Octavio Roca, Chronicle Dance Critic.
San Francisco Chronicle. Tuesday, December
26, 2000
The last time I saw Reinaldo Arenas, we sat together on the front stoop of
his dilapidated brownstone on 46th Street in New York's Hell's Kitchen.
"More than anything," he told me, "I miss the Cuban voices."
He was already sick. But he was still handsome, and he said he felt fine.
Cuba's greatest living writer had been working furiously in exile, both on what
was to be his last novel and on an open letter to Fidel Castro on the 30th
anniversary of the communist takeover, asking for free elections in our unhappy
island.
Even in a decade when friends were dying all around, the suicide of Reinaldo
Arenas on Dec. 7, 1990, was a shock, a terrible blow. Few people knew he had
AIDS, and none suspected he would kill himself.
Arenas had put behind him years of censorship and humiliation, forced labor
and torture in Castro's jails. He was far from the tropics, from his beloved
Caribbean sea. But he tried to tell himself that he was home.
"The real fatherland for a writer is the blank page," he said. "If
in his own country he is not allowed to fill that page, he must leave." He
did leave, and for a decade he wrote extraordinary novels, plays and poems. He
also, almost secretly, wrote his autobiography: "Before Night Falls,"
posthumously published, now turned into a motion picture.
Arenas was and remains a towering, dangerous figure in Cuban literature. His
writings are celebrations of imagined freedom, prose and poetry drenched in
uncertainty and terror, visions of a world where hope is but the dimmest memory.
His style is excessive, sensual and ecstatic, often approaching the fervor of
the Spanish mystics.
THE BIRTH OF MAGICAL REALISM
The kaleidoscope of details, the brutally honest emotions and sublime
flights of fancy in Arenas' books signaled something new for the Spanish
language. Latin America's magical realism had been born of the Baroque: not of
the exquisite convolutions of Spain's literary past, but of the living memory of
a dying sensibility in a decadent, tropical landscape. Arenas emerged from that
landscape, in full armor, his writing subversive and outrageously brilliant.
He was dirt poor, born in a hut in Holguin, a fighter in his teens against
the Batista dictatorship, later educated on a scholarship from the revolutionary
government. He went on to study philosophy at the University of Havana. His
first novel, an early version of "Singing From the Well," won the
first prize from a Cuban jury headed by the celebrated Alejo Carpentier in 1965.
His second novel, "Hallucinations," won among other prizes Le Monde's
award for the best novel published in France in 1969.
But by then he could no longer publish in his own country. From 1969 to 1980
-- when he managed to escape Cuba -- the most exciting young writer in the
Spanish language was forbidden to write.
BALD-FACED LIES
That fact was not widely known at the time. Information in a communist
country is controlled with diabolical efficiency. In Havana in 1979, I remember
one lie among many as being particularly cruel. As a visiting scholar in the
Union of Cuban Writers and Artists, I asked about Arenas. Here is what I was
told.
Norberto Fuentes, a Hemingway biographer and militant party member, said in
all seriousness that Arenas, whom I then knew only from the epic "Hallucinations,"
had left Havana and had given up writing. He was, in fact, in that summer of
1979, between jail sentences, desperately trying to smuggle out of the country a
third version of his devastating novel "Farewell to the Sea." The
first two manuscripts had been destroyed -- one burned in front of him -- by his
torturers in El Morro prison.
Then came 1990, the frantic storming of the Peruvian Embassy in Havana and
the ensuing boat lift in Mariel. Arenas had not published anything in Cuba since
1965, and all the local police knew about him was that he had a penal record and
he was squatting in a condemned building in Old Havana. So he was allowed to
leave on a boat.
ESCAPE FROM HIS HOMELAND
It was while Arenas was adrift at sea that officials in the Ministry of
Culture realized what had happened. They recruited an illustrious communist
intellectual to repair the damage to Cuba's image from the spectacle of its most
famous writer leaving in such conditions: Gabriel Garcia Marquez gave several
press conferences to say that Arenas had not left through Mariel, that he had
left on a plane with him -- for purely personal, not political reasons. That lie
was widely published in Europe; and by the time Arenas himself turned up in a
refugee camp in Miami, the news was overshadowed by the larger political import
of Florida's latest refugee crisis.
I met Reinaldo shortly after that, and we became friends. My sister Ana Roca
profiled him for Christopher Street magazine, I wrote about him for my newspaper
in Washington, we saw more of each other when he moved to New York.
I remember the clutter of his little apartment, the piles of books and the
pictures of Cuba. Above his desk were photos of his literary idols: Virginia
Woolf, Marcel Proust and Virgilio Pinera. I remember his gentleness.
And I can still hear him. Reinaldo never picked up Havana's notoriously fast
accent; to the end, he sounded like a Cuban country boy from Oriente. And the
sweet lilt of his speech drenches his prose. Even at his angriest, as in "Before
Night Falls," it is the tenderness of that voice that drenches his writing
and makes his message heartbreaking.
"I miss my country every moment of my life," I can hear him say. "But
in my imagination, I am always in Cuba."
