I take it you were moved by the story of her idiot son, as we were. Well, I’m telling you, that’s not true either: there is no son nor moron nor monster. It’s her husband who has a daughter, a girl about twelve and perfectly normal. He had to send her to the country because she made life impossible for her. She is married, there’s no doubt about it, to this man who owns a hot-dog stand on the beach at Marianao. He’s a poor man whom she blackmails and when she visits him in his shop it’s to rob him of hot dogs, eggs, soft or hard-boiled, stuffed potatoes, the lot, which she eats in her room. I should mention by the way that she eats enough food for an army and that we have to buy all this food—and she’s still hungry afterward. That’s why she’s so huge! She’s as big as a hippo and like a hippo she’s also amphibian. She takes a bath three times a day: when she arrives in the morning, in the afternoon when she wakes up to have her breakfast and in the evening before she goes out. To no avail, mind you, because you wouldn’t believe how she sweats! She drips water as if she were in a permanent state of high fever. So she spends her life in the water: sweating and drinking water and taking baths. And she’s always singing: she sings when she’s getting ready to go. out. She never stops singing! In the morning, when she comes in, we know she’s arrived before she starts singing, because she holds onto the railings to climb the steps and you know what they’re like, those marble steps and wrought-iron balusters of old Havana. So she climbs the stairs and as she climbs them she clings to the banister and the whole balustrade trembles and resounds right through the house and when the iron is loudly ringing against the marble she starts singing. We have had a thousand and one problems with the neighbors below, but nobody can say anything to her because she doesn’t listen to reason. “They’re jealous,” she says, “real jealous. You’ll see how they’ll worship me when I’m famous.” Because she has this obsession about being famous: and we too are obsessed with her becoming famous: we’re crazy for her to become famous so she’ll finally take her music or rather her voice—because she insists that you don’t need musical backing to sing and that she carries her own accompanist inside her—her voice, then, someplace else.
When she’s not singing she’s snoring and when she’s not snoring she floods the house with her perfume—Cologne 1800, can you imagine! although I shouldn’t be talking so badly about my number-one backer—she sprays it all over, she showers herself with it and she’s such a huge woman! Besides, she sprays herself with talcum like she sprays herself with perfume. That, plus the way she pours water all over herself and the way she eats, my dear, it’s not human, believe you me, it’s not human. Believe me! Croyez-moi! Créeme! (And this is one of the few Cubans who pronounce the second e of the verb creer.) Talcum for heaven’s sake! Have you seen the folds of flesh, of fat on her neck? Then take a look next time and you’ll see that in every crease there is a crust of talcum. To top it off listen to this, I beg you—she’s obsessed with the imperfections of her body and she spends the whole day pouring scents and perfumes and deodorants over herself and plucking out hairs from her eyebrows down to her feet. I swear I’m not exaggerating. One day we returned home unexpectedly and we found her walking up and down naked in her birthday suit all over the house and, alas, we got a very good view of her! Nothing but rollers of human flesh and not a single hair on her whole body. Believe me, this Estrella of yours is one of nature’s true freaks! More than that, she’s a cosmic case. Her one weakness, the only human thing about her, is her feet, not their shape, but because they hurt her, yes, she’s flatfooted, and how she complains. It’s the only thing she complains about. There are times when her feet really hurt. She just puts them palms up, legs perched high on any chair, and she lies on the floor complaining, complaining, complaining. Almost to the point when you begin to begin to feel sorry, almost pity for her, but that’s when she gets up and starts shouting up and down the house, shouting at the poor neighbors, “But Ise gonna be famous! Ise gonna be famous! Famous, you fuckers!” You know who her enemies are aside from the invisible neighbors? (A) Old men, because she’s only interested in young men and she falls in love with adolescent boys like a bitch in heat. (B) The impresarios who’ll exploit her when she’s famous. (C) People who will call her a nigger or allude to her black color behind her back. (D) Dose who’ll make signs in front of her that she won’t understand or who’ll laugh without saying what they’re laughing at or who’ll use some private code or other which she’ll have no means of deciphering. But the biggest unseen enemy is death. She’s frightened to death that she’ll die before she is, as she says, discovered. I know what you’re going to say before you’ll agree with me: that she’s pathetic. Yes, she’s pathetic, but, my dear, it’s one thing being pathetic in a tragedy, and another being pathetic in a comedy. The latter is simply intolerable.
