Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

  —Plan de Obras Públicas del Presidente Batista, mil novecientos cincuenta y siete–mil novecientos sesenta y seis. Ese es el hombre. So what?

  —The numbers, not the hombre.

  —There are two dates. What about it?

  —The two figures add up to twenty-two, which is the day I was born, and my name and my two family names together add up to twenty-two (he said veintidós and not veintidós like any other Cuban for twenty-two). The last number, the sixty-six, is also a perfect number. Like nine.

  —Pass me the corollary, please.

  —The more I know about letters the more I like numbers.

  —You can stuff it, I said and I thought, Shit! Another tiger with infinite stripes. But what I said was, —You’re a cabalist.

  —Pythagoric elixir, anodyne used against literary spasms. Or cramps, as they say in our own eastern province.

  —Do you really believe in numbers?

  —It’s almost the only thing I do believe in. Two and two will always be four and the day they make five, start running.

  —But you haven’t always had these problems with mathematics?

  —The problem is not the numbers but the way the numbers are treated. It’s a bit like the lottery, which is the exploitation of numbers. The Pythagorean theorem is less important than Pythagoras’ advice on not eating beans or killing a white cockerel or wearing the image of God on a ring or putting out a fire with a sword. And there are three other things which are even more important: not to eat the heart of an animal, not to return to your country if you have left it and not to piss facing east.

  I laughed and the street suddenly opened out onto Maceo Park and La Beneficencia. But not because I laughed. Cué let go of the wheel and shouted:

  —Thalassa! Thalassa!

  He made one more joke and humming the Mexican waltz “On the Waves” circled Maceo Park three times.

  —Look at it, Xenophobon! he said.

  —Don’t you like the sea?

  —Would you like to hear a dream I had?

  He didn’t wait for me to say yes.

  VII

  Arsenio Cué’s dream:

  I am sitting on the Malecón and looking at the sea. I am sitting on the wall facing the street, but I am looking at the sea even though my back is turned. I am sitting on the wall and I can see the sea. (That tautology is part of the dream.) There is no sun or very little sun. In any case the sun is pleasantly warm. I am feeling good. It is obvious that I am not alone. A woman is sitting beside me who would have a face of great beauty if only I could see it. She seems to be with me, to be my companion. At least I don’t feel any sensation of tension or desire, only the contentment one gets from the company of a woman who was very beautiful or desirable and is so no longer. She must be wearing an evening dress but I am not at all surprised. Nor do I think that she might be eccentric. The Malecón is no longer close to the sea: a broad white beach separates us from it. There are some people sunbathing. Others are swimming or rowing in the sand. There is a group of children playing on a large flat dazzling white strip of concrete near the wall. Now the sun is strong, very strong, too strong and we all feel like we are being crushed, flattened, shriveled up by this unexpectedly strong sunlight. Something suggests that we are in danger or there is an uncertain suggestion which then becomes a reality: the beach—and not only the white sand but the sea as well which is no longer blue, but white, not only the land, the water as well, are rising—folds over and climbs on top of itself. The sun is so strong that the black dress my companion is wearing begins to burn and her invisible face is black and white and ashes all at once. I hurl myself off the wall toward the beach or toward what was the beach but is now a field of ashes and start running without so much as giving a thought to my companion, forgetting in my fear not only my affection for her, but also the pleasure of having her with me. We are all running except her, and she stays where she is, on top of the wall, burning quietly. We run run run run run run toward the beach which has now turned into an enormous umbrella. To save ourselves involves running under the shelter of the umbrella. We are still running (there is a child who falls over and another who sits down on the ground, worn out maybe, but it’s of no importance even to his mother, who continues running, although she looks behind her for a moment as she runs) and we have almost reached the umbrella of white sand and white sea and white sky as well now. At the same moment as I see that the shade of the umbrella is being wiped out by a white light, I also realize that the pillar is not shaped like an umbrella but like a mushroom, and that not only is it no protection against the murderous light, but that the pillar itself is the light. In the dream, this moment seems to have come too late or is no longer important. I keep running.

