The Cuban Comedy

by Pablo Medina

  “What would he possibly be informing on?” Elena said.

  “That I came to pick you up and we stopped at the Malecón.”

  “What business is it of theirs?”

  “They make it their business. We play a sort of game in which I make believe Zacarías is a real driver, and the Ministry of Culture makes believe I am the Bard of the Revolution.”

  “But you are,” Elena said.

  “The title means only what they want it to mean. I’m a functionary now. I meet foreign dignitaries, I speak to them about the achievements of the Revolution, I award prizes, and I cannot say what I really think about any of this.”

  “What you really think?” Elena asked. The waters of Havana were becoming deeper by the moment and she had better learn to swim in them.

  “We have to return to the car,” Daniel said. “Zacarías is likely to report that we were looking longingly at the Florida Straits.”

  Daniel certainly was. He’d exiled himself in New York years before during Batista’s rule, leading a poet’s life in a poet’s city. He knew then what it was like to exist without a framework of ideology constraining you, confronted with daily triumphs and failures, breathing the ambivalent air of freedom in minor and major keys, an ant in a kingdom of ants. That’s what he longed for, not his straitjacket title or the circus clowns at the Writers’ Union or the lemming calls of the new order. Zacarías would have been right in reporting him to his superiors. The Revolution did not tolerate skeptics.

  The meeting at the Writers’ Union went as all such meetings go. Roll was called. The agenda was followed. At least two people in attendance fell asleep. Daniel’s assistant, sitting in a corner away from the table, took notes at a furious pace, and when it was over, much had been discussed and little accomplished. Later, while Elena and Daniel were having coffee in one of the outer rooms, a man approached the table where they were sitting. The hair on his head was thick and unruly, and the lenses on his black-frame glasses were so dirty that Elena couldn’t make out the color of his eyes. He wore a wrinkled blue shirt, the pocket of which was lined with pens and mechanical pencils. From him emanated the mystical smell of camphor. Elena immediately sensed Daniel’s discomfort as the man stood by the table. He leaned over them, said a quick hello to Daniel, and introduced himself to Elena as Elvis Santos. As he did so he pulled out two copies of his slim volume of poetry from a bag he carried slung over his shoulder and said he would be honored if they would read it.

  Daniel put his hand out in denial. He’d already read Elvis’s jagged poems and labeled them as more than sufficient evidence of his craziness.

  “You don’t understand my poetry. That’s the problem,” Elvis said, waving his index finger at Daniel and, with the same finger, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

  Elena took the book and read the title: El hombre de la cara moteada, or The Man with the Mottled Face.

  “It’s autobiographical,” Elvis said to Elena. He put the copy Daniel rejected back in his bag and added that he was sure she, Elena Blanco, whose talent was as wide as the twin brown oceans of her eyes, would be impressed by the work. He left trailing behind him that smell, which reminded Elena of an arthritic Portuguese sailor who lived in Piedra Negra.

  Daniel told her the story of Elvis while he smoked a cigar and she finished her coffee.

  Elvis had shown some promise in the early years of the Revolution, when he published the title poem of his collection, “L’homme du visage tracheté,” in a Parisian Dadaist magazine with the English name The Most Juice. Enamored with Elvis’s first name, the editors of The Most Juice had taken the editorial freedom of publishing the poem in reverse, causing a minor controversy in the French capital between traditional and new wave Dadaists. The traditionalists contended that the poem carried too much meaning, while the new wave group thought not enough, since it was their belief that true Dadaism rested precisely on the contest between sense and nonsense inherent in language and texts should embody that struggle to its limit. The magazine paid for Elvis to go to Paris and settle the controversy once and for all. Here was a true representative of the exploited regions, a Caliban who brought with him the undiluted truth of the third world.

