The Tower of the Antilles

by Achy Obejas

  Some people say it wasn’t long before they took up together, but that their affair was doomed from the start. They say they made love once, a gingerly act full of possibility, but when Supermán took to his throne that night, his penis dropped like a spooked marsupial. No amount of recall, no effort to focus, proved useful. He resorted to petting and coaxing, but his panic only fueled more panic: in the audience, restlessness led to outrage. There were insults and denunciations, a shower of coins, and then a shoe hit Supermán in the face. He collected his goods with both hands, enveloped himself in his cape, and scrambled off stage, panting as a line of showgirls—including Gise’s mother—ran onstage to shake their naked breasts.

  They say Osmany and Mercedes gave him a talking-to that night (or maybe it was Orozco himself, or any one of the others at the Shanghai, maybe even Gulliver the dwarf). You have to make a world simply from wanting, find fulfillment beyond your own delectation, said whoever took him aside. On this path you must become a monk of mortification.

  Oh, you go ahead and keep your juice! That’s what Gise exclaimed, but it was in dismay, maybe even in mockery (or so goes at least one story).

  Some say she never talked to him again, that his refusal to consider becoming a gardener or bricklayer, a clerk or a driver, sealed it for her: she’d grown up at the Shanghai and, though the experience had not been unpleasant, she was not interested in repeating it for any of her own kids to come. Her mother had carefully cultivated her future respectability with private school tuition and trips to Key West, Florida, where she met educated Bahamians and second-and third-generation Cubans who’d never heard of the Shanghai, or thought it was a myth. Her mother aspired to a different kind of man for her, a man who owned his own car, who had a trade or profession, no matter how dull, and who would love and protect her golden girl. What do you want to be? Gise asked Supermán. What do you want to do with your life?

  Others say Supermán and Gise defied everyone and stayed together in mutual suffering. Always on the precipice, always embracing denial to the point that they both experienced lacerating muscle pain and, sometimes, even hallucinations. There were nights when Supermán couldn’t control the flood and Gise would weep with joy and roll in the froth on the wet sheets like a baby seal. Others say it wasn’t that way at all, that the two found their own naive path to coitus reservatus, and Supermán would breathe slow and deep and use a steely stillness to lift her to heaven. In his mind—and maybe in hers too—together they would become a glowing ball of light.

  What’s known for sure is that one evening Supermán showed up for work and found the Shanghai’s back door shuttered. When he rounded the theater, he saw Orozco (or Gulliver or one of the other workers) placing a lock and chain on the front entrance. It was drizzling and Supermán held a folded newspaper above him to keep his cottony head dry.

  We’re closed, the shutterer (whomever it was) said. We only close for revolution, so come back when it’s over.

  On the way home the skies were gray, the streets were deadly quiet, and the only faces Supermán saw were wide-eyed behind a flutter of curtains. At some point there was a shattering sound—a gunshot or a car backfiring—and it felt like a punch to the gut. For weeks after his dismissal, Supermán kept going back to the Shanghai, spied the lock on the door, and slinked away.

  Did he go back to Gise and tell her they could wait it out, that they could let go, enjoy themselves fully, and discover too late she liked it best when he was the monk of mortification? Did he return to tell her he’d keep her safe and find her mother had spirited them both away to Key West or New York or maybe even Paris, to a new life in exile from which neither would ever return? Or did he go back to her and, now that he had her every day, realize he could never cool off, that no matter how much he sweat, the glowing ball of light had become an eternal and consuming flame? Did he learn to cultivate white ginger flowers and sell them for bridal bouquets, funeral wreaths, or offerings to the saints? Or was he frying eggs and stirring rice in a steaming kitchen somewhere? Maybe he was at home, at his father’s bedside (or his mother’s, or grandmother’s, or that of the older sister who always believed in him), tending to him or her until their last breath? Maybe he begged Orozco to talk to somebody and ended up hauling bags of sugar down at the ports. There were Americans in Havana Bay, Americans in the bars, Americans in the capitol building. Did he root out Osmany and Mercedes and her lover and put on private shows? Or did he lean on the walls of Saint Jude Thaddeus after dusk, loosen his fly, and let men drop to their knees, surrendering whatever was in their pockets, just so he could eat?