Have I forgotten anything? Oh, yes, to tell you that I prefer freedom to justice. You don’t have to believe the truth. Go on being unfair to us. Love La Estrella. But, please, help her to be famous, see that she makes it big, rescue us from her. We will adore her like a saint, mystically. That is to say, in the ecstasy of her memory.
SESERIBO
Ekué was sacred and lived in a sacred river. One day Sikán came to the river. The name Sikán perhaps meant curious woman once or just woman. Sikán, just like a woman, was not only curious but indiscreet. But are the curious ever discreet?
Sikán came to the river and heard the sacred sound which only a few men of Efí were permitted to hear. Sikán listened and listened—and then talked. She went and told her father, who didn’t believe her because Sikán was the fibber of Efí. Sikán returned to the river and listened again and this time she also saw. She saw Ekué and heard Ekué and told all about Ekué. So that her father would believe her she pursued Ekué with her gourd (which she used to drink water with) and she caught up with Ekué, who wasn’t made for running. Sikán brought Ekué back to the village in her gourd of drinking water. Her father believed her now.
When the few men of Efí (their names must not be repeated) came to the river to talk to Ekué they didn’t find him. The trees told them that he had been chased and followed, that Sikán had caught him and taken him to Efí in the gourd of water. This was a crime. But to let Ekué talk without stopping up the ears of profane listeners and to tell his secrets and to be a woman (but who else could have done such a thing?), this was more than a crime. It was sacrilege.
Sikán paid with her skin for her blasphemy. She was skinned alive and died. Ekué died too, some say of shame at letting himself be caught by a woman or of mortification when traveling in the gourd. Others say he died of suffocation in the pursuit—he certainly wasn’t made for running. But his secret was not lost nor the custom of reunion nor the happiness of knowing that he existed. With his skin they clad the ekué that speaks now in the rites for initiates and is magic. The skin of Sikán the Indiscreet was used to dress another drum, which has neither nails nor ties and which has no voice, because she is still suffering the punishment for not holding her tongue. She wears four plumes with the four oldest powers at her four corners. As she is a woman she has to be beautifully adorned, with flowers and necklaces and cowries. But over her drumhead she wears the tongue of a cock as a sign of eternal silence. Nobody touches it and it is unable to talk by itself. It is secret and taboo and it is called seseribó.
Rite of Sikán and Ekué
(Essential mystery of Afro-Cuban magic)
I
On Fridays we don’t have a show, so we can take the night off, and that Friday seemed the perfect day to be at the opening night of the summer dance hall at the Sierra. So it was the perfect night for taking a ride up there to hear Beny Moré singing. Besides, Cuba Venegas was making her debut that night and I just had to be there. You know it’s me who discovered Cuba, not Christopher Columbus. I heard her the first time at the time when I was just starting to hear again and at that time I was hearing music wherever I went, so my ear was in perfect pitch. I’d given up music for advert
ising, but I made very little money in that agency which was more like a regency and as there was a whole load of new cabarets and nightclubs opening up I brushed up my tumbadora (a tumba is not a tomb, a joke I repeat like a ritual and every time I say it I remember Innasio: Innasio is Ignacio Piñeiro), who wrote that immortal rumba about a rejected lover who seeks revenge by composing this epitaph on his sweetheart’s tomb—you got to hear Innasio himself singing it—which is the lyrics of a rumba: “Don’t weep for her, gravedigger / Don’t weep, please / She’s not my wife, she’s a whore / You dig, gravedigger? / If you do, don’t weep!”) and began practicing my drums nonstop and in one week I was making them sing smooth and sweet and suave, so much so I went to see Barreto and told him, “Guillermo, I want to make a comeback,” joking of course.
Anyways, Barreto found me work in the second band at the Capri, the one they have playing between two shows, for people to dance to or to trample themselves to death to but in rhythm or to tread on corns in six-eight time. Take your pick.
