Stacking trunks, marbles, benches, cots, and chairs into a sort of ramp, Clara and her cohort soon made a stairway up to the opening high in the wall. Of course there was no way that everything in the convent—some of the things, such as the mother superior’s bed, trunks, confessionals, and tables, were immense—would fit through that little hole. Almost everyone pitched in, though, to expand it.
At some point Odoriferous Gunk had seized a gigantic musket, one of the many in the convent (who knows why), and now, dressed from head to foot in black and standing on the huge pile of stuff that made up the jumbled stairway, he began to hack away at the hole.
As all this bustling back and forth was going on, Skunk in a Funk was off on her own, wandering through the scores of apartments, halls, caves, crypts, and oratories in the convent. She even found a reading room tucked away in a corner of the immense nave. . . . As she entered what had once been the kitchen, an army of rats scurried away in terror. Pushing aside barrels, demijohns, and pots of every size, at last she came to a cupboard, made of the finest woods, that rose from the floor all the way to the high ceiling. She opened its doors and suddenly, as she realized what was inside, her face grew young again and glowed as though all the light that entered the convent were trained directly upon her.
She had discovered a cupboard filled with empty bottles. There were hundreds of bottles, my dear—thick, heavy, bottle-green bottles that looked as though they’d withstand anything. Skunk in a Funk fell to her knees before those empty bottles with such devotion (never before expressed) that even the walls of the antique convent seemed to gently throb—for the first time, an act of true religious fervor had been performed within its walls.
The peace of the place, and the evening light, created a new dimension in time in that immense kitchen—on whose floor Reinaldo knelt before a cupboard full of empty bottles.
That same evening, the pillaging began. Each person carried off what he, she, or s/he could, promising to pay Clara half the real value of the merchandise. Through the front (and only) door of Clara’s little room, there began to emerge the most incongruous stream of objects—from frills and fringes to Venetian ceramics, from gigantic crosses to iceboxes filled with chapter records, from portable hermitages to trunks full of leather whips and smocks for altar boys, from tapestries more than nine feet long to strange dried flowers and gigantic coffers with silver handles. . . . At midnight, when the pillaging was at its frenzied peak, the chairwoman of the block’s Watchdog Committee appeared at Clara’s door. Quickly, Clara (who was keeping a notebook with a record of everything that came through the tunnel) covered the hole with the painting (Birds Mourning the Caonao Massacre, remember?) and invited Madame Chairwoman Snoop in. The old snoop came right to the point.
“Listen, Clara, I’m not going to ask you who owns the things that’ve been coming out of your room. But what I do want you to tell me right now is how such huge stuff can come out of such a tiny place.”
Clara knew that there was no way she could carry on her new trade without the consent of the chairwoman of the Watchdog Committee, so she took down the famous painting and showed the investigator the hole.
“You can go down and take whatever you want.”
The chairwoman of the Watchdog Committee peeked through the hole and stood in shock for a few seconds as her eyes took in that mob of fairies, queens, hustlers, hunks, hookers, and wheezing old men and women who, in the light of gigantic oil lamps and rusty sconces, were trying to move, push, lift, or dismantle the (to her) most unsuspected things. Shaking off her astonishment, the chairwoman of the Watchdog Committee rushed down the stairway-ramp, picked up a huge hemp hammock, stuffed several copper pots and kettles, a chamber pot, fourteen screws, and four or five of what looked like railway spikes (nobody could figure out what they were doing there) in it, and throwing that huge bundle over her shoulder, she clambered back up the improvised stairway and headed for Clara’s front door. As she left, she lifted her hand in farewell and said:
“I haven’t seen a thing, I want that clear. Do you hear me?”
“I haven’t seen a thing, either,” replied Clara as she stared fixedly at the huge bundle over the chairwoman’s back. “But if you need anything, come back anytime.”
And so, with the tacit permission of the chairwoman of the Watchdog Committee, Clara and her troops began to dismantle the convent with the freedom of sinners given dispensation by a papal bull and with the speed of squirrels who’ve just heard that a blizzard is on the way. . . .
