“Confession Is a basic human need,” Victorio says during one of these lonely afternoons. His voice takes on a feigned tone of ingenuousness, and it is clear that he wants to rid the phrase of its hint of ridiculous theological wisdom.
Salma nods in agreement, though she doesn’t seem to be paying attention. They lie down on the boards of the stage, in the languid-ness of the afternoon, which for some mysterious reason is not hot. Actually, the days and nights in the theater are never hot; a breeze is always blowing here, as if these ruins were not in Havana but in the ideal meridian of an ideal geography.
Victorio says, “When I was little, my mother used to send me to a neighbor woman’s house for milk. To get to her house, near the obelisk, I had to walk along the old railroad line, which passed behind the Maternity Hospital and ran through a region of backyards, pastures, stables, orchards, woods, and darkness. The shadows induced a paralyzing terror in me. I couldn’t keep going; I thought I couldn’t keep going; it’s the same thing. Night sounds awakened to assail me. Crickets, spiders, and owls transformed their cries into shrieks and yells. Near the vinegar store, long, dark arms would always reach out to touch me, and I could hear a voice, a voice calling for me. I’d close my eyes, I could only keep going with my eyes closed, and of course I’d trip and fall in every pothole that dotted the ground; I’d hurt my legs and hands, and get up again, and become paralyzed again. I’d recite the prayer my grandmother had taught me to ward off fear — a useless prayer, naturally; in moments of terror, nothing does any good. The neighbor woman lived in a little wooden house fenced off by prickly pear cactus. The ugliest woman in the world, I used to think. A kerosene stove had exploded in the poor woman’s face while she was cooking, and the fire, its tongues of flame, its fury, its piti-lessness remained fixed forever on the perplexed face of my mother’s friend. She used to kiss me with her astounded eyes and twisted mouth; I could feel the crags on her face, the wickedness of the flames on her cheeks. She’d kiss me and ask me questions I didn’t know how to answer; she’d give me the jug of milk, and I’d begin the journey home: the same arms, the same voices, the same way I had of closing my eyelids, but now I not only had to watch my balance, I had to balance myself with the milk jug, and when I got home my mother never knew, never could know, what kind of battles her son had survived.”
Salma stands up, raises a hand, and declares, “Well, the paths I was on when I was a kid were dark, but not at all like yours, and that’s the truth. They were shadowy dark, the nasty streets of the part of Havana where I was born, by the will of God or the Devil. And me, I associated fear with eyes — not my own eyes, you, but other people’s eyes, you know? Lots of pairs of eyes peering through window blinds, because, ay, everybody in Havana looks, know what I mean? And the thing isn’t that everybody looks, it’s that everybody judges you. They look so they can make comments, so they can catch you. That’s it: their eyes, you, their eyes like knives, their eyes sticking in your flesh, you, their eyes looking for some weakness so that later they can tell where they found the lips of the wound, tell where your tumors were throbbing, tell where you were hiding your weaknesses, so they can disclose what’s about to break at any moment. Me, just imagine! Ay, Triumphito, me, I was a girl who always had my heart between my legs. I found out real young that the center of my life throbs there, nothing else had any importance, I didn’t care about the rest of my body, I hardly knew what my fingers were doing when they used to look for refuge in that damp, hungry, greedy orifice. I’d give myself pleasure, till one day, or one night, I don’t know which, you, I discovered that other fingers could give me even more pleasure than my own. Fusilazo taught me — that was the nickname we’d given to my cousin Iván: Fusilazo, Gunshot, he was the one who taught me this glorious little detail. Fusilazo would come visit with his mother from Los Baños de Elguea where they lived, and we’d go get in the same bed, you, to sleep together, and as soon as we heard our mothers snoring and my brother Chichi breathing heavily, I’d open my legs so that Fusilazo could hold out his hand and let his fingers disappear into that soaking wet hole, damp with the promise of pleasure, the hole that I called ‘my real-true-heart.’ And Fusilazo, my cousin, he called that heart ‘your mouth-down-there.’ I remember him telling me, ‘Let’s play geography. Me, Fusilazo, I’ll be Punta Brava, and you be Hoyo Colorado.’ I’d start opening my legs, that is to say, my real-true-heart, to every finger that felt like penetrating it. And guess what happened, you. I discovered something so-so-so-so marvelous that I figure it must be the best, the most beautiful find of my life: I discovered something better than my own pleasure, which was the pleasure of others; since my eyes adjusted quickly to the darkness in the room, I could make out the expression of satisfaction on my cousin Fusilazo’s face while he was hungrily digging into the inner secrets of my real-true-heart, and I could see his prick sticking straight up like some triumphant flagpole, a pole that I caressed with my hands to induce that magnificent eruption from all its inner volcanoes. And what do you think happened then, you? His happiness turned toward me like the dazzling light from a streetlamp reflected in the water of a mirror.”
