Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

  —Do you have a good memory?

  I almost jumped out of my seat. Arsenio Cué sometimes displays the most unexpected inductive talents. Unexpected in an actor, I mean. Shylock Holmes is his name.

  —Good enough, I said.

  —How goodonov?

  —A lot. More than enough, it’s very good. I remember almost everything and what’s more I often remember the times when I remembered something.

  —You should be called Funes the Memorious.

  I laughed. But I was gazing at the port and thinking that there must be some relation between memory and the sea. (It is called el mar in Spanish. Mar, mere, memory. The sea of Marmory.) Not only because the sea is vast and deep and everlasting but it also is always there and somehow manages to return every other second in successive, incessant waves identical in themselves changing it instantly and yet eternally. The castle of Everness submerged emerging as a cathedral of my mind. Neverness. Now I was sitting on this terrace firma drinking a beer and a breeze blew in, that warm wind from the sea that picks up in the late afternoonca, and my memories of this evening air came to me in repeated gusts, but it was a case of total recall because in a copula of seconds I had remembered all the afternoons of my life (don’t bother, I’m not going to list them for you, dear reader) that I would be sitting in a park reading a book and would lift my head above the printed surface to feel the evening air blowing across the pages on my face or lean against a wooden balneal house listening to the wind in the palm trees or lying on the beach eating a mango that stained my sandy hands mellow yellow or sitting by a bay window during an English lesson about the present participle or visiting my uncle and sitting in a rocking chair made of beach wood with my feet reaching now not reaching the ground with my new shoes getting heavier and heavier and heavier by the second, and on each occasion this warm gentle briny breeze would be blowing all around me. It must be the Aeolus of memory blowing over my sea of troubles and by opposing it make Marcelled waves. I should be called Mister Memory the Funneous.

  —Why did you ask?

  —No particular reason. It’s not important.

  —No, tell me why. We were probably thinking the same thing.

  My only weakness, trying to think the same thing everybody else is thinking. Arsenio stared at me. His eyes squinted sometimes when he stared. It wasn’t a defect but an effect he achieved with his eyes. I thought of Códac who said that in every actor there is an actress struggling to get out. He spoke, some seconds after opening his mouth in the shape of a liquid consonant. The Marlon Brando school of thought.

  —Listen, can you remember a woman well?

  —A well of a woman.

  —Which woman?

  I was taken aback. Was it another inspired guess that will never abolish the future?

  —Any woman. Take your pick. But it must be someone you’ve been in love with. Have you ever been in love? I mean, really in love?

  —Yes, off courts. Same as anybody.

  More than anybody was what I should have said. I tried to remember various women and I couldn’t think of any and when I was on the point of admitting defeat, it wasn’t a woman I thought of but a girl. I remembered her sandy hair, her high forehead and her clear, almost yellow eyes, and her wide fleshy mouth and her chin which had a dimple and her long legs and the sandals on her feet and the way she walked and I remembered waiting for her in a park and remembering as I was waiting how she laughed and how perfect her teeth were when she smiled. I described her to Cué. A wishing well of a woman.

  —Were you in love with her?

  —Yes. I think so. Yes.

  I should have told him that I was hopelessly in love, lost and found in a love that I never had again, before or since. But I said nothing. A woman is a well of love, bottomless.

  —You haven’t been in love, old boy, he said. A well of loveness. Lovelessness.

  —What did you say?

  —That you’ve never, never been in love, that this woman doesn’t exist, that you’ve just invented her.

  I should have been furious, but I can’t even get mildly irritated when the whole world is foaming at the poles with anger.

  —Why do you say this?

  —Because I know it.

  —But I told you I was in love. Isn’t that enough?

  —No, no, you believed, you thought, you imagined you were. But you weren’t.

  —Really?

  —Really.

  He paused for a moment to take a drink and wipe the drops of sweat and beer off his lips with a handkerchief. It seemed like a studied gesture.

