Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

  Ay sí Mirtila says when I don’t have to work evenings.

  Do you go alone, Mirtila? says Silvestre.

  When I don’t go in company, sí Mirtila answers with a smile that almost lets itself be a giggle and Livia almost laughs in solidarity: Livia Solidaria, that’s her full name.

  Ingenious ingenue I say. But I don’t know why, she reminds me of Maelzel’s automaton chess-player but Silvestre isn’t interested any longer in my wit which becomes as intimate as masturbation: playing a private part.

  Will you come with me, Mirtila? Silvestre begs.

  Ay no Mirtila says.

  (I thought of ye goode olde Doctor Johnson who always began his allocutions with the word Sir.)

  Why not? Silvestre insists. Would you be so kind as to inform me.

  (Overcultivated manner of speech, I explained. To no effect, because I was talking to myself.)

  I hate men with glasses Mirtila says. So there!

  Underneath I wear yellow eyes Silvestre says and I look at him. Besides I look better in the movies.

  In what film? says Livia Innuenda.

  I doubt it Mirtila says more stupid than cruel.

  She doesn’t believe in miracles, sonny boy says Livia Perfidia. Silvestre was on the brink of taking off his glasses but this had already gone too far (and too long for Livia, who can’t bear to go more than ten seconds without being the center of worldwide attention) and suddenly I hear a hideous din behind us which I can’t imagine why it didn’t make itself heard earlier: from the line of cars behind us waiting for me to move on or get out of the middle of the road. In the midst of this flashing of lights (making Livia look for a moment as if she is in the world premiere of the film she never made, waving her arms asking for recognition as she drowns in the luminous waves made by the headlights of celebrities) and blowing of horns I hear voices, particularly a recognizable one shouting quite distinctly Early to bed and easy to arouse, makes a man out of a mouse! Livia puts on an expression as though she senses something rotten in the Denmark of her illusions of grandeur and says, reverting to the language of the gutter like a nun returning to the world from the retreat of a dialogue among well-shod Carmelites What a fucking nerve! and Mirtila who hasn’t heard or understood a thing (or both) feels obliged to say Ay sí, darling, they’ve got a fucking nerve! once more sliding her hand away from under mine. Livia says Arsen, we have a dear loft (I think she was talking of the rent but then I see she means dear in the sense of tender and isn’t talking about money but about love, just as she always says loft and never apartment or pad like everybody else) next door and she just has time to lift and point a perfect livid arm It’s that magenta building on the corner. I start off more propelled than compelled by the noise of our homemade jam. Come up and see us sometime and already I’m moving off rapidly carried on the noise of engines, exhaust fumes and tires turning the white waves of speed into gray blurs on the black asphalt of the evening. It’s on and I hear Livia forgetting her famous tropical contralto and yelling in shrieking soprano fifth floor next to the a last cry which turns into a single word ascending on her voice

  r

  o

  t

  a

  v

  ele

  a scream we can still hear as I make a turn to go up 25th Street. What do you think of Silvestre says. Who? I say pretending not to be on his wavelength. Mirtila, who else says Silvestre and lets his question which is not a question keep hanging above us like the real roof of the car or like the pale crown of the night, and under its weight or inside its dome we cross that somber area between 25th and N Street and L and 25th, which I’ve never particularly cared for, and now, safely in the hustling and bustle of the corner of the Havana Hilton and all those ancillary or ancient pensions and cafeterías or cafés around it, with people moving from neighborly modest street corner to mammoth hotel for tourists, and students coming with the alibi of drinking coffee to better sit the night out studying but actually to watch the parade going by with all these girls fluttering toward Radíocentro and La Rampa, I say Mirtila, as a woman? Not bad. She’s tall, elegant, cute without being coy and because the lights turn green (traffic chameleon, mercy is your color not hope) I don’t have time to finish what I’m trying not to say but when I see I’m still going up 25th I cry shit on my existence at the top of my inner voice because through saying little and thinking much while I’m talking I’ve continued down this street which goes past the School of Medicine and at the thought of so many naked dead given lodgings behind those useless iron railings, mortal men preserved in the hideous posterity of formol, I simply step on it. But what do you think of her Silvestre insists asking as we are heading toward the Avenida de los Presidentes really? feeling better here myself not because of the question but because we are riding now past the gardens which divide embellishing one of my favorite avenues. I must answer him right away or he’ll go on asking me the whole fucking night: while we’re having dinner in El Jardín, at the movies and after, having a refreshing pause or a coffee on 12 & 23, my favorite street corner, sipping black coffee or brown Cokes our favorite drinks while we’re watching the last of the chickadees going home each one to her own bed and not, ay! to either of ours, until I drop him off at his house and I go home to try to sleep or to read all night till it be morrow or failing that to phone whatever easy say is in and ready to discuss my chosen subject for the wee hours of tonight, namely Quentian Theory—in other words, I would have to sit between the two prongs of his question the rest of the night. So it’s better if I answer him now and then let Ella Kazan in East of Eden, with its sociometaphysical preoccupations in Cinemascope cum DeLuxe Color, entertain and move him and keep him happy in that never-world which is more real for him than this dark passage we have just negotiated without/apparently/as much as a scratch, leaving intact also my reputation as the sort of Cuban explorer who’s a man to go in the jungle with. You’re naïve, believe you me I say you are fucking naïve!

