They have left the marabú bushes behind and are entering The Beyond. Uncle Rolo looks pensive, as if he is afraid to give the news he has prepared for them. At last, he throws his head back, closes his eyes, and exclaims with some embarrassment, My friends, what I have discovered is the following, please pay close attention to what I am about to say: in a previous incarnation, I was Charles Baudelaire.
Addio, del passato bei sogni ridenti,
le rose del volto gia sono palenti…
comes the voice that has been heard around the Island for the past few days. Casta Diva runs to the mirror. There’s nothing to be seen on the other side.
There’s a garden here now with poplars, willows, cypresses, olive trees, even a splendid red sandalwood tree of Ceylon. I know this is hard to believe. On this Island of anonymous, uniform trees, all of them boringly green, it’s hard to imagine willows and cypresses, even after the other, among the sea mist of their little hamlet by the sea, near Santiago de Compostela. Angelina did receive a ticket for passage on an opulent schooner that set sail from La Coruña one jubilant spring morning. Enrique, who knew about his sister’s botanical leanings from her letters, had bought a fairly large country estate in the district of El Cerro to welcome her. She was twenty-five years old at the time, and bright as a Virgin by Murillo. When she disembarked from the schooner in the foul-smelling and festive port of Havana, Angelina looked at her brother without knowing who he was, impressed by the power emanating from that figure of a man. Enrique, too, looked at her without knowing who she was, impressed by the sweetness that emanated from that figure of a woman. He saw her dressed in discreet white linen, which she had embroidered herself, her skin clean and rosy, her hair as jet black as her large eyes, her mouth lovely and well formed, and he couldn’t help trembling. She couldn’t help trembling when she saw that man, whose strength did not reside merely in the vigor of his arms but came from some recondite region of his heart, and was reflected in his precise and restrained movements, and in his resolute, calculating, pitiless eyes. It was a confusion of a few seconds, naturally. He immediately discovered his mother’s face in hers, and softly, almost timidly, called her, Angelina! and she heard her father’s deep voice and was at the point of weeping from joy, from sadness, and exclaimed, Enrique! And they embraced, and they blushed when they embraced, and they kissed, and they blushed when they kissed, and they went to El Cerro as a pair of strangers, and not at all disposed to stop being such. She thought Havana looked like a farmyard. A rainstorm had fallen shortly before, and although no symptoms of it remained in the clear blue cloudless sky, the streets were pure mud, the walls of the houses were pure mud just like the streets, and the chickens, pigs, dogs, turkeys, cows, and sheep that ran before and behind the coaches were pure mud just like the walls and the streets. The women, singing inexplicable songs at the tops of their lungs, hurled the contents of chamber pots from their windows. Sweating mud, passersby barely escaped these urinary assaults and screamed curses, which the women returned between one inexplicable song and the next. There were lots of blacks. This especially called Angelina’s attention. Handsome, splendid animals, with the most enchantingly naked torsos she had ever seen, they gathered together to display their utterly healthy teeth and to play their disturbing music on wooden boxes, music that did not sound at all like it was being played on wooden boxes. Where have I landed? she thought, remembering, in contrast, the misty calm of her little hamlet in Galicia, and she instinctively stretched out her hand toward her brother’s, while he, as if reading her thoughts, or rather, as if he were thinking the same thing, stretched out his hand at the same instant toward hers, and their hands joined, and he placed a kiss on hers, and she received that kiss on her hand and in some other unmentionable part of her body, and she rested her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes to give herself courage and to say, If I’m with you I don’t mind living in this Babylon of blacks, and the phrase coincided with the moment their coach entered Cuatro Caminos and clumsily took the road, flinging mud and provoking curses, toward the country estate of El Cerro. Angelina couldn’t sleep the first night. Sheets and mosquito curtains suffocated her. The heat was impossible. The flowers gave off so much perfume that there was no way for her to close her eyes. She heard singing in some foreign language. When she managed for a moment to yield to exhaustion, the heat, the flowers, and the singing joined together to awaken her with a start. Then she had to get up, strip off more and more of her clothes, end up naked, sleepless, facing the balcony where white flowers seemed to move, seemed