Thine is the Kingdom

by Abilio Estevez

  There’s no autumn here. No winter. Much less spring. There would never have been a Vivaldi here. His sad imitation would have composed a requiem to lament the unending summer. There’s a fixed sun here (eternal, like the Island) that doesn’t let you live. A sun that opens windows and slips through them; a sun that pushes open doors; a sun that falls on rooftops like tons of lead; a sun that pursues you into the most hidden corner and takes over your body as fire takes over a roast, and enters your eyes for the sole purpose of leaving you blind, so that when night comes and with night a supposed calm, a supposed truce of a few lightless hours, you still see it, that impertinent and chronic ring, even with your eyes closed, even in your dreams; on an island like this, the worst and only nightmare is dreaming that you’re naked under the sun. You search in vain for the redeeming shade of a palm leaf; in vain for the stream that will cool your burning temples or your dry throat or your ever feverish brow. In vain. You’re born and you die with your body bathed in sweat. The monsters of light don’t let you live, they lie in wait for you, waiting for the right moment to devour you. And you turn transparent from all this light. Of course there are some days when the sun clouds over before dusk. Those are the days of downpours, of sweeping rain that carries off trees and destroys the landscape, rain that’s like another face of the sun, because it also pushes open windows, opens doors, knocks down roofs, destroys houses, annihilates you. The also chronic rain is like railroad ties falling head on. And there’s nothing you can do about it but go to the seashore and try to dream about other lands that you aren’t sure exist, other lands beyond the horizon, other lands where they say the sun doesn’t punish you so intensely and the rain doesn’t pillage, doesn’t leave you so helpless. That’s why, listen to me, this downpour today is holy. We’re content. Are we deluded?

  Listen, even though the downpour may be a blessing, even though it’s here to interrupt the sun’s outrages for a while, the truth is that this much rain can drive you to distraction. So I write, The downpour stopped, and of course the downpour stops. There’s the Island, wet, intensely green, shining in its eternity.

  Everything in the past was better, that’s my motto, Irene declares while she softly, sweetly runs a damp cloth over the Wounded Boy’s body The Wounded Boy lies naked on a bed with clean sheets. She looks at him as if she were looking at Christ. Because you look like Christ, she says softly, whispers (fearing that Lucio, the others, might hear), at least you resemble the image my mother kept in her prayer book. (What mother? What prayer book?) She gets embarrassed, stands absorbed in thought for several seconds, she doesn’t know if she remembers whether her mother kept an image in her prayer book, what nobody could ever take away from her is the memory of the image itself, the little print with its gilded frame. There’s the image, under the glass of the nightstand. And it is time to reveal it: Irene doesn’t know that the image she imagines to be Christ, the little print of the Son of God to which she dedicates flowers and candles and prayers, the one to which she prays on her knees for the return of her memory for the welfare of Lucio, of the house, of the Island, of the world, is actually the famous self-portrait of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She doesn’t know (she has no way of knowing) how the photogravure came into her hands. What’s for certain is that the picture is of the painter and poet: his face; his great eyes observing what he observes with a certain innocence, a certain apprehension, a certain surprise; his large, well-defined nose; his voluptuous lips; his long hair falling across the shoulders. So that, according to Irene (though she’s unaware of it), the Wounded Boy looks not like Christ but like Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

  Without knowing it, without realizing it, Irene is correct. If God is present in everything that has been created, you can worship God in anyone’s image, since anyone could be the image of God.

  Yes, it’s true, everything in the past was better. Irene runs a damp cloth over the Wounded Boy’s body. He no longer has a fever, his visage has taken on a delicate, serene expression, and as for his white and perfect body, it seems as if it had never been wounded. Everyone wonders how the wounds could have disappeared.

