“The eyes were out and about: as soon as I left the backroom of the corner store, the whole neighborhood knew that I had been in the arms of Cuartobate, the black giant, the old shopkeeper, and that was when I understood the pernicious power of eyes that spy through the blinds of thousands and thousands of windows. That afternoon I realized it, you: every step, every gesture, every act had been observed, meticulously spied upon, precisely recorded — and not to do good, to tell the truth, but to screw you and screw you and embitter the milk of your life. That’s right, Triumpho, they accused Cuartobate, the poor, magnanimous black shopkeeper, of corrupting minors. I denied it all, my love, denied it and denied it: I may have been a young thing but I was nobody’s fool, and without my accusation, you’ll understand, there wasn’t any case, except that my reputation as a whore stuck so hard that not even the Chinese doctor could have gotten rid of it for me. My reputation was that of a whore, and the eyes that grew more and more bloodshot from watching me, the eyes that pursued me everywhere, other people’s eyes, were like the eyes of the devil. And what was I supposed to do, you, in a case like that? How could I explain to them that I wasn’t a whore, that I didn’t charge a penny, that all I wanted was for them to take pleasure in me, that my reward was seeing them find joy? Come on, tell me: how could I explain to them that at heart it really was an act of generosity? Fourteen years old and already Salma was a whore, the whore of all whores. They gave me a horrible nickname, Triumpho, it gives me the chills just to think of it: they called me Isabelita-Bite-and-Run; that’s why I erased the name Isabelita from my life. Around that time I saw a movie with a gorgeous Mexican actress and I took her name, Salma. I called myself Salma. Ay, Triumpho, my brother Chichi got into so many fights on my account… !
“That’s how things were, terriblehorriblebloodcurdling, until El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud, showed up, and all the gossip stopped — at least, they stopped gossiping at the top of their lungs; their eyes didn’t close or even move away from the blinds of all those windows: no, no way, they kept on floodlighting me; and El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud, protected me like a brother — an incestuous brother, that is. Incestuous and mercenary, because he was the one who set a fee for my satisfactions. And at first, to be honest, it didn’t bother me, not at all, it didn’t bother me at all: old Spaniards, Italians, Germans, white as white frogs, with spots all over their skin, cultured, with cultured sweat, strange-smelling sweat, sweat from ancient civilizations, sweat that dated from the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages — that’s what El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud, told me — sweat that came from exhausted civilizations, sweat from Carthage and Tyre and Cyprus; old tourists with stinking breath, cultured breath, some of them with limp pricks that they called penises, old men with the stench of the Renaissance, throwing themselves on top of me and satisfying the boredom of Europe through me; and then, to top it all off, they’d leave El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud, the bright green of real bills — dollars, you, hard cash, freely convertible, money-money, that I could use to buy my mother her powdered milk, her toothpaste, her soap, her oregano, her nose drops, her deodorant, her oil, her detergent, her almond butter, her nutmeg, her shampoo, her blood pressure medicine, her ‘red rags’ — that’s what they call beef in the black market, her mosquito repellent, and her Viennese pastry, which they sell for a lot of money, ay, you, for lots and lots of money, at Pain de Paris …”
“Why don’t we go into the locked dressing rooms?” asks Salma.
They are alone. The clown has gone off clowning at a school for the mentally and physically handicapped.
Victorio tells her, no, they shouldn’t enter any locked rooms: Pandora’s great sin was curiosity.
She doesn’t know who Pandora was, and doesn’t care; she explains that she doesn’t see what harm it could do to anyone to open a locked door in a building in ruins.
He tries to convince her, bringing up all the arguments about being well-educated, of having good manners.
Salma makes fun of him and counters with an equally large number of arguments: the truth is, if they are going to live in this old theater, they should get to know every inch of it.
Salma, of course, is like a little girl, and little girls tend to be hardheaded, so Victorio points out to her that the keys are hanging next to the handless clock, so she should open and go in whenever she wants; he’ll stay.
