Dear Professor Kingston: the Sailor will approach in a rowboat and will help the two of you to board. Being experienced (God knows how many boats he must have guided in his time), he will row with agility and the boat will head rapidly for the high seas, for that horizon you don’t know. It will continue drizzling, a fact that both you and Cira will interpret as a good omen. You will continue expounding to that woman (let’s say) a slightly pessimistic, slightly sentimental philosophy. Pessimistic and sentimental, she will be enchanted to listen and will keep on smiling. Actually the conversation won’t be so important, and the two of you will know it. The important thing will be what always was important: that you’ll be facing each other, as you did in those happy times when you met. No one knows for certain whether at death you meet the dear ones who preceded you in death, so you and Cira should feel satisfied that fiction can, in this case, easily resolve such a delicate matter. Dear Professor, you will begin rejuvenating. Without realizing it you will become again the elegant black man you were so many years ago. Thus the couple you and Cira make will become a handsome couple of two twenty-year-olds as the boat pulls away from the shore. Dear Professor, if you were curious, you should turn to look, you should notice that the shore is out of sight. You should note, besides, that the young sailor no longer sits in the boat. But you will not be curious, nor will you pay attention to such details. The moment will come when you no longer sense the beating of the oars, nor the boat, nor the sea, nor the night. You will only recognize the presence of Cira and the happiness of believing you are traveling together to a place where no one can disturb you. We fervently wish that everything you two imagine be real, and that you have a good trip. Godspeed!
There is so much light in Havana that it gives the impression of being a city submerged in water. There are no colors in Havana because of the light. Aside from blinding us, from keeping us from looking at the city straight on, the light turns Havana into a radiance arising among mirages. It makes us feel that everything here is nonexistent, invented and destroyed by the light. The realness of Venice, what makes one live it so intensely, is rooted in its water and its light, which far from blurring colors, emphasizes them, so that the real Venice is always superior to the Venice of painters. Havana is the opposite of Venice. The basic problem is that, rather than being a city, Havana is an illusion. Havana is a trick. A dream. This last word (dream) does not appear here in the poetic sense of fantasy, of hope. We could correct, rewrite, the sentence: Havana is a case of torpor, of lethargy. Its light assumes such vigor that Havana lacks materiality. One of the functions of light in this hallucination is to erase your sense of time. You wander between past and present, back and forth, never coming to glimpse the future. The future does not exist. The light is so overwhelming that time in Havana is motionless. There is no time, though this hardly means that Havana is eternal; quite the contrary. There is no time, so Havana is the city where you comprehend, with almost maddening intensity, what it means to be ephemeral. And a man walking around Havana is as lacking in materiality as the city. This is why bodies search each other out in Havana like nowhere else. Physical encounters, bodies touching one another, become the only act of free will that can restore your sense of realness. In an ever-disappearing city, the need for a physical encounter becomes a matter of life or death, or rather, of appearance or disappearance.
Looking for someone who’s gotten lost in Havana must be an act of insanity. Everyone’s lost in Havana, everyone’s succumbed to the harshness of the light. Nonetheless, how could these arguments convince a father who has lost his son and who’s going around looking for him in every nook and cranny of the city? In this book, this father has a name, Merengue, and the places he visits are the most popular ones, let’s say for example that he’s spent an entire morning in Fraternidad Park, among the crowd, back and forth, sitting among the beggars, among the drunks, showing everyone a photo of Chavito, who is a twenty-year-old black man, therefore similar to the million twenty-year-old black men who wander the city. Nobody’s seen anybody, of course. Let’s say Merengue has gone to the beach at Marianao, that he’s spent a whole afternoon at the Coney Island on the beach at Marianao, that he has walked the Malecón from Castle to Castle, from the Castle of La Punta up to La Chorrera, that he has prowled about the Stock Exchange, around the port, that he has pretended to have a drink in Dos Hermanos, that he’s pretended to have another in Sloppy Joe’s, that he has sat from dawn to dusk in Prado Boulevard near the statue of Juan Clemente Zenea, that he has fallen asleep with exhaustion on the Ferry of La Playa, that another dawn has surprised him in Guanabo, on the sand, by the sea (surely the realest thing about Havana), and that he has gone through the nearby towns: Bauta, Santa Cruz del Norte, Bejucal, Güira, San Antonio de los Baños, El Rincón, the latter being a holy town, a town of lepers and of sanctuary, where he has prostrated himself before the miraculous image of Saint Lazarus and cried and prayed, and begged the saint to return him his son, and if he does this miracle, he will come on foot every December 17 in pilgrimage from the Island, dragging an anchor behind him. Merengue has done all this and still more that it is better not to detail here, though it would be impossible to overlook his visit to the hospitals and clinics, his visit to the morgue, where he recognized in the end that death is something that man, in this life, will never come to understand.
