Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

  THE DEATH OF TROTSKY AS DESCRIBED BY VARIOUS CUBAN WRITERS, SEVERAL YEARS AFTER THE EVENT—OR BEFORE

  José Martí

  (1853-1895)

  THE HATCHET JOB

  Legend has it that the stranger didn’t ask where he might eat or drink, but only where he could find the house with the adobe wall around it; and that, without so much as shaking the dust of his journey off both his feet, he made for his destination, which was the last retreat of Leon Son-of-David Bronstein: the prophet of that new-time religion who was to become the eponymous founder of its first heresy: messiah, apostle and heretic in one. The traveler, one Jacob Mornard, warped and twisted, and accompanied only by his seafaring hatred, had finally arrived in the notorious sanctuary of the Exile whose family name means stone of bronze and whose frank, fiery features were those of a rebellious rabbi. Furthermore, the old man was distinguished by his haughty and farsighted gaze underneath his horn-rimmed glasses; his oratorical gestures—like those of the men of the Greek agora not of the Hebrew agora; his woolly and knitted brows; and his sonorous voice, which usually reveals to ordinary mortals those whom the Fates have destined, from the cradle, to profound eloquences: all this and his goatee gave the New Wandering Jew a biblical countenance.

  As for the future magnicide: his troubled appearance and the awkward gait of the born dissident were sketches of a murderous character which would never, in the dialectic mind of the assassinated Sadducee, find completion to cast, in the historical mold of a Cassius or even a Brutus, the low relief of an infamous persona.

  Soon they were master and disciple; and while the noble and hospitable expatriate forgot his worries and afflictions, and allowed affection to blaze a trail of warmth in a heart that had anciently been frozen with reserve, his felonious follower seemed to carry in the stead of a heart something empty and nocturnal, a black void in which the slow, sinister and tenacious fetus of the most ignoble treachery was able to take roots and strike. Or perhaps, perchance it was a mean cunning that looked for revenge; because they say that at the back of his eyes he always carried a secret resentment against that man whom, with faultless subterfuge, he was in the habit of calling Master, using the capital letter that is reserved only for total obedience.

  On occasions they could be seen together and although the good Lev Davidovich—we can call him that now, I suspect, even if in his lifetime he concealed with an initial this middle name that spelled yarmulke, and carried false credentials—took extreme precautions—because there were not lacking, as in the previous Roman tragedy, evil omens, the revelatory imagery of premonitions, or the ever-present habit of foreboding—he always granted audience in solitude to the taciturnal visitor, who was at times, as on the day of misfortune, both adviser and supplicant. This crimson Judas carried in his pale hands the manuscript in which his treachery was patently written with invisible ink; and over his thin blueish and trembling body he wore a Macfarlane, which would, to any eye more given to conjecture and suspicion, have given him away on that suffocatingly hot Mexican evening: distrust was not the strong point of the Russian rebel: nor systematic doubt: nor ill will a force of habit: underneath the coat the crafty assailant carried a treacherous hoof-parer: the magnicidal adze: an ice pick: and under the ax was his soul of guided emissary of the new Czar of Russia.

  The trusting heresiarch was glancing attentively over the pretended scriptures, when the hatchet man of the Party delivered his treacherous blow and the steely shaft bit deep into that most noble head.

  A cry resounded through the cloistered precincts and the sbirri (Haití had refused to send her eloquent Negroes) ran there in great haste and eager to convert the assassin into a prisoner. The magnanimous Marxian still had time to advise: “Thou shalt not kill,” and his inflamed followers did not hesitate to respect his instructions to the hilt.

  Forty-eight hours of hopes, tears and vigil the formidable agony of that luminous leader lasted, dying as he had lived: in struggle. Life and a political career were no longer his: in their stead glory and historical eternity belonged to him.