A sexual outlaw and a transgressive artist, he was bound to be a problem for
the Castro regime. He was a dissident, a gay man and an advocate of human rights
in a land where those were and are scarce. He knew what he was talking about,
and that was the problem. A child of the revolution, Reinaldo Arenas could not
be called a fascist or dismissed as just another bourgeois. Not even in exile.
Not even in death.
E-mail Octavio Roca at oroca@sfchronicle.com.
Respecting The Dead
Edward Guthmann, Chronicle Staff Writer. Tuesday, December
26, 2000
When Javier Bardem was making "Before Night Falls," a film about
Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, he created a ritual that he performed every night
after shooting. "When I came home," he says, "I wrote to
Reinaldo. Maybe only to say 'Hi,' sometimes to tell him how the day went and ask
him for help."
Given that Arenas died in 1990 and Bardem never met him, those letters and
poems were more than an actor's exercise: They were an act of blind faith. "Reinaldo
helped me a lot to get a connection with him writing these letters," Bardem
insists. "Otherwise, I could not be able to do this movie."
Whatever its source of inspiration, Bardem's haunting, emotionally grueling
performance is winning some of the best reviews of the year and is on the fast
track to an Oscar nomination. Voted best actor of the year by the National Board
of Review, he was also nominated last week for a Golden Globe award.
"I'm a lucky person," Bardem, 31, says during an early morning
conversation in a tony South of Market hotel lobby. "Here I come to the
States with my very first American movie and people like it and they give me
awards. Yesterday I was with Sean Penn, and he said to me that he liked my work.
Sean Penn is one of my favorite actors."
In Spain, where he was raised by Pilar Bardem, a popular stage actress,
Bardem has been a major film star since his appearance in "Jamon Jamon"
(1992),
an erotic melodrama that co-starred Penelope Cruz and built a wide audience
with its generous helpings of sex and nudity.
An unusual combination of extraordinary good looks and fierce talent, he's
on the verge of crossing over and becoming, with Cruz, Spain's first
international movie star since Antonio Banderas.
Bardem has acted in two Pedro Almodovar films and played everything from a
Satan worshiper to a phone-sex worker, but never a character with the tragic
dimension of Arenas. Persecuted as a homosexual and critic of the Castro regime,
Arenas was jailed, tortured and hunted as a fugitive before he joined the Mariel
boat lift and came to the United States in 1980 -- along with 250, 000 other
homosexuals, criminals and "undesirables."
Directed by painter-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel, "Before Night
Falls" includes scenes of lush beauty and excruciating pain, and is
overlaid with pieces of Arenas' desperate, rhapsodic prose that Bardem reads in
voice-over. The film ends in New York, where Arenas contracted AIDS and
committed suicide, at 47.
"It wasn't easy for me at all," Bardem says of the film's
three-month shoot in Mexico. "Sometimes it was really hurting, really
painful. But when the movie was done, I was a better person. It was a pleasure
to give everything, because I received a lot."
For one scene, set in El Morro prison where Arenas spent a week in solitary
confinement, Bardem acted in a tiny isolation cell -- a cage, really -- with a
dirt floor and a loud, hissing lightbulb overhead. To play the scene
authentically, he insisted on spending 10 hours alone, locked in the cell
without food.
"My girlfriend was quite scared," he remembers. "It sounds
good now to say this to the press, but it wasn't for my ego or my vanity. It was
because Lazaro (Lazaro Gomez Carriles, Arenas' friend and co-writer of the film)
was there. He spent a month in a place like that, so we have the responsibility
to be respectful with that pain that he has suffered. And that has to be my
pain."
Since most of "Before Night Falls" is spoken in English, Bardem
had to learn a language that he barely knew -- and learn to speak it with a
Cuban accent. He spent three months, working nine-hour days with a Cuban
language coach who also taught him to speak Spanish with a Cuban accent.
"I was more afraid with that than the English," Bardem admits. "It's
really difficult for a person like me, a Madrileno (Madrid native) to play a
Cuban. The difficulty was not to say something in Cuban Spanish, but to say it
in the mood of a Cuban person, which is really, really specific." His
preparation also included a three-week visit to Cuba, where Bardem met and
interviewed several of Arenas' friends. Because there was so little video
footage of Arenas, Bardem took a video camera on his visits to Arenas' friends,
and asked them to teach him the proper body language. "I said, 'Please hold
the camera. I want to walk, I want to talk in front of you, and you tell me how
he did it. ' "
After playing Arenas, Bardem says, "I can look at the world with
different eyes -- I'm very lucky with this movie. It's a gift."
He recently shot "The Dancer Upstairs," an independent film
directed by John Malkovich, and says he's continuing to receive offers from
Hollywood studios.
"I don't want to miss this unique moment in my life, where you're doing
something you like and other people like it," he says. "But it won't
change my point of view about the American market and an American career. If
they offer me something good, I'll do it. If they don't, I have enough in my
country. They pay me very well.
"I would like to work out of Spain; I'm getting tired of my own country
in a way and I need a little bit of fresh air . . . but I'm not crazy about
money.
Money will kill you faster than a bullet."
©2000 San Francisco Chronicle | 