Thine is the Kingdom

by Abilio Estevez

  That was, besides, the era when the beggars appeared. Little by little they took over Typee. The first day two arrived; by the end of the week there was a crowd. They were rowdy boisterous, and spent the whole day singing and playing. Perhaps their mother was right, perhaps it was pleasant to live a timeless and unworried life with them. Except that their lack of responsibility led them to stink; to eat with their hands; never to comb their hair or change their tattered rags; to piss and crap in full sight of everyone; and worst of all, to relieve their burning lechery at any time, in any place. A moment came when even Uncle Leandro, who only saw his own saintliness in this world, began to grow concerned. The greatest concern took place when their mother sat down among the beggars and ended up at the foot of a bonfire singing, I’m the woman from Lagartera and I bring Lagartera lace to the rhythm of the beggars’ part-mocking, part-kindly hand clapping. For her as well, with the passing of the days time ceased to be a concern, with all the baneful consequences that phrase encapsulates. She forgot about entering the kitchen. She never again set foot in the bathroom. Never again embroidered or sewed. Unkempt, disheveled, she now spent little time inside the house. Her life was limited to staying on the beach, bathing, and singing with the beggars. Laughing, playing with them, as she had never laughed or played with her own daughters. So it went until one morning when silence and peace were reestablished in Typee. One might have thought it had all been a hallucination, that all those beggars had never lived by the sea, next to the house. To prove, however, that it was not just illusion, one could see the remains of dinners and campfires, an unstrung guitar that their uncle found floating in the sea, two books in an unknown language, a rabbit tied to a tree and hundreds of pages of the magazine Bohemia strewn across the sand. The best proof, in any case, was their mother’s absence. Mercedes stated that her mother had stayed up very late that night burning photographs and that much later she had heard a sound of breaking glass. In effect, they found the albums empty and the mirror broken.

  Though you might not believe it, Sebastián, I saw them leave, no one ever believed it, I was blind and they said it was impossible for me to see them leave, though I had also begun to lose sleep, to fall victim little by little to insomnia, the insomnia that still torments me today and is (I swear to you) worse than hunger and thirst and blindness itself, always being awake is like living twice as much, one life is fine, but two, on the other hand, can become a torture, in those years I still went to bed at the same time as everybody else, when the sensible people of the world go to bed, and I heard how the bell of the clock rang the hours and how everyone else’s breathing showed they were already soaring up to other worlds, other times, while I remained mired in reality by the weight of I don’t know what punishment, and though I couldn’t see it I knew reality was there, intransigent, severe, tedious, Sebastian, and that’s how it’s been ever since, for a long time now I don’t know what it is to sleep, and the worst part isn’t that the light of my eyes has gone out, or that my eyelids remain obstinately open, no, the worst is that God (that sweet way we have of invoking the devil) hasn’t even left me with the possibility of imagining, of recomposing a new reality based on what I once saw, like a good islander I always wanted to see the world, go to other cities, learn what they were like, how men lived in other cities, Glasgow, Manila, Paris, Buenos Aires, Baghdad, San Francisco, Oran, Tegucigalpa, have you noticed how enchanting the names of cities are? each one suggests something different, Glasgow smells of trees, Manila is golden, Paris a crystal, Buenos Aires a great bird with wings unfurled, Baghdad smells of incense and also is a tenor’s voice, San Francisco sounds like rainfall and piano music, Oran is a handkerchief, Tegucigalpa a pitcher of milk fresh from the cow, and the night the beggars left (and with them my mother) I had my last vision, I was awake, the others were peacefully sleeping, rubbing it in that I was still awake, I heard the murmuring of the sea, a strong murmuring, a swelling surf, I got up, I already knew how to behave like the perfect blind girl, I knew where each piece of furniture was, each door, each window, and when I didn’t know where they were I knew that, too, because one of the mysteries of being blind is that your body doesn’t need your eyes to find a path, and I went to the window, I don’t know why it occurred to me to go to the window, I wasn’t sure what I would see, I must have gone perhaps because the land wind caressed my face with the smell of the ocean, perhaps because the sound of the sea was more imposing at the window, the fact is that I went, the darkness dissipated as if by magic, the first thing I saw was the moon emerge between the scudding clouds, then a crowd of beggars launching rafts into the sea, rafts made from any old lumber, any old tree trunk, with sails made from old shirts and canvases tied to masts (if you could call them that) poorly crafted from branches, and they illuminated them with torches, and they sang, I remember very well they were singing, We’ll he free when we’re far from this prison, we’re off in search of wider horizons … and there were thirty, forty rafts beginning to move off, and thirty, forty more in the sand waiting their turn to set sail, I saw my mother carrying a torch, I saw her practically naked, practically an old lady, giving orders to launch her raft on the sea, the beach was a ceaseless to and fro, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen rafts set sail, Sebastian, I don’t know if you’ll have a chance to see it someday, you see those poorly tied logs, you see a man working so hard to push them toward the water, you see him run across the sand, enter the water, jump onto that little defenseless square of lumber, you see the boundless sea, the wind agitating the boundless sea, and you get a knot of sadness in your belly, that man might not get anywhere, and you think, Here in the sand I’m not going to get anywhere either, he might drown, might end his days at the bottom of the sea, I’ll drown on the surface, end my days on the shore, it’s all the same, except that he’s carrying out an act, I’m not carrying out anything, see what I mean? there’s something solemn and tragic about seeing someone set to sea on a raft, and he’s got to be very dispirited, very put-upon, to go fight against the sea so humbly, without the pride of that Oriental king who punished the ocean with lashes, this is like trying to fool it, to ply the water unnoticed on little more than a piece of paper, to navigate hoping neither the sea nor anyone else notices you’re navigating, it’s glorious to see a ship leaving the bay, that’s proof of human greatness and patience, but it’s piteous to see a man, a woman, an old lady, and a child on a raft, that’s proof of human poverty, hopelessness, and desperation, it’s something that reminds us that in the end we’re so unimportant, a raft is proof of insecurity and also of weariness, I broke down in tears watching the beggars’ rafts drift away, turn into luminous little points as they moved off from the shore and melted into that dark expanse (the sea), I broke down in tears, I cried for so long, I spent whole days crying, and when I didn’t have any tears left in my eyes, Sebastian, that was when I really never saw anything again.