  VIII

  —It’s the myth of Lot in the light of present-day science. Or of its dangers, I tell him and at the same time I’m saying it I realize how pedantic I’m being.

  —Possibly. In any case you can see now that neither myself nor my subconscious nor my atavistic fears have any liking for the sea. Neither the sea nor nature nor outer space. I believe, as Holmes says, that concentrated spaces are an aid to the concentration of thought.

  —Boethius is the cell he lived in. The consolations of claustrosophy.

  —Not quite, because you could talk about the groves of Academe and about Plato and fuck up my argument. But it’s true I’ve never seen an open-air lab. I’m thinking of ending my days in a cubicle at the National Library, of course.

  —Reading everything from Pythagoras to Madame Blavatsky.

  —No. Interpreting dreams and decoding ciphers and playing the numbers.

  —What would Eliphas Levy say?

  We had finally left the Malecón and I saw how the clouds had drifted away from the city and formed a white and gray and occasionally pink wall between the sea and the horizon. Cué was doing a thousand.

  —You know that Cuban literature has never concerned itself with the sea, even though we are condemned to what Sartre would call islienation?

  —That doesn’t surprise me. Haven’t you seen the equestrian statue of Maceo and how it turns its hindquarters toward the Pontos? And people sitting on the wall do what I did in my dream and turn their backs on the seascape, completely absorbed in this landscape of asphalt and concrete and passing cars.

  —But the strange thing is that even Marti said: “The stream of the mountains pleases us more than the sea.”

  —And you’re going to rectify this rhetorical rebuff?

  —Dunno. But someday I’m going to write on the sea.

  —Shit. The joke is that you don’t even know how to swim.

  —So what? According to you the only poet who could do it would be Esther Williams.

  —See? You’re beginning to understand why some of my best friends are numbers.

  I searched all along the far-off/black/breezy archaic arches around the Carreño building, beyond the Tower of San Lazaro, and in the very exclusive mock-castle where Mercedez Bens on street level had all you need for traveling (spare parts & accessories inc.), which would have excited Cué, and upstairs Mary Tomes had her famous brothel for rich people, where you had to ask for an appointment by phone and prove your identity as a client first and where you were offered all you need for loving (spare parts & accessories inc.), which excited me without tempting me overmuch and where one day I met a girl who was beautiful but had only one arm and was dumb because of her almost eternal profession and I went on scanning the length of the porticos now where the sun was casting a placable shadow and when we pulled up at the MiTío service station I had my revenge and Arsenio Cué his nemesis: a lottery vendor holding up a vertical multicolored display leaflet with the ticket numbers in one hand, while with the other he offered the tickets and proclaimed all you need for winning in a voice we couldn’t hear. I pointed to him and told Cué:

  —Sad end for a philosophy.

