Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

  II

  He hurled away his cigarette, rolled in corn paper, because somehow it smelled of the custard porridge, made with American maizena, eaten for breakfast in his infancy, of pounded cornmeal served up for desserts, of the preprandial polentas called tayuyos in his native Santiago of yesteryear, and the yellowish maize-made missile hit against the fence formed by lined iron bars hammered into spears with artistic intent no doubt, for, toward the top, they resolved themselves in symmetrical deles, calligraphic signs, borders exquisitely filleted and painted gold, and other ornamental ironwork here and there, not thrown in haphazardly but for good measure. The gate was a grooved portcullis set in motion by pulleys, cables, springs, bolts, turnstiles, block pulleys, racks, axle shafts, bolt holes, toothed wheels, ratchets, mortises and, finally, handles plus the occasional hand of whatever Cerberus was on duty, to whom the simple and memorable password, which he recited in his brazen baritone, should suffice:

  Queste parole di colore oscuro

  vid’io scritte al sommo d’una porta;

  per ch’io: “Maestro il senso lor m’e duro”

  congratulating himself warmly on the splendid Italianate pronunciation that slipped from his lips like a swift Gregorian train. But the smile into which his Dantesque terza rima flowed died the very moment he half heard the gatekeeper, who, for a reply, nonchalantly chanted Avernal words in his perfectly archaized Tuscan dialect:

  Qui si convien lasciare ogni sospetto;

  ogni viltá convien che qui sia morta

  Noi siam venutti al loco oy’io t’ho detto

  che to vedrai le genti dolorose,

  c’hanno perdutto il ben de lo’nteletto.

  Now there was nothing left he could want except that occult and primitive lifting mechanisms would start raising the ferrous door with its bristling iron spikes locked in their base of premonitorially reinforced concrete. He walked down steeply sloping bifid paths bordered by volcanic rubble and gazed at the imposing château-fort which already towered above him. He saw facades that mingled a delirium of styles, where Bramante and Vitruvius disputed the primacy with Herrera and Churriguera and where traces of early Plateresque were fused with a bold display of late Baroque, and if the pediment appeared to be in the classical Greek sharp-edged triangular style it was only an idle guessing game, because you saw immediately that the edge of the portico was in no wise triangulated, and in parts of the entablature, between the screens and the architraves, he noticed some friezes and on the left and right wings there were side arches which supported Catalan vaults that looked like empty crypts, although some of the fascia revealed a certain usefulness or at least a pretension toward being aesthetic, but it disturbed him greatly that the intrados made the voussoir provocative of unforeseeable meditations. It was the upper bracket, with its projecting buttresses which suffered an excess of molding, the element which brought him back to the sumptuous bracket carved with all the delicacy of the Rococo. But what was the reason for the three ogives that were so conspicuously asymmetrical: one of them equilateral, another flamboyant and the third Moorish? Did it mean that the convex moldings with their quarter-circle profile were oval? Would they not be the pivots for still more digressions? Eccentric and possibly paradoxical methods of constructing a facade, because the quarter-round molding instead of being concave molding that we can all recognize at first glance, and which seemed clearly from its profile to be a quarter of a circle, faded away at the edges and on joining the capital adopted circular eccentricities but on descending the column was replaced by a certain formal nonsense, while the facade was at once infested with columns of every order: Ionic, Corinthian, Doric, Doric-Ionic, Solomonian, Theban and between capitals and plinth there extended curiously flutings and grooves, and our visitor was astonished to see the plinths between the base and lower cornice, around the pedestal and not between the frieze and the architrave as other previous visitors who had praised the architects and masterbuilders of these exotic lands had told him. The keystone of this construction system was provided, a rare thing, by the keystone of the building carved in capellanía stone and it was then that he realized that he had been on the right track from the start, and that he made no mistake, because here were the purplish rounded moldings he had expected, the architraves of porphyry he was told to expect and the apophyges with their striations so unexpectedly executed in chartreuse and magenta. This had to be the place of his appointment with historical destiny, and he felt that instead of blood and plasma there was quicksilver flowing mercurially in his peripheral and minor arteries. He arrived at the entrance with its overlapping and superfluous denticles overhanging festoons of cretonne and little cords which imitated an awning so well, and he decided to call out. But first he gazed at the memorable door which did not need the inscription “Per me se va ne la cittá dolente . . . lasciate, etc.”

  III

  A curious door, he said to himself half aloud, while he gazed at the transom, whose frame was classical, though made of quartz, feldspar and mica, elements which, he knew that when combined formed granite, and the door leaves, covered with a coating of metal of a consistency which if it hadn’t been made of steel would have made him think it was iron, with a protective plaque in the place that the keyhole should have occupied, although the door knocker—made of bronze was exactly where it should have been: above the sash, dividing the lower from the upper panels and indicating one of the three hinges, which were also gilded. He didn’t knock. Why? To have done so he would have to have been wearing an iron gauntlet.