*
“I have never, girl, listen to me: never! known love,” Victorio states categorically, and he tries to conceal with a smile the self-pity that sometimes attacks him. “I have never felt the delicious anguish, the gentle desperation of love, of that tormenting happiness, that ambrosia-sweet poison, that cotton-candy knife, no less deadly for all its sweetness. No, my friend, I have never known the serene disquiet with which one waits for one’s beloved. And what’s worse, much worse: nobody’s ever waited for me with that kind of disquieted serenity, with the intention of disquieting my own serenity. I’ve never awakened anxiety in anyone; I’ve never managed to turn anyone’s reason into outrage; nothing, no being, human or divine, has been struck down to his knees by lustiness before me; no loving words have ever called out for me; no angels have ever appeared at the bends in my paths — and the world, you know, is full of angels, isn’t it? I, Salma, my sweet friend, have never seen my body gleaming in another man’s eyes; no one’s lips have ever sung the praises of any part of me; no lips have ever wanted to join with mine; no hands have desired to know the softness of my skin. I’ve never known love — never, neither my own nor that of other men. I’ve never learned what Stendhal meant by the crystallization of love. And perhaps — I’ve thought a lot about this — the first of my sexual experiences set the tone for all those that would follow. One can never know if things will turn out in life the way they do in superstitions, in cards, in essays, or in books.”
“How old would I have been? Fourteen, fifteen years, not more. The Painter’s Son was brushing up against seventeen, which is just the age for pushing hard on every door and shoving them all wide open without thinking about it. His father, the Painter, had the job of whitewashing all the poor houses in the neighborhood of Santa Felisa. The Painters Son helped his father, cleaning his brushes, preparing the paint, handing him paint cans, holding ladders, cleaning up the few drops that the Painter — good painter that he was! — allowed to hit the ground. I remember that when they were working, both the Painter and the Painter’s Son wore only cut-off pants, and I’d look at the epiphany that was the body of the Painter’s Son: God makes Himself manifest in all creation, Salma, and seventeen-year-old bodies are the parts of creation that are the worthiest vehicles for revealing the Creator. Maybe it was because of that business about the Divine Light needing perfection to reveal perfection. I admired that body as if I already understood what it really was: a sacred image. For some mysterious reason, beautiful bodies always catch sight of the bedazzled gazes that they induce around the world, no matter how slyly they are stolen; and sometimes reason isn’t what calls their attention to those gazes, but some sign in their own skins, in their own forms. Something exists in themselves that’s quick to let them know when the clockwork of admiration has been set in motion. And, even though it isn’t always clear whethe
r you can talk about a virtue of their bodies for catching sight of those gazes — because fascinated gazes must also have their own vivid intensities — the thing is, sweet Salma, that I was sure that the body of the Painter’s Son was aware of the depth of devotion with which it was encompassed by the gaze of that boy of fourteen or fifteen years, not more, whose house he was painting; because, for some other just and mysterious reason, beautiful bodies, like God, also have the inevitable component of perversity. And I know, Salma, that you’d like to hear an example of that perversity, so let me tell you that the Painter’s Son used to pee without closing the bathroom door, and he’d direct his gushing urine into the precise center of the toilet bowl, right where the water is the deepest, and in that way he managed to intensify the exultant noise of the flowing stream, since, for some reason, even though he was just brushing up on seventeen years old, the Painter’s Son understood what kind of wicked conjectures and disquieting certainties a powerful stream of urine can awaken in someone who is devoted to hanging around, to listening intently near the bathroom; and I also can’t help but point out that I, being all of fifteen or fourteen years old, not more, knew how to make myself disquieted, and I knew how to decipher the coded language of a stream of urine.”