  There are moments when running away seems like the only solution, a voice exclaims behind them, and it laughs, and how it laughs.

  Vido’s bare feet feel the sand on the beach. The sea, at this hour, is a steel grey, and Vido sees it motionless with only a brief surge of breakers by the shore. The sky acquires a more intense blue. He begins to hear a dog barking, so far away he doesn’t know if it’s a real dog or a dog from some other place and time. He greets the others, who can be seen some distance off, and he stands on a shore covered with seaweed and seashells, with miniature crabs. The sea enters the sand and forms a circle, closed off by two lengths of coral reef. There’s a depression in the sand, where the water, entering, forms an ephemeral pond.

  There are moments when running away seems like the only solution. Marta doesn’t move. Sebastián turns and sees the Barefoot Countess coming across the sand, with her fan, her ácana cane, and her air of an exiled queen. We live in an Island, chéri, you shouldn’t be so shocked, after all, what is an Island? have you read the dictionary? The Countess jams her cane into the sand, sits down next to them.
As is her habit, she wears a mocking face. According to the Dictionary of the Royal Academy, island means a portion of land surrounded entirely by water, a concise definition, what an aseptic tone, what linguistic precision! it couldn’t be so simple, right? for an inhabitant of the islands this is something profound and poignant. The Countess spreads her fan out on the sand and traces its outline with her finger. The dictionary phrase uses words that fill us with terror: a portion of land, meaning something diminished, something brief, a quantity wrenched from a larger quantity; surrounded, the participle of a verb with warlike connotations, prisonlike resonances; entirely by water, observe how this adverbial phrase evokes the impossibility of escape: water, symbol of the origins of life, is also that of death. She pauses for breath and caresses Sebastian’s hand. Wasn’t the Flood a punishment sent by God? She laughs briefly. You have to live on an island, yes, one must wake up every morning, see the sea, the wall of the sea, the horizon, as a threat and as a promised land, to know what it means.

  Vido breathes deeply and opens his arms and feels his lungs filling with the breeze. He opens his eyes wide, closes them, opens them again. When he has them open, it’s the sea and the sky and the horizon, clearer each time; when he closes them, another sky, another horizon, a reddish gleam. He shouts a name, his name, Vido! so that his voice, his name, will stop the bellowing of the sea.

