Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

  I’m already on the point of leaving when there’s another uproar in the entrance and it’s Colonel Ventura arriving, as he does every night, to eat at the Sky Club and listen to poetess Minerva Eros, the alleged mistress of this assassin in uniform, she who bleats happily (for her and myself) in the roof garden, and after greeting the manager Ventura goes into the elevator followed by four gunmen, while another ten or twelve remain scattered around the lobby, and as I’m sure I’m not dreaming and add up all the disagreeable things that have happened to me tonight and see that they were three in a row, I decide it’s just the right moment to try my luck at the crooked slot machines and I pull out of my pocket, which feels more like a maze, a coin that doesn’t have a minotaur engraved on it because it’s a genuine Cuban real not an American nickel and I put it in and pull the handle, the single arm of the Goddess of Fortune, and then put my other hand like an inverted horn of plenty in the chute to catch the silver rush to come. The wheels spin around and an orange comes up first, then a lemon and a little later some strawberries. The machine makes foreboding rumbling, stops finally and comes to rest in a silence that my presence renders eternal.

  My door is locked. It must have been Rine who locked it, loyal as ever. I open the door and I don’t see the friendly chaos that supplanted the alien order imposed by the cleaning woman just this morning, I don’t see it because I don’t want to, because there are more important things in life than disorder, because stretched out on the white covers of my sofa-bed, yes sir, no longer a sofa but entirely a bed, on those spotless Saturday sheets, I see the enormous, cetacean, chocolate-colored stain, stretched out like a hideous blot, and it is of course, you’ve guessed it: Estrella Rodríguez, this star of the first magnitude who dwarfs the white heaven of my bed with her expanding black sun’s appearance: La Estrella is sleeping, snoring, slobbering, sweating and making weird noises on my bed. I accept it all with the humble philosophy of the defeated and take off my coat and tie and shirt. I go to the refrigerator and take out a pint of cold milk, and pour myself a glass and the glass smells of rum not milk, though its contents probably taste of milk. I drink another glass. I put the half bottle back in the refrigerator and throw the glass into the sink, where it sinks in a sea of glasses. For the first time that night I feel how suffocatingly hot it is: it must have been like this all day. I take off my undershirt and trousers and remain there in my underpants which are short, and I take off my shoes and socks and feel the floor which is almost hot, but cooler than the city and the night. I go to the bathroom and wash my face and mouth and see there’s a great pool of water under the shower, a mere memory of the ice it had once been, and I dip my feet in it and it’s only moderately cool. I go back to the only room in this idiot pad that Rine Loyal calls a studio apartment and look for somewhere to sleep: the sofa, the one of wicker and wood, is very hard and the floor is soaking, dirty and littered with cigarette butts and if this was a film and not real life, this film in which people really die, I would go to the bath and there wouldn’t be an inch of water in the bathtub, it would be a clean well-whitened place where I could sleep comfortably, the greatest enemy of promiscuity, and I would wrap myself in the blankets I don’t have and sleep the sleep of the just and chaste, like an underdeveloped Rock Hudson (surely underdeveloped for lack of exposure) and the following morning La Estrella would be Doris Day singing without a band but with music by Bakaleinikoff, which has the extraordinary ability to remain invisible while sonorous. (Fuck Natalie Kalmus: I’m beginning to talk like Silvestre!) But when I return to reality it is dawn and this monster is in my bed and I’m exhausted and I do just what you, Orval Faubus, and anybody else in the world would do. I get into my bed. Onto an edge.

  Fourth session

  It must have happened when I was a little girl. All I know is that I had a tin box, orange or red or golden, with chocolates or candies or cookies in it, which had a landscape on the lid, with a lake that was all painted amber and there were some boats on the lake, motorboats, or yachts that were traveling from one side to the other, and there were some opal-colored clouds and the waves looked gentle and easy to sail on they moved so slowly and everything was so peaceful that it would have been a pleasure to live there, not on the boats but on the shore, on the edge of the candy box, sitting there looking at the yellow boats and the peaceful yellow lake and the yellow clouds. They gave me the box one day when I was sick and I must have taken it to bed with me, because I dreamed that I was in that landscape and I still have that dream quite often. There was a song my mother used to sing that went: “Rest your oars, mister boatman, because I like your way of rowing” (then there was an unpleasant discussion between the beautiful woman enraptured by the rowing and this boatman who didn’t want to rest his oars for fear of being shipwrecked, but I was no longer listening to this part, because I had gone to sleep, or whatever it was, I didn’t listen) and I listened and listened to the song and I thought I was there on the edge of the lake watching the boats come and go without making a sound in that eternal calm.

