Thine is the Kingdom

by Abilio Estevez

  First she thought she had bought it for her mother in the little shop of the Jew who lived on the highway to Cayo La Rosa. A dark and humid shop, crammed with cheap pieces that did a fairly poor job of pretending to be originals from Frankenthal or Sevres. She saw herself there picking out the pitcher with the rococo landscape. The Jew, an elderly man more than eighty years old, with a long yellowish beard and small, dark and impertinent eyes, leaned before her and explained the reasons why this pitcher was a true work of art, and why this selection therefore proved that she had exquisite taste. Irene held out her handkerchief with the money she had been able to squirrel away from what the match factory paid her for the little boxes. The old man in turn held out the pitcher with trembling hands. It must have no doubt been a May afternoon because she would have wanted the pitcher for Mother’s Day, and there were still a few days to go and she would have to keep the pitcher at her cousin Milito s house. She vividly remembered the smell of wood and varnish in that dark shop, in front of which there opened a pasture full of beautiful horses. She knew, however, that the elderly man she saw in her memory drew a lot from the tailor in Santa Rosa who made Lucio s clothes. And on the other hand, hadn’t Rita once laughed at her, saying that there was never any Jew with any shop on the highway to the Cayo? The only Jew who lived in Bauta, said Rita, was the Pole with the shoe store. Actually, Irene thought, I never bought that pitcher in any shop, my father gave it to me for my birthday. Yes, for my fifteenth. Her father got home one day from the textile factory with a large box and he said it was for her and she hugged him and gave him lots of kisses, and opened the box and was amazed by the pitcher, which she placed on the pedestal table in her bedroom, next to the bed. What pedestal table? That pitcher had never been in the house in Bauta and she had never had a pedestal table in her house. And she told herself that if she would just concentrate, as she had done other times, she would surely return to that house of her childhood and would find out if the pitcher had ever been there. She saw a long avenue lined with royal palms and at the end of it the wooden house, fairly large, painted blue and white, with a spacious wraparound porch that was a marvel. And she reached the garden planted with miniature palms and jasmines, country roses and plumbagos, and she climbed the four steps that divided it from the porch, and she could even hear her heels tapping on the polished floorboards. She entered the living room. She felt like an intruder, there was no way this could be the living room of her house. She realized the house she had actually reached was Uncle Rodrigo s in Baracoa beach. And she couldn’t be certain of that, either, because it could easily be the house of her cousin Ernestina in Santa Fe, or any other house she might have invented. Then she tried to remember her own house, her childhood house, whether it was made of wood or of masonry, and she realized she had no way to pin down that detail. She felt certain that there had been a special smell in her house, a smell of charcoal from the little heaters her mother used to warm the irons, but that information didn’t do one bit of good. She couldn’t smell the charcoal or the irons or the hot starched cotton clothes; the only thing she smelled was rain in the Island on an October afternoon. She spent a long time entering other people’s houses, strangers’ houses, houses she had only entered in her thoughts, trying to find among them her own house, the house of her childhood, but she couldn’t get her memories to return her to the one place she had been so happy she could die. And it was at that moment she thought she recalled that the pitcher had actually been a gift from Emilio on the day they had fixed their wedding date. Irene saw Emilio with his Prussian bluejacket and the timid air he always had about him until he realized he was dying. She saw him as he must have looked, entering the night in 1934 when they decided they would marry on the first of April the following year, with her pretty face illuminated by happiness and the pitcher wrapped in a golden taffeta cloth. She saw him enter several times. There was something false about the evocation, she didn’t know what it could be, it became apparent that Emilio wasn’t Emilio, she even thought the problem was his jacket. He never wore a jacket, but a handsome military outfit. By then, after Machado fell, he had been made a colonels orderly at the Columbia military camp. And the jacket she was seeing couldn’t be Emilio s, but rather Lucio s, and it had actually been not Emilio who gave her the pitcher but Lucio, and she thought she was going crazy

  Don’t worry, these things happen, exclaims Miss Berta, actually thinking that these things do not happen. And she takes Irene’s hand and caresses it because she thinks this is the best way of showing her support. Sometimes I forget my own name, Miss Berta lies, and she lies so badly that she notices how Irene looks at her with incredulity and briefly makes a face. Well, not that I forget … I mean, I forget. She falls silent. Stops caressing Irene’s hand. You know, life is full of surprises … Irene nods. Yes, life is full of surprises … And she raises her head as if she were listening; no, it’s not that, it’s not that she’s listening. And she puts up her hands. You need to sleep, Miss Berta says sweetly, sleep mends all things. Irene seems like she’s about to leave, because she gets off the chair and stands up with a certain difficulty and approaches the door. She does not go, however. I still haven’t told you the worst part.

