In Cuba, lovely isle of burning sun
beneath its blue sky, beloved dark-skinned beauty,
You are the queen of every flower …
and night begins to fall, and Tita keeps on walking through the fields dressed as the Republic, beneath the darkness of night, so dark you can’t even see your own hands, and Tita keeps going, and Tita needs light to be able to venture through fields that have disappeared in shadow. Still dreaming, Doña Juana lifts a hand and searches for the candlestick with the white and Solomonic candle before the little print of La Caridad del Cobre. She holds up the candle to light Tita’s way, but the candle falls onto her white linen nightgown. In reality, Doña Juana is burning. In her dream, Tita can see that everything is illuminated, that the fields are aflame as if day were beginning to dawn.
Epilogue
Life Everlasting
What be not writ we shall not affirm.
— Gonzalo de Berceo
It must be said that Flaubert was incorrect: no real good comes of it if a writer, in his work, imitates the way that God is present, but invisible, in His Creation. To begin with, God isn’t even invisible. We see him every day, in the most unlikely forms: as a street sweeper, employee, child, lover, clown, enemy, writer (good or bad), fruit, cat, tree, flower … and if we don’t see him as a statesman, it’s because that’s the devil’s job. So if we insist that God isn’t around, if we’re unlucky enough not to believe He reveals Himself in every part of Creation (except for chiefs of state, of course), isn’t His absence one of the main causes of despair? So why should writers imitate precisely the worst of God’s attributes, invisibility? I’ll take the liberty of making a confession: I’m the only one who can put out the fire; I’m the only one responsible for it. My characters wait for the firemen, their hopes dashed, and they pray, perhaps because they still expect a miracle, not knowing it all depends on me, not knowing that the miracle isn’t God’s to grant but mine, that in this case (and this case alone) we’re basically one and the same person. I’d just have to tear up a few pages, and the Island would return to normal. If I made Doña Juana not wake up, not stretch out her hand, not knock over the candle, they’d reach the new year nice and happy. Perhaps I’ll be moved by what I myself have to lose, be moved by the things of mine that will turn to dust in this fire; all the memories, all the happiness, the only place where I could ever be happy, so much so that I’ve come to think that my actual life, my real life, was the life I led on the Island, and that the rest of it, everything I lived after that, has been nothing but poor variations, pretexts for recalling my past, finding the best way to retell it, sometimes well, other times not so well. So you can conclude that my life really lasted only eleven years. Perhaps I’m not the only one this has happened to, perhaps every man is conceded a short span of life, a vigorous center of a few years around which the years that come before and the years that come after must revolve. This falls within the field of speculation. In any case, the one who’s most hurt by the fire is me. And what pains me is that I’m the one who caused it. Well, of course, it was Doña Juana who stuck out her hand and knocked over the candle that set the blaze. That is, however, the superficial side of things. Why was that precisely what happened? I was shuffling, as anyone could tell, a limited number of possibilities. I could have forgotten about her. I could have had her wake up, resplendent in her ninetieth year, pick up the candle and walk out into the Island; the characters would have been surprised, Miss Berta would have cried … but instead, it occurred to me to start a fire. So there you have it, the Island’s burning. The characters (I was in the courtyard) abandoned the gallery and entered the Island, fleeing, shouting, not knowing what to do, who to call, and that was on top of being unaware of the confusion the rest of the country was going through at that exact moment, since it’s time to reveal that at that exact moment the President of the Republic, Fulgencio Batista, was fleeing by plane to the Dominican Republic with his family and his money, and the Columbia military base (two or three blocks from the Island) was left powerless, and the Rebels, with their long impetuous beards, were taking charge of the situation. And although I have tried to keep my characters on the sidelines of political life, obeying (too closely) Stendhal’s famous stricture to the effect that politics produces the same effect in literature as firing a pistol does in a concert, the truth is that firing the pistol would seem inevitable to me now, even if we were listening to the Divine Maria Callas singing a Saint-Saéns aria. At bottom, there must be some relation between the flight of el Señor Presidente, the triumph of the Rebels, and the fact that Doña Juana sticks out her hand, bumps the candle, and causes the fire that put an end to the first eleven years of my life, which according to the opinion expressed above, is as much as to say my entire life.
It is true that the philosopher’s stone
cannot be found.
But it is good to search for it.
