Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

  It was dancing time and I was falling all over the floor in rhythm and the voice I was holding in my arms was saying between giggling fits, You’re pretty far gone, you know and I looked hard at her and saw it was Irmita and I wondered where Cuba had gone to but I didn’t wonder how I came to be dancing with Irenita, I-re-ni-ta, Irenita that’s her name, Irena if it really is her name and not an alias because I’m like Switzerland surrounded by allies and it was Irenita who said, You’re going to fall over and it was the truth, I noticed it the moment I was telling myself, She must have come out from under the table, yes, that’s where she comes from because she was always under the table where she fits very neatly but does she fit? She isn’t as tiny as all that and I don’t know why I had thought she was so tiny because she comes up to my shoulders and has a perfect body, perhaps her thighs or what you can see of her thighs are not so perfect as her teeth or what you, me I mean, can see of her teeth and I hope she’s not going to invite us both to laugh together because I’ve no wish to see her thighs as far back as I’ve seen her teeth when she laughed and showed me her missing molar, but she had the cutest and best figure I’ve seen and the face of a swinger and her face was the mirror of her body missing molar excepted and I forgot about Cuba completely, totally, absolutely. But I couldn’t forget La Estrella because she didn’t let me. A great uproar exploded in the submerged cathedral, that is to say in the back room, and everybody was running toward it and we ran too. On the sofa near the entrance, next to the door, in the darkest corner of the room was an enormous black shadow shaking and roaring and falling on the floor and heaving it back onto the sofa and It was La Estrella, helplessly drunk and throwing a fit of crying and shouting and raving and as I went to see what was the matter with her I stumbled over one of her shoes lying on the floor and I fell on top of her and when she saw it was me she folded her Doric columns around me and held me tight and then she was giving me a missing molar with her crying, hugging me and saying, Ah negro it’s hurting me, it’s really hurting and I thought there was something in her body hurting and I asked her and she repeated it’s hurting me, it really hurts and I asked her what it was that was hurting and she said, Ah mulato he’s dead he’s dead and she was crying and not saying who or what was dead and I managed to free myself and then she cried out, My little son and finally she said, He’s died! Ay how I miss him! and she fell to the floor and stayed here and looked as though she had died herself, or passed out but she was only asleep because she began snoring as loud as she’d been shouting and I slipped away from the group, come on all together now, which was still trying to lift her back onto the sofa and I groped my way toward the door and went out. I missed La Estrella as much as you miss a missing molar when it’s still there and it hurts.

  I walked the whole length of Infanta and when I got to 23rd I met up with this moveable coffee vendor who’s always around and he offered me a cup and I said, No thanks I have to drive and it really was because I didn’t want any coffee because I wanted to stay drunk and go around drunk and live drunk all my life which is the same as saying I wanted to drink myself to life. And as I didn’t want just one coffee I took three and I got talking with the portable vendor and he told me that he worked nights from eleven to seven up and down La Rampa and I thought that’s why we never run into each other because it’s the same time I do my Rampa beat and I asked him how much he made and he told me 75 pesos a month no matter what he sold and that every day or rather night he sold between 100 and 150 cups of coffee and he told me, This, tapping his Goliath of a thermos with his David of a hand, makes about 300 pesos a month and I’m not the only vendor and it all goes to the boss. I don’t know what I said to him about his missing molar of a boss because now I was drinking not coffee but a rum on the rocks not the beach rocks as you might imagine but bar rocks and I thought I would phone Magalena and when I got into the phone booth I remembered I didn’t have her number but then I saw a whole telephone directory written over the walls and I selected a number because in any case I had already inserted a coin and I dialed it and waited while the phone rang and rang and rang and finally I heard a man’s voice very weak and tired say Hello? and I said, Is that you, Hellen? and the man replied in his voice that wasn’t a voice, No, señor and I asked him Who then, her sister? and he said, Hello hello and I said Ah so you’re a double Hellen, and he said, almost screaming, What’s the idea, waking people up at this time of the night! and I told him to go fuck his missing molar and hung up and picked up my fork and began cutting up my steak very carefully and I heard music behind me and there was a girl singing and lingering over the words and showing off her missing molar and it was this queen of musical suspense Natalia Gut (iérrez was her real name) singing a version of “Perfidia” that sounded like “Porphyria,” and I realized I was in Club 21 eating a T-bone steak and when I eat I sometimes have this habit of suddenly lifting my right hand so the sleeve of my shirt can disentangle itself from the sleeve and from the food and fall backward and when I lifted my arm a searchlight blinded me and I heard them saying a name which turned out to be my professional name and I stood up and people were applauding me, many people, an audience, but the light on my face went out and it hit a table several tables away and then someone said another name and I was eating the same steak but in a different place because I was in the Tropicana but not only do I not know how I got there whether on foot or in my car or whether they took me there and not only that but I no longer know if all this happened the same night and the Emcee is continuing to present the guests as though the place was full of celebrities and fuck it! somewhere or other in the world there must be an original for this shitty parody, in Hollywood I bet, a word that gives me a missing molar, not only to pronounce but even to think of and I get up to go out and fall into the missing table between two tables and with the help of the captain of waiters I reach the patio and give him a military salute and say permission to go overboard sir, before going off, permission granted.