  Elvis was ebullient. He’d never been out of the city of Havana, let alone traveled by airplane across the Atlantic to be received by a group of European intellectuals. At least this is what he hoped. By the time he arrived the controversy was forgotten. The editors of The Most Juice had misplaced his poem, and when he tried to reproduce the original (he hadn’t thought to bring a copy), they were so disappointed that they abandoned him in favor of a child poet of Nigeria who declaimed extemporaneously in sixteen dialects of Yoruba. Left to his own devices, Elvis wandered the streets of the French capital with only a few worthless pesos in his pocket and two hundred francs given him by one of the editors of The Most Juice, who took pity on the hapless poet. “Spend it all on the splendors of the flesh,” he told Elvis during a break in the child poet’s recitation. Elvis was a virgin at the time and had little idea what the editor meant by the splendors of the flesh. Sex he understood and longed for in the long Gallic nights of his sojourn, but the Frenchman’s phrase was imbued with intimations of a grander, more sublime experience. Elvis found an apothecary shop, and for fifty francs he bought a vial of fragrant oil. A few blocks away he entered the Jardin de Tuileries and hid behind a tree. Believing himself to be out of view, he took his clothes off and proceeded to smear himself with the fragrant oil, then stood with arms outspread and eyelids fluttering at the sky waiting for the splendors of the flesh to manifest themselves. Just as he was beginning to feel a certain tingling in his groin, two gendarmes appeared and arrested him for public lewdness. He was taken to the gendarmerie, where he was booked, thrown in a jail cell with several prostitutes, and given a bowl of soup and half a baguette. When they saw the malnourished poet slurping his soup and sopping up the bottom of the bowl with the bread, the prostitutes took pity on him and had their souteneur pay the fine for Elvis’s release. One of the women, a Moroccan of ample hips and breasts as round as the heads of two small children, took him to her apartment in a distant arrondissement, and it was there that Elvis experienced for the first time “the splendors of the flesh.”

  Le poète cubain, as Elvis became known among the prostitutes of Paris, became a fixture in their circles, sharing their wine and food and occasionally their bodies in return for running small errands for them, such as shopping for groceries, taking their children to school, and picking up their penicillin prescriptions when they contracted one of the diseases against which that drug is remarkably effective.

  Elvis Santos left Havana an innocent and returned an imbecile. Some say he was given a bad beating by a jealous souteneur from which he never recovered; others maintain that Elvis lost his mind as a consequence of being jilted by the prostitute with the perfect breasts; still others speculated that his idiocy was a mere ruse so that people would take pity on him and read his poetry, no matter how bad it was. When it was first published, one critic maintained that El hombre de la cara moteada was the worst written but best read collection of poetry ever published on the island. Another critic likened the poems to voluntary jets of vomit. According to Daniel, Elvis’s efforts weren’t as bad as that; there were flashes of brilliance floating in the tepid waters of his verses but not enough to gain favor with the critics or satisfy his poet colleagues, who suffered from chronic bouts of literary envy.

  Since he could not get in Havana the fragrant oil that had led him to experience, no matter how fleetingly, the splendors of the flesh, Elvis applied to his body a powerful Russian liniment provided to him by the trainer of the national basketball team (another of his many, albeit reluctant, benefactors), which was very effective for alleviating muscle soreness but imbued the poet with the leaden smell of camphor that followed him everywhere.

  “You’ll find many individuals like him in this madhouse of a city, where the gates have been shut a
nd the key thrown into the sea,” Daniel concluded. “Elvis is a bothersome nut, but he is harmless. Many others are vicious brutes. Those are the ones you must avoid.”

  When Zacarías drove her home after the gathering that day (Daniel had to meet a Mongolian dignitary), Mirta was waiting for her by the kitchen door, trying to alert her with her eyes that she was about to encounter something unexpected. Elena turned the corner into the living room and saw her father sitting stiffly on the couch. His thinning gray hair was standing on end and he had the forlorn look of someone who had lost his bearings. Their eyes met and both waited for the other to speak, a contest that could have lasted a long time had not Mirta interrupted by saying that she was making coffee for Fermín José and asked Elena if she wanted some. Elena was relieved and said yes.

  “Go, then, sit with your father. The coffee will be ready soon,” Mirta said.

