Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

  He recited gray darkened passages from what he called his Dicktionary of Contaguous Words end Andless Idees, which of source I cannot remember in their entitirety, but I can give you many of his past words and the explanations, not definitions which their author indented: Aha, Anna, deed, Eve, gig, Hannah, noon, poop, radar, wow, which upsidedome explains why I’m sodown, and finally regretting in passing away the fact that Adam wasn’t called Adá in Spanish (would he be called like that in Catalá? He wondered) because then not only would he be the first man but he’d also be perfect and the only man right enough to name things, and declaring that noon was logically the zenith of the day just as deed when it is written done has a completeness which says what it means and the number 101 should be praised one hundred times because it was like 88 (glory be) a total number, round, identical to itself eternity cannot change it nor space wither nor time stale and however you look at it it is always the same, another one, even though the plus perfect of perfect numbers was, is, the 69 (to Rine’s great Joy) which is the absolute number always differing and never the shame, not only Pythagorically (which, but exactly, bugged Cué) Platonically as well and (which tickled Silvestre: a mystic bond of broaderhood made them both one, Don One) Alcmeonic, because it closed in on itself and the sum of its farts plus the sum of the sound was equal (Cué walked out at this point) to the last figure and I don’t know how many other pseudo numberical complications which always drove C. crazy and when he was leaving B. called at him in the doorway with Cuban Malice, And what does that innuend, gentlemen!

  Bustrofrankbuck spent all his time hunting wild words in the dictionaries (his semantic safaris) when he went out of sight, and out of mind (his not ours) and shut himself up with a dictionary to bring ‘em words back alive, and any dictionary, it didn’t matter which, in his room, driving into the rough sketches of letters, became his dictumnary, eating out of it at oddmeals, taking a bath with/in it sleeping with/on it with words as a pillow waiting for sunup/or/down: It by His side sliding in and out of It, not a book- but a dictionary-worm, because dictionaries were all he read and he said, he said to Silvestre that they were better than dreams, better than masturboratory fansies, better than glu movies. Better than Hitchcock o belie me! Because the dictionary created its suspense with one word lost in a wood of words (not like needles in a haystack which are easy to find, but one particular pin in a pincushion) and there was the wrong word and the word innocent and the word guilty and the word-assassin and the word-police and the word-chase and the wordrescue-patrol in the last word-reel and lastly the word end, and because the suspense of the dictionary lay in seeing oneself looking desperately for a word up and down the columns until one found it and when it turned up seeing that it meant something different, this was better than one’s surprise at the last real, and the one thing he truly and reely regretted was that the dictionary the dictionaries have hardly any obscenities in them as this Bustrofunkandwagnalls knew them all by heart as he also knew by heart and played by ear the definition of the word dog in the Diccionario Manual llustrado de la Real Academia Española (2a.ed., Madrid, 1958, p.1173/a): M., domestic mammal of the family of canidae, of varying size, shape and color according to the breed, but which always has its tail shorter than its hind legs (and he paused at this pointer) one of which the male of the species lifts in order to urinate, and he went on with his happy trip around the words:

  Tit

  eye

  nun

  kayak

  level

  sexes (everything starts with them three)

  radar

  civic

  sos (the most helpful)

  gag (the funniest)

  boob

  and for years he missed Miss Gardner lovesickly because he said, Ava was the ideal woman, and he went crazy over the simihilarity between allegory and allergy and causality and casualty and chance and change, and how easily farce becomes force, and he also made a list of words that read differently in the mirror:

  Live/ evil

  part/ trap

  flow/ wolf

  diaper/ repaid

  reward/ drawer

  drab/ bard

  Dog/ God!

  and from this blastphemy he used to jump into concussions, what he called his anagogic anagrams:

  cats scat

  risk irks

  wells swell

  Spain pains

  cars scar

  to end his high IQ in hai-kus:

  I saw, I was

  Psychic, chic spy.

  Eve, Adam’s rib:

  A maid, a bride:

  Eve!

