Loving Che (6 page)

When Calixto came home, I gave him the papers, and he walked to his study with them, closing the door behind him.

When the weather was good, I liked to walk the several miles to my studio, a walk that took me along the malecón and then up into the old city and past the grand department store, El Encanto, at the corner of Galiano and San Rafael. For many days after the revolution, while men filled the streets and stores took holidays, the windows at El Encanto remained unchanged, and as the days and then weeks passed I came more and more to see the rigid mannequins standing there as sculptures from another age.

I had been inside often and still remember the small pleasure of stepping off the tight streets of the old city and into the wide interior of the store. The inside, at least in memory, was very grand and clean, almost plastic in its perfection, and I imagined it a copy of the great department stores I had heard about in the United States. Jewelry, cameras. The most fashionable women in Havana bought their clothes there. As the revolution wore on, people began to whisper about the fate of El Encanto. Before long, they said the new government would issue a directive that the prices there would remain unchanged—almost as an unconscious nod to a capitalist past. And on hearing this I thought, with a smile, that every era builds museums to its secret longings.

* * *

El Encanto, like my studio, was a private comfort to me in those times. I dared not speak of the turn my heart had taken; I don't think I dared admit it to myself then. But I found that I was returning to the quiet spaces I had favored as a child: the closed doors, the shadows that can hide a secret afternoon. Alone with my paints, even when the panic seized me that I would never work again, I could retreat to the rhythm of the work, the smell of the oils, the light through the window.

I was working then on a large commission for a friend of Calixto's family. It wasn't the sort of work that I usually did, but it paid well. I was to create a total of seven panels that would depict scenes from Miami. The panels were supposed to hang in the lobby of a new hotel that was scheduled to open in a neighborhood that the man was developing in the Isle of Pines. I remember the day he came over with his plans. Moncada had already burned, the street fighting was flaring, a lot of people we knew were already moving their money to Miami, but this man was full of plans. He was going to call his neighborhood the New Miami, and it would rival anything in that American city, he told me. And I remember that in December—days before the revolution—he took out an advertisement in the magazines for his funny little development.
The thing brimmed with hope: A new ferry! New airlines from Florida! And the spectacular Monkey Jungle!

It was after this that I took to calling him El Mono. He was a strange-looking man, with one of those faces that seems kind enough on first impression but that then reveal themselves to be hiding something else. His lips stretched over his mouth in a way that could be regarded as a smile or a barely suppressed baring of teeth. And his skin was so pale that, when he became agitated, thousands of tiny capillaries broke around his nose. I don't think I ever paid attention to any conversation he directed at me, so fascinated was I with the displays of his face. El Mono promised me a lot of money, twenty thousand pesos—this at a time when it cost eight cents to ride the bus—and I took the commission. But I had never been to Miami and so was forced to work from photographs and postcards, other people's interpretations. The strain of it would hurt me deeply. It was a hideous way to make art; but by the time I realized the magnitude of the lie, it was too late, the money had been spent and I had to work on. It's strange to think about it now. There I stood in my studio in Havana, day after day trying to paint Miami as if it were a city of dreams; more truly, it was a city of lies.

I spent a full week staring at these photographs that El Mono had brought me, trying to decide on seven
scenes from all those images—the long flat beach, the buildings that sparkled at the end of the bay, the canopy over the white homes of Coconut Grove. I returned again and again to a photograph of a couple standing by a palm tree in front of an old hotel. It might have been a worn image except for the white, empty expanse of sand surrounding them and the way the woman held the man's arm, her fingers bent a little as if she were hanging on with fear. And the man's eyes had something—not a sadness exactly, but a kind of weariness that I couldn't understand and that therefore interested me. I placed the photograph on a stand and studied it day after day. The bent fingers, the downturned eyes, the lonely beach—one could paint this as a speck of black on a bright yellow background. And that old hotel, so straight and neat.

I thought the photograph, with the mystery of the man's eyes pulling at that happy scene from below, might prod me to make a true painting. But I could not seem to put down the first stroke. I went through the photos of Miami, thinking maybe to start with another scene. But the more I looked at the photographs the more they looked as if they were from an alien place, a place of the imagination. The revolution came and we were into January and then February and I still had not completed the first panel.

