That particular painting radiated a vitality and a power that were almost otherworldly. Every flower blossomed into a strange pair of scissors endlessly opening and closing. The background of the painting was an infinite world of hallucinatory perspectives and barking birds. Filled with wonder at its skill, Skunk in a Funk minutely studied the masterpiece, but she was careful not to touch the canvas or even get too close to it; many of those who did had injured themselves on the leaves and flowers. Ramón Sernada, who had once been director of a museum and a dealer in fakes, confessed to his intimates (so we can’t reproduce his exact words here) that he had gotten AIDS from a prick from one of Clara’s paintings. And although that is extremely doubtful, it was true that Clara received a small commission or a government pardon every time she transmitted AIDS to someone in the general population.
Skunk in a Funk continued exploring that fantastic picture gallery. Naturally she stopped to marvel at the Portrait of Karilda Olivar Lubricious, an unfinished masterwork that we will be mentioning in a short while, in the chapter titled “The Death of Virgilio Piñera.” But her moment of true ecstasy came when she was standing before the immense canvas entitled Homage to Luisa Pérez de Zambrana. This painting, like all extraordinary things in this world, had the wondrous ability to hint at depths of mystery, at facet after facet of significance. Once one had seen that painting, it was simply impossible not to return to it again.
Like all great works of art, it beggared explanation, and it also, of course, eluded all attempts to grasp it whole; nor did it allow of rational, or any single, interpretation. Superficially, it was the portrait of a poet, a woman who had actually lived—a woman who was young, olive-skinned, sitting under a tree with her hair pulled back, and with a white flower (or perhaps a butterfly) in her hair. This lovely young poet was holding a book, though she was not reading it—she was looking outward at the spectator of the painting. To Skunk in a Funk, this meant that all the terrible truth the book contained was useless, that there was something more terrible still that lay beneath the first discovery, and beneath that, things still more terrible.
The problem was that from that woman—her eyes, her hands, her hair, her entire figure, and the painting that surrounded her—there emanated a mystery so total, so desolate, and yet so resigned, that it was outside time. That face was the outward symbol of the heart of a woman who had seen her children, still in childhood, die, and then seen her husband die as well. The work was touched with an infinite grief, as terrible as the resignation that also filled it. Its subject was a woman who came from the Night and had known its minute terror. One could say that it was the sum of all misfortunes, all calamities, concentrated in one horrific, stoic act of wisdom.
That woman, that painting, was not a painting; it was a spell, an awesome and irrepeatable force that could have been born only out of an ecstasy of genius and madness. It was enigma and consolation; it was faith in the belief that come what may, life does still have meaning; and it was absolute despair. It was concentrated diabolism and goodness that struck the person who looked upon it dumb—and then made him weep.
Perhaps no painting but the Mona Lisa itself could compare with that portrait hanging in a dim corner of Clara’s stifling hovel. The portrait, in this room that breathed defeat, was a triumphant, pathetic, and terrifying cry of defiance.
The amazing thing was that the brilliant painter’s room was crammed full of wonderful paintings—they covered the walls and even the high colonial ceiling. But Skunk in a Funk, entranced, and temporarily oblivious to all the world’s horrors—especially the horror of being alive—could not tear himself from the portrait of Luisa Pérez de Zambrana. To look upon that painting was a privilege that transformed any pain, any grief, any calamity.
But then Clara told Teodoro to lock the door and slide the crossbar into place—everyone had finally arrived. And she began to speak to the gathered guests.
“My children,” she said, although among her guests were several of her former fathers- and mothers-in-law and even her great-grandfather, “you know that all my life I have been a whore. You know the dangers I have had to face in the practice of my profession. But thanks to that profession I have survived in every sense of the word—I have helped you all, I have supported an enormous family, and I have been able to work on my paintings. But above all, I have lived independently and freely, practicing the only profession that has still not been prostituted: i.e., prostitution. This wonderful calling has allowed me to be the captain of this household and, even more importantly perhaps, the captain of my own life. But now, something terrible has happened to me. My breasts have fallen. Look!”
