They return to the highways and struggle to find the transportation that would take them back to the city, to their refuge in their ruined theater. The three of them can be heard singing, infected by Victorio’s irony:
Qué linda la alborada,
qué prirnor,
cuando asoma en las montañas!
! Qué linda se ve la sabana
con los rayitos del sol… !
How beautiful the dawn,
what a pretty show,
when it creeps upon the mountains!
How beautiful the savanna
in the new beams of the sun!
Every day they visit a new place. They travel from one side of the city to the other. Along roads, streets, highways, and alleys. Restlessly, in cars and trucks and bicycles and carts pulled by oxen. Salma and Victorio come to know the good fortune of sleeping in secluded parks, on damp romerillo bushes, under the disconcerting profusion of stars. Too many stars keep you from getting a good night’s sleep, as Marti said long ago. They drink water from rivers that have not yet been polluted. They eat fruit from the trees. They wake up in the light of dawns whose colors they never would have imagined. They take the combs from beehives without encountering danger, and savor the honey. They drink milk fresh from the cow. They don’t care that the countless varieties of butterflies and insects already have their names: they classify them again with names that amuse them or that they find more appropriate. The same for plants and flowers. And roads. Byways. Estuaries. Savannas. Coves. Rivers. Channels. Palm groves.
They go into the sea whenever they have a chance. They enjoy the danger.
Havana, like the sea and like the countryside, sometimes shows its generous side. “Yes, it does have a generous side: the thing is to look hard to find it.” That is what Don Fuco insists. They are content to appreciate the personality of each street, the dialogue between buildings, the beauty hidden in new constructions and in ruins. They begin to appreciate the human side of the aggressive, anxious people of Havana. On long, interminable workdays, they crisscross the contradictions of that odious and lovable city. Havana has many faces. So do those who inhabit it.
Many days and lots of patience have taught them to dance, without music, on the gables of former palaces. Don Fuco has trained them to dance to the music in their memories. In addition, they have spent long hours practicing on the railings of the primitive opera boxes in the ruins of the theater. But now they are having their debut on the streets of Havana, in the old mansions where the moneyed families of Havana once lived. Not wishing to seem too outlandish, they have limited themselves to dressing in black, the only details being their very white makeup and two small felt hats.
They dance to the memory of a Debussy melody, so that their movements will be smooth and so that, for the moment, they will not run any risks that might prove fatal. This dance thus tends toward subtlety, with a touch of the indispensable voluptuousness that so pleases the public. From time to time Salma lifts her long skirt and shows off her thin, white, well-formed thighs.
The crowds that slowly form in the street shout, clap, or whistle. They’re as likely to shout praises as insults.
Since they have learned to listen to the public’s opinion to the same degree that they ignore it, they silently continue their dance, which is a parody of love. For them Havana then becomes the dance, the precarious balance and joyful danger of knowing that they could fall with any step in the dance, with any distraction. Havana, too, is a leap from gable to gable, with the elegance of two ballet dancers and the ridiculousness of two clowns. Reconciling elegance with ridiculousness has been an arduous task. Reconciling the two atop the gables of a ruined palace has been a rash deed. What is truly magical, however, is that they have learned to avoid the stones that the audience throws at them from the street, and to escape from the police without letting it look like they are running away. To transform a getaway into a disappearing act. Fear into bravery.
As Salma and Victorio pick up confidence and virtuosity they begin to add variety to the trio’s acts. Don Fuco makes rabbits appear out of Victorio’s hat and pulls scarves from Salma’s ear. Victorio learns poems by Amado Nervo, Salvatore Quasimodo, T. S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Nicolás Guillén, Luis Cernuda, Cesare Pavese… After long, exhausting rehearsals, Salma can now dance like a marionette that mimics Maria Taglioni. Also dancing like a puppet, like an inanimate being created by the prodigious hands and imagination of Doctor Coppelius, Victorio plays the role of Josephine Baker or Fred Astaire to the rhythm of music that Salma wrests from the flute of Belisario Lopez.