to lean toward her. Enrique couldn’t get to sleep, either. Never before this night had he felt the simmering humidity that arose from the earth and conspired with his sheets to expel him. He, too, had to strip, to go out onto the balcony. His manhood had reacted forcefully, growing and growing, throbbing, as if there were some independent, unsuspected relationship between the earth and his cock. Concentration exercises did no good; it did no good to think about the account books or the lepers who sometimes came to the door begging for food. His prick remained as erect as a spear, ready to fall only in bodily combat. The next morning, when brother and sister sat down to breakfast, they looked pale and haggard. She tried a soursop juice for the first time, and she liked it, and she felt it slipping down her throat, and she couldn’t repress an exclamation, Where the hell are we! He peeled a mango with his teeth, sucked at it helplessly, let its sweet juice flow down his neck to his chest, wiped the juice from his chest with one finger, squeezed his prick, which, still full of blood and momentum, lifted his trousers passionately, and replied, Where the devil cried out three times and nobody heard him. She broke a raw egg yolk into her mouth and sighed, I’m so sleepy. I’m so sleepy, he repeated, wiping a slice of pineapple across his burning temples. She wet a napkin in the cool milk, fresh from the cow, and wiped it across her brow. He sucked on the fingers he used to stir the papaya jam and said, When you were a little girl you’d fall asleep before supper was over, and I’d carry you to bed, remember? I don’t remember, I can’t remember anything, ever since yesterday, since I came into this city, which isn’t a city but the uproar of a delicious nightmare, a disturbance, I can’t remember a thing, I’m stuck in the present present present without a past or even a future. She looked at her brother with sleep-reddened eyes. And you, who are you, looking so much like my brother, like my father? He pushed back his chair with a certain aggressivity, stood up without worrying about how his full-grown manhood was lifting his trousers. That other body, full of life, bursting with blood, was, on this unforgettable morning, the most important part not only of his body but of the whole universe. Who am I? I’m going to tell you who I am. He went over to her, picked her up, carried her to her bed, stripped her. He stripped himself and stretched out on top of her, and she sensed, emanating from his body, the aroma of flowers, the fierce heat of the morning, the curse of Havana. He brought his lips to hers, kissed her many times, ran his tongue around her teeth and tongue. Who am I? Your brother, your father, the man who has your own blood, the one who shared the same womb and who engendered you; you are my sister, my mother, the woman who bore me and who shared the same womb with me. The enjoyment she felt was much more disturbing than that caused by the soursop juice, and she exclaimed, We’re moving on from wherever the hell we were, and entering hell itself. While he caressed his sister’s neck, he said, The devil’s still crying out, there’s no way to hear him, and he went down into the dark and desirable depths of her body and began a tormenting caress at the same time that he told her, When you were little, I’d carry you to the sea and bathe you naked and you’d be afraid of that blue expanse that wanted to devour you, devour us, and you’d cling to me, and I’d calm your fears by promising that I’d always protect you, that nothing could ever harm you so long as I was with you. Squeezing his head with her hands and pushing it toward her swarthy crotch, she cried with joy and said, You were always the best brother in the world, sweet, obliging, handsome, I felt proud to have you lead me by the
hand, to carry your blood, to look like you, everyone said we had the same eyes, the same lips, that I was your female side, that’s why I recognized in your mouth the taste of my own, and in your eyes the violent calm of my own, and it was like I desired myself and like I was pleasuring myself. He sat up tall, caressed her face with his hardened manhood, her face so like his mother’s face. She caressed it with her mouth, moving her tongue rapidly. He could barely stand it and explained, Ever since adolescence I’ve wanted to give myself the same caresses that you, Sister, are making me so happy with, but it’s impossible, no matter how hard you try it’s impossible, you just can’t give yourself joy, you always need someone else, ah, what good fortune if that someone else is yourself, if that someone else is the woman you rocked to sleep in her cradle, my sister, my other self, my female side. She took out his prick. Her lips were bright red and moist. Why don’t you enter me, you, my brother, the only one with the right to do so? And he entered her body while he whispered in her ear that, as a young girl, she was afraid of the ghosts of night.