And Clara stood up and ripped open the bodice of her long white dress, showing the entire room her dry, shriveled, discolored tits, which hung like worms or leeches down below her waist.
An Oh! of horror swept the gathered guests, including even Miguel Barniz. This was a truly devastating development.
All of Clara’s children ran to her, clutched at her skirts, and wept, while Clara, still standing erect before the world, exposed her fallen tits. Her great-grandfather, her former fathers- and mothers-in-law, and even her mother (for whom Clara had always done so much) fell to their knees and kissed her long, ripped-open dress. The bonze pronounced a few strange yet obviously pain-filled words in his native tongue. The monumental sailors and hunky stevedores wept like babies. The most stoic queens buried their heads in their arms. Coco Salas turned aside and removed his spectacles. Even Delfín Proust, bound to his iron bar, looked on in emotion, and Sakuntala la Mala had to clear her throat. But perhaps the most moving thing about the moment was those hoarse, despairing moans that came from Teodoro Tampon as he rolled around the figure of Clara Mortera.
Then Skunk in a Funk, stepping over the sorrowful heads, walked up to the tall, tragic figure and looked at her fixedly. And seeing her standing there—svelte, her gown ripped open, her breasts shriveled, her eyes vacant and staring into space—Reinaldo realized that for a long time Clara had known that her tits had fallen and had suffered because of that, and realized too that this moment of confession was the most painful moment in her life, because she was making her defeat public. And Skunk in a Funk realized something else: she realized that the portrait of the mourning, afflicted, maternal, despairing, patient, enigmatic, and brilliant poetess Luisa Pérez de Zambrana was the self-portrait of Clara Mortera.
A TONGUE TWISTER (23)
After the botched boycott of the Coptic optician’s shop, inept Calypso, black-market operative, opted to boycott an agricultural cooperative trafficking in captured raptors and eucalyptus concocted into cough drops. This cockamamie boycott cooked up by inept Calypso also flopped.
What boycott cooked up by Calypso could succeed? Hah! Calypso’s boycotts suck.
For Mayra the Mare
CLARA’S HOLE
It would be unfair not to chronicle, as best we can, the proofs of solidarity that almost all of Clara’s guests immediately showed her. Even Odoriferous Gunk, in an unprecedented gesture, promised to sell all his dying mother’s medicine on the black market and turn over the proceeds of the sale to Clara. Sakuntala la Mala pulled off one of the gold earrings that had been left to her by her slave-trading great-grandmother and in the most respectable way deposited it, like a votive offering, at the painter’s feet. Urania Bicha slipped off her imported brassiere (which she had battled so fiercely to get her hands on!) and laid it before Clara. Mahoma took off her amazing platform shoes (more than a food and a half high) and put them down beside Clara. The bonze cut off the braid that grew from the crown of his shaved head and with a bow of reverence dropped it at Clara’s feet. Even Coco Salas swore an oath to sell Maya Plisezcaya the secret of his mosquitoes and with the two sacks full of rubles he made on the sale, accompany Clara to the Black Sea, the waters of which would surely, Coco said, restore Clara’s fallen breasts. . . . The offerings, the promises, the gestures of encouragement and compassion went on and on—until finall
y Clara, pushing aside the mound of objects that were accumulating before her long body, spoke as follows:
“No more . . . no more. Don’t you people understand that none of these things is going to lift my tits? I am no longer myself. I am no longer what I was. I am no longer I.”
At that irrefutable statement, silence fell. But it was a brief silence, because almost immediately a violent tropical shower began pouring down on Old Havana—so violent that some of Clara’s guests thought the Apocalypse had come.
Suddenly the room was like a sauna, and Clara, pulling herself together and laboriously making her way through her friends as she fanned herself with a tin plate that Teodoro had stolen from a pizzeria, exclaimed:
“This heat is killing me! I can’t breathe! This room needs a window! Quick, a window, or we’ll all suffocate!”
