Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

  —Look, there’s some writing on the stone.

  I couldn’t see properly. I’m shortsighted. People who read too much never see clearly in twilight.

  —I can’t see a thing.

  —You’re going blind, coño. Soon you’ll only be able to see movies in your memory. I stared at him. —Sorry, kid, I’m sorry, he said, putting on a pained look. He put an arm around me.—I won’t kiss you because you’re not my type.

  What a bugger!

  —You’re the worst kind of peorcito, I said.

  He laughed. He recognized this familiar Cuban quotation. The key to twilight. Presidente Grau San Martin had used it: amigos my dear true friends to be Cuban means to be a friend, etcetera, that was how he had described his political rival in a speech. De lo peorcito. Grau was talking about Batista of course. Will El Hombre kill more people than time?

  We walk among the palm trees and I point to Havana, with its lights, land of promise on the historical horizon, its limestone skyscrapers looking like ivory towers. San Cristóbal la Blanca. It should be called Casablanca and not that city in Morocco nor the little fishing village on the other side of the port. I pointed this out to Cué.

  —They are whitewashed sepulchers, Silvestre. It’s not the New Jerusalem, kiddo, it’s Somorrah. Or if you prefer, Godom. I’m not convinced, so I say:

  —But I love it. It’s a snow-white city, a delectably salty sleeping beauty.

  —No, you don’t love it. It’s your city now. But it isn’t white or red, it’s pink. It’s a lukewarm city, a city of lukewarm people. And you’re lukewarm yourself, Silvestre. You’re neither hot nor cold. I knew you were incapable of love, I know now that you can’t hate either. You’re just a writer. A spectator, a tepid soul. There’s nothing I’d like more than to puke you up, but I can’t because I’ve already puked up everything I had in me. Besides, what the hell, I couldn’t do that to a friend.

  —Think of the things of the spirit as well. Now I’m Payanini, with his magic instrument, a payola or loote.

  —Is nothing sacred to you?

  —Remember that sin means without in Spanish.

  —Have you no convictions, then? No honor?

  “The best lack all convictions,” I quoted and he didn’t even give me time to finish.

  —The Beast lacks all convictions while the words/ Are full of passive immunity. Do you like The Second Coming?

  —Yes, I said, naïvely thinking he was talking about Yeats and forgetting he once said Yeats had to wait till he was fifty to have his second coming. —It’s a great poem. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold . . .

  —I prefer the third.

  —Third what?

  —The Third Coming. The third time I come.

  He went off atarun, metaphorically speaking, toward the car. In my village, when I was a kid, they used to say at moments like this, wildly indecent, Mare Metaphor is loosed upon the world. Rhetoric of the nation?

  XV

  The wind sprang up and our mauve-colored pleasing dome became magenta violet purple navy blue and black when Arturio Gordon Cué switched on his lights and cut the air in front of us up into dark bands that bent when they hit the propinquous park and gardens and the speedy houses across the street, and these ultraviolet curbs rounded down, rebounded and ran alongside the car until they fell silently making night behind our backs. As we were driving east the sunset no longer existed except as a slightly paler blue trembling halo above us and as I looked back Lotswively I saw a moribund pallor straddling the horizon and the equally black barrier of clouds that were so twilighted before and now made of graphite not only because the sun had in fact sunk into the sea but because we were traveling, accelerating toward the city and under the trees of the Biltmore avenue. We left the Santa Fe highway to the west at fifty, sixty, seventy-five as Cué’s foot was hungering to turn the road into an abyss of speed—no: already it had become an acceleration, a free fall. He continued to hurtle at full tilt down his horizontal precipice.

  —D’you know what you’re doing? I asked.

  —Yes, going back to town.

  —No, mi viejo, I don’t mean it like that. You’re trying to turn the road into a Moebius strip.

  —Kindly explain yourself. You know I didn’t graduate from high school.

  —But you know what a Moebius strip is.

  —On and off I do.

  —Then you know that what you want is not to follow the road into Havana, but to go into the fourth dimension, that what you’d want to want is for the street to continue till instead of being a circle it becomes an orbit in time, and your car is then a humming-top of time, Brick Bradford.

