After resting, without exchanging a word, they continue their march. Victorio shoulders the body of Anna Pavlova, the Great One, which is the body of Don Fuco. As everyone knows, crossing from one rooftop to another in Havana has never been very difficult. The paths through Havana have always been many, and one of the safest is the one that can be traced across the roofs and terraces. They trek across the highest part, across the rainy skyline of Havana. Neither the sleeping people of Havana nor the waking police notice that a young woman decked out in tulle and a forty-something man in a green wig, a harlequin outfit, and a laurel crown made not of laurels but of tin, are carrying the dead body of an elderly man in a tarlatan tutu.
For a long time, beneath the storm, moving between storage rooms, dovecotes, water tanks, rabbit hutches, clotheslines, moving between so many antennas for so many televisions, moving between the falling rain, Salma and Victorio carried the corpse of the clown. They rarely stopped to rest. Time was growing short. Dawn must have been near, though the early morning sky remained so dirty and so soaked with rain that believing in day was like believing in the dogmas of faith. But a moment came when Victorio couldn’t go on, and he came to a halt as if by order: a sharp pain jabbed at his back, an ache that ran all down his dorsal spine. Salma saw her own pain and fatigue in the mirror of her friend’s faintness. She helped him lower the dead old man. Darkened with blood, the feather headdress further accentuated the pallor of the clown’s face, whose makeup had been dissolved by the rain. They sat him down and leaned him against the dark and badly built wall of a wooden shack, which they guessed was an improvised carpentry shop. From the damp wood rose a pleasant aroma of wet pine, cedar, and mahogany. The rain did not let up. They couldn’t be sure whether the whistle they heard was from a ship or a train. That must have been a flock of seagulls flying tediously through the storm. When day began to break and the first glimmerings of dawn mingled with the perpetual flame of the oil refinery, Salma looked at Victorio in surprise. She thought she was seeing him for the first time. In that ridiculous red, yellow, and black harlequin outfit, that green wig and tin crown, he was the perfect image of a clown. She couldn’t repress her guffaws.
“Not that you’re so elegant,” he exclaimed in another explosion of laughter.
Then they saw the city that was emerging from the shadows, like another shadow, or like a relic. “Do you think they need us?” she asked, still laughing, pointing to the ruinous buildings and battered rooftops in the distance.
Victorio felt as if he were being freed from his own weight, from the cursed law of gravity. Salma watched him stand up, ridiculous and handsome in his outfit, and saw his sudden joy. “Now it’s our turn,” he replied, convinced.
And indeed, at their feet, still sleeping in the rain, Havana appeared to be the only city in the world ready to shelter them. It also seemed the sole survivor of four long centuries of failures, plagues, and collapses.
Havana-Palma de Mallorca-Havana,
1999-2002
Clowns perform impromptu high-wire acts above the ruins of Havana. Brightly colored hot-air balloons pass effortlessly from reality into dreams and back again. A bronze bust of Cuban poet and independence hero Jose Marti is wielded as a deadly weapon. Abilio Estévez’s second novel, Distant Palaces, is packed with striking, magical images. Unlike the exotic “magic realism” that has become a commonplace of Latin American literature, these images are imbued with the magic of art and artifice — that is, the magic of the theater, where the alchemy of the imagination can transform a cardboard reality into unreal yet truer perceptions of beauty. Estévez began his literary career as a playwright, turning to prose only in his forties with his first novel, Thine Is the Kingdom (1997). He is recognized today as one of the premier prose stylists in the Spanish language, but his apprenticeship in drama is worth bearing in mind. Theater is one key to his prose. The twin aspects that define theater — the shabby reality of the props that make up the world, and the beauty into which they are transformed by the herculean efforts of performers — form the two poles around which his writing revolves.
This isn’t magic realism, and it certainly isn’t social realism. But it is one way to face up to life and make it worth living in Havana today.