  A knock at the door. Irene opens. Mercedes leans forward, says her good evenings, explains, I couldn’t sleep, this strange night is keeping me awake, just like Marta, I’m tossing and turning and I can’t get to sleep and then to top it all off I saw a man at the window. Irene takes Mercedes by the arm and leads her inside. A man at the window? Mercedes nods. Miss Berta stands up, goes to the kitchen and comes back with a glass of cold linden tea for Mercedes. The three women sit down at the table. A man at the window?

  Tall, thin, distinguished as an elderly exiled empress, you can see a mile off that the Barefoot Countess is, or was, a woman of class. All you have to do is see her coming down the galleries with her silver bracelets and sandalwood fan, leaning unnecessarily on a cane that is a serpent, proud in her bearing, sure in each of her gestures, talking to herself with precise and chosen words. She is not beautiful and apparently has never been able to boast of being beautiful. What does it matter? She has known how to appear beautiful. Her hair, now white, seems straight; actually, when you get close, you note that it has been painstakingly combed to seem straight. Black at times, her eyes turn green on some very bright mornings, and they have an intense gaze, mocking and wise (wiser still at those moments when she reaches the point of delirium). She has a surprisingly wide nose and thick lips that she hides by smiling, emphasizing the mockery in her eyes. Her skin, a handsome copper color, is always clean, untouched by the cruelty of the sun on the Island. And although she wears dresses from twenty or thirty years past, no one can call them anachronisms, much less laugh at her. The fact is that her elegance transfers to her clothes (not the other way around, as usually happens), and confers on them a mysterious modishness. They aren’t dresses from any given era, Casta Diva states, perplexed. They are dresses for all times, Uncle Rolo observes, emphatic. And the most obvious thing is that despite her obvious mulatto background, there is something about her that does not belong to Cuba. No Cuban woman, Rolo tries to explain, is so dignified in her manners, nor walks with such majesty that, rather than moving through this burning Havana of ninety-plus in the shade, she seems to be strolling through the gothic corridors of a castle on the Rhine, and besides, in this era of confusion and shallowness what Cuban woman can cite Gessner’s Idylls in perfect German? No; Cuban women, those sacred pearls of Eden, too busy with their toilettes, can at best recite the facile rhymes of José Angel Buesa, and they never hum Wagner, but the Rico Mambo by Dámaso Pérez Prado. Cuban women are too busy attending to their waistlines, says Rolo.

  This is not an Island, exclaims the Barefoot Countess, but a tree-filled monstrosity. And she walks down the gallery jingling her silver bracelets and perfuming the air with her sandalwood fan. The cane on which she unnecessarily leans is a serpent carved from ácana wood. And her dress, tonigh
t, is white linen in Richelieu embroidery. I tell you, there will be a day when the trees come into the houses, she insists in the tones of a prophetess. And she stands still next to the Apollo Belvedere right behind the wooden screen in the courtyard. She sighs. That all this should be destroyed! And the Island the crack between the hinges. Lucio takes a few steps forward, looks back, raises an arm and lowers it with a certain brusqueness. Gives the impression he’s about to do something. Stops. Stops before he does what? Now it seems he has decided to leave, only he suddenly returns with decision and caresses, with fear but with relish, the thighs of the Apollo Belvedere.