  Those were dark days, very dark days that turned into years. After the clarion of revolution and the drudgery of dictatorship, he found himself alone. And then, just as suddenly and unexpectedly, the skies parted and the sunshine of democracy returned: the Shanghai’s doors swung open and there was Supermán, as drowsy as ever, in one of his gabardine suits, barefoot again, anxiously tapping a rolled newspaper against his thigh while waiting for Orozco to recognize him. And he did—he did! Who could forget? And of course he had work for him, but this time it would be different. This time Supermán would have a part in the show. This time Supermán would come to rehearsals, he would be in the cast. And Supermán accepted, because what else could he do? One thing he’d discovered in the few years away from the Shanghai was the curse of his peculiar talent. It had been so easy for him to ascend from Shodan to Judan in his profession that he’d never considered anything else. Wherever he was, whatever he’d done to survive during his time in the wilderness, the experience had shown him that maybe, just maybe, he’d sealed his fate, that whatever window of opportunity Gise had tried to open was now shut.

  Come by tomorrow at three o’clock, said a beaming Orozco, and Supermán arrived at two thirty, bathed and perfumed, dressed in crisp and clean clothes, a clutch of white ginger flowers for whoever might be his partner.

  Señoras y señores, ladies and gentlemen . . . bienvenidos al teatro más espectacular del mundo. El Gran Teatro Sanghai, una gloria de Cuba. Aquí no paramos nunca, aunque se la paramos a cualquiera!

  And then it was that way every day, followed by dinner and performances at nine thirty and eleven thirty. After that, the occasional private show, sometimes at the San Francisco brothel, the Mambo Club, or at a gangster’s private party, usually at one or three or five in the morning.

  At the Shanghai, the script was simple: The audience would see a couple walk into a restaurant and sit at a table, then Supermán would come to take their order. They’d joke about the tenderness of the meat and she’d order coffee, Supermán’s cue to ask if she wanted some cream with that. Later, there was a different skit: a woman (whenever possible, her skin a contrast to his) would be tied to a stake and he’d appear, caped and menacing, to rape her. This particular skit was a big hit (it was even referenced in an American movie), and included a lot of his trademark moves, such as the pivot to profile and the long streams of cum that would arc high and thick in the air. (As time went by, he stopped this and made virtue of his stamina instead.)

  They say it was more or less then that he decided to attend to his talent, to cultivate the lightning that ran through his body. There are those who claim to have witnessed him in a trance that lasted hours, never once flagging, never once touching himself, his face still, his eyes blank as if he were hypnotized. Some say if you sat close to the stage or used opera glasses, you could see the most subtle of movements, a ripple of radiance up his spine, like a river navigating the force of the current. They say he never smiled, never grimaced, but seemed to have a sixth sense, both for his partners’ threshold and for how far he could push those watching.

  Soon Supermán had regained and then surpassed his previous fame, and the rape scene would be followed by an offer to the handful of women in the audience to come and ride his magic wand. There would always be at least one taker, a girl from Boise or Louisiana, sometimes Los Angeles or Maine, giggly and scared but so excited: in those
days, Havana was a place where conscience took a holiday.

  The city was rich and opulent then, with Nat King Cole at the Tropicana; rumba dancers at the Zombie Club; casinos at the Nacional, Montmartre, and the Sans Souci; the Cabaret Kursal and the Palette Club. Ernest Hemingway held court at La Floridita, and elsewhere Edith Piaf, Jimmy Durante, Maurice Chevalier, and Frank Sinatra rioted until the wee hours.