The spirit of the theater pervades Distant Palaces. I am not just referring to the ruins of the “Pequeño Liceo of Havana,” the fictional private theater that serves as the setting for much of the novel, nor to the street performances that become the novel’s key theme. Its characters are creatures of the theater, in more ways than one. They have the iconic intensity of characters in a play. The main character of the novel has been afflicted since birth with the theatrically inappropriate name of Victorio — not a common name in Spanish but one that, for a Cuban, immediately calls to mind a kind of revolutionary fervor that has now become a bit of an embarrassment, particularly for this semi-closeted gay man whose very existence contradicts the manly pretenses of the revolutionary era. “What, did your parents hate you?” his new friend, the young prostitute who goes by the name Salma, asks him. She rebaptizes him on the spot with the even more ridiculous name Triunfo (or Triumpho, as I have half-translated it), referring to the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959. Salma, for her part, has named herself after a Mexican film star, and until she learns to become a performer in her own right, she papers over her dreary reality with the ersatz magic of Hollywood dreams. Don Fuco, the old clown who welcomes this odd couple into the ruins of his theater, uses a name lifted from a character in the stage comedy by Galician playwright Alfonso Caste-lao, Old Men Shouldn’t Fall in Love. Don Fuco trains Victorio and Salma — or better, initiates them — in all the arts that he uses in his street performances: magic, dance, music, theater. “The only value to be desired is that of artifice,” he tells Victorio, and when he serves a glass of plain water in a crystal glass, it tastes like cool, rich juice. The true substance of life lies in performance.
The novel itself is a theatrical piece of writing. Estévez’s prose often takes on an insistent musical rhythm that demands to be read out loud. (I can only hope that I have captured some of these rhythms in the translation.) Victorio, Salma, and other characters in the novel spontaneously quote poetry and song, citing verses ranging from Cuban poet Gaston Baquero to contemporary singer Carlos Varela (Salma’s favorite): these scenes reflect Cuban reality, for few people in the world are as ready to break out in song as the people of Havana, but they also serve as theatrical leavening while reiterating the novel’s theme of the enduring power of art. Simple names become elaborate motifs, repeated like the refrains of an opera. Victorio’s mother is never simply his mother, but always “La Pucha, Hortensia, his mother.” The triple repetition reveals something about the woman (and about Victorio): the down-to-earth nickname “La Pucha” stands for the woman as she was known to her working-class neighbors; her religiously conservative character is revealed by her more pretentious yet old-fashioned given name, “Hortensia”; “his mother” is Victorio’s inadequate synthesis of the woman’s twin aspects. The phrase, then, is revealing, but it is repeated as much for the musical quality of the repetition itself as for the revelations it brings.
Estévez set his first novel, Thine Is the Kingdom, in the waning days of the Batista dictatorship, during the weeks and days leading up to the “Triumph of the Revolution” on January 1, 1959. Virtually all of the plot takes place in the working-class Havana suburb of Mari-anao where Estévez himself was born and raised, among a crowded polyphonic cast of the score of vivid characters who make up the micro-neighborhood with the overtly symbolic name of The Island. (The Island has a brief cameo in Distant Palaces, when Victorio walks past “the place where the ninety-year-old Doña Juana caused a devastating fire on the thirty-first of December in 1958”) Estévez sets his second novel in a different waning era: the year 2000, the last days of the twentieth century, when Havana itself— after forty-one years of revolution and isolation — has become so worn and faded that the m
etaphor of the shabby stage seems all too appropriate. Scarcely more than half the length of the earlier novel, Distant Palaces has a smaller cast of characters, but it encompasses a far broader setting: all of Havana, which in essence becomes the book’s protagonist.
The novel opens with Victorio living in a miserable one-room apartment carved from a building that once was an opulent palace. As if this reduced life were not bad enough, he gets the news that the building is about to be demolished before it can collapse of its own weight, a depressingly common occurrence in the older sections of Havana nowadays. Because of the ravages of time and neglect, the people of Havana are being deprived of the timeless art represented by these old palaces — art that had outlived the craftsmen who carved their elegantly curving spiral staircases “in the days when people had the patience to work.” Newly homeless, Victorio undertakes an Ulyssean journey around the poorest, least picturesque, and touristic neighborhoods of Havana, in a seemingly vain search for the palace, the site where he can savor the pleasure of living, that should be his by birthright. All palaces, in a Havana that abounds in aging palaces, now seem far too distant.
