impassivity of his face, was transformed into a grimace of pain by the effort of that colossal, inhuman leap, an expression of anguish, of desperation; we wanted to see him fall, and see how all the others ran to him with concern and rubbing alcohol and damp towels. The princess and I were both interested in the splendor of genius. We were also attracted by its disagreeable dark side, its obstinate, demented side, without which its splendor would not be possible.”

  The clown raises his hands toward the candlelight. Victorio can see how his palms light up, full of wrinkled lines, hands that would drive the most brilliant palm reader insane. He can also see how the clown’s smiling face falls into darkness.

  “What fun we had with Anna Pavlova in her dressing room, which no one else used,” he continues in his lovely tenorino voice, muted by his memories. “We saw Anna Pavlova cry, shout, bite her hands, beat her head against the walls, just minutes before going out and doing a glorious Dying Swan with all the aplomb and assurance of what she was: not a great ballerina, but a goddess possessed by the dance! And this theater likewise welcomed Pablo Casals and Ella Fitzgerald, Antonin Artaud, Jean Marais (with Jean Cocteau), María Felix (with Jorge Negrete), and Michèle Morgan and Galina Ulanova and Celina González and Cora Vaucaire and Alicia Alonso and Miko Yana, the most famous of Japanese dancers.”

  “The locked door of the fourth dressing room, the first one go-ing from right to left, the one with the largest sequined-and-tasseled star, belonged to Anna Pavlova, the Great One, during the four visits she made to Havana.”

  Don Fuco knocks on the door of the second dressing room and says, “This is where Lorenzo Nadal, better known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, got dressed, prepared, and practiced. He was not only the best pianist in the world, the man who has understood and inter-preted the works of Chopin better than anyone else, but also the best Cuban landscape painter ever, even though no one knows him for his piano playing or for his brush… Lorenzo, as magnificent as he is modest!”

  At the third dressing room, he presses his ear against the door. “This one, in which you have put on such a virtuoso performance of sleep for the past several days, belonged, as you know, to Nijinsky during the times he visited us with Karsavina and Diaghilev.”

  He smiles sweetly. Victorio knows that the smile is not dedicated to him.

  “It doesn’t mean that they are the only ones who have used these dressing rooms, of course, yet on the other hand it does mean that they inaugurated them.”

  Don Fuco advances with difficulty toward the fourth dressing room, in front of which he kneels. His hand caresses the door with delight. He looks unsettled, nervous, fascinated. “This is the Dressing Room of the Grand Guignol,” he says, or sings, in his clear, adolescent voice, now trembling, with a touch of mellifluence; “I know that this must be amazing for you, my boy.”

  “What’s amazing is the story behind this theater,” Victorio comments.

  “Did you like it? Ah, well, another day I’ll tell you a different story that will be just as true.”

  Afternoons, Victorio lies down on the boards of the stage and closes his eyes. He usually experiences a rare sensation. Not joy though related to it. He
thinks: Happiness is like men, capricious; and like men, it possesses many faces, and does not have just one way of presenting itself.

  Afternoons, on the boards of the old stage, he closes his eyes with no intention of sleeping. This is the surest way of attracting the easily molded material from which memories are made. And he manages to calm himself and invoke his childhood in the little house in Marianao, in the Santa Felisa neighborhood.

  He has been told that since the death of La Pucha, his father has been confined to a wheelchair. He remembers him as a tall, expressive, headstrong man of uncommon eloquence, able to carry on arguments about the most unforeseeable topics, a man for whom the words “life” and “revolution” designated an identical degree of certainty Victorio always felt inadequate next to this man, with his strong smell of tobacco, who always looked older than he was, who at a certain stage in his life gave his son bear hugs that left saliva on his cheeks, and to whom he owed his name Victorio, the grounds for so many rude jokes among his schoolmates.

