*
Victorio caresses Salma’s head. It has gotten late in the ruined playhouse. The last shafts of light are again falling to good effect on the boards of the stage and plunging it into an implausible atmosphere of chiaroscuros. Whether out of fear or out of nostalgia, Salma sings
No le abras la puerta
a tu soledad,
la siudad está muerta,
pero qué más da…
Don’t open up the door
to your loneliness,
the city is dead,
but why should you care…
Sometimes she likes to pick up the bronze bust of Jose Marti, as she does now, and hold it high, brandishing it as if she had a grenade in her hand. “With this bronze head,” she declares, “there won’t be an enemy left alive. Trenches made of stone are better than trenches made of ideas,” she repeats. She sighs and caresses the bronze head. “I wish I could have gone back home!” Salma says after an incalculable time. “Walk in like nothing had happened, pour a bucket of cold water over my sweaty body, eat a bowl of vegetable soup, talk with my mother, ask about Chichi, go to sleep!”
What kept her from going home was her greater fear of running into El Negro Piedad. Salma would head off to Cuatro Caminos and wander around the farmers’ market, and from there to La Esquina de Tejas, where a shoeshine boy (specializing in white shoes) would talk with her, and an herb seller, tall as a palm tree, with beautiful, gleaming jet-black skin, and the old-age-blue eyes of a prophetess, would give Salma a few twigs of vencedor and tell her, “May you find tranquillity, my daughter.” Salma would continue down to Calle Agua Dulce. In the old Quinta Dependencia clinic she’d mix in with the patients and spend the day in the cool shade of lemon, mango, and avocado trees. One afternoon she felt so reckless that she dared to walk up Belascoaín, turn onto Calle Reina, and go into the church.
“It was,” she says, “as if I had come to the end of a well-planned trip.”
She entered not knowing why, and yet with a sense of hope.
“Hope?”
Salma shrugs.
She didn’t usually enter churches. She felt overawed and somehow protected by the somber silence of the nave, the solemn odor of incense, the humid coolness emanating from the walls, the lovely colors into which the sun seemed to break through the stained-glass windows above the high altar. She wanted to approach the crucified Christ on the high altar, with that lovely face of desperate resignation and those eyes, which couldn’t understand the reason for so much suffering, turned heavenward. She tried to cross herself. She couldn’t remember whether you did it with the right hand or the left, whether you did it starting from forehead to heart or from heart to forehead. A woman was sleeping on the front pew. It caught her eye that the woman was not badly dressed or dirty and that she had with her an immense leather suitcase covered in old stickers for Air France, Pan American, KLM, Aerovías Q, as well as that she was keeping the light from the stained-glass windows off her face with a beautiful silk shawl. The image of the sleeping woman made Salma feel the burden of her exhaustion. An uncontrollable urge came over her to lie down on one of those comfortable church pews and sleep, too, sleep, sleep, sleep, that’s it, sleep. She found a half-hidden pew under a column on which you could see a Christ praying on the Mount of Olives. Moved as much by hope as by exhaustion, she lay down on the pew.
“I fell asleep, Triumphito, and that was when I dreamed of you and of my brother Chichi. A very odd dream, because I had only seen you once, and if you’re wondering how I knew it was you, let me tell you: simple, you, real simple. We were standing in the rain, just like on that night, sheltered under the arch in the city wall; I had lost a shoe and I was looking for it, and you told me, ‘Don’t look for it, it doesn’t matter anymore,’ and suddenly we were standing on the seashore — I don’t know how or why, you, you know what dreams are like, don’t you? And there was a rowboat by the shore, with some man in it I didn’t recognize, and my brother Chichi, who hugged me, happy like crazy, you, so happy that his happiness seemed like sadness.”