  I return to the city and the cool night breeze makes me see the streets again and I reach La Rampa and continue along it and turn the corner into Infanta and park near Las Vegas, which is closed and there are two cops at the door and I ask them what’s up and they tell me there’s been trouble and ask me to keep moving pronto and I say I’m a reporter and they come on friendly and tell me they’ve arrested Lalo Vegas, the owner, because they’ve just discovered he’s been pushing drugs, Just? C’mon, show me your missing molar I ask one of the cops and he laughs and tells me, Please periodista don’t give us a hard time and I tell him there aren’t any hard times telling him No hay problema just that and I go on my way past Infanta and Humboldt, on foot, and I come to a dark passage where there are some garbage cans and I can hear a song rising from the garbage cans and I walk around and around them to see which garbage can is singing so I can introduce her to her wonderful one-man audience and I go from one garbage can to another and then I realize that the honey-toned or honky-tonked words are rising from the ground, from among the scraps of food and filthy bits of paper and old papers which make a missing molar out of the words Sanit. Dept. written on these cans and I see that underneath the papers there’s an iron grille on the sidewalk which must be the air vent of some joint down there under the street or in a basement or maybe it’s the musical circle of hell, and I hear piano music and cymbals playing and a slow moist clinging bolero and then some applause and more music and another song and I stay there listening and feeling the music and the rhythm and the words climbing the legs of my pants and flowing into my body and when it stopped I realized that what was coming through this grille was the warm air pushed up by the air-conditioning of the Mil Novecientos and I turn the corner and go down the red staircase: the walls are painted red, the steps covered with red carpeting and the handrail striped red velvet and I shift toward the red to plunge down into the music and the noise of glasses and the smell of alcohol and the smoke and sweat and rainbow lights flooding the place and the people and I hear the fa
mous finale of that bolero that goes “Lights and liquor and lips/ Our night of love has ended/ Adiós adiós adiós” which is one of Cuba Venegas’ songs and I see her bowing all elegant and beautiful and dressed in sky blue from tits to toes and bowing again and displaying those great rounded half-uncovered breasts of hers that are like the lids of two marvelous stewing pots under which is bubbling the only food that makes men into gods, femmebrosia, and I’m happy to see her bowing and smiling and that her incredible body is swaying and that she’s throwing back her breastaking head and above all that she’s not singing anymore tonight because it’s better, much much better to see Cuba than to hear her and it’s better because anyone who sees Cuba falls in love with her but anyone who hears and listens to her can never love her again because her voice is her missing molar.