  BUT

  Eve’s mad:

  A river’s dam

  Is bad:

  I’ve made bras!

  and he showed the changes in muted and/or mutant syllables like anon and onan and navel and venal and late and tale in endless alchemies, and he explained and expounded and explosed as he played with words till three in the morning (we knew what time it was because they were playing the waltz Three O’clock in the Morning Waltz) when he hit the jackityjackpot of the spot that tops the post with a stop of pots and puns. That was the night that was exactly the same as another night when he wore Cué out with his new system of discontinuous numeration based on a proverb he’d read (probably B. would prefer to say heard) I don’t know where about (we ignore his presidents whoreabouts, Ho Ho Ho!) a figure being equal to a million and in which the numbers have no value fixed or determined by their position or order but they have an arbitrary and fluctuating or totally fixed value, and you could count, for example, from 1 to 3 and after the 3 or course the 4 didn’t come but 77 or 9 or 1563 and he said that some day they would discover that the whole system of postal addresses was in Error, that the logical thing would be to give numbers to the street and a name to every house and he declared that the idea paralleled his new system for baptizing brothers in which they’d all have different last names but the same first name, and aside from Cué being completely pisstaken (I’m sorry, there’s no other word for it, a pissword) it was the short and happy night of frank comradery until the we ours, and wee were all amused (said B. : I’m not amused, am used) when in the Dewville Silvestre picked up a card that a croupier had discarded, the two of diamonds, and he said he could say what was the up or the down of the card, not the obverse or reverse, but that he knew how to set it right, put it on its feet, fix it, by pure intuition, so he said, meaning that the two of diamonds, it’s well known, always falls on its two feet and Bustro was delighted to find a graphic palindrome and defied Silvestre to destroy it once he knew its true position and Cué said Silvestre was cheating and Silvestre got bugged and Bustrófedon took his side saying it was impossible to cheat with a single card and he persuaded Silvestre to show us the game of polygamy (that was what he called it) and Silvestre asked us all, aside from B., if we knew exactly what was a hexagon and Rine said it was a six-sided polygon and Cué said it was a solid object with six surfaces and Silvestre said it was a hexahedron and then I began drawing one (Eribó wasn’t there, of courset: otherwise he’d have done it) on a piece of paper

  And then Silvestre said that really it was a cube that had lost its third dimension and he completed it like this

  and he said that when the hexagon found its lost dimension again and we knew how it did it, we’d be able ourselves to find the fourth and fifth and other dimensions and travel freely between them (along the diMason Avenue, B. said, pointing to Eribó’s former pukebiscity aliency) and enter a picture, across the frame and into the motion picture, then to move frame by frame at twenty-four paces a second, and one more step and stop on a point as on a full-stop, then travel from present to future or to past or to that side of paradise just by opening a door, and Rine took the chance to talk about his inventions, like the machine that would turn us into a light ray (into a shadow ray too, I said) and it would send us to Mars or Venus (that’s where I’d like to go, said Vustrofedon) and far away and long will be another machine would tur
n us re, would make the light beam into lights and solid shadows and so we’d become tourists of time-space, and Cué said it was the same technique as the stage coaches and B. said they weren’t the stage but the space coaches man-aged by H. G. Wells Far-go & Co., and Cué made the error (which B. spelt misstake) of telling how he’d once thought of a love tale in which a man on earth knew there was a woman on a planet in another galaxy (Bustrófedon was already saying she’d gone the way of all milk, translating from cow Latin) whom he was in love with and he went crazy with love for her and they both knew that it was the genuine love because they would never-never meet and they’d have to love each other in the silence of infinite space and of corpse Bustrófedon brought the skeletal evening to a closet bugging Cué by saying they were Tristar and Isolstice, and so we all blundered and stumbled off each to his humble home, homble for short (by way of the desert, for short-cut) when, by a strange chance (change-stance), we met up in Las Vegas with Arsenio Cué, who’d been evading our invasion (or invading our evasion) all evening because he was with a woman vulgo tore or wart (and if I talk like Bustrófedon from now on till the end of mine I’m not sorry except that I do it consciously & conscientiously and the only thing I regret is that I can’t talk normally and naturally and all the time (by all the time I mean time past as well as time future) like this and forget about the light and the shadows and the chiaroscuro (about photos for shot, because one word from him is worth a thousand images), a blond, tall, white, white-white, real, pretty, photogenic, a, model, who was a silk-screen repro of herself and Cué put on his leaden face and his radiant voice and B. told him the club was full of simple elements and that we’d probably turned his saturnalia into a saturnine joint, and it was then that Bustrope invented that criminal slogan of Arsenic and old lays, which we turned into a hymn to the night until the night ended and when I wanted to go on hymning and make it into a humn to the dawn of the Magi, Rine said you’re an haurora bore all is, so I’d shot my bolt and I shut my mouth and shat my ass silently but on kulchur which always comes and balls things up (if you’re having a ball) with its sado-metaphysicks.

