By Ann Louise Bardach. Los
Angeles Times. Sunday, March 18, 2001.
DIRTY HAVANA TRILOGY A Novel; By Pedro Juan
Gutierrez, Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer; Farrar Straus &
Giroux: 392 pp., $25
'Inside the Revolution, anything" goes the mantra of Fidel Castro's
Cuba. "Outside the Revolution, nothing." And Pedro Juan Gutierrez's "Dirty
Havana Trilogy," a corrosive portrait of that magnificent city as a fetid
ecosystem of godless desperadoes, pushes the limits of the official credo to the
deadly tautness of a slingshot. The fact that Gutierrez is able to live in
Havana and not in jail after penning such a derisive work speaks to one of the
mysteries-and possibly the secret-of the 42-year endurance run of Castro's Cuba.
Complaining is OK; doing something about it-like starting a new political party
or organizing a demonstration-is not. Indeed, Cubans have made the complaint,
the safety valve of the Revolution, into an art form. Even Cuba's minister of
culture, writer Abel Prieto, has just published his own novel, "El Vuelo
del Gato" ('The Flight of the Cat'), which takes its share of swipes at the
failures of the revolution. But Gutierrez slams the complaint full-tilt boogie
to the wall. (Not surprisingly, "Trilogy" was not published in Havana,
but a Spanish-language edition by Editorial Anagrama sold by street vendors gets
gobbled up quickly. Cuba's Writers Union claims that it offered to publish an "abridged"
version, but Gutierrez took a pass on a censored version.)
Gutierrez's novel is a string of some 60 vignettes divvied up into
three piquantly entitled sections: "Marooned in No Man's Land,"
'Nothing to Do" and "Essence of Me." Beginning in 1993, the nadir
of the Special Period, the government euphemism for the grim years that followed
the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's patron for more than 30 years, "Trilogy"
follows the daily scramblings of its narrator, Pedro Juan, who, like the author,
is a former journalist, street vendor, scammer and occasional pimp poseur.
Gutierrez is most reminiscent of Zoe Valdes (author of "La Nada
Cotidiana," published here as "Zocandra in the Paradise of Nada'), who
also mines Cuban street life and marginalization. Both excel in transposing
Havana street talk, and each is at risk of being a one-trick pony, confined to
the shock-jock genre of "I'm writing as dirty as I can." In fact,
there is little difference between "Dirty Havana Trilogy" and its
predecessor, "El Rey de La Habana" ('The King of Havana'), which also
chronicles the scuffling of the baddest, coolest stud on Havana's El Malecon.
Though it is largely true that sex-even infidelity-is the national
sport of Cuba, Gutierrez's sex is always detached and devoid of love. Sex is a
divertissement, a respite from boredom, a balm against feeling, a cheap opiate.
Regrettably, the stereotype of Cubans as mindlessly promiscuous is pounded ad
nauseam. Pedro Juan, whose partners of choice are naturally mulattas, another
stereotype, boasts his own philosophy: "Sex isn't for the squeamish. Sex is
an exchange of fluids, saliva, breath and smells, urine, semen, shit, sweat,
microbes, bacteria. Or there is no sex. If it's just tenderness and ethereal
spirituality, then it can never be more than a sterile parody of the real act."
* * *
What's unsaid is that sex today in Cuba is the one zone of complete
unfettered freedom, where rebellion and dissidence are tolerated. One can argue
there is a tradition of dirty writing in Cuba. Most notable is Chapter 8 of Jose
Lezama Lima's Proustian masterpiece "Paradiso," which Valdes did an
apparent knock-off of in her own first novel. But Gutierrez even outdoes
Reinaldo Arenas' famed libidinousness. His Pedro Juan, ever the Iron Man, by
Page 8 is bragging that one conquest "had 12 orgasms with me, one after the
other. She could have had more." In the parlance of the recovery movement,
Pedro Juan is a hopeless sex addict with palpable self-loathing. And it is only
toward the end of the book that there is any admission of feeling. "My
heart is hard now, and the only feeling I have for women is in my erections."
Nevertheless, Gutierrez vividly re-creates the claustrophobic squalor
of Havana's underbelly with ultraviolet cameos of its lost souls and gritty
survivors. These passages-searing in their rigor and lack of sentimentality-make
"Trilogy" a page turner that few are likely to put down. Gutierrez is
well served by the superb translation of Natasha Wimmer.
"Tough Guys" is among Gutierrez's most evocative chapters;
here, Pedro Juan has bicycled to the funky neighborhood of Marianao for a
spiritual "checkup" with his santera. But before they begin, the
santera discovers that her neighbor has hung himself from the ceiling, his naked
body latticed with stab marks. Another neighbor, a family man, runs to embrace
the dangling boy. The santera tells Pedro Juan she'll have to give him a rain
check:
"I can't give you a session today. A fresh death gets in the way.