  Ninth session

  Didn’t I tell you I’m a widow? I married Raúl, the boy who invited me to the party. His whole family was at the wedding, which we had in Jesús de Miramar, and the church was full of society people and I went dressed in white and as it was a misa de velaciones ceremony my fiancé remained under my veil while they were saying Mass and he kept on looking and looking at me, he was so nervous. He got married to me when he found out that I was—how shall I put it, doctor?—that I was . . . You remember the story I told you about his brother, the one who kept a skeleton in his bathtub? Well, after that night he came to look for me one day at drama school and we went out together several times and we became pretty intimate and in the end I got, I was pregnant. His name was, and still is, Arturo and he refused to have anything to do with me after that so I went to see his brother Raúl and told him everything and there and then he decided to marry me and that’s how we got married. But on the wedding night, we went off to spend our honeymoon in Varadero, in his parents’ house which they had left us to be alone in, and his father had given him a new car as a wedding present. On the wedding night he stayed up talking to me very late and when I went up to bed he stayed downstairs alone, saying he’d come up later. I was waked up three hours later by the phone ringing, someone from the police who told me that he had had a car accident. He hovered between life and death for three days and then he died. The first thing he did when he recovered consciousness in the hospital, after the accident, was to say my name, but he didn’t say anything else though during his delirium he said a number of things and words that nobody could understand. I told his family that he had gone out to find me something to eat and that that was why he was out on the road so late. There were two things I couldn’t explain very well though: that he had gone out to the street when the house was full of food and what he was doing on the main highway to Havana two hours later. His family always treated me very coldly afterward, but they were very kind when my daughter was born and even more kind when two years later they succeeded in taking her away from me to New York by telling the judge I was leading the immoral life of an actress. The child had the same face as Raúl but this time in the right body.

  I HEARD HER SING

  Now that it’s raining, now that I have to look at the city lost in the smoke of the pouring rain, this city somewhere behind the vertical mist on the other side of my office window, yes, now that it’s raining I remember La Estrella. Because the rain erases the city but it cannot erase memory and I remember La Estrella’s hour of glory as I also remember when she fell from glory and where and how. I don’t go to the nitecaves, as La Estrella called the nightclubs, any longer because the censorship has been lifted and they have moved me from the entertainment supplement to the front page and I spend my time taking pictures of political prisoners and bombs and Molotov cocktails and dead bodies the police leave lying where they fell to serve as an example, as though the dead were able to stop any other time than their own, and I’m again on night beat but it’s downbeat.

  I stopped seeing La Estrella I don’t know for how long and I hadn’t heard anything about her until the day I saw the copy about her opening at the Capri and I don’t know to this day how her quantity of humanity had managed to make this great leap forward in quality. Someone told me an American impresario had heard her in Las Vegas or the Bar Celeste or at the corner of 0 and 23rd and had made a contract with her, I don’t know, all I did know was her name was in the paper, my own newspaper, and I read it twice because I didn’t believe it and when I was convinced it was true I felt really happy for her: so La Estrella has finally made it I said to myself and I was frightened like hell to see that her unshakable self-assurance had proved more prophetic than pathetic because I’m always alarmed by people who make a one-man crusade out of their destiny and who while denying luck and chance and even destiny have a feeling of certainty, a belief in themselves that’s so deep it can’t be anything but fate and now I saw her not only as a physical phenomenon but as a metaphysical monster: La Estrella played the Luther of Cuban music and she had always been dead right, as if she who couldn’t read or write had in music her sacred scores.

  I sneaked out of the city office that evening to go to the opening. Somebody told me she had been nervous during the rehearsals and although she was always on time at the beginning she missed out on one or two important rehearsals and they penalized her and almost took her off the program and if they didn’t do it it was because of all the money they’d spent on her. This guy also told me she had refused to sing with a band, but what happened was that she’d paid no attention when they read her the contract which made it perfectly clear that she had to accept all the clauses of the company and there was a special clause in which they mentioned the use of transcriptions and arrangements, but she didn’t know what the first word meant and it was quite clear she hadn’t any notice of the second because underneath, next to the signatures of the managers of the hotel and the company, there was a gigantic X which was her signature in her own hand, and so she had to sing with a band. This is what Eribó told me. He’s the bongo player at the Capri and he was going to play with her and he told me all this because he knew I was curious about La Estrella and he came to the office to explain things and patch up a fight we had because of something he did which almost killed this story and me with it. I was on my way from the Hilton to the Pigal and was just crossing N Street when I saw Eribó. He was standing under the pines near the car park facing the Retiro Médico skyscraper and talking to one of the Americans playing at the Saint John and I went up to them. He was the piano player and they weren’t just chatting but arguing about something and when I greeted them I saw the American had a strange look on his face and Eribó took me aside and asked me if I spoke English, and I told him, Yes, a leetle, and he said, Listen, my friend here is in a tight spot, and he took me over to the American and in this weird state he formally introduced me and told the piano player in English that I would look after him and then he turned to me and said, You’ve got a car, haven’t you? and I said sure and he said, Could you do me a favor and find a doctor, and I asked what for, and he said, This fellow needs a shot badly because he’s in terrible pain and he can’t sit down at the piano in the state he’s in and he’s on in half an hour, and I looked at the American and I could see from his face he really was in pain and I asked Eribó, What’s the matter with him? and Eribó said, Nothing, he’s just in pain, do me the favor will ya, look after him because he’s a nice guy, and I got to go play because the first show is just about over, and then he turned to the American and explained what he’d said and turned to me and said, See you soon, and he left.