  IX

  Is space in space? Arsenio Cué seemed to want to prove it an
d the fact that he contradicted me quoting Holmes was proof just as now he was driving along the Malecón in the opposite direction or, like a pendulum, swinging back to the way we came. He was concentrating on the driving and now that the scenery wasn’t broken by his histrionic profile, I gazed at the brilliant sky and the low-hanging, far-off and deceptively solid clouds that looked like unreal islands and the sea which lay spread out a little way beyond the window and the sea wall. La Chorrera slipped by again, like the signal to leave your seat in a continuous program at the movies. Cué didn’t enter the tunnel but went around it and up to 23rd and he pulled up alongside the traffic signals there and pressed the button to lower the top, which slid back like a moveable sky. I remembered the Verdun movie house and its moveable roof. We started up again with the air enveloping and oppressing and holding us back: it was the only boundary in our new-found freedom. From the bridge over the Rio Almendares, with the dense thickets of trees on its banks and its wooden piers and the sun’s reflection on the muddy current, it all looked like a river out of Conrad. We went down Mendoza and after a while took a right and continued down the Avenida del Rio. Once more we saw the handwritten sign saying Think twise—would you thro bricks to woman with baby? and Cué said, —Nobody but W.C.! Fields could have done it, like that other sign on the Via Blanca which read OPEN ONLY TO GANCEDO meaning you couldn’t turn except into Gancedo Street, and Cué said that it was one more exclusive property of the industrialist of the same name, or in the Biltmore where another sign read SLOW DOWN—YOU ARE RISKING THE LIVES OF OUR SONS and one night he had wanted to substitute the letter s for a c, or when he passed the sign on the Cantarranas highway which said DELICIOUS BLACKS AND DELECTABLE MOORS. DRIVE IN, an ad for black beans and rice, called “Moors and Christians” in Havana, he said it was a standing invitation for André Gide—which he pronounced André Yi until I asked him who this distinguished Chinese pedelast was. We talked about billboards and signs like that surrealist one on the beach, which said RIDERS ON THE SAND PROHIBITED. Synge at Guanabo perhaps? Or the unconscious humor of Alfredo T. Quílez when he ordered that on the walls of the house where they printed Carteles magazine the traditional notice NO CARTELES, which means no posters, should be replaced by one saying NO LAMPOONS. Or the enigmatic DON’T THROW IN YOUR DOGS on the gate of a villa on Linea Street, which was absurd but for the little-known fact that an heiress turned her manor into an asylum for dogs and anyone who wanted to get rid of an undesirable cur would throw it over the gate—a sudden and unexpected airy sanctuary. And what about the sign outside a glassware shop which would have made all the difference in the world, if not for P’ui at least for the Dowager Empress: WE SPECIALIZE IN THE RESTORATION OF CHINA. Or when Cué wanted to write on the notice in the El Recodo bar which said HOT DOGS HERE! the words Cave Canem! Or to add to the numerous ads reading PROPOSALS WELCOME on sites that were up for sale the word DISHONEST for an opener. It was he who also found this last beautiful piece of Sign Buddhism in Mexico, which notified truck drivers carrying building materials: MATERIALISTS ARE FORBIDDEN TO STOP IN THE ABSOLUTE. Arsenio Cué always predictable and always surprising and renewing himself. Like the sea.

  We came out on Seventh and crossed Fifth Avenue (Cué called it Filthy Ava Nude) and went along up First: he offered me another San Lázaro Street and I saw the sea again, this time cut into fragments between Californian villas and hanging balconies attached to châteaux and family villas and hotel de posh and the Blanquita Theater (the Very Illustrious Senator Viriato Solaún y Zulueta wanted to be the owner of the largest theater in the world and asked, Which is the greatest theater on earth? Radio City, they told him. It has six thousand seats: well, the Blanquita has twenty seats more) and private and public balneal beaches and a vacant lot (Proposals wel) where the grass grew up to the shoreline, and at the end of the street, as we turned back toward Fifth Avenue, going all the way down Third so as to join the avenue by the tunnel and flying up along this street with its trees and lawns, hurtling through these vertiginous gardens at 60 mph, I realized what made Arsenio run. Under the simmering sky.

  He didn’t want to eat up the miles as we say here (and it’s curious how many things in Cuba go in through the mouth and not only do we eat up space, but to eat a woman means making love and balls-eater and shit-eater is a synonym for an idiot and to eat rope means to go hungry, to be down and out and a fire-eater is a goon and to eat out of someone’s hand is to let oneself be tamed by an adversary and when someone does something well or extraordinary, we say he ate it up, se la comió!), it was more like he was going over the word mile and I thought his intention was the same as my pretension to remember everything or as Códac’s temptation wanting all the women to have a single vagina (though vagina wasn’t exactly the word he used) or like Eribó who got an erection whenever he heard distant drums or the late Bustrófedon who wanted to be a living language. We were totalitarians: immortals to be by uniting the end and the beginning. But Cué was wrong (we were all wrong, all of us except, perhaps, Bustrófedon, who could well be immortal by now), because if time is irreversible, space is irreducible and what’s more infinite. This was why I could ask him:

  —Where are we going?

  —I don’t know, he said.

  —You choose and I’ll obey.

  —I don’t have the slightest.

  —How about Marianao beach? Clue said.

