For the first time, in a fit of disrespect or daring or debatable independence, he takes the bunch of keys that the clown always leaves hanging by the handless pendulum clock. He steps lightly across the floor, he walks on air, and his footsteps therefore cannot be heard. He makes no footsteps, nothing could give him away: his curiosity has transformed him into a shadow. He must try several keys in the lock before he discovers which is the obscure and insignificant little key that can set in motion the uncomplicated gearworks of the grim-looking padlock.
The door, it turns out, is stiff. Victorio has to push hard against it to make it open. The dressing room is small and empty. The only thing in it is a player piano or organ with a large golden crank.
Victorio shuts the door and approaches the instrument. It is made of glossy, polished wood: it looks like crystal. Inscribed in Gothic letters, it says “Lorenzo Nadal.” Victorio checks to see that the door is shut tight, and he turns the crank, starting up the mechanical works of the player piano.
Nobody would be able to see Victorio right now. He deduces that this is the key difference between bad music and good music. It’s that real music makes you invisible. The listener escapes and reappears elsewhere. All your senses switch functions. All that is hermetically sealed becomes diaphanous. He thinks he has finally recognized that life is everlasting and fleeting. He listens to the music, and tells himself, “This apparent paradox is usually called happiness, joy, gratification, satisfaction, delight, contentment, fruition, pleasure.”
This next door is simple to open. Stepping across the threshold is nevertheless not a simple matter. What name should he give to this instinct, which begs him to lock the door again and go lie down on the pallet to try and sleep? There is no doubt about it, curiosity proves stronger. He makes an effort, takes a step, a second, a third, and here he is, inside the dressing room.
The candlelight is so diffuse, its active radius is very limited, but that doesn’t keep Victorio from noticing the many marionettes, the unsuspectedly enormous number of marionettes that hang from the tangle of cords stretching from one end of the room to the other. How many are there? Two thousand, three thousand? Marionettes of every size, material, color, dress, and expression. Black, Chinese, white marionettes. Clothed marionettes and naked marionettes. Contented and annoyed marionettes. Marionettes that are laughing, marionettes that are crying. The unbelievable profusion of marionettes does not impede him as he makes way through to the back of the room, where he finds, against the wall, a small theater of boxes and boards, nothing too fancy, a simple framework sitting on a table covered with a black cloth. The box is painted, gracefully decorated with the intent of imitating the eclectic splendor of the proscenium of the Paris Opera. The curtain has been concocted from a lovely red cloth. A real shell, a seashell, serves as the shell-like prompter’s box.
Right next to the puppet theater there is another table, not covered by cloth, with several cases where more marionettes are resting. Victorio approaches and sets the large candle in its candlestick on the table. By the bashful light of the candle he tries to see the marionettes resting there in their cases, as if in their beds or their sarcophagi. He looks closely at them. He can’t tell whether what he is seeing is real. He also intuits that if it isn’t real, it Isn’t false, either. There is a small cardboard airplane that looks burnt. A shirtless, dark marionette that recalls El Moro. The next marionette looks like a dead woman and the dead woman is similar to Salma’s mother. The next marionette would represent Salma herself. Any closer resemblance between the marionette and the person would have to be impossible; no one could understand how this might be a coincidence. Farther off, far away, sitting in the basket of a hot-air balloon the size of a ball, Victorio thinks he has found Victorio, he thinks he finds himself in the form of a puppet covered with strings, solemn and badly dressed, looking famished, like a bum.
Pinned to a small bulletin board are pieces of paper with notes that are not clear, scrawled hurriedly in careless calligraphy. Victorio feels that he can decipher such phrases as “collapsed building,” “rooftop terraces,” “hunger,” “sacred shroud,” “church,” “cemetery,” “death.”
He turns to the puppet theater. Opens the curtain. On the miniature stage there are no props, just two suspended marionettes: a ballerina and a policeman. And a pistol has been placed in the policeman’s left hand, while the ballerina’s pearly white or eternally white tutu has been theatrically stained with red paint, simulating blood.
“Pandora’s great sin was curiosity,” booms a voice behind him.
Victorio notices that there is much more light now in the Guig-nol’s dressing room. He turns around. Don Fuco is not carrying any light in his hands, just his white robe and his ancient and ridiculous Shylock cap.
“Curiosity, the great sin,” the clown exclaims, amused, swishing the luminous whiteness of his robe.
“Please forgive me,” Victorio tries to excuse himself, caught red-handed, ashamed, not knowing what to do.
