Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

  When we got to his house I felt very good, because everyone was dressed informally, although the house was a very snazzy one in the Country Club and his father was delighted to have me and wanted to teach me to play golf the next day and we decided to eat in the garden though we drank our cocktails indoors. I felt very good with Arturo too, that’s Ricardo’s brother who was studying medicine, and with their mother who was very young and beautiful, a bit like a Cuban Myrna Loy, very distinguished-looking, and with Ricardo’s father who was tall and handsome and never stopped looking at me the whole evening. I had had a little to drink and we were sitting in the living room, talking and waiting for the turkey to be golden roasted, and Ricardo’s father invited me to go on a tour of the kitchen. I remember I didn’t feel well and that Ricardo’s father gripped me tightly by the arm as we went to the kitchen and as the house was half in darkness because of the Christmas tree the brilliant, almost white, light of the kitchen bothered me. I went and looked at the turkey and then I saw the girl who had brought us our drinks and who helped the chef (they were very rich and had a chef instead of a woman to cook for them) and then I saw she wasn’t old and I remembered that Ricardo’s mother had said something about her not being very experienced and I saw her in the light of the kitchen, as she was moving between the table and the sink and the refrigerator with the salads and she never once looked at us and I thought that her face was familiar and I saw that she was quite young and it was then that I realized she was a girl who had been at school with me in my pueblo before I came with my family to Havana and whom I hadn’t seen for ten years. She was so old, doctor, so worn out and she was the same age as me, exactly the same age and we had played together when we were girls and we were very good friends and both of us had a crush on Jorge Negrete and Gregory Peck and we used to sit out at night on the steps of my house and make plans for when we were grown up and I felt so uncomfortable that I couldn’t say hello to her, because it would make her feel so bad, and I had to leave the kitchen. Then, when I was in the living room again, I just about went back to the kitchen to say hello, because I thought I hadn’t said hello to her because I was afraid Ricardo’s family would see that I was from the country and had been very poor. But I didn’t go.

  The meal took a very long time coming, I don’t know how long: something had happened to the turkey and we went on drinking and then Ricardo’s brother wanted to show me all around the house and first of all I went to see Ricardo’s room and then his brother’s room and I don’t know why but I went into the bathroom and the curtain of the shower was drawn and Ricardo’s brother said, “Don’t look,” and I was so curious I opened the curtain and looked and there in the shower, drenched in dirty water, was a skeleton that still had bits of flesh on it, a human skeleton, and Ricardo’s brother said, “I’m cleaning it!” I don’t know how I managed to get out of the bathroom nor how I went down the stairs nor how I managed to sit at the table in the patio to eat. All I remember is that Ricardo’s brother took me by the hand and kissed me and I kissed him and then he helped me across the dark room.

  In the patio everything was very pretty, very green because of the lawn and beautifully lit up and the table was very well arranged with a very expensive tablecloth and they served me first because Ricardo’s mother insisted on it. And what I did was to look at the meat, the pieces of turkey, very well cooked, almost burnt-looking in the brown gravy, and put my knife and fork across my plate, lower my hands and start crying. I spoiled their Christmas for them, these people who were so kind and friendly, and I returned home worn out and so sad and quiet that not even my mother heard me come in.