  IV

  Those shoulders (these shoulders because I can see them here or, as people say, I have them right in front of my eyes), those/ these shoulders, these and those shoulders of the woman, of the young woman, of the girl who was, uselessly, my fugitive love—will they return? I don’t think they will. There is no need for them. Others will return, but that moment (her shoulders bare under the black décolletage, the satin evening gown clinging to the body and with flares below like the shirt of a Spanish gypsy or a rumba dancer, the perfect legs with ankles that never came to an end, her dress cut low at the front and her long neck continuing down between her breasts, and her face and her blond/ straight/unbound hair, and the timid malice of that smile on her fleshy lips that smoked slowly and talked and sometimes burst out laughing so they revealed in her large mouth teeth that were equally large and even and almost edible, and her eyes her eyes her eyes always so indescribable, impossible to describe but unforgettable that night and the/ her glance that was like another outburst of laughter: the eternal glance) will not return and this is exactly what makes moment and memory precious. This image assails me violently now, almost without provocation, and I think the best way of recapturing time past is not one’s involuntary memory but the violent irresistible memories, which don’t need any madeleines dunked in tea or the nostalgic fragrance of the past or an identical faux pas, but which come up suddenly like a thief by night and smash the window of our present with a blunt memory. It is then not uncommon that this memory induces vertigo: that sensation of being on the edge of a precipice, that sudden, unpredictable journey, that bringing together of two planes by the possible violent drop (the planes of reality by a vertical physical drop and the plane of reality and memory by the imaginary horizontal drop) shows us that time, like space, also has its laws of gravity. I would like to marry Proust off to Isaac Newton.

  V

  that’s right, man (Cué was still talking) because if you had, if you had been in love you wouldn’t remember a thing, you wouldn’t even remember if her lips were thin or fleshy or broad. Or you might remember the mouth but you wouldn’t be able to remember her eyes and if you remembered their color you wouldn’t remember their shape and what you would never, never, but never be able to do would be to remember hair and forehead and eyes and lips and chin and legs and feet and sandals and a park. But never. Because it would either not be true or else it would be that you weren’t in love. Take your pick.

  I was getting tired of this croupier in memories. Why should I have to take my pick? I remembered the end of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre:

  Gold Hat Bedoya: Mi Subteniente ¿Me deja coger mi sombrero?

  Sublieutenant: Recójalo.

  Offshot voices are heard saying Ready! Aim! Fire! in Spanish and then a volley of Mexican rifle fire. Listen! If you had really been in love you would be trying, you’d be killing yourself trying to remember something as little as Her voice—the voice, and you wouldn’t be able to or you would see her eyes right in front of your eyes suspended in the ectoplasm of memory—”ectoplasm of memory”: that’s what Eribó says too. Who could have invented it? Cué? Sese Eribó? Edgar Allan Kardec?—and all you could see would be her pupils looking at you. The rest is literature. Or you would see the mouth coming closer and feel the kiss, but you wouldn’t see the mouth or feel the kiss because her nose would be in the way or run across like a referee, but it wouldn’t
be the nose of that time, but another nose, the one of that time when you saw her in profile or the time you saw her for the first time (to be continued).

  He went on talking and I had fallen back into my habit of looking first to one side and then to the other side of the face of the person talking to me and I looked over his head and saw behind the coconut palms and above La Cabana a Mediterranean flock of pigeons which was really a mirage, an optical illusion, white flies in my eyes—and the sky is not a peaceful roof but a violent ceiling of clarity, a mirror turning the white light of the sun into a burning, blinding blue, a deadly glare streaming like quicksilver under the pure, innocent blue of a heaven by Bellini. If I had a feeling for prosopopeia (Bustrófedon would have called me Prosopopeye the Sailor) I would say that it is a cruel sky—and I would be like that pathetically fallacious Gorky, who said that the sea laughed. No, the sea does not laugh. The sea surrounds us, the sea envelops us and finally the sea washes our shores and flattens us and wears us away like pebbles on the beach and it survives us, indifferent, like the rest of the cosmos, when we are sand, also called Quevedo’s Dust. It is the only thing in the world that is eternal and in spite of its eternity we can measure it, like time. The sea is another time or it is visible time, another clock. The sea and the sky are glass bubbles of a water clock: that’s what it is, an eternal metaphysical clepsydra. Now the ferry was steaming away from the sea, from the Malecón, and entering the narrow channel of the port, almost sailing against the traffic, along the drive, and I saw its name clearly, Phaon, and Cué’s voice, which had been trained for the air, came to me out of the sea of time saying:

  —And you don’t see Her, what you see is pieces of Her.