A knock. Another knock. Merengue opens his eyes. He is sitting in the rocking chair and he opens his eyes and sees nothing because he hasn’t turned on the lights. The candles, before the Saint Lazarus, have dwindled so low they are two nervous little points that can do nothing against the darkness of the Island that has taken over his room. Merengue realizes he has just dreamed that someone was opening the shutters of the window that looks out on the gallery. He rises and stretches, lazily. Smiles. Nobody could open that window, I locked it, intruders don’t come in through locked windows. The cigar is on the floor, gone out. Merengue is going to pick it up when he hears a knock and another knock. It’s the window. The wind is opening and closing it as it wishes. So it must be true that somebody opened the window, that it wasn’t a dream (just because it’s impossible, that doesn’t mean it’s not possible). Urgently, fearlessly, he grabs a machete from under the mattress. The hand grasping the machete raises up, ready to strike, and he stealthily approaches the window. Outside, the Island, night. Merengue opens the window wide, avoiding a fresh knock of wind. There’s nobody in the Island. The world has gone inside early. He hears the hooting of an owl. Merengue crosses himself. What time is it? He looks at the clock he has placed on top of the dressing table. Five past one, that means it’s broken or needs winding; it couldn’t possibly be that late, but it couldn’t be morning yet. More certain, he goes to the door and opens it, goes out into the gallery. One knock and another knock and he opens his eyes. He realizes: he’s been dreaming, and he gets up, smiles at his dream, sees that indeed the window is open, and thinks somebody must have opened it, otherwise … He picks up the machete, which isn’t under the mattress but in the sideboard drawer, and observes the Island, empty and full of restlessness tonight. There’s nobody there and most likely he just thought he had locked the window but hadn’t, it’s nothing out of the ordinary, you spend your life thinking things are one way when they’re really another. And he goes right up to the very boundary where the gallery ends and the land of the Island begins. Something’s shining among the mourning brides that Irene planted. In the instant that Merengue is going to stoop to see it better, he has the impression that a white shade passes swiftly behind the Discus Thrower, heading for the Diana or the David. Merengue runs through the Island. He doesn’t shout, to keep from alarming everyone. He raises the hand holding the machete, ready for come what may. Pushing branches aside, hurting his feet, he’s barefoot, he follows something he cannot see, something he can’t even be sure exists. He passes the Discus Thrower, reaches the Diana and enters an area of pines where he becomes disoriented, not knowing which way to turn. He hears a knoc
k and another knock and opens his eyes and realizes: he’s been dreaming. He gets up and sees that the window is open and thinks, Maybe that’s how I left it, I probably shut it in my imagination, not in reality, and he takes out the machete, which isn’t under the mattress nor in the sideboard drawer, but in the suitcase where he keeps the pliers and the spare parts for the pastry cart. Out of curiosity he goes into the Island. He knows that there is no link between a dream and reality other than that of a sleeping body A sleeping body is a dead body. When men aren’t awake it’s as if they were dead. And in the gallery he sees something shining among the mourning brides that Irene planted and when he stoops he sees it’s the key to the lock of some chest. It isn’t an everyday kind of key; it’s a large antique one. And although he doesn’t see any white form running behind the Discus Thrower toward the Diana or toward the David, he goes in that direction, and he reaches the pines and doesn’t get disoriented, instead he keeps on pushing branches out of his way, hurting his feet, he’s barefoot, and he stops next to the narrow little wooden door that separates The Beyond from This Side, and stands there in silence for an instant, trying to hear, to discover some strange sound in the Island. Of course, the night wind is so strong it makes the sounds of the Island strange, and you think there are thousands of strangers, white forms running from one side to the other. Merengue smiles to think the statues must have gotten tired of their uncomfortable positions and run off at last, they’re running away, well, maybe. And he opens the narrow little gate that separates The Beyond from This Side and crosses into The Beyond that looks impassable and goes straight to Professor Kingston’s house where he sees, hanging from a marabú branch, a bloody handkerchief. He hears a knock and another knock and realizes, with relief, that he has been dreaming and he gets up smiling; there’s nothing that makes