Anyways, I was listening to someone singing through the window and the voice didn’t sound at all bad. The song (it was Frank Dorníngues’ “Images”: you’ve got to know it, it goes like this: “Like in a dream, quite unexpectedly you came to me . . .”) and the voice came up from below and then I saw that behind it was a tall mulatto girl with hair like an Indian, going up to the patio to hang out her washing. You’ve guessed it: it was Cuba, who was called Gloria Pérez at that time and obviously I hadn’t been working in an advertising agency just for fun and I got her to change her name to Cuba Venegas because nobody named Gloria Pérez is going to be a halfways decent singer, so that mulata who was once Gloria Pérez is now Cuba Venegas (or the other way round) and as she’s in Puerto Rico or Venezuela or someplace like that and I’m not going to gossip about her now, I can tell you this in passing.
Cuba made it in a very short time: the time it took her to leave me for my very good friend Códac, who was the in photographer that year, and then she discarded Códac for Piloto & Vera (Piloto first and then Vera), who’ve written two or three good songs, among them “Sad Meeting,” which Cuba made her instant creation. Finally she moved in with and/or onto Walter Socarrás (Floren Cassalis said in his column that they were married: I know they weren’t married, but as Arturo de Córdova would say, Eso no tiene la menor importancia), he’s the musician-arranger who took her on tour through Latin America and who was conducting from his piano stool in the Sierra that night. (Eso no tiene la menor importancia either.) And so it was that I went to the Sierra to hear Cuba Venegas sing, with that very pretty voice of hers and her lovely face (Cubita Bella, they call her for a joke) and her tremendous stage presence, and to wait for her to see me and make eyes at me and dedicate to me her song “Stop Him on Site,” just for fun.
II
So there I was in the Sierra drinking at the bar no less and chatting with Beny. Let me tell you about Beny. Beny is Beny More and to talk about him is the same as talking about music, so let me tell you about music. Remembering Beny made me remember a common past, that is music: a danzón titled “Isora” in which the tumbadora repeats a double beat of the double bass filling the bar and beating the most accomplished dancer, who has to put up with or dive under the swaying mean measure of the rhythm. Chapottín repeats this tricky beat in a record that did the rounds in ‘53, the offbeat riffs of “Cienfuegos,” which is like a guaguancó turned into a son where the bass fiddle plays a dominant role. Once I asked old Chapo how the hell he did it and he told me it was (long life to the long fingers of Sabino Peñalver) by improvising the choruses when they were cutting the record. Only this way was a circle of happy music made out of the rigid square of Cuban rhythms. I was talking about this with Barreto in Radioprogreso one day after a recording session where he was on drums and I was playing my tumba and from time to time I happened to cut across him. Barreto told me you had to break the mandatory two-two/four-four beat of Cuban rhythms, and I told him about Beny who, in his songs, made fun of that four-to-the-bar prison for squares, making the melody glide over the rhythm, forcing the band to follow him in his flight and making it supple as a saxophone, as a legato trumpet, as if he were conducting a rubber band. I remember when I was playing in his banda gigante, standing in for the drummer, who was not only my friend but who had also asked me to take his place as he wanted the night off to go dancing! It was one hell of a job playing behind Beny, turning his back to the band, singing and making faces at the audience, sending the melody soaring over the heads of our earthbound instruments and their dragging feet and then all of a sudden to see him turn and ask you to throw a bomb at precisely the metronomic moment, right on the spot. Ese Beny!
