Distant Palaces

by Abilio Estevez

  Victorio wanders down Calle Reina and Avenida Carlos III. He passes (without a glance) the School of Letters and Art. He turns down Zapata. He rounds the Colon Cemetery. He sits in the lovely park where the Bureau of Investigations stood before the revolution. He rests his elbows on the bridge across the Almendares, “this river with its musical name,” and thinks of Dulce María Loynaz, of Juana Borrero, and of Julian del Casal.

  The neighborhood of Santa Felisa, the neighborhood of his childhood, is completely transformed, though it would be impossible to explain how. Everything is exactly the same, strangely identical, stuck in a time that has nothing to do with the time of reality. Nevertheless nothing looks the same; the neighborhood has been scandalously transformed. Victorio has experienced this sensation many times in Havana: the landscape has been modified precisely because it so obstinately remains unchanged. The passage of time has aged walls, columns, roofs, streets, trees, people, leaving them singularly motionless, like objects in the Museum of Useless Things. There, sitting inside the everlasting door to the corridor down which three families live, is old Ricarda. Still perched on her stool, just as Victorio remembers her, she keeps her feet soaking in a pewter basin of hot water, as is her custom, to counteract her aching rheumatism and the chilblains in her heels. As is her custom, she is asleep. It’s all unchanged: the same old Ricarda, the same stool, the same basin, the same water, the same feet, the same problems. As if ten years hadn’t passed. In any case, it cannot be the same Ricarda, nor the same basin, nor, of course, the same water.

  The door to the humble apartment that once belonged to Victorio’s family stands unlocked. The man who returns after a ten-year absence stops to caress the old boards that have lost successive coats of paint and now display the color of worn, worm-eaten, perhaps waterlogged wood. Sun, hurricanes, rainstorms, blasts of wind are, he imagines, among the fiercest manifestations of weather and time. The whirlwinds of time.

  Victorio dares enter the little dining-living room, over which a churchlike silence spreads. Inside, the paradox of this neighborhood persists: everything is identical and different. The floor, like a chessboard, black and white tiles. The wicker rocking chairs, in need of varnish, faded tatters of cushions. The dining table covered with the same cracked glass. The tall blue vase “with the bouquet of crepe paper flowers, which La Pucha, Hortensia, his mother, spent her free hours arranging, is now covered with dust and fly droppings. The same painting of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the only religious symbol that Papa Robespierre was unable to banish when he set about burning saints and virgins to the accompaniment of La Pucha’s wailing. Right next to the Sacred Heart, another photo, also religious in its own way, of a young and hope-inspiring Fidel Castro, giving the famous speech at which a dove settled on his shoulder. Elephants, Bud-dhas, damsels with parasols, troubadours with lutes, Chinese girls, dogs, doves, Spanish beauties with ornamental combs and mantillas, ghastly knickknacks, fakes porcelain statuettes bought for next to nothing in La Quincallera, in Sears, in El Ten Cents, in Los Precios Fijos. The bookshelf with the complete works of Lenin. Mao’s little red book. The photograph of Papa Robespierre in Red Square, Moscow, overcoat, fur hat, winter, below zero, back in ‘75, ‘76, Victorio can’t remember, some time when they must have awarded him a trip to go along with his being inducted into the Order of the National Vanguard. A trip whose main objective was to contemplate Lenin’s mummy. The illuminated photograph of La Pucha, Hortensia, his mother, surprised while walking along Calle Monte, reddish dress, hair pulled back with a white flower, her smile as timid as ever. The photographs of Victoria, his sister, and Victorio — in La Concha, next to a gigantic beer bottle, on the Marianao beach — have been removed: their outlines on the wall persist.

  Victorio reflects insistently: everything is in the same place as ever, but nothing is the same. He still doesn’t know, cannot explain to himself, where the dissension lies between present and past, since each wall, each piece of furniture obstinately persists in fixing, in making permanent, a reality that cannot be the same, yet is. Reality takes revenge and transforms itself into itself.

