Distant Palaces

by Abilio Estevez

  Lying down on the boards, with his eyes closed, in the ruins of the theater that becomes confused with Havana, Victorio thinks he has always known, since he was a small child, how many ways there are to find charm in things. Then, it was the matter of a man’s body Large, dark hands, dirty hands with fingernails darkened by the grease of Fokker engines. A big nose, broken, like a boxer’s. Purplish lips, Algerian, wet, smiling, split by a delicate scar (as a child, he himself said, he had a harelip: they operated on him in Paris). Dark nipples, turgid, ringed by the rebelliousness of thin, downy hair and bluish blackness. The way one muscle stood out, one which, Victorio learned much later, was called the serratus. The gesture with which he shooed an insect or dried a drop of sweat that was dripping down his hair into his temple. The round navel — rather crude (that is to say, classic). The hairy black underarms. The way he had of turning toward a tree, opening his legs, unbuttoning his fly, pissing. Scratching his toes. Saying good-bye. Singing hit songs. Spitting with his tongue pressed against his teeth. Cleaning his ears with the nail of his little finger. A curse word, or just a simple gesture, meaning nothing. Come on, boy, let’s fly!

  Victorio wonders whether things are the way they are, or the way the multiple whims of memory reset them. In the theater which, according to the clown, saw the agony of Pavlova and heard the peerless voice of Callas and knew the enchanted dancing of Alonso and observed the way in which Nijinsky prepared for The Spectre of the Rose, Victorio becomes certain once more that El Moro is still there, saying nothing, leaning against the tree. The tree, too, is the same one as ever. The Algerian is peeling and sucking on a piece of sugarcane; the syrup spills from the corners of his mouth, reaches his chin, dampens his chest, his stomach, his pants. Again Victorio sees El Moro’s wet pants. Not only wet with cane syrup. His sweat is forming a dark band around his waist. There’s the smell of cane syrup. And the strong smell of the Algerian’s sweat. And the aroma of damp earth. As he did in his dainty child’s bed, Victorio curls up into a ball. He keeps his eyes closed, and feels protected.

  Now she is a pile of bones kept in the ossuary of the family crypt, but back then La Pucha, Hortensia, Victorio’s mother, was a quiet, discreet woman. She had large eyes, subtly almond-shaped, as if some impossible Chinese blood had flowed through her Cantabrian veins. Her skin was white, the skin of the daughter of an emigrant from the north of Spain, and her body, like herself, was obliging and lovely. Victorio remembers her slender, graceful hands, the hands of a princess, not of the seamstress that she actually was. She spent the whole livelong day sewing dresses for weddings and quinceañeras. Unlike Papa Robespierre, for La Pucha, Hortensia, his mother, the only true politics was affection and the only country was the family Victorio thinks that at some time his mother must have loved Papa Robespierre’s resolute eyes and the vigor of his body and spirit. She must have loved him, Victorio doesn’t have the slightest doubt about it. It’s just that her youthful passion must have turned, over the years, into mere acquiescence, into nostalgia, and of course into much more pity for him than she ever would have allowed herself to feel toward her own self.

  Victorio-as-a-child withdraws from the bustle and partying of his extended family He walks along the coastline, littered with sargasso. The sea breeze, the sky, and he form the same matter. Something is becoming vast, everlasting, that is to say, indestructible and eternal. His body grows huge and comes to fill all that can be seen and not seen, all that can be heard and not heard, all that can be touched and not touched, all that can be tasted and not tasted. On the beach, you are anywhere in the world. Say one word, you’ve said them all. Any song you sing is every song.

