El Negro Piedad squeezes his arm forcefully. “Leave her alone,” he orders in his sweetest voice, “she got what she deserves.” Salma looks at him without hatred, without reproach, with an enigmatic expression of mute dauntlessness. “I need your help, Victorio,” pleads El Negro Piedad, “this girl is wild, skittish, she refuses to be led down the right path, the path that will take her out of poverty.”
“What do you mean?” Victorio’s naivete is feigned, of course.
Sacredshroud stubs out his cigarette on the sole of his shoe. He stands up. My God, Victorio acknowledges in amazement, he has got the looks of a colossus. Sacredshroud uses his most persuasive voice: “If she keeps going on the path she’s on, she’ll end up like Chichi, her beloved little brother.”
And now, for the first time, Salma loses her composure. She bolts upright, gesticulates, looks at Victorio with terrorized eyes. She raises her hands, perhaps in an attempt to keep the words from coming out of Victorio’s mouth; he understands what Salma is trying to tell him, what she wants to keep him from asking. But curiosity turns out to be stronger than kindness, sensitivity, or terror; much more intense than any act of politeness or pity. “Her brother’s fine,” Victorio exclaims with all the candor he is capable of. “He’s living in Rome, in an apartment near the Quirinal Palace.”
Salma covers her face with her hands.
El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud, again looks very sad. He tries listlessly to laugh, he makes a movement with his body, a bit artificial, he tries to cover his ears as if he had heard the business about Chichi, Rome, and the Quirinal too many times. “Yes, of course,” he stresses, “he hooked up with an Italian prince who looks like Marcello Mastroianni, et cetera, et cetera.” He looks in every direction with an astonished expression; now he brings a hand to his forehead. He doesn’t look like a nineteen-year-old man, but a thirty-year-old. Beauty, Victorio tells himself, is a dangerous disease. “Her brother is in prison,” El Negro reveals, as if each word hurt him.
Quickly, Salma jumps to her feet, naked, on top of the bed. “Shut up!” she screams.
El Negro seems not to hear her. “He’s in for armed robbery He wounded some poor old woman with a knife — all but killed her — and came away with twenty-seven dollars and thirty cents.”
Salma suddenly grows calm. She is standing on the rickety old bed, naked, motionless, bruised from the beating. Possessing a strange dignity, she says nothing.
El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud, comes up to her, kisses her nipples, bites them softly, embraces her. “I love you,” he says in a convincing tone. “I love you and I want the best for you.” He turns to Victorio. “Help me, Victorio. Make her see reason. We could make so much money — thirty thousand, forty thousand dollars — and then live the only kind of life that would make this miserable life worthwhile!”
Victorio thinks that in this destitute country where everybody has gone crazy, there is no more reason; madness is a virus that has possessed everyone’s brains. “What do I have to do to help you?”
“Convince her to put on an elegant dress and put on enough makeup to cover the marks of her obstinacy. I’ll come pick her up to take her to the Havana Cafe in the Hotel Cohiba at twelve o’clock sharp. Midnight, I’ll be here.” He looks at his watch. He picks his shirt up from the chair and puts it back on. He appears tranquil and satisfied. He opens the door of the old photography studio. A gust of hot, humid air blows in through the door.
Before he leaves, El Negro Piedad pulls out a key and turns toward them with a generous, almost imploring expression. “One important detail: I am going to lock the door now, from the outside, just so I can be sure you’ll be here at midnight.” He kisses the key and kisses the joined tips of his fingers. The childish gleam still glows in his almond eyes.
Worried, obviously frightened, Salma combs her hair, puts on her makeup, and picks out her best shoes, an ugly pair in burgundy satin, and her best clothes, a tailored dress in a glossy mauve fabric, nothing plain about it, with two straps and an exquisite, showy detail: a gilded fleur-de-lis over the right breast. She hides a photo of her mother in the skimpy front of her dress. “Let’s skip this trap,” she orders.
“How?”
“You’ll see, easy. This isn’t the first time. He’s crazy,” she says while adjusting her dress, on the verge of tears. “I’d die before I’d show up at the Havana Cafe, that nutcase is likely to kill us both. I wonder if you noticed he’s a schizo — yeah, he is, it runs in the family.”
“He didn’t seem so dangerous to me, Salma, he just looked like a sad little boy.”