  Sinatra, in fact, was a regular at the Shanghai, where he sometimes brought the beautiful Ava Gardner. And it’s told—it’s been written about, even in the official press—that one evening Gardner went alone and asked to meet Supermán after the show. They say he was in a robe in his dressing room, reading one of those pocket Westerns, when Gulliver opened the door without knocking and breathlessly announced she was on her way up. Supermán didn’t move. When Gulliver escorted her in, he lifted his lids and made a barely perceptible nod in her direction. She asked his name, his real name, and told him to use it later when he came by her suite at the Hotel Nacional. Then she stepped up, brushed the Western aside, and opened his robe. She ran her hand down the inside of his thigh and shivered. To Gulliver’s surprise—and it’s hard to know if this is his direct testimony or second-, third-, or tenthhand—Enrique removed her palm, closed his robe, and let his eyes drop back to his novel.

  Yes, it’s true, no one saw him come in or out of the hotel, but later that same night, the Barefoot Contessa was rushed by ambulance to the Hospital Calixto García, delirious, with blood between her legs. Sinatra, who was buddies with the mafiosos who ran Havana, swore revenge, but Enrique’s own criminal friendships—his value as entertainment and talisman—trumped even Ol’ Blue Eyes. (Others say it was a belligerent Sinatra himself who beat her and then sought to blame it on Enrique, for all the obvious reasons. Many will insist Enrique always denied ever being alone with her.)

  Yes, Enrique had gotten into the spirit of things by then: He would go out with the mobsters who ran most of the establishments where he worked, party with them and their hangers-on until dawn (though it’s said he never drank, and never smoked more than the occasional cigarette). He now wore linen suits, starched shirts, or tight pullovers that showed off his muscles, though he never quite took to shoes. He told stories and jokes, and sometimes he’d chat about movies or even books. Mostly, though, he listened: he nodded that almost invisible nod, he made direct and sustained eye contact, he knew when to pat men on the back or squeeze a thigh (it depended on the man) and when to whisper to a woman so his lips brushed her ear. Of course, he performed acrobatics and endurance marathons for the highest bidders. (Some said he fucked mules onstage, others said it was bulls, and only for private clients, but none of that was true—those were the rumored deeds of another man, known as El Toro.)

  In Los Sitios they still talk about the wild shindigs Enrique hosted, about the drums and the screaming, the men pissing off the second-floor balcony and passing out on the steps of Saint Jude Thaddeus. Did the neighbors mind the noise, the debauchery? No, not at all—everyone knew what Enrique did for a living, and he was generous: a dress for a quinceañera, dentures for a grandmother, a new coat of paint for Saint Jude Thaddeus. He brought visible and speedy help, consolation for the suffering of his neighbors and patience for their whims. No kid in Los Sitios lacked a cake on his or her birthday.

  Still, there are others who refute these stories, who say Enrique drew a line around his home in Los Sitios as a kind of fortress of solitude and that only later, much later, did he come to share it with a partner, and even then, they were so quiet and circumspect that if you didn’t already know, you never would.

  Not that there weren’t occasions when Enrique’s worlds came together against his will, like the time Marlon Brando wouldn’t leave him alone. This was a swaggering post-Oscar Brando, a Brando who’d recently pranced through a fake Havana for the cameras and now wanted to experience the real thing. He’d stepped into the Shanghai with two girls, one on each arm (they say these were dancers from the Tropicana, but they could have been from anywhere), watched the show, and demanded to meet its legendary star. He caught up with him in the same dressing room where Ava Gardner had come calling. This time, Enrique was at a small table slicing strawberries (each the size of an egg) when Gulliver opened the door. On his left at the table was a copy of Colin Wilson’s The Outsider and on his right an English-Spanish dictionary held open by a rock. He looked up with his droopy eyes and saw the world’s most famous actor before him, with his weight-lifter arms and Charles Atlas chest. It was hot, very hot, in that dressing room, and sweat beaded up almost immediately on Brando’s broad high forehead then rolled down his flushed untough cheeks.

  When Gulliver left, he took the distraught showgirls with him. They say he came back later, pressed his ear to the door, and heard Brando talking, that he figured out later the long pauses must have been when one or the other would look for a word in the dictionary, and then Enrique would repeat it back and Brando would say, Yeah, yeah, that’s it, and Enrique would say, Good, very good, in only slightly accented English (one of the side effects of so much exposure to tourists).