  José Lezama Lima

  (1912-1965)

  THE NUNCUPATIVE WILL OF A CRUSADER

  +++MOST-TRANSPARENT-REGION-OF-THE-AIR, July 16 (NP)—Lev Davidowitch Bronstein, the onomastic vicar forane of the Bolsheviki, presently ambulating under the pseudonym of Troztky [sic], died today in this megapolis in Wagnerian angst, amidst the profoundest sympathies of sycophants and seneschals alike, exhaling rounds and catches like ecumenical melismata after his protégé, an uncertain Jacopus Momardus or Merceder [sic], pulled out with scholastic secrecy from a vesture feignedly discipular but in actuality deceitful and traitorous, a deicidal weapon conveniently hidden under that tautological cloak to end abruptly the ne’er-yarmulked diaspora which has had its inception, by just analogy, on the island of Prinkipo. The assassin did not employ, as reported, a bare bodkin. There were faint murmurs that the pseudo apostate drew out on that crepuscular Valpurgis nach [sic] a killer pick or puncheon or perhaps a malevolent-cum-endwishing alpen-stock, and nailed it with murderous intent to that tête so heavily laden with thesis and antithesis and para-diaboloid synthesis. The sharp-edged tool dived deep into the stubborn, dialectical tufty mane of the Steppenlowe, or feline of the steppes, whose roaring was as philosophically shallow as ideologically naïve: obliterated this image, formerly so aurorean and now vespertine, which validates the symbol of the orthodox and later heretical father, terminating with extreme political prejudice such singular opposition. Of course, Mollnard [sic] himself ended up by solely imposing his favori to his companions, just one more incipient inmate in the mysterious and innumerable corridors of Lecumberri, locked minotaurically in his duplex labyrinth of silence and allegiance: a shrewd sicarius or an autistic automaton? Lew Davidovicht [sic sic] before exhaling his final, so revelatory and apocalyptic last gasp, it is known here to have said, in a sort of spoken twilight of the gods in exile, in a Marx-Engelian Strugund-Drame [sic sic sic], in a materialist version of the Last Supper, or rather like another John of Pannonia taking exception to the violent intrusion of the arguments of a new Aurelian in his ideological privacy, these infamous last words quote I feel like one possessed who has just been penetrated bodily . . . by a soft assegai unquote+++

  Virgilio Piñera

  (1914-1966)

  AFTERNOON OF THE KILLERS

  I believe with my heart crossed that nobody ever knows whom he is working for. This handsome young man, Mornard (here and entre nous, I can say that his real name is Santiago Mercader and that he is Cuban; I mention it because I know that all this is food for the gossipmongers), went to Mexico to kill on purpose Leon D. Trotsky, this lion of Russian letters, while he was showing the master some of his writings for him to read and criticize. Trotsky never knew that Mornard was working as a ghost writer for Stalin. Mornard never knew that Trotsky was working like a dog for literature. Stalin never knew that Trotsky and Mornard were working like slaves (excuse the simile) for history.

  When Mornard arrived in the lands of the Aztecs the night was as dark as an inkpot and his intentions were black as ink or as the night, good only for moonshining. The assassin was not, as is usually the case with epigones, an original mind. He has of course his historical antecedents, as the history of this vale of tears is full of violence. This is why I have so great a hatred for historians, because I detest violence with all the strength of my soul. But violence seems to be the motivating force of this piccolo mondo that we live in. Although there is violence and violence. And then some.

  For example, there is no doubt that the French aristocracy was in a state of decadence when the Revolution and Danton, Marat and company decimated it. But only a little before it had what is called its golden age, son age d’or. This is an epoch which I know inside out, because I haven’t neglected to read a single one of the memoirs that were written during that epoch or before or after and . . . but not to weary you with an erudition that I detest as I detest all specialists, scholars,
etcetera, I must say I am thoroughly acquainted with all the tittle-tattle of the Aristocratie. An aristocracy which, let it be said in passing, was rotten through and through, like the Palais de Versailles, which had to be abandoned every six months while everyone went to the Louvre, because the staircases and corridors and salons had been converted into a pigsty with all the feces and stools of nobles and aristocrats. The same thing happened six months later with the Louvre. Did you know that the royal dentist of that time instead of pulling out a back tooth of Louis XIV extracted a piece of bone the same size from the soft palate and the poor man contracted so great an infection that he had such a case of halitosis that nobody was able to go near the Sun King for fear of getting nasal sunstroke? Just like that. But this could never have been sufficient justification for a quid pro quo like the guillotine, because cutting off your ruler’s head is not the best way of curing him of bad breath.