The clown makes a dainty gesture with his hands, raising them as if trying to stop something that is collapsing on him, and exclaims in his finest tenorino voice, “No, my friend, no, don’t blush: Pandora was a mortal, after all, a human being; luckily for her, she didn’t participate in the divine essence. You’ve been more than discreet. Logically, you should have entered the dressing room long since. By my calculations, you should have opened this door more than a month ago.”
Victorio recovers from his shame and, emboldened, picks up the marionette that to all appearances represents himself. “What does this mean?” he asks.
The clown lifts his hands to the spot on his chest where his heart supposedly lies. “Please don’t commit the vulgar error of thinking that someone tried to make a puppet that looks like you.” He opens his eyes in a sad gesture. “These Punchinellos are older than me, and that is saying a lot. They are more than two hundred years old — no, my friend, please don’t stare at me with that look of incredulity. The puppets you see here were made in the sixteen hundreds by Giovanni Briocci. There are others here by Hoffman, and from the collection of Carl Engel, and I have a number from the Salzburg school, and others from the Osaka school, and if they look like us…” He moves his hands as if he were conducting an imaginary orchestra, then stands motionless for several seconds. “But, no, my friend, they do not look like us: marionettes are superior. As Heinrich von Kleist asserted, a puppet would never do anything in an affected manner, because affectation appears when the soul (vis motrix) inhabits any other point than the center of gravity of a movement. Puppets have the advantage of being weightless, my friend. They know nothing of inertia, and inertia is the enemy of dance. Puppets are different from dancers because the force that raises them into the sky is greater than that which ties them to the earth. In 1801, Kleist said that puppets need the ground as much as elves do, and he concluded with a marvelous assertion: only a god might, in this regard, measure up against mere matter, and this is the point where the two ends of the ring that we call the world join together.”
The clown strides forward with his adolescent gait, crosses the dressing the room, and pulls back a curtain that Victorio has not noticed. It is a curtain or tapestry in gold and sepia tones, depicting a hot-air balloon that rises toward the cupolas of palaces high in the clouds. The curtain or tapestry hides a small door that opens onto a darkened room. The clown crosses the threshold and the room lights up. A long table is covered with black cloths. The only furniture in the room. The black pieces of cloth take on different forms all along the table, so it is obvious that the cloths and the table are all hiding something.
“Now you are inside my sanctum sanctorum, my locus solus, my Valhalla, and here you’ll see something wonderful,” the clown exclaims in a magician’s voice, and he raises the first piece of cloth. Victorio can see a bell jar that contains a dense fog. The clown winds a key several times, and to the tune of Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude, executed in the tones and insipid sounds of
a music box, the fog rises. There, inside the bell jar is a man in a white shirt, riding a sorrel colt; something suddenly stops the horseman, whose shirt stains red; the terrified sorrel rears its forehooves; the horseman falls onto the grass. Don Fuco winds the bell jar mechanism several times; several times they watch the man in the white shirt, who rides a colt and who is shot dead (by a bullet?) onto the grass.
The second bell jar is uncovered, its mechanism is wound, and a poor parody of a Chinese or perhaps a Japanese melody is heard. A young man, sitting at a table set for supper, laughs; the young man laughs and, laughing, spits up blood; the tablecloth is covered with blood, blood covers the young man’s clothes, the young man collapses onto the table.
In the third bell jar the chords of Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata ring out, and a man with an umbrella appears, sitting on a wicker rocking chair and rocking sadly, sorrowfully. And so, in each bell jar a scene takes place to the beat of a different piece of music. The dolls are disturbingly precise. They look like tiny people. They have the color, the spirit, the vulnerability, the grief, the desperation of human beings. As soon as the clockwork mechanism stops and the artificial music ceases in each bell jar, fog obscures the jar’s interior.
“Everything is here,” declares the clown, self-satisfied, and his look of complacency and his firm gestures show how certain he is. “Everything is here,” the clown repeats. “The whole island can sink tomorrow; what can never disappear are the ruins of this theater.”
“How did you get… ?” Victorio tries to ask, looking at the marionette that represents him and experiencing deep feelings of confusion. “I mean, all this, the place where we’re standing, the theater, everything in it.”
The clown performs a dance step and spreads his hands, as if the geography to which he was referring were too remote. The clown goes to a wardrobe and takes out a harlequin’s outfit, red, yellow, and black, and makes Victorio put it on. He takes out a wig of bright green hair and places it on Victorio’s head. “Come on, put on these clothes, your country looks down on you with pride.”
