Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

  My Spanish is not perfect, but I can make myself understood.

  There was never any melodrama. Nor lynching mobs nor cheers, and if the beggar did make an ugly face, we didn’t see it. Nor did I scream when I saw the other stick (I find these dramatic italics of Mr Campbell in very poor taste: “other stick.” Why not simply “other stick”?). I merely pointed at it without any hysteria or catatonia. I thought it was terrible, obviously, but then I also thought that error and injustice were easy to correct. We went out again and found the café and learned from the clientele where the precinct was, since they’d arrested the beggar for theft: it was Mr Campbell’s ruined fortress. He wasn’t there. The police officer had released him at the gate, to the accompaniment of the laughter of the other policemen and the tears of the thief, who was himself the only one who had been robbed. Nobody, of course, knew where we could find him.

  We missed the boat and had to return by plane, together with the two walking sticks.

  THE TALE OF A WALKING STICK WHEN FOLLOWED BY MADAME CAMPBELL’S CORRECTIONS IN THE COMIC STYLE

  The Tale

  We arrived in Havana on a Friday afternoon and a very hot afternoon it was, with a low ceiling of dense heavy dark clouds. As soon as the boat entered La Bahía[2] the pilot very simply switched off the breeze that had refreshed the crossing. It had been cool and now suddenly it wasn’t. Just like that. Ernest Hemingway, I presume, would call it, a marine ventilator. Now my leg was bothering me like the devil and it was with a great deal of pain that I walked down the gangplank, but I disguised it well for the benefit of our hosts and guests. (Should I say natives and discoverers?) Mrs. Campbell came behind me talking and gesticulating and amazing herself over everything the whole saintly time and she found every little thing enchanting: the enchanting blue bay, the enchanting old city, the enchanting and picturesque little calle[3] near the enchanting dock. Who, me? I, what I was thinking was that the humidity must have been 90 or 95, and I was more than sure that my saintly leg was going to give me terrible trouble the whole condemned weekend. It must have been the devil’s own idea that brought us for a restful vacation to this ardent,[4] moist island that was bleached white by the sun wherever it wasn’t entirely scorched. Dante’s Invierno, no less. Of course it had been Mrs. Campbell’s project in the first place. (A design by Mrs. Campbell, with a HERS embroidered behind, I am tempted to add.) I warned her as soon as I was on the upper deck and saw the dome of black clouds hung up over the city like a sword of Damoclean rain over my leg. She protested indignantly and said that the travel agent had sworn on his postered heart that it was always Spring in Cuba. Spring, my poor bloody big toe! The travel agents! They must all have been in Trader’s Horn with Carey and Renaldo and picked up Booth’s disease. (Edwina Booth, I mean. She is a woman’s disease.) We were well planted in the Torrid Zone, infested with mosquitoes, endemic malarially and populated by forests of rain. I said so to Mrs. Campbell and she had to have the last word: “Little dear, this is the Tropic!”

  Upon the dock, like an essential part of the machinery of disembarkation, there was a trio of those enchanting natives scraping at a guitar and shaking two castanets shaped like calabashes and banging bits of wood one against the other and uttering certain savage cries such as pass for music here. As décor[5] for this orchestra of aborigines someone had erected an open air stall where they sold all the fruits of the tree of knowledge of tourism: castanets, colored habanicos, the instruments that looked like gourds, little musical sticks, necklaces made of shells and bits of wood and seeds, a mediocre menagerie scraped from the bottom of the barrel, and hats made of hard, brittle yellow straw: Tutti frutti.[6] Madame Campbell bought one or two examples of every item. She was radiating with pleasure. De-lighted. Static. I advised her better to leave all these purchases for the last day on land. “Little dear,” she said, “they are souvenirs.”[7] She couldn’t grasp the point that the souvenirs are supposed to be bought only when you leave the country. Thank to God, we managed to get through the custom very quickly, a fact which, I have to admit, surprised me much. They were also very amicable, even if they did lay it on a bit too thick, if you know what I mean.