Salma tells how she and Victorio entered the warm water, walked all the way to the boat, and Chichi and the oarsman together helped them get aboard. The sea was calm. They lost sight of the shore. The lights of Havana seemed like remote glimmerings from other distant cosmic agglomerations. They found themselves in a black, impotent hole. The sea at night seemed nothing like the sea in the daytime; the sea at night is like an abyss: there are unfathomable chasms within it. There was nothing in the sea other than night. They felt it, they knew it. There was no way to search in their memories for this darkest darkness, impossible to resort to the storehouse of memory where darknesses, lived and not lived, are hoarded. No matter how long you searched and searched, you’d never find a darkness comparable to this. The darkness of the sea is a one-of-a-kind darkness, unlike any other. Even in the gloomiest site on earth, you still have your feet and the solid ground, and you still have certainty there under the soles of your shoes; the gloomiest site at sea is much gloomier than the murkiest places on earth. To top it off, it lacks conviction and firmness. There is no darkness, real or imaginary, anything like the darkness of the sea. Not only is it total, it is also aimless. Salma folds her arms over her crossed legs, huddling as if she felt cold. She feels cold, and afraid.
“Yes, I felt afraid, Triumpho, but not afraid of drowning. You, I remember you were sitting there calmly, holding my shoe in your hand.”
Salma says that at some point they saw lots of boats, barges, smashed rowboats, broken rafts shattered from long voyages, inner tubes from trucks, all traveling along with them. Silent beings were following the same route. Chichi nervously ordered, “Don’t look at them, don’t pay any attention, don’t even think of looking, keep your gaze straight ahead, let’s mind our own business.”
“They were drowned men, Triumphito. I don’t know why we knew that they were drowned, but they were.”
Drowned men, who came out to guide navigators along a good route and ended up guiding them to the worst. Yet they were not evil spirits: their intentions weren’t bad. They tried to help, only they couldn’t. How much can you expect from an army of dead rafters?
“In the blackness of one of the rafts, I thought I could make out a little girl, and she was singing, and I couldn’t hear the song, and you were sobbing, Triumphito, and I couldn’t hear your sobs — it was awful! — and we tried to touch each other but our hands passed through our bodies like they were passing through air or through light, and that was when I felt a soft pressure on my shoulder.”
A young woman, as young as Salma, perhaps younger, practically a girl, told her, “Come, please, don’t stay there.” Salma saw that it was a nun wearing a white habit and a silver crucifix. She understood that they had turned on the lights in the church, perhaps to begin the Mass, and that the nave was filling with poorly dressed old people, taking tenuous, sullen steps, steps that, after so many failures of history, had lost all hope for human justice and sought the ever more comforting help of a God: because men, no matter how much they try to paint themselves as men of the gods, always betray; the gods, never.
Perplexed, not totally awake, Salma rose from the pew. She followed the nun through one of the tall side doors. They came out into the lovely cloister, where the vegetation possessed the urgent green of patios where the sun barely shines, where the humidity of Havana becomes even more humid. Salma admired the radiance of the worn stone paving. They went up a lateral staircase that also gleamed. They reached a dining room. At one of the tables she saw the woman with the suitcase and the silk shawl. Salma smiled and greeted her like an old friend. With a gesture of disappointment, or of exhaustion, weariness, or debility, the woman attempted to respond to her signal: she could barely close her mouth.
The nun pointed out a table to Selma, and ordered her sweetly, “You will have some lentil stew.” The nun brought a bread basket and served a large bowl of lentils with vegetables, beef, ham, and the strong f
lavor of onions and garlic. For Salma, it tasted like heaven. In a large polished, elegant crystal glass, Salma savored a tamarind drink for the first time in her life. The nun watched her eat with a smile of approval, perhaps with a touch of superiority: sometimes, practicing charity makes us see how much we have and how fortunate we are compared with those who receive our gifts. Salma didn’t know how to thank her. She took the hundred-dollar bill from her shoe and, when the nun was looking the other way, placed it under her empty plate.
“Would you mind telling me,” Salma asks, quickly forgetting the story she has been recounting and looking at her hands with a baffled expression on her face, “what they mean when they say that the present isn’t important, and that the only thing that matters is the future?”
Victorio smiles, shrugs, makes faces that are supposed to mean that he doesn’t understand either.
“The present time is for the struggle: the future is ours! In other words, what we get is the struggle, because the future is nothing, and if it is anything, nobody knows anything about it, so the really-real reality is struggle and what’s really ours is nothing! Unreality!”