  That was the last time (if I forget what I want to forget, which is why I put in this apparent thesis, to put a period to my memory: Saturday night and Sunday mourning) that I saw Bustropharaoh (as Silvestre sometimes said) and if you don’t see him alive you don’t see him, and it was really Silvestre who saw him last. Alive. The very evening before this Bustrofilmfan as he was called that week by us, not by everybody or for all time, just by us, had turned up and told me that B.’d been taken to the hospital and I thought they were going to operate on his eye because he had a bad but not evil eye that squinted, squandered and wandered in the jungle of the night: one of his eyes aimed, as Silvestre always said, at lettre and the other at le neon or at the nothing in being, at nothingnest, and this chameleon seeing was terrible, he said but not complained, a puzzle for his brain so he always had headaches, great sustained, stable and migratory migraines which the poor fellow B. called his paracerebellum or the Brutalcephalalgias or the Bustorrential Brainstorms, and I thought of going to the clinic on Monday at midday when I finished my nightshift, which B., more economically or with less ceremony, called my shight sometimes and other times my nift. But yesterday on Tuesday morning Silvestre calls me and tells me straight out that Bustrófedon had just died and I felt that the phone was telling something that meant the same whichever way round you put it, like one of those games he invented, and I saw that death was a far-out joke: an unknown combination: a palindrome that spilled out of the viscious holes of the eternally in mourning phone stopbathing my soul with a shower of muriatic acid: the ultimate spoilsport.

