Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

  At that moment I felt my arm gripped by a little hand and there was Irenita. You gonna stay all night with La Gorda here? she asked, and as I didn’t answer she asked me again, You gonna stay with Fatso, and I told her, Sí, nothing else, all I said was yes, and she didn’t say anything but dug her nails into my hand and then Estrella started laughing in bucketloads, and putting on a very superior air, she was so sure of herself, and she took hold of my hand and said, Leave her alone, this little hot pussy can do better on a zinc roof, and to Irenita she said, Sit on your own stool, little girl, and stay where you belong if you don’t mind, and everybody started laughing, including Irenita, who laughed because she couldn’t do anything else, and showing the two gaps in her molars just behind her eyeteeth when she laughed, she exited into daylight.

  The chowcito always put on a show after the other show had finished and now there was a rumba dancer dancing to the jukebox and as a waiter was passing she stopped and said, Poppy, turn up the lights and let’s rock, and the waiter went off and pulled out the plug and had to pull it out again and then a third time, but as the music stopped every time he switched off the jukebox, the dancer remained in the air and made a couple of long delicate steps, her whole body trembling, and she stretched out a leg sepia one moment, then earth-brown, then chocolate, tobacco, sugar-colored, black, cinnamon now, now coffee, now white coffee, now honey, glittering with sweat, slick and taut through dancing, now in that moment letting her skirt ride up over her round polished sepia cinnamon tobacco coffee and honey-colored knee, over her long, broad, full, elastic, perfect thighs, and she tossed her head backward, forward, to one side, to the other, left and right, back again, always back, back till it struck her nape, her low-cut, gleaming Havana-colored shoulders, back and forward again, moving her hands, her arms, her shoulders, the skin on them incredibly erotic, incredibly sensual: always incredible, moving them around over her bosom, leaning forward, over her full hard breasts, obviously unstrapped and obviously erect, the nipples, obviously nutritious, her tits: the rumba dancer with absolutely nothing on underneath, Olivia, she was called, still is called in Brazil, unrivaled, with no strings attached, loose, free now, with the face of a terribly perverted little girl, yet innocent, inventing for the first time movement, the dance, the rumba at that moment in front of my eyes: all of my eyes and here I am without my fucking camera, and La Estrella behind me watching everything and saying, You dig it, you dig it, and she got up off her seat as though it was a throne and went toward the jukebox while the girl was still dancing, and went to the switch, saying, Enough’s enough, and turned it off, almost tearing it out in a rage, and her mouth looked like it was frothing with obscenities, and she said, That’s all, folks! Dancin’s over. Now we’ll have real music! And without any music, I mean without orchestra or accompaniment from radio record or tape, she started singing a new, unknown song, that welled up from her breast, from her two enormous udders, from her barrel of a belly: from that monstrous body of hers, and I hardly thought at all of the story of the whale that sang in the opera, because what she was putting into the song was something other than false, saccharine, sentimental or feigned emotion and there was nothing syrupy or corny, no fake feeling or commercial sentimentality about it, it was genuine soul and her voice welled up, sweet, mellow, liquid, with a touch of oil now, a colloidal voice that flowed the whole length of her body like the plasma of her voice and all at once I was overwhelmed by it. It was a long time since anything had so moved me and I began laughing at the top of my voice, because I had just recognized the song, laughing at myself, till my sides ached with belly laughs because it was “Noche de Ronda” and I thought talking to Agustín Lara, Agustín, Agustín, you’ve never invented a thing, you’ve not ever invented a thing, you’ve never composed anything, for now this woman is inventing your song: when morning comes you can pick it up and copy it and put your name and copyright on it again: “Noche de Ronda” is being born tonight. Esta noche redonda!