One night they bring their show to the Parque de los Filósofos, near a carnival of carousels and roller-coasters that has been set up alongside the Havana Amphitheater. They hang black curtains for a camera obscura from the trees. For lights, they have only a few large and ancient candles, fused forever to their intricate bronze candlesticks. Passersby begin to draw near, attracted by the strangeness of the improvised stage, until a sizable crowd of spectators has amassed around the ugly curtains.
A flute is heard, playing music. The melody is one that repeats, over and over, with disquieting insistence, a central motif. A Pierrot appears among the curtains. One blood-red tear shines on his cheek. It is a tear that seems to be made of tiny rubies. The Pierrot’s attitude is one of sadness, dejection, and helplessness. This Pierrot has been subtle enough to understand that exaggerated tragedy can turn into comedy He raises a hand and the music stops, while an odd voice is heard, saying:
No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte
el cielo que me tienes prometido …
I am not moved, my God, to love you
by the heaven you have promised me…
The audience suffers its first confusion. The audience doesn’t know if it should laugh. Until, happily, someone — the usual audacious soul — breaks the silence with the first guffaw. Emboldened, the rest of the audience follows. The poem is finished to a rousing choir of laughter.
Then an ambiguous figure enters, wrapped in a long cape of white feathers. The feathers shine white under the insufficient light of the candles. The silence now is impressive. The cape falls to the ground. From under it emerges an imitation, half tender and half grotesque, of the Blue Angel — that is, of Marlene Dietrich — singing “Lili Marleen.” From the hat of this Dietrich, who evokes pity and therefore laughter, fly sparrows.
Now a young image of Death is advancing through the air; Dietrich’s sparrows are attracted to her small hat. Death wears whiteface and phosphorescent bones painted on her black leotard. Dietrich begins to rise toward a meeting with Death, and when her song ends, they are joined in a single body. The resulting body is neither that of Dietrich nor of Death.
On the stage, the improvised space that serves them as a stage, a chair now sits. No one knows how it got there. The scant light of the candles dampens even more. The proportions of the chair grow, as if it has changed dimensions.
A long silence continues in the Park of the Philosophers. A useful silence. The body that contains both Dietrich and Death is lit with blue light. An adolescent body, covered only by white shorts. The steps with which he approaches the chair are slow, slow, incredibly slow. He sits down. His handsome back, the back of his neck, can be seen in staggering detail. The hypothetical stage is also lit up, perhaps because the adolescent has lifted his right arm with his palm open and turned toward the sky White smoke is rising from his hand. From amid the smoke, which dissipates on high, appear domes, battlements, towers, arches, columns, windows, and balconies.
Half the audience applauds; the other half whistles in annoyance and shouts insults. A group of children stationed in the trees throw stones. Police sirens are heard. Police race toward the small crowd, who run away in terror at the sight of them. The police tear down the old curtains and put out the candles. “Hey, you there! Where the hell do you think this is?”
The Pierrot, Dietrich, and Death are forced into a police car. They are taken to the poli
ce station on Zanja, a place where the style is willfully ugly. There, on harsh benches of frightful granite, they spend the stifling late-night hours.
Though she is a member of the police, the lieutenant doesn’t seem brutish. She is a little over twenty and capriciously beautiful, like all mulattas with yellow eyes. At five in the morning she orders them to leave, with the recommendation that they should wait until Carnival to start wearing masks.
*
“It is characteristic of any road to have roadblocks,” says Don Fuco; “it is characteristic of any roadblock to grow larger and larger.”
From that night on, everything gets harder. Entering hospitals, for example, becomes an odyssey. They have to use doctors’ and nurses’ gowns to enter unnoticed through the guarded doors. On many afternoons, in cemeteries and funeral parlors, they find themselves obliged to interrupt their performances so they can run away from the police.