“That statement,” Victorio points out, “reminds me of the posters that storekeepers used to hang in their store windows (in the remote era when storekeepers owned their own stores), the posters that said ‘No credit today; we only give credit tomorrow,’ with the result that every time you went to the store, today was today, and tomorrow would come tomorrow, and as for buying something on credit: never! It’s the same thing, it certainly is: ‘The present time is for the struggle,’ but nobody could guess how long that struggle might last, and as for ‘the future is ours,’ ugh! You can’t touch, you can’t grab, you can’t know the future!”
“And what do you think they mean when they ask you to bleed yourself dry in the present so that you can have a better future?”
“Well, I don’t know, I don’t know, the storekeepers were just making a joke, they were using the charm of humor to make the point that they’d never sell anything on credit. I don’t think it’s likely that the spiritual guides of the people have the objective in mind, because, you know, as far as jokes, humor, and laughter go — no, they don’t go in for happiness, for making people laugh.”
“Are they trying to lull us to sleep, like the Christians with their story of heaven?”
“That must be it. Look, don’t rack your brain over it; we suffer enough from those fine folks without having to put ourselves in their places, too, and trying to understand what they do and why I think they just like power, and anybody who gets a taste of power will invent the most preposterous formulas in order to hold on to it.”
“Hey, you, you’re catching on.”
“Sometimes an angel enlightens me. I was ten or eleven years old when my mama took me to catechism behind Papa Robespierre’s back. Right there in the chapel of the San Rafael hospice—clinic, a tender little old nun, the Platonic idea of a nun, from the Carmelite order, would be my guess, prepared me for my First Communion. I didn’t understand that religion. I never understood religion — not that one, and not any other, either, to tell the truth. It isn’t that I don’t believe in God. I’ve always been too vulnerable not to believe in God; but on the other hand, I did understand that every religion was quite a ways beneath my concept of God. For example, how could you believe in that strange separation between the Vale of tears’ here and the ‘promised paradise’ to come? It’s clear, it’s utterly clear: if I was born — I thought, I think, I’ll always think — if I was born, I had to be happy here and now, and not have to go around hoping for some doubtful paradise. But I always liked the church’s pomp, Bach’s music, Mozart’s Requiem, Giotto’s paintings, Tiepolo’s apotheosis, Bernini’s colonnade, Narciso Tomé’s Transparente, the potent silence of the naves, Michelangelo’s Pietà, the smell of incense: sure, because all those things speak of the soul, of the spirit, of the unitive way and all that, right; all these things are able to get straight to the senses. So, fine, and then what happened? Ah! Well, one day the revolution triumphed and they started getting rid of the churches and for heaven they substituted ‘the future,’ for ‘the next world’ they gave us unforeseeable futures, Utopian futures, just as illusory as ‘the promised paradise,’ that is to say: come on, guys, start suffering! Put up stoically with the hardships of the present, because the good stuff is coming after you all die, and after your children’s children’s children die! Bullshit. For God they substituted the Idea, the Ideal, History, how should I know what all! For the saints, they substituted the heroes. Ay, poor heroes! I don’t know if the saints wanted to be saints, or the heroes, heroes. They couldn’t have cared, it couldn’t have mattered to them, and you know why? Because their present was for the struggle, and the future that was in store for them was sainthood or heroism, that is, nothingness. Nothingness! Doesn’t it make you laugh? Did you ever believe that fraud? And what can you tell me about equality, the idea that we’re all equal? Be honest, doesn’t it make you laugh?”
*
Salma says that she left the church, faced the night, and felt that her eyes shone with unaccustomed peace, that her lips formed a sedate smile, that her arms were swinging placidly, and that her footsteps were taking on a long, slow rhythm.
Salma says that her whole being radiated a harmony which, like all harmonies, was apparent to everyone.
“Ay, Triumpho, I swear to you that when I walked the whole length of Calle Reina, all the pedestrians made way for me reverently, the young guys that passed by looked at me respectfully, the rudest fellows bowed to greet me.”