  That night (it seems so long ago, actually it was just a few days back) when the boys found the Wounded Boy wrapped in a Cuban flag in Berardo’s old carpentry shop, no one asked, no one doubted, they just brought him straight to Irene’s house. Right away they made Doctor Pinto come, and he asked them to leave him alone with the boy Doctor Pinto showed up drunk, as was to be expected, though everyone was pleased since Doctor Pinto is at his very best when he’s drunk, because it’s as if the rum opens up his brains, and he says, Yes, that’s it, mm is short for reason. And when he came back out after an hour of keeping us there waiting impatiently, Doctor Pinto was smiling and exclaimed with his ethylic breath, He’s out of trouble, you’ll have to feed him and care for him but he’s out of trouble, and above all, be very, very discreet, in this Island there are terrible times ahead. He paused to clear his throat, shook his head several times, and concluded, Well, in this Island when haven’t terrible times been ahead? And he took Irene aside and told her about the wounds: They aren’t bullet wounds, Irene, it’s strange, this body was wounded by darts, arrows, understand? he’ll get better if you tend him closely Irene almost cried from emotion, from all the responsibility she had now, and she ran off to the self-portrait of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and there she promised Christ that, yes, she would save him. And she asked the others (including Helena) to leave, Don’t worry, I’ll dedicate myself to him as if it were the body of my own son (may God forbid). And she didn’t even serve Lucio his dinner. Let him work it out as best he can, there are more serious matters right now, and there went Irene to the boy’s room, she took off his filthy dirt- and bloodstained cotton -twill suit, cleaned his wounds with thimerosal and lots of hydrogen peroxide, rubbing the gauze over them brusquely, penetrating without mercy, as Doctor Pinto would recommend. The wounds were not from gunshots as they had originally believed, but arrows, arrows! and who would be so criminal as to treat a man in these times, however ominous they are, like he was some kind of early Christian? Irene saw the Wounded Boy’s naked body, his beautiful face, the chestnut hair falling over his shoulders just like in the print of Christ (Dante Gabriel Rossetti) under the glass top of her nightstand, and she was overwhelmed by tenderness, by compassion. She poured alcohol on his wounds and was happy to see him move, utter a groan. Doctor Pinto had predicted it: When the alcohol hits the wounds he’ll rise from the dead. The truth is, the doctor’s ethylic breath doesn’t matter a bit, nor do his trembling hands nor the flask from which he sometimes gathers courage. Yes, Irene, a sip of rum takes away my fear, and that helps me confront this horror of getting up every day, getting dressed every day, going outside and discovering that, contrary to every prognosis, a new day has dawned again. She counted the wounds. Twenty-seven bowshots. As if to annihilate him, how cruel! And the Wounded Boy was feverish, he looked shriveled, dark, lost among the white sheets. The violet hue of the wounds made Irene shudder and feel like crying. It was about four in the morning. Another October dawn was drawing near. It had started raining, or at least it seemed like it from the sound of the trees and the strong smell of earth. She left the lamp burning and sat down in front of him, ready to sit watch for what remained of the night and for the approaching day. He’ll live, Lord, he’ll live, You are magnanimous and You put him in my path so I would save him, here I am, doing my duty, and though I know You love him, don’t take him yet, so young and so handsome, yes, Lord, so handsome that if it weren’t a sacrilege I’d tell You he deserves to be sitting at Your right hand. The Wounded Boy moved slightly, smiled. He opened his eyes, which shone, which lost their dark color in favor of a limpid blue. The rings under his eyes disappeared. He said several words Irene couldn’t understand. His lips recovered the lively, human color that lips need to be able to speak and kiss. His face acquired a gentle expression. His body began losing thinness and darkness, gaining harmony and bulk; the violet hue of the wou
nds disappeared and they became red, rosy; then the open slits in his skin swiftly diminished until they began to blur, until they began to disappear, until the body ended up looking as if it weren’t the body of the Wounded Boy, as if it had never suffered, and of the wounds there remained only a scant memory in Irene’s confusion.

  Yes, child, my Wounded Boy, I saw the pitcher smashed to bits, and maybe it seems silly to you for me to place so much value on a broken pitcher, you don’t have to say it, I know: a pitcher is just one thing among many, you should just give it the importance it really has, no more, I know, a pitcher, a dress, a fan, a table, a spot on the wall, things! but aren’t things put in this world for a purpose? don’t you think? yes, they must be, things add up to something, things on top of things form the whole world, and for that matter, what is man without things? thanks to things you know where you are and where you’re going and where you came from, and I for that matter knew that the pitcher that broke was important to me, but at the same time I didn’t know why, and I realized: If the things in the world begin to lose their value, the world begins to lose its value, and there’s nothing you can do in it, the pitcher broke, I cried, I was aware it was important to me, but I had forgotten why, I wanted to remember Emilio, my husband, the result was: I found a photograph of Lucio, my son, and I took it to be a photograph of his father, and that confusion, do you know what it means? if the affair of the pitcher were just the affair of the pitcher, fine, what difference would it make, right, but what’s terrible about this case is that when a pitcher breaks it doesn’t break alone. complained but spread his legs, yielded to him, with resignation, with joy, both sweating, uniting his sweat with Sandokán s, enjoying it to the point of tears. He experienced something he hadn’t felt in a long time, had the world stopped? This detail of The Transfiguration is marvelous, he observes in his connoisseur’s voice, the truth is that Fra Angélico …