  Other forgotten moments of wonderfully rich times come back to him. Not the sort of moments that are generally taken to be wonderfully rich. No great occasions. Nothing of the sort. Just plain happiness. Running through the streets in the thunderstorms of May Eating manzano bananas. Sticking his hands in the mud and feeling the contact with the wet earth. Getting mango fibers stuck in his teeth. Sliding down the hill on a palm-bark sled. Listening to Grandfather Don Inés sing old songs on his stool in the courtyard, after a bath, while the sun is going down and the road is cooling off. Stealing the malanga fritters that Grandmother Emilia would hide in the pantry. Sticking his finger in the meringue icing on the cake. Scratching his back against the rough edge of the door. Skinny-dipping in the river. Running his hand over trembling skin. Drinking coconut milk. Peeling mandarins with his teeth. Sitting in the sand to witness the sunset. Leaping as if the possibility of flight were really possible.

  He opens his eyes. Total silence over the ruins of the Pequeño Liceo of Havana. The ruins are suspended over the face of the abyss and hover over the surface of the waters.

  Victorio thinks about his father. Papá Robespierre always thought that traitorous sons are no sons at all. Traitors to what? he wonders. Victorio doesn’t think he has betrayed anyone. It has been a long time since he would have liked to tell the incorruptible Papa Robespierre that he never betrayed anyone. He would have liked to have asked him if he, the Jacobin among Jacobins, could imagine that his son had different desires and needs, that he thought differently, that he was (he is!) different. Why, in that world of discipline and soldiers, have they never been able to understand variety? Why does everyone have to wear the same clothes, sing the same song, and worship the same idols?

  On the quiet stage, the persistent beams of the sun, entering through cracks in the ceiling, are once more at play. He finds the ruinous orchestra seats facing him, and he feels a desire to recite the famous verses of Gastón Baquero,

  La mañana pregona que no existe la nada.

  Sal con el pie derecho a saborear el día.

  Vive y nada más! Este día es tan hello,

  que nos olvidamos de que tenemos huesos.

  Morning proclaims that nothingness does not exist.

  Step on out with your right foot first to savor the day.

  Be alive, and nothing more! This day is so beautiful,

  we might just forget that we have bones.

  He enters the bathroom. He disrobes. The contact with the water awakens him. As in his dreams, he feels his body’s communion with the water. He rubs his skin with a sea sponge that revives forgotten sensations. He accepts the shower with gratitude, which translates into a mixture of dynamism and sleepiness. Again he experiences the elated way his body has of enjoying, and repaying, its contact with water and soap. Each muscle has its moments of glory. His skin allows the intoxicating rapture of warm water to flow over it.

  Yo tengo ya la casita

  que tanto te prometí…

  Now I have that little house

  I’ve promised you so much…

  He finds a blue silk kimono with apple trees and Fujiyamas in various pastel colors, very Japanese. It occurs to Victorio that it must be a costume from some production of Madame Butterfly. The kimono reminds him of the house robe he used to wear, in spite of heat and custom, in his little room on Calle Galiano.

  And where is the clown? It has been awhile since he last heard music from either oboe or flute. Unlike other kinds of loneliness, the sensation that there is no one else here in the ruins is a discovery and a joy.

  He has no idea what time of day it is, but the sun is coming through the blue windowpanes of his dressing room. He climbs on top of a piece of furniture and opens the window.

  The sea. The empty Malecón seawall disappears into the distance. It must be early. The excessive sun and exaggerated heat turn the seawall into a searing stone altar. No skiff is out fishing at this impossible hour; no fisherman would risk it. There aren’t any children swimming, either. No bather would be so suicidal. At most, some German from northern Germany, or some Norwegian, or some Swede might lie down on the wall to bathe in this sun, so much more insolent than any sun they would ever find in Hamburg, Molde, or Stockholm. This is the precise time when the sea is so tranquil that it allows the sun to multiply into endless suns and form a multit
ude of mirrors. Entering the sea means wandering among flashes of light: the brilliance of the sun and the brilliance of its reflections. Along the horizon he seems to see a sand barge passing, the long arms of its cranes now dormant. It is also possible that there is no boat out there, neither sand barge nor cargo ship: everyone is familiar with the falsehoods created by the complicity between horizon and light.