  Sensitive people are so vulnerable, Brando supposedly told Enrique. They’re so easily brutalized and hurt just because they are sensitive. A sensitive person receives fifty impressions when somebody else may only get seven. The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized. Then you never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel too much.

  Some people say Enrique gave Brando the wildest, scariest night of his life, then deposited him back at the Nacional the following afternoon, jaundiced and sick. But others—especially those who rely on Gulliver as a source—say that’s not what happened at all. They say instead Brando fell in love, that he followed Enrique home, that he offered to take him with him, back to Hollywood, then to Japan where he was scheduled to film his next picture.

  Others say a jealous lover ushered Brando away, but the neighbors themselves—the neighbors who for days collected the movie star’s autograph and borrowed cameras for pictures with him on his rented motorbike—insist it was Enrique la Reina who looked up at him with his sleepy gaze and said: I’m going to live here forever. On the last day, a weeping Brando was seen motoring away, The Outsider in his back pocket.

  After that, life seemed to just go on for Enrique la Reina: sleeping during the day, reading and cooking in the afternoon, shows at night and in the wee hours. There were loves, of course, but no one knows—not really—who they were, how long they lasted. It’s possible he was partnered when they began to hear about bombings in the city, when stepping out for any errand could make him a witness to the aftermath of any of these attacks. He bought rebel bonds, or maybe not. He observed the groups of workers at the Shanghai arguing the merits of Revolution (because this was a big-R Revolution, everyone knew that).

  So it was no surprise when he came to work one day and discovered yet again that the Shanghai had been shuttered. Come back after the Revolution, Orozco (or whoever) told him again, smiling, but it was an anxious smile, a smile with a tic. The hand that put up the Closed sign trembled.

  The Shanghai stars—the dancers, the sex artists, the choreographers and lighting technicians, the projectionists, the carpenters, the makeup and costume artists—were adrift now. Who would remember them? Who would tell their story? For years the Shanghai’s biggest star had banned cameras, refused to pose for postcards, and generally avoided the press. He’d always understood his legend depended on mystery, on personal experience. And now, a lawyer for one of the mobsters wanted to make a film, before he disappeared.

  Do it for history, Gulliver told him.

  Somewhere in Florida, and maybe in New York, that grainy celluloid gives a glimpse of Supermán’s glory, but it’s just a glimpse, a god in his twilight, unabashedly naked but for a pair of black socks: there is no ceremony, no performance, just evidence the way it might be presented at trial.

  What happened to Supermán?

  A w
riter who lives on San Lázaro says Supermán lives in Havana still, on that same street, a shriveled old man in a wheelchair, his legs and testicles lost to diabetes. He says his wife—maybe Gise, maybe someone else—takes care of him to this day and that the kids in the neighborhood pass him with no idea of who he once was. He says Supermán sits on his stoop—there’s no ramp, there’s no going anywhere without help—and watches the human parade as if he were back in Los Sitios.

  Another writer—this one a crime reporter in Mexico City—says that’s not true, that Supermán got out of Cuba in the early days of the Revolution, that he made it to Mexico City. She says he was trying to find a way to Miami, or over the border to Texas, when he was stabbed to death, neither an accident nor a coincidence, given that Sinatra—who’d never forfeited his right to avenge Ava Gardner—was in town for a few charity concerts.

  Others say he made it out of Cuba and landed in the Jim Crow South, a shock so severe he drank himself to death, or was lynched, or left to die on the ramp to the emergency room of a whites-only hospital after a terrible beating or car accident. A story went around for a while that he joined the army and went back to the island as a CIA operative during the Bay of Pigs invasion and then later served in the capture and interrogation of Che Guevara in Bolivia, but there was scant evidence to so much as suggest any of that. There was a rumor, too, that he was one of the Watergate burglars, but that was quickly discounted. Still others claimed intermittent sightings in Havana for almost two decades, and that he only got away when he slipped onto a barge during the Mariel crisis.