They never paid much attention to the rumors that began spreading in the provincial city, the Babylonian city with the soul of a village. One morning they dismissed the parish priest who had come to visit them; the next, the bishop himself, who was scandalized (as was to be expected in a bishop worthy of his rank). They remained selfish and apart. They thought only about the world of happiness they had built. For at least four years they managed to live in that joyous irresponsibility, warding off the attentive eyes of the hypocritical city, the shameless city, living for one another, enjoying the perfect love, since they loved doubly, as lovers and as siblings. So it went, until she became pregnant. When the doctor they were forced to consult (she couldn’t keep anything down, and vomited if she so much as thought of a plate of food), pale and trembling, with horror on his face, diagnosed her pregnancy, Enrique and Angelina decided to abandon the country estate and move to a remote location where no one would know them, where the gossip wouldn’t affect them. They sold the country estate of El Cerro; they bought what today is the Island. In those years, before the U.S. occupation of Cuba, Columbia had not yet become a military base; Carlos J. Finlay had not yet become famous for discovering in this area the mosquito that carries yellow fever. Marianao was a small settlement famous for its benign climate, its proximity to the beaches and the Hippodrome; sufficiently close to Havana to feel that you weren’t in the countryside, sufficiently far not to suffer the terror of the city. In that expanse of arid land, in that grassy patch that barely kept the cows fed, in that bad land, cursed by God, there was a large house where brother and sister went to live, and a tiny house, barely two rooms, where a lovely young mulatta named Consuelo lived soon afterward with her husband, Lico Grande, a much older black man who had been a slave of the Loynaz family. Consuelo took care of Angelina. Apart from being lovely, the mulatta was sweet, and possessed a strange wisdom or a strange power. It is said that one night, for example, soon after she occupied the new house, Consuelo came up to Angelina with a profoundly sad expression, touched her belly, and exclaimed, A son cannot be a nephew and at the same time a man like any other. Angelina broke down crying, How did you know … ? My dear, Consuelo replied in an old woman’s tone of voice that hardly fit her face’s nearly adolescent expression, the eyes of a sister who is also a wife aren’t like those of other women, have you looked at yourself in the mirror? And she hugged and caressed Angelina, who let herself be hugged and caressed like a young girl with the chills. At that time Enrique had already embarked upon his obsessive planting of rare trees, of cypresses, poplars, willows, olive trees, even the red sandalwood tree of Ceylon, ignoring the advice of Lico Grande, who explained, In this land nothing’s possible. At night, while everyone else slept, Consuelo carne out and replanted whatever Enrique had planted by daylight. She did this, blessing the future tree, whispering prayers that she herself invented. And the trees, of course, grew as vigorously as Angelina’s belly It’s a miracle that this patch of grass can grow such rare, handsome plants, exclaimed Lico Grande. No, Consuelo replied, it’s not a miracle, it’s compensation.
At last, one day, with Consuelo’s help, Angelina gave birth. Some people say it was to a minotaur. Some say a basilisk. Others, a medusa. We all know how boundless the popular imagination can be. In any case, it’s true, it was a monstrous being that Consuelo wrapped up well in black cloth and showed to no one, least of all the mother. She walked straight to the garden, where Enrique was planting a willow, and said, Your son came from the depths of the earth with a smell of sulfur, I want you to let me do it the favor of perfuming it and sending it to heaven. Enrique looked at Consuelo, not understanding, and, not understanding, agreed. Consuelo drowned the monster, sprinkled bottled essences on it, and buried it, half an hour after its birth, at the foot of the red sandalwood tree, which wasn’t yet the vigorous tree we admire today. As if she knew, Angelina did not inquire about her son. All she could ask was, Could you open the windows? the smell of sulfur is killing me! That was the last thing they heard her say. Angelina fell mute for many months. She dedicated herself to helping Enrique plant the trees of the Island, which Consuelo replanted at night. It’s thanks to her and to Enrique (though the actual truth of it is that we should be thanking Consuelo) that the Island enjoys the profusion of trees we admire today
One fine day Angelina disappeared. They never heard from her again. Enrique, who went on to become Godfather, lived for a hundred years. Some people say he left the Island. Story goes, he was accursed. They say that at the age of a hundred and nine he’s still around in Galicia. There, instead of planting willows and cypresses, he plants mango and soursop trees.
Did you like it? No, it’s a fake story, too melodramatic, too graphic, sounds like it was told by a southern writer from the United States. Then I’ll just have to tell you the story of Consuelo, you’ll like that one. I’ll tell it another day, right now I’m tired (yawning sounds).
Of all the characters in this book, Lucio is beyond a doubt the most typically Cuban. For many reasons. For now, however, I am interested in pointing out his exaggerated need to dress well. Let’s be clear about this: not in the style of Beau Brummel, no. According to Barbey D’Aurevilly’s famous book, the dandy might spend three hours composing his wardrobe so that, when he steps out, he can forget all about it. The dandy abhors exaggeration and clothing that appears newly bought; for him, the man should stand out above the clothes. Lucio is no dandy He never forgets about his attire. (The habit makes the monk, he tells Fortunato every chance he gets, since Fortunato isn’t very interested in stylish clothes.) Lucio is no dandy He never gets his clothes to attain that indispensable quality of elegance, invisibility. He is patently interested in having everyone notice that he wears suits from Casa Prado, Gregory guayaberas, Once Once socks, Amadeo shoes. He exaggerates the Old Spice (which isn’t expensive, but does attract attention). He shows off his eighteen-karat gold chains, his emerald ring, his bracelet, also gold, and his Omega watch. His fingernails are trimmed and polished. For him, the image of a Baudelaire, armed with a glass-bristled brush, trying to eliminate the uncouth gloss of a recently bought suit, is little less than sacrilege. His beauty is also that of a typical Cuban. Tall, thin, muscular though not exaggeratedly so, very white (utterly and suspiciously white), his hair black, his features delicate and beautiful, or rather pretty, almost feminine. When Lucio steps out, dressed to the nines, and coquettishly dries his forehead with a linen handkerchief daubed with perfume, he is the most Cuban of Cubans. It would never occur to anyone to imagine that this extraordinary, delicate, and elegant specimen works in a vinegar factory.