  II

  As the elevator wasn’t working, I half turned around to go out again but finally I decided what the hell and go up by the stairs anyway. Now, this very moment, I hesitated for a moment being faced with the street glowing like the rays of a torch from these lower depths, and I mean horizontal depths because looking at the long corridor which was more like a tunnel I knew I was in one of the deepest darkest damnedest sulphur mines in the world, with three or rather two seams to exploit: one of them already exhausted (the elevator) and two that were still intact (the alley at the back where I could shout up at her window and the fucking staircase) and the possibility of vacations al fresco, in the free air of the evening, that transom/ ransom of life now a parole of free will, alien and distant because I had myself chosen to come here—a nonparolee. There was also the occupational hazard of an aleatory escape of laughing gas. Why had I come here? From somewhere or other, from below maybe (though down below there could be no other living quarters than what Jules A. Vernus called the Hall of Winds Phenomenal, vulgo the airshaft), I heard sounds which couldn’t be taken for an answer because very plainly they were hammer strokes plus the corresponding echo. They were mending the elevator evidently. I began to climb the stairs and felt an inverse vertigo/ does such a sensation exist?/coming: if there’s anything I hate more than going down a dark flight of stairs it’s going up one.

  Why have I come to see you, Livia Roz? (Is that your real name or are you perhaps called Lilia Rodriguez?) Did you really invite me to your house? If you prefer, if you are able, please answer the two frank questions and forget the pernicious parenthesis, would you? I could never have explained to Silvestre why I was counting these steps on a metaphysical flight with the tip of my shoe, while one of my hands/sweating/gripped the railings of the polished marble banister and the other/soft/was futilely trying to hold onto the sweaty wall of granite. I think I must have arrived because my invisible knuckles were knocking on a nonexistent door and a distant, piercing and recognizable voice was saying or shouting
or whispering Coming! I remembered a dream of another door/ other doors/ and another answer to my knocking.

  I could have told Silvestre many things. One of them was I used to know Livia Roz when she had black hair, which must have been some time ago. Her transparently white skin, so alive, had startled me, her dark blue eyes had delighted me and I wondered at her hair which I had imagined was naturally black. She remained standing holding my hand—or at least she held it in her own so long I forgot about her (her hand, I mean). I was introduced to her by Tito Lívido, who wasn’t yet a film director but a cameraman for television. When she finished smiling and combing her hair with her hand and moving her neck rhythmically and pulling on my hand as though she wanted to play a game of tug-of-war, when she had spoken, perhaps a little before, or when she opened her mouth to say something, I knew that I had in my hand the foot of a peacock, the voice of a cockatoo, the waddling walk of a swan. So she said you are pause for breath of deep emotion the famous grimace of recognition Arsenio Cué? How could I possibly answer such a question? No, I’m his brother of the same name. The laughter was general (and C in C as well). Explanation of Tito Arsen, a consummate joker livid. A joke of a consumer I said. More laughter. I can’t imagine why. You Livia said, lifting her ontological fan for the first time and employing it to strike me on my hard head are naughty putting on a tone of voice that was intended to be maternal very naughty. I really had no idea what to do, because she still hadn’t let go of my hand. Then in one of the phases of the game/ tug or war/ she pulled me down toward her and while she was bending me over forward to look at my other hand, the left one, she said whispering in my ears and at the same time letting the whole world hear she was interested in culture: Ay exactly the same tone of voice Rodrigo de Triana had employed when he discovered America you have a book in your hand! (I know I’m making it sound complicated but you would have had to have seen it, seen and heard: I say and heard, because if you had only seen it, through a glass lightly for example, you might have got the idea that something obscene was going on.) What is it? I showed her the book. She read it like someone who has just learned how to read. Across-the-river-and-into-the-trees. Here she made a grimace almost of disgust. Eminguey? You read Eminguey? Yes, sometimes I think that was what I said. Isn’t he a little bit out of fashion? I think I smiled: The thing is I was sick when I was little. Tito said, lividly, something in her ear and just as she was opening her mouth so it looked like an exclamation mark without a dot, I said and now I’m catching up with my reading. She was smiling now with her broad rosy lips (she wasn’t wearing any makeup that day, I remember), and the smile spelled I am so ignorant but actually meant Poor darling, you definitely are behind the times and what she actually said was Forgive me delicate pause may I call you tú? a new and deeply intimate beginning.

  Certainly I said of curtsy you may and as I said it she squeezed my hand as a token of gratitude. Thank you: she was also a friend of emphasis. She reached out for the book with her other hand. Please lend it to me for a second she said I must go now and she slipped her hand inside my jacket (it was then I realized she had let go of my hand, which remained hovering in the air, reminding me of that game children play of muscular reflexes and the arm against the wall: incipient dynamic tension) to fish out my pen I’ll give you my number she said as she wrote and you must give me a call. She gave the pen and the book back (I looked at the phone number without seeing it) and smiled her smile marked Good-bye But Maybe See You Soon. Ciao was what she said, naturally.