  And I thought of Celia Margarita Mena, of Landru’s women, of all those jigsaw-puzzled ladies famous only because they have been hacked to pieces. When he stopped to catch his breath, I said:

  —You know, Códac, the Photographer of the Stars, was right. In every actor there’s an actress struggling to get out.

  He understood the allusion. He knew I wasn’t accusing him of being effeminate or anything like that, but that I knew his secret in part or in toto and he shut his mouth. He put on so serious an expression that I felt sorry and cursed myself for my habit of telling people the best right thing at the wrong time or the wrong thing at the right time. Or how to have bad timing in twenty easy lessons. He returned to his drink and didn’t even tell me to go fuck myself or that it was impossible to talk to me, but he remained silent looking at the yellow liquid that made the glass yellow and which going by its color and smell and flavor must have been beer, beer warmed by time and memory and the evening. He called the waiter.

  —Two more and make them cold, maestro.

  I looked at his face and still saw the fire which Kallikrates or Leo must have had when he met Ayesha and knew it was Her. She, I mean.

  —I’m sorry, chico, I said and I meant it.

  —It doesn’t matter, he said. —I have committed fornication, but that was in another country and besides the chick is dead—and he smiled, Marlowe (Christopher, not Philip) or culture had saved us. I remembered a time when a woman was lost for culture or the lack of. It was Shelley Winters who pantingly said to Ronald Colman in A Double Life, “Put out the light,” as she was going to bed with him, and poor old Ronaldo, dead as he is now, in real life as in films, who had gone mad in this film from playing Othello on the Broadway of film and he could not distinguish between the theater and real life (or real film), this Ronaldello turned the light off and said, “Put out the light and then put out the electric light:/If I wench thee thou flaming mister &c. . . . but once put out the light/ Thou cunting’st pattern of excessive nature/ I know not where is that Promiscuous heat . . .” and thus (that in Alejo once) he threw himself on Shelley, the poor wench, and smote her by error & trial. (What the hell are you doing you a sex maniac or what ughh oughhhh!) Shelley who was more innocent than Desdemona because she hadn’t even heard of Othello or Iago or Shakespeare, not to mention Cassio, being an ignorant waitress albeit a New Yorker. It was this—being totalliterate, the opposite of an elephantine pedant—that actually killed her. On Literature Considered as a Fine Murder.

  VI

  We went up Calle San Lázaro for a change. I don’t like this street. It’s phony. I mean that at first sight, at the beginning, it’s like a street in a city like Paris or Madrid or Barcelona and then it becomes mediocre, profoundly provincial, and when it gets to Maceo Park it broadens out into one of the most desolate and ugly avenues in Havana. Under the sun it is pitiless and by night it is dark and hostile and the only places that relieve its hideousness are the Prado and the Beneficencia orphanage and the steps of the university. But there is one thing I like about San Lázaro and that’s the unexpected view of the sea you get on the first few blocks. Crossing Havana in the direction of El Vedado and if you have the good luck to be a passenger, all you have to do is follow the cadence of the blocks, turn your head and catch a glimpse, on the right-hand side, of a side street, a piece of wall and beyond it the sea. The surprise is dialectic: there is a surprise, there shouldn’t be a surprise and finally without surprising me the sea assails me. A bit like Bach-Vivaldi-Bach for Cué just a while back. Besides, there is always the fear or hope that the wall of the Malecón might rise, might somehow become higher (by the whim of several commissioners of public works) and you’d no longer be able to see the sea so you’d have to guess it was there by looking at the sky which is its mirror.