  La Estrella went on singing. She seemed inexhaustible. Once they asked her to sing “La Pachanga” and she stood there with one foot in front of the other, the successive rollers of her arms crossed over the tidal wave of her hips, beating time with her sandal on the floor, a sandal that was like a motorboat going under the ocean of rollers that were her leagues of legs, beating time, making the speedboat resound repeatedly against the ground, pushing her sweaty face forward, a face like the muzzle of a wild hog, a hairless boar, her mustaches dripping with sweat, pushing forward all the brute ugliness of her face, her eyes smaller now, more malignant, more mysterious under her eyebrows that didn’t exist except as a couple of folds of fat like a visor on which were sketched in an even darker chocolate the lines of her eye makeup, the whole of her face pushed forward ahead of her infinite body, and she answered, La Estrella only sings boleros, she said, and she added, Sweet songs, with real feeling, from my heart to my mouth and from my lips to your ear, baby, just so you don’t get me wrong, and she began singing “Nosotros,” composing the untimely dead Pedrito Junco’s melody all over again, turning his sniveling little canción into something real, into a pulsating song, full of genuine nostalgia. La Estrella went on singing, she sang till eight in the morning, without having any notion that it was eight until the waiters started to clear everything away and one of them, the cashier, said, Excuse me, family, and he really meant it, family, he didn’t say the word for the sake of saying it, saying family and really meaning something quite different from family, but family was what he meant, really, and he said: Familia, we have to close. But a little earlier, just before this happened, a guitarist, a good guitarist, a skinny emaciated fellow, a simple and dignified mulatto, who never had any work because he was very modest and natural and goodhearted, but a great guitarist, who knew how to draw strange melodies out of any fashionable song no matter how cheap and commercial it was, who knew how to fish real emotion out of the bottom of his guitar, who could draw the guts out of any song, any melody, any rhythm between the strings, a fellow who had a wooden leg and wore a gardenia in his buttonhole, whom we always called affectionately, jokingly, Niño Nené after all the Niños who sang flamencos, Niño Sabicas or Niño de Utrera or Niño de Parma, so this one we called Niño Nené, which is like saying Baby Papoose, and he said, he asked, Let me accompany you in a bolero, Estrella, and La Estrella answered him getting on her high horse, lifting her hand to her breasts and giving her enormous boobs two or three blows, No, Niñito, no, she said, La Estrella always sings alone: she has more than enough music herself. It was then that she sang “Mala Noche,” making her parody of Cuba Venegas which has since become famous, and we all died laughing and then she sang “Noche y Día” and it was after that that the cashier asked us familia to leave. And as the night had already come to an end, the noche already día, we did so.

  La Estrella asked me to take her home. She told me to wait a minute while she went to look for something and what she did was to pick up a package and when we went outside to get into my car, which is one of those tiny English sports cars, she was hardly able to get herself in comfortably, putting all her three hundred pounds weight in a seat which was hardly able to take more than one of her thighs, and then she told me, leaving the package in between us, It’s a pair of shoes they gave me, and I gave her a sharp look and saw that she was as poor as hell, and so we drove off. She lived with some married actors, or rather with an actor called Alex Bayer. Alex Bayer isn’t his real name, but Alberto Pérez or Juan García or Something Similar, but he took the name of Alex Bayer, because Alex is a name that these people always use and the Bayer he took from the drug company who make pain-killers, and the thing is they don’t call him that, Bayer I mean, these people, the people who hang out in the dive at the Radíocentro, for example, his friends don’t call him Alex Bayer the way he pronounced it A-leks Báy-er when he was finishing a program, signing it off with the cast calling themselves out, but they called him as they still do call him, they called him Alex Aspirin, Alex Buff
erin, Alex Anacin and any other pain-killer that happens to be fashionable, and as everybody knew he was a faggot, very often they called him Alex Evanol. Not that he hides it, being queer, just the opposite, for he lived quite openly with a doctor, in his house as though they’d been officially married and they went everywhere together, to every little place together, and it was in his house that La Estrella lived, she was his cook and sleep-in maid, and she cooked their little meals and made their little bed and got their little baths ready, little etceteras. Pathetic. So if she sang it was because she liked it, she sang for the pleasure of it, because she loved doing it, in Las Vegas and in the Bar Celeste or in the Café Nico or any of the other bars or clubs around La Rampa. And so it was that I was driving her in my car, feeling very much the showoff for the same reasons but the reverse that other people would have been embarrassed or awkward or simply uncomfortable to have that enormous Negress sitting beside them in the car, showing her off, showing myself off in the morning with everybody crowding around, people going to work, working, looking for work, walking, catching the bus, filling the roads, flooding the whole district: avenues, streets, back streets, alleyways, a constant buzzing of people between the buildings like hungry hummingbirds. I drove her right up to their house, where she worked, she La Estrella, who lived there as cook, as maid, as servant to this very special marriage. We arrived.

