Bobo limited himself to asking, and then replying:
“Where’s the mike? Ah, here it is.”
The hostess left.
For a few minutes, the only thing to be heard in the room was the clinking of glasses coming from the first floor and the sickly-sweet pentatonic harmonies from the set. I went past the table and out onto the balcony overlooking the street. The lights of La Habana—from the scattered small houses, not the piers—were shining hopelessly. I remembered that anecdote my mother used to recount: from the port of Progreso, in the Yucatán, it’s possible to see the lights of La Habana and say good-night to the valiant Fidel Castro. Dedicate a bolero to him: the black flowers of fate separate us without mercy.
Just at that moment, Bobo Lafragua let his beautiful bluesy voice flow through the room:
“Chi mu ke pe o ni yu, chi mu yang, o ni yu. Chi mu ke pe chi mu yang, ni mu ni mu num.”
His invented lyric perfectly matched the televised melody. He stood up, still singing, and, microphone in hand, began imitating the conventionally stylized gestures of Emmanuel and Napoleón.
“Give it a rest, Bobo.”
“Soo, too, ni-mu-yang. Soo, too, ni-mu-yang. Ka tu yan go wo.”
From the inside pocket of his dinner jacket, he extracted a small comb. He threw it to me and I caught it. The symmetry between that invitation and my first melodic, revolutionary memory seemed incorruptible. I decided to play along. Using the comb as a microphone, clumsily copying the dance moves of the boy band Menudo, I sang:
“Soo, too, ni-mu-yang. Soo, too, ni-mu-yang, ka tu yan go wo, ka tu yan go wo.”
The waiter who came to take our order was disconcerted. He attempted to reason with us, first in Spanish and then in Chinese. We didn’t even turn to look at him: we were absorbed in trying to put together a new dance routine based on all too well known eighties steps.
“E-go-ne ma yu a-a, e-go-noh, go-noh-ke.”
The manager was called. The racket (by then we were singing at the top of our lungs) attracted a number of clients. Some were laughing softly. Others looked at us with unconcealed disapproval. “What the heck,” I thought. “They can’t deport you twice from the same river.”
They forcibly escorted us out of the restaurant. We couldn’t stop laughing, dancing, singing as we descended the stairs and passed between the tightly packed clients on the first floor and continued along streets with steely-sharp names like Zanja, Cuchillo, and Rayo: Grave, Knife, and Lightning. And on beyond the Barrio Chino (Forget it: it’s Chinatown), walking and dancing and running and dancing and zigzagging along the fine dividing line between Habana Vieja and Centro Habana, pedestrian precincts, avenues, and historical sites, Paseo del Prado, Floridita, Casa de la Música, the Granma in its museum, palm trees on the Malecón, the Hotel Nacional first above and then below us, El Gato Tuerto—the gas station where the gay kids hang out—the stretch of flags where little girls spy on the fat prey of Italian peccaries from their lipstick jungle, then turning again up the street toward Vedado to ask a gypsy cab driver friend, parked near the Yara movie theater, to please take us back to Miramar still laughing dancing and singing:
“O-ho-ho-he-la-fo ha no no ha no, ke-re-ke-ne-la-fo ha no no ha no, yu-ni-yu-e-la-fo ha no no ha no, haaa-no, haaaa-noooo …”
My mother isn’t my mother: my mother was music.
FEVER (2)
… we know for certain that psychoanalysis, which believes it serves the reality principle, cannot abstract itself from the corresponding form of social domination, and so may unintentionally be at the service of the repressive system of that domination with its morality and prejudices.… In spite of all this, neurotic phantoms are not only regressive: in their core they are revolutionary, since they offer a substitute to an inhuman “reality.”
Igor Alexander Caruso
It begins on a Monday.
