Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

  —Bach, says Cué, —who smoked tobacco and drank coffee and fornicated like any habanero is traveling beside us now. Did you know that he wrote a cantata to coffee (was he asking me?) and another to tobacco, and that he dedicated a poem to it which I know by heart: “Every time I light my pipe/ To pass the time by smoking it/ And sit down and take a drag, my thoughts return/ To a sad and gray and tenuous vision/ Which proves how well I get lost/ In smoke like any other ghost”—he left off citing and reciting. —What do you think of the Old Man? I’ll be doggone if that isn’t a Montuno melody he’s playing. He fell silent to listen or make me listen. —Listen to this sudden ripieno, Silvestre viejo, doesn’t it become Cuban when you hear it on the Malecón and it’s still Bach but not exactly Bach? How do you think the physicists would explain it? Maybe speed is a musical continuum? What would Albert Schweitzer say about it?

  In Schwahili? I was thinking. Cué was driving and at the same time humming to the music, his hands pushing forte with closed fists or following a pianissimo with butterfingers, then descending an invisible musical scale. But what he really looked like was an expert in deaf-and-dumb language translating a speech. I remembered Johnny Belinda and he almost reminded me of Lew Ayres, the most honest of dramatic cl i chés written on his face, carrying on a silent conversation with Jane Wyman accompanied by the ignorance or admiration, in any case silent, of Charles Bickford and Agnes Moorehead.

  —Can’t you hear how old Bach plays on the tonality in D, how he builds up his imitations, how he makes his variations always unpredictable but only when the theme allows and suggests it and never before, never after, and how despite that he always manages to take you by surprise? Doesn’t he seem like a slave with all the freedom in the world? Ah, amigo, he’s better than Offenbach, because he’s ici, aqui, hier, here in this tristeza habanera and not in any Gaieté Parisienne!

  Cué had this obsession with time. What I mean is that he would search for time in space, and they were nothing but a search, our continual, interminable journeys along the Malecón, a single infinite journey like this one, but at any time of the day or night, traveling over this decaying landscape of old houses between Maceo Park and La Punta, which will end up becoming what man took from the sea to build it: another barrier of reefs, bitten by the brine, salted by the spray whenever there is a wind and by the waves on those days when the sea breaks over the street and dashes against the houses seeking the coastline that has been stolen from it, creating it, making another shore for itself, and then the parks in which the tunnel begins now and where the coconut palms and the fake almond trees and catkins do not entirely blot out the appearance of a goat’s pasture which the sun produces by burning and toasting the green grass till it’s yellow like straw, and the excessive dust becoming another wall in the sunlight, and then the waterfront bars: New Pastores, Two Brothers, Don Quixote, the bar where the Greek sailors dance arm in arm while the whores look on and laugh and the church of San Francisco, the convent church, facing the Stock Exchange and Customs, pointing out the different times of history, the successive foreign occupations carved in this plaza which in the times and engravings of the Capture of Havana by the English looked like a parody of Canaletto, and the bars which mirror the entrance of the Alameda de Paula reminds you that in Havana the docks begin and end the promenade by the sea. Following the sweet curve of the bay we would go on every trip to Guanabacoa and Regla, to the bars, and look at the city from the other side of the port as if we were in another country, listening to and watching the vaporetto that makes the crossing every half hour. Later we would go back the whole length of the Malecón as far as 5th Avenue and the Playa de Marianao, unless we drove to Mariel or plunged down into the tunnel under the bay and reemerged in Matanzas for dinner and then on to Varadero to gamble and then return at midnight or dawn to Havana: talking all the time and telling jokes or gossiping all the time and always, and also philosophizing or aestheticizing or moralizing, but always: the thing was to make it look like we didn’t have to work because in Havana, Cuba, this is the only way to be gente bien or high society, which is what Cué and I wanted, would have wanted, tried to be—and we always had time to talk about time. When Cué talked about time and space and when he went over all that space in all our time I thought that he did it to divert us, and now I know: it was: to do something different, to make one thing of another, and while we were going over space he succeeded in evading what he always avoided, I think, which was to go over another space outside of time. Or to be precise—remembering. The opposite of me, because I like remembering things better than living them or living things knowing they can never be lost because I can always evoke them again—there must be time. This is the thing that is at present the most troubling and if there is the time that is at present the most troublesome the time-sense that is at present the most troubling is the thing that makes the present the most troubling. There is at present . . . I can live them over again by remembering them and it would be good if we used our word recordar, which means to remember, in the way the English do—to record—instead of grabar, for cutting a record or making a tape, because that is what it is, which is the opposite of what Arsenio Cué does. Now he was talking about Bach, about Offenbach and Ludwig Feuerbach as well (of the baroque as the art of honest plagiarism, and of how he could reconcile himself to that Austrian and joyful Parisian because he said he knew that in the forest of music he would never be a nightingale, and praising the latter-day Hegelian who had applied the concept of alienation to the creation of the gods), though this had nothing to do with remembering, but with its opposite. That is to say with memorizing.

