Life should not be a novel that is imposed on us,
but rather a novel that we invent.
— Novalis
it is my duty, as Master, as writer, as a man with a high sense of morality, no, understand, I have no choice, I can’t tell lies, at most I can tell a lie that leads to truth, because I, you, he, we who write, are, like Cocteau, liars who always reveal the truth, and now, that’s all, that’s enough for today, I’ll put out the candle and we’ll leave Hades. He put out the candle, we left Hades. By magic, we were once more in the garden …
And time passed. Yes,
… TIME PASSED.
Having reached this point, I cannot but acknowledge it: the novelist must choose, select (lovely word: selection) a limited number of details from among the enormous abundance that life offers, for the simple reason that, as Maupassant said (he wasn’t as crazy as we’ve been made to believe), Telling it all would be impossible, because you would need a volume a day to enumerate the multiple incidents that fill our lives. Long ago, novelists abandoned the pretense of writing it all, as Rétif de La Bretonne would have wished, or those gloomy demiurges named Balzac and Tolstoy. Humbler now, the miserable novelist must resort to whatever artifices he has at hand to keep the reader from noticing his impotence to say it all: syncopes, accelerations, summaries, brusque leaps. Time has become such a constant worry among novelists that it has gone from being one more theme, or the background of a production, to being, at times, the hero of the story, as in Tristram Shandy, or to being The Theme, as shown by Mann, Woolf, and the greatest of them all, Proust. As the reader will recognize, there are three possible times: the time of the adventure, the time of writing, and the time of reading. The time of the adventure … God, no! With the number of things still left to narrate, with the number of sorry, contemptible, nasty, pusillanimous, relapsed, solemn, insidious, pale, sepulchral, boring, tremendously ingenuous, and slightly, discretely wicked men and women (guardians of the cemetery, Sartre called them) who cannot do (don’t even know how to do) anything but dedicate themselves to literary criticism, what will I accomplish by wasting time with a digression on time. So the best thing will be to return to the astounding instant when I was able to write in complete innocence
and time passed.
Of course, many nights had gone by with Scheherazade in that garden. In so-called reality (in the equivocal, the indecipherable, the ambiguous reality whose true name should he fantasy), he and I were alone. Now I should restrict myself, however, to the unequivocal, powerful fantasy whose true name should be reality. Each night Scheherazade made a different character appear. Thus, he made my mother appear, and Irene, and Lucio, and Uncle Rolo, and Professor Kingston, and Merengue … and he was retelling the story of each one in his own way, as he would have liked to tell it. Look at them! he ordered me one night. At who? Who else, at them. And all the characters of the Island reappeared, sitting on the rocking chairs in the gallery one cool and luminous October afternoon, drinking coffee, conversing … Do you know who they are? I looked at the Master full of surprise, the only way to look in cases like this. Yes, Master, I know, I responded timidly He replied: Don’t start in on the banality of explaining that it’s Marta, Casta Diva, Chavito, Mercedes… anybody could know those details, that’s completely unimportant, I’m talking about something else. I looked at them again, saw again that they continued to have exactly the same expression of happiness on a lazy afternoon. Scheherazade, the Master, had stood up, he couldn’t contain his anxiety, and he took short walks, always accompanied by the light that came down diagonally from the ceiling. And at this instant I must admit that I was the one who was astounded, when I discovered that he had once more become the Wounded Boy and that he was holding in his hands nothing less than that notebook he had sat down in Irene’s rocking chair to write in. Where did you get that notebook from, Master? I hate foolish questions, he responded, and then, casting a furious gaze at me with eyes that were not greenish but red, he said, Observe them well, why are they here, what have they come to do? (compassionate gaze, sigh), and now, pay attention, you’re going to have a sign, I’m going to write in the book while you watch them. The characters began to change the color of their hair, their eyes, their noses changed, their mouths, hands, bodies, clothing, expressions, and postures, they were different, and not just different, but there were others, others besides them, changing, and they responded to so many names, Rene, Sofía, Foción, Alma, Felipe, Bárbara, Esteban, Ramón, Estrella, Gregorio, Maité, Pascasio, Oppiano, Luz Marina … They switched around so much, in such a short time, that I am unable now to give precise testimony of the changes. There was even a moment when they turned into exact replicas of myself. I saw myself multiplied, repeated five, six, seven times as if reality had been covered with mirrors. I raised my right hand and several hands raised. I was astonished and they were astonished. I sang and they sang. I laughed and they laughed. I cried and they cried. Do you know what’s happening? the Master shouted in a voice of exultation characteristic of one who reveals to another the key to a great discovery, they are characters! — … ?