  I HEARD HER SING

  I dreamed I was an old man who’d gone out on a skiff into the Gulf Stream of the night and had gone 68 days now without catching any fish, not even a damselfish or a sardine. Silvestre had been with me for the first 66 days. After 67 days without a single fish Bustrófedon and Eribó and Arsenio Cué had told Silvestre that I was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of salty. But on day number 69 (which is a lucky number in Havana-by-night: Bustrófedon says that it’s because it’s a capicúa, that’s Cuban for a palindrome number, Arsenio Cué for a thing or two he knows about it and Rine for other reasons: it’s the number of his house) on day or rather on night number 69 I was really at sea and all alone, when through the deep blue, violet, ultraviolet waters a phosphorescent fish came swimming. It was very large and bosomy and it looked like Cuba and then it became small and toothy and it was Irenita and then it got dark, blackish, pitch black and lissome and it was Magalena and when it bit my line and I caught it, it began to grow and grow and grow and it fought the line as it grew and it was as big as the boat now and it stayed there floating with strange sounds coming from its liver-lipped mouth, purring, groaning beside the boat, gaping, palpitating, making funny noises, noises more weird than funny like somebody choking as he swallows, and then the big fish was quite still, and then predatory fish began to arrive, sharks and barracudas and piranhas, all of them with faces I could recognize, in fact one of them looked very much like Gianni Boutade and another like the Emcee and it had a star on its mouth and yet another fish was Vítor Perla and I knew it was him because it had a throat like a tie made of blood and a pearl pinned on it, and I pulled the line quickly and fastened it to the side and, funny thing, I started talking to it, to the fish, Big fish, I said, fish that you are, fish, Nobel fish, I have lampooned you, harpooned I mean, it’s true I caught you but I’m not going to let them eat you, and I began to haul it into the boat in a slow frenzy and I managed to get its tail into the boat and it was a radiant white now, the fish tail only, the rest of it being jet black, and suddenly I began to struggle with its soft, sticky, gelatin-flanks, gelatin because that side of it wasn’t a fish but a jellyfish, an aguamala, but all the same I kept on pulling and suddenly I lost my balance and fell back into the boat, still pulling at its jelly side and the whole whale of a fish fell on top of me and the boat was too small for both of us and it, the fish not the boat, gave me no room to breathe and I was suffocating because its gills had landed on my face and over my mouth and nostrils and as this fish was all blubber it was spreading over me, smothering me as it sucked in my air, all the air, not only the air for breathing, the air outside but the already breathed air, the air inside as well, the air from my nostrils and from my mouth and from my lungs, and it left me with no air to breathe and I was suffocating badly, choking, asphyxiated. I was about to drown or choke when I woke up.

  I stopped fighting the noble fish that was in my dream to begin another struggle, kicking and wrestling with a villainous sperm whale in real life which was lying on top of me and kissing me with its immense lunglike lips, kissing me all over my face, kissing my eyes and nose and mouth and who was now chewing my ear and biting my neck and sucking my breast and La Estrella kept sliding off my body and climbing back onto it again making unbelievably weird noises, as if she were singing and snoring at the same time and in between her groans she was speaking to me, whispering, gasping in her rasping baritone mi amor please kiss me mi negro please kill me mi chino come come come, things which would have made me die laughing if I’d been able to breathe and I pushed her with what strength I had left, using a half-crushed leg as a fulcrum and making a springboard not of the bed but of the wall (because I’d been driven back against the wall by that expansion wave of fat, flattened, almost obliterated by that black universe that was expanding in my direction at the speed of love), I managed to give her a final big push and succeeded in putting her off balance and out of bed, my bed. She fell on the floor and there she stayed puffing and panting and sobbing but I leaped out of bed and switched on the light and then I saw her. She was stark naked and her breasts were as fat as her arms and twice as large as my head, and one of them fell over on one side and touched the floor and the other jutted out over the central breaker of the three great rollers that separated her legs from what would have been her neck if she had had one and the fir
st roller above her thighs was a sort of canopied extension of her mons veneris and I could see how right Alex Bayer was when he said that “she depilated herself completely” because there wasn’t a single trace of hair, pubic or otherwise, on her whole body and that couldn’t have been natural, but then nothing was natural about La Estrella. It was then that I began to wonder whether she came from outer space.