They don’t always manage to make people laugh. They are stoned in many workplaces. Expelled from gas stations and stores. Insulted and shooed away like enemies. Treated like lepers. As almost always is the case, incipient fame brings problems. Much more so in a city as envious as Havana, where fame is never forgiven; success, much less.
One morning they are not allowed to enter the Colon Cemetery. Two blue-uniformed guards call them over and lead them away to an office with tall windows opening onto a shining sea of tombs and mausoleums. The office is furnished in a savage Spanish renaissance style. The office smells of dust, dirty boxes, cockroaches, files, old papers, tobacco, and coffee. The secretary — a wax statue of a woman from the Havana of the thirties, complete with a Remington typewriter at her fingertips — points them to a door.
The cemetery administrator receives them: a small, thin, bald little man with a long white beard stained yellow from nicotine. He moves like a bureaucrat who is imitating a priest about to give absolution.
“Comrades,” he says, and his shrill voice seems like it couldn’t be coming from his little body: it is the voice of Tito Gobbi, reanimated after all these years in the least appropriate body. “Comrades, I wonder if you understand that this is a cemetery: a cemetery, a graveyard, a burial ground, not a side branch of the carnival at Rio.” He taps his left index finger against his right palm. “Not merely a cemetery, but one of the most elegant cemeteries in the world, in the same class as Montparnasse and Père-Lachaise.” He blinks as if he had dirt in his eyes. “Magicians and clowns? To the circus with them! That’s where they belong.”
“We make people laugh,” Salma dares to say.
The administrator seems not to hear her. “We have received a lot of complaints. Next time I see you here, I call the police.” He opens the door. At last he looks at Salma with wide, reddened eyes. “People come here to cry, miss. People come here to show that they have a sensitive and tragic side. Why do you want to deprive them of that pleasure?”
It is in the cemetery in the town of Bauta that Salma breaks down and cries. During the funeral of “the Emilia who lived in the little old house.”
Her performance was to have consisted of something very simple: lift up a big red cloak so that the clown Don Fuco could appear from under it. But Salma hasn’t done what was expected of her. She has allowed herself to be overcome by tears and sobbing, and her arms haven’t had the strength to lift the cloak, so the clown hasn’t been able to move, remaining trapped between the folds of cloth. It has been odd, very odd indeed, to see this young woman in her se-quined leotard and her giant cloak, crying disconsolately over the Estévez-Pazó family tomb.
The mourners have not halted their ceremony. They have even pretended not to see the outlandish character.
Later, the three of them are sitting silently in the entrance of the Masonic Lodge. It is a luminous, lifeless, stifling midday The town is shining so brightly that the walls seem made of glass. Apart from the light and the barking of dogs, the only thing that seems to have any kind of life here is the smell of burning sugarcane that wafts in from the fields.
*
Salma explains that she has been obsessed for several days by a matter that has weighed on her. An issue that does not let her be as happy as she would like.
“And tell me if you two don’t think it’s terribly important: I can’t remember my mother’s face, and that’s with me turning it over and over in my head; and, yes, I can see her hands all covered with spots, her fingernails infected with the fungus she could never get rid of, I see her swollen feet with their bunions, and her varicose veins that looked ready to explode any day, and I see her old patched-up house robes, and I can even see her hair if I close my eyes, her hair that I liked to feel between my fingers when I got home at dawn to eat the soup that made me happy again to be alive. But her face, what you’d really call her face, that has disappeared from my memory.”
Don Fuco asks Salma to stop by the old Van Dyck photography studio on their way back and retrieve a photo of her mother. “Having exact memories is of capital importance,” he says. He also invites Victorio to accompany her. Victorio is to wait for her on the corner by the fire station; they should absolutely not enter the girl’s room together.
Salma promises that she will only need a second.
The “second” that Salma requested has become an hour. So Victorio knocks insistently on the entrance to the old Van Dyck photography studio.