Victorio kisses the key to the palace that he wears around his neck, and gets dressed. In an old chest, Don Fuco now discovers a laurel crown, which isn’t really made of laurel leaves but of tin. With theatrical gestures he places the crown on the green wig.
Walking backward, as one should do for kings, the clown Don Fuco steps back from the harlequin. He admires his finished work. He smiles with satisfaction, Don Fuco does not leave: he vanishes into the shadows.
Two knocks are heard at the stage, next to Giselle’s tomb. For several seconds there is no other signal. It is raining. Hard. Rain is falling on the peaked roof above the stage. It sounds like an ovation. Victorio draws near the false tomb. He sees, he thinks he sees, that someone is pushing against the prop cover of the tomb. Jostling it gently, carefully, but firmly; if they had done it a little more decisively, the cover would have given way easily. Whoever is on the other side, you can tell that either they don’t understand the mechanism of the entrance, or else they prefer to act with restraint. They don’t want to make any noise, that much is obvious, and they allow another long period of calm to stretch out in the Pequeño Liceo of Havana. No new sound disturbs this primitive silence. Victorio even comes to thinks that he has been a victim of fear, of the delirium that fear induces: say what you will, fear remains the most potent way to transform reality. Victorio walks very carefully, barefoot, in his harlequin outfit, his wig and laurel crown, which isn’t made of laurel leaves but of tin. He slips in among the old orchestra seating. He has left the candlestick on the marionette table. He makes do with the scanty light that filters in through the cracks in the roof, along with the rain. The rain is so intense that the bats have ceased their clumsy gliding across the space above him.
Two, three, four concise knocks. The only consequence is that they awaken Salma. Victorio sees her appear in the gauze and spangles of her dress, from the left side of the stage; he sees her come down into the orchestra seating, close to him. “What’s going on?” she asks without asking, her eyes confused by a dream from which she has perhaps not yet shaken free.
He raises an index finger to his lips in a sign of silence.
The disorder of Salma’s sleepy eyes rapidly turns to fright: besides being potent, the influences of fear are also swift. She needs no explanations: Salma understands. Victorio then sees her close her eyes, as if this momentary loss of sight might sharpen her sense of hearing. More knocking is heard at Giselle’s tomb. There is nothing restrained about these new knocks. Salma and Victorio run to the end of the pit. They hide behind the tattered screen with countryside scenes of palm trees, brooks, and huts. Salma’s hands squeeze Victorio’s. He feels the chill of her sweating hands against his. For a few minutes all they hear is the knocking of the thunderstorm against the roof They would have preferred a rapidly unfolding outcome of noise and aggression; the truth is different: a century passes before they hear more noise, breaking glass, and see a policeman appear, a policeman soaked with rain, rising from Giselle’s tomb. Hesitantly and without hesitating, the officer steps toward the stage. A circle of water forms around him. He walks forward cautiously. He carries a flashlight in his hand, which he switches on to see where he is going. The policeman looks far too sure of himself for his self-confidence to be real. To all appearances he lacks the serene gait that the uniform gives police. There is even something in his figure that Victorio seems to remember, and which he cannot at first decipher. Salma cries out, in a mute, whispered scream, “It’s El Negro Piedad!”
Indeed, as he walks stealthily and never stops looking in every direction, there are moments when the flashes of lightning that enter through the cracks in the roof reveal the proud profile of Sacred-shroud. Strange at it seems, during those dangerous seconds Victorio finds him handsomer than ever.
What happens at this precise instant seems like a dream, another dream, even though this time it is a matter of the ordinary stuff of which reality is composed. In the center of the stage, a candelabra laden with thick candle stubs rises, calmly and rapidly. The echoing rain dies down and a flute is heard playing the melancholy melody of “The Swan,” piece number thirteen of The Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saëns. The shock of it not only immobilizes Salma and Victorio: even the policeman, El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacred-shroud, stands paralyzed, his arms hanging limp. White feather headdress, classic tarlatan tutu, and pointed dancing slippers: performing a perfect pas de bourrée, Don Fuco enters the stage. A timid look on his face, he moves both arms like wounded wings. Any turn of phrase that might be used to describe this scene enters inevitably onto the plane of paradox. Extremely laughable; extremely moving. An old clown parodies a ballerina; an extraordinary ballerina figures the death throes of a swan. For a while, Salma and Victorio forget about El Negro, forget about where they are; they feel the excitement of witnessing an act whose essence vanishes like smoke. A yearning to laugh out loud; a yearning to cry. They have to suppress both laughter and tears. Comic, tragic, ridiculous, distinguished, poignant, hilarious. Any pair of contradictory words would do.