She acts offended, and growls, “All right, I’ll go by myself, after all, I don’t need anybody to go with me, I was born by myself and I’ll die by myself” (tone of dramatic comedy).
“Find something you can use to defend yourself,” he warns malevolently.
She laughs defiantly and specifies that she walks with Marti, that Marti defends her wherever she might go and wherever there is danger, that trenches made of stone (or bronze) are better than trenches made of ideas.
Victorio sees that she is, in fact, holding the bronze bust of Jose Marti. He hears her footsteps moving off toward the other dressing rooms. It isn’t that he has no curiosity. He’d also like to know what’s hidden there; it’s just that he knows how to control his curiosity, because there is something even stronger in him, which is fear, the fear of the unknown.
And Victorio, who lies outstretched on the recamier, tries to read; he cannot concentrate on what he is reading; he wonders what Salma will find when she opens the door to the dressing room of the Guignol. So the best thing, the most intelligent thing to do, he thinks, is to drop his book and go see; after all, she’s right, if you live on a planet, it’s so you can get to know it as well as possible. He sticks the leather bookmark in the book, stands up, and leaves the dressing room. He hasn’t taken two steps when he runs into Salma. “What happened?” he asks.
She trembles, doesn’t reply right away. “The Guignol’s dressing room was full of people; well, not people: full of dead people,” she says.
“Dead people?”
“That’s what you heard, dead people, you, corpses hanging from the ceiling.”
Victorio goes to the Guignol’s dressing room but doesn’t dare open it. No, Salma’s lying, she’s gotten carried away by her imagination. He returns to her, has her lie down on the recamier with her head on his lap. “Tell me about the dead people.”
“What dead people?” she asks innocently.
To triumph in Hollywood: to have a house like Shirley MacLaine’s, up on a hill, with wide decks projecting out over the Pacific coast, the way she saw it in a magazine article (Hola? Vanidades? Marie Claire?), to have a young, rich, handsome husband, Andy Garcia or Benicio Del Toro, if possible, to be as fought over by casting directors as Julia Roberts.
In dreams that are not dreams, she envisions herself on the high seas. The Virgin — golden, radiant, blinding — appears on high. Salma becomes aware of a colossal force that is freeing her from the water and lifting her up toward the resplendent figure, so that Salma melds with the Virgin’s radiance. She is certain that she is disappearing, devoured by the glare. A voice that is not a voice, of course, music that is not music either (how to explain it?) blesses her and gives her patience, and for a few moments, Salma learns what substance comprises salvation. The only terrible thing is that this kind of understanding is composed of substances that are far too fragile: fleetingness and forgetting. Afterward, all that remains in her are a few sensations, the intuition of the sort of happiness that dissolves, disappears into the folds of sleep or the traps of wakefulness, just like the image of the Virgin herself, above the deep sea of her aspirations.
Victorio holds her tight, as if he could save her from what has already happened.
“That night, I almost merged with the Virgin’s radiance, and I heard ‘Salma!’ Again I heard my name, and at first I thought it was Her, all goodness and love, calling me, ‘Salma!’ until, when I was already too close to her incandescent glow, I realized it wasn’t the Virgin’s voice, and my fantasies fell apart in confusion and shadow.”
/> She opened her eyes. “Salma!” Her mother was leaning over her. “El Negro Piedad is looking for you, darling, El Negro Piedad is looking for you,” her mother was whispering.
Salma didn’t move for several seconds; she was having a hard time understanding what her mother meant by those words. She got up, naked as she was, stretched, yawned, looked at herself in the mirror, and opened the door. Preceded by the penetrating fragrance of Kenzo cologne, El Negro Piedad appeared. Dressed in white. Linen shirt, linen pants, leather slippers. Alert almond eyes, gentle, smiling lips, hair cut very short. That night he wore no Santería necklaces. Tall, strong, handsome and sacred as an orisha. So tall, he always had to lean over to kiss Salma’s lips. With the fingers of his right hand, he played with the short hairs between her legs, while with his left hand he squeezed her nipple.
“What are you doing here, guy? Didn’t you say we’d have today off?” Salma asked, exaggerating her sleepiness.