  —What are you looking for? Cué asked.

  —La mer.

  —What?

  —La mer, mon vieux, toujours recommencée.

  —Excuse me, I thought it was L’amour. You know, as in Dorothy Lamour.

  —I haven’t seen a single woman lately who’s worth looking at twice or fucking once. Only the sea is worth looking at now.

  We laughed. It was clear that we had our own keys to dawn and sunset. Then Cué with his actor’s memory would go through a rosary (mumbled like a rosary) of quotations which he would declaim for the rest of the journey.

  —”But now as August like a languorous replete bird winged slowly toward the moon of decay and death . . .” What did I tell you?

  —”. . . they were bigger, vicious.”

  It was Faulkner and he was making fun of my admiration. A righteous revenge.

  —Man, what a way to talk about mosquitoes! A little more and he’d say they were vampires open day and night.

  I laughed. No, I smiled.

  —What do you want? I said. —That’s his first novel.

  —Really? You don’t say! Suppose I quote you something more recent? The Hamlet for example? “This happened during the autumn that preceded the winter at the beginning of which people, when they grow old, start counting time and dating events.”

  —But that translation is horrible, you know that. Remember also . . .

  —Listen, kid, you know better than I that . . .

  —That he’s talking about an event that is as tragic and didactic as . . .

  —Faulkner translates like an angel and in English it must be a damn of a lot worse.

  —Faulkner is a poet, like Shakespeare, it’s another world and you can’t read it looking for purple patches. Shakespeare also has his Phamous Lynes as they call them on Radio Reloj.

  You’re telling me! Cué said. —I haven’t yet forgotten the scene, which still seems incoherent no matter how much I see it, the scene in the grave of the unhappy Ofelia (played by Minín Buck-Jones) where the vehement Hamlex Bayer leaps into the grave, which becomes for a few moments a dried-up version of the Mindanao Trench, and berates the contrite Laertes because he doesn’t know how to pray!—to which the grief-stricken most brotherly brother (yours truly on that occasion) obligingly replies by seizing the petulant prince by the neck and without a moment’s hesitation Amletto comes out with (in Luis Ah! Baralt’s translation) an “Os ruego que quitéis vuestros dedos de mi cuello.” Just like that, cool, calm
and collected.

  —So what are you trying to prove?

  —Nothing. I’m not trying to prove anything. We’re just talking, right? Or do you think I’m some kind of Elizabethan word-finder general?

  He lowered the shades and fished in his pocket for the wraparound sunglasses he wore day and night and night and day he used to put on and take off, alternately, to show off his expressive eyes and his photogenic gaze, and later to cover both gaze and eyes with a mantle of moody modesty. The sin of lumière.

  —”And the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-colored taffeta . . .” It should’ve been you doing the quoting or should I say quothing?

  —Quo Modo?

  —Because they are the words of a prince like you to a buffoon like me, who is, what’s more, a better counsellor than you and me put together.

  —I don’t follow you.

  —Don’t follow me, follow Shakespeare.

  “Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty . . .” That’s Falstaff, and man, is he something. The fellow he’s talking to is Prince Hal. Henry the Fourth, act 1 scene 2.

  Cué has a stupendous (or stupid) memory for quotations, but his English only escapes from the Caribbean singsong by falling into a light Hindu intonation. I thought of Joseph Schildkraut, the gone guru in The Rains Came.

  —Why don’t you write? I asked him suddenly.

  —Why don’t you ask me rather why don’t I translate?

  —No. I think you would be able to write. If you wanted.

  —I used to think so once too, he said and fell silent. Then he pointed to the street and said:

  —Look.

  —What is it?

  —Over there. He pointed more precisely (with his finger) and slowed down.

  It was a billboard belonging to the OP which said SITE FOR PUBLIC WORKS OF PRESIDENT BATISTA, 1957-1966. HE IS THE MAN! I read it out aloud.