  MIRRORMAZE

  I

  Silvestre and I were driving my car down 0 Street coming from the Hotel Nacional and right now crossing 23rd to zoom out like a fart past the Cafetería Maraka when Silvestre said Lights! and I asked him What? and then he said The headlights, Arsen, you’ll get yourself a ticket because it was already after seven and in the time it took to slide down the soft shoulder of 0 and into the bosom of 23rd it had already gotten dark and my car lights are not yet on because it’s not easy to tell if it’s day or night when you’re in a convertible (I know somebody up there is going to ask me if I know what I’m talking about, don’t I know that a convertible is an open car and you can see everything better from it including weather, climate and time? I know what I’m talking about and whoever the unknown person or persons are who are saying this let me tell them once and for all that all I said was, please see above, that “in a convertible it’s not always easy to tell if it’s day or night,” that’s all I said: I didn’t go into any superfluous details: we are not Proustians, my friend and I, I mean we’d rather be Proustites: Silver and Arsenic soulfides: as a matter of fact I haven’t even said whether the top was up or down: it is down but what I wanted to say and didn’t is that anyone who is fortunate enough to own a convertible will know these infinite enumerations without me having to tell them, so I’m only saying this for the benefit of those who have never traveled in a convertible along the Malecón, between five and seven in the afternoon or rather evening on August 11, 1958, at sixty or eighty miles an hour: such privilege, such exaltation, such euphoria of the finest hour of the day with that summer evening sun going down red into a west indigo sea, between clouds which almost succeed at times in perfecting it to a flop, turning the sunset into a major production: the schmaltzy finale of a religious picture filmed in Glorious Technicolor, something which luckily didn’t happen that day, though the city is now rosy at times, then amber, then salmon-colored above while below the blue of the sea becomes deeper, almost mauve, even purple, and it’s beginning to cover the waterfront and penetrate the streets and the houses till all that remains afloat is the concrete skyscrapers all pink and cream like delicately spun frothy-beaten sugar-topped meringues for chrissake!—and all this is what I’m gazing at as I feel the evening air like a halo around my head and the speed between chest and shoulders like a second heartbeat when this fellow Silvestre had to come up with his thing about The headlights) and I turned the car lights on off course. But I switched the high beam on instead, who knows why, and the beam spurted straight ahead: a horizontal stream of flour, of smoke, of cotton candy whipping out of the wheel right to the end of the st. Silvestre said Stop her on sight! But I thought he was asking about the headlights again and I said Can’t you see them, you cunt! and he said Of corset I can see them cunts! and he made his eyes round like two plates with an egg (his eyes are yellow yellow) on each of them and that no-neck of his was popping out of his shirt and he flattened h
is head against the windshield so much that I thought we had hit some invisible truck head-on and that I hadn’t yet felt either the bang or the pull of the crash, because I was watching him all the time, seeing his bespectacled face flattened against the windshield: glass grinding glass. Meanwhile, back on the street, the car was hurtling down O on her own and when I looked (I knew that the street was empty: I hadn’t been driving these past five years just for fun) I saw Them! I put my foot all the way down on the pedal and the car braked hard with a corresponding scream which the echo formed on the north face of the windowless buildings on Humoldt Street transformed into the Lorcan lament of a pedestrian (tube of Soulgate truthpaste) who has had his anima pressed out of his mouth on the spot. Consequently the street filled with people and I was obliged to stand up in my car like a politico at a whistle-stop (I even had it on the tip of my tongue to say “Romans, countrymen, lend me your lire”) to shout with all my lungs All right, folks, break it up! Everything’s all right! But the mob wasn’t standing around because of us.