  If the dreams of reason beget monsters, what do the dreams of unreason beget? I dreamed (because I had fallen asleep again: sleep can be as stubborn as insomnia) that UFOs were invading the earth, not as Oscar Hurtado threatened in ships that touched down noiselessly on the rooftops or like Arsenio Cué’s creatures quote hurld headlong flaming from th’Ethereal Skie/ with hideous ruin and combustion down unquote or as Silvestre feared infiltrating our lives in the form of microbes reproducing silently, but with definitely Martian shapes, creatures with suckers that could create total suction, as Rine would say, and adhere to walls made of air and then descend or ascend invisible steps and with majestic footfall could spread terror like an overflow of their black, brilliant, silent presences. In another dream or perhaps another form of the same dream these alien beings were sound waves which mingled with us and haunted us and enchanted us, like unseen sirens: from every corner a music gushed out that made men stupid, a paralysing song ray which nobody could resist and nobody could in fact do anything to fight this invasion from outer space because nobody knew that music could be the secret and final weapon, so nobody was going to stop his ears with wax or even with his fingers and at the end of that dream I was the only man on earth who could realize what was actually happening and I tried to lift my hands to my ears and I couldn’t because my hands were tied and even my neck and shoulders were tied to the ground by some invisible menders and it happened that I must have fallen off the bed because I woke in a pool of sweat on the floor. I remembered then that I’d dragged myself right across the floor to the opposite end of the room and had gone to sleep right there near the door. Did I wake up with a motorman’s glove in my mouth? I can’t tell but I can tell that I had a taste of bile on my lips, and was terribly thirsty, and I didn’t even drink so much as a cup of coffee because I felt like vomiting, but I thought twice before getting up. I wasn’t at all keen to see La Estrella whether she was freak or foe, sleeping in my bed, snoring with her mouth open and half-closed eyes, rolling from side to side: nobody ever wants to meet the nightmare of the night before when he wakes up. So I began to work out how I could get to the bathroom to wash and return to look for my clothes and put them on and go out into the street without disturbing her. When I’d done all this in my mind I began to write a mental note to La Estrella to ask her more or less when she got up to do me the favor of leaving without letting anyone see her, no that was no good: of leaving everything as she’d found it, no that was no good either: of closing the door behind her: shit, all this was childish and besides it was quite useless because La Estrella might not know how to read, O.K. I’d write it in big bold caps with my grease pencil but who told me she couldn’t read? Racial segregation, that’s who, I said to myself as I was making up my mind to get up and wake her up and talk to her openly. Of course I had to get dressed first. I staggered to my feet and looked at the Castro convertible and she wasn’t there and I didn’t have to look for her very far because I could see the empty kitchen right in front of me and the bathroom door was open so I could see the bath was empty as well: she wasn’t here, she’d gone. I looked at my watch which I had forgotten to take off last night and it was two o’clock (in the afternoon?) and I thought she must have gotten up early and left without making any noise. Very considerate of her. I went to the bathroom and as I was sitting on the can, reading those instructions that come with every roll of Kodak film which had been left on the floor I don’t know by whom, reading this conveniently simple division of life into Sunny, Cloudy, Shade, Beach or Snow (snow in Cuba, they must be joking!) and finally Clear Well-lighted Indoors, reading these instructions without understanding them, I heard the doorbell ringing and if I’d been able to jump up without foul consequences, I’d have done so because I was sure it was La Estrella’s triumphal comeback, so I let the bell ring and ring and ring and I managed to silence my gut and my lungs and the rest of my body so I became the Silent Don. But a Cuban friend is more adhesive than a Scotch tape and someone shouted my name through the airshaft between the kitchen and bathroom, not a difficult operation for someone who knows the building, has the physique of a trapeze artiste, the chest of an opera singer, the persistence of memory and a stunt man’s daring to risk his neck by sticking his head through the corridor window. It wasn’t the voice of a Martian. I opened the door after performing some hygienic rituals and Silvestre burst through the doorway like a white tornado, livid, shouting excitedly that Bustro was sick, seriously ill. Who? I said, picking up the debris of my hair after the wind of his entry had scattered it over a radius of my face, and he said, Bustrófedon, I left him in his house early this morning because he was feeling sick, throwing up and all that and I laughed at him because I thought he was able to take his drink better than that but he told me to leave him alone and take him to his place and not disturb him but this morning when I went to look for him to go to the beach the maid told me there was nobody at home neither the senor nor the senora nor Bustrófedon because they’d taken him to the hospital so Silvestre told me all in one breath without a comma. And the maid called him Bustrófedon, just like that? A question that was my token gift of shit to this morning already brimming with drowsiness, hangover and diarrhea. No, you cunt, she didn’t say Bustrófedon but of course it was Bustrófedon, who else. Did they tell you what was wrong with him? I said on my way to the kitchen to drink a glass of milk, that oasis well in the morning-after desert of us nomad drinkers. I didn’t know, Silvestre said, I don’t believe it’s serious but I don’t think he’s at all well either. I don’t like the sound of his symptoms, it could very well be aneurysm. A new rhythm? I asked in mock-disbelief. No, hell no! Cerebral aneurysm, an embolism of the brain arteries, I don’t know, and I laughed at his words just before he said I don’t know. What the fuck are you laughing at now? Silvestre said. You’re on your way to becoming a famous diagnostician, viejito, I said. Why, he shouted and I could see he was getting angry, why did you say that? Forget it, I said. So you think I’m a hypochondriac too? he said and I said I didn’t, I was merely laughing at his vocabulary but admiringly, dazzled by his instant diagnosis and stunned by his scientific knowledge. He smiled but didn’t say anything and I narrowly missed hearing yet again his story of how he’d already started or was about to start studying medicine when he’d gone with a classmate of his to the faculty and straight into the dissection room and had seen the corpses and smelled the smell of formaldehyde and dead flesh and heard the ghastly sound of bones creaking when a professor cut them up with a saw, a common saw for chrissake! And so on and so forth. I offered him a grateful glass of milk and he said, No thank you I’ve already had breakfast and from the word breakfast he went on to what comes before breakfast—which is not the morning after but the night before.