He knelt to plant a kiss on Salma’s navel. “There’s this thing, angel, called ‘imponderables,’” he pointed out, sitting down on the creaky bed. He didn’t look at Salma’s mother, didn’t greet her, didn’t notice her: he never did, as if the woman didn’t exist. “We have to get going quick. Dress up.”
Salma shut her eyes. Perhaps she was invoking the image of the Virgin; all she could see, however, was the light of fleeting fireworks, so she opened her eyes to the only possible reality. “Ay, sweetheart, I feel like the Cuban flag, tattered and shredded!” she exclaimed piteously.
“Well, sew the flag back together, angel, because our country looks down on us with pride; call on all your womanly strength, put on a pretty dress, comb your hair, put on some perfume, don’t forget your crystal slippers, and away we go! With your charm, that’s all it’ll take.” And he stuck out his tongue in a not exactly childish way.
Salma couldn’t answer him. If El Negro Piedad ordered something, opposing him would be futile, even dangerous. She called on all her strength and began to get dressed. She felt her mother’s almost useless eyes on her; they saw little, or saw nothing, but they couldn’t hide their fright at what they thought they saw. She tried to pretend that she felt happy to have an excuse for going out. She improvised a glad expression.
“I even went so far as to sing,
In the country of His Majesty
everybody repeats what the king has to say…
while I stuffed myself into a tailored green dress, a crazy dress, you, shocking, provocative, a plunging neckline, it left my shoulders bare, and it isn’t that I have pretty shoulders: I have young shoulders, and sometimes youth is more important than beauty, don’t you think?”
For lack of jewelry, she wrapped a silk scarf around her neck, in open defiance of the heat of a Havana night. She wore black patent leather shoes with thin heels, an ancient pair from her aunt Mary She piled on the makeup with a touch of exaggeration, outlined her eyes, rouged her cheeks, and crimsoned her lips like an aged coquette who needs to seduce an adolescent. She meant to make fun of El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud. She really didn’t like excessive makeup; she loved the pallor of her face, her uncolored lips, her wide, masculine eyebrows, as well as the permanent dark circles under her eyes, which she thought lent her the air of a Mexican vamp — though men no longer liked vamps, Mexican or otherwise, but rather robust, buxom, ridiculously healthy women. She combed her long black hair with its white, or golden, or rather, golden-white highlights, and she did it up and kept it in place with a tortoiseshell hair band; and she put on a Givenchy fragrance, Fleur d’Interdit, the gift of a businessman from Bilbao who was in town selling detergent. Finally she put on her sunglasses, an excellent knockoff of Dior, which didn’t make her feel any more elegant, but did make her feel safer and better masked, like a rock singer at a concert in New York’s Central Park. She turned toward El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacred-shroud, with her arms upraised, as if she were finishing a musical number, an odd and outdated imitation of Doris Day.
Standing up, El Negro Piedad, Sacredshroud, couldn’t help laughing; he tried to control himself, which could have seemed more insulting. “You look like the countess of Revilla de Camargo,” he exclaimed, doubtless having no idea who María Luisa Gómez-Mena had been.
She cared little about El Negro Piedad’s joke, much less who the countess might have been. The only thing she wanted was for this torture to end, and to come back home and go to sleep on her creaking bed in the old Van Dyck photography studio.
On the ground floor of the Cacique Inn Hotel, one of the newest and most elegant hotels in the city, in El Vedado, on one of the banks of the Almendares River, close by the sea, there was (or is) the Sweet Feeling Cafe. As usual, even though it wasn’t a weekend, the cafe was fairly full and bustling. It was decorated with old automobiles (Chevrolets, Fords, Buicks…), with helicopters, illuminated record players, neon lights, very good-looking waitresses and waiters dressed up as Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, and Elvis Presley, with mixed perfumes and mixed drinks, and loud boleros played at top volume. This was a place where you could bask in nostalgia for the mythical Havana of Beny Moré, of El Chori and Marlon Brando, or of a Hemingway who looked more like Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not. The results, however, couldn’t have been more counterproductive. A tourist who entered the Sweet Feeling Cafe could have been in any city in the world. The atmosphere would be vaguely reminiscent of Havana. The Havana of clichés. As all the old-timers, who had worn linen guayaberas and savored expensive cigars in Vuelta Abajo, liked to explain, Havana in the fifties had never been like this. Havana today, much less so. There was something affected about this cheap stage design. What did Cuba’s austere capital, with its dirty, desolate, dark, stifling, poor nights, have in common with this flashy production piece of colors, lights, loud music, cell phones, shimmering fabric, mojitos and Cuba libres, drunken sprees, and lots and lots of hundred-dollar bills?