  —That’s what is known as total culture. From Moebius strip to comic strips.

  I scarcely caught a glimpse of Santo Tomas de Villanueva, which had turned from a catholic university (what a tautology!) into a blurred white and gray and green stain on the night-ground.

  —Hey, watch out. You’ll kill somebody.

  —Or something, namely boredom or the stillness of the night.

  —You’re driving like a maniac.

  —And what’s so bad about that? I’ll tell you, my crime is that I’m not a falcon. Do you know how hawks make love? They copulate at a dizzying altitude and let themselves fall, beak against beak, flying into union, caught up in an intolerable ecstasy (was it a recital he was giving?). The hawk or falcon, after copulation, rises again, swift, arrogant and alone. To become a peregrine falcon now and my trade to be the Faulknery of love!

  —You’re drunk.

  —Drunk with vertigo.

  —You’re drunk like any other drunken slob and please quit looking for poet’s liquor license. You’re not Edgar Allan Cué. He changed his tone.

  —No, I’m not. I’m not pretending to be either. But if I am drunk, let me tell you I drive better when I’m drunk. He could be telling the truth because he slowed down right in time for the double lights of the Náutico to switch from red to green as though turned by our inertia.

  I smiled at him.

  —That’s what’s known as sympathetic action.

  Cué nodded.

  —Today you are riding the tandem of physical delirium, he said.

  Now he braked easily to allow some dogs to cross the avenue led by three men in red uniforms who held the leashes firmly in their hands.

  —Greyhounds for the dog tracks. Now don’t you go telling me I’m like them, please, running after a March hare.

  —It would be a lousy image, because it’s too obvious.

  —Besides, you mustn’t forget the things of the spirit. Nobody’s going to lay bets on me.

  —Except your ventriloquist.

  —He’s a poor chess player or, as you say, a pool player. And I don’t need to tell you that chess is the opposite of a game of chance. Nobody puts bets on Botwinnik because there’s nobody to challenge him.

  —If Capablanca could take him on, by means of a medium, I’d take all bets against myself.

  I smiled as I thought of this eschatological possible game of chess and I remembered my ancestor, that ancient artificer who was something better than a scientific chess player because he was an intuitive thinker, an incurable womanizer, always a happy player: a winsome winner and a loser who was a chess bank because he laughed when he lost and never cared for training and was incapable of cheating: the opposite of Maeltzel’s invention, he didn’t play scientifically nor was he a chess machine: but an artist who kept his chess next to his heart, a chest player, a jazz player, a guru, the Zen master of grand chess, who like the Horse Dealer gave immortal and masterly lessons to the worst and most disreputable disciples.

  “I remember the case of a friend of mine, an enthusiast who had little talent, who used to play in his club in the evenings. Among his opponents there was one who beat him regularly, and it got to the point where he was really troubled by this. One day he called on me, told me what had happened and asked me for help. I answered that he should study the books and
see how quickly things would change. He told me: ‘Fine; I’ll do just such a move.’ He told me the opening the other player had used and the particular thing about his opponent’s development that bothered him. I showed him how he could avoid getting into that humiliating position and drew his attention to certain general elements in the game; but above all I insisted that he study the books and proceed in agreement with the ideas that they expounded. . . . A few days later I met him looking very pleased with life. As soon as he saw me he told me: ‘I followed your advice and it went very well. Yesterday I played the man I told you about two times and he beat me only twice.’ “ That was the way the Master would talk in his Last Lessons. I wouldn’t send him out to buy horses, but I knew that there was some relation between his lessons and the lessons of the master of Zen in the art of archery and if I knew that Death wanted to play a game of chess for my life, I would ask her one favor: that Capablanca should be my champion. That wise chessire with the luminous name-grin is the guardian angel, and the real reason that the one good film of that mediocre director Vsevolod whom the movie morons call the Great Pudovkini, his only encounter with the right path, is called The Chess Player, and that Capablanca should be his protagonist and saving grace like the black knight who leaps finally from his light hands and falls on the white cape of the snow is something more and something less than a symbol.