El Negro Piedad, better known as Sacredshroud, seems to recover from the shock. As might have been expected, he escapes the enchantment long before Salma and Victorio do. While Salma and Victorio are moving from surprise to admiration, the pimp, or the policeman (you can no longer tell), is coming out of his surprise merely to fall into the coarse realization that here, in a ruined theater, under the light of a handful of candles, a terribly ugly old man, decked out in a tutu, is dancing grotesquely to the tune of some weird music. All three observe the same thing and all three observe different scenes.
Neither Victorio nor Salma hears the shot. They let themselves be dazzled by a flash that could be another bolt of lightning. They think they see a multitude of bats escaping in terror from the ruins. The Old Man-Ballerina-Clown-Swan stops still in the center of the stage. He tries to raise his hand to his head. He takes two more
steps, two wavering steps. He falls headlong. Near the proscenium. Don Fuco’s feather headdress is rapidly turning red. The music stops. All that can be heard is the fluttering of the bats and a sound like stone falling against stone.
In one agile bound, El Negro Piedad is on his knees next to the clown’s inert body. He lifts Don Fuco uncaringly. He looks into the dead man’s eyes and uncaringly lets him fall. Victorio notes El Negro’s almost sad expression. Melancholy makes the face of Sacred-shroud more beautiful.
Salma appears backstage. Victorio doesn’t know when the young woman found the time to leave his side and travel around the orchestra pit until she reached the stage. The fact is, she’s there, in her gauze dress and colored beadwork. In her hands she is carrying the bronze bust of José Martí.
Still kneeling, El Negro Piedad now looks at the blood, at his own bloodied hands. He is about to stand up, but Salma brings the bronze head of the poet down upon his head. For a moment the eyes of Sacredshroud appear captivated. You might swear that he is smiling just before he falls forward and lies outstretched on top of the ballerina, on top of Don Fuco, both of them lit by the flickering flashes of the storm.
The old clowns body is wrapped in a black velveteen cape. He is wearing the pointed dance slippers, the tarlatan tutu, and the feather headdress. Dressed in that getup, his dead body would be hard for them to take and carry through the streets without calling attention to themselves. They haven’t noticed that their precautions are pointless, given that Salma is dressed in a spangled gauze dress and Victorio is sporting a green wig, a harlequin outfit, and a laurel crown that is really made of tin. With some trepidation they go outside, into the driving rain, into the early Havana morning of soaked and badly lit streets, of facades that look like rubble. Salma realizes that she is still carrying the bust of Jose Marti, and she sets it down carefully, like an abandoned baby, at the door of an office building that has been closed because it is danger of collapsing. Fortunately, Don Fuco’s body weighs little, and it is raining furiously. They have no problem moving the corpse a couple of blocks. But the streets are empty only of pedestrians, not of police officers wearing black raincoats. As soon as they see the police car and the first pair of watchmen, they duck into the first staircase they find. The building is four stories tall. Rainwater is oozing through the walls. If Victorio’s calculations are correct, if his knowledge of Havana is not mistaken, at the top of the staircase there should be an access door to the rooftop terrace. With Salma’s help, he hoists Don Fuco over his shoulder. They begin climbing. Salma holds Don Fuco’s feet, to help Victorio. After the fourth floor, indeed, a door opens onto the early morning rain. The storm remains the same, omnipresent and aggressive. They rest against the water tanks. Worn out. Panting. Soaking wet. The weight of the dead body makes Victorio lose his vision momentarily. Salma looks at him with a frightened question in her eyes, and she wipes the sweat mixed with rain from his forehead. Victorio guesses what Salma would like to ask him. He tries to laugh. He doesn’t have the strength to talk. At this odd hour of the morning, this unknown hour, this storm-swept predawn hour, silence is complete silence, and silence becomes the supreme authority. Victorio manages to keep his smile, his only defense against Salma’s doubts. What else can he do? He would have liked to tell her about his dream, about the hot-air balloons, and, above all, about the Guignol. He would be happy if he could give her any kind of encouragement. First, he thinks, he should find his own courage.
Distant Palaces Page 24