  I called her up one day just as I was finishing this moving novel for the third time, this canonic text which is both sad and happy at once, one of the few books genuinely about love that have been written this century, when I saw her name written above the phrase The End in a large hand, copybook but attractive: a yes she is no she isn’t false/carefully written/male-looking. She wasn’t there but I spoke to Her for the first time, She. I mean Laura her friend as a little too sugary voice told me Livia isn’t in. Can I take a message? No, thank you, I’ll call back another time. I hang up: strange, that, we hang up. We both hang up. We cut short our conversation like this, with a gesture, when we were just beginning to communicate. We hang up. I believe that never after (and there were plenty of occasions when we might have been) have we been so close to each other. She told me later that she had remained glued to the phone (which was on the main floor, near the dining room full of guests) that evening at a quarter past seven, waiting for me to call her back. This was what she told me one day when Livia introduced us opposite the TV station. She left the group of people she was with to greet me, because she knew I don’t like groups. Arsen Livia said there is a pause friend of mine who is longing to meet you. I hadn’t the slightest idea who she was and I was even going to say excuse me and get back into the car when I saw a tall girl, poorly dressed in black, very slender, with pale-chestnut-almost-sandy hair, standing by the staircase and smiling: I had glanced at her as I was passing, happy to see that lithe young perfect body, and I think that I’d have noticed her eyes which were gray or hazel or maybe green (no, I can’t have even looked at them because I’d have remembered: it is her eyes, mauve, dark, a quality purple, that I’m unable to forget) and I was walking on by when Livia’s possessive hand brought me back to the present, to present me: Laura she called her, and she came giving the first proof of that docility in front of Livia I was so often to reproach her with, so stupidly. Listen, I want to introduce you to Arsen. Arsenio Cué/Laura Díaz. I confess I was surprised by that simple Díaz among all the sonorous exotic and memorable names that pollute the show biz world, but I liked it as I like the fact that she still uses it today when she is famous. There was nothing special about the way she shook my hand: perhaps only good enough for shaking hands in the town square on Independence Day. I looked at her: I looked at her face and I smile when I remember it, because where there is so much sophistication today, so many lips that pout like Brigitte Bardot, so much black eye shadow, so much morning/evening/and/or dramatic makeup, here instead was a simple, down-to-earth and open beauty, which was also serene, sad and trusting, because twenty-year-old beauties and total hunger are too much in competition with each other for the prize of Havana. Besides, she was a widow—a thing I didn’t notice, of corpus, as there were plenty of other things I didn’t notice and I think maybe I would have known more about her by phone than I do now that I have her here fixed in my memory: talking and laughing with the sun falling behind her flying hair and the sea, five hours later when I took her from Mariel from a late lunch by the bay and later on driving along the Malecón to her home.

  Between this opening word (Between) and that final period there is another story, of which I only want to tell the ending. Livia gets crazes to use an ordinary word instread of tendencies, which is a medical term. One of them is to have roommates, another is always to get herself invitations (when someone passes by in a car, to anonymous dinners, to live in any friend’s house), another craze she has is to “steal boyfriends from her girl friends,” as Laura explained one day. Livia and Laura were more than just roommates, they were close friends now and went everywhere together and they worked twogether (Livia, with rare ability, turned Laura from an ugly small-town duckling—too tall, too skinny, too pale for Santiago—into a swan of Avon Inc.: now she was a model for ads and commercials and a mannequin for fashions and clothes in newspapers and magazines: she taught her how to walk, how to dress and how to talk, and not to be ashamed of her long white neck, but to hold it up “as though the Hope pearl were hanging from it, dear” and finally she got her to dye her hair Apache black—”raven’s wing, darling” Livia would say if she was standing behind me and reading this page I’m writing) and they ended up by being like twin sisters: Laura and Livia/Livia and Laura/Lauralivia: one and the same thing. Livia also had another craze: she was an exhibitionist (Laura was one too, which makes me think that all the women I’ve known were exhibitionists one way or another: inside or outwardly: shy or brazen—bu
t then aren’t I one myself too with my car and its lowered hood, this exhibition case on wheels, aren’t we all, isn’t man a creature who exhibits himself to the cosmos in this enormous convertible we call the world? But I’m getting metaphysical and I don’t want to go beyond the physical: it’s about the flesh of Livia and the flesh of Laura and my own flesh that I want to talk now) and she lived in a display window. One day, when I first knew them and I went up to their room in the boardinghouse for the first time, she insisted that Laura should try on a new model of bathing suit they were going to advertise next morning and she also tried on her bikini. Livia suggested Let’s make Arsen suffer and smiled and Laura excited by the game asked To see if he’s a gentleman? and Livia answered To see if he’s a man or only a gentleman but Laura intervened Please she said, and after an embarrassed pause, Livia and she said to me Arsen, s’il vous plait, go out to the balcony and don’t look or came back in till we don’t call you.