  He took the roundabout of the Yacht Club gracefully and turned into Fifth Avenue again, passing almost under the pine trees, the two of us blinded, dazzled, riddled with lights from the radiating vertigo of Corny Island and the electric honky-tonk of bars and street lamps and the luminous speed of headlights coming in the opposite direction. When we had gone around the darkened roundabout of the Country Club, I saw that Cué was concentrating on the wheel once more. It was a vice of his. You’re hooked on space, I told him but he wasn’t listening. Or hadn’t I actually said it? We crossed the avenue and the night sheathed us in an envelope of speed and smells. It was a pleasant vice. He spoke without looking at me, focusing on the street or his double drunkenness. Treble.

  —Do you remember Bustrófedon’s games with letters?

  —The palindromes? I don’t forget them, I hope I never do.

  Nor his jokes, I thought softly. Wherever he made a pun a pain was hidden.

  —Don’t you find it significant that he never hit on the best of them, the one that is the easiest and the most difficult and at the same time the most terrifying, Yo soy?

  I spelled it out, I read it back to front, yos oY, I’m I, and said:

  —No, not especially. Why?

  —I do, he said.

  The city had become a quantum night. The bulb of a street lamp slipping swiftly past yellowing and making visible a ticker tape of storefronts or a sidewalk with people waiting for the bus or pale, speckled trees that left off being trunk and branches and leaves and disappeared in a dark facade, was also a single blue-white light, struggling overhead to light up still more space and only managing to deform things and people with a sick unreality, and at times it was a fugitive window, of chrysolite, where you could see a family interior which because it was so alien seemed always peaceable and happy.

  —Bustrófedon, who was my friend as much as yours (I was on the point of saying, No kidding!) had one failing, aside from his vulgarity. Like on that memorable night (coño, how it bothered him: looking back in rage is the name of the game) and this particular fault was that he thought about words, all the time, as though they had always been written and nobody but he had ever said them and then for him they weren’t words but letters and anagrams and games with signs. My problem is sounds. At least that’s the only profession I’ve really learned.

  He fell silent dramatically as he often did and I examined his profile, until his trembling lips, faintly outlined by the amber light of the panel, relayed to me that he was going to go on speaking.

  —Say a sentence.

  —What for?

  —Please.

  An insistent gesture came with his petition.

  —O.K., I said and I felt a little ridiculous: caught in a sound trap as though I was testing an illusory microphone and I was even tempted to say testing one two three, but instead I said: —Let’s see. I was silent again and finally said: —Mama is not a palindrome but Madam is.

  Homage to Departed, held in contempt these days.

  A familiar and at the same time unknown noise came from Cué’s lips.

  —Simadam tub emordnilap a ton siam am.

  —What the heck does that mean? I asked him, smiling.

  —What you’ve just said but inverting the sound.

  I laughed with a trace of admiration—which is no mean feat.

  —It’s a trick I learned during recording sessions.

  —How do you do it?

  —It’s very easy, like writing back to front. All you have to do is spend hours and hours recording shit, programs with incredible dialogues that are almost unsayable or at least inaudible conversations made of silence, rustic comedies or urban tragedies with characters that are about as probable as Little Red Riding Hood and whom you have to impersonate with a super-human naïveté and do it knowing that, because your voice has the bad luck to be what they call euphonic, you’ll never be allowed to play the wolf, wasting your time as though it was something you could use all over again, like one of the tritons in the fountain at the entrance to the tunnel spouting water.

  I told him to do it again. Encore, Cué, enCuére.

  —What do you think of it?

  —I think it’s great.

  —No, I don’t mean that, he said, rejecting my flattery as

  though I was a fan asking him for an autograph. —I mean how

  does it sound to you?

  —To me? I don’t know.

  —Listen again, and he unreeled several other sentences.

  I couldn’t describe what I felt.

  —Doesn’t it sound like Russian?

  —Possibly.

  —Nais surekild noustit n seod?

  —I don’t know. It’s more like ancient Greek.

  —How the fuck do you know what that sounds like?