  Many people have gotten lost in the Island, never to be seen again. At least that’s what they say over here. Uncle Rolo (who is afraid and, by the same token, rather happy) has followed the stone path as far as the poor and anguished Laocoön being strangled with his sons by the two serpents of Pallas. It is a Laocoön without muscles, skinny, poorly sculpted, yet despite all that it is a startling sight on a night like this. There is no sign of Lucio anywhere. And Uncle Rolo continues up to the fountain, where today the frogs are not singing and the Boy with the Goose is not smiling, and he keeps on up to the bust of Greta Garbo (they know it is Greta Garbo because Chavito says so, otherwise you might think it’s a bust of Miss Berta reciting the rosary), and it seems you can hear the voice of the Barefoot Countess: This is not an Island, but a tree-filled monstrosity, and she laughs, and how she laughs. Uncle draws back. The only thing he couldn’t put up with at this hour is meeting that crazy woman with her air of a queen in exile. He doesn’t take the stone path, instead he cuts through the thick vegetation that Irene tends, passes the Wrestlers (Chavito’s inert Wrestlers), and reaches the Apollo Belvedere with those perfect thighs that Lucio caressed a moment before. Uncle Rolo searches, trying to discover some special movement in the vegetation that will tell him in which direction Lucio disappeared. The Island is awhirl with this October wind that threatens rain, and thousands of paths open up where Lucio could have disappeared. Paths that instantly reclose. Strange portals of branches. Uncle Rolo makes a gesture of discouragement, a brief sigh while lowering his head. Then he sees, at the feet of the majestic Apollo, an object shine. He bends over and picks it up, damp and mired with slime and dead leaves from somewhere. He takes his handkerchief out and cleans off the object and realizes it is a compass mounted in a seashell, mother-of-pearl. And the compass has its indecisive red and black needle. And on the other side of the seashell, a blurry photograph of the cathedral of Hagia Sophia. And you can hear, from the other side of the wooden screen, the sound of water and a voice singing low, a religious song in some other language or perhaps in terrible Spanish. And Uncle Rolo walks around and discovers the person he already knew he’d discover. Merengue is cleaning his vending cart, intoning religious songs under the unfurled wings of the Victory of Samothrace. Merengue turns his head when he senses footsteps; smiles lightly; interrupts neither the work nor the song. Uncle also smiles, with more zeal: seeing Merengue is always a relief Merengue, he says. And the black man straightens up, tosses his damp rag in the soapy water, and smiles more broadly, showing the white, white teeth of a pure black. Bad night, says the black man. Every night s a bad night, replies Rolo, also smiling, as if meaning to imply that he feels happy to have met him here, in the courtyard. The black man, however, suddenly grows serious, looks nervously in every direction, crosses himself and says no, Rolo, tonight is a bad night. And Rolo is just about to say, No, old man, its not so bad, I just had the luck of finding me a mother-of-pearl compass, the instrument that points out the way, the only thing that orients us, that keeps us from getting lost. He opens the iron gate and goes out into Linea Street, which is deserted at this hour with the laurel bushes agitated by the gusting wind. Toward the left, toward the Columbia base, you can see the lights of the first watch houses. You can hear voices and knocking sounds. Uncle Rolo walks to the right, and it would seem he’s heading toward the bookstore, though, of course, what would Uncle be doing in the bookstore at this hour? He goes by the horse pastures, and the place Rolo is really heading toward without realizing it (or realizing it) is the train station. A grey edifice (or a blue one turned grey by time), one of those built twenty or thirty years ago, grim, austere, with an imposing, poorly lit entryway that doesn’t harmonize with its scant waiting room. An unpleasant edifice rising harshly in the midst of a landscape dominated by trees and poor houses with roofs of blackened tiles. Many nights, when he can’t sleep, Uncle goes to the station and spends hours there, thinking about any old thing, and sometimes not even thinking, just watching the soldiers, or trying to talk with Homer Linesman, to get him to tell something about the tragedy of his life, though the linesman never yields one iota of his terseness, because if there’s any man who doesn’t say a word in this world it’s that filthy and stooped old man who looks in every direction with the eyes of an animal lying in wait. At this hour there’s hardly anyone at the ticket counter. At this hour no train is leaving. You can see a shadow pass between the rails that may be the linesman’s. The four or five cheap wooden benches in the main hall are empty. However, there’s a dirty duffel bag on a stool next to the Coca-Cola machine. Almost mechanically, Uncle straightens his hair, wets one index finger with his tongue, and rubs it across his thick eyebrows. He sits down on the best bench, the one that lets him see a good part of the hall, and adopts an attitude of unconcern. Then the door to the restroom labeled GENTLEMEN opens. A sailor appears, buttoning his fly. The sailor finishes buttoning the buttons of his fly, all the while watching Uncle with eyes that could be either mocking or reverent, and he runs his fingers over the fly as if to check that it is well closed. He walks over to the stool with sure steps (too sure to really be sure, thinks Uncle) and picks up the duffel bag. Uncle Rolo stands up. He tries to express indifference, tiredness, boredom, he raises his eyebrows, lets the lids fall. Doesn’t smile. A smile is the first step toward complicity: you should never smile from the first moment. Can you tell me what time it is, says Uncle Rolo without looking at the sailor (so that it seems Uncle has addressed the question to no one in particular). Since, however, the sailor takes his time responding, Uncle observes him for a moment. The sailor is looking at Uncle with mute eyes and a face that doesn’t tell him any more than any of Chavito’s statues. And Uncle, who can’t stand the intensity of those large, dark eyes, averts his own toward the rails, toward the countryside beyond the rails, which is a reddish stain agitated by the wind on this October night, and luckily at the same instant you can hear the whistle of an approaching train. He experiences the relief of having something to do. He goes toward the doorway leading to the tracks and feels the racket, a sound like the thunder that should have been falling tonight. A passing train, a swift light, enlivening for one moment the lifeless train station. A military train. He sees the soldiers pass, adolescents, smiling, waving good-bye, playing with each other, with the shield of the Republic flashing from their caps. Just one second for the train to pass, so little time, so quick, and then silence is restored, it’s all too hard to believe it ever passed, and Uncle turns back and sees that the sailor is gone.