  They opened up, surely by putting an eye beam or photoelectric cells into action, and he went in, passing over the threshold and under the lintel without either difficulty or surprise. But no sooner had the heavy doors closed behind his shoulders than he began to feel afraid and he tried to find some support between the door jambs and on feeling his shoulder striking against paneling of steel from Akron, Ohio, he fell back instead against the bevels. The sight before his eyes was indescribable. From the street the whole mansion had the appearance of a castle, fortress or casemate visible because of the absence of triglyphs and metopes over the convexities of the echinus with its apparently Doric frieze, because the soffit did not ascend in the ruled inverted steps, because some parts of the openwork were ramparts, because there were corbels that were reinforced at the angles, and which were not only through their irregularity capable of destroying any order, but also because he noticed watchtowers, loopholes, projections, posterns that had the appearance of sally ports, portholes that gave little or no ventilation, merlons that seemed like parapets over the facing, fortifying the roof tiles and flat roofs above the fluted molding, and inside the patio very strong buttresses and counterforts protected the solid thickness of the wall not far from the innocence of latticework suggesting the mysteries and jealousies of an arbored bower and surrounding it, trellises of flowering judases! Higher, higher up, on the roof, the guttering was disguised with burlap and barbicans for the trompe-l’oeil of the termination of the impluvium, while turrets in an Assyrian-Romanic style were made to look like Gothic flying buttresses and between double windows and lanterns and embrasures that were evidently excessive, rusty catapults and stone cannons, anachronistic gun carriages and short carbines had appeared at some epoch, and between the acroteria, gargoyles and hippogryphs there could well emerge the fearful asymmetry of an opportune franc-tireur. All this made him think that he was among comrades: armed men. But now, once he was inside, all was a cauchemar of inebriated interior decorations. True, the nightmare had already begun in the left wing of the patio where, in order to make a pendant to the austerely priveted gazebo, there was a crumbling monopteric shrine and through the intercolumniation, across the delicately stylish portico, between silent pilasters, a stone block could be seen that was evidently dedicated to funerary rites. But this, this! Would it be better to beat the air or rather a hasty retreat? Impossible, since the door had closed hermetically, and it was protected by bolts, spring latches, iron leve
rs, crossbars, linchpins, padlocks and square bolts that would provide obvious resistance to any sudden assault, however Herculean, and besides all he would achieve by it would be to stain the sleeves and shoulders of his impermeable, bought in Paris, which protected the steel-headed pickax that was to deal justice—or murder most foul, if we are to believe the opinion either of exegetes or of detractors.

  The memory came to his mind now that he had forgotten in his closely detailed observation certain florid architraves, and foundations of granite supported on socles of broken cockles and the eye measurements of the divisions of the foundations (wretched rhyme) of the facade. He returned to the present reality and gazed at the floor with its green glazed tiles, a Grecian fret on a white mosaic, and confronted his doubts with determination by walking toward some archivolts where helicoidal figures reclined on fascias of fluted stone. This was a mere peccadillo compared with what would happen afterward, when his eyes were to fall on the salon which was vestibule, lobby and labyrinth at the same time, on the profusion of half arches, or horseshoe arches, trilapses, ogee arches, lanceolates, mitrals, quarter arches and curves of arches, in silent promiscuity with neoclassical pilasters, art nouveau paneling, internal spandrels, side arches that supported imitation vaults and intrados that had been painted every color of the spectrum and some more besides, a hallucinatory fuchsia opposing itself to the complementary and equally dazzling colors of the denticular ornamentation, shaped like pearls, garlanded, fretted, ring-shaped, of grooving entredos, of meshwork and network, and below festoons and dosserets made of acajú that separated the interior friezes or socles which the natives had endeavored to pass off as valances, these last hung with tassels of mauve silk. At the end of the room near the monumental staircase and as though presiding over this formal chaos, erect, with his arm as pale as his pointed little beard, with mongoloid features, dressed in a greatcoat, wearing shoes or a wide cravat, still eloquent or at least gesticulating, standing on a pedestal, was Vladimir Ulitch Ulianov or his marmoreal likeness whom an inscription, also in marble, under the eponymous effigy identified in Cyrillic characters as Lenin. Gazing at candelabra, counting steps of variegated marble, lowering his observant eyes to banisters of calcareous stone, lost among volutes, spirals, curves, foliated ornamentation and the vertical joists of the ironwork of the handrails and balconies, he was dozing off, but not before he had first approached in perpetual astonishment a glaringly obvious Marcel Breuer sofa, in which he buried himself comfortably.

