Judy Stoffman. Entertainment Reporter.
Toronto Star, Feb. 3, 2001. 02:37 AM.
An intriguing symbiosis is developing between literature and the movies.
Neither seems to be able to do without the other. The movies need novels and
memoirs for subject matter and books are often rescued from oblivion by films.
Movie magic has belatedly touched the books of the late exiled Cuban writer
Reinaldo Arenas with the release of Before Night Falls, based on Arenas' life
and directed by Julian Schnabel.
This couldn't happen to a finer writer, one willing to brave imprisonment
and torture for his art. Too bad he's not around to enjoy it.
Suffering from AIDS, living in penury with no health insurance in New York
City, Arenas took his own life in 1990 at age 47. His memorial service was
attended by fewer than a dozen people.
His memoir, Before Night Falls, was published in English three years after
his death, like a message in a bottle from shipwreck victim. The New York Times
pronounced it a notable book, but sales were slow. Most of the 15 books he wrote
- novels, collected essays, plays, poems - began to appear in English only
after his death.
Now, thanks to the movie, which opened in Toronto yesterday, Before Night
Falls has been reissued by Penguin in paperback with hunky film star Javier
Bardem on the cover. The first two printings of 15,000 sold out in the United
States before any copies could be sent to Canada. Local bookstores have to wait
for the third printing.
Thomas Colchie, Arenas' agent, feels a sense of vindication. "In
Germany and Spain there was a conspiracy not to publish him, and the same in
Latin America. For people on the left in Latin America, the Cuban Revolution was
a dream. It was acceptable to be a dissident in Eastern Europe, but there was
no such thing as a dissident in Cuba.
"He was reviewed by people who hid their motives when reviewing him;
they wrote that his style was too baroque but they were really criticizing his
political views. Right-wing Cuban exiles rejected him because he was a
homosexual, so he was isolated.
"It's hard to imagine now that the Cold War is over that this stuff
went on.''
If Schnabel's movie, with its sparse dialogue, leaves you puzzled, the book,
in Dolores Koch's luminous translation, does not.
It tells the remarkable story of Arenas life, from unloved illegitimate son
of a jilted teenage mother. Since nobody cared about him much, he grew up free
and uncensured. Nature provided nourishment for his imagination and was to
inform all his writing.
On his grandparents' farm he was introduced to the brutality of nature, its
rampant sexuality. His earliest sexual experiences were with animals and he
carved his first poems, when he learned to write, on the trunks of trees.
At 16 he went off to join Castro's rebels, and after the revolution,
attended a sort of agricultural college whose real purpose was to teach
Marxism-Leninism: "We had been indoctrinated in a new religion and after
graduation we were to spread that religion all over the Island . . . The
atmosphere of the Revolution admitted no dissent whatsoever.''
In 1963, when Arenas was 20, he won a storytelling competition and a job in
the National Library. Here, he read voraciously and wrote his first novel,
Singing From The Well, based on his childhood. In 1965, it won a prize from
UNEAC (the Union of Cuban writers and artists) and became the only one of his
books to be published in Cuba.
His second book (published in English as Hallucinations) also won a prize,
but UNEAC, the country's only publisher, refused to publish it unless Arenas
deleted some homosexual scenes. Arenas refused to do so and secretly gave the
manuscript to the painter Jorge Camacho and his wife Margarita who had come from
Paris for an exhibition of Camacho's work in Havana. The Camachos became
lifelong friends and supporters.
When the novel was published in France and won a literary prize (it
eventually appeared in 18 languages), Arenas was arrested on trumped-up morals
charges. He escaped to the trees of Lenin Park, starved and filthy, reading his
treasured copy of the Iliad and writing the beginning of a memoir that he had to
complete "before night falls.''
This book, like most of his subsequent work, was confiscated by the police
and had to be rewritten after he left Cuba.
Caught and imprisoned again in the notorious El Morro jail, he was put in
isolation, brutally interrogated and forced to sign a fake confession that he
was a counter-revolutionary, regretted his errors and promised to reform
sexually and politically.
Of course, he had no intention of doing so. He engaged in sex whenever he
could. Sex was the one exuberantly defiant act the state couldn't control. He
estimated that he must have had 5,000 homosexual partners in his life.
In telling his own story, Arenas documents with a stunning clarity and a
complete absence of self-pity the destruction of Cuban culture and intellectual
life in the 1970s, as writers were arrested, humiliated, denied publication,
imprisoned or driven to commit suicide.
Eventually he was freed and found a kind of hilarious community with
prostitutes, a dwarf, thieves and other outcasts until finally, in 1980, he left
Cuba on the Mariel boatlift to Miami along with other undesirables.
"He had total integrity as a writer and steadiness in his
convictions,'' his translator and friend Dolores Koch says on the phone. "His
books tell the story of what happened in Cuba. He doesn't talk about politics -
only his personal experience. He's not theorizing.''
His memoir, she says, circulates clandestinely in Cuba today, and his first
two novels are taught at the University of Havana. The official position of the
regime now is that it tolerates gays.
"He wanted to write - that was his revenge,'' says Koch.
Before
Night Falls (film's official site) | 