“Because you don’t know him. Because you let him charm you. I’ve seen him carrying a pistol stuffed in the back of his pants. You know what he wants me to do? Seduce an Estonian saddle maker, a Russian mafioso, a millionaire no doubt, an old geezer, a hundred years old at least, the most disgusting, degenerate old man I’ve seen in my life, trying to set up his horse harness business here, or a harem for his personal satisfaction. I’ve never seen such an ugly, slimy, wicked old man as him. I swear on my grave of my dead mother,” she joins her index fingers to make a cross, — may she rest in peace, that if that old Lithuanian —”
“Not Estonian?” Victorio interrupts.
“Same thing, you, who cares? Disgusting ugly old men don’t have homelands.” She falls silent for a few moments, and then adds, “Well, nobody has a homeland, you; that’s the truth, and I swear to you that if that old Estonian or Lithuanian or Latvian touches me one more time, I’m going to cut off that ridiculous piece of tripe that he so pompously and stupidly calls ‘my virility.’ I’ll castrate him, by God Almighty up in heaven, I’ll castrate him!”
Victorio has stopped paying attention to her venting and has helped her finish getting dressed. Salma looks at herself in the mirror. She raises her eyebrows, touches her pink-powdered cheeks, puckers her crimson lips into a fake kiss,
Then she leaves the mirror. She looks at her friend. Her voice suddenly sounds affected, with sarcasm in the background: “You let yourself get seduced by El Negro Piedad, you?” She doesn’t let him answer. “I admit, he’s good, he’s real good, and if you saw him naked. . . No, my dear, for your health’s sake, I won’t go into details — a Cuban, a real Cuban, you! Ay, Virgencita del Perpetuo Socorro, what a well-endowed brute he is.” She sighs and raises her eyes up to heaven, that is, up to the ceiling, in mock compassion. “You, more than anyone, should understand what I mean. But let me put it clearly: he doesn’t like men or women, he just likes himself. His name should be Narcissus. El Negro Piedad is madly in love with himself,” Salma declares; “he’s the only man I’ve ever slept with who has made me doubt whether I’m a woman, and who has made me think I’m just a prolongation of himself: his leg, his arm, his chest, his dick, whatever! He’s a miracle of self-love. He gives a heavenly screw, but I think he doesn’t do it out of generosity, he does it for the honor of driving somebody else crazy. Ah, and he loves mirrors — on the ceiling, on the walls; he loves being able to see himself all over, all at once and in every posture. Besides, let me tell you, he only gratifies men for money, so…”
She has to stop to catch her breath, and Victorio snatches the moment to explain: “Don’t be ridiculous, Salma. I hate to disappoint you, but your dear Piedad Sacredshroud, who is indeed a good-looking man, has left me colder than an iceberg. I’m sorry, dear, I really am, very sorry, I know you would have liked a good passionate drama — maybe some other time, but not now, not this time, at least not with your Narcissus. And now, let’s get going! If you really do have a way to escape, the sooner the better,” Victorio rudely orders.
Salma obeys him in silence, perhaps feeling frightened. “Come over here,” she directs. She pulls out a wooden ladder from under one of the rickety old beds and leans it against a wall. She climbs up. Victorio now notices a wooden rectangle in the ceiling, which Salma effortlessly pushes open with her hand. She climbs higher and gestures to her friend to follow. H
e also goes up the ladder.
They climb through the small rectangle and find themselves in a forgotten photography lab, with cobwebs so large they look like props. They don’t see the rats: they sense them. Sometimes they feel them moving, spying. The door is held shut with twisted wire. They have little trouble opening it.
Now they are standing on a narrow, filthy cement staircase, with no stone steps and no handrails. It smells of dust, of sparrow nests, of dried flowers, of cockroaches, of vinegar, of damp earth, and of course, of gas. Above one of the lintels, a pair of bats are sleeping.
The staircase takes them up to the flat rooftop of the old Van Dyck photography studio. There, as you might imagine, are the shattered water tanks, the birdcages, the clothesless clotheslines, the broken furniture, a few television antennas rusted by the sea air and knocked down by the wind, and lots of dead sparrows. They can see, blackened by the rain, the small tower of the chapel of Our Lord of Patience and Humility. A little farther off, the two towers of the train station and the perpetual flame of the refinery. The color of the flagstones on the rooftop terrace has turned aqueduct green, thinks Victorio, and he recalls the reservoirs built by Don Francisco de Albear y Lara. The drains are stuffed with piles of dead leaves, bird bones, beer cans, bits of wood, and every other type of trash. The wind blows in dirty and fetid.
*
Calle Apodaca. Its darkness can induce terror. They go down Calle Revillagigedo to Monte.
“This part of Havana has lost its former urban, cosmopolitan air, and now it has a sorry village atmosphere,” Victorio observes.
