Is it really true, Oscar Wilde, that lust is the mother of melancholy? Sitting on his ivory-colored moire easy chair, under the floor lamp he had recently bought at clearance sale at Quesada Lighting, Rolo turns and re-turns the pages of Samuel Hazard’s Cuba in Pen and Pencil. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t even pause to look at the illustrations. He’s turning the pages mechanically and thinking, That’s what you say, Oscar Wilde, because at bottom you weren’t in agreement with yourself, you had a secret awareness of sin in you, a sense of rejection, which you hid behind your scandalous attitude. Rolo feels sad. It’s past four in the morning. It’s been approximately an hour since he got back from the Leech’s house and he feels as if his skin were covered by a crust of earth, despite the fact that the first thing he did when he got home was to take a long bath in hot water, with lots of Cologne 1800. He leans his head against the back of the easy chair, looks at the handsome reproduction of Velazquez’s Christ hanging on his wall, above the sideboard, and continues turning, not reading, the pages of his book.
He got to the Leech’s house about seven o’clock, too early, to be sure. He actually just wanted to say hello, leave a couple of kisses on the Leech’s aged and odiously perfumed cheeks, tell him a few witticisms, several jokes (perhaps the same ones as last year), congratulate him, May you celebrate many more, Havana would be such a sad village without you, and run out of there, eyes watching you go. Nevertheless, from the moment he turned from Consulado Street onto All Souls (it should actually be called Souls in Torment) he knew that, like every other year, he wouldn’t leave, a strange force (not so strange, that’s a lie, I don’t know why I’m getting so rhetorical) would keep him there to the very end so that he could come back home nice and late, filled with disgust, as sad as ever, feeling that contempt for himself that he would sum up in the question he would, invariably, ask of Oscar Wilde. He thought that if Sandokán had come, he would perhaps have overcome the temptation to stay for the party. Except that Sandokán hadn’t shown his face for more than a week, and anyway it would have been the same with Sandokán, after all, la chair est triste, helas! He slowly climbed the stairs of the house marked with the number 98 and the bronze inscription, ELIO PECCI, DEALER AND DECORATOR (a flagrant lie, the bit about Elio Pecci: that isn’t the Leech’s name, it’s Jorge Tamayo, and he wasn’t born in Trieste as he ostentatiously claimed, but in Bayamo). He climbed the stairs as he always did; that is, with a mixture of repulsion and fascination, as if he thought he could resist at any moment, though he knew at the ~ same time that he wouldn’t go back, that he would rest on the landing where you could appreciate an excellent reproduction of a seascape by Romañach, and at last would touch the enormous knocker that imitated one of the frightening gargoyles from the cathedral of Notre Dame. Two timid knocks. Followed by seconds of absolute silence. Rolo reasoned there was no better time to head back into the noisy streets where night was swiftly falling and where the clamor, the uproar, the boleros, the cha-cha-chas sung at full volume seemed to be in some mysterious relation with the shadows. Havana lived by night, the darker it was the more alive, a constant party, a stranger to profundity, to metaphysical speculation, to poetry (my God, Rolo, how pedantic you get, and how you like looking for pears on elm trees). No, he didn’t leave the spot before the door. In the first place, he didn’t actually want to; in the second place, the door opened to display a splendid specimen of the human race, a garlón more than six feet tall, a blond such as only a country with this much racial mixing could produce, because, even with his straight and dazzlingly yellow hair, with his aquamarine eyes and his skin as white as you could imagine, something suspicious, remote, and imprecise distanced him (thank goodness!) from the exotic reality of the Scandinavian. Rolo told himself that you’d have to seek the key not in his physical appearance but in another ineffable quality about his caressing eyes, about the audacity of his smile, about his attitude of yielding and rejecting at the same bewildering time, the way, as feminine as it was manly (if you could have seen him, Plato!), he said good evening and extended his strong, delicate arm in a dancelike motion to invite you in. He wore matador pants, marvelous silk embroidered with gold and silver, which fit his abundance of legs and thighs perfectly, his abundance of everything in that abundant body As it was clearly too early, he hadn’t finished getting dressed and his torso was naked; one of those wide, powerful torsos that you shouldn’t look at if you’re interested in keeping your heart still. Whom should I announce? the garlón asked, still smiling, inflecting his voice with a half-authoritative, half-submissive tone (really, that boy’s a living paradox). Say that Rolo Pasos is here, he replied with an arrogance that revealed his defenselessness. Have a seat, please, Señor Pecci will attend you as soon as he is able. More than ever, Rolo felt like a caterpillar watching a butterfly. He crossed to the living room, thinking: They’ve got you well trained, boy, do you really not know that as soon as your skin loses its shine, as soon as wrinkles sadden your shameless eyes and your whole body sags from the terrible force that emanates from the earth, they’ll