  IV

  The noise of footsteps on the tiled floor awoke him and he glimpsed through the nets of his dream or of his eyelashes what he thought were buskin boots, then he went on to wonder whether they were sandals or perhaps huaraches and finally he saw that they were ordinary shoes composed of sole, together with lining, first sole, welt, inner sole—cambrera, as the country people here call it—heel, heel piece, upper and tongue, also known as “ear” in these remote byways of South America. In them a man was walking wrapped in clothes that had the color of old engravings. By his side was another man and he saw that one of them had a thick neck consisting, he suspected, of: hyoid bone, thyrohyoid membrane, thyroid cartilage (concise pronunciation key:), cricoid and thyroid membrane, cricoid and tracheal cartilage, and as he gazed at him with his single eye (he wore an eyeshade over the other in the style of the Princess of Eboli or of, in the future, Moshe Dayan) and knew that it was only one eye that was looking but that this eye was also a functional collection of: cornea, iris, choroid, crystalline lens, sclerotic, superior nasal artery, inferior nasal artery, papilla of the optic nerve, interior temporal artery and macula lutea, and from the yellow stain of this last he knew that the other, at least, saw him in two dimensions but in color.

  Of his companion he saw appear no more than an ear and although the unexpected rhyme troubled him not a little he enumerated to dismiss any unpleasant sensation the parts of it that were visible which were the helix, antehelix, cochlea, lobule, tragus and antitragus, a pinna that certainly covered a duct smeared with cerumen, vestibule, tympanum like anvil and hammer, external and medial ear and labyrinth. One of them stretched out his hand to him and he didn’t know which (man or hand) it was, but he did know that it was not only hand or man that was greeting him, but: wrist, hypotenary eminence, palm, little, ring, middle and index fingers, thumb and ternary eminence, not to mention tarsus and metatarsus, fingers and any dead ringers (merde!), tendons, muscles and protective skin. He raised his hand to return the greeting and when he had finished this gesture he turned it over palm up and saw the lines and zones of logic, instinct, will, intelligence, mysticism, of Jupiter, Saturn, Apollo, Mercury, of Fortune, of heart, of health, of Mars, the lines of the head, the Moon, the life line and the line of Venus, and wondered whether he would have good fortune or not and at the same time whether the red stains localized near his Mount of Venus were warts or tetters.

  He could hear that the thugs were talking on the square tiled floor of various warlike subjects and that they were making verbal comments thereon, and he couldn’t avoid his old analytic habit of making a synoptic chart for everything that is in this world. So when he heard the word rifle he thought of cannon, gunsight, breach, ammunition box, ramrod, bolt, trigger, trigger guard and butt; bullet, he knew that it could be made of lead or steel, that it could be incendiary or a tracer, perforated, 4. Print. a heavy explosive or for hunting and that they always had a casing of brass, and a nucleus of lead, niter and the fuse; grenade, he remembered the firing pin, the safety catch, the washer on the safety catch, the stopper made of an alloy of lead, the detonator and firing mechanism—and not once did the idea come to his mind of what their target was or whether they might be aiming at him. They went on their way and he was left alone again, but not for long because he was soon kept company by the buzzing of an intrusive and aboriginal insect, of which he could discern the following parts: head, faceted eyes, feet (first pair), prothorax, feet (second pair), sting, abdomen, meta-thorax, notum (noted?), the lower wings, the upper wings and feet (third pair). Could it be a wasp? He felt he suddenly had a transparency of spirit, that his fear was seen as metaphorical and his intentions were thus revealed by his own concealing. From this point to inferring that an intrusive hymenopterum would produce so great an upset and even greater revelations, was no more than one step and that not a wasted or lost step, not a one and a two-step lost but Lot’s a trouble because at once they will be brought to associate his phobia with perverse intentions, and they will see that he was a sort of ichneumon, this wasp which in the jungles of the Orinoco hunts tirelessly for its spider, so as to jab its mortal sting into its nucha. Or could it be a bee, queen or worker or drone? To distract himself from the terrors and anxiety of these last considerations, he looked away to the other end of the room, where he observed some banners, but well before he could discern whether they were the initial and orthodox banners of the Party he saw that they were divided, like all banners, into splice, sheath, cloth, stitching, selvedge, pendant tassels, selvedge (the other one), seam and tip, and as it was not a triangular pennant nor a galliard or heraldic colors but a square flag, he knew that it was the one, the Venerated, although he couldn’t pick out any sickle and crossed hammers on the background which he now saw was blue and not red. Could he have been suffering from Dalton’s disease? To test whether this assertion was certain or uncertain (more of these anacoluthic alliterations!) he looked at the four escutcheons dexter and sinister that seemed to guard the flags and before he came to the conclusion that one of them was Spanish, another French, another Polish and the fourth the Swiss Guard, he observed the different quarterings: canton dexter of chief, chief, canton sinister of chief, flank dexter, heart (or abyss), flank sinister, canton dexter of point, point, siege of honor, and he began looking at the navel (of the escutcheon, of the four, four different navels and only one true navel) and went on to note gold or or (fuck!), argent, gules, azure, vert, m., purple, sable, stones which served as base of distinction to: oaks, ch
ains, lashed trees, enguiched cornets, enguled bands, crowns enfiladed, enclaved escutcheons, dentate, quartered, capes, burels, bordured, quartered coats, vairies, chequereds, lozenges, rustres, potences, parties, orles, borders and pumas and eagles rampant and meandering snake.