“I’ve always seen it just like this,” Salma replies.
Gloomy shadows, dirty houses, dusty sidewalks, broken streets. Groups of ten, twelve men, standing on the street corners, not doing anything except making noise, shouting, holding shouted conversations, unintelligible conversations in an unthinkable Spanish. The groups turn to watch Salma and Victorio walk by. Another characteristic of villages, where life becomes so needy that it aggravates people’s curiosity, where the emptiness of your own life gives singular value to everyone else’s most insignificant movements.
They stop in front of the magnificent entranceway to the palace of Don Miguel Aldama. They linger as they walk by the former Campo de Marte, now called the Parque de la Fraternidad, the Park of Brotherhood. Victorio has Salma look at the park.
“Just another park, you.”
Victorio explains that, no, they are standing in front of one of the most beautiful parks in the city, built by the dictator Machado. “In the center of the park grows a ceiba tree that is supposedly nourished by soil from every republic in the Americas,” he says professorially.
She claps her hands. “Then, if I hop over this little fence and stand on top of that soil, I can walk from Bolivia to Brazil, from Argentina to Mexico, from Paraguay to Chile.”
“They say,” Victorio continues, paying no attention to her puerile commentary, “that the dictator Machado buried an evil charm under that ceiba, a powerful piece of witchcraft that would keep the Island from ever being happy.”
Salma laughs. “So tomorrow let’s come back with picks and shovels, what do you think?”
They walk up Calle Reina. Salma’s ignorance about Havana doesn’t surprise Victorio. With a line of reasoning that belies the relative youth of his forty-six years, he tells himself that most young people are like her, they don’t know anything, though the most remarkable detail is that they don’t care, either. You might say that, for them, Havana has no history, as if they were wandering around a city that had just been created. For the youngest people here, Havana has no history, and this is perhaps a kind of defense mechanism; the oldest people here invent a different history — a false one, which is what every history, after all, must be — in which Havana ends up as a sort of Susa, Persepolis, or Sybaris, which they have had the good fortune to inhabit: this, you will comprehend, is by any reckoning another sort of defense mechanism; and so, between the Havana-that-does-not-exist and the paradise-lost-of-Havana, they find themselves in the peculiar reality of this dreaming fantasy, this subtropical delirium, under the sun, by the edge of a beautiful, a diabolically beautiful bay, open to the perilous waters of the Gulf of Mexico, swarming with sharks and lost souls.
The window (he couldn’t have said which one) opens onto the night. Tonight displays the false luminosity of clouded, rainy nights when the moon is shining despite it all, round and lovely, surrounded by halos of humidity that are said to unhinge madmen: an aggressive moon, which manages to break through the heavy, motionless, reddish cloud cover. Small fishing boats are also glaring, upsetting the calmness of the sea.
Black is Don Fuco’s telescope on its tripod by the window. Victorio bends over and moves it, observing: Aldebaran, Altair, Antares. He doesn’t know if these are actually the stars he is naming: the names are sonorous, lovely, and he takes the liberty of rechristening those luminous points with the names he knows and others that he doesn’t know.
He envies the fishers in their tranquil boats. The sea has always seemed to him more noble than the land. Victorio likes its way of seeming so resolutely unsure; he likes the way that it is dangerous and doesn’t try to hide the fact, while the land, which is just as precarious, masks its threats with meadows and hills and valleys and roads and flowers and savannas and gentle rivers and silver moonbeams and pure-voiced mockingbirds that gladden the mountains and the plains. Land is deceitful. Besides, if you find yourself needing to overcome something as terrible as the sea, something so elusive, so difficult, in order to reach the mystery of faraway places, doesn’t that constitute a powerful incentive, not to say the only incentive, for travel?
The lights on the boats look like fallen stars, and they, too, deserve to have names. He can’t be certain: he thinks he can see the silhouettes of the fishers. He guesses at the patience of the fishing lines, guesses at the man who is in the process of eliminating his destructive nervousness. Sometimes, man is capable of adapting to the eternity of fish.
In the distance, above the horizon, a hot-air balloon is silhouetted against the low cloud cover. Victorio knows, he thinks he knows, that it is displaying several signs. It must be a promotional balloon, for tourism, he says to himself, though it makes no sense to fly a promotional balloon through the sky this late at night. Dawn is breaking. It looks reddish, immaterial, illusory, in a city like this one, which stops living as soon as dark begins to descend. In an attempt to be precise: the artifact out there doesn’t remind him of a hot-air balloon, but of the shadow of a cloud that looks like a hot-air balloon.