a man happier than waking up from a bad dream. The bedroom is dark, he hasn’t turned on the lights, the candles for Saint Lazarus have burned down so far they are two nervous little points that can do nothing against the darkness of the Island that has taken over his room. The window is open, shutters spread wide, at the mercy of the wind that brings a smell of damp earth and of sea, on rainy days the sea seems like it’s just around the corner. Merengue is going to shut the window and he realizes that he’s holding something in his hand. What he’s holding is a key, an unusual key. He isn’t afraid. As a cautious man, however, he looks for the machete, which isn’t under the mattress, nor in the sideboard drawer, nor in the suitcase with the spare parts for the cart, but right on the altar to Saint Lazarus. He goes out into the Island. He heads without hesitation toward The Beyond and realizes that the narrow little door that separates the two parts of the Island is open, as if someone had passed through there. Indeed, dangling from a marabú branch there is a bloody handkerchief. He picks it up as evidence, continues down the narrow path that Professor Kingston wore with his daily walk. Continues toward the marabú trail. The stars and the moon are shot to hell. There’s a smell of damp earth, of sea, the sea is right there just around the corner. It’s threatening to rain. How long has it been threatening to rain? Merengue continues barefoot through the marabú grove. The Island here is wilderness. The wilderness. And are those voices? No, it’s your imagination. There are no voices here now. That shout, that lament, are nothing more than the wind sifting through the foliage. Merengue wonders whether what the Barefoot Countess says might be true, that crazy woman is full of surprises. And even though the Island is deserted and you know it, you walk through it as if you could bump into somebody at any moment. That’s how the Island is. And now it’s darker than dark ever is on earth. And without realizing it Merengue reaches the seashore, which is neither blue nor black, but red, a threatening red. And the sea is restless, as restless as the wind and the sky. Merengue falls to his knees in the sand on the shore, when he hears a knock and another knock and opens his eyes and this time he really is still there, kneeling at the sea’s edge, waiting for something, for he doesn’t know what. The clouds open. A very vivid light escapes through them and falls on a small portion of sand. Merengue first sees a shade, or not even that. At the light’s contact, the shade takes on the form of a man. Merengue sees how, in the light, two legs emerge, a torso, two arms, a head. For a moment it is no more than this. Little by little, the outline takes shape. The legs and arms are a man’s legs and arms. On the head the eyes take shape, the nose, the mouth. Merengue would like to hear a knock and another knock to awaken him, to get him away from the shore, to take him out of the chills that are attacking him as intensely as the waves knocking against the shore. It’s Chavito, he thinks, and his heart skips a beat. And he tries to look with all the power in his frightened eyes. And Chavito raises his hands to his eyes, looks at them, apparently with surprise, and then laughs. He starts walking. Followed by the light, he sets out for the shore. One couldn’t say he’s entering the water; rather, to be clear, he’s stepping up on top of it. Chavito has begun walking across the water, and the sea, as if by miracle, calms down to receive him. And his footsteps become firm and sure as they leave the shore and set out for a horizon hidden by the night, a horizon Merengue was never sure existed.
And if the sky joined with the earth, then what? Nothing. We’d be walking among the clouds, nice and happy. Look, over there, see that big evergreen oak? See it? Did you see the big old branch that looks like the foot of a giant chicken? That’s where Carola hanged herself, the beautiful daughter of Homer Linesman. Who told you that? My Uncle Rolo, cause he saw her hanging there all black and blue, he says. You’re a liar and your uncle’s a triple liar; besides, shut up, they’re going to notice we’re here. Now the evergreen oaks are singing, yes, singing religious songs, lullabies. Tonight looks like it’ll never end, dawn’ll never come again, we’ll always have to live in this night, this eternal night, a simple pretext for the sky to join once and for all with the earth and then we’ll have to walk in the constant bland darkness of the clouds, with the angels and the saints, and God with His scepter, all comfy up in His enormous easy chair upholstered in His favorite blue satin, telling us what we can and can’t do. Lay off the nonsense … Tell me, is it true Carola hanged herself there? Fuck it, my God. And why did she hang herself if they say she was pretty? That’s why, because she was pretty.