  —It’s not a secret language, if you don’t mind me saying so. I mean I’ve got friends who study philosophy and they speak it—with a habanero accent, I was going to add, but I could see he wasn’t in a mood for jokes.

  —I’m telling you it sounds like Russian. I’ve got a good ear. You should listen to a complete recording, but it would only need a bit of the track to convince you that Russian is only Cuban in reverse. Isn’t it weird, like really strange?

  No. What astonishes me now is not what astonished me then. What amazed me at the time was that there was no trace in his voice of what we had been drinking. Nor in his driving. I was even more surprised by his reference to time and the tritons. But I was so fascinated by his verbal acrobatics that I completely failed to notice that it was the only time I’d ever heard Arsenio Cué talk about time as though it were something vaguely precious.

  XVI

  We drove into Havana along Calzada. The lights on 12th were with us and we are passing in front of the Lyceum like a Buddhist arrow—zen! instead of zoom! I can’t see the Trotcha, with its meandering gardens and the ancient deluxe bathhouses (which were located, my god, at the end of the century, in a remote hacienda outside the city walls called, because it was off limits, Vedado: a point for our Le Cuérbusier, who calls music melting architecture), just a lousy labyrinth of ruins today and the former colonial theater next door which is a hotel now, less than a hotel: a decayed pension that has gone down in the world: ruins which won’t find me unmoved because I can never forget them, ever. The traffic stopped us on Paseo.

  —Are you serious?

  —About what?

  —Do you seriously mean it when you say that Russian is Cuban spelled backward?

  —Not spelled, read backward. Yes, I am. Perfectly serious.

  —My god! I shouted. —We are glasses
, communicating vessels. That fits right in with Bustrófedon’s theory that the Cyrillic alphabet (what did he call it? Cyrillic/cilyric) is the Roman alphabet in reverse, that you can read Russian in the mirror.

  —Bustrófedon was always joking.

  —You know that jokes don’t exist. Everything that gets said is said seriously.

  —Or everything one says is a joke. Life was an absolute joke for him. Or Him, if you prefer. Nothing human was divine for him.

  —In other words nothing was serious for him. By the same token, there are no jokes. Aristotelian logic.

  He started off again, first sketching an exclamation mark with his lips. Jimmydeancué.

  —Shit, mi viejo, he said. —Nobody would miss you if I drove you off in this time machine to live with the sophists.

  —Look who’s talking! All you have to do is to stop your quadriga, your Quatre Chevaux, and get out and kill a steer and pull out its liver to make the future present and find out whether we’re going to Sardis or the sea. (He smiled. ) But I’m going to suggest we form a new presocratic duo. We could easily be Damon and Pythias.

  —Who’s who?

  —You choose.

  —I don’t see you giving your life for me.

  —And what else is yours truly doing when he’s sitting in the suicide seat?

  He laughed, but he didn’t take his foot off the accelerator.

  —Besides, I’m more than willing to take your place wherever you want.