— Fontenelle
Whatever the relation between these events may be, in the final inscrutable instance, in the final pointless instance, given that it cannot erase the main event (in this case, for me, THE FIRE, though History has ignored this fire and instead has put so much emphasis on the flight of the President and the triumph of the Rebels), the fact is that the blazes flared up over there, chez Miss Berta, for whole seconds that called into question the measurability of time. We stood fascinated before the blazes, which grew higher and higher, more and more beautiful, spreading with a swiftness that corresponded to our degree of fascination. I have the impression (I can’t be sure) that Merengue was the first to react, to yell Fire! (as I’ve already noted, there’s an abyss of bewilderment between Fire and the word that designates it, Fire is one of the few things in this world that are more impressive than their names), and to run to get water. Though, of course, by this time a few buckets of water did little or no good. Irene also ran to get the hose she used to use to water her garden. Nonetheless, the water only seemed to feed the vigorous flames, casting colors into the night that turned white up high, looking like stars that left the earth to try to fix themselves in the sky. At some point Morales the parrot, apparently as dazed as we were, was seen flying into the flames. It was the first (and last) time Melissa cried. And then came something truly astounding: after the parrot, many other birds began flying out of the trees, seagulls, canaries, parakeets, ducks, cardinals, mockingbirds, bluebirds, swallows, hummingbirds, and more, cheerfully circling the fire only to hurl themselves into it with an intense beating of wings. A long line of rats, ju tí as, and possums also abandoned their burrows to enter the flames. Uncle Rolo shouted like he was out of his mind. With Vido’s help, Merengue continued hurling tireless and fruitless buckets of water while arguing with Saint Lazarus, Fuck it, you leprous old fag, why’d you forget us? Holding Tatina, Casta Diva cried. Practically naked, armed with a sledgehammer, Lucio looked like a character from a Greek tragedy (although the bit about the sledgehammer is somewhat reminiscent of what many, many years ago, millennia ago, was called socialist realism) struggling against adversity, a kind of Perseus ready to put a stop to the Medusa; I don’t know if he realized (we didn’t realize it either) how useless the blows of his untouched bit of earth. At most you could hear a whispering like that the wind produces in the bamboo. Not disturbing at all if you didn’t know that a few short meters away a conflagration of colossal proportions was taking place. Like an experienced Theseus (who even takes the liberty of disdaining Ariadne’s thread), I ran without seeing, but seeing in another way, to the very center of the bookstore where the carpet hid an unevenness in the floor. There was the wooden door. I opened it and, after closing it again above me, rapidly descended the stairs. At last I had reached a world of absolute calm. The fire was just a memory. It took me a long time to descend it, so I imagined it was an immense tunnel. At times I thought I saw a patch of light farther down; when I reached the place where I presumed the possible light had come from, I found the same darkness, and another luminosity even f
arther off. I also had the impression I was hearing voices. I suppose I did hear them, except that at some point I noticed that my own thoughts were acquiring real sonority independent of my will. My thoughts could be heard, they echoed in the tunnel, so that I thought it well to recite to myself the verses of that book I had stolen the afternoon when my mother had sent me to look for Uncle, and immediately I could hear them, incomprehensible, but of a beauty that made them crystal clear:
I pine for the regions
where halcyons fly
over the sea …
And it was like in those tales of the Thousand and One Nights where the magic words open doors that seemed closed forever, or allow the djinn to appear and resolve any problem and load us down with treasures. A chorus of voices answered me, reciting phrases, some known, others unknown, and the long tunnel lit up and I saw that it was actually no tunnel at all but a beautiful place of birches and cypresses and poplars and springs and calm brooks (for all that one tries to avoid clichés …) and a special light, an almost false light that could be that of dusk or of sunrise, a Fragonard or Corot landscape, with splendid flowers sweetening the breeze that carried, to top it off, the strains of a lute. The reader needs no warning to realize that this passage is a sham and a mystification. I must acknowledge at least three reasons for having written it. First, I always wanted to reach such a place, the kind of Cythera to which we all more or less aspire, with greater or lesser passion; I imagine that in my case the pretentious atmosphere of the place of my dreams was due to the landscape paintings my grandmother had in her house, which had their almost identical duplicates in every house we visited in those years in Havana; impossible landscapes, Lorca would call them, forthrightly idyllic, even more idyllic than the one I’ve just described, landscapes in which you could see damsels (in my memory I recall no damsels) strumming lutes. The second reason for lying so flagrantly was that when I sat down to write, my mind was blocked by the shameless whiteness, utterly unhidden and fairly infuriating, of the virgin page, to which there can be only one reply: write, write down the first thing you think of. (The virgin page has to be set right, filled