Carola, the prettiest woman ever born in the Island, lived happily with her mother and her father, Homer Linesman, and they lived in the little house that’s falling down over there, same way the old man’s falling down now, all alone and sad, ‘cause he walks between the tracks dragging a life that isn’t his own behind him, the little house used to look beautiful, painted blue with yellow doors and windows, and lots of flowers because Carola and her mamá and even the linesman liked flowers, and Carola, the prettiest girl ever born and possibly the prettiest who ever will be born in this Island, sat down every evening after her bath, dressed in clean clothes, wearing a perfume she prepared herself from the flowers in her garden, sat down, I say, beautiful as could be, to do embroidery by the window from which she watched the trains pass by, coming and going, and waved good-bye to the passengers, they say the passengers knew when they were coming up to Carola ‘s house and they’d get ready to wave good-bye well in advance, and they say the men tightened their ties that had been loosened by the exhaustion of all those hours on the train, and they put on their hats, and the women fixed their makeup and straightened their hair before they passed Carolas house and waved to her, goodbye, good-bye, with their handkerchiefs, what I’m telling you is as true as we’re standing here, well, even truer, because I’m not sure I’m even here. Why did you stop talking? Where are you taking me? Now we’re entering The Beyond. I know that, where are you taking me? You’ll find out soon enough, look, there’s Professor Kingston’s house. Right. The little wood is behind us. The yellowish old building where the Jamaican lives reminds you of a castle tower rising precariously among siguarayas and mastic trees and casuarinas and the impassable marabú grove. A bit to the left, in a clearing in
the tangle of vegetation, the dog cemetery, with nine tombs and nine tin gravestones. Where are we going? Stop asking, tell me, what happened to Carola? Can you see okay? Doesn’t it look foggy? There’s no fog at all. Walk slower, you’re going to fall. We’re getting there now. What happened to Carola? Poor girl! Folks started coming from all over the Island. From all over the Island, what for? Just what you heard, from Cape San Antonio to Maisi Point. Folks coming from far off, whole families coming to see Carola. What for? To see her, just to see her is all, her beauty was getting famous because so many trains used to pass through here. Families came from the mountains in Oriente, and from the plains in Camagiiey, and from the Escambray, and from the Ciénaga, and from the Isle of Pines, and from all the big and little cities on the island, because there’s hundreds of cities in Cuba, don’t you know? There’s exactly three hundred twenty-seven, or something like that. People came and came, more came every day. They’d hang out around Homer Linesman’s house. Camping out there, in the fields, because they say there weren’t so many houses back then as today. And they’d hang out just to see Carola when she came to the window, to embroider, so pretty. Of course Homers daughter wasn’t just pretty, she was super pretty, and folks weren’t happy just to sit and watch her, and so one day they wanted to touch her, and since she wasn’t just pretty but nobody had an edge on her in goodness, she let them touch her, smiling, she’d kiss the babies, hug the old folks, every day more families came from the farthest places, and not just from this country, the fame of her beauty also traveled by ship, crossed the seven seas, and they heard about Carola far far away, they even heard of her in Peking and in China, they say, and the people didn’t even fit around here, the crowd spread across all Havana and reached Batabanó, and if it didn’t keep growing it’s just because the island of Cuba stops there, they wanted to see Carola even though they couldn’t all see Carola, and then some people died, lots of people killed to see her, there were men who challenged duels just to get a few steps closer to Carola’s house, women who collapsed from exhaustion and hunger, children who couldn’t take the sun by day and the stars by night, or the rain, or the hurricanes that came through (and there were several), old people with weak and anxious bodies who fell from emaciation and anger since even in their final moments they couldn’t see the magnificent, divine face of Carola, the daughter of Homer Linesman, and she, who nobody had an edge on in goodness, stood up and went out through the crowd so they’d get a good look at her, they say she put on her best dress, of the finest tulle and organdy, and she adorned her golden blond hair with flowers, and she wore satin slippers that they keep over there where the Pope (the miserable king of the