In the streets and alleys of Old Havana there began to be seen the most amazing variety of objects bumping and rattling along atop draft vehicles manufactured inside the convent itself—in most cases consisting of no more than five or six planks sitting on wooden wheels. A dozen husky queens would be pulling a cart on which a pipe organ was precariously balanced; Mahoma would be pushing a gigantic upholstered armchair; Clara’s children would be pulling a weird-looking makeshift cart piled high with globes of the world; round and red, Miguel Barniz would be huffing and puffing as he tugged at a monstrous coffin-looking box filled with porcelain toilets and washbasins; behind him, Casandra Levinson would be pulling a little red wagon full of religious books that she planned to sell (“for their weight in gold!”) at a New York cultural center. And while these two sinister personages were staggering along with their shit pots and religious books (which they would never pay Clara for), they were already planning the report that they would be turning in to Fifo’s computers. . . . A black man was dragging a marble bathtub filled with copper wire, oil lamps, missals, and wooden dildos. . . . A fairy was pulling a covered wagon full of portable cookstoves and plaster virgins. Several sailors were rolling a huge tapestry down the street, toward the ocean. Sets of dishes; sections of brass and clay pipe; cushions, pillows, and bolsters of all kinds; decanters; floor tiles and wall tiles and ceiling tiles; pendulum clocks, pilasters, marble tables, armchairs and thrones, confessionals, portable hermitages, and cameos were pouring out of that little room, headed for still-unknown but undoubtedly avid recipients. Almost everything could be taken (or ripped) out and sold—but when Tomasito the Goya-Girl emerged from the tunnel with two big metal cans filled with kerosene, Clara’s face turned very serious and she told him that that was not for sale.
Finally, knowing that she couldn’t possibly control the sale of all these objects, Clara decided to charge her clients, or “associates,” a toll fee. She began to charge by the minute for a visit to the convent. If you wanted to go inside the convent, you had to pay cash on the barrelhead, although you could bring out almost anything you wanted if time (and in this, Clara was implacable) allowed.
Since the demand grew by leaps and bounds, an almost unsustainable spirit of competition emerged among the scavengers. Sometimes a skinny, tottering, malnourished old woman would have to wrestle fifty clay water filters out of the tunnel in less than fifteen minutes if she was going to cover the price of her admission. Sometimes in five minutes Odoriferous Gunk would have to carry out ninety iron penitential shirts studded with nails—which, wrapped in mosquito netting, would make an infernal racket as he dragged them down the building’s stairway into the street. But be all that as it might, within a very few weeks all the even remotely transportable furniture, utensils, and other objects that had once filled the convent had been sold off. Naturally, the chairwoman of the Watchdog Committee came in almost every afternoon to pay a terrified visit to Clara’s hole; she would grab up the first thing that came to hand (a piece of tile, the leg of a chair, the hinge off a trunk, a rush chair seat, the springs from a mattress, a carpenter’s plane, or a scapular) and leave again, her brows knit in tribulation.
During this time, Skunk in a Funk, aided by the Key to the Gulf and even sometimes Teodoro Tampon, was helping enormously to make Old Havana a better place to live, for he was filling the old city with wonderful artifacts which, by both the dictionary definition and Fifo’s repressive laws, would be classified as “extravagance
s.” The drunks at the pilot breweries now quaffed their beer from silver chalices; housewives stood in line for vinegar ladled out of huge violet-colored demijohns; the children of Old Havana would play ball in the street with copper candy dishes that made a tremendous clanging sound when the kids hit them with their bats, which themselves had begun life as enormous crucifixes.
All over the city, altars to San Lázaro and Santa Barbara were lighted by enormous medieval wax candles. Many bathrooms in even the most distant parts of the city were tiled with glazed Islamic tiles, and in the darkest hovels, Flemish tapestries adorned the walls.