  Papa Robespierre (as he and his sister had come to call him in revenge, years later) had struggled “for social justice, that man not be the bane of man.” Luckily, when Victorio was little, Papa Robespierre was never home. He was first in line for self-sacrifice. He worked hard as an administrator and spent most of his time in the hangars of Agricultural Fumigation. Like any good communist, he had no sense of humor. He couldn’t stand laughing at himself. Whatever the subject, he would look for its solemn, serious side. When he was home, however, he cherished affection, even played with La Pucha, and took the children skating in the park and bought them sodas, Guarina ice cream, candy, toys, and cotton candy Victorio remembers him in his olive-green militia uniform, wearing the black beret with the tiny, waving Cuban flag. Today the son doesn’t know whether his father continues to dress like that, whether he is settled still in his old hopes. It has been years since they’ve seen each other. Victorio is able to remember him in the park, or anywhere, reading out loud, over and over again, the same speeches by Lenin, and a few paragraphs that he had underlined in the Marxist-Leninist textbooks (Konstantinov and Afanasiev). Papá Robespierre had belonged to the Popular Socialist Party, but he had been a rebellious communist, one of those who could never reconcile himself to the pact with Batista, and who felt great admiration instead for the young lawyer Fidel Castro (the Boss, as he said) and the “rebels” of the Sierra Maestra. During the assault on the Moncada barracks, in Santiago de Cuba, he suffered two excitations: the news of the assault and the birth of his son, Victorio, who by miraculous coincidence was born that same Saint Anne’s morning in 1953.

  In the years following the attack on the barracks and the birth of Victorio, Papá Robespierre left the Popular Socialist Party (or was expelled from it; the truth was never learned), and devoted himself to selling bonds to support the Movimiento 26 de Julio. A few years later he couldn’t go up into the Sierra Maestra to join the rebels, as had been his desire, because La Pucha, Hortensia, his wife, not only had little Victorio, but had become pregnant and miscarried a baby girl. This misfortune left her with a serious imbalance of the nerves. Papa Robespierre believed he had a civic duty to fulfill for his unhappy country; his fanaticism, however, did not let him lose sight of the duty that he also had toward his unhappy wife. He behaved sensibly; he resolved not to forsake either country or wife: instead of going up into the Sierra, he devoted himself to the civilian struggle. Not only did he sell bonds for the 26 de Julio, he also bought arms and prepared and sent messages together with the weapons. He sent combatants to the mountains and plains where the battle was spreading. The second successful girl was born (another miracle) on January 9, 1959, barely twenty-four hours after the triumphant rebels entered Havana. For that reason, Papa Robespierre decided to name her Victoria (full name: Victoria Patria, though only a few people, thank God, knew this). The same name for both children, the name that so upset them and that made them put up with so many crude jokes at school. According to La Pucha, they were given the name by order of Papa Robespierre, no discussion, despite her tears and pleas.

  La Pucha, superstitious as she was, considered it a disastrous name. As she tried to explain to her husband: “If a name means anything, it means the opposite of what it means.”

  “Balderdash!” replied Papa Robespierre, who believed in neither God nor superstitions, much less in women’s tears or word games. And he insisted, “My son, my male, born weighing eight pounds on the day of a heroic action; my daughter, my female, the apple of my eye, born during the first days of Freedom, a citizen of the free city of a free country, not any old free country but the freest of the free, the First-Free-Territory-of-America, in the very heart of the Realm-of-Utopia.”

  And he wanted to prepare Victorio, above all, for the rigors of life and history. Although the adult who had been that child cannot remember anything about those days, he knows, he has been told, that he accompanied his father selling bonds for the 26 de Julio; that is why he often insists, sarcastically and inexorably, half joking and half serious, that he was born to go underground. He often repeats, “Since I was a child, I’ve been an outlaw.”