  They were all watching the two blondes or the repeated blonde walk down the street and they used our noisy stopover as a pretext (though there was little need of one: the blondes were a real pretext in themselves, besides there is always this enclave of hipsters, hustlers, hombres, hotheads and homos saps at the encampment between the Maraka and the Kimbo cafeterías if you go south by southwest along the sidewalk from the Saint John to the Pigal, all of them congregating under the lamp or near the oyster stall, inside the den of coffee stand or in the yellow newspaper booth and around the other smaller coffee stand across the street or even crowding the doors of the twin eateries by just standing there hands akimbo: dugouts ready for trench whorefare) and they began wolf-whistling and bitch-calling and howling and shouting “Don’t push, cabrones!” “Let me through pleassse!” “Introito ad altarem Deae” “Leave some of her for us assholes!” “Down with women!” and there was even someone hollering “The witches of Swatzerland.” But the best catcall was shouted from the guts as someone made a bullhorn with his hands (it must have been Bustrófedon, who is always hanging out around here, because his voice was cold and hoarse very much like Bustrófedon’s, but I couldn’t tell), then this odd fellow, this spirit compass, yelled at the top of his mouthpiece The blonde leading the blonde! and every but every playboy in the western world roared with laughter, including Silvestre whose face was by now glued forever to the windshield (the blondes were not walking in our direction anymore: they were rather on. top of the car because they came marching down the street and I realized then that they weren’t tourists or American chorus girls but real Cubans—although it was not only because they were walking in the middle of the street that I knew it naturally: I knew it for the same reason as el maestro Innasio knew it thirty years back in New York, a city then as foreign as Havana now, when he taught us a new tune: “Those who do not walk with an easy pace, with an unequaled grace, those are not she-Cubans”) because I’d braked so sharply and he was complaining of the blow on his head, so I told him What about the state of grease you’ve left my windshield in. I was joking of course but he wasn’t listening either to the beginning or to my final words you graceball! Neither would I have been listening if it hadn’t been a voice from one of those women who make me another Ulysses lashed to the mizzen topmast stay so as to listen without falling into shark-infested waters or into lava or into a swamp with a brand-new white dril-cien suit on—or simply, falling in disgrace: which voice or siren song was calling Arsen! and I look up and see the double blonde who has stopped next to us and naturally what I see are two gowns of tulle or organdy (organza, one of the blondes corrects me later on, when her gown is all creased up, but it sounded more like orgazm then) or some very delicate durable-crispy material, that becomes four bundles beyond the blue horizon of my car, which is what I have right in front of my eyes, and where the two bloodless necklines come to a violet end (they are both dressed in purple) I see the beginning of two white bosoms, milky white, almost blue (like my car which is also white) in the tungsten lights of the street lamp and two long necks not swanlike but like two fine white and exactingly trained fillies, Lippizaner mares as it were, and then two super (haughty superb) chins, because they know that under them their necks are fine and long and pearly (white) and their busts so milky (white) or rather violet-colored that everybody stops to look at them (so do we: I for one can hardly take my eyes off them) before looking at the other certain wonders which this dumb car of mine now keeps hidden, and then (I must go upward on my journey) two broad red fleshy mouths (broad because the broads are smiling a smile which doesn’t display their teeth as they know Mona Lisa is back in town) and the fine (I’m sorry, fellers: I have no other adjective—not at this moment) nostrils and, oh mah Gog, those four eyes! One pair of eyes is blue and laughing azuredly and has thick eyelashes that look like eye wigs (as the mouths look crimson and are really rosy) but in a few seconds I’ll know, and so will you, that they aren’t false, and then a high smooth forehead from which a true mane of blond hair begins, with one of those bouffant hairdos which are in fashion (which have only just begun to be in fashion and it had to be a woman who was pretty sure of her beauty and very much given to displaying it and very proud of being a modem belle to venture out in the streets of Havana with those puffed-outs, although up to now the skirtmishing terrain has been limited to the streets of El Vedado and La Rampa only, Havana proper immediately declared off limits) but right after the coiffure takes off puffing it is stopped short by a pale lavender bandeau, fencing her natural beauty in history: features framed by fashion. Oh what a perfect freak when a woman is a man-made monster!