  And it was at the phone, by a casual or causal chance of life, that Bustrophoneme, Bustromorphosis, Bustromorphema began really to change the names of things, really and truly, for he was already sick, not like in the beginning when he mixed everything up and we couldn’t tell when it was a joke and when it was a yoke. But now though we didn’t know if it was meant to be funny or phony we suspected it was serious, grave, gravely ill. Because it wasn’t only the feca con chele for café con leche he’d taken from the Argentinian lunfard-language in New- York (where he’d met Arsenio Cué off course: he was the first to see, the first to hear him, his disc-overer), as from gotan, which isn’t Gotham but the reverse of tango, he derived the barum which is the opposite of the rumba to be danced in reversed gear, with the head on the floor and moving the knees instead of the hips. Or his recitation of his Numbers (more, later) which are: Amerigoes Prepucci and Hareun al-Hashish and Nevertitty, and Antigreppine the mother of Nehro and Dungs Scrotum and el con de Orgasm and Sheets and Kelly and Fuckner and Scotch Fizzgerald and Somersault Mom and Julius Seizure and Bertolt Bitch and Alexander the Hungrate and Charles le Magnate and Depussy and Mayor Wagner who wrote the Lord of the Rings and that cockieyed musical compositor Igor Strabismus and Prickasso and the philosopher avec le savoir-faire De Sartre (also called Le Divan Maquis) and Georges BricaBraque and Elder de Broiler and Gerónimo Ambusch and Versneer and Vincent Bongoh (to bug Silvio Sergio Ribot, better known as Eribó, thanks to B period) and wanting to write a roman a Klee, about a painter that lost its tale, and things-stings like forming an airway company to rivald Aer Lingus and with cunning call it Cunny Lingus, and likenesses like calling Atanasia by the name of Euthanasia (she was the cook at the Cassalis’, so she only cooked Cassalores) or his cuntpetitions with Rine Leal, whom he once beat by a short head (Rine was lowering his I-brows at the time) saying that the Ukrainians had U-shaped heads and that their real name was Ucraniums, or just Craniums, if they happened to be non-U) or his put-ons like turning up saying he’d come implacably dressed when he meant dressed to kill or Cuémpeting with Silvestre to hear who could make the greatest number of variations on the name of Cué, on Cué, or for X sample pseudonaming me Códac (it was a second baptism for me, a baptism of fireworks because the first initialtory write had washed off after the immersion, so the logo of Kodak, once revealed, blew up and superimposed on my prosaic habanero name the uninversal and graphic mark of my trade) saying, Come forth, Lazarus Ludwig the Second, knowing, as he knew, everything there is to be known about Ido and Volapuk and Dr. Esperanto and the Neo and Novial and after Idiom Neutral the beautiful front of Novesperanto with its Saussuges plus playing his Peano’s and using & abusing the Basest English (for Forforeigners) and easing out the easiest and most perfect language, Malayalam, and expounding his theory that contrary to what happened in the Muddle Edges, when seven (7) languages all different came out of a single language like Latin or German or even Slav, in the tense future these twenty-one (he stared at Cué as he said it) languages would turn into one single long language based on or sticking to or on a guided turn with English, and man (and/or woman) would speak at least in this partition of the world and till eternity do us part an enormous lingua frangla, a sensible, possible, stable Babel. But at the same time and in the same breath this man B. was a termite attacking the scaffolding of the tower before they’d even thought of building it because every day he laid the Spanish language waste saying in imitation of Vitor Perla (whom he called Von Zeppelin because of the shape of his helium-filled head), saying sotisphicated and etoxic and decilious or boasting he had asex to the innard depths of a subject or complaining that they didn’t understand his mal-or-odous humor in Cuba but taking a comforter in the thought that he’d be praised overseas or in that abroad of time which is the future. Because, he Mused, no man is a mofette in his own country.

  When I’d finished listening to Silvestre, without saying anything, before hanging up, hanging up the suddenly black terror-phone, in morning that mourning, I said to myself, Fuck and shit, the whole world dies! Meaning the happy and the sad, geniuses and morons, the open and the inhibited and the cheerful and the gloomy and the ugly and the beautiful and damned and the bearded and the shaven and those with five-o’clock shadows and the tall and the short and the vicious and the innocent and the strong
and the weak and the meek inheritors and the immortal and all the bald people too: everybody and even people like Bustrófedon who could make out of a couple of words and four letters a hymn and a joke and a song, these people, they also die and their memory dies too and even their songs die too, a little bit later perhaps but they die and ideas also die, so I said, Fuck! And nothing more—and right after that I said shit.