  Fermín José’s large hands, which Elena had observed most of her life hovering over the chess pieces like hawks about to pounce on their prey, rested helplessly on his knees. His high cheekbones glowed with the dry salt of an affront Elena was about to discover. She asked why he had come.

  “I have not slept in twenty-four hours,” he said. “The bus trip was a voyage through a purgatory of discomfort, it was.”

  His voice lacked the flinty tonalities that she remembered. On the floor between his legs was a small travel bag with the logo of the old Pan American Clipper service, which flew between Havana and Miami before the Revolution.

  “Your mother,” Fermín José continued, “a lover she has taken.”

  Elena was dumbfounded. Her relationship with her father was tentative at best, and she had never exchanged any sort of intimacy with him.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Papa. How can that be?” she said.

  “I saw it with my own eyes,” he said. He was staring straight ahead barely blinking. His eyes were deep in their sockets and round them spread puddles of misery.

  “She wouldn’t do anything like that. Besides, who would take her on?” Elena regretted the question as soon as she said it.

  Fermín José made a growl of disgust. He was in his sixties and his skin was beginning to sag over the bone structure of his face, giving it a permanent scowl.

  “Your former father-in-law, Pedro el Cruel.”

  This time Elena couldn’t hold back her laughter.

  “I tell you I saw them,” he said, raising his eyebrows. They were the only part of his face that moved in any expressive way. “Pedro buys firewater from me. One day at my chess table I was sitting and watched as they chatted on the front porch. He was saying something to her I couldn’t make out, and she was smiling. From then on, when he comes to pick up his two bottles of firewater, they stand together and speak in whispers, like little doves of love. You should see her face! So animated I’ve never seen her.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with smiling or being happy,” Elena said, making a mental note to herself about the phrase “little doves of love.”

  “Your mother a smiling woman she is not,” he said.

  That was true. Cándida was a somber matron who dressed in black as if in permanent mourning and was subject to bouts of deep melancholy. Elena couldn’t imagine her with someone else, let alone that ogre of a man, Pedro el Cruel. People called him that for a reason.

  “Maybe all she needs is a little attention,” Elena said.

  There was a lull in the conversation and she felt a wave of anger rising in her chest. At some point in their lives, infected by grief over the death of her two brothers perhaps, her parents’ marriage had dried up and become mummified. It had been clear to Elena for some time that Fermín José didn’t care for Cándida, or she for him. The only thing that kept them together was a sort of emotional inertia.

  Fermín José stared straight ahead with the inscrutable look of an Easter Island statue, which Elena took as a sign that she shouldn’t continue her marriage counseling.

  “I can’t even play chess anymore,” he said, breaking the silence.

  “Why not?” Elena asked.

  “I mated myself. Only Soledad brings me solace now.”

  Elena had missed her daughter but the city had absorbed her attention. She asked her father about her.

  His face became lively and he spoke up: “She is very energetic and she crawls circles in the living room. And then she stops in front of the sofa while my rest I take. A strange and wonderful child she is. To our household she is a gift. She makes faces and says,’Ma, ma’; then quiet again she grows, so quiet, and holds her doll.”

  Elena felt a needle pierce her heart. She gasped a little. “Maybe I should bring her here,” she said aloud to herself and immediately regretted it.

  Fermín José looked at her with provincial indignation. “This is a godforsaken city, a factory of licentiousness.”

  She did not reply to her father’s comment. It was certain to her now that there was no way she was going back to live in Piedra Negra, and after the press conference she was determined to return and bring Soledad with her. She asked Fermín José where he was planning to stay and he said he didn’t know. He hadn’t thought that far.

  “You can’t stay here, Papa,” she said in a low voice so Mirta wouldn’t hear. “There isn’t any room.”

  Fermín José shrugged his shoulders and resumed his staring. Then he said, “I can sleep in the Parque Central. I’ve done it before, during the revolution against the dictator Machado. The Butcher, they called him. He was a beast.”

  At that point Mirta came in bearing a tray with three cups, three glasses of water, and a dish with several lard buns. She expressed her pleasure that he was visiting and apologized for the meager offerings.