  We went off in the car, me looking for a doctor not in the streets but in my mind, because to find a doctor during the day who’s willing to give a junkie a shot of heroin is hard enough, let alone during the night, and every time we ran over a hole in the road or crossed a street the American gave a groan and once he screamed. I tried to get him to tell me what was wrong and he finally managed to get through, over, across to me that it was his anus. Your what? My asshole, man! and at first I thought he was just another pervert and then he told me it was only hemorr
hoids and I told him I would take him to an outpatients’ clinic, to an emergency clinic nearby, but he insisted all he needed was a shot to kill the pain and he’d be O.K. again and he was writhing on the seat and sobbing and as I’d seen The Man with the Golden Arm I hadn’t the slightest doubt where it was hurting. Then I remembered that there was a doctor who lived in the Paseo building who was a friend of mine and I went and woke him up. He was scared because he thought it was someone wounded in a gunfight, a terrorist who’d been busted by his own petardo or drunk a Molotov cocktail or whatever or maybe someone who’d been hunted down by the S.I.M., but I told him I didn’t get mixed up in things like that, I wasn’t interested in politics and that the closest I’d been to a revolutionary was at a focal lens distance of 2.5 and he said all right, all right he’d have to go to his office and he gave me the address and said he’d follow us. I got to the office with the man fainting all over the place and as luck would have it a cop turned up just as I was trying to wake him so I could get him into the house and sit him down in the portal to wait for the doctor. The cop came up and asked me what was wrong and I told him he was a pianist and a friend of mine and that he was in pain. He asked me what was wrong and I said he had hemorrhoids and the cop repeated the word, Hemorrhoids? and I told him, Yes, piles, but he thought it was even weirder than I did and said, Are you sure he’s not one of those guys, meaning was he dangerous, like a terrorist or something, and I said, Oh come on, he’s a musician, and then this guy came round and I told the cop I was taking him inside and whispered to him he should try and make it by himself because this cop here was suspicious and the cop must have heard what I was saying, because he insisted on coming with us and I can still remember the iron gate creaking behind us as we entered the silent patio and the moon shining on the dwarf palm tree in the garden and the cold-looking iron garden chairs painted white and the strange group we made, the three of us, the American, the cop and myself sitting on the terrace in Vedado as the dawn was about to come up. Then the doctor arrived and when he turned on the light in the portal and saw the cop and us sitting there, the piano player in a half-swoon and me thoroughly frightened by now, he made the face Christ must have made when he felt Judas’ lips on his own and saw the Roman sbirri over the apos(tate)tle’s shoulder. We went in and the cop with us and the doctor got the piano player to lie down on a table and made me wait outside, but the cop insisted on staying and he must have inspected the anus with a vigilante’s eye because he came out perfectly satisfied when the doctor called me and said, This fellow is very sick, and I saw that he was asleep and he said, I gave him an injection now, but he has a strangulating hemorrhoid and he’ll have to be operated on at once and of course I was astonished then because I was lucky after all: I played the wrong number and it came up. I told the doctor who the piano player was and how I met him and he told me to go away, that he would take him to his clinic which wasn’t far and he’d take care of everything and he walked me out and I thanked him and also the cop, who returned to his beat smiling.