  With great caution, the Barefoot Countess takes off the straw hat that she’s wearing tied beneath her chin by a red ribbon. She arranges her hair coquettishly. She says, This is something that people who live on continents will never know, they’ll never know how isolated the man of the islands is. A long silence follows. The afternoon sea is calm despite the breeze; its color is intense, becoming darker and darker as it moves away from the shore and approaches the horizon. It seems to Sebastián that the sea is covered with hundreds, thousands, millions of tiny mirrors.

  He undresses and it’s as if each part of his body were acquiring life, or better, as if he were discovering his body, his skin, the tension in his muscles, the throbbing that runs through him from head to foot. Vido is naked and he vividly feels the sensation of the breeze. The landscape, the whole world fits in his hands, in his arms. His lungs can capture the breeze that stirs the branches of the sea grape trees. He kicks up sand with his feet and he picks and bites into the red fruits. A sweet flavor wets his lips.

  The Countess throws her head back and for a moment it seems that she isn’t going to laugh. This Island we live in, she says, has been and is particularly unfortunate. She takes one of Sebastian’s hands. I don’t know, poveretto, if Miss Berta has told you that when the Spanish discovered this bit of land, where a few defenseless natives could barely live, they were searching for El Dorado, and this bit of land, for good or ill, has never had a drop of gold, so that the Spanish fled from it for the continent, they just opened two or three ports here, founded a few towns (with the poorest families of Iberia), and the Island (sigh) became a transit point (another sigh), which it has never ceased to be. She sits, looking into the distance. At one moment she lifts a hand as if she wanted to point out something. Marta holds her head down; at times she touches Sebastians back, perhaps to assure herself that he is still there.

  When a first wave wets his feet, it’s as if there were other Vidos there next to him, inside him. He enters the water and feels it move up his thighs, wrap around his waist, reach his chest. He feels as transparent as water, and he dives in.

  The Countess’s voice now sounds more serious, It’s logical, chéri, that the beggars on the rafts would make you cry, the man of the Island always believes he’s on a raft, always believes he’s about to set sail and also about to founder, except that this raft doesn’t ply the sea, and the moment he discovers that the Island will never move, the moment the man of the Island realizes that his raft is fixed to the bottom of the sea by some eternal and diabolical force, at that instant, he cuts logs and builds his raft and leaves forever. She lets loose a laugh. And what happens? the unexpected, the Island doesn’t abandon him, he abandons it but it doesn’t abandon him, there’s the worst part (more loud laughter), you leave the Island and the Island doesn’t leave you, because what the islander doesn’t know is that an Island is rather more than a portion of land surrounded by water on every side, an Island, my dear Marta, my dear Sebastián, let it be said once and for all: an Island (all right, I’ll be more precise), this Island we live on, is an illness. She picks up the fan open on the sand, closes it and looks in every direction with such a mocking face that Sebastián feels afraid. Ah, mon Dieu, a country could never be happy when it’s founded on the homesickness of Galicians, on the nostalgia of Andalusians and Canary Islanders, on the rauxa and angoixa of Catalans, no, no place could be happy when a slaver like Pedro Blanco brought thousands of blacks there, torn from their homes, mistreated, tortured, and sold them there naked, and enslaved them, and made them work from sunup to sundown, such a hodgepodge must necessarily make for a sad people, an accursed people, and if you add to that the heat, the suffocation, the time that never changes, and the methods of avoiding all this, the rum, the music, the dancing, the pagan religions, the body, the body to the detriment of the spirit, the body sweating on top of another body, the idleness, the idleness! not the productive idleness that Unamuno spoke of, no, but the kind that is called laziness, an idleness called impotence, skepticism, lack of faith, I would like you to tell me … She suddenly falls silent. As the afternoon has advanced, the sea has been acquiring an intense violet color. (Nostalgic for the birth of the gods?)

  Swimming along the bottom of the sea is more than a pleasure. He wants to observe this imprecise bottom and, opening his eyes, thinks he sees verdant leaves waving like miniature arms, rocks that sometimes are faces, lines of silvered fishes darting by faster than his gaze. Returning to the surface, he lies on the water with his arms folded. Above him is the afternoon sky. Something is making him drift away, but it isn’t the water, rather a force within himself. He swims away from the shore, comes back again and dives. He returns to the sea bottom. Comes up with a piece of seaweed. Jumps up with it on his neck and raises his arms. Breathes strongly. The smell of the sea is strong, very strong. Again he shouts his name and he doesn’t know why calling out to himself makes him laugh. He swims back to the shore, where he lies down and closes his eyes, to plunge into a new stillness that could be sleep. He brings a hand to his chest, over his heart, and perceives the strength of its beat. He also caresses his shoulders, his neck, his nipples. Though he thinks he is sleeping, his body is aware of the last sunlight of the afternoon.