  After the coffee and the snack, Elena insisted on going into the kitchen to help Mirta, though there wasn’t much to clean up. Away from her father she explained the situation. Fermín José would sleep on the sofa that night, and she would make do on the floor if Mirta and Juan could spare the bedroom rug to sleep on. The next day Elena would talk to Delia Müller about having Fermín José stay with her, at least until Elena called her mother and straightened things out.

  Mirta adopted the plan with her usual enthusiasm and did one better—the neighbor across the street had a cot he had stolen from the barracks when he did his military service. He’d gladly rent it out for ten pesos for the night.

  That night Elena barely closed her eyes. The cot was stiff and smelled like a soldier. She tried reading Elvis’s book, The Man with the Mottled Face, but there was so little light that the words ran together and the effort gave her a headache. Her father, after finally falling asleep at three in the morning, snored like an old truck going uphill. That’s what she dreamed of when she finally dozed off—a truck that used to pick up their garbage in Piedra Negra and misfired and grumbled all the way out of town to the dump, except in the dream, instead of carting garbage, the vehicle was carrying Cándida, who was sitting on the truck bed on a gilded chair with faded red cushions. Despite the heat she wore an ermine-lined purple cape and held a royal staff. Sitting next to her and whispering things in her ear was Pedro el Cruel, dressed like the king of Castile and holding a bottle of firewater in one hand and a chunk of greasy pork in the other. As he ate, the pork fat dribbled down his chin and onto his velvet doublet. At one point in the dream he tried to crawl on Cándida’s lap, but the armrests were too small and he slid off. Just before the truck turned onto a distant cross street, Pedro stood in front of Cándida and pulled down his britches. At that point Elena awoke, greatly troubled.

  About a foot above her head two flies were zigzagging. The light was just beginning to slip into the living room through the half-closed blinds. Her father had stopped snoring and was lying with his back to her, breathing gently. At this time of morning, before most people were awake, each sound outside was clear and fully shaped—a pail filling up with water, a man and woman talking in the courtyard below, the cooing of a far-off mourning dove. Elena waved a
way the flies and sat up. Her back hurt from the military cot and one of her arms had fallen asleep. She shook it several times until the sensation returned, then she proceeded to fold the sheets carefully and undo the cot. By the time she came out of the bathroom, someone was stirring in the kitchen.

  It was Juan preparing coffee. Even in the worst of times there had to be coffee, no matter that it was cut with ground chickpeas. The smell of it was enough to bring a dead man to life.

  “Good morning, Elenita,” he said, pouring a demitasse for her. He was the cheeriest person she had met in the city. Nothing seemed to disturb him, not even the possible loss of his pigeons. “If everything isn’t lost, then nothing is lost,” he’d said two nights before, quoting a Spanish poet who died in one of Franco’s prisons.

  “Good morning, Juan,” Elena said. “That’s my father sleeping on the couch.”

  “Yes,” Juan said. “I met him before you arrived.”

  “He seems to have gone a little crazy,” Elena said, taking a demitasse from Juan. The coffee was thick and very sweet, just the way it should be. “He thinks my mother is having an affair with the most despicable man in Piedra Negra.”

  Juan smiled and shook his head. “Jealousy drives men insane.”

  “My mother is incapable of such a thing,” she said. “She is a plain and honest woman. A dutiful wife.”

  “Hmm,” Juan said. “Maybe they’ve been together too long.”

  “Why should that matter?” Elena asked. “You and Mirta have been married a long time.”

  “True,” he said. “But every year we spend three weeks apart. We don’t ask what the other does and we don’t tell. I look forward to going to my brother’s house in Matanzas, and when it’s over, I look forward to being with Mirta back in my marriage, in this apartment that has become our lovers’ lair. Jealousy doesn’t breach it. Or anything else for that matter.”

  “Where does she go?”

  “She stays here. Sometimes I stay and she goes to her cousin’s in Cienfuegos. And a couple of times we’ve both gone to different parts and left the apartment vacant. I think the Americans call it breathing room, espacio para respirar.”