  The doorway to the bedroom, the only bedroom in the minimal house in Santa Felisa, is covered by the same curtain as ever, the one from his childhood, with geometric motifs, red triangles, blues rhomboids, green circles, black squares. He hears coughing. Papa Robespierre, it couldn’t be anyone else, clearing his throat. With unaccustomed calm, Victorio walks forward. He tries to make no noise, not for his own sake but for the old man’s. No, this time he isn’t possessed by the fear that his father always inspired in him. Facing up to the man whom he always feared more than anyone else in this life holds no importance for him at this point. He even finds it funny to think that he was once terrified of him. He draws the curtain aside. In his wheelchair, Papa Robespierre holds his head low and a book on his lap. The door to the little patio is open. Victorio sees the invalid against the backlight, in a shadow that washes out details.

  “Papa,” he says.

  The old man doesn’t move.

  “Papa,” he repeats, afraid that the old man’s deafness has gotten worse.

  With a great effort, the elderly man then raises his head.

  “I’m Victorio.”

  Papa Robespierre rests his chin against his chest, as if keeping his head up cost him too much effort.

  Victorio enters the room. He is surprised by the bad smell, the rank stench, of accumulated sweat, of dirty clothing, of urine, of an unwashed body. Victorio notices that the photograph of the German Walter Ulbricht is missing. He sits down on the unmade bed. In the distance he can hear a salsa band. Papa Robespierre has become an old man, so old that Victorio can scarcely recognize his father almighty in him. His eyes are sunken, small, colorless; his pupils are blurry, as if they had been replaced with two chunks of glass. His son gets the impression that his eyes are not looking in any particular direction. He is wearing the beret with the Cuban flag. Even so, his hair sticks out like greasy white fuzz. His yellowish beard, grown long, which at one time gave him the look of a biblical patriarch (Job before the wager between Yahweh and Satan), now turns him into the image of a homeless man (Job after the wager). This image is fostered by his shirt, which was once a glorious olive green, and now looks yellowed, frayed, and dirty. He is wearing the medals he earned on all those cane harvests, on all those army mobilizations, on all those work battalions; these, too, have lost the gilded sheen they had in former years when Victorio thought they were made of gold.

  Papa Robespierre’s hands tremble. Water runs persistently from his nose, which he constantly has to wipe with the back of his trembling hand. With great difficulty he raises his head toward the ceiling. For an instant. Again he lets it fall heavily. The salsa band stops. The silence grows long and heavy, like a great dead animal. The distant cheer of the salsa band can make the room’s squalor more dismal. Still trembling, the old man’s hands attempt to grasp the arms of the wheelchair. The book slips from his useless legs and hits the ground. He also tries to wipe the water dripping from his nose. Victorio helps him.

  From nearby kitchens comes a strong smell of recently filtered coffee. An argument can be heard, fierce words without any background: somebody is refusing to visit somebody or other. The band again goes on the attack:

  El cuarto de Tula le cogió candela,

  se quedó dormida y no apagó la vela…

  Tula’s bedroom is all on fire,

  she fell asleep and left the candle burning…

  Papa Robespierre looks at Victorio through reddened eyes. The bedroom in the minimal house in Santa Felisa grows even darker, as if the afternoon had given way to night. One of the veins that stand out on his father’s temples is making his forehead swell and throb. His nose continues dripping.

  The neighbors end their argument. Another neighbor, perhaps the same one, sings along with some hit singer, one of those singers who don’t belong to any country and who sing ballads that have no nationality, about loves of ove
rwhelming intensity, about desperate meetings and departures. This doesn’t mean that the salsa band has stopped playing: both commotions, the singer and the band, mesh in an odd way.

  Papa Robespierre coughs again. The cough makes a bellows-like sound in the cavern of his chest. He looks at his wrist as if he wants to see what time it is, except he has no watch. The old man again rests his chin against his chest, and seems to have fallen asleep.

  A fly begins to bother him. Victorio shoos it.

  In some nearby house you can hear a clock chiming the hour, an antiquated sound, one you wouldn’t expect to hear in the year 2000. Whenever he hears a clock’s chimes, Victorio experiences an inexplicable discomfort, as if he were the victim of some confusion or some fraud. On the other hand, the chimes serve to remind him how much he enjoyed, as a child, listening to the sounds in his neighbors’ houses, the auditory promiscuity that allowed him to reconstruct, after his own fashion, other people’s lives.