  I regretted that I hadn’t brought my Buick. What good is it going on a ferry if you don’t take your car with you? But Mrs. Campbell decided at the last moment, that we would have wasted a lot of time learning the traffic regulations. If the truth is to be known, she was really afraid we would have another accident. Now she had one more argument to add: “Little dear,” she said, “with your leg in that [pointing to it] condition, you couldn’t possibly have driven a car. We’ll take a cab.”

  We hailed a cab and some natives (more of those than were strictly necessary) helped us with the baggage. Mrs. Campbell was very full of this so-called Latin courtesy. Proverbial, she called it. Putting tips in extra hands, I considered how pointless it would be to tell her that it was a courtesy that was proverbially well paid for. She will continue to find them just wonderful, no matter what they do and/or prove on the contrary. Even before arriving I knew that everything was going to turn out wonderfully well. When our cases and the thousand and one things Sra. Campbell had bought for her were in the cab, I closed the door (in fierce competition with the driver, who was obviously a cousin of Jesse Owens) and went around to the other side to get in. Ordinarily, I get in first and Mrs. Campbell follows me, to make the things easier for me. But this gesture of obsolete good manners which Mrs. Campbell was enraptured by, and said was mucho latino,[8] induced me to a mistake I will never forget. It was then (on the other side) that I saw the walking stick.

  It was not a common walking stick and I shouldn’t have bought it if only for that reason. Quite aside from the fact that it was a thing ostentatious and twisted, it was also expensive. It is true that it was made of some precious hard wood, ebony or something similar and it was carved with tedious care. (An exquisite hand, Mrs. Campbell said.) In terms of dollars, of course, it wasn’t expensive. Under a nearer inspection, the carving was nothing more than grotesque designs with no particular significance. The stick ended with a head that was cut into the shape of a Negro or a Negress (you can never tell with these artists), whose features were strikingly ugly. In toto,[9] it was a little on the repellent side. Like a fool, it immediately attracted me, although I can’t exactly say why. I am not a frivolous man, but I think I would have bought it even if my leg had been hurting or not. Who knows, maybe Mrs. Campbell would have finally pushed me into buying it, seeing my interest. Like all women, she is in love with buying things. She said that it was beautiful and (hold your breathing) exciting. My God! Los mujeres.[10]

  In the hotel, our luck she was still running good and our reservations were found valid. We went up and took a shower and ordered a speedy lunch from room service. The service was rapid like the lunch was good and then we took a satisfactory short nap, the Cuban siesta—when in Havana . . . No, it was very hot and sunny and noisy outside and inside it was a clean, cool lighted place. A good hotel, quiet, with excellent air-conditioning. True it was expensive, but it was worth it. If there is anything the Cubans have learnt from us Americans, it is a feeling for comfort and El Nacional is a comfortable hotel and, even better, it’s efficient. We got up late, at the fall of night and took a turn around the vicinity.

  In the perfumed gardens of the hotel we made the acquaintance of a sort of the driver of a taxi who offered to be our guide. He said he was called Ramón something or other and he produced a very filthy wrinkled identity card to prove this. He then proceeded to drive us through a labyrinth of palms and parked cars in the direction of that broad avenue which the haveneros[11] call La Rampa, with her stores and clubs and restaurants on both sides and her neon signs and heavy traffic and people going up and down the ramp which gives the avenue her name. It isn’t at all bad, a bit like Frisco. We wanted to see the Tropicana, the Night-club which bills itself as “the most fabulous cabaret in the world.” Mrs. Campbell had almost made the journey specially to visit
it. We, or rather she, decided we would have dinner in there. Meanwhile, we went to see a movie which we had wanted to see in Miami and had lost. The movie house was near the hotel and it was new and modern and was air-conditioned.

  We returned to the hotel to change ourselves for the occasion. Mrs. Campbell insisted I should wear an evening dress. She would put on her finest evening gown. As we were leaving my leg started to hurt again, probably because of the cold air in the movie house and the hotel, and I took the stick with me. Mrs. Campbell raised no objection. On the contrary, she found it peculiar.