  It was a quiet little street in El Vedado, where the rich people were still asleep, still dreaming and snoring, and I was taking my foot off the clutch, putting the car into neutral, watching the nervous needles as they returned to the point of dead rest, seeing the weary reflection of my face in the glass of the dials as if the morning had made it old, beaten by the night, when I felt her hand on my thigh: she put her 5 chorizos 5, five sausages, on my thigh, almost like five salamis garnishing a ham on my thigh, she put her hand on my thigh and I was amused that it covered the whole of my thigh and I thought, Beauty and the Beast, and thinking of beauty and the beast I smiled and it was then that she said to me, Come on up, I’m on my own, she said, Alex and his bedside doctor, she said to me and laughed that laugh of hers that seemed capable of raising the whole neighborhood from sleep or nightmares or from death itself, They aren’t here, she said: They went away to the beach for the weekend, Let’s go on up so we can be alone, she said to me. I saw nothing in this, no allusion to anything, nothing to nothing, but all the same I said to her, No, I’ve got to go, I said. I have to work, I’ve got to sleep, and she said nothing, all she said was, Adíos, and she got out of the car, or rather she began the operation of getting herself out of the car and half an hour later, as I was dozing off from a quick nap, I heard her say, from the sidewalk now, putting her other foot on the sidewalk (as she bent threateningly over the little car to pick up her package of shoes, one of the shoes fell out and they weren’t woman’s shoes, but an old pair of boy’s shoes, and she picked them up again), she said to me, You see, I’ve got a son, not as an excuse, nor as an explanation, but simply as information, she said to me, He’s retardado, you know, but I love him all the more, she said and then she left.

  First session

  you’re going to laugh. No, you’re not going to laugh. You never laugh. You don’t laugh, you don’t cry, you don’t say anything. All you do is sit there and listen. You know what my husband says? That you’re Oedipus and I’m the sphinx, but that I don’t ask you anything because I’m no longer interested in the answers. Now all I say is, Listen or I’ll eat you up, and I talk and talk and talk and talk. I tell you everything. I even tell you things I don’t know. Because I’m the sphinx that’s had its bellyful of secrets. That’s what my husband says. He’s so cultured, my husband, so clever, so intelligent. The only thing wrong with him is that I’m here and he’s there, wherever that is, and I’m talking and you’re listening and when he gets home he sits down and reads or eats or listens to music in his room, the one he calls his studio, or he says to me, Get dressed, we’re going to the movies, and I get up and get dressed and we go out, and since he’s the one who does the driving he still doesn’t say a thing, all he does is shake his head or grunt yes or no to anything I ask him.

  Did you know my husband’s a writer? Yes, of course you know, you know everything. But what you don’t know is that my husband wrote a story about you. No, you didn’t know. It’s very clever, this story. It’s the story of a psychiatrist who makes a fortune, not because his patients are millionaires but because whenever they tell him a dream he goes and plays the numbers. If someone tells him he dreamed he saw a turtle in a pond, he goes and calls his bookie and tells him, Pancho, five on number 6. If someone else tells him he saw a horse in his dreams, he phones him and says, Pancho, ten pesos on number 1. If someone else tells him he dreamed of a bull that had fallen into the water and that the water was full of prawns, he goes and phones Pancho and says, Give me five pesos on number 16 and five on number 30, just for coincidence. And this psychiatrist in the story, he always comes up with the winner because his patients always dream the number which is going to come up and one day he hits the jackpot and retires and lives happily ever after solving crossword puzzles in his home which is a palace shaped like a couch. How do you like it? Funny, eh? But you aren’t laughing. Sometimes I think it’s you who are the sphinx. My husband’s the same, he hardly ever laughs. He makes people laugh with the stories he writes and his column in the magazine, but he doesn’t laugh himself, at least not very often.

