“How he liked to trace the outlines of my ass with his tongue!” she recalls, her voice glowing with something akin to pleasure, fear, and nostalgia.
He softly turned her over, looked at her with the clemency of his beautiful eyes, though he couldn’t manage to make them reflect as much tenderness as he could demonstrate with his hands and the rest of his body His mouth — hearty, humid, reddened — went to her small nipples. Salma’s hands, apparently needing to feel hardness, went in search of the center of El Negro’s body, the place where all his blood was concentrating. Realizing this, he moved his pelvis up so that she could touch it. He penetrated her with the amazing mixture of brutality and exquisiteness, of impiety and mercy, that was his most accomplished skill, his greatest refinement. The movements of his hips took on, as always, a rhythm that almost seemed like laziness, a torturous cadence, slow and musical. She never would have wanted it to stop, and El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud, never did stop. He enjoyed his absolute dominance over his gratification, over his rhythm, over his demon; and he had another divine gift or infernal grace as well: an awareness of the precise moment when he should let loose. He stayed on top of her for a while. He was very careful to respect the other’s pleasure as long as possible. Then he straightened up; calmly, languidly he pulled out his long member, gleaming with many mixed essences, and wiped it on the sheet with gestures that never seemed disgusting.
“Even when he wiped his prick on the sheets he did it elegantly, you; he cleaned it carefully, meticulously, because he gave (or gives) a good fuck, like a good Cuban, and like a good Cuban he was (or is) squeamish: everything disgusts him.”
He completed his hygienic operations, stared at Salma with childish eyes, with amused and roguish eyes, and exclaimed, “So my little whore turned out to be a thief.” He raised his heavy hand, and then and there he vented his fury on her face. Salma closed her eyes, because of the pain and because she was ready to let herself be beaten: what else could she do? Experience had taught her that she would come out the better for it if she didn’t defend herself.
Don Fuco is massaging Chinese ointment into the soles of his feet. He says that this relieves the tensions in his body and soul, which is the same thing: body and soul are the same.
Salma is polishing the bronze bust of Jose Marti, because the clean bronze gleams like gold.
Victorio, who has remained lying down on the stage, stands up. He is seen marching to the back of the stage, where a feeble, distant light is being projected, creating an ominous set design on the tattered back curtain. Victorio lifts up his arms and recites in a powerful, lovely voice:
Dichoso el árbol que es apenas sensitivo,
y más la piedra dura, porque ésta ya no siente,
pues no hay dolor más grande que el dolor de ser vivo
ni mayor pesadumbre que la vida consciente.
Happy is the tree, which can scarcely be called sensitive;
happier still hard stone, because it is devoid of senses:
for no grief can be greater than the grief of being alive,
nor any sorrow greater than the life of consciousness.
He is making what he imagines to be an intelligent and theatrical pause before continuing the poem, when he hears his two companions laughing heartily. Salma collapses on the boards of the stage, her shoulders aquiver. Don Fuco laughs harder than Victorio has ever seen him laugh, his hands clasped in front of his face, without removing his gaze from Victorio, his eyes wide with surprise.
Victorio undergoes a series of confused reactions that take him from perplexity to disappointment, from disappointment to jubilation. For a few brief moments, he sees himself in the middle of the affected yet natural design of the stage. He has gone from reciting the pessimistic alexandrines of Rubén Darío to breaking out laughing, himself, enjoying himself at his own expense.
What is the reason behind their uncontrollable laughter at these serious verses? The humor does not lie, of course, in the magnificent alexandrines. Nor is there anything about Victorio — Victorio’s seriousness, the pathos of his image half dissolved in shadow — that would move you to laughter. Perhaps the key is the way these two kinds of seriousness are conjoined. Maybe the grimness of the alexandrines, joined to the austerity of the performer, is what evokes the spark of humor, like two stones struck together. It could be a matter of the force evoked by the disillusionment of the verses, added to the force implicit in the sorrowful manner of the recitation, that somehow creates a force with the opposite sign. All that’s certain is the forthright, enchanted, celebratory laughter, which relaxes the muscles of their bodies, the tension in their souls, the hardness of their spirits.