Nor do I paint portraits. It isn’t my style. I invent. The
public, which doesn’t know what inventing consists
in, tries to find the originals everywhere.
— George Sand
Do you mean they don’t exist? The things you think of! quite the contrary, child, they exist more than we do (brief pause, another sigh, compassionate gaze, inexplicable background music, another sigh, many sighs), in some ways, of course, they’re like us, there are ways in which we resemble each other, given that they’ve been made through a strange alchemy, Sebastián, with all their flesh and blood, with all their bones and arteries, with muscles and nerves, with their worries, joys, and uncertainties, their nostalgias and impieties, their greatnesses and miseries, they partake, as we do, of God and the devil, and of every mystery; but no, in the end, they aren’t, we aren’t, like you: we have the glow of eternity! Scheherazade cast me a profound, ironic, complicitous gaze, and ran circles around me with surprising agility. In one of these laps he lost his cheap clothes and appeared dressed in cape, cane, and top hat. I myself, who am I? Your character! if we’re going to be honest, I’m being constructed from your entrails, and also from the entrails of that great writer, Virgilio Pinera, whom you loved so much and to whom you owed so much and will owe so much forever, the writer cursed and blessed with you (ah, you should have found a way to join with him!), and I’m also being constructed from many other entrails, of course, a character is made from the bodies and souls of so many cadavers one ransacks along the way. He continued spinning, moving the cane, taking off, putting on the hat, fluttering the cape. The other characters lost their bodily forms. They became outlines, turned transparent, disappeared. Not only them. As the Master went by, reality fell apart like the battered set of a play at the end of the season. Scheherazade and I, alone. The rest, gone. Just like a few pages back, nothing at all. Absolutely nothing, dear reader. Again I write: I know the word nothing is pretty hard to understand. Again I write: I would like for this sentence to be understood in its strictest sense: nothing! On this occasion that I am retelling I found myself alone with Scheherazade in the midst of the nothingness. On this occasion I didn’t even have a path before me. She/he handed me the notebook and exclaimed between laughs, The world is without form: it must be given one, Sebastián, the world is a deep sea covered with darkness, your spirit and mine (which come to the same thing) are moving over the waters, don’t you think it’s necessary to make light?
I opened the book.
I wrote
light
and these five letters, so innocent in appearance, made the nothingness fill up with a magnificent, golden glow, and I saw that there is a world of difference between nothingness in the dark and nothingness in the light (day and night in the midst of nothingness). And Scheherazade, who had gained an expression of blessedness when the light came, asked in h
er/his finest voice, Don’t you think, Sebastian, that there should exist a firmament to separate the waters? I wrote, of course,
firmament
and a firmament separated the nothingness, and instantly became the heavens, which, as if by magic, turned blue. And without being asked to do so by anyone
I wrote
earth
and our bodies ceased to levitate, our feet stood at last on something firm,
as you may imagine I continued writing words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words
wind
water
mountains
houses
rivers
trees
and with each word, something was added to reality. The world was shaped and set in order as I wished or desired. The Wounded Boy and I strolled through that invented world feeling a joy we could not contain. I know, or think I know, we got to a lake. We must have sat down on its shore (lakes are there so we can sit on their shores). In a gesture heavy with intent, he ordered, Bend down, look at yourself in the blue waters, which being newly created, and since we are the only humans, are not yet polluted. There, reflected in the waters, I didn’t see myself, I saw him, saw the Wounded Boy whom Tingo and I had found on that night at the end of October, in the carpentry shop of Vido’s deceased father. And the image in the waters, unsteady and rather ephemeral, allowed me to understand, in a flash of insight, what he had been doing with the notebook, and more important, it allowed me to understand who I was. Master, I said, I want to tell the story of my childhood, the story of the Island where I was born, in Marianao, on the outskirts of Havana, next to the Columbia military base, to narrate the story of the people who accompanied me and made me wretched or happy, to return to the final months of 1958 when we were drawing near, without knowing it, to a such a decisive change in our lives, to a hurricane that would open doors and windows, and destroy roofs, and throw down walls, we were unaware then of the power of History in the life of the common man, Master, we were unaware that we were the pieces on a chessboard in an incomprehensible game, we couldn’t see that the flight of the tyrant and his family to the Dominican Republic, the entrance into Havana of the victorious Rebels (whom we took to be sent by the Lord) would transform our lives as much as if we had died on the night of December 31,1958, to be born on the first of January 1959, with our names, bodies, and souls completely transfigured (although this, I know, will have no space in the novel: it will have to be narrated in other books). The Master, it seems, was not listening. He sat there smiling, motionless. His eyes acquired a special resplendence. He became young again. An intense, blinding radiance began to issue from his body. Only then did he react. Write, don’t waste time, write! he shouted while spinning away, and I noted, as you will now note, distinguished and possible readers (by the confident gesture that accompanied the exclamation, the gleam in the greenish eyes, and the smile, as confident as the gesture), that he (or she) was properly conscious of the importance the phrase needed to be given. She (or he) continued spinning and ended up dissolving into smoke, into sparkling dust that rose on high and then fell upon the earth in the form of a generous rain. I understood, I understand: there was and there is only one path. Once more, then, I open the notebook. I write: So many stories have been told and are still told about the Island that if you decide to believe them all you’ll end up going crazy …
It is not the victory that I wanted, rather it is the struggle.