  Did you know I’ve also got a story about a psychiatrist? No, you wouldn’t know, because I’ve never written it down, because this is a story I’ve never told anyone except my husband. It was something that happened to me the first time I thought of going to a psychiatrist. Or was it the second time? It wasn’t the first time. Yes it was, it was the first time. I had two appointments with him. This psychiatrist played background music during his sessions. Just imagine, background music. I remember it was always the ending of a piece and then a moment passed and you could tell what it was because they started playing it over again. It was like a piano roll. That’s the word, roll, isn’t it? The session began and there I was listening to the music while I was waiting my turn and then when it was my turn the music continued and it was still playing when I went away and it was already dark and this receptionist with bad teeth he had disguised as a nurse smiled good-bye at me but she didn’t say goodbye, she said, See ya soon, quite sure I’d come back the next day I had an appointment, and all the time this damn music was rolling around nonstop. Sometimes there were Argentine tangos, again and again, or international rumbas. Or background music that really came from way back because you didn’t know where it came from, I mean not what part of the house it came from, but what part of the world. I’d already been there twice to listen to the Muzak and to hear that doctor with his face like an alligator in glasses asking me questions! and asking and asking. And the things he asked me. What a knack for asking embarrassing questions! You’ll excuse me for saying so, but I think he was quite the opposite of my husband’s psychiatrist, I mean the psychiatrist in my husband’s story: this psychiatrist I’m telling you about, after he had finished with me he had to go not out to play the numbers but in to play with himself. I have a real dirty mouth, I know. That’s what my husband says. But that psychiatrist, he had an even more dirty mind. The first day I was there he gave me a notebook so I could write down everything that crossed my mind. I had to show it to him later. It was la escuelita all over again. I took the notebook around with me, and jotted down everything that crossed my mind, not what happened but what I was thinking of everything that happened, everything I thought or what I thought I thought, and then he read it, ever so calmly, and he read it once and then he read it again and while he was reading he pinched his lips, his upper lip, plucking the penciled mustache he had above it and he nodded his head back and forth. When he finished he said, Perfect, and he didn’t say another word. My third appointment, he came and sat right next to me on the couch, against my legs. I sat
up very quickly and he said, Don’t be afraid, he said. Consider me another Freud, he said. Freud, I said, another Freud, I said to myself, another fraud is what you are, Dr. Fraud. But I didn’t say anything, I only sat there with my legs very close together and my hands on my knees. I didn’t look right or left, but straight ahead along the floor, and so we stayed like that for a moment, until I felt the man get up and come and sit almost on top of me, by my side, but so close to me it felt as though he was sitting on my lap. That’s what it felt like, I swear. I closed my eyes and got up, but I wasn’t able to get up right and then I did something stupid. I sat down again on the couch, but a little farther away, and the man moved next to me again and I moved away again and sat a little farther along the couch and he moved up against me again. So we went the whole length of the couch and neither of us said a word. The end of the couch felt like a cliff and it took me as much effort to stay seated there as if I had really been on the edge of an abyss. Then I got up and managed to find my voice, very squeaky, like an old woman’s, and I said to the man, Doctor, I’m very sorry but your couch comes to an end here, and I got up and rushed out.

  My husband died of laughter when I told him and he said to me that it would make a great story, that’s what he told me. But whenever I felt like I feel now, he began talking me into seeing a psychiatrist, so much so that he made me go to another one. This psychiatrist belonged to the school of reflexes. Pavlovian, that’s what he called himself. Also he belonged to the hypnotic school. Induced hypnotherapy, he called it. The way he looked at me, he could have been Rudolph Valentino. He stood there looking at me for something like a month. He didn’t make me write things down in a notebook nor did he sit beside me on the couch nor did he show me the inkstains or anything. Finally after about a month and a half, he suddenly said to me out of the blue, What you need is a man like me. He was as sure of himself as if he had been a political candidate. It was almost as if he was saying, Havana needs a mayor like me. I told my husband, and you know what he said to me? You should write a book, he said, and you could call it Couch, Ouch! A funny guy, my husband. But he’s the one who’s always sending me to a psychiatrist.