Preceded by the fragrance of Kenzo cologne, a young man appears in the doorway. Tall, dark, elegant, with almond eyes and shaven head, he is dressed all in beige linen, with open shirt and baggy pants. Around his neck he wears a complete collection of Santería necklaces that stand out against his sculpted chest, as neat and distinguished as his clothing. Victorio notes that he has placed a folded handkerchief in the neck of his shirt — to collect his sweat, he guesses, the way bus conductors usually wear them. Nobody has to tell him, of course, that standing before him is El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud.
“Hello,” he greets him, smiling, amiable, and again he smiles, feigns a smile, because the truth is that Victorio feels afraid.
The other doesn’t reply; he smiles, too, but he doesn’t reply. He opens the door a little wider to let him through. “Is this Triumpho?” he asks in an excellent voice, strong but sweet at the same time, without seeming to ask anyone in particular, without ceasing to observe Victorio with a protective smile. There is a childish gleam to his almond eyes.
“My name isn’t Triumpho,” Victorio explains with all the calm he feels he can muster, “my name is Victorio. I was born on the same day as the assault on the Moncada barracks, and my parents, committed Fidelistas, decided to give me this name, Victorio. My name is Victorio, at your service.” He has attempted to dress up his words in irony. He resorts to what he imagines is his best expression of meekness. He exaggerates his embarrassment. He adds a pinch of self-pity He tries to keep El Negro Piedad from noticing his fear.
“Committed Fidelistas!” El Negro exclaims, serious, as if he can’t believe what he’s hearing. He laughs again, and his laughter becomes even more forthright, fascinating, enchanting. “Come on in, come on in.”
Salma is lying on one of the rickety old beds, motionless, curled up into a little ball.
“Victorio! If you only knew how much I… like your name! Your name is so… how can I put it?… so… victorious!” He jabs at Victorio with a finger that is as strong as a pistol. “It’s a good name to get through life with, isn’t it?”
Victorio dares to ask, “What happened to Salma?”
“Salma?” El Negro asks uncertainly. “Who is Salma?” He pauses to run his hand over his shaven head, which shows off the beauty of his mulatto and Chinese traits. The expression on his face is suddenly almost sad. “Oh, her? Isabel, her name isn’t Salma,” El Negro Piedad explains in a pitying tone, “her name is Isabel.” Utterly serious, El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud, sits down on the other bed. “Isabel has told me that you are a philosopher,” he declares without dropping
the grieved look on his face, “and I’ve been dying to meet a philosopher.”
“I’m nothing,” Victorio corrects him, “nothing at all, a poor devil”
“You’re not a philosopher? What a pity, I had such high hopes! So tell me, what are you doing here?”
“I came to see her,” Victorio explains bombastically, with the expression of someone living through a tragedy.
Sacredshroud frowns at him. He caresses one of Victorio’s hands and asks again, “What did you come here for?” He nods toward Salma, who is still curled up into a ball. “Isabelita told me that you’re a fag, is that true?” El Negro finishes taking off his shirt, which he hangs ceremoniously and carefully on the back of a chair. A tattoo rings the muscle of his left arm like an armband. Victorio admires his perfect torso. “Even if she hadn’t told me, boy, you look sad, like every fag who’s over forty.” He pauses to look at Victorio with a respectful expression. Now he is holding one hand over the other, both of them over his fly. Victorio can’t decide whether this posture is votive or defensive. Then he pulls out an elegant little box of menthol cigarettes, picks one, and lights it with mannerisms that would seem appropriate to a prince. He half closes his eyes. He inhales the smoke as if the future of the world depended on it. He looks, Victorio thinks, as if he and infinity were alone here in the room.
Victorio lowers his eyes, shrugs his shoulders, tries and manages to make himself smaller, feels and manages to transmit this sensation. Salma moves for the first time. She raises her face, too, and looks at Victorio. She has been beaten black and blue. Victorio cannot suppress the look of alarm on his face, his desire to come close to her.
Distant Palaces Page 19