  Even the wide avenue lining the Malecón, built on land won from the sea, is empty. Not even cars whiz by at this hour. Victorio experiences the sensation that this city is not his. Havana becomes a foreign, malevolent, reticent, remote city. Too much loneliness, disconnection, exile, incomprehension, abdication, anger, and injustice seems to have settled between Havana and Victorio. He knows that he is in Havana and not in Havana. This sensation of being exiled within his own city is not new. For many years he has felt alienated, observed and observing, an outsider, excluded, cut off, out of place. For far too long Victorio has wandered through Havana without recognizing it as belonging to him, and even more seriously, without Havana seeming to recognize him as belonging to it. So the sensation that assails him now at the window turns out not to be that of the exile-who-still-lives-in-the-same-place; its is something more subtle: at the blue windows of Nijinsky’s dressing room, in the ruins of a theater unknown until now, he has a feeling that there is not only an unfathomable spiritual distance between himself and Havana, but that a physical distance has also been established, as if the ruins were not in Havana but in some more distant, some much more distant point, in land salvaged from the limits of geographies and histories.

  The city becomes completely effaced, disappearing without disappearing: fleeting, ghostly, like the cathedral of Rouen in the famous paintings by Monet.

  He tries to open the other dressing rooms. He can’t. Chains and padlocks keep them closed tight. He returns to the stage, where the play of light and shadow has lessened. Where do you enter and exit from this theater?

  For the moment, he doesn’t want to go anywhere else, though it is always good to know where the exits are; it is even useful to track down the exit to the Champs-Elysées, to keep evacuation doors well marked. One sometimes has a need to escape, even from Edens and empyreans, from nirvanas and idyllic gardens (as the Quintero brothers might have written). Without doors that say exit, salida, sortie, in bright red lights, as anyone knows, the glories of Paradise can turn into the torments of Inferno. And from this place, it seems, there is no exit. No matter how much Victorio goes over the ruins, he cannot discover a door to Havana. He walks from one end to the other, feeling the walls and murals; and those doors that do not lead to bathrooms or dressing rooms turn out to be purely decorative, doors opening onto adobe walls.

  Victorio feels no fear. Unlike other times when he has felt closed in and locked up, over so many cloistered years, the ruins of the theater do not induce claustrophobia in him. This walled-in ruin is the least walled-in place he has ever known.

  The days pass by. Victorio, however, is living a single, gigantic, happy day. Here among so much history he finally feels at home. He is annoyed and enchanted by Don Fuco’s delirious stories. Victorio loves watching him rehearse the acts, so ridiculous and so beautiful, that he will later perform in funeral chapels, hospitals, on the street, in cemeteries and old age homes. “Any place where grief is to be found,” the clown specifies, “and there are lots of these places, to tell the truth. The first rule on this island is to suffer, as if it were an offense to enjoy life, a crime against the nation. No, no, you can’t take pleasure in the delights of life, you have to suffer, for who-knows-what future. We can’t be frivolous, we can’t be frivolous, we can’t be frivolous!” And then, as if he had just made a great discovery, he adds, “The worst part is what always happens next: some people suffer and others don’t. I can’t imagine presidents and ideologues, ministers and subministers, presidents of corporations, ideological-journalists-of-renown eating our horrendous daily bread from the corner store, which isn’t bread but some poor idea of bread, or living in shacks made from rotting wooden planks that let in the damp when the first three raindrops fall in the summer rainy season, and let’s not even get into the hurricanes of September or October. No, I can’t imagine high-and-mighty presidents suffering through heat and blackouts, or searching desperately for an antibiotic that can’t be found in any pharmacy.”

  “As always,” Victorio adds, “presidents, ministers, generals, and commanders-in-chief live in palaces with their gardens and swimming pools, they get around in extraordinary cars, they partake of the most exquisite delicacies.”