All at once Beny gives me a slap on the shoulder and says, “Hey, Charlie, that nymphet from your school? She doesn’t look your class !” I didn’t know what he was talking about and as you never know what Beny is talking about I never paid him much attention except when he’s making music but then he’s not talking about singing now. However I turned and looked around. Do you know who I saw? I saw a girl, almost too young for consent, about sixteen, staring hard at me. It’s always dark both inside and outside the Sierra, but I was able to see her from the bar though she was on the other side, outside, on the patio, and looking at me through a dark glass panel. She was staring at me all right and real hard, there was no doubt about it. Besides I could see she was smiling at me now, so I smiled back and then I left Beny ‘xcuse me a moment and went up to her table. At first I didn’t recognize her because she was very tanned and she had her hair down and looked all woman. She was wearing a white dress, almost up to the neck in front, but cut very low down the back. Very, very low, so I could see the whole of her back and a very pretty back it was too. She smiled at me again and said, “Don’t you recognize me?” It was then I recognized her: it was Vivian Smith-Corona and you don’t need me to tell you the meaning of that double-barreled name. She introduced me to her friends: Havana Yacht Club types, or Vedado Tennis, or Casino Español. It was a grand table. Not just because it was the size of three tables put together, but because there were several millions sitting in those wrought-iron chairs branding asses that were prominent both physically and socially. Nobody took much notice of me and Vivian playing the part of a demichaperone, so she was able to talk to me for a while, me standing and she sitting and as nobody stood me a seat, I said:
—Let’s go outside, meaning the street, where there are many people talking and breathing in the warm dirty fumes of the buses when it’s too hot to stay indoors.
—I can’t, she said. —I’m chaperoning tonight.
I didn’t know what to do and I hovered over the social gathering uncertain whether to go or stay.
—Why don’t we see each other later? she said, speaking between her teeth. I didn’t know what exactly she meant by later.
—Later on, she said. —After they’ve taken me home. Mummy and Daddy are away at the ranch. Come up and see me.
III
Vivian lived in the Focsa building on the twenty-seventh floor, but it wasn’t there, not so high up, that I met her for the first time. It was more like a basement where I met her. She came to the Capri one night with Arsenio Cué and my friend Silvestre. I only knew of Cué by name and at a distance at that, but Silvestre was my classmate at high school, until the fourth year when I left to study drawing at San Alejandro Academy, imagining at the time that my real name was Raphael or Michelangelo or Leonardo and that Bernard Berenson would be putting on a volume off my pantings—living under the influence of Bustrófedon. Cué introduced me to his fiancée or girl friend first, a tall slender girl with hardly any breasts but very good-looking and you could see she knew it. He introduced me to Vivian and finally he introduced them to me. Very sophisticated he was and a regular ham. He introduced us in English and to show he was a contemporary of the UN building he started talking in French to his sweetheart or fuckiancée or whatever she was. I was expecting him to switch to German or
Russian or Italian on the slightest provocation, but he didn’t. He went on talking French or English or both languages at once. We local lads were making plenty of noise and the show was under way, but Cué spoke his English-cum-French above the music and the singer’s voice and above the din of dining and drinking and dealing that you get in cabarets. They were both deeply absorbed in showing they could speak French and kiss at the same time. Silvestre was watching the show (or rather the chorus girls in the show, freaks all legs and breasts) as though he was seeing it for the first time in his life, neglecting this real beauty at his side for ersatz flesh and roboobs. (Big B. again.) As I knew those dancing cheeks and chicks as well as Vesalius knew his anatomy and as I’m as tough as a Lawrence in this Arabia Deserta of sex, I stayed in my oasis, gazing at Vivian, who was sitting opposite me. She was looking at the show but, like a proper young lady, sat so as not to turn her back on me and as she saw I was staring at her (she had to see it because I was almost touching her fully clothed flesh with tactile eyes) she turned around to talk to me.
—What did you say your name was? I didn’t catch it.
—That always happens.
—Yes, introductions are like condolences, social whispers.
I was going to contradict her and say that this always happens to me only, but I liked her intelligence and more than that, her voice, which was soft and caressing and agreeably low.
—José Pérez is my name, but my friends call me Vincent.
She didn’t understand but gave me an odd look. So much so that I felt embarrassed. I explained it was a joke, that I was parodying a parody, that it came from a speech by Vincent van Douglas in Lust for Life. She said she hadn’t seen it and asked me if it was good and I answered that the painting was great but the picture was lousy, that Kirk van Gugh! painted while he was crying and vice versa and that Anthony Gauquinn was a bouncer in the Saloon de Refusés but anyways she must have the second opinion of my friend Silvestre, a thorough professional (no joke intended). Finally I told her my name, the real one.
Three Trapped Tigers Page 9
