The Black Cathedral
Page 18
PRINCE
Then everything remained like an unfinished poem, like something that switches off and we can’t prevent it, we can’t, then everything remained. They’re calling me and I go, they say, Prince, come here, and I do it. Tell us what happened so we can laugh and then crow like a rooster and say that you killed your parents just so you could go to the party with all the orphans, say it, Prince, or we’re going to set loose the night hounds to scare you, to ask you what happened to you, why you’re so bad and so mad, tell it, but from the beginning, talk to us about your sister, Johannes, the one that’s rich, and your brother, Cricket, the fucker who got AIDS, talk to us about when a madman like you decided to become a poet, tell us everything, young Prince, without leaving anything unsaid, or you’ll see, you’re mad, do you know? And if you don’t, then figure it out, you killed your father. All of us want to kill our fathers at one time or another, but you did it, young Prince, that’s why you’re here until you die, and no one wants to have anything to do with you, no one, you’re screwed, young Prince, you’re screwed, who actually kills their mother or their father, which are one and the same thing? Your mother escaped because she untied the rope that you had her bound with, and all that to cure your brother’s AIDS, it’s not like you loved him that much. Did he get cured, by chance? No, he died in jail of AIDS, lucky for him, not like you, who will be here until the end and only go out that door once you’re dead, to be buried in a goddamn tomb, a fucking nameless hole, and no one will remember you existed, young Prince, they’ll forget you forever and at the hour of your death, mad fucking poet, who told you a black man had the right to be a poet? At the hour of your death, your God will be waiting for you, young Prince, the one in which you haven’t stopped believing, to take revenge, because it’s your fault that the cathedral was left unfinished, O young Prince! Hold out for a long while, cling to life strongly enough because so much awaits you, O young Prince! Fucking black madman, if you remember one of your poems, read it to us, and perhaps we’ll give you an extra ration of bread, they say that your brother, the other black madman, had a terrifyingly large cock, is that true, young Prince? Let me see yours, let me at least touch it. If you let me, I’ll lower your ration of pills, I promise you, let me.
It’s not all bad, all of you are like that, well-endowed for naught, young Prince, for naught.
BERTA
One day the pigeons will take over the unfinished cathedral, they’ll smother it with their wings, and when that day comes, I’m going to be in Cienfuegos to see it. Then time will pass, I will die, and with me everyone who lived in this time, but the photos will remain. Then the photos will die, along with anyone who can decipher a human face; later on, the heat will rise, and all of Cuba will end up underwater, and with Cuba, the cathedral; but later, when everything dries up and nothing remains, and the extraterrestrial voyagers find it, how will they know that this cathedral was never finished? They will think that it was once the main temple of a city of happy beings and that the parishioners’ children once ran down its aisles, and over the course of time, will it matter that it wasn’t like that?
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marcial Gala was born in Havana in 1963. He is a novelist, a poet, and an architect, and is a member of UNEAC, the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba. He won the Pinos Nuevos Prize for best short story in 1999. The Black Cathedral received the Alejo Carpentier Prize for best novel and the Premio de la Crítica Literaria in 2012. He lives in Buenos Aires and Cienfuegos. You can sign up for email updates here.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Anna Kushner, the daughter of Cuban exiles, was born in Philadelphia and has been traveling to Cuba since 1999. She has translated the novels of Norberto Fuentes, Leonardo Padura, Guillermo Rosales, and Gonçalo M. Tavares, as well as two collections of nonfiction by Mario Vargas Llosa. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Epigraph
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
A Note About the Author and Translator
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2012 by Marcial Gala
Translation copyright © 2020 by Anna Kushner
All rights reserved
Originally published in Spanish in 2012 by Letras Cubanas, Cuba, as La catedral de los negros
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2020
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71944-9
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Endpaper illustration by Thomas Colligan