  I was delighted. For a moment I thought he was going to say Mariel. One of these days we are going to come to blows with the blue dragon or the white tiger or the black turtle. Cué will also find his Ultima Thule. What did I tell you? We braked violently on 12th Street because the lights had changed to red. I had to hold on tight.

  —”The air invents the eagle”: Goethe, said Cué. —”The traffic signals invent the brakes”: I. Myself.

  X

  We continued under the shade of the trees (laurels or false laurels, jacarandas, flowering chestnuts and in the distance the enormous fig trees of the park—cut in two by the avenue whose name I can never remember and from which these holy green giants look like a single Bo tree repeated in a blasphemous set of mirrors) like a roof over our heads and when we got to the pine trees nearer the shore I scented the sea, briny and penetrating like a shell opening up, and I thought, like Códac, that the sea is a sexual organ, another vagina. We saw Las Playitas slip past, and the amusement park which is called, inevitably, Coney Island, and the Rumba Palace and the Panchín and the Taberna de Pedro (which by night is a musical oyster with Chori as its black pearl singing and playing and making fun of himself and of everybody else as well: he’s one of the clowns most deserving of world fame and perhaps the most anonymous) and the little bars, cafés and fried-food stands that meant, as on Avenida del Puerto, that the street was coming to an end or a beginning, and on Biltmore Avenue the date palms of Fifth Avenue turned into royal palms and I knew now where we were going—along the Santa Fe trail. Soon (because Cué stepped on the accelerator) we had left Villanueva behind and the picken-chicken (picking chicking), which became memorable one night, and the golf courses so we could see the roadsteads and the yachts at anchor and behind them the gulf and beyond the horizon the barrier of heavy white and solid clouds that formed the wall of another Malecón.

  —Do you know Barlovento?

  —Yes, I think I’ve been there with you. It’s that allotment . . .

  —I mean the Bar Lovento, Cué said.

  Jaimanitas is a popular beach, but from the Santa Fe highway it’s no more than a few flat ugly concrete houses, a first-aid hospital and one or two run-down bars and a river surrounded by mangrove swamps with stagnant water neither blue nor brown nor green but a dirty gray that glitters in the sun because the sea although you can’t see it is only half a block away and the breeze comes up the channel of the river as though up a chimney.

  —I don’t remember it, I remember I told him. —Is that its name?

  —No. It’s called La Odisea.

  —And I suppose the owner�
�s a guy called Homer. Why not Aeneid Bar?

  —You’d be surprised, but the bar’s called Laodicea and that’s the name of the owner, Juan. Juan Laodicea.

  —Surprise is the cradle of poetry.

  —It’s a great place. You’ll see what I mean.

  We took a right turn, down a new avenue where the asphalt was still black, with tall curved concrete street lamps that bent over the road like Scott Fitzgerald’s flappers over love, like the necks of antediluvian beasts over their prey, like Martians spying on our peripatetic way of life. At the bottom there was a hotel or the unfinished structure of a hotel, a square edifice. We took a turn to the left, and rode parallel to the sea, like the canals of this rich man’s Venice whose happy owners could keep their automobiles in the carport and their motor launches in the yacht port and feel hemmed in by all you need for flight. I knew this was the paradise of the Cués. The project (or its realization) was false, or fictitious, but like everything in this country nature lent it its true beauty. The Traveler was right. The place was incredible for more than one reason. We arrived at the bar, which was on a wooden bridge on one of the side canals, and had a view of a large lagoon, also artificial, where the sun was reflected and multiplied in nuggets, in threads, in veins that formed a gold coast. In front of the bar was a maze of little coves and marine pines. I saw five palm trees whose trunks were covered with gigantic growths of lianas and on the sixth palm the fronds had died so that it appeared naked among its neighbors.

  —This is my amen, Cué said. I thought he meant to say his acme.

  —Drive back, I asked him.

  —What for?

  —Drive back, please.

  —You want to go back to Havana.

  —No, I just want you to drive back, twenty or thirty yards. To drive backward, not to turn around.