Salma judged herself happily immaterial, as if she weren’t walking down one of the filthiest streets in one of the filthiest cities. She was walking on air, that is, on heaven: a touch of the divine had rubbed off on her. She had nothing to do with the shortcomings, the poverty, the misfortunes of Havana.
This blessedness came crashing noisily, painfully to the ground when she reached the corner where the old Van Dyck photography studio stood. Salma says that she looked in every direction: in every cranny she sensed the lurking shadow of El Negro Piedad. Once more she saw the Fat German lying on the bed like an immense volcanic island rising up in the ocean. She reproached herself for her recklessness in venturing home; but since she had come this far, and was already here, the best thing to do would be to go in quickly, without thinking twice about it.
Salma says that the door was ajar and the room was dark. She turned on the flickering light of the porcelain Buddha lamp. Mama, she called, Mama. A pointless call, given that the house was a photography studio converted into a single room, with three dirty, disordered beds, and the doorless wardrobes, the cardboard boxes, the kerosene stove, the primitive Singer sewing machine. And the photographs, of course: the tinted photographs of so many unknown people, which served to hide the damp stains on the walls.
Her mother wasn’t there. A shock: her mother wasn’t there. A knot formed in the pit of her stomach, the knot that always formed when she foresaw some sort of danger. Mama, damn it! she called again. She suffered the exact opposite of what she had just experienced on Calle Reina: now the law of gravity seemed to be multiplying, and something was calling her toward the floor, toward the ground. She turned off the miserable light of the lamp. Surrounded by darkness, she let herself sink onto the bed and wondered, “Now where do I go? What do I do?” She didn’t have the slightest idea.
Salma goes to the spot where Don Fuco has hung the chains of Plácido, the poet. She returns with them tightened around her ankles and wrists. “A good magic act would be to break these chains,” she says, and jingling, she sings again,
Y siemprefue así
y eso tú lo sabes,
que la libertad sólo existe
cuando no es de nadie.
Desde que existe el mundo
hay una cosa cierta:
unos hacen los muros
y otros las puertas.
That’s the way it’s always been,
you know it very well:
the only kind of freedom
is the kind nobody owns.
Long as the world’s been ‘round,
only one thing’s been for sure:
some people put up walls
and others make the doors.
In the old photography studio, the dirt had accumulated, so it was clear that her mother had been gone for some time. A spider had even spun a web inside the coffee can. As for Salma herself, did she have any idea of how long she had been away from home, how long it had been since she had seen her mother?
She gathered water in a rusted olive oil can and took a bath with a bar of soap; in spite of it all, this consoled her. She lay down on the creaky old bed. She wanted to sleep, to disappear into dreams; whenever something was tormenting her, Salma only knew one way of avoiding reality, sleep. As soon as she lay down, naked and wet, she lost the link with the thing that was assailing her, the thing she wouldn’t have dared to call “reality.” She dreamed that her back was being caressed. Her back was being caressed so much that she stopped dreaming and woke up to find that, in fact, her back was being caressed. She opened her eyes. Sacredshroud was there, naked, on top of her. Salma says that she felt a shudder of joy, a delight which, she noticed, was composed of fear and pleasure — words that aren’t as far separated as is usually supposed.
El Negro appeared tender. His dark almond eyes hadn’t lost their constant gleam of childish cheerfulness. Sometimes, like now, Salma came to believe that Sacredshroud was really in love with her. His lips smiled. His whole irresistible body seemed to protect her. “My girl, my little lost girl,” he formulated sweetly, so sweetly He began to caress her backside, the loveliest part of her feminine body Something told her he was not caressing it with his hands. She recalled how much he liked her skin to react visibly. “God,” Salma thought, implored, cried, screamed, “why do I like it so much?” The scent of that one-of-a-kind breath reached her. His breath showed that El Negro’s body was even more perfect on the inside. His tongue traced spirals around her ear, ran down her back, again reached her backside where it began to move more rapidly; it found the best, most secluded spot of her body, “your finest ass-pect,” as he would say.
Distant Palaces Page 17