First entry in the red notebook
It’s a pack of lies. I’m repressed. I’ve never had anal sex. Bobo Lafragua only exists in my imagination. I speak several Chinese languages perfectly. No one will ever find a dive called El Diablito Tuntún in La Habana. I’ve never been to La Habana. That’s a lie: I did go there once, but I never saw anything at all because I spent the nights in my hospital bed, suffering from a fever, dying, depressed and alone, connected to the black mask. The afternoons and mornings, I labored (in my habitual role of literary mercenary or prostitute) as the scribe of a sect presided over by Carlos Slim: a secret brotherhood of far-right Latin American businessmen who have been planning the future of the island after the death of Fidel.
That’s a lie: miraculous Cuban medicine cured my mother of leukemia.
That’s a lie:
So, from inside fever or psychosis, it’s relatively valid to write an autobiographical novel in which fantasy has set up camp. What’s important is not that the events are true: what’s important is that the illness or madness is. You have no right to toy with other people’s minds unless you’re ready to sacrifice your own sanity.
Second entry in the red notebook
This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but with a whimper. What I’m attempting, of course, is morbid reflection, not the transcription of pain.
I wrote the story of my trip to La Habana based on notes I took during a Special Period of hallucinations. I managed, to the extent I was capable of, to combine three stylistic bodies:
1. the true entries, many of which were, unfortunately, unintelligible (I have the impression that what was written in the notebook was funny and tragic, in contrast to the coldness of my summary);
2. the perception of the febrile moment (or rather: what little of that perception I was able to preserve in my memory), something that obviously isn’t mentioned in the original entries (no delirious person is so imbecilic as to lose the delicious thread of his madness by trying to describe it), and that I succeeded in reproducing through the fiction of opium;
3. and, of course, a vain, frivolous imperative: trying to write well, whatever that might mean.
I perceive the symptoms of my infection with love. I perceive the antibiotics with suicidal paranoia. I’m sorry: I can’t pour that inner truth into the insignificant language of allopathic health.
I find the entries in my diary that make sense exceedingly boring:
The day before yesterday my fever rose to 105. I was unconscious. Aurora and Cecilia, two nurses on the night shift, put me in the shower. They gave me an intramuscular injection of a gram of ceftriaxone. They made me take 500 milligrams of Tylenol. They sent me home. For three days, I’ve been taking my medicine obediently. I’m halfway through. I feel better. Three more days before Dr. O. gives me the all clear.
What the hell does all that neatly groomed shit mean?
My performance consists of infecting myself with every possible germ and suffering fever until my pupils turn inward. Beyond the aesthetic experience the illness itself unleashes, there will be no other by-product than a logbook. I have to turn to the mechanisms of literature, despite the fact that many of my spectators consider it a dead language: otherwise the intervention would be just a tepid blot. I have to write so that what I think becomes more absurd and real. I have to lie so that what I do is not false. I don’t intend to blackmail anyone with this project: I undertook it because I’m a Hartista.
“Hartista” is a concept that Bobo Lafragua and I coined to give some dignity to the most congruent creative function of our century: having had enough. We are the opium front men of a vulgarity that, a thousand years ago, was considered sublime.
I’m not trying to convince anyone there’s art in this hartista-ness. I started it because it’s the last resource left to me in my attempt to approach sensibility. I don’t believe in the mirages of the new flesh, or in Moravec’s arboreal intelligences, or in the information-religion of the couch potato: I don’t believe in the Beyond the Screen. What I want is for someone to internally caress my old, blubbery, scarred flesh. If the world won’t kiss
me, let fever do it.
I don’t have the diary referred to here. And I don’t remember anything of what was written in it. Either I lost it during my convalescence or it never existed: it’s another hallucination.
The story of the drift of these disjointed notes lies in the third and last entry in the red notebook in which I used to keep a record of the costs of my mother’s hospitalization. It’s the shortest, most enigmatic text, but also (not for you, but for me) the most revealing:
Third entry in the red notebook
Kill the southern dandy.