  Although you’d say it’s raining, Uncle Rolo says, No, it’s just a trick, and he wants to sleep, and he closes his eyes, and he cannot sleep, and he turns on the lamp on the nightstand and begins to read, once more, chapter twelve of Against the Grain, the chapter in which Des Esseintes travels to London without leaving Paris.

  You can’t even read. Between you and Huysmans’ words (which, as you like to say, aren’t Huysmans’ words, because they’re translated into Spanish) floats the figure of the sailor. And you know that something about him troubled you, though you don’t know what. And you can see him again now that you are lying in bed listening to the rain that isn’t falling. You can see him again, tall, thin, with the slimness a sailor’s uniform brings out so well, his dark, fresh, adolescent skin, and a mouth (the mouth really impressed you) that’s almost thick, but not quite. The eleg
ant motions of a dancer, not a sailor. Again you can see his eyes, shining, the color of honey. Since you were a child you’ve heard that the eyes are the mirrors of the soul; and if every man’s soul is reflected in his eyes, what kind of soul does the sailor have? You thought from the first moment there was an insolent look in his eyes, but now you wouldn’t be able to confirm it. Insolence? No. Perhaps the look of someone who knows everything or is able to imagine everything, perhaps the look of someone who doesn’t see the other person s eyes but their insides. Large eyes, shining, honey-colored. And suddenly you know why he troubled you, you know that he troubled you because in his look, in his eyes, there wasn’t a drop of pity.

  And Uncle Rolo, who is a character in a novel, turns out the light. Tonight I won’t get to sleep, he says, and he falls asleep in the way that a character in a novel usually sleeps (by disappearing).

  Lucio turns on the light. It’s easy to tell that Irene isn’t home, he doesn’t hear the stealth of her slippers, the footsteps pursuing him around the house, doesn’t hear her too-maternal questions. He has reached his room without anyone showing him the time or asking him if he wants to eat or where he’s been. No one has forced him to lie. And he undresses calmly, as if he had all the time in the world to undress. And when he is naked and turns off the light and lies down in bed and strokes his thighs and his chest, he feels dirty. He thinks about Miri’s mouth running over his body, about Miri’s little hands that touch him as if he were God, and he feels dirty. He also thinks, of course, about Manilla. He sees him, fat, lolling back in the easy chair with frayed upholstery, very serious, smoking a cigar almost down to the butt, with an expression of helplessness that can’t be real, and he feels dirty.

  And why did he go to Manilla’s house? He has no answer to that question. Sometimes it’s just a matter of getting dressed, in the firm belief that he’s going to see Miriam, or perhaps thinking it’s better to go to the movies because they’re showing a James Dean picture, and suddenly, as if the devil were guiding his steps, he finds himself before Manilla’s frayed easy chair, letting the money fall into Manilla’s huge hand, and allowing the little girl’s little hands to caress him as if he were God.