  Now, as for the other blonde, I don’t think I need describe either her mouth nor her Joyconda smile nor her bouffant—nor even the lavender headband. The only way she’s different (if you want to differentiate them) is that her eyes are green, her eyelashes not very long and her forehead not so high. You shouldn’t drive so fast, dear the blonde on the right, who’s the one I know, is saying: now that she moves back a little to let the purple para lights make her smooth gleaming cheeks turn phosphorescent (as sole makeup she’s wearing an oily cream to show off her poreless Japanese-like complexion) I recognize her. Livia I’m saying What a pity I didn’t know it was you before! Otherwise I’d have run you over and the trip to the hospital would have been a pleasure cruise. She laughs her guttural spurting laugh, her head shaking and thrown back as though she’s gargling my joke on doctor’s orders and says in a voice as phony as her laugh Ah, Arsen, you’re always the same: you never change! Because Livia is one of those women who always expect a man to change his ways in the same way as she changes her hairdo or her hair dye. It suits you very well, being blonde I say. That’s a thing you should never say to a woman (who to, then—Liberace?) dahling she says with a delivery as phony as her laugh: lips pouting and wet and at the same time she moves a hand deftly in my direction as though she were ready to strike my head with an imaginary fan: That’s naughty she says. (If this scene, because it was a scene, had happened in Old Havana, circa 1858, the novelist Cirilo Villaverde would actually have seen a fan, guards made of carved mother-of-pearl, brisé sticks, leaf of black lace.) Ay sí, you’re naughty says the other blonde, who has an echo of a voice. Very naughty! Who are they? Silvestre asks me Anna and Livia Pluralbelles? Livia turns her shortsighted look on him first and then her arrogant look and then her look of a femme fatale and then her look of acknowledgment and then her enchanting look and then her charmed look: Livia, as you can see, has quite an arsenal of looks, which, if they could be traded for hand grenades, would turn her eyes into the magazine of one of Batista’s barracks. You she said, removing the pin of the look she keeps for the assault on well-known strangers and at the count of seven throwing it at Silvestre. The fused stare blows right in his face: You must be one of Arsen’s intellectual friends, aren’t you? Yeh I say he’s Silvestre Isla, the famous author of For Whom the Balls Tell. Livia’s lackey enter
s the war to tip the outcome of the battle in our favor: Isn’t it For Who the Bell Tolls? she says. Yep I say he wrote that one too: this is just a sequel. That tru? Livia’s altar ego asks, talking more to Silvestre than me. Too true Silvestre says poker-faced. She has just lost the war, poor thing. It’s also a fag, I mean fact I say that he wrote them both under a fruity pseudonym, though some historians insist that it was under a budding chestnut tree. Ay sí? Livia thinks the moment has come for her to intervene as a great power and she hurls a fragmentation glance into the allied trenches which she follows up with an eye grenade at my public parts. My dear she explodes can’t you see that this couple is pulling your leg? I’m not pulling her leg at all I say rather I’m holding her hand though I’d like to seize her capital, violently if possible and end the war not with a whimper but with a bang. What’s the name of the country in Spanish? I’m not being facetious: Livia’s altered ego has had her hand on the door of my car for some time now and for some time now my hand has been on her hand: for some time now our two hands have been on the door of my car one on top of the other: a fact that Livia’s alter idem doesn’t seem to register. Now, while I’m speaking, I’m looking at my hand as though I was looking at hers and device versa. She smiles. Ay sí, its tru! she says. She takes her hand from under mine and positions it a couple of inches nearer Livia as she says Ay, you’re being fresh, ain’t you? not looking at me, not looking at Livia either but at some vanishing point between us both and Limbo. My name is Mircea Éliade. WHAT? Silvestre and I both start up in disbelief at the same time. Mirtha Aleada she repeats: we hadn’t heard her the first time: that’s what it was of coarse. But my professional name is Mirtila. I chose it for her Livia says. It’s a good name, isn’t it, Arsen? Beautiful I say in my best actor’s voice: till a short time ago that’s exactly what I was. You’ve always been good at choosing names for people I say. Except my own she says which is my real name. O.K. I say all that’s left is for me to introduce myself. No need to says Mirtha Aleada or Mirtila. You are Arsenio Cué. And how did you know it, Mirthful Mirtila? says Silvestre. Ay, because vague gesture showing a total apprehension of culture I watch television. Ay, she watches television Silvestre says to me and Livia and to her he says Do you go to the movies too?