  From among the sea grapes they see Uncle Rolo appear. The Barefoot Countess turns and smiles. Uncle is coming at a rapid pace, as if he is about to deliver important news. Nevertheless, when he sees the Countess he doesn’t speak, he sits down next to Marta, hugs her. She lifts her head, Rolo? she asks, and he smoothes her straight pageboy-styled hair. The Countess fans herself for some time. Sebastián throws pebbles at the water. The crazy woman closes her eyes and says, Mon petit, do you know what has happened to the poets of this Island? No, don’t tell that story, Rolo suddenly interjects. There’s no way to help it, Rolo, you know that. Not right now, at least not right now, Rolo begs. The Countess makes an authoritative gesture with her hand and exclaims, The first stammering poet, Zequeira, lost his mind from being the first stammering poet, he went crazy, Sebastián, he put on a hat and became invisible, which wasn’t true, but it really was, as you may understand; the first great poet, José María Heredia, was fated for exile (as I told you, men flee but the Island doesn’t abandon them, poor Heredia saw a palm tree growing next to Niagara Falls), he never truly left, exile killed him, nostalgia and consumption killed him (you can’t deny to me that both, together, add up to a tragic destiny); they shot Plácido, the mulatto comb-seller to whom rhymes came so easily; Zenea (the first in this Island to read Alfredo de Musset) was also shot; Milanés of Matanzas, wonderful when he didn’t give in to moralizing, also
found himself compelled to go crazy; and what about El Cucalambé? with his simple but enchanting stanzas, he disappeared without a trace, they never heard from him again; another elegist, Luisa Pérez de Zambrana, saw her large family die while she lived on, nearly eternal, and came to know solitude in the humblest little house in the district of Regla, across the bay; and Julián del Casal, the first to read Baudelaire, the friend of Darío, misunderstood and lonely and sad, with a sense of sadness and guilt that I don’t know if we’ll ever understand, died at the age of twenty-nine, also consumptive, from a hearty laugh that made him cough up all his blood, he died like Keats without the glory of Keats, I weep for Adonais … (consumption was the great ally of the ephemeral nineteenth-century bourgeois against the immortal poets). And as for Martí … you already know: he let himself get killed on the battlefield at the age of forty-two …

  Far, far away the white outline of a ship can be seen among the scudding clouds of afternoon. Sebastián waves good-bye with his hand. Vido, Rolo, and the Countess do the same. Marta raises her head. It’s a ship, Uncle informs her. The horizon has become a fiery line.

  I waited to reveal what I’m about to reveal because I didn’t dare do it until I was sure. So says Uncle Rolo to Marta, the Countess, and Sebastián during their walk back to the Island. It’s something so important that I couldn’t take it lightly, he emphasizes. He pauses, then announces, I have received important signs in my dreams, first, in my dreams, I saw a street that I didn’t know, that I couldn’t remember ever actually seeing, and I knew it wasn’t a street in Havana because its hues, its color, its silence were different… I returned to this street again and again in my dreams, and one house stood out, number 13, until one day, leafing through a book about Paris, I was shocked by the surprise of seeing the street of my dreams in a print, it was called, ladies and gentlemen, listen closely, Rue Hautefeuille, then 1 began dreaming that I was at my father’s wake, that is, my father is dead, but my father in my dream wasn’t my father, the father I always knew, understand? in the funeral wake in my dreams I was about six years old, which would argue against this dead father being any other than the father I had as such, if it weren’t for realizing that the wake was taking place in another era, a wake from another era, understand? in a third dream I hated my mother, by her side I saw a man in uniform, covered with gold braid, a general, and I, like Hamlet, hated the general and hated my mother (I hated her and loved her, as is always the case with mothers), in a fourth dream I saw myself dressed up as a dandy, on a ship, surrounded by sea mist, and I felt more weariness than I could ever express to you, no matter how much I tried, understand? the days go by and I have more and more dreams that I don’t want to burden you with, every day I recite phrases in French, phrases I never knew, I don’t even speak French,phrases like La, tout n’est qu ‘orare et beauté …