Out of the finest wood, Skunk in a Funk and his trusty assistant the Key to the Gulf constructed a really marvelous loft—what the citizens of Old Havana, in honor of the loft’s design, called a “barbecue grill”—and they furnished it with the most exquisite religious tapestries, and then they built a spiral staircase by which to reach it. The Skunk’s room, multiplying from within, acquired a bathroom with copper tubing, a living room with a marble table, furniture carved from a single block of wood, and (of course) a magnificent long cameo. Chandeliers with crystal teardrops hung both above and below. Then, Skunk in a Funk transformed the window (which opened onto a black void) in her room (which was no longer one room but rather a two-story apartment) into a door, and out from that door, using steel bars and pieces of wood that she brought in through the building next door, she constructed a cantilevered terrace that she adorned with brass rails and mosaics with fleurs-de-lis and huge rosettes. On that improvised terrace, which spanned the building’s air shaft and was therefore always much cooler than anywhere else in the neighborhood, the queen set wicker chairs, wrought-iron tables, flowerpots with plants stolen from Lenin Park, lovely stained-glass panels, and lanterns which on nights when there was no electricity (i.e., almost every night) produced a soft yellow glow that was the envy even of Coco Salas, although her room, girl, was practically a medieval stained-glass birdcage!
Even Odoriferous Gunk had decked his pup tent with brass rings, rugs, tapestries, mats, mother-of-pearl flowers, velvet runners, and convent record books. His dying mother said she was going to be suffocated by all that bric-a-brac that Stinky had crammed into the tent—among which objets d’art were a long-barreled musket and a strange-looking mandolin, set like offerings before a portrait of Elizabeth II of England. But no matter how wonderful the objects were, the Dying Mother (now swathed in a black shroud that had also been lifted from the convent) still complained.
From that most unusual tent Odoriferous Gunk would sometimes emerge attired in vestments taken from Clara’s cave-convent: a billowing chasuble, an alb, a cope, black sandals, a gold miter, a mantle, a maniple. He now walked with the aid of a three-hundred-year-old crosier.
But even this apparition caused no particular surprise among the inhabitants of Old Havana, since they were all caught up in the hallucinatory frenzy over Clara’s things—clothing, furniture, ceiling fans, mantles, table runners, psalters, missals, whips, rosaries—and in figuring out a way to get some of the loot, even if they then gave it away or auctioned it off. And speaking of auctions, my dear, the auction of leather-bound Bibles conducted by the Areopagite from a tree in Central Park became world-famous.
Skunk in a Funk even gave José Lezama Lima—who was alive at the time (or maybe resurrected, I don’t remember which) and kept up-to-date on everything that happened in the hole—a huge silver cross and a long gold watch chain to wear it on. One day Lezama showed up at a meeting of the Cuban Writers and Artists Union with that immense cross hanging from his waistcoat down over one of his Pantagruelian legs, putting to flight Nicolás Guillotina, who locked himself in his office and begged Eachurbod to dance while singing Sóngoro Cosongo. Lezama said the cross would exorcise even Lucifer himself, given that it had a stored potens of more than five hundred years. With María Luisa Bautista on his arm, Lezama would walk into the Bella Napoli pizzeria on Calle Trocadero and not even have to stand in line, even if there were (which there always were) thousands of people waiting. The cross would part the crowds.
“María Luisa,” Lezama would say to her in his asthmatic voice before they stepped into the street, “get the potens; we’re going to the pizzeria.”
It was also rumored that Mahoma (that cunning creature) had made a fortune selling the platform shoes that she’d manufactured with the fine woods and calfskin she hauled out of Clara’s hole.
Despite the fact that the traffic through Clara’s hole went on day and night, and that the convent appeared to be plundered to the last nail, every once in a while, amid the rubble, someone would find some unsuspected object—a metal hairnet of some kind, a leather whip, even a strange sacred jewel that sparkled with an otherworldly gleam. In a shadowy cell, somebody discovered a pillory, which reawakened in Clara the idea of punishing Delfín Proust, who’d used the excitement of the discovery of the convent to avoid turning over his autobiography. At that new threat, La Reine des Araignées made her escape dressed in a mantle of fine batiste and with her huge head covered by a bishop’s wide-brimmed hat that had perhaps been left, forgotten, in the convent for hundreds of years. As Delfín Proust was making his escape from the building (which was humming like an anthill), Odoriferous Gunk was slowly and ceremoniously ascending the stairway in his pontifical vestments. The two queens stopped, made the sign of the cross over one another, and continued on their respective ways. . . . In a huge portmanteau, someone discovered more than a hundred men’s suits, several masks, yards of black lace, some cowboy costumes, a little cannonball, a number of evening gowns, a dozen mantillas, and other exquisite confections.