  He pushes open the door to Eleusis. Helena has sent him in search of Uncle Rolo. A moment ago, after lighting the little oil lamp before her Saint Barbara, Helena turned to Sebastián and ordered him, Go to Rolo’s house (she, of course, doesn’t call him Uncle) and tell him to come, urgently, I have to talk to him. And Sebastián knows she is upset. Tell him to leave whatever he’s doing, Helena insists, and come here right away. And no one has to tell Sebastián how obstinate Helena will be about this, because although her face is the same as ever, her voice is the same as ever, her expression is as serene as ever, there’s something in it that betrays her and makes it all not the same as ever. This, of course, is something only Sebastián knows. And he hasn’t told anyone (especially not Helena herself) that he has come to know her so well. Something very bad must be up, and Sebastián knows he’s the bearer of bad news when he opens the door to Eleusis, the bookstore.

  He’s surprised by the bells on the door. If this were any other day, the ringing bells would make Uncle look out from among the mountains of books with his affable smile, his good morning or good afternoon (depending), a ceremonious nod of his head, and his mellifluous voice saying, How can I help you? Today the bells on the door ring but Uncle doesn’t appear. Sebastián shakes the door several times to make the bells ring enough. Since Uncle still doesn’t appear, he closes the door carefully, extremely carefully so the bells won’t ring again, and latches it shut.

  The small enclosure, somewhat smaller, Sebastián is thinking, than his bedroom, is crammed to the ceiling with books. It may be possible that it isn’t small and that it’s the profusion of books that makes the room look more scant than it actually is. Thousands and thousands of books squeeze into the small store, mountains of books, columns of books snaking sinuously and precariously upward, shelves sagging from all the weight, baskets overflowing, boxes so overstocked no god could lift them. There are a few narrow passages between the piles of books, through which you almost have to walk sideways. And you can’t see the walls, it’s impossible to tell what color the walls of this bookstore are, and sometimes you can tell there are some paintings hanging on them, and you can tell that because between one column and the next you can catch a corner of a picture frame, a bit of painted canvas, but the paintings themselves can’t be seen, hidden as they are behind the books. In this disorder, Uncle often says, a superior order reigns, behind the apparent lack of logic lies the spirit of Aristotle. And though few understand what he means, it is well known that you can ask Uncle Rolo for any title, no matter how recherche, how extravagant, and without thinking twice he’ll know whether he has it or not, and if he has it he’ll go straight to it without the slightest hesitation, because books have voices, Rolo explains, and I’m the only one who can hear them.

  At the entrance are the Cuban magazines, from Bohemia to Vanidades, not forgetting Carteles, and the collections of Orígenes and Ciclón that no one buys. Then come the French, American, English, Mexican, Argentine magazines (Sur, gentlemen, no more and no less than Sur, which is to say, the Platonic idea of a magazine). Magazines from all over the world meant for the most varied tastes, from those that show how to build a boat to those that speak of the private lives of the exiled (and by the same token, ennobled) nobility of Russia. Religious magazines, Catholic and non-Catholic, Japanese magazines revealing the wisdom of Zen (the fashion of Orientalism, listen up, comes to us from the feeble pages and exquisite taste of the brothers Goncourt), magazines of the occult (Schopenhauer too was, like Mallarmé, an Orientalist of culture and not of the occult), magazines for opera singers (yes, Casta Diva, for opera singers, where they say there never has been and never will be a Norma like Maria Callas, that she is to opera what Christ is to history, B.C. and A.D., you know?), magazines for gardening (Irene, for gardening) and for lawyers and delinquents (and now I won’t mention names, if the shoe fits …). With utter disdain, like a Catholic priest speaking of the Delphic cults, Rolo has complained of having to sell magazines: You don’t realize, he exclaims while rocking in his chair, that I’m turning into an accomplice of superficiality and mystification, you don’t realize (he continues in his schoolmaster’s pose) that magazines (begging the pardon of Victoria Ocampo) are an ocean of culture one inch deep, and he pauses to stress a gesture of impotence, My dears, you have to give in to the evidence, ours is a lost era, an era of frivolity, of insubstantial-ity, of fraud, the evil of our century isn’t ennui (helas, ennui is the sentiment of geniuses) but inanity, our century has run aground on a sandbar of magazines, magazines are the means that this era we live in has found for faking culture when in reality this era of ours is a barbaric and stupid one, when the idiot governs and philosopher shines shoes (transition), and what can I do about it, I don’t guide the spiritual destiny of the twentieth century, I’m a humble bookseller, and as such all I can aspire to do is to make a little bit of money as honorably as I can, I’m just here to satisfy everyone else’s tastes in reading material, and each person’s life or stupidity is his own business, I’m not a policeman or a religious reformer, and besides (brief pause; change of tone) I think it’s better for people to read magazines than not to read at all: you take what you can get.