He vomits. By the side of the bed, ashen, he is vomiting up a yellow liquid that smells of bile and rum. Fortunato, who has taken his shirt off for him, wipes a towel soaked in rubbing alcohol across Lucio’s head and says, Fuck it, man, I don’t want you to drink anymore. I would like it if the reader could note the interesting mix of demandingness and protective
ness heard in Fortunato’s voice.
Like a typical Cuban, when it is time to dress up, Lucio first combs his hair. Facing the mirror, completely naked and covered with talcum powder, legs spread wide, like a typical Cuban. He arranges his smooth, black hair with generous amounts of brilliantine. With the slight palm of his hand he pats down his hardened, diligent hair. Retouches the sideburns. Looks at the skin of his face, if there are any pimples, any stain … observes his nose, his eyes, his forehead. He does everything he can to make the mirror show him his own profile. He wipes his forehead and nose with a powder puff to keep the sweat from making them shiny, and, like a typical Cuban, wipes his eyebrows and lashes down with a finger wet with saliva. Then, like a typical Cuban, he carefully studies his teeth (a gold molar flashes) and cleans out his ears with cotton. He continues looking at himself in the mirror, like a typical Cuban. This time his study takes in his whole body. In one swift motion, happy, satisfied, he lifts his potent and talcumed manhood, and looks at his balls, which are also talcumed, which are also large, like those of a typical Cuban. Sitting on the bed, he covers his feet, softly, caressing them, with socks. Then his clean cotton and of course starched undershirt and underpants. Like a typical Cuban, he makes sure the undershirt fits tight against his body, tucked into the underwear. He looks at himself from front and side wearing the underclothes; he admires, he verifies that his abdomen is perfect, that his chest is perfect, like any typical Cuban. He lightly thumps his chest and abdomen. Then, like a typical Cuban, he puts on perfume without taking his eyes off himself in the mirror: neck, ears, chest, and arms, not forgetting first to put deodorant on his armpits, where, like a typical Cuban, he has first trimmed his armpit hair. He smells his arms, his armpits. He smiles, satisfied. He takes advantage of the smile to study once more his exaggeratedly well-brushed teeth and to admire the sheen of the gold molar. (No, the molar doesn’t shine enough. Lucio comes up to the mirror and, like a typical Cuban, takes a piece of cloth and works at it, to make it shine, yes, to make it shine, because your forehead and nose shouldn’t shine, but your gold tooth should, so it can be seen at night, so everybody can see it.) Now it’s time for the trousers. Cashmere. He likes cashmere. It’s a fabric that caresses your thighs, and Lucio, like a typical Cuban, likes to have his thighs caressed. He puts on his polished shoes. He ties and unties the laces until the knots are perfect. With a rag he works at his shoe tips, because they should also gleam and dazzle. He studies, swiftly but precisely, the way his trousers fall over his shoes (for a typical Cuban, this is of the utmost importance). Carefully, with slow and studied voluptuous movements, he puts on his shirt. White, of course, and short-sleeved to make the heat bearable; white, starched linen, ironed to excess by Irene (even that: Lucio, like a typical Cuban, has a typical Cuban mother to make sure that her son looks like a prince). He quite intentionally forgets to button the top two buttons on his shirt; that way you can see the edge of the undershirt and the clear skin and the rough, victorious way Lucio’s neck lifts high. Now it’s time for the jacket. The jacket quickly adapts to his body, as if it had been given an order. He retouches his sideburns again. Studies his teeth again, especially the gold molar. Combs his hair once more. Once more wipes a finger wet with saliva across his eyebrows and lashes. Wets his lips with his tongue. Perfumes his handkerchief, which does not go into the jacket pocket but the trousers. Looks for an instant, almost mechanically, at the watch on his wrist, and contemplates the finished product. Yes, it’s turned out well, it’s just fine, he seems to say with a half-worried, half-satisfied expression on his face, with his pleasantly frowning brow. At last, like a typical Cuban, he tosses a mock-sincere kiss at the image on the other side of the mirror. The image, which is also that of the typical Cuban Lucio is, responds with a kiss that carries the same burden of mocking sincerity.
Thine is the Kingdom Page 17