with signs, any old signs: it will take charge of transforming the possible lie into revelation.) The third reason is the one I find most convincing: if all literature is a sham, what difference does it make if I pile one fairy tale on top of another? If in the end the reader knows he’s being lied to, why pretend I’m not lying? The fact is, of course, that there are lies and there are lies. There’s the lie of Victorien Sardou and the lie of Honoré de Balzac; there’s the lie of Pearl S. Buck and that of William Faulkner. Too thorny a subject, I’d rather pass it over as quickly as possible. In the final analysis each had as much right to lie as the others. And while I’m abusing this digression, what happened to the eleven-year-old adolescent I used to be, after he went down the stairs of the infinitely dark tunnel and found himself in the midst of that bucolic scene? It should be made clear here that there was nothing madrigalesque about this landscape. It was a marabú grove. Wilderness. The indecisive hour preceding night had apparently arrived. My legs and arms were bleeding from the marabú branches. I heard no music, no voice, nothing, and the only possible smell was that of my own fear. When I finally managed to get out of the wilderness, I found myself in a desert region, a rocky place devoid of trees, over which a starless, moonless night was settling. In the distance, as in the tales that Helena (my mother) used to read me at bedtime, I guessed at a dubious little light. I ran toward it, if not with joy at least with a fair amount of resolve. I found a large house, in ruins. I found, besides, the inconvenience of a fairly wide, overflowing, and turbid river between the house and myself. Sitting on the bank of the river, I meditated for a long time on which path to follow. The river looked too dangerous to swim across. Furthermore, it goes without saying that I had never seen such a powerful river. The only river I knew was the ditch that passed behind the Island, crossing by the carpentry shop, where Vido bathed naked. Much less did I think of building a raft, given that there wasn’t a single log there to make it from. I thought: Probably if I rest and wait for dawn, in the double light of a refreshed mind and the sun I’ll be able to find a way to cross the river. I was about to lie down on the rocks, when I saw a little old man next to me. I don’t know how he could get so close without my noticing. The fact is, there he was. Tiny, practically bald, dull little mouse eyes behind glasses with no lenses, several years of white beard, dirty tattered clothing. He stretched out his hand to me. Do you have a coin? I don’t have any money, I replied. That’s bad, that’s bad, money’s the force that moves the Earth, the Final Reason, the Logos, the Causa Eficiens, if you don’t have any money it’s because you’re a spendthrift, no doubt. I couldn’t respond. I merely watched the house and its promising little light. The old man came very close. I smelt a whiff of his empty stomach. Do you want to go to the house? Logically, I nodded. Yes, everyone does: few can, I’ve been trying to go for years and here you see me. The old man took out his false teeth and stood there looking at them for some time, with his brow furrowed like Hamlet in the scene where he finds the skull of poor Yorick. There’s a ferryman, he said at last. Interested, I asked, When does the ferryman come? Between Christmas and Midsummer hardly ever, never, don’t expect him. Have you seen him? I’ve spent years on this bank and I’ve only been able to see him a couple of times. And why haven’t you used him then? He put his false teeth back in, chewed a few times, perhaps to check their efficacy, and showed me one of his dull mouse eyes so that I’d see it was made of glass. Going to that house’ll cost you an eye, he explained, shrugging. Since you’re missing an eye, must mean you already paid. Pretending he hadn’t heard, the old man took a bag of coins from I don’t know where and started counting them. Then he moved the bag up and down to make the coins jingle. Listen, the music of the spheres — Mozart, my foot! He looked at me in astonishment, turned scarlet red, and put the bag back where he had found it; that is, in some place I couldn’t see. Calmer, he put an arm around my shoulders, I’m going to tell you a story And just at that moment of supreme danger, at the edge of the abyss at the tender age of eleven, from the blackness, from the fog, from the nothingness, a ferry appeared, or rather the shade of a ferry, with a human shade, or nearly human, who shouted my name in a stentorian voice, Sebastian, Sebastian, and held out a human hand, or nearly human, to which I held tight. In his turn the old man held tight to me, weeping, whining, I want to go, I want to go. The ferryman, or the shade of the ferryman, pushed him so brusquely the little man went flying through the air. May the devil be with you, the ferryman shouted in an even more stentorian voice. The sensation I felt then was that of finding myself in a ferry and at the same time not finding myself in a ferry, of crossing a river and at the same time not crossing it, of being led by a ferryman who was next to me and was not. Partly to be polite but mainly to give the indispensable touch of reality to that illusory situation, I thanked the ferryman and told him he had acted with true bravery. I can’t say that he looked at me or smiled because I could see nothing in that ghostly face; I can’t say he touched me because, though he did, my body felt nothing. Now I do feel a deep tiredness and,
Whether the work be horrible or glorious, terrible or divine, there is little to choose between. Only to accept it peacefully.