  “You don’t have to be a minister…” says Don Fuco, and he leaves the sentence unfinished.

  The clown would like to eat nothing but salt bread (if only he could have some bread sprinkled with seeds!) soaked in olive oil. “That alone would be enough to live on, bread and olive oil, well-seasoned olives. And a good red wine, of course, an aged wine from the banks of the Duero,” he adds with a wink and the roguish melancholy of an old connoisseur. “The oil should be extra virgin,” Don Fuco expertly clarifies, “low in acidity, unfiltered, deliciously bitter, if possible from Baena, from the Nunez de Prado family.”

  Don Fuco’s lips and his nostalgic pupils gleam, his hands raise in a false gesture of pleasure. But he makes do with the daily ration that he receives, sometimes, from the nuns at the Santovenia Old Age Home or at the Convent of the Immaculate Conception, and sometimes from his friends, the cooks at the Calixto Garcia Hospital, the Emergency Hospital, or the Covadonga Hospital. Don Fuco has managed to get hold of some plastic containers that hold the heat very well, and with them he brings lunch and dinner to the ruins of the theater every day, where they graciously give him their leftovers. The rations are not abundant, but there is enough to share, especially because they put plenty of bread in his covered basket. The bread is made with little flour and almost no grease (“The miracle of the loaves!” the clown remarks ironically), with almost no flavor or substance, yet it’s enough to keep your stomach busy and to trick the phantoms of hunger. Yellowish and smacking of jute, the rice also tastes heavenly in the china plates. At the hospitals they usually serve a lot of stews and a lot of soup, and every now and then a bit of fried fish chock-full of fishbones. Some of the old age homes, on the other hand, being under the care of the Vatican nunciature and the Spanish embassy, offer fried chicken and now and again a little roast beef. Don Fuco brings dessert from Chaca’s. And the coffee — made from ground roast chickpeas, with lots of sugar to ward off fainting spells — keeps all day in a huge metal Chinese thermos with pagodas painted in black on its sides.

  For Victorio, the food that Don Fuco finds is plenty. They eat on worn-out white linen tablecloths. They use silverware with Marina Volkhovskoy’s monogram. Victorio is surprised to find, amid these ruins, the Chelsea china and the silver cutlery with the imperial coat of arms and the two initials.

  “It isn’t the same to eat on a clay plate as on fine china, my friend,” the clown declares in a feigned didactic voice; “the china makes it so that flavors don’t lose their virtue, just as the Murano crystal enhances the bouquet of wines and liquors.”

  In the ruins of the old theater, time goes by differently. It isn’t that it seems to happen more rapidly or less so, that it quickens, slows down, or stops. Nothing of the kind. Victorio is thinking about another quality of time, which belongs to the theater alone, ineffably, as if one minute, neither more nor less than the sixty seconds of a single minute, could enclose all the hours of the day and all the days of a month and all the months of a year and all the years of a century.

  Best of all are the magic classes that Don Fuco gives Victorio, for then the student, naive and bewildered, but fascinated, too, experiences an even more intense excitement that involves not only time but space; and it is as if, in these moments, time and space, those two mysterious qualities, depended on Victorio.

  For example, Don Fuco has an hourglass. It is an hourglass that, in principle, w
orks like any other hourglass. Yet when Don Fuco holds the ancient timepiece in his hands, it violates the laws that Newton deduced, and also breaks the stringent direction of time (older and more established than Mr. Newton’s laws): instead of falling, the sand rises, moving from the lower to the upper space, as if the World had turned upside down and the North Pole had transformed into the South Pole.

  Likewise, Don Fuco has a hat — that ancient, ridiculous cap of Shylock — from which doves do not fly, but into which they are instead attracted. The entire stage is suddenly covered with white doves, and Don Fuco has to do nothing more than hold out the Shylock cap for there to be a beating of wings, and the birds come to the hat, and disappear within it.