Salma makes it clear that she didn’t waste her precious time wondering about serious and difficult-to-answer questions. Once she had found herself there, in the Sweet Feeling Cafe, she’d forgotten the wretchedness of every day, the daily hunger, the dreams, and the fact that she had felt like sleeping. She’d forget everything that was bad about her life, or about life. As much as she had needed pleasure as well as money, she didn’t feel capable of framing questions that might hinder delights and deals. She’d close her eyes and turn to face any feeling of estrangement or guilt.
“I felt like Cinderella on the night of the ball, and I couldn’t care less if I got caught at midnight and my gown turned to rags.”
Victorio takes on the role of prosecutor and reproaches her in tones of admonishment. “Eleven million Cubans were suffering while you were off having a great time in a realm of make-believe and partying.”
“So? That’s their problem,” Salma replies, not getting the joke. “You learn to be an egotist in this life; and if not, tell me, who the hell else was going to worry about me?”
For Salma, entering the Sweet Feeling Cafe came to signify what entering through the door for Oscar nominees does to a Hollywood actress on the night of the award ceremony. A preamble, she believed, to what awaited her when her turn came to go out into the world. Cinderella or Salma Hayek. Same difference. Beautiful-elegant-powerful-magnetic. She and the world, both transformed: she’d leave behind the filthy, gloomy streets, descend the marble staircase, step onto the red carpet, and find herself in the middle of a festival of multicolored lights. From the moment when the maitre d’ came over to greet them, all courtesy and dressed-up formality, Salma would correct her way of talking, smiling, looking, gesticulating, walking, and breathing.
“Three men were waiting for us that night,” she tells Victorio.
At one of the best tables in the Sweet Feeling Cafe, three ruddy, red-faced men with blond hair and transparent eyes, all over sixty, one of them weighing well over three hundred pounds, sat sweating in spite of the air conditioning, and from their gesture
s and tones of voice, they must have been drinking Havana Club and Coca-Cola for quite some time. They greeted Sacredshroud in English, with exaggerated friendliness. In perfect English, so slightly accented that everyone who heard him was astonished, El Negro Piedad introduced Salma. She lowered her chin almost against her chest and cast her Lauren Bacall look. She stretched out her hands and wiggled her fingers like little wings. She recited the usual phrase, the one El Negro had taught her, Jao du yu du? which he always corrected, How do you do?
“I really should explain, Triumpho,” Salma said, doubling over with laughter, “that one of my tricks was to pretend I was less educated than I am, and you know I’m a dunce. Sometimes I went so far that I came off like a real fool, a borderline idiot, you, and the thing is, my intuition told me, I thought I knew, that the only thing men’s stupidity would appreciate would be the stupidity of women; that a male, being an idiot after all, would never put up with females who were smarter than him. That was the great lesson of Marilyn Monroe, the most womanly of all women, and Isabelita-Salma humbly adapted it to her tarnished circumstances.”
The three men kissed her hands, raised the volume of their guffaws as if she had made a joke, and invited the pair to sit. Salma cast two glances: a naive one toward the foreigners, and a complicitous one at El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud. From his glance, she would know whose side to sit at. Quickly, furtively, he moved his attractive, playful almond eyes; that was all she needed: she sat next to the old blond who weighed more than three hundred pounds. “Salma, Salma!” shouted the ruddy blonds, clapping as if the name were worthy of applause.
Distant Palaces Page 15