  —Te das cuenta, viejo? This man was a sum total and he looks like a multiplication. Bach squared.

  At that moment (yes, exactly that moment) universal silence fell: upon the car, the radio and Cué, all because the music had stopped. The announcer was speaking—he was a lot like Cué, at least voicewise.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, you have just been listening to the Concerto Grosso in D Major, opus 2 number 3, by Antonio Vivaldi. (Pause) Violin: Isaac Stem; viola . . .”

  I bellowed with laughter and I think Arsenio did too. The speaker just transformed his contrapuntal rumination into musica falsa.

  —Culture in the tropics, chico! I said. —How about that? Te das cuenta, viejo? I said, imitating his voice, but making it sound more pedantic than friendly. He didn’t look at me but said:

  —Fundamentally I’m right. Bach spent the whole of his life plundering things from Vivaldi, and not only from Vivaldi (he wanted to save himself from perdition through erudition: I could see it coming) but also from Marcello, he said in his clipped voice, Marchel-lo, —and Manfredini and Veracini and even from Evaristo Felice Dall-Abaco. That was why I was talking about a sum total, or summa.

  —You’d have done better by saying remainder or subtraction, wouldn’t you?

  He laughed. What’s good about Cué is that he has a more developed sense of humor than he has of ridicule. “This program in our series Great Composers of the World was dedicated to the work of—” Off he switched the radio.

  —But you’re right, I said, temporizing or contemporizing. I’m the Contemporizing Cid. —Bach is the father of them all and Music is his lawful wedded wife, but Vivaldi winks at Anna Magdalena from time to time.

  —Viva Vivaldi! Cué said, laughing.

  —If Bustrófedon were with us in this time machine he would already have said Vibachvaldi or Vivach Vivaldi or Bivaldi and he would have gone on like that all through the night.

  —Then, what do you think of Vivaldi at sixty?

  —That you’ve slowed down.

  —Albinoni at eighty, Frescobaldi at a hundred, Cimarosa at fifty, Monteverdi at a hundred and twenty, Gesualdo flooring the accelerator . . . A pause followed, more exalted than refreshing, and he went on: —It makes no difference; what I said is still true and I’d like to know what Palestrina would be like in a 707 jet.

  —A miracle of acoustics, I s
aid.

  II

  The convertible rode on, as though on rails, along the expanding curve of the Malecón and I saw Cué concentrating once more on driving, another appendage of the engine, like the steering wheel. He was talking to me then of a unique sensation, in other words one I couldn’t share (like dying or defecating), not only because it was a religious experience but because I didn’t know how to drive. He said that there were times when the car and the road and he himself disappeared and the three became one and the same thing, the ride, space and the destination of the journey, and that he, Cué, felt as though the road was as much his as the clothes he wore and that it gave him the same pleasure as wearing a fresh clean and newly ironed shirt on his body, and that it was a physical pleasure as deep as fucking and that at the same time he, Cué, felt detached, as though he was in the air, flying, but without a machine to mediate between himself and the elements, because his body had disappeared and he, Cué, was the speed at which he was traveling. I spoke to him about the bow and the arrow and the archer and his target, and I lent him the little book and all, but he told me that Zen talked about eternity and he was talking about the moment, so discussion was useless and mark my words never the twain would meet. At the red light at La Punta he finally came out of his trance.