  Papa Robespierre is sweating. Victorio takes a towel that is hanging from a nail and dries the sweat that is running down his forehead, down his neck. The old man lifts an arm. On the wall above the bed, La Pucha, Hortensia, his mother, had hung a Madonna and child. It is a mestiza Madonna, made with rough clay and vivid colors. Covered in dust. Empty eyes that have come unpainted. Like Papa Robespierre’s eyes, the Madonna’s eyes do not look in any particular direction. Victorio turns on the lamp with the porcelain base, some kind of running nymph, Lladró-style, that had seemed so elegant to him as a child, and that he now discovers in all its pretentious vulgarity.

  *

  No, it isn’t raining. It isn’t even cloudy. The afternoon is gorgeous, clear and cool. And this proves to Victorio that, sometimes, life. That sometimes, life, what?

  He wanders off again along sidewalks that shimmer like desert sands. The trees provide no shade. A carnival atmosphere on the broken streets.

  He heads all the way down Calle 51, passes the old Quinta San Jose mansion where Lydia Cabrera lived, the Bilacciao peanut factory. He stops to rest at the Puentes Grandes bridge, where again he inevitably invokes Juana Borrero and Julián del Casal, who would arrive at her house here in the tram that once ran from Avenida Carlos III. When he reaches the wooded park that surrounds the July 26 Clinical Surgical Hospital, he recalls Salome, the dazzling ephebus who liked to like to stroll around naked at night among the trees that screen off the railway line, and who turned up dead one day, his head split open and a wild stick shoved up his ass; to date, his killers have not been found.

  Victorio skirts the sports complex and the Fuente Luminosa, the fountain that Cuban jokers have christened with the nickname “Paulina ‘s bidet.” Again he walks slowly, for a long time. Walk, stroll, ramble: these are the three synonyms on which at some point his fate seems to have settled. He leaves behind the Plaza de la Revolución and the National Library, where he spent the hours of a magical adolescence in the music room.

  He reaches the bus station. Now the rain has started falling, A fine, patient drizzle, inappropriate for a city that isn’t characterized by its refinement or patience. The night begins to take on a pleasantly sultry atmosphere. The city is strangely empty. Unlike the city, however, the bus station is full to the brim. Especially on the second floor, where those who are on the waiting list persist in waiting. Women, men, old people, children, lying on the floor, resting against suitcases, boxes, trunks, with the dejected expressions of those who know for certain that they have a night of waiting ahead of them, that is, an endless and pointless night. The place swarms with people hawking peanuts, candles, coffee, costume jewelry, cold pizzas, miraculous prayers, croquettes and bread, leather shoes, dog collars, pencils and notebooks, devilishly ugly plastic saints, coconut candy, towels, pillows, hair clips, and burners for kitchen stoves. A woman in her forties, dressed in black, makeup applied without the benefit of a mirror, has a portable radio tuned in to the mellifluous music of Radio Encyclopedia (Paul Mauriac and his orchestra? Richard Clay-derman? Barry White?). An incredibly ugly, grimy, dandruffy old man, stinking of sweat, with dreadfully bad breath, sexless, of course, and nicknamed Coridón, is selling little Olympic flags, stamps from some conference, cassettes of Latin American national anthems, movie posters, and mimeographed poems by an Uruguayan semi-poet, a leftist and therefore necessarily pretentious.

  Victorio heads for the restroom. He is dying to pee. That is the only reason that has caused him to pull into the horror that is the bus station. Whenever he enters this waiting room, where it seems that nothing will ever happen, he is overcome by a terrifying sadness. Lucky for him, he thinks, he doesn’t have any relatives to visit in the interior of the Island. A famished little old man is nodding and dozing as he sits on a stool by a table, on which there is a plate of twenty-centavo coins and a caged, and therefore restless, parrot that flutters desperately. There is no one in the urinals. Another piece of good fortune. To be able to urinate calmly, without being stared at obliquely by the hopeless-queens-of-the-urinals. What a pleasure, emptying a full bladder! What a pleasure, listening to your urine hit the porcelain of the urinal! What a delight, shaking yourself, getting rid of the last drops of urine, pulling up your underwear, fixing your dick like someone who has just accomplished an arduous, meticulous, hygienic task!