“Ay, Triumpho, my Triumphito, let me tell you, after those nights with Fusilazo, my cousin from Los Baños de Elguea, I started looking for other guys who would find pleasure in me and who would spread their pleasure to me. I went around the stinking streets, you, looking for somebody I could satisfy so as to satisfy myself, and there were lots of guys ready to give me a scrap of satisfaction in passing. And as you might have guessed, the time came when doing it with their fingers wasn’t enough for them. I remember the shopkeeper from the corner store, a guy they call Cuartobate, Heavy Hitter, a black man, sixty, seventy years old — older than the palm grove in Anafe, you, tall as a palm tree, brawny as a two-hundred-year-old ceiba. He carried me to the backroom of his store one afternoon, and there, on top of the sacks of rice and beans and brown sugar and the cans of mackerel, he let me know that fingers aren’t the only things good for entering my ‘heart,’ my ‘mouth-down-there.’ He lay me down on a sack of rice, you, and I swear, Cuartobate, that old black man, looked like a Romeo when he was naked in my arms. I’ll never forget the amazing size of his manhood, I’ll never forget how he could pick me up with practically just one finger, or how, with that third arm of his, he tore me up inside, like he was ripping up a flimsy piece of tissue paper, like he had stuck some blessedly lit torch all the way into the wellspring of my guts, and set fire to my insides and to each and every one of my organs: a sweet fire, a fire that didn’t do me any harm. I didn’t suffer, you, I didn’t suffer. All I had to do was look at Cuartobate’s face — the black shopkeeper, sixty, seventy years old, older than the palm grove in Anafe, like I said — because as long as the old guy was on top of me, burying the most important member of his body in my insides, he was young again, you, I swear it, he was transfigured into the adolescent he must have been once upon a time. Each movement, each thrust of his yearning, took a ton of years off of him. He turned back into the fabulous black dockworker he had been in the thirties, back when Machado was in power, I guess, or maybe the Pentarquía, what do I know. And that old guy Cuartobate ‘s recovered youth, and his attitude, the intensity of his pleasure, completely erased my pain, if there was any pain. That was when I learned the morbid joy he got from screwing the little white girl who could have been his granddaughter — what am I saying, his great-granddaughter! And there I was, full of thanks, grateful for the satisfaction that his satisfaction stirred in me, kissing his great big hands, which weren’t hardened any longer by his years of hard work, which had turned back into the hands of a strapping lad on the Havana docks. I kissed his bronze arms, molded by unloading sacks of sugar, nice and young again, bronze again, crisscrossed by veins that were pumping his twenty-year-old’s blood, you. I kissed his neck, his rejuvenated cheeks, and I let my mouth disappear in his great big mouth, in Cuartobate’s broad lips, with their taste of tobacco and rum that so excited me. I mixed my sweat with the sweat of his body that came and came and tasted of jute, sugar, grass, flour, earth, onion, garlic, and sweat.”