And she began passing out objects for making a hole in the wall—a long wood-handled kitchen knife, a hundred-year-old machete, a flagpole, two forks, a crowbar, and the long, pointed wooden dildo carved by Teodoro. Several people proceeded to clear a space on the wall on which hung one of Clara’s masterpieces, Birds Mourning the Caonao Massacre, and set to work digging at the wall. With the thunderstorm still pounding outside, the heat in Clara’s room really was suffocating, especially if you consider the number of people who were crammed into that miserable hovel. Hacking out a window was, in a word, a matter of life or death.
Almost everyone took a turn at the job, attacking the wall with those outlandish picks and drills—which, by the way, had to be muffled so the noise of hammering and chipping wouldn’t draw the attention of the block chairman of the Watchdog Committee. As sailors pounded their fists against that wall which seemed to be forty feet thick, the Jamaican cultural attaché wielded the crowbar with surprising expertise and Casandra Levinson stabbed frenziedly at the hole—which by now was more than six feet deep. Clara’s children used their bare little hands to extract the rubble produced by the excavations. Mahoma hammered at the tunnel with her enormous platform shoes. Some of the neighborhood hunks addressed the hole, emitted intimidating whoops and grunts, and gave the wall karate chops.
With her long fingers and long, tough fingernails, Skunk in a Funk clawed at the grout and cement.
The heat was getting more and more unbearable, and although by now they had dug through more than nine feet of wall and the room was filled with rubble, there was no sign that they were coming to the other side. One of the brick masons who happened to be there, Lutgardito from the town of Regla across the bay, explained that this wall had been built in colonial times—back then, he said, the walls might be built as much as fifteen or sixteen feet thick. But instead of discouraging the tunnelers, this information spurred them on to even greater fury.
And so with the desperation of moles pursued by wildfire—and fire was what the room felt like—they continued to burrow.
They unanimously agreed to free Delfín Proust, who was now asleep, so they could use the iron bar he was bound to.
Delfín rubbed his hands, wrists, feet, and ankles, swung his arms and stamped his legs to return feeling to his numb extremities, then he opened his little snakelike eyes and registered a serious protest.
“Why have you people waked me up?” he whined. “I was dreaming that I was fucking Stalin. I was riding the old man’s enormous prick while I pulled at the ends of his moustache. We were speaking Russian, of course, since as you all know I speak Russian perfectly. Just as you woke me up, Stalin and I were about to have our third orgasm. What a magnificent fuck! The only other time I’ve ever enjoyed a fuck that much was back in the days when I used to screw my great-grandfather. My love affairs have always been fleeting, doomed, it seems, almost from the start. . . .”
“A sad fate, indeed,” replied Skunk in a Funk sympathetically. “And we’re sorry to have interrupted your wet dream, but right now what we need is that iron bar you were tied to. Either we finish this hole or we all die of asphyxiation.”
“Yes! Yes! But my screw with Stalin has been interrupted, probably for all time. Now I shall never find solace or satisfaction—never!”
But very few people were paying any attention to Delfín’s complaints anymore; practically everybody was holding the iron bar (wrapped in one of Clara’s sheets) using it like a ramrod on the wall. But the weight and the blunt nose of the bar prevented any great progress.
When it began to seem as though no one’s strength could hold out any longer, and chubby Teodoro, tunneling through the wall, looked like some poor little rat in a hole that apparently went on and on and finally led nowhere, the cunning Mahoma, aided by Skunk in a Funk and Lutgardito, smashed her platform shoe so violently against the wall that the three of them, with a thunderous far-off crash, were hurled right through to the other side. Everyone thought the poor things (now including Teodoro Tampon, who had tumbled through behind them) had plunged headlong into Calle Muralla (which was where the tunnel was supposedly going to come out), where they would now be no more than broken and twisted bodies. But no! Suddenly Teodoro, Mahoma, Skunk in a Funk, and Lutgardito found themselves not on the street—not on any street—but rather in a cavernous colonial-looking building that lay, unbeknownst to either Clara or any of her guests, on the other side of the wall. Yes, the four friends now stood in (or rather sprawled on the floor of) the central convent of the Sisters of Santa Clara, a vast colonial edifice that those nineteenth-century nuns from Santa Clara had fled to when the Condesa de Merlín had torched their provincial nunnery, and then that their twentieth-century sisters had abandoned when Fifo’s Revolution had come to power. The doubly ill-starred nuns had left the impressive building absolutely intact, and since that time, the convent had been sealed by Urban Reform and forgotten. It was one of many buildings that Fifo had locked and shuttered and on whose massive door there had been placed, like the medieval mark of the plague, a sign that read
RECOVERY OF MISAPPROPRIATED PROPERTY
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF URBAN REFORM
—a notice that was capable of scaring off even the most intrepid of burglars.