  Tropicana is localized outside the town. It is a sylvan cabaret. The gardens grow right up to the roads leading to it and every square yard is overgrown with trees and bushes and lianas and epiphytes which Mrs. Campbell insisted were orchids, and classical statues and fountains with running water, everywhere, and spotlights with occult colors. The nightclub can be described as physically fabulous: that is its highpoint, but the spectacle for the most part never gets airborne and is simply dull, like in every Latin cabaret, I suppose, with naked half women dancing the rumba and mulattoes shouting their stupid songs and pretentiously dressed singers struggling with the style of old Bing,[12] in Spanish, of course. The national drink of Cuba it is called a Daiquiri, a mishmash which can best be described as a rum ice-cream-soda-cum-cocktail-on-the-rocks, good for the general Cuban climate which is not far from a hot oven. In the streets outside, I mean, because this cabaret had inside the “typical Cuban air-conditioned”, so they told us, which is the same as saying that they take the temperature of the North Pole and box it up in a room. There is a twin cabaret without a roof beside in the aire libre which one wasn’t using this particular night because they were waiting for rain at about 11 o’clock. These Cubans are good meteorologists. We had just begun eating one of those meals that Cubans call international, catholically greasy and full of things cooked in deep fry and the meat is too salty and the desserts are too sweet, when the rain started falling down so strongly we could hear it above the sound of the music. I say this to suggest how violent a Cuban storm can be because there are few things on this earth that make more noise than a typical Cuban band. For Mrs. Campbell this was the climax, the high pinnacle, the acme of the evening, what with the sophisticated savagery of the environments, the jungle, the rain, the music, the food and the sylvan pandemonium she was quite simply enchanted. We might have been visiting Las Encantadas. Everything would have come out passable or even pleasant upon switching to bourbon and soda[13] when it almost began to feel like home, if only then this emcee[14] who was a real maricón[15] had not started introducing the artistes to the public and the public to the artistes and everyone to everyone else and finally, to round it off, this hick or idiot of an emcee sent someone off to ask us our names proper and introduced us in that incredible English of his. Not only did he take me for one of the soup people, which is a frequent and supportable mistake, but he also said (over the loudspeaker, what’s morel) that I was an international playboy. What barbarity! Maybe he meant the Playboy of the Western World.[16] But it didn’t look at me that way. And what do you imagine Mrs. Campbell had been doing all this time? She was laughing, in stitches, laughing till the tears rolled down her face. Having a delirium!

  It was well after midnight when we left the cabaret, and it had stopped raining and the air was cool and fresh, a new day scrubbed clean. We were both intoxicated, but I didn’t forget my stick. I grasped it in one hand while with the other I did the same for Mrs. Campbell. Our chauffeur-guide-physical counselor, this Virgil of the Inferno of the night, insisted on taking us to see another class of show. Mr. and Mrs. Campbells were bien borrachos. D,r,u,n,k. Mrs. Campbell found it very exciting, which didn’t surprise me. I have to admit that for my part it was a disagreeable and boring function, and I believe I slept over a piece of it. The function, as they call it, is a local by-product of the tourist industry by which the cab drivers double up as men or salesmen at the same time. They take you there without asking you and before you really realize what’s happening, there you are inside! By inside I mean that you are in a house that looks like any other on this street, but when the door closes behind us visitors they take you through a corridoors[17] to an inner sanctum or penetralia, like a living room but with seats all around the circumference like one of those off-Broadway theaters that were so after a fashion in the mid-fifties, a cross between an arena and a theater, only this time the arena isn’t a stage but an enormous round centrally-placed bed. A Ganymede[18] offers you some beverages (which you pay for, of course) and they are much more expensive than the drinks at the Tropicana) up to the high balls ( ? ) and later but not much later when all the guests have arrived and every body is accommodated, they put out the light[19] and then put on the lights (one red and the other blue) above the bed, so you can see the scene with discretion and at the same time forget the presence of your neighbor which you might find somehow embarrassing. Then the two women come in, severely naked. They go to bed together and compromise themselves in some really unhealthy gymnastics, which are indecent and completely unhygienic. At the climax, the lights flash on and off and the couple becomes a single woman, screaming, because such cries are the most common form of expression in Cuba. Then a third actor is brought in, a Negro Black, naked, pitch-black now because of the lights an Othello in search of profit, a professional Lothario, Superman they called him, with an exaggeratedly large penis which he wields shamefully to add to that terribly intimate love play that the double (or quadruple because there is a broad focal mirror on the platform) Desdemona is playing, and they seem to get a great deal of pleasure out of the final act. There were a number of Officers of the marines naval officers in the public and it all seemed very anti-American, but they were also enjoying the show and it’s not part of my business whether the Armada go there in or out of uniform. After the show they turned up all the lights and there goes a nerve! the two little girls (that is because they were very young) and the negro black bowed to the audience. This Samson Sex and his young associates made some jokes at the expense of my dinner jacket and black tie and the walking stick, in Spanish of course, and with appropriate gestures, standing right in front of us completely in the skin, and the Marines were dying of laughter while Mrs. Campbell tried hard, but without success, not to laugh. Finally the Negro Black went up to one of the officers and said to him in a very effete and fractured English that he hated women most and this time the marines cracked up and Mrs. Campbell did the same. Everyone applauded a round of applause including me.