  I looked at the park, at what remained of the Martyr’s Park (also known as the Lovers’ Plaza) since the tunnel had been opened up under the bay. Now the whole park had become just one more ruin, like the remains of that prison and the fragment of that wall where they used to hold executions in the nineteenth century, and the park, like the museums, had become a relic. Suddenly, in the reflection of the evening light, sitting under an almond tree, but, as always, in the sun, I saw her under. The Summering sky. I told Cué.

  —What of it? he said. —She’s just a nut.

  —I know that. But it’s incredible that she’s there, that she’s always been there for the past ten years.

  —She’ll still be there for a good while longer.

  —You know, I told him, —that it’s about ten years. No, not ten: seven or eight . . .

  —Or five or maybe yesterday, Cué interrupted, because he thought I was joking.

  —No, no, I really meant it. I saw her for the first time some years ago and she was talking and talking and talking. I sat down close to her and she went on talking, because she didn’t see me, she didn’t see anything at all and I thought it was so special, symbolic, what she was saying that I went to a friend’s house, one of my classmates, Matías Monte-Huidobro, who lived nearby and I asked him for a pencil and paper, without saying a word about it because he was also writing or wanted to write at the time, I returned and picked up a fragment of the speech, which was exactly what I heard before, because when she got to a certain point, like the roll on a pianola, she repeated the whole thing over again. The third time around, I had copied down what she said, convincing myself nothing was missing except the punctuation, and then I got up and left. She was still carrying on with her speech.

  —And where did you put it?

  —I don’t know. It must be around somewhere.

  —No, I mean I would have thought you’d make a story out of it.

  —Oh no. First of all I lost it, and then I found it again and it no longer seemed so fascinating, and the only thing that surprised me about it was that the writing had gotten fatter.

  —What?

  —Yes, it was the ballpoint I’d used, one of the old ones, and the paper was very porous so the writing had become swollen, and I could no longer read what I’d written.

  —Poetic justice, Cué said and he started up and as we drove slowly past watching the mad woman sitting on her bench I took a good look at her.

  —It’s not her, I said.

  —What d’you mean?

  —That it is not her. It’s someone else.

  He looked at me as if to say, Are you sure?

  —Sure I’m sure. It’s somebody else. It’s another woman. She was a mulatto.

  —This one’s a mulatto too.

  —Yes, but the other looked Chinese. It’s not the same one.

  —If you say so.

  —If you like I’ll get out and look.

  —No. What for? You’re the one who knows her, not me.

  —It’s definitely not her.

  —Maybe she’s not mad either.

  —Maybe. Maybe she’s just a poor woman who came to take in some fresh air.

  —Or sun.

  —Or to be near the sea.

  —This is the sort of coincidence I like, Cué said.

  We drove on and when we were going by the amphitheater he suggested we have a drink at the Lucero Bar.

  —It’s a long time since I’ve been there, he said.

  —Me too. I already forgot what it’s like.

  We ordered a beer and saladitos.

  —It’s funny, Cué said, —how the world changes its axis.

  —What d’you mean?

  —There was a time when this was the center of Havana both day and night. The amphitheater, this part of the Malecón, the parks from La Fuerza to the Prado, Misiones Avenue.

  —It’s as if Havana was becoming once more what it was in the times of Cecilia Valdés.

  —No, it’s not that. This was the center then, and there was nothing more to be said. Then the center moved to Prado, as before it must have been the Cathedral Plaza or Plaza Vieja or City Hall. With the years it moved up to the corner of Galiano and San Rafael and Neptuno and now it’s reached La Rampa. I wonder when it will stop, this walking center which moves, and strangely enough, like the city and the sun, from east to west.