— Charlotte Bronte
looking out the window (this window, here, the real window, the window of my house) I realize: it’s a beautiful day, one of those days, so rare in Havana, when the excessive light doesn’t erase everything, quite the contrary, and when the sky is a uniform blue, and a breeze is blowing (a breeze is blowing!) and you feel like going to the sea, taking a stroll along the empty coast, or strolling in the countryside, beneath a palm grove, next to a murmuring creek, above the hammock hanging from mango trees, watching peasant lads (young ones) pass by wearing hats, freshly washed clothes, leggings, guitars, guitars, singing happily, singing happily, yes, why not? singing happily Outside the world is alive, a
y! it rejoices. So what am I doing in here trying to write a page that maybe no one will read? Why don’t I get dressed instead and go outside into the sunlight and converse and laugh with everyone else? I lie down in bed, my body aching, repeat the questions out loud. What’s important is letting the arrow fly, not hitting the target, I tell myself The phrase, obviously, is Lezama Lima’s. I think of him, of that immense, fat, obese writer, closed up inside his house at 162 Trocadero, in the very heart of the most pestilent, horrible, and loudmouthed city on the planet, unable to travel farther than from the living room to the dining room, leaning on María Luisa (even while he was still alive, she had already become the perfect widow), hearing his neighbors’ pricks and balls as music, trapped among dusty books, damp walls, suffocating, sunken into the rocking chair, writing on a scrap of paper, writing stubbornly, with the surefooted pace of a mule in the abyss. I think of Virgilio Pinera, erased from the dictionaries, from the anthologies, from critical essays, in his apartment at the corner of 27th and N, with that syrupy smell of gas and coffee grounds, up since four in the morning, pounding out, pounding out on his typewriter the verses of his last work for the theater, A Pick or a Shovel?, in verse and prose (unfinished), getting up constantly to sip a spoonful of condensed milk, or to listen to the Appassionata Sonata a thousand times (in music, it’s Beethoven or no one), and to read in French, out loud, a page from the Intimate Diary of the brothers Goncourt, from the letters of Madame de Sevigné, from Casanova’s Memoires, and Proust (again Proust, tirelessly Proust, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Proust). Now I recall, one night he exclaimed, once and for all (he knew it was once and for all),There might be all the distance in the world between Marcel Proust and myself, but the two of us are equal in the passion with which we sit down to write. So, does that mean that life was made for everyone else? Well, you don’t have to get tragic about it, poor me! Things are what they are. Yes, because what’s written is also life. No, it’s more, much more, it’s the triumph of order over chaos, of structure over formlessness, the fiat lux, the magic wand that transforms something with no feet, head, or sense into a universe, the additional, indispensable sine qua non. Sine qua what? Nothing, Fm not going to keep repeating clichés. What is the purpose of writing a novel? Silence. Impenetrable. Vast. Religious. Magnificent. Eloquent. Understandably, there’s nothing for it but to return to the desk, to the shameless page dazzling me, to the ink, to the broken-tipped pen. I don’t know how I leaped ashore. In the same way that I saw myself suddenly traveling in a shade of a boat across a tempestuous river, accompanied by the nearly human shade of the ferryman, so, with the same unreality, I saw myself on the opposite bank, in an even more inhospitable landscape if possible than that on the other side, but with the hope of the house that, a few steps away there, promised shelter, a little corner to sleep in (if I wished for anything it was sleep; if anything is unbearable it’s prolonged wakefulness). I walked along, tripping over the rocky ground. I thought there were several luminous figures accompanying me, though much as I turned around to look I detected nothing, not even the river, much less the ferryman and his ferry. To be honest I should say: there was nothing behind me. I would like for this sentence to be understood in its strictest sense: nothing! Nothing at all. I know the word nothing is pretty hard to understand: Fm asking for a little effort: Nothing! Which meant, among other prodigious things, that my only alternative was to keep moving forward. So I concentrated on the house and on my own desire to get there. Two or three yards from the narrow, low door, I detected a well-dressed gentleman, in black tie or something of the sort, with a half-English, half—North American face, in other words a hieratical face, and a candlestick in his right hand: the promising little light I had seen in the distance! He gestured for me to stop. He articulated what I interpreted as a magic phrase, which sounded more or less like The Portrait of a Lady or perhaps Princess Cassamassima, I’m not sure. The door opened. Here is Sebastián, the Englishman announced, even more hieratical than his face. From the interior of the house a strange voice was heard, amplified by the echo, which ordered in super-Cuban Spanish, OK, Mister James, let him in. And I found myself in a gloomy living room, at the other end of which, sitting in a rocking chair, rocking, illuminated by light that entered diagonally through a window that wasn’t there, or that came through the canopy ceiling of climbing vines that wasn’t there either (the same light as in the paintings by Vermeer of Delft), was a man with a sad and bored and skeptical face, mocking greenish eyes, wrinkled brow, raven’s nose, as described by Mr. Poe, thick lips predisposed to forming a disapproving frown. He received me without a smile, with an At last you’re here, welcome, feel at home, I promise you a more wonderful journey than Nils Holgersson’s through Sweden. Although I think I must have dreamed this last part, my eyelids were heavy, and exhaustion had gotten the better of me.
Thine is the Kingdom Page 31