Church) lives, in a glass case, and Carola walked and walked through the fascinated crowd, for months, for years, walking, smiling, waving, kissing, hugging, they say that when she came back no one could recognize her, all skinny, drawn up, wrinkled like a little old woman, the flowers in her hair had rotted along with her hair itself, she had lost her teeth, and she had lost her eyes too, gone blind, you know, they say that when she came back it looked like hundreds of years had passed for her, centuries had crawled into her body like bugs and ravaged her skin and bones, she came back by pure instinct, the crowds had already dispersed because the rumor had gone around that in Athens, a real faraway city that has ruins on top of ruins, there was another girl prettier than Carola, they left in steamers and trains for Athens to see the other one, it was the survivors, of course, who left; the land around her house, for several miles all around, was transformed, just like Carola herself, the land looked like an enormous desert where not even grass could grow, the very night she came back home, Carola kissed her mother and her father, said good night like she was going to go to sleep, and hanged herself there, in the evergreen oak I showed you. And we can take advantage of Homer Linesman’s appearance to point out that, after Carola s suicide and the death of his wife, the good man tried to find comfort in the raising of rabbits. And he didn’t raise them to sell them, nor to eat them, not at all, he raised them just because, the same way someone might raise a dog, a cat, a parrot. And he had them by the thousands, in enormous cages where several human beings could live. You could say that Homer’s life is well balanced between trains and rabbits, and whatever happens in the rest of the world is of no concern to him. Chacho and Homer were always good friends. As good friends as you can be, that is, with a man who practically stopped talking after his daughter’s suicide. But in their own way, they’ve really understood each other. And it so happens that, Homer having learned from Casta Diva that Chacho was spending his days lying in bed not talking, that he had later taken to playing Gardel records tirelessly on the gramophone, and lastly, unexpectedly, had burned uniforms, medals, and everything that reminded him of the army, it so happens, I repeat, that one morning Homer appeared in the Island with a little rabbit. A gift for Chacho, he explained to Casta Diva, about the same time that he disappeared again behind the wooden screen in the courtyard. To Casta Diva’s surprise, to my surprise, Chacho cared for the animal that I put in his bed, and he sat down, picked it up in his hands and I swear he looked tenderly at it, brought it up to his cheek, and when he lay down he did so next to it, next to the grey and skittish rabbit, and for days he didn’t part from it for one second, he just lived for the animal’s sake then, to pet it and feed it grass, to stare at it for hours, to pamper it and tell it things I couldn’t manage to hear even if I tried to with my whole soul. In order to find a bridge, no matter how small, of communication with her husband, Casta Diva also attempted to pamper the rabbit, except that Chacho pushed her hand away brusquely. That same afternoon he went to Homer’s cages, and stood there watching the rabbits, one by one, as if they were animals he had never seen before, petting them, feeding them grass, telling them those things no one could hear. He never went back home again. He seemed to have forgotten about Casta Diva, Tingo, Tatina. Homer arranged some blankets for him in one of the cages, where a white rabbit that had just given birth, named Primavera, watched over her abundant brood. Chacho never left the cage again. He ate the same grass Homer served for Primavera. One afternoon after another, Casta Diva would come to see him and would talk at length about their children, about the days when they had been happy, about the tangos he used to sing to me, about how we used to go on excursions to the beach at El Salao, with the cooler full of beers and the pot of chicharrones, about how we had suffered when Tatina was born, and we had longed for her so much, and the doctor had told us she was an idiot, about how we had run around with her trying to cure her, about how fruitless those attempts had been. And when she realized that words no longer had any meaning, she even brought Tatina and Tingo so that he could see them, and one day she went so far as to install the old gramophone in the cage and put on one of the Gardel records. And it was useless, the truth is that there was nothing she could do to get Chacho to abandon the cage or his attitude, up to the very moment when he disappeared almost between Casta Diva’s hands.
Thine is the Kingdom Page 24