  After the triumph of the revolution, the fervent father started dressing the boy in little militia outfits that kept him bathed in sweat and covered his tender skin with rashes. As soon as Victorio was able to talk, Papá Robespierre made him learn anti-imperialist poems about the sugar harvest (Agustín Acosta) and poems praising the flag (Agustín Acosta, Bonifacio Byrne), and he taught him national anthems, war songs, verses about coal-mining girls with no white shoes, odes celebrating patriotic bravery, and more verses about freedom, the new era, and the birth of the New Man: Immaculate, Perfect, Spotless, Unstained, Pure, Pure as the era. He gave him toy rifles and targets that had, as their vulnerable bull’s eyes, the Statue of Liberty (that hypocritical allegory), Donald Duck, President Eisenhower, Uncle Sam (those monstrous aberrations). “The Empire must be destroyed,” he would exclaim in theatrical tones, scattering flecks of spit with every word, making excessive arm gestures that would almost always destroy one of the cheap porcelain decorations that La Pucha loved so much, purchased at La Quincallera or El Ten Cents. Papá Robespierre would take Victorio to stadiums where revolutionary meetings, baseball games, or both were being held. He would make him get up on the field inspectors’ horses, and climb into the Fokker airplanes used to fumigate the crops. He wanted to teach him to be brave.

  One of the methods that Papa Robespierre used to fortify Victorio’s courage was to turn off all the lights in the house and leave him alone in that darkness for ten minutes. The old communist, the grave and circumspect admirer of Stalin (he never believed the horrors that were told about him) felt proud of his pedagogical method, which he had taken, he explained, from a text of Anton Makarenko. Papa Robespierre never knew what was all but inevitable: that during those ten minutes of blackout, Victorio felt a greater and greater terror every night; a terror that paralyzed him and that left him cowering in a corner of his room. His father was so absorbed in and fascinated by the creation of the New Man that he paid no attention to the sad, taciturn, and melancholy lad he was forming. Nor did he ever notice (he never noticed anything that was nearby and real) the only reason why Victorio was so delighted to accompany him to the Agricultural Fumigation hangars.

  El Moro must have been close to eighteen years old. His skin was dark, his eyes Arabic, and his hair blue-black, hard, and steady. He was said to be the son of an Algerian revolutionary, an expert in economics who had graduated from the Sorbonne and was a confidant of Ahmed Ben Bella. In reality it doesn’t matter where he got those traits, because beauty — Victorio thinks now — has no homeland. Victorio was impressed by El Moro’s height, his walk, his ballet movements (he never seemed to set foot on the ground), his deep, light voice, his perfect Spanish with its distantly French rs, his smile, whiter than you ever could have imagined. “Come on, boy, let’s go fly,” he was always saying to Victorio-as-a-child, by way of greeti
ng. El Moro would go up in one of those ancient Fokkers and he might have become the most daring man you might have imagined. He played around in the sky, turning loops like an overconfident bird, making Papá Robespierre and the rest of the workers there curse over and over, “That degenerate Moro, the day you least expect it he’s going to kill himself, and the worst part is: hell screw up the best plane we’ve got, that sonofabitch-Moro-faggot.”

  That’s what they said. The truth was otherwise: their words of reproof bore no relation to their smiles of approval, their indulgent expressions, the pride that burst through their phrases of condemnation; they called him. faggot, sonofabitch, while smiling approvingly at the loops he turned in the air with such ease. Loops and loops and loops, mysterious Ss. He would get lost in the clouds and reappear like a glorious bird. El Moro stood for happiness, freedom from care, intrepidity, generosity, beauty. Victorio doesn’t even need to close his eyes to see him again like the first time, that afternoon, when he and his father had gone to the airfield. It was lunchtime. The workers were taking advantage of the little free time they had to organize ball games. El Moro was bare-chested and wearing his camouflage militia pants. He was in the center of the field, in the middle of a leap, stock-still (in every leap there is an instant of eternity), with a concentrated expression and arms upraised. He was going for a ball that was far too high. Victorio saw no ball. All he saw was him, El Moro, and that was enough. And is enough, and will be enough, he thinks. He saw, he sees, he will see a young man, motionless in midair, who could not reach the ball and did not need to return to earth to start running. All these years later, Victorio can glimpse El Moro supporting himself with one arm so that the rest of his body can climb up a fence and get over to the other side. This isn’t really a memory. It’s something more: an obsessive, motionless scene, a still photo. An instant of eternity. Time has not, has never been able to undo the scene. Victorio remembers that the game ended and that El Moro came up to them, sweaty, smiling, greeting Papa Robespierre with respect, and noticed the boy He asked the father, “What, your lieutenant?” and patted the boy’s head with such a rough gesture that it became tender.