Clara Mortera, who was not only a painter of genius but also one of the world’s finest haute couture seamstresses, altered the most extravagant pieces of clothing for herself, while storing away other pieces for the now-famous but then-future exhibit of forbidden costumes which, with Fifo’s permission, would take place on the day of the Grand Carnival. It was not, then, strange, as we have almost said several times, to see people strolling through Old Havana dressed in the most outrageous costumes, but since Fifo had decided to encourage tourism just then, and precisely in Old Havana, not even the most diligent of the diligent midgets could take action against this extravagant behavior, since to tell the truth, nobody could tell the natives from the tourists. And besides, even though there was lots of time before the Grand Carnival, rehearsals for it had already started. So it seemed normal to bump into figures decked out in the most bizarre ways. Not even Sakuntala la Mala caused a stir when she walked down Calle Muralla dressed in a costume made out of medieval wood—a painted altarpiece that s/he had turned into a triptych and that opened and closed as she walked along, revealing his horrible naked body.
But the market in wood was one aspect of Clara’s merchandising that had been cornered by Skunk in a Funk and the Key to the Gulf from the beginning. Knowing that one of the most pressing problems of Old Havana (and the Island as a whole) was housing, Skunk in a Funk realized that with the wood that paneled the caissoned and coffered ceilings of the convent, she could fashion barbecue grills—the wonderful loftlike structures that she had constructed for herself and, of course, Clara—for custom home installation in other people’s rooms. I mean, is there anyone who lives in a tiny room in a dilapidated building who doesn’t want to expand? And if you consider the height of the ceilings in the buildings in Old Havana, you can see how easy it would be to build barbecue grills—and the tenants wouldn’t even have to give themselves a concussion every time they stood up.
And so, under the leadership genius of Skunk in a Funk, and with the invaluable aid of the Key to the Gulf and a small team of helpers (such as Teodoro Tampon and Lutgardito), Old Havana became the only city in the world that grew inward. The barbecue grill, designed by Skunk in a Funk, was soon the absolute rage, an inspired solution to the problem of urban housing. At any hour of the night, Skunk in a Funk and the Key to the Gulf (who was now sleeping at Skunk’s place) might be
awakened by some desperate housewife who wanted to separate from her husband and so needed a barbecue grill. New mothers urgently needed barbecue grills. Queens who wanted to move out of the family home (or even to have a good screw above their families’ heads) practically screamed for their barbecue grills.
Construction of the barbecue grill was undertaken on the basis of an oral contract, with payment of one-half the total cost required up front; when the grill was finished, the client had to pay the other half or the barbecue grill would be dismantled and whisked away on the instant. The barbecue grills had to be put up at night and in complete silence, of course, since otherwise Fifo would root them out and punish them as “clandestine constructions.” And yet almost the entire population of Old Havana, including Fifo’s secret police, turned a blind eye on the proliferation of these constructions (with which so many of those very secret police solved the problem of a place to live), or even collaborated in the feverish work. In a single night, almost all the rooms in the Hotel Monserrate doubled in size, and although the din of hammering was terrible, nobody seemed to hear a thing. . . . For people of limited means, Skunk in a Funk designed a half-grill, which was a sort of interior balcony or mezzanine cantilevered from one wall of a little room.
Every piece of wood in the convent—the columns, brackets and supports, uprights, coffered ceilings, and the pine laths and sheathing that the coffering had been attached to—all of it was stripped from the building.
At any hour of the day or night, Skunk in a Funk or the Key to the Gulf might be seen up on the distant ceiling of the nave—saw, hammer, or crowbar in hand—pulling down the glorious paneling, which would boom and creak like the rigging of a ship. Then they would cross the city with their cargo and that very night put up two (or twenty) barbecue grills.
The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights Page 47