In a tense counterpoint with the squalor of everyday life, however, the world of art remains a vivid reality Distant Palaces, just like Estévez’s first novel, swirls with references to Cuban and world art, music, and literature. Being men and women of Havana, after all, the characters of the novel ceaselessly drop names and cite works. Salma deliberately misquotes Jose Martí’s saying, “trenches of ideas are more powerful than trenches made of stone,” in the confidence that Victorio (or any other Cuban) will understand her reference, but also in the knowledge that she is keeping true to Martí’s legacy by adapting his words to her current circumstances. Nineteenth-century Cuban poets (Julián del Casal and Juana Borrero, Plácido and El Cu-calambé), Cuban singers and songwriters (from Sindo Garay and “Freddy” to Carlos Varela), composers of Italian opera, French ballet dancers, painters from Watteau to Monet: all coexist in this world where nameless politicians are endured, while art endures.
In this tour of Havana, the seemingly most fantastic stories and events are, in fact, the most real. At one point, Don Fuco tells Victorio the story of a black Cuban violinist who married a German princess and played to packed houses throughout Europe: this is based on the real life story of Claudio José Domingo Brindis de Salas (1852—1911), widely considered the greatest Cuban violinist of his time, though Don Fuco fuses his life’s tale with that of the purely fictional — I think! — Russian princess Marina Volkhovskoy. At another point, Victorio enters an apparently abandoned apartment building and follows the sounds of violins and singing until he reaches a room filled with men and women, all dressed in white, performing ceremonies around an altar for “Obbatalá, the Virgin of Mercy.” This scene, too, is based on a Cuban reality. Obbatalá is one of the principal orishas, the deities of the Afro-Cuban religion of Yoruba or Santería; the daughter of Olofi and Olodumare, she symbolizes purity, justice, and balance, and in honor of her purity, her followers often vow to dress entirely in white, and their ceremonies in her honor are performed just as they are described here. Obbatalá is equated with the Catholic saint la virgen de la Merced, an apparition of the Virgin Mary whose official title in English is Our Lady of Ransom, though I have chosen to translate her name more literally from Spanish as the Virgin of Mercy.
The antics of the old clown, Don Fuco, who rescues Victorio from homelessness, may also seem to belong to the realm of the fantastic, but in the touristic Havana of 2001, such street theater was a commonplace: gangs of clowns, on stilts, singing, playing drums and instruments, would make their sudden apparitions among the throngs of tourists in Old Havana, not overtly asking for tourists’ change but not averse to receiving it, either. Don Fuco’s performances are fantastic only because he does not direct them at the tourist trade. Instead, he targets the people of Havana themselves. He and his little troupe put on their guerrilla theater precisely in the sites least likely to be frequented by tourists: hospitals, funerals, cemeteries, gay hangouts, and, above all, the poor neighborhoods that are off the beaten tourist track, far from the Old Havana-Malecón-Heming-way Marina axis that defines the tourist’s Havana. High on Don Fuco’s list of targets are the poor working-class neighborhoods that ring the Cuban capital: La Jata, Diezmero, El Cotorro, El Husillo, and of course the many crowded neighborhoods of Marianao, the place where, as we have discovered, Victorio (like Estévez himself) grew up.
During his odyssey through Havana, Victorio returns to his old family house, and there he faces the central paradox of the city: that the places that have remained the most unchanged over time, the ones that have not been rearranged or refurbished or repainted in decades, are those in which the destructive passage of time is most evident. “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.” Havana-as-museum is a dead place, and a place of death, whether it remains fixed in place because of tourist demands for exotic displays, or because of the inability of its own citizens to change. Don Fuco’s theater of life provides a necessary answer to this living death. Between the collapsing palaces of Old Havana on the one hand, and the mushrooming nonentities of foreign-financed tourist hotels on the other, there has to be a space for Havana and its people to live, to change, and to grow on their own terms. In the end, Victorio and Salma decide that the people of Havana need their laughter; and despite it all, they agree to endure.
David Frye
Distant Palaces Page 25