“You, sir, are a genuine clown,” Don Fuco notes, “a real clown, a total clown, my friend.”
Salma stares with a mixture of tenderness, amazement, and envy at this new Victorio, diminished by such overwhelming praise.
The ruins seem abandoned. Unpredictable, like everything else on this island, the days can bring rain or clear skies. Some days it rains while the sun still shines.
“It appears this will be a rainy year,” Victorio deduces after a while.
“I think it’ll be just the opposite, you,” says Salma.
Without looking at any landscape other than the furious gray sea that can be glimpsed through the window in Anna Pavlova, the Great One’s, dressing room, Don Fuco decides to devote himself to passing on his knowledge. At dawn each day they will stand before the master teacher, for long hours of arduous apprenticeship.
Salma learns the mystery of making roses and rabbits and doves disappear into hats, bags, and gift boxes. She dances with balls, fans, and umbrellas, and learns to shuffle cards in the air. She develops a routine in which she is Mata Hari, as played by Greta Garbo.
Victorio not only perfects the art of poems-so-serious-they-make-you-laugh, he learns the technique of Japanese dance, and is able to imitate Don Fuco, carrying out all his movements: as a samurai, as a geisha, as a small child, and as an old man. He can also enter the small wicker basket with the highly refined artistry that Don Fuco must have learned from Kazuo Ono himself.
Don Fuco tells them long stories about Pailock and Baro the Great. He shows them the art of the mime, which he learned in a Paris of the imagination at the hands of none other than the equally imaginary Marcel Marceau. How to make the most of facial expressions, glances, hand movements, the subtlety of the fingers. He reveals the secrets and nuances in the voice. He lectures on the unfathomable enigmas of chains of action; on the art of laughing and crying with authenticity.
“The spectator cannot catch sight of how much work each act takes us. As Alicia Alonso always says, one must master the technique in order to extend over it the illusion of ease. And so, in literature, music, acting, or dance, it is fatal if the reader, listener, or observer notices the work we are going through to attain what we attain.”
Salma and Victorio are now able to recite verses from Shakespeare as if they were the commonest sort of speech; they are trying to understand the enigmas of the body Don Fuco speaks to them of Stanislavsky Meyerhold, Grotowski, Peter Brook. He teaches them how to receive applause, a rather more difficult discipline than most actors think: how to convert the applause into a second performance that will create a desire to come back to the show. They practice for long and productive hours, for glorious, amusing, joy-filled days.
Victorio has designed his own costume. He wants a Pierrot costume exactly like the one that Gilles wears in the famous painting by Watteau: baggy, overflowing at the collar, round, sleeves too long to be taken in, silk as white as mother-of-pearl, wide-brimmed hat, and white slippers decorated with big pink ribbons tied in bows. Victorio-Pierrot paints a blood-red tear on his left cheek.
Salma adores the joy, the shock that the upcoming practices will cause, and she asks, she insists that Don Fuco include them from now on in his shows. Her arguments are cruel and therefore unassailable. “All right, who’s going to take car
e of this ruin when you’re not here anymore? And tell me, who’s going to go to the cemeteries when people are crying, and who’s going to make people’s lives easier — people who can’t expect any other life — on an afternoon when they suddenly see a clown, a real clown, not one of those clowns that make them suffer? Old man, do you think you’re going to live forever?”
Don Fuco laughs, lifts his hands, nods his head and accepts. And that is how Salma comes to be seen in a dark mask, a crimson leotard that she has decided to decorate with bursts of yellow, blue, orange, and mauve sequins on the breast and hips, and a felt hat with satin flowers, which, the old clown reveals, once belonged to Miriam Acevedo, the greatest actress from the Island.