  What happened to you last night? he asked and I’ve never known anyone to ask more questions than Silvestre: Why should be his middle name. I went out, I said. For a walk. Where? Nowhere special I said. Are you sure? What do you mean, am I sure? Of cures I’m sure! At least nobody else was in my shoes, or were they? All! he said, making a guttural noise to show he understood what I meant, how interesting! I didn’t want to ask him any questions and he took advantage of my disadvantage to ask me some more. So you don’t know what happened last night? Here, I said, trying not to make it sound like a question. No, not here, he said, in the street. We were the last to leave, I believe. Yes, the last because Sebastián Morán left before you returned with La Estrella as he still had to do his show (I thought I heard a musical note of sarcasm in his voice) and then Gianni and Franemilio left and we stayed and by we I mean Eribó and Cué and Bustrófedon
and me, talking, shouting rather above La Estrella’s snores and Eribó and Cué and Piloto & Vera left together and Rine had gone earlier with Jesse and Juan Blanco, I think, I’m not sure, so Bustrófedon and I took Ingrid and Edith with us. I mean, what happened was that after closing up shop in your place Bustro and I picked up Ingrid and Edith as we planned to go to the Chori and on our way to La Playa Bustrófedon was in true form, you should have heard him, but we were already on the heavy side of the river when he began to feel ill and we had to go back and Edith finally told the driver to stop on the corner and she went to bed all by herself, Silvestre said.