give you a kick in the butt, leave you in the street without a latchkey, and some other splendid specimen will take your place? He felt avenged for an instant; almost immediately he replied, That doesn’t matter, enjoy your privilege in the meantime, so long as the Lord was so extravagant with you, you might as well take all the advantage you can of God’s glorious injustice. And so, with a mixed feeling of wonder and envy, he sat down in an Art Nouveau easy chair, upholstered in a floral motif, as lovely as it was uncomfortable. There was no doubt about it, Señor Jorge Tamayo, alias Elio Pecci, alias the Leech, didn’t act like the upstart he was. Despite his illegitimate birth in Bayamo, he had exquisite taste. His salon was very smart, tres chic. Rolo had to recognize once more that, apart from all his defects (the first of which was called frivolity), his old friend had managed to establish in the very heart of the Caribbean Sea a Proustian house if there ever was one, as Proustian or more so than the very house of the author of A la recherche … insofar as Monsieur Proust had never set out to be Proustian. And speaking of Proust, there he was, presiding over the living room, above an Emile Gallé vase, lapis lazuli blue with mother-of-pearl lilies, on his deathbed, an immense reproduction of the famous Man Ray photograph. The photograph repulsed Rolo, he didn’t like the image of the bearded genius, his eyes half closed, watery, his Jewish nose even more sharply profiled in death. He didn’t like it, he didn’t want to think that this was the author of the most passionate novel in the history of literature, a phenomenon that, as Conrad said, can never be repeated. Then he thought, Could the Leech have read Monsieur Proust?
He closes the book by Samuel Hazard. His gaze runs over the living room, the cheap furniture bought on installment at Orbay y Cerrato, the old worm-eaten bookshelves, the antique RCA Victor that you can barely hear now, the faded walls on which reproductions of famous paintings, stained by the damp, collect dust. My life is a failure, my life is a failure, my life is a failure, my life is …
A door opened grandiloquently, and the Leech appeared. Rolo stood up, smiled, said, Your entrance was announced by clarion calls. Ah! mon eher, what a delight to have you here, he exclaimed in a countertenor that scarcely fit his thickset body, his round, bald head. They embraced. May you live to be one hundred, my dear, for your own sake and for the sake of this city that needs you so badly, Rolo said, unconsciously adopting the Leech’s own theatrical tone. Ma non tanto, a hundred years is more than I need, though perhaps ninety-nine. (Laughter) The Leech smelled strongly of perfume, some expensive cologne, and looked clean, snowy white, almost blue, freshly shaven and bathed. Rolo told himself he had grown older since the last time they saw each other, that his double chin had grown, his cheeks were Leech, however, paid no attention to him, had turned back to the young man, was saying, Pepito, sweetness, why don’t you bring Rolo a little drink of something? And turning to Rolo, What would you like? a little vermouth, a Campari, a whiskey, a little rum, a beer? ask for whatever you’d l
ike because Pepito is obliging as can be. Perhaps a vermouth, Rolo conceded, giving up. The Leech looked at the boy with Marilyn Monroe eyes and blew him a kiss. With a mocking bow, the garlón disappeared. Did you see how cute he is? and look … He made a hand gesture to indicate an enormous size. A beauty, I took him with me to Paris, my dear, because France is France, which is one thing, and the French are the French, which is something else, if I were the president of the United Nations I would compel the French to live at least a hundred kilometers from Paris, such a lovely city, child, they ruin it, they’re vulgar, ugly, uncultured, all that about French rationalism is a lie, they aren’t all Albert Camus, not that cross-eyed philosopher, not that lady with the frigid womb, Simone de Beauvoir, besides, I took Pepito with me because, like I told you, a man, what you mean when you say man, what is universally meant by the word man, the Platonic idea of man, can only be found on this mysterious and terribly ill-fated Island, let me tell you I’ve been all over the world like Western Union, and beyond that, mon amour, I’m getting to be an old girl, thirty-seven, that’s no joke, Rolo, that’s a lot of years. Rolo didn’t even blink when he heard thirty-seven years, to which you’d have to add, at the least, another ten. He felt a certain anger that he could barely control to think that this fat and Duce-like faggot got to sleep with the most splendid beauties in Havana. You’re very lucky, was the spoken summary of his thought. You’re very lucky, he repeated, trying to eliminate any burden of envy. God has been generous with me, because to tell the truth, I don’t even go off looking for them, they’re the ones who come knocking at my door; of course: a girl has to have her cachet, pardon me, I’m telling you this because I know you’re happy for my fate and because there’s never been the slightest trace of envy between you and me. And after a sad and extremely long pause: Don’t mind me, Rolo, they cost me enough money. Rolo thought: You’ve told the truth for the first time tonight and probably for the last. The Leech stood up, recovering from his brief weakness, Now pardon me, my love, I must dress. And he disappeared with the same art with which he had arrived.
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