  He didn’t hear or he didn’t want to hear. Words are not enough for the Pythagorean listener. It needs figures. I’d have to show him some prime numbers. A pity. I could have spoken to him just now. Well, I’ll talk to myself instead. To masturdebate. In the idiom of a mastur race. Thus masturspake Zarathrusta. Make a solution of pollution. The solution of a sage is to pollute a page. Or a pageboy. Bring a boy to the boil. Bugger the little boys to come unto me. It is harder for a camel to enter a needle’s eye than to have its prick up your neighbor’s asseye. Don’t shit till you see the white of their oneyes. In the country of the oneyed, the blind man is king. A la lanterne rouge with all proverbes. Red Light District. Was it the whores who invented the traffic signal? No, because the inventor has a statue in Paris. It comes in The Sun Also Rises. The sun always comes. About the only thing which either comes and/or rises in the novel. The Sun Only Rises. Poor Jake Barnes. He’d be luckier on the moon. Luckier or cockier? There’s less pull there. Or would he waste all his moonshots in blanks of love? The sylphilis of Chopin. According to the theory of the master (guru) of ceremonies every man has an exact number of shots in his locker, no matter how or when or where you spend them. If you fired fifty in your youth you’ll have fifty less for your old age. How you aim is your problem. Don’t (dis)charge until you see the red light. Chicko, chico, you’re preoccupied with sex. I’ve never seen a single human being who wasn’t preoccupied with sex. Come again, who said that? Aldoux Huxley. Ah, I knew it didn’t sound like your subject. Essays were never your strong point. A weakness of yours. A weakness for ensayos, essais, essays and French lettres. To Aldous Husley they are exsayssive. Is he dead? No, he’s alive. Old writers never die: they just go Chrome Yellow. Shit, there’s that old man of the sea with his trident and his tritons. hings happen in threesT. He always turns up in Cuban literature. Like the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I see him/I don’t see him/I see him. What a beautiful row of arches. R of retches. Artches or reches or just pure baroque puke. I’m the Masturbanger of Venusberg with a baruque peruke. Art makes me sick. Sick. Arch. Artch! Aagggh! if you feel sick. A closed mouth tells no flies. Lies. There are no flies on me. Flies don’t lie by night. Mosquitoes then. Good-bye Neptune. In El Carmelo there are people eating dinner and the Auditorium lights were not dimmer, on the contrary, it was lit up, hiccup, sick-up. Like you’re going to be. Sss. $33.33 Gestapo? No! 33 rpms? No, I meant that music begins when words die. Heine. Hein Hitlere. All die. All dust. Aldust Huxley. Ad lib. Adliberace. All die die all. Dial Hitler. Heil Heine! When the word dies. It’s a concerto. Bachaldiviv? Krauts sonata. Kreutzer sonata. It’s a concerto not a sonata! A concert. There’s a Konzert and Enna Filippi will be going to battle with her harp, waltzing plus que lente. A cuntcert then. Cut that sex out! Ouch! It hurts. Shit, it’s Ravel, a famous asexual. He only wrote boleros, you know. Though I don’t know what he was up (or down) to in Antibes. Remember that Ida Rubinstein danced on a table. Big deal. Idadown? Ida means to go in Spanish. So what? Just because you go it doesn’t mean you come. Harping in the dark. Ina? Inna? In her? No, Edna asking for More by Salzedo, making harpwaves in the Seltzedo water, celestial lyre-player (liar-plier) who on the syrinx (rhymes with sphinx, like in sphinxter) makes it a celesta, an Arp. Arp? Is that how it’s spelled? Then it should be Hans Harp. What are women who play the harp called? Harpies. Enna making her celestial sounds material: Marxing the Harp. Or is it the erection of Mount Edna? It could be Kleiber. Erich Kiavier. Eines Wohltemperirte Kleiber. Eine Kleiber Nachtmusik. Ein feste. Stop festering around, Silver. Ein feste Brandenburg. No good. Komm Susser Todd-AO. No good either. Could it be Celibidache, Chelibidaque, celodese, celousy. Cellofabitch, Coelovideo. Celiberethoving, eroicating, changing the third (drei) movement, Cuévidache accelerating, because (he says that) there’s a dusty score (an old score to settle, let the dust settle) in Salzedoburg which demonstrates (to demons trate, where demons fear to trate) that Ardebol and Kleiver and even Sylvie & Bruno Walter were so immerdsed in each other that Adolfas Cider (for Adolferers Only) was quite right to prevent Walter by any means from playing Beethoven or Reichearsing, ifaisant des repetitions eroically or erotically amusicking themselves, n-no there’s nothing like French the Frenchman said, as that chivato, portrait of the informer as a young man, the kid who’s going to die as the melomane wants in the concert hall, as squealer-dealer, Bully the Fink, listens to the music from the terrace where he’s hiding as he reads Implosion ex Cathedra written to fffastidiare il souvenire d’un grand’uomo and to be read (Jazz a l’homme or Ella Cossa) in the time it takes Celibidet to play the Aeolica symphony number three because they had both taken a course in rapid reading. Rabidreaders. Accelerated readers. Gli scelerati. Or reader becomes rider. So we went back down the Avenue, down the Evenue of the Presidents. The impudence of office. They are all Fucker Wolffs and when they’re fucked off they are replaced by Vice Presidents. Agnewsticism.