In the summer of 2007, a Coahuila Week was organized in La Habana. I attended the event as an organizer: at that time I was on the staff of the Coahuila Cultural Institute. I began feeling bad a couple of days before the trip back home. Nothing serious: a mild stomach bug. The problem is that, after flying from Cuba to Mexico City, I took another plane to Tijuana, where I was scheduled to teach a course. I worked in the Tijuana Cultural Center for a week. I bluffed: I have a dangerous ability for feigning health. It’s not too complicated: if you’re intoxicated most of the time, the people around you get used to reading your expression through a patina of chronic poor health. It goes without saying that I palliated the fever with alcohol. The kids in the workshop took me each night to a bar on Calle Sexto that’s been there forever: the Southern Dandy. That’s where Bobo Lafragua was born, and it’s also part of the title of a novel I was never able to write: Kill the Southern Dandy.
Before returning to Saltillo, I was also supposed to pass through a book fair in Los Mochis. The people in charge of my travel arrangements gave me the cruelest of itineraries: I flew from Tijuana to Los Mochis at dawn, spent just one night there, and then, again at dawn, flew—for no clear reason—to Guadalajara. I waited three hours in the airport before finally boarding a flight to Monterrey, where Mónica was waiting to drive me home. After this protracted journey, I spent two weeks in the hospital: the stomach bug had become a serious infection.
The plot of my novel was meant to be simple: Bobo Lafragua, a Mexican conceptual artist, while traveling from La Habana to Tijuana, decides to stage a monumental piece of performance art in which he would purposely contract a fever in order to set down his deliria in writing. From the beginning, I conceived the character as an imaginary friend, a psychological Frankenstein, armed with the traits of almost all the men I love. The incidents involved would be pastiches of fragments of twentieth-century novels about Evil and illness; is it necessary to add that the major inspiration would be The Magic Mountain …?
Some chapters would contain descriptions of Bobo Lafragua’s pieces—narrating conceptual art is an emerging literary genre. One of my favorites was:
In a room with white walls, measuring around five hundred fifty square feet, a transparent acrylic false ceiling has been installed at four and a half feet from the floor. To enter, you have to get down on all fours. On the acrylic ceiling stand mannequins: avatars of people walking on a transparent plate over your head. The floor is comfortable, with carpeting and cushions. There are even books in case you want to stretch out there and read. In a corner of the room, at ground level, a phrase is inscribed on the wall: “Anguish is the only true emotion.”
The fever turned out to be more than I could handle: I don’t have half of Bobo Lafragua’s mettle. One day, I spent four hours alone with a sharp pang of pain that traveled from my middle ear to my molars. It moved with such precision I could almost feel every one of its steps throughout my whole body: dolorous particles. I buried my head in the pillow, but the pillow was an inferno. As soon as the fever abated, I decided to throw the character and his novel into the trash.
Some characters just won’t go away. They wait patiently until you have a breakdown to come and collect what you owe them.
The initial stage of my mother’s leukemia ran from October to December 2008. The second was in June of the following year. Although her first period of hospitalization was the longest and most painful, she managed to get through it with relative peace of mind: she wrote, stayed sober, was dignified. Her relapse, on the other hand, was not something she could deal with. Mónica was, by then, six months pregnant, and all my moral energy and fears were focused on my forthcoming paternity.
I’d begun to fall apart two days before the first meeting with Bobo Lafragua. In the morning, I bought a gram of cocaine, which I consumed completely in three trips to the visitors’ restrooms in the U.H. It wasn’t enough: at midday, I phoned the dealer again to ask him to bring me crack. I thought up an ingenious way to smoke it. As soon as dinner was brought around, I walked to a hardware store and bought a Yale padlock. When I went outside to smoke tobacco, I collected the ash in a bottle cap. Then I ran up to the room where Mamá was lying unconscious, locked myself in her bathroom, balanced the rock of coke on the keyhole of the padlock, sprinkled the ash on it, lit it, and inhaled the smoke through the open cylinder. It wasn’t the perfect pipe, but it functioned. At some point, I remembered the ultrasound pictures of my future child and threw a half-gram rock into the toilet bowl. But the damage to my sanity had been done.
After our first conversation near the morgue, Bobo began to come to me in screen mode. One night, I was killing time at my mother’s feverside, scrolling through digital photos of the Berlin trip, when I noticed that in a picture where I’m standing under the belly of the Lego giraffe at the Sony Center, there was a small blue spot right where the stolen penis of the statue should have been. I zoomed in on the image to get a better look at the anomaly, and recognized in the pixels the face of Bobo with his mouth wide open, sticking out his tongue.