When alone, however, as their debut approaches, Victorio grows restless, loses hope, says no, confesses to Salma that he’s no clown, that he’ll never be one, that he doesn’t have buffoonery in him, that he doesn’t know whether he’ll be up to clowning before an audience whose reaction he cannot predict. “I’ve always run away from other people’s gazes, Salma. I’ve always hid, ever since I was a little boy. In school, when they realized that I was feeble or clumsy or queer, as they liked to say, I could never stand it when they made fun of me. Their mordant gazes and mocking laughter wounded me like they were stabbing me with augers. I always wanted people to take me seriously, to look at me without laughing, without teasing. How do you suppose I could just stand there dressed like a clown in front of everybody? How am I, at my age, going to put up with things that I couldn’t stand as a child?”
As if she had grown old during these seconds, as if she had become a very wise old woman, Salma makes no reply but limits herself to looking at him with eyes that light the darkness in the devastated stage of the Liceo. She seems to understand his arguments and more: she seems to understand what he is hiding, or what he himself doesn’t know. Her hands caress Victorio’s face. She sits down next to him. She hugs him like a mother, and like a mother she tells him, “My little boy, you’re a little boy and you’re mine,” and she squeezes him in her arms and holds him to her bosom as if he really were some fellow out freezing in the rain. Victorio recalls that first meeting between the two of them, under the archway in the ancient city wall. He can even see the stray dog that was out there in the rain. “Who told you that acting like a clown makes you ridiculous? Have you ever stopped to think how many people make themselves ridiculous without ever dressing up as clowns?” She holds him even tighter, as if she wants to transfer her faith to him. “Ay, my angel, haven’t you realized that there’s too much ridiculousness and not enough clowning in this poor city of ours? Haven’t you seen that we have too much mockery, trickery, nastiness, and not enough laughter and lucidity? My little boy, my poor little forty-six-year-old boy, don’t you remember the story I told you about when I was an adolescent, when I discovered that bringing about pleasure in others is a greater pleasure than pursuing my own?”
Victorio nods, with his eyes closed.
“You can do it,” she tries to convince him in her finest voice, barely a whisper, “you can do it, my boy, my angel, Victorio, I know you can dominate your demons and demonize your body and your words. You know why?”
But he is so bewildered by the fact that she has called him Victorio for the first time that he doesn’t hear the question, much less the answer.
One day they have finished rehearsing an act that does not present too many complications, which they plan to perform, as a kind of test, in an old age home in El Palmar, a remote neighborhood of Marianao, out where the last houses give way to open fields.
Against the merry background music of a Vieuxtemps composition, originally written for piano and violin and adapted here for flute, Don Fuco comes onto the stage and pantomimes a man at table. His top hat serves as an imaginary dressing table, desk, workbench, shop counter, bar, console, and it is amazing how Don Fuco can leave it there suspended in midair, stuck in the air, and write on it, eat at it, sit on it, lean against it, use it as a stage on which he contorts his body in a strange dance that might be composed of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese elements as well as movements from the magnificent Martha Graham. To conclude, he falls down as if dead after a virtuoso tour-en-l’air with an allonge fall.
At that moment Salma enters in her sequin-spangled outfit, and covers up the clown’s body with a black velveteen cloth. Victorio appears, reciting Rubén Darío’s inimitable alexandrines. Victorio has managed to forget about the old folks and their nurses, and he recites the text with his eyes closed and arms upraised.
Some of the old people laugh and applaud timidly. Others neither laugh nor applaud. All of them, however, allow Salma to sit on their laps and sing a nursery song about a palace that has been destroyed and a king who has no subjects.
They don’t go out every day. Maybe once a week. Sometimes not even that. They can’t rush into it, just like that, so suddenly: they still have many things to learn and many fears to lose. “It is harder to make people laugh than to make them cry,” says Fuco.