Lutgardito, Skunk in a Funk, Mahoma, and Teodoro Tampon picked themselves up and wandered through the immense shell of what had been the religious center, their eyes filled with the vision of enormous round-backed trunks, huge chests, slabs of marble, pieces of statuary, lovely tapestries and rugs, crosses, grandfather clocks and wall clocks, cedar benches, confessionals, wicker chairs, and literally thousands of other objects, artifacts, and pieces of furniture. What they found most awesome, though, was the high, caissoned ceiling, which was so massive and so high that it muffled the sound of the thunderstorm that still raged outside. The four of them stood in wide-eyed amazement, huddled together, breathing a peace and grandeur that no longer existed in their world. Clearly, the hole in Clara’s room had given them not only a huge fortune but another universe.
And it was a monumental universe. It had been frozen in a time when one did not have to ask permission to take off running—a universe in which at last Mahoma, breaking out of her spell, began to tap-dance in her platform shoes over the medieval floor tiles and glazed enamels that covered the remains of the first Mother Superior, who had been laid to rest there more than three hundred years ago. “The acoustics are perfect,” said Mahoma, her tap dancing coming to an end. Then, looking up toward the high opening through which they’d tumbled, she yelled for the others to throw down a rope so they could come down and see this.
“Not a rope, a scaling ladder,” said Skunk in a Funk, suddenly feeling medieval.
The guests tied together sheets (on which Clara had planned to paint her future paintings) and began to rappel down the wall. By the time the descent was completed, it had stopped raining and the guests, wandering in astonishment through the convent, were bathed in a watery, wavering, many-colored light that filtered down through the high stained-glass windows.
“This is a gold mine,” said the cunning Mahoma—though with the astounding variety and lux
ury of things that the nuns had patiently accumulated through the centuries and then been forced to abandon in less than twenty-four hours, no one person, not even the brilliant entrepreneuse Mahoma, could, in such a short time, take it all in. Each person, therefore, went his or her (or his/her) own way, exploring to inspect the place—down the corridors, into the large halls, the chapels, the cells, the collective sleeping quarters, the enormous library, the refectory, the sacristy, the toilets, and the thousand and one other compartments that the building contained. They stood in awe before a tapestry, a lamp, a cushion, a length of copper tubing, a religious painting, a metal fan, a stone drip water filter in its cabinet, a marble table, a monumental crucifix, a wooden santo. . . . In one immense chest the nuns had piled strange cylindrical objects about a foot long carved from precious woods. At first no one could figure out what these objects were, but at last Clara offhandedly (as she continued her exploration) told them.
“They used to call them ‘the nun’s solace’—they’re dildos, you dildos!”
The altar stood majestically under a stained-glass vault.
Then they all began to appropriate what most struck their fancy—an urn, a sconce, a lamp, a piece of antique furniture, a beautifully glazed tile, a reliquary, an icon, a water filter, a book of religious music, a set of dishes, a dildo, a missal. . . . But Clara Mortera, as owner of the hole, took charge of the situation. First, they needed to build a ladder to reach the opening into her room. Then they’d see how to get the stuff out of the convent.
“Remember,” said Clara, foreseeing the legal troubles that might face them, “all this stuff has been claimed by the Commission on Misappropriated Property. We’ve got to do everything with the greatest caution, so as not to call attention to ourselves. And, of course, nothing will be done without my express permission.”
The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights Page 46