And all that blood. That boy who hanged himself was queer.... Do you know what
he did yesterday afternoon? He was riding a horse on the land out back, but he
whipped the horse so hard it kept bucking until it threw him. Well, then he
stabbed the horse in the neck and killed it.... They'd been together a long
time. I never understood it. The man has a wife and children; he's handsome, the
kind of guy who carries a machete and is always getting in trouble with the
police. But what do I know? I guess they liked each other."
The revelation of a secret sexuality and the anguish of being
homosexual in a machista culture are also explored in Abilio Estevez's "Thine
is the Kingdom" but on an entirely different canvas.
* * *
A more challenging work, "Thine Is the Kingdom" is an
interesting counterpart to exiled writer Ernesto Mestre's equally inspired novel
"The Lazarus Rumba," published last year. Whereas Gutierrez is almost
self-consciously the Cuban descendent of Bukowski and Genet, 46-year-old
Estevez's ancestor is Virgilio Pinera, the lyrical Cuban master, harassed during
his life for his homosexuality and ironic iconoclasm but rehabilitated and
revered in Cuba today. Indeed, "Kingdom" is dedicated to Pinera, who
died in 1979. Like his mentor, Estevez writes achingly well, reminding one of
Fitzgerald's description of his "Gatsby" as "blankets of
beautiful prose." A work of elastic genres-fables and history melded into
Cuban magical realism-it is a daunting, unrealized task for translator David
Frye.
Set on the eve of the Cuban Revolution, in a once stately, now decaying
Havana mansion called the Island, Estevez's work is peopled with a troupe of
disparate eccentrics: among others, a deranged Barefoot Countess; a wannabe
singer named Casta Diva and her mute husband; Merengue, who hawks pastries from
his pushcart; a geriatric Jamaican English teacher; and a Wounded Boy, who was
found wrapped in a Cuban flag, his body dimpled by arrow piercings. "Kingdom"
abounds with whimsy and fanciful chaos and is transparently allegorical. With
the grounds of the estate littered with imitation Greek statues and bordered by
a marabou grove called the Beyond, there is the feeling of "Last Year at
Marienbad" speeded up to a Caribbean frenzy.
"It's raining. Furiously. Since this tale is being written in
Cuba, the rain is falling furiously. It would be another matter if this were
being written anywhere else in the world .... All you can describe here is a
frenzied storm. In Cuba, the Apocalypse comes as no surprise; it's always been
an everyday occurrence. Which is why this chapter begins with a downpour that
forebodes the end of time." "[T]he characters in this book," the
narrator tells us halfway through his tale, "have never learned to live
alone. Cubans don't want to know that men are all alone in the world ... Cuba is
a nation of children, and children (as everybody knows) like to get into
mischief when there's an adult who'll see them ... applaud when they're cute,
and punish them when they go too far, and (above all) will rescue them in case
of danger." Later he chastises one of his characters: "You don't have
any exclusive rights to suffering, it's characterized all Cuban literature, as
you know."
Occasionally a historical personage-such as music legend Beny More, who
died in 1963-walks onstage: "Behind her, of course, came the Greatest
Singer in the World, Beny More! Merengue shouted in greeting, what a great band
you have! In his wide-brimmed hat, denim overalls, red-and-yellow checkered
shirt, Beny looked thinner than usual, tired, haggard, a little sad despite the
smile that never left him .... Not even Uncle Rolo could hold back his
admiration and he shouted, The day you die, Beny, the Island will go under."
* * *
Both Estevez and Gutierrez are Cuban baby boomers, their childhoods
forged in the revolutionary culture of the preposterous New Man, their teen
years bearing witness to the flight of thousands during the Mariel boat lift.
Moreover, they confront the staggering literary legacy of such post-war giants
as Jose Lezama Lima, Virgilio Pinera, Severo Sarduy and Alejo Carpentier.
Curiously, both novels omit any direct mention of Castro, although they
abound in elliptical asides. In "Kingdom's" last chapter, the narrator
confesses, "I have tried to keep my characters on the sidelines of
political life, obeying (too closely) Stendhal's famous stricture to the effect
that politics produces the same effect in literature as firing a pistol does in
a concert, the truth is that firing a pistol would seem inevitable to me now."
On New Year's Eve, 1958, one of his characters (accidentally) burns the island
down.
"We were unaware that we were pieces on a chessboard in an
incomprehensible game, we couldn't see that the flight of the tyrant to the
Dominican Republic, the entrance into Havana of the victorious Rebels (whom we
took to be sent by the Lord) would transform our lives as if we had died on
December 31, 1958, to be born on the first of January 1959."
Always, for Estevez as for Gutierrez, Fidel Castro's 42-year social
experiment is the unidentified elephant in the room.
- - -
Ann Louise Bardach Is the Author of the Forthcoming "Troubled
Waters: the Miami-havana Showdown" and the Editor of the Forthcoming "Cuba:
a Traveler's Literary Companion." She Is a Contributing Writer to Talk
Magazine
Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times |