— Strindberg
and there, next to the mango, mamey, and soursop trees, grow poplars, willows, cypresses, and even the splendid red sandalwood tree of Ceylon, tangled vegetation blooms, ferns and flowers, statues arise, the Discus Thrower, the Diana, the Hermes, the Venus de Milo, the bust of Greta Garbo, the Laocoön and his sons, the Apollo Belvedere next to the wooden screen in the courtyard, the fountain in the center displays the little boy with the goose in his arms, there are the houses, the great iron gate opening onto Linea Street, This Side separating itself from The Beyond. I return to a night at the end of October. Before me, Mercedes with her loneliness, Marta with her dreams, Lucio and his confusion, Uncle Rolo in his bookstore, Miss Berta who taught us classes while dreaming of God, Tingo crying over his ignorance, Merengue cleaning his pastry cart while thinking about his missing Chavito, Casta Diva and Chacho, Helena, Vido, Melissa, the Barefoot Countess, Professor Kingston, Doña Juana sleeping … I can see them: they are waiting. They are ready, I know, to come to life and repeat, transformed, the brief but vigorous period between one afternoon at the end of October (rain is threatening, they sense an unknown presence in the Island) and that historic date of December 31, 1958, when the devastating fire took place. They enliven. As I write, they enliven. Their eyes come to life, their voices resound. Footsteps, whispers are heard. Doors, windows open and close. Night falls. Day dawns. Frogs croak. An owl flies. A breeze rustles the tops of the trees. The intense smell of the pines and casuarinas awakens. The earth, too, has a special smell, as if it were raining. It is the kingdom, my kingdom, returned to life. The Island of my childhood before my eyes again. And the people who inhabited it. Their states of mind, their victories and failures, their destinies will depend on me, on this notebook. Its time to write: I write. For now, I occupy the place of God.
61 the death of Pius XII On October 9,1958.
64 Lord, Tm coming … The line is from the poem “Martirio de San Sebastián” by Eugenio Florit (born 1903).
77 Francisco Vicente Aguilera An important figure in the unsuccessful 1868-1878 war for Cuban independence, as are most of those associated with Doña Juana (who would have been born in 1868).
84 that same month, the German cruiser the Königsberg went down, an earthquake completely destroyed the Italian city of Avez-zano January 1915.
111 Epiphany gifts January 6, Día de Reyes (Day of the Kings, known as Epiphany in English), is the traditional “Christmas” gift-giving time in many Catholic countries.
124 El Chino Zayas Alfredo Zayas, president of Cuba, 1920-1924.
138 the day they hoisted the flag May 20,1902, marking the end of the U.S. occupation and the inauguration of the Republic of Cuba.
151 The first stammering poet, Zequeira Manuel de Zequeira y Arango (1764-1846) went insane in 1821. Heredia (see above) wrote of Niagara Falls during his New York exile,” Why do I not see / around your immense cavern / the palm trees, ay! the delicious palms…” Plácido, pseudonym of Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (1809-1844), was shot in the aftermath of an unsuccessful uprising against Spanish rule. The same fate met Juan Clemente Zenea (1832—1871; referred to below as “the hapless author oí Fidelia”) during the unsuccessful first phase of the Cuban War of Independence (1868-1878). José Jacinto Milanés (1814-1863) fell into a prolonged depression in 1843, and insanity by 1852. El Cucalambé, pseudonym of Juan Cristóbal Ñapóles Fajardo, was born in 1829 and “disappeared without a trace” in 1862. Luisa Pérez de Zambrana (1835— 1922; referred to below as “the ghoulish poetess of Returning to the Woods”) survived her husband and their five children to write some of her most moving verse. Casal: see above.
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