“By that time Hortensia, La Pucha, my mother, was already letting me go to the movies alone; well, actually, she’d let me go to the Lido, which was two blocks from home,” Victorio resumed. “One night, pretending to be fearless, I risked sneaking off, with a pounding heart that made the risk even more attractive, all the way to Cine Avenida, which was a little bit farther, around Calle 41, out past the Tropicana. I remember they were showing a Jacques Tati movie, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, and I always loved — I still love —Jacques Tati. The theater was almost empty, as it usually is whenever the movie they’re showing is fabulous. And since it was empty, it was easy for me to distinguish the close-cropped, powerful head of the Painter’s Son, trying to get together with another female head. Indeed, the boy had apparently taken his girlfriend to the movies, and of course the last thing they had on their minds was to enjoy watching that hilarious actor — tall, extravagant, ridiculous, expressionless, with his little cap and his odd walk — while he walked around in the sand on the beach without saying a word, until at the end he set off a festival of fireworks. Then I remember that, after the show was over, I walked back with the cheerful kind of calm that movies leave you feeling when they’ve seduced you, going down the streets that lead to the Tropicana cabaret; and the thing is, right next to the Show Under the Stars there was (or is) an entrance to a narrow little alley where I could take a shortcut, which meant getting home more quickly so that I could pretend to my mother that I hadn’t gone to the Cine Avenida but to the Lido. Besides, the good thing about the alley was (or is) that it was dark, that it was lit up from time to time by the colorful lights from the show, and it was also fun to listen to the deafening bands from the cabaret, the obligatorily cheerful, obligatorily likable voices of Miriam Socarrás (the most-beautiful-mulatta-in-the-world) and the other emcees and singers, who’d say, ‘Welcome to Tropicana, el cabaret más esplendido in the world!’ — you know how stupid or full of shit we Cubans are: for us, everything about Cuba is the most splendid, the greatest, the most beautiful, the most heroic in the world; and on the night that I’m telling you about, sweet Salma, when I was walking down the Tropicana alley, as everybody called it, I saw a figure leaning against one of the black walls that surround the cabaret, behind the clumps of oleander. At first I didn’t recognize him, until the flashing red and blue lights whipped past to the easy drumbeat of tourist music, and revealed the frowning face of the Painter’s Son. He didn’t have to call to me for me to come obediently over to him, through the disobedient vegetation of woody ferns, garden malangas, rosebushes, and long-rooted poplars that were painted in the carnivalesque colors of the lights emanating from the cabaret. The Painter’s Son had his fly open, and overflowing through it was his blessed bloom, the noblest part of his body; and his right hand was engaged in bringing a cigarette to his mouth — yes, he smoked, despite his youth — while his left hand gently moved that magnanimous prick, yes, affectionately, carefully, lightly; and I want you to know, sweet Salma, that the Painter’s Son never looked at me, he didn’t seem to notice I was there until I was standing close by and could hear, from the Tropicana, the most-beautiful-cabaret-in-the-world, the paradise-under-the-stars, the lovely voice of Manuel ‘Pun-tillita’ Licea singing ‘El Son de la Puntillita’; and so it was that the Painter’s Son tossed his cigarette away, took me by the waist, undid my belt, pulled down my pants, and I didn’t get to see him but I knew that he was spitting on one of his hands and smearing his prick with saliva; I felt the coolness of the night and the heat of the prick of the Painter’s Son on my bottom — a prick that was probing, searching, and since it couldn’t find the place to stick in right away, the Painter’s Son used his other hand, his fingers, to orient it, in such a way that one of his fingers penetrated my virgin ass,
my little fifteen-year-old ass, and cleared the path, and his prick slipped in ruthlessly, almost scornfully, with a sense of victory and superiority, and I experienced a pain that wasn’t pain: an intense, shooting pain that felt strangely more and more like delight. And what did I learn, sweet Salma? I learned that this was the only pain that tended toward pleasure until it was transformed into satisfaction, absolute satisfaction; and the Painter’s Son forced me to lean forward, he wrapped my waist in his arms, I felt his exhalation against the nape of my neck, the fire of his breathing, while Manuel Licea was singing
!Ay nena de mi vida, la puntillita… !
Ay, my darling little girl, the tip … !
while the Painter’s Son was moving yearningly on top of me, for a few minutes, and I could tell he was coming because of the intensity of his panting and because I felt when his cum hit me in my darkest depths. Then he pulled out his dick, shook it hard a few times until it let out the last drop of cum, plucked a few poppy leaves to clean himself off, calm, satisfied, put his member back in his underwear, buttoned up his fly, lit a cigarette, started walking, went away, and while the audience was applauding for Miguel ‘Puntillita’ Licea, the Painter’s Son left without turning a glance, a smile, a curse in my direction, sans me parler, sans me regarder, as the poet would say”.
Distant Palaces Page 14