  We slept late on Saturday morning and went out nigh on eleven o’clock to go to Varadero, a beach exactly at a hundred and forty-one kilometres to the East of Havana and we stayed there the rest of the day. The sun was as relentless as usual, but the sight of the calm, open multicolored ocean and the dazzlingly white dunes and the pseudo-pine trees and the sunshades made of palm fronds and the wooden villas along the shore with their late Victorian mannerisms were something that Natalie Kalmus could have imitated. I took out many photos in color of course, but also some in B & W,[20] and I was very glad I had gone there. There were no people or music or porters, or cab drivers or emcees or who prostitutes to make me look ridiculous or despicable and/or just plain silly. Paradise Gained? Not quite. At the end of the day I had blisters all over my shoulders and arms and a terrible heartburn to match, the product of eating an excessive amount of shellfishes at lunch. I tried vainly to prevent them with Bromo-S[21] and cold cream—tossing the stomach powder down with water and rubbing the ointment all over me, not vice versa. To no avail. Dusk also brought with it a horde of Transylvanic[22] mosquitoes. We beat up a hasty retreat to Havana.

  I was delighted to find my walking stick waiting for me in my room, neglected and almost forgotten because the sun and the sand and the redoubled heat had alleviated the pain in my leg. All our sunburn, and other discomforts were forgotten and Mrs. Campbell and I went downstairs and stayed in the bar until very late, listening to more of
this extremist music which gives her so much pleasure and which was a little softer now, muffled by the night and the curtains of the room, and I felt very good with my walking stick by my side.

  The following morning and a beautiful sunday morning it was too we sent Ramón away until it was lunch, when he would return to the hotel to pick us up and take us away for ever. The ferry was programmed for navegating at three in the afternoon. Then we decided to visit Havana Vieja[23] and grab a last look at the neighborhood and buy some more souvenirs. You will see that once more hers it was rather than our decision. We bought them (“Now there”, said Sra. Campbell, “that’s just the place for you”) in a tourist shop opposite an old Spanish fort which had fallen into disrepair. Abierto Cada Día it said, Including Sundays. English spoken. Laden with cadeaus[24] we decided to sit down impromptu and have agreeably cool drinks in an old café, which Sra. Campbell had spotted on the other side of the plaza, two blocks distant. El Viejo Café it was called redundantly, but it fitted in perfectly with the calm, picturesque, suffocating atmosphere of a civilized sunday down there in the old part of the Spanish city.

  We sat there for about an hour or so drinking, and then we asked for the check and paid and left. We had gone about three blocks when I remembered that I had left my stick in the café and I went back. Nobody seemed to have seen or noticed it and nobody seemed particularly surprised. So strange an occurrence hardly raises an eyebrow in these countries. I went out again feeling mortified and far more depressed than I should have been by such trivial a loss.

  “The world is full of walking sticks, darling”, Mrs. Campbell said and I remember seeing myself looking at her fixedly, not coldly or out of the corner of my anger but in a state of trance, incapable of turning away from the glorious splendor of this Doctor Pangloss of an emancipated woman.