And they test themselves, they lose heart, they take heart, they grow bolder, they shrink with dread. One moment they’re saying that nothing makes any sense, and an instant later they adopt the opposite opinion.
“A time will come when we take Havana by storm,” says Salma, always the most likely to get carried away by her fantasies. Victorio and Don Fuco know that when she is inspired they have to let her be. “All three of us will go,” she says, “all three dressed identically, you, to three different places, and we’ll do the same act. We’ll baffle everybody in Havana. They won’t be able to figure out how a single clown can be in three places at once, and little by little they’ll start joining us, others will come out, lots more people will want to discover their funny side, their clownishness, and in the end there’ll be lots of us, hundreds, thousands, what do you think of that? A whole army of clowns.”
“We have to start on the outskirts,” Don Fuco declares. So they disappear out on the rocky alleyways of Zamora, in the marshes of El Fanguito, in the unsanitary byways of El Husillo, in the dangerous shadows of La Jata, in the crammed quarters of Diezmero, in the remoteness of El Cotorro, among the wretched side streets of Pogolotti. They manage to infiltrate, during visiting hours, the big hospitals such as the Military Hospital, Covadonga, Emergency, Naval, Calixto García, Quinta Balear, Oncology, Mental Illnesses (Mazorra), and the Sanatorium in Santiago de las Vegas for those infected by the Epidemic of the Century. In each of them, they hear laughter from patients on the verge of death, and from the despairing sleepwalkers who treat the patients on the verge of death. They don’t have trouble performing in Mazorra, because its director, a sensitive man, welcomes anything that can distract his tormented patients. They travel around as many funeral parlors as possible, whether run by the city, the province, or the nation. They attend burials in the Colon Cemetery, in the cemetery of La Lisa, in the Chinese cemetery, in the Jewish cemetery, the two in Guanabacoa. They visit old age homes. They enter the shelters where the victims of hurricanes and catastrophes have to wait, for year after pointless year, until their houses are rebuilt.
Since Don Fuco deems that misfortune is not always apparent, sometimes they approach the city center and go along the Malecón, the beaches of East Havana, the entrance to Cine Yara where the most beautiful boys in the world hang out, and the hangouts that line the Avenue of the Presidents (where the Fiat Bar, better known as the Repair Shop, has been closed by military decree). They venture into Catholic, Protestant, Adventist churches, Masonic temples, and Christian Science reading rooms. They put on performances at bus stops where passengers tend to spend whole hours of their fleeting lives waiting for an oversized bus called “the camel.” They go to countless bars, above all to ugly, sorry, cagelike neighborhood bars, where a cheap alcohol called chispetrén is sold for Cuban pesos.
They travel to the fields where crops are being weeded or harvested, and where sugarcane is being cut in the same way it was two centuries ago. “U
nder the shimmering sun,” as El Cucalambé would say. On the scorching mounds of red soil between the fields, Don Fuco puts on his shows during the lunch hour, when the people in the countryside take off their straw hats, wipe the sweat from their brows and chests, and leave their chores with a sigh of relief for a single hour of rest. They know that sweating in the countryside is not at all like sweating in the city. They likewise know the taste of the dust and the bad taste of the water. They curse the Cuban poets who would take any horror and turn it into an idyll, who sang about those infernos as if they were so many bucolic paradises. Victorio likes to recite ironically:
! Qué Undo brillan los campos
de mi Cuba idolatrada… !
How beautifully the fields gleam
in my beloved Cuba… !
No doubt about it, Romantic poets were blind to the flies, the mud, the buzzards, the sun, the mosquitoes, and the shit. Don Fuco points out, “It didn’t occur to any of our nineteenth-century Romantics to stop and ask some of the slaves who were out here cutting cane what they thought about ‘the fields of their beloved Cuba.’ Did we have no Baudelaire who might have shown us the terrible beauty of carrion?”
Distant Palaces Page 18