  But revenons a nos moutons . . . and to those who make mutton of them. This young fellow, Mornard, came to kill Mr. Trotsky, who was writing his memoirs—in a style which, to be strictly truthful, was much better than that of Stalin, Zhdanov, and the other Cossacks. It wouldn’t surprise me if they had ordered him to be killed out of envy, a sin that grows like poisonous ivy in literary circles, otherwise why would Antón Arrufa say that a book should be a pistol? Obviously to aim the book at me and shoot, literarily speaking, point-blank. But Piñera lives!

  This is the problem that all the masters have to face with their disciples, epigones, followers, etc., and L. D. Trotsky should never have tried to teach these people how to write. Teaching (above all in literature) doesn’t pay. And here we come to the “kernel” of the problem. I presume that when Trotsky decided to write his drama—because to say it once and for all and unreservedly, the memoirs of the men who make or have made or will make history are nothing other than historical dramas—a drama, I repeat to say it again, which treats of the antagonism between master and disciples, and in which he was forced to choose between a realistic, a social realist, an epic or a symbolic treatment, he chose the last. And why did he choose the symbolic? those who are inclined to ask questions will ask.

  He chose it then because he preferred the symbolic and he chose it so to speak like an animal, instinctively, for the same unreason as we choose stewed meat instead of baked fish when confronted with the menu containing both items—simply because we prefer our meat stewed. So it was that, to put it as crudely as possible, Trotsky ordered stewed meat. Now, does the choice of stewed meat or of the symbolic presuppose the existence of a master-disciple antagonism or a literary mayhem—or mythifying and mystifying and mystimythifying and mythimystifying of the occasioners of this antagonism or combat between baked fish and stewed meat? Or, to say it with as little pedantry as possible, the ichthyosarcomachy. Made mincemeat, as it were. Only this. In a setting (and it was nothing else—let it be said once and for all, this château or fortress in which the criminal assassinated his victim was a stage) that was realistic or socialist realist or social realist they appeared demystified and demythified and demystified or demythimystified; in an epic they would divide the roles, technically speaking, of heroes and villains. In Trotsky’s tragedy he was a sort of Russian Agamemnon while the Soviet Union was Clytemnestra—Russia—they are mythifiers and mythimystiflers or mystimythifiers of their own political persona. But the antagonism would be the same, to be perfectly precise about it, in the two or three or four possible conceptions.

  It raises, as if with a hand, the following, and very hard, penetrating question: that of the good or bad conscience of the writer. Did Trotsky gamble away his “bad conscience” by choosing the symbolic conception of his assassination? Should he, instead, have had recourse to his “good conscience” by choosing the realistic or social realist or socialist realist or epic conception of the above-mentioned act, so terribly personal?

  These two questions prompt us to make the following reflection: would the conscience of the assassin have a seamy side, a loose seam where to hem and haw on both sides? Would the good conscience of the assassin, on choosing these two sides of every question, not at the same time be turning itself into a bad conscience because of the exclusion it made of the third or divine conception—that is to say the ideal conscience of the master—the way you turn a glove inside out? Would the man who was being assassinated not impose his own limits, in this case the toughness of his skull resisting the assassin and his piercing instrument, which amounts to the same thing: that is to say this insistent pick? There are here, as a good housekeeper at the marketplace would put it, fruits to be had.

  And by reason of what symbolic conception would he have to obey the bad conscience on the part of the assassin? Or of the assassinee, which amounts to the same thing? In that death in the afternoon of the killers (they won, the killers, the matadors, the assassins, I have to say, because they completed their faena and in this moment of truth or minute de la verité—in the manner of a toreador the disciple delivered the death blow with a puntilla to his bull or father-master-leader) the master-disciple antagonism was brought suddenly to a conclusion. At no point did the conflict or agon (with a child-author this tantrum would have been solved by a good caning from the teacher-father) suffer any diminution, nor, to use the language of the professional parlor magician, was there any sleight of hand; at no point did the expiation of the masters and the hubris (or “cockiness”) of the disciples seem less honest than it would have been in the realist or socialist realist or social realist or epic conscience; at no point did the feigned or pretended bad conscience of Trotsky develop, as with his disciples, into the mystimythifying or mythimystifying and mythifying and mystifying of an antagonism proper. Which amounts to saying, anything alien to the genre. Artistic form, ideological content and motivation are fused in one and the same thing: the aired conflict. Or as a gossip columnist would put it: the private feud. Or literary mayhem, as it were.