He spoke to me on the television. He was there behind the voice of a male nurse. I was soon noticing his features in the damp stains on the walls or in the folds or creases of the sheets. Four days after his first appearance, I went out to get some fresh air on the eastern courtyard. There, in the garden area, adorned with its deep-red and melon-colored mosaic, I stood looking at a squat, dried-out palm tree. And what do you think happened? For a few hours, I was transformed into a ghost, walking the streets of La Habana in the company of an imaginary friend in a dinner jacket. Mónica says that when Dr. O. came across me, I was trying to force open the metal door of the autopsy room, singing “Fuego” by Menudo, substituting the original lyric with syllables of an invented Chinese:
“O-ha-no-he-la-fo ha no no ha no, ke-re-ke-ne-la-fo ha no no ha no, yu-ni-yu-e-la-fo ha no no ha no, haaaa-no, haaaa-nooooo …”
Pretending to have regained my senses, I said to him:
“Apologies, doctor. The thing is my mother isn’t my mother: my mother was music.”
They sent me home provisioned with six ceftriaxone capsules and a pack of Risperdal.
The medicine relieved the pain, but not the dense putrefaction.
While I was recovering, I often dreamed I was in the square of gray tumuli opposite the Tiergarten in Berlin, and a man armed with a flamethrower was chasing me, chasing after all my friends, chasing the pregnant Mónica; he was trying to set us on fire. I would wake up in the backseat of a bus. We had arrived at our destination. All the passengers had alighted, except for one individual and me. I hurried to get off and, as I passed, recognized him: it was the man with the flamethrower; he was getting married that day and invited me to be his best man. We left the bus together. I was terrified; he was happy: well, it was his wedding day. There was an immense, circular, bare cement esplanade around the bus.
“Precisely,” the man with the flamethrower repeated in a flat tone each time I realized I was still dreaming.
I don’t know how many minutes, hours, days, dream layers I had to pass through to finally free myself from his fire.
Regaining your senses means your demons have returned to their place. They can’t torment anyone any longer. Except you.
I was ordered to stay away from my mother for a month. I next saw her when she was discharged from the hospital.
“Let’s get her a welcome-home present,” s
uggested Mónica.
We went to Walmart and chose a beautiful black straw hat that, in addition to looking gorgeous on her, hid her bald scalp.
I begged Mónica to wait for me in the car by the exit ramp of the hospital: I wanted, for a moment, to expiate the sins of my scrawneebly soul.
(Scrawneebly is a word Mónica and I invented to refer to cowards: a mixture of scrawny and feeble. We stand facing each other, arms akimbo, in superhero pose, and recite in unison, “And did you really think I was scrawneebly?”)
Mamá was waiting for me in her room. She was sitting on the sofa I used to sleep on. Her parchment-like skin seemed to me more beautiful than ever. She was wearing a laughable outfit: blue knee socks, black Crocs, pajama bottoms, and a red T-shirt. She’d put a towel over her head to cover the lumps and scars on her bare scalp. She was rickety. She stroked my cheeks with her two hands.
“How’s my baby …? You wouldn’t believe how I cried when they wouldn’t let me care for you, the way you care for me.”
For the first time in many years, we kissed on the lips.
Diana had taken charge of all the red tape, so we didn’t have to wait long: they brought a wheelchair (Lupita would have liked to walk out beside me, but protocol didn’t allow it), lowered her into it, and we headed for the exit.
Mamá’s face lit up when she saw Mónica by the door. She rubbed her almost full-term belly.
“Thanks for coming to fetch me in your car, Leonardo.”
Mónica took our present from its bag. With childlike glee, Mamá threw off the towel, put on the hat, and hugged Mo again.
“Thank you, thank you so much, my dear. Have you got a mirror?”
We left the parking lot, happy.
Mamá never took that black hat off until September 10: the day she died.
Tomb Song Page 14