  It was later, today, right now that I learned that in the autopsy before the funeral, which I refused to go to because Bustrófedon stuffed away in there, in that coffin, wasn’t Bustrófedon but something else, just a thing, a useless bit of trash preserved down there in a strong box out of custom, when they’d finished trepanning Bustrófedon’s skull in the form of a question mark for science and they pulled his brains out of their natural resting place and the psychopathologist had taken it in his hands and played with it and scratched its surface and patted its top as much as he felt like and had discovered finally that he had a lesion (he, poor guy, would have called it a lesson) since he was a kid, or earlier, from birth, or before he was even formed and that a bone (what do you think, Silvestre and Cué: an aneurysm, an embolism or a bubble in the humorous vein?), a knot in the spinal column, something like that, which pressed on his brain and made him say all those marvelous things and play with words so he ended his life as a new Adam, giving everything a name as though he really was inventing language (him talking to Dragon Lady, to Death: Madam I’m Adam) and Death proved him right, not him but that doctor who killed him, who didn’t murder him, no, please don’t get me wrong, he didn’t even want to kill him, he wanted to save him, in his fashion, a scientific fashion, a medical fashion, because he was a philanthropist, a humanitarian, a Doctor Sch (you know who) whose Lambsarena was the orthopedic hospital where there were so many deformed children ,and paralytic women and invalids in his care, who opened the skull shaped like B. to get rid of once and for always (terrifying word, that: always, eternity, the fucker) the repetitions and changes and alliteration or alterations in spoken reality, what the doctor called, to, please Silvestre where it pleasured him most, bang in the middle of his hypocondria, tickling his scientific ribs, almost imitating Bustrófedon himself, but of courses with his medical qualifications, his diploma for genescide, the Dr and period among all the ornamental lettering and little drawings and signatures guaranteeing the impossible, using longer technical and medical words which all went to prove that all experts are liars but as people always believe in them they are always the greatest liars, saying Aesculapius’ jargon, with Galen’s stone (a philosopher’s stone, or a touchstone or, more simply, a gallstone or a Keystone, or a tombstone, Arizona?), saying “aphasia,” “disphasia,” “ecolalia,” things like that, explaining, very pretendentiously. So Silvestre said, that it was Strictly speaking, a loss of the power of speech: of oral discrimination or if you prefer me to be more specific, a defect not of phonation, but derived from a dysfunction, possibly a decomposition, an anomaly produced by a specific pathology, which in its last stages dissociated the cerebral function from the symbolism of thinking by means of speech, or—no no no for chrissakes! it’s perfectly clear just as it is and you should leave him in peaces, can’t you see doctors are the last elephantine pedants left, the only mammoths of palaeolitery pedantry still alive now that the megaesoteric J’aime Joys and Earza Pounk and Teas Eliot are gone—with the possumble exception of the foulaired George Ludwig Borgid? These are the hypocritical pretexts, the diagnosis to camouflage the perfect murder, the Hyppocratic alibi, the medical excuses, but what he actually wanted was to see in what corner of Bustrófedon’s skull (his Bucranium as Silvestre the disciple called it zoo aptly), to find the particular habitation and place where ordinary clumsy language and commonplace logic and everyday words (our daily breath) were so marvelously changed into Bustro’s magic nightwords, which you couldn’t even preserve in that formol of memory called nostolgia because I, who am, was, the one who saw most of him, wasam very bad at keeping words when they don’t have anything to do with the photo (above right) and even then it’s a wreckedched caption I write with caution and I always have to have it corrected by somebody—like this one. But if the games, the dursty yokes as Cassalis’ mother used to say, are all lost and so I can’t repeat them, I don’t want to forget (so far as I preserve them: not in the memoria memoranda of Silvestre—his formol logic—nor in Arsenio Cué’s feedback in anger nor in Rine’s criptical mass, nor in the exact photocopy I’ve never been able to make, but in my tallboy drawer, alone among the negatives of a memorable half-Indian half-Negro woman, mon violon d’Indegro, the picture, the naked affiche-davit of her white flesh against black light, her Rubensian flash as Juan Blanco would say and one or two letters that have and have not any importance other than what they had when written and the telegram from Poppy Fields, my god, what kind of a pseudo-pseudonym’s that, the telegram that was once blue and is now yellow and which still says in a Spanish learnt on the radio: TIME AND DISTANCE MAKE ME UNDERSTAND I LOST YOU STOP: write this, gentlemen of the jury, and give it to the telegraph officer at Santiago—doesn’t this show that women are either right out of their heads or that they have more cojones than Maceo e-pony-must and his heroic horse’s balls as well?) his parodies, those we taped at Cué’s place, which Arsenio taped rather and which I then copied and which I never wanted to return to Bustrófedon, still less after his discussion with Arsenio Cué and the radical decision they both made to wipe the tapes clean—each with a different and opposite motive. That’s why I kept this thing that Silvestre wanted to call memorabilia, and which I now return to its rightful owner, folklore. (A nice sentence, ain’t it? Too bad it’s not mine.)