The balloon approaches. The wind is carrying it swiftly in the direction of the ruined theater. What, he wonders, will the unbelieving people of Havana think when they see this immense hot-air balloon pass by with its red glowing basket? He tries to put himself in the place of those skeptical inhabitants, who stopped believing in miracles years ago. The telescope is useless. All he can see with it is an even cloudiness and the same old stars. With his naked eyes, however, he can contemplate the balloon in all its splendor. Red, green, yellow. A wicker basket, in which stands a man whom he recognizes at once. El Moro is waving good-bye from the basket. Victorio sees his dark naked torso, his spacious smile, his wide eyes; he smiles and responds to his good-bye.
*
In reality, of course, Victorio is lying down on the recamier and he hasn’t seen any balloons floating by Now he does think he can hear a sound, over there above the stage, around Giselle’s tomb. He gets up. He doesn’t turn on the lights, so as not to waken his companions. He lights the thick candle in Don Fuco’s candlestick and heads out barefoot from the dressing room toward the stage. His footsteps are furtive. Fearful. Distrustful. Things aren’t silent: nor could you say that the sounds that can be heard are suspicious. The howling must be from the wind; the sound of beating wings must come from all the bats. As for the applause, that could be rain. It has started raining, for certain. But no, it’s not so certain after all, becau
se the usual drips aren’t falling on the boards. Victorio walks down into the orchestra seating. He gets as far as the frayed screen, where he sees the black armchair for taking journeys. He sits down in it. He doesn’t take a journey. At least not in the sense you would when you sit in this armchair. He sees himself as a child, sitting on El Moro’s lap, inside the airplane on the embankment that serves as a landing strip.
“Triumpho, Triumpho!”
Salma’s cries fill the ruins of the theater with echoes and bats. She enters, excited. She jumps up onto the stage with surprising agility and runs over to the screen, oriented by the candlelight. Seeing Victorio, she spins around with her arms held wide. She stops and adopts Taglioni’s pose from the rotogravure in the dressing room. She ends up sitting on her friend’s lap. She kisses him repeatedly.
“Ay, Triumphito,” she says ecstatically, “that door over there, the one that opens onto the dressing rooms, was thrown open enthusiastically; I can still hear it, and I know I’ll always hear it: the hinges creaked, and there she was. Who was it? I wasn’t sure, I didn’t know who it was, you, I didn’t guess right away. It was a woman, but if I say ‘it was a woman,’ that’s like saying nothing. I know she opened the door to the dressing rooms, and she wore a patched-up house robe and her eyes were shining, I think the light that was lighting up her eyes came from the woman’s own body, and of course you’ve guessed right, Triumphito, it was my mother, my very own mother: she had broken into the dressing room like it was the most natural thing in the world. I felt dizzy, you, and at the same time I had the strange sensation that I wasn’t there; I saw her again, not like she was there in front of me, but like she used to be when she’d talk to me about my father, the trumpet player in New York, about how we’d go, her, my brother Chichi, and me, into the Apollo Theater up there in Harlem, to hear my father play with Dizzy Gillespie, with Chico O’ Farrill, while Patti LaBelle and Sammy Davis Jr. were singing. Chichi and I were by my mother’s side in the old Van Dyck photography studio; the place looked so pretty — not the horror you saw, dismal, dirty, sad, no, not at all — clean, fragrant, wide open, and I was so happy, I went outside naked and nobody shouted insults at me, can you believe it? Not a single insult, you. They threw flowers to me from the balconies on Apodaca and Corrales and Cienfuegos, they said the nicest things to me, that I was a prize among women and things like that, you. What happiness, fuck! What happiness to be reconciled with my neighborhood, with my neighbors, that my nakedness didn’t offend them or embarrass me. I was sure that I was also lit up from inside, so sure, you, so sure, as sure as I am that I’m sitting here in front of you. I was convinced that the light went right through my skin, like my skin was made from some kind of rice paper. I left, I left again, I mean that I went out once more without leaving this old theater; haven’t I ever told you that I love to bathe in the pouring rain? Well, there I was, under the pouring rain, in one of those intense, fleeting summer squalls when, for an hour or two, we have the conviction and the hope that the world is coming to an end. What a miracle, the world is dissolving in water, and there you are in the middle of it watching it being destroyed, turning into water and water and water, water falling on top of water. For me there’s nothing like standing in a thunderstorm in June, July. My mother taught me, she, who never liked to do anything fun, she always went out to bathe in the thunderstorms, the only grown woman among all us kids and adolescents, dancing with us, singing,
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