  Someone crosses behind Victorio and stops two urinals down. Almost instinctively, Victorio delays the action of closing his pants. Now he is the one with the grim gaze, the oblique stare, the hopeless-queen-of-the-urinal. It’s worth it to lower your eyelids, twist your eyes. An opulently vigorous prick, stout, blood-red, abundant, noble, breaks through two equally opulent fingers. Translucent, the salutary and beneficent stream of urine gives testimony to a faultless pair of kidneys. Victorio casts a quick glance at the man’s face, half hidden by shadows and by the visor of a Florida Marlins baseball cap. He doesn’t actually care, he couldn’t care who the owner of this marvel might be; he doesn’t know what he looks like, nor does he need to know. He looks at nothing but the prick. There are some pricks that aren’t mere pricks, they are the aleph, the yin-yang, the alpha and omega, the stars on whose energy whole astral systems are centered.

  The man finishes his piss and shakes his virile pride self-confidently. He gives it a good shake — not just self-confidently but meticulously, affectionately, very carefully, so that not a single drop of urine will stain his underwear. Then he leaves it hanging there, abandoning it to its own life. He shakes it again, unnecessarily, more tenderly Victorio notes the triumphant way in which that handsome piece of flesh begins to turn into a divine mast, leaning slightly to the left. Long and opulent, rosy and clean, the glans tops off a marvelous stalk, rutted by a hydrography of deep-flowing veins.

  Such an image cannot suffice: that is what the man must think, for he has introduced his right hand, with ostentatious, theatrical gestures, inside his pants, and has taken out a pair of luxuriant balls, as if he were setting out two loaves of bread. Corona of dark and hispid hair, thick and sinewy member, succulent balls. Victorio takes a bold step forward, stops at the urinal that stands next to the stranger. The stranger, in turn, does not touch his masculinity; perhaps he is trying to show that it is capable of shaking and moving on its own. Indeed, it does move up and down. And this kind of movement seems to be its way of sending an invitation. Victorio brings his hand over, slowly and quickly; he takes up this weapon with gentle violence. The stranger’s prick has a soft hardness. It is very solid, very hard: at the same time, and at heart, it has a seductive blandness, a harsh frailty. Victorio notes that it is seething, he feels it pulsate in his hands like an animal that is both confident and fierce. He feels how the blood courses through the vast rivers of those veins. He moves it back and forth. Its skin is a delicate sheath. Its glans hides and peeks out, hides and peeks out disquietingly.

  One of the stranger’s hands goes to Victorio ‘s head and presses it down. The other hand presses on the back of his head. Victorio kneels obediently. He tries to fill his mouth
with saliva, for he knows full well (anybody would know full well) how much males like it when their manhoods enter the warmness of the wet mouths of other kneeling men. But when he is just about to let this splendor enter his mouth, the stranger takes a step back. Victorio hears, for the first time, his tender, somewhat sad voice, warning, “No, Victorio, before I can gratify you, you have to tell me where Salma is.”

  Without even standing up, Victorio lifts his eyes. He meets the perfect, smiling face of Sacredshroud.

  He walks up Rancho Boyeros. Turning onto Calle Bruzón, he disappears among the broken sidewalks, overflowing sewers, frightful little houses, until he thinks he is out of danger on Avenida de Ayestarán. He is marching at a quick pace, running without running, of course, so as not to call attention to himself; excited, sweating, his heart in his throat, constantly looking back. He goes up Ayestarán and reaches Avenida Carlos III. At the first bus stop, miraculously, a bus is taking on passengers. He doesn’t know how, but he is able to get on. He shamefully tells the conductor, “Pardon me, I don’t have any money to pay for the bus.”

  The conductor, a tall black man with a thick mustache and long sideburns, in a uniform worn out from too much laundering, looks at him mistrustfully He apparently perceives the truthfulness of the shame that Victorio feels, and replies with a generous smile that belies his fierce expression, “No problem, neighbor, go ahead on in.”