  Standing before all these magazines, Sebastián notices that, just to the right of where their disorderly and contentious presence comes to an end, there are whole shelves full of every comic book you could imagine, from Prince Valiant to Little Lulu. And then he sees the science fiction books (Ray Bradbury, Sebastián, never forget that name, Ray Bradbury), in a bookcase that leans against the wall of the main building; that is, against Uncle’s room. Turning once more to the right, in front of the magazines and comics, against the wall that faces Linea Street, the detective novels are gathered (don’t even glance at them, boy, no matter what the great Alfonso Reyes has to say) in super cheap editions, pirated editions from Bogotá and Buenos Aires. When Sebastián finishes inspecting this area, he finds the books on useful topics, cooking, clothes, makeup, furniture, decoration, books for farmers and gardeners, veterinarians and electricians. And farther on, the books that are useful in
school: Mathematics by Baldor, Chemistry by Ledón, Spanish Grammar by Amado Alonso and Pedro Henriquez Ureña (Uncle sighs in ecstasy), Literary Theory by Gayol Fernández (more provincial than even we: he lives in Sagua la Grande), the volumes on English by Leonardo Zorzano Jorrin (don’t waste your time with that, you don’t have to read those big old tomes to learn how to bark).Then come the art books, the most famous art galleries in the world (in one hour you can visit the Louvre or the New York Metropolitan Museum), beautiful and solemn books with embossed plates and gothic lettering. And closing off the path, in front of what seems to be a sealed-off door, a sign with Uncle s unmistakable handwriting, SEVERAL CENTURIES OF KNOWLEDGE HERE, the encyclopedias, the books of criticism and essays. Smell of dust and old paper, a whiff of another era escapes from the austere bindings, most of them burgundy red, against which their illegible names stand out (the unjustly reviled Saint-Beuve, Taine the positivist, Lord Macaulay whom I read so often as a young man and who says nothing to me now). The smell dissipates when Sebastián moves a little to the right and discovers an enormous bookcase where the word Theater is repeated in thousands of forms and sizes, on cheerful many-colored bindings, and Sebastián remembers a gigantic chandelier, a large brown velvet stage curtain, and the vertiginous toast scene in the production of La Traviata that Casta Diva took them to see, Tingo and him, on a night when the poor woman couldn’t stop crying. And the smell Sebastián senses before these books is the same smell he sensed that night in the theater, an undefinable smell, a perfume composed of many perfumes, smells of brocade and painted lumber, smells that he has never found again despite having searched for them in the most hidden corners of the Island. And he has to step around to avoid a large wooden base on top of which rests a bust of a fat, nearly bald man with enormous mustaches that end in points, and pupilless eyes. And it isn’t easy to read the name written on the base (Flaubert, child, Flaubert, and if he hadn’t been born what would have become of the modern novel?), and above, on an uncovered bit of wall, a mask, a death mask with closed eyes (on your knees now, this is Proust! the divine Marcel, read Proust and the rest can be fed to the bonfires), And when he crosses over it’s as if he were in the middle of the Island on this night of gusting winds, because the smells at this moment carry the aroma of damp leaves and wood, and also the magnificent smell of earth when it’s just starting to drizzle. The books on these shelves are large, robust, showy, but they don’t have the fragile air of the ones that say Theater; to the contrary they seem like books put there to stay forever, books no one should touch. And Sebastián walks past the long bookshelf fastened by robust iron bars to floor and ceiling, touching the books, trying to read the impossible names of their authors, names that could never have belonged to people of flesh and blood. And he’s about to take down a great big volume by some guy named Thackeray, when he discovers, in a reflection, the cash register.