  —Batista’s trying to move it across the bay.

  —No future in that. You wait and see.

  —What, Batista’s regime?

  He looked at me and smiled.

  —What are you getting at?

  —Me? Nothing.

  —You know I never talk about politics. That’s my policy.

  —But I know how you think.

  —Well, that makes two of us.

  —That’s what I think, I said. —Nobody can make this city cross the bay.

  —Off Kursk not. Look how Casablanca and Regla are declining.

  I looked at Casablanca and Regla declining. I looked at La Cabana. I also looked at the Morro Castle. Finally I looked at Cué, who was drinking his beer as he did everything, like an actor posing in all positions and even sometimes in profile. Sons & lumière.

  III

  We spent a while talking about cities, one of Cué’s favorite subjects. He has this idea that the city wasn’t created by man, but quite the contrary, and communicating that sort of archaeological nostalgia with which he talks about buildings as though they were human beings, where houses are built with a great hope, in novelty, a Nativity, and then they grow with the people who live in them and decline and are finally forgotten or they are torn down or fall to pieces and in their place another building rises which begins the cycle all over again. It’s pretty, isn’t it, this architectonic saga? I reminded him that it sounded like the beginning of The Magic Mountain. Enter Hans Castorp in act one with what Cué calls “the arrogant carefree drive of life itself” and arrives at the sanatorium, petulantly sure of his own obvious good health, a cheerful tourist in white hell—to learn a few days later that he too is tubercular. “I like that,” Arsenio Cué said, “I really like that analogy. That moment is like an allegory of life. You go—or come—in with all the self-confidence of the young immaculate conception of the pure life, whole and hearty, and in next to no time you discover that you too are just another sick man, that the same shit has fallen on you as well, that living means decaying: Dorian Gray and his portrait.”

  I used to come to this park when I was a child. This was where I would play and I would sit on the wall to watch the warships coming in and out just as I am now watching the pilot’s launch making its way out to the open sea and here, there, near the Castillito, this little
castle which is nothing more than the ruins of a water closet in the old wall, I was teaching my brother to ride a bike one day and I pushed him very hard and he went off at full speed and crashed into a bench and the handlebars hit him in the chest and he fainted and vomited blood, he was like dead for half an hour or maybe ten minutes, I don’t know. But what I did know was that it was I who had done it and a year or two later when my brother got TB I continued to think that it was all my fault. I told Cué about it, then. I mean now.

  —You aren’t from around here, Silvestre, I mean from Havana?

  —No, I’m from the country.

  —Where?

  —From Virana.

  —How d’you like that. I’m from Samas.

  —It’s very close.

  —Yes, it’s right next door, as the crow flies, as they say in the country.

  —Thirty-two kilometers and a hundred and six curves Qn a small highway, which should really be called a dirt road.

  —I used to go to Virana quite a lot during vacations.

  —Really?

  —We could even have known each other there.

  —When was that?

  —During the war. Forty-four or forty-five, I think.

  —Ah, no. I was already living in Havana. Although, I’ll tell you, I often used to go there for vacations, when we had money. But we were really poor.

  The waiter came and interrupted us by bringing some fried prawns. And I was grateful to him. Doubly grateful. We went on drinking. I noticed the black spots in front of my eyes which had begun to appear recently. Like mute flies buzzing about. Probably another side effect of nicotine, toxic spots. A drag. A dreg. A critical precipitate. That’s where all the bad movies I’ve ever seen must be gathered, so it could be a meto-p8-ysical—that’s how my typewriter spells metaphysical—sickness. Or cosmic bums on the retina. Or Martians whom only I can detect. They don’t bother me too much, but there are times when I think it could be the beginning of a fadeout and that someday a black light will be projected on my screen. A thing that will happen sooner or later, but I’m talking about blindness not death. This total blackout will be the worst possible fate for my movie eyes—but not for the eyes of memory.