  In the room I come and go talking to my guardian angelo as I look for my socks which only last night came in pairs and have now all managed to become single specimens. When I got tired of searching for them through the universe of my studio I returned to my own private galaxy and went to the closet and pulled out a new pair and put them on while Silvestre went on talking, telling me his story, and I was working out what do with the rest of that Sunday. The thing is, he said, that I was making out with Ingrid (and now I should explain that Ingrid is Ingrid Bergamo but that’s not her name, that’s her nickname, we gave it to her because that’s how she pronounces the name Ingrid Bergman: she’s a mulata adelantada, as she herself puts it when she’s in a good mood, meaning she can easily pass for white, and she dyes her hair ash blond and puts on lots of makeup and wears the tightest skirts of anyone in this island where the women don’t wear dresses in any case but body gloves, and she’s a very easy lay, which didn’t do anything to diminish Silvestre’s pleasure because no woman is easy on the eve of her bedding), so I picked her up and took her to the posada on 84th Street, he said, and after we were already inside the patio she started saying no, no and no, and I had to tell the driver to please drive on. But, he said, when we were back in El Vedado and the taxi had gone through the tunnel for the fourth or fifth time, we started kissing and all that and she let me take her to the posada on 11th and 24th Street and the same thing happened there except that the driver said he was a cab driver not a pimp and that I should pay him there and then so he could go away and then Ingrid started arguing with him for not taking her home and the guy was so cut up that I paid him quickly and he shot off. Of kosher, he said, Silvestre said, I took Ingrid with me and there in the intimate darkness she staged a big row and we went out onto the street again arguing with each other or rather she was doing all the arguing as I was trying to calm her down, as reasonable and cool as George Sanders in All About Eve (Silvestre always talks like that, in filmese: once he made a frame with his hands playing the photographer, and he said to me, Whoa! Budge an inch and you go out of frame! and another time I arrived at his house, which was dark, with the doors of the balcony closed because the evening sun hit them hard and I inadvertently opened the balcony and he said, You’ve just exploded twenty thousand full candles in my face! and the time he and Cué and I were talking about jazz and then Cué said something pedantic about its origins in New Orleans and Silvestre told him, Don’t cut in with that flashback now, viejito! and other things I forget or can’t remember now), and there we were walking and quarreling and crossing El Vedado from north to south, you know where we finally ended up? he asked but didn’t wait for my answer. We arrived at the posada on 31st Street and went in as though there was nothing to it. I believe, he told me, I won the game by default but this was only the first round and inside, once we were in the room there was a wrestling match between a heroine from Griffith and a Von Stroheim villain to get her to sit down, are you listening? just to get her to sit down and not even on the bed but in a chair! After she’d sat down she didn’t want to let go of her handbag. Finally, he said, I got her to calm down and sit quietly, almost relaxed and I go and take off my jacket and she’s up like a shot and runs to open the door to leave the room and I zoom in on the door and see her hand in big close-up on the bolt and I put my jacket back on and calm her down once more but in calming her down she gets so nervous she makes a mistake and sits on the bed and no sooner is she sitting than she leaps up as though it was a fakir’s bed of nails and I, playing the part of a man of the world, very much a la Cary Grant, I manage to persuade her not to be frightened, there’s nothing to be afraid of, sitting on the bed is only sitting, and the bed is just like any other bit of furniture, namely a chair, and like a chair the bed could just as well be a seat and she’s much quieter now, so she gets up and leaves her handbag on the table and sits back on the bed again. I don’t know why, Silvestre told me, but I guessed I could now take my jacket off, so I took it off and sat beside her and began to caress and kiss her and having got this far I pushed her back, so she would lie down, and she lies down only a second because up she pops like on a spring again and I go on pushing her down and she goes on sitting up and I insist she lie down until something’s got to give and this time she lies down and stays down for good, very quiet and very much the ingenue in a romantic-but-risqué scene, so I decide to take a chance and begin telling her how hot it is and that it’s a pity she’s going to fuck—pardon—to wreck her dress and how it’s getting all rumpled and how elegant it indeed is and she says, It’s cute, isn’t it? And with no heralding effect whatsoever she tells me she’s going to take it off so as not to crease it, but that she won’t take off anything more, that she will definitely keep her slip on, and then she takes her dress off. She gets back on the bed again and I’ve already taken my shoes off and I forget the Hays code, I start working on her body in medium shot, and I plead with her, I beg her, and I almost go down on my knees on the bed, asking her to take off her slip and I tell her I want to see her beautiful starlet’s body, that she needn’t wear more than just panties and bra, that it’s only the same as a swimsuit except she’s in bed not on the beach and I succeed in convincing her with this argument, viejito, and she takes her slip off though first she tells me that’s all, she’s not taking off anything more. But nothing. So then we start kissing and caressing and I tell her I’m going to get my pants rumpled unless I take them off so I take them off and I take my shirt off too and now I’ve got nothing on but my shorts and when I scramble back on the bed again she starts getting angry or pretends she’s angry already and she won’t let me caress her like before. But a minute later I’m touching her hand with a finger and then the finger climbs on top of her hand and then climbs up her arm not only one finger but two and then my hand climbs up the south face of her tit because it’s there, and then I caress her body and we start feeling and fondling each other again and then I ask her, beginning in a whisper, almost in voice off, telling her, pleading with her to take off the rest of her clothes, or just her bra so I can see her marvelous breasts but she won’t let me convince her and then just when I’m on the point of losing my cool, she says, O.K. and suddenly she’s taken her bra off and what do you guess I’m seeing in the dim red light in the bedroom? That was the subject of another public debate: switching off the overhead light and switching on the bedside lamp. What I’m seeing is the eighth wonder of the world, the eighth and the ninth because there are two of them! And I start going crazy over them, and she starts going crazy and the whole atmosphere switches from suspense to euphoria like in a Hitchcock movie. The end of the sequence was, so as not to bore you with any more detail shots, that with the same or similar arguments that had become standard treatment by now I succeeded in persuading her to take off her pants, but, BUT, where old Hitch would have cut to insert and intercut of fireworks, I’ll give it to you straight—I didn’t get any further than that. Not even the Great Cary would have been able to persuade this poor man’s Ingrid to do a love scene, torrid or horrid, and I came to the conclusion that rape is one of the labors of Hercules and that really there’s no such thing as rape, because it can’t be called a crime if the victim is conscious and only one person commits the act. No, that’s quite impossible, dear De Sad.