So it was that I was very absorbed in my work one early morning when the wind whistled down the alley, rattling windows as it went. If I heard the door open behind me, I made no note of it. There was a group of boys who lived on that floor who were always scurrying about, and I had taken to leaving the door unlocked rather than have to listen to their knocking. Perhaps I thought they had wandered in, as they sometimes did, to watch me paint. I heard footsteps. And then that smell, like wet leaves, old earth, metal.

I turned quickly to him, and maybe I gasped. He told me later I had gasped, though I have no memory of this. I remember only seeing him there and the strange feeling that it occasioned in me, because, except for the very brief moment at my house, I had not really taken a good look at him in person. As he stood before me he seemed very much the man in the photographs, and at the same time not at all him. Of course, there are the things that a photograph can't capture. The smell, yes. But also a roundness, a totality. A man whose full face seems gentle and kind may reveal himself something altogether different in profile. Gestures, movements—all these things go into an image of a person, or even of an object.

He was so alive, a man of breath and skin, and as I stood there with my paints I saw that within this life of his was contained also death. I would come to read his death
in strange places: in the stories he chose to tell, in his walk, in the breath that caught in his chest as if a terrible parting were already wrenching at his heart. But even before all that, even before I knew him, that day in my studio, I could see the death that gently draped him.

I don't remember what I told him. Something trite that I later came to regret, no doubt. I have a recollection of him laughing. He pointed to a drawing in a corner and asked me what it was. It was a half-completed painting of an orchid, I told him, for a friend. He wore a strange smile, as if I were a child and he were about to scold me for a transgression. After a moment, he turned from me and walked to the canvas. I remember watching him walk that first time and thinking that some people move with such ease in this world that it is as if they had lived in it for many lifetimes before this one. He stood some moments before the unfinished canvas and then turned back to me and with that same smile said, Is it really necessary to make it so beautiful? I didn't smile back at him. I remember being uncomfortable with his familiarity. And also having the sense that he was mocking me. I responded with something absurd; I think I said, Yes, that's the way it is. And, suddenly sweating, I picked up my brushes again, which was a rude thing to do, of course. I began to dip the brushes into the paint as he stood there. Finally I looked up and said that it was a great honor, his visit, and asked if there was anything he needed. Imagine. What a thing to say to this man. But he was calm and
didn't take advantage of my nervousness. He said only that he had heard of my paintings and wanted to see them for himself and that I should remember, in my work, that glory comes through struggle. I smiled a little bit. He walked around the studio for a while looking at various paintings, sometimes stepping back, sometimes picking one up and running his hands slowly down its length. I watched him move in my space and this time there was no color in the throat, no sound; only a sense that the days as I knew them were ending and that something new was waiting beyond the burnt edges.

That night I turned and turned in a hot bed. I had let this Argentine with his funny accent and mocking smile humiliate me. He smelled like a beast of the forest. Who did he take me for? When I closed my eyes, I fell instantly into a shallow sleep where no dreams came, only patterns of colors, sliding and laying themselves over one another. I grasped at the colors, sure that there was one that no human eyes had ever seen. Sometimes when I was about to fall asleep I had fantastic ideas such as these, visions that I could not later recall or put to paper, yet that when I awoke seemed to fill me with a new knowledge. I knew these visions still danced and fluttered at the dark edge of my imagination and lived and were fed in my waking life.

I awoke in the middle of the night. Calixto lay sleeping beside me. I remember that the windows were open, the night being cool, and that I thought the sound of the sea, liberated from the din of day, floated into the room. Everything was bathed in the blue light of night. The white curtains billowed in the breeze. To me, still half steeped in sleep and forgotten dreams, the house seemed suddenly enchanted. I left the bed carefully so as not to disturb Calixto. Downstairs I poured myself a glass of water, and it seemed to me that the water had never been
so delicious. I walked through the darkened house until I came to the courtyard, where I stood for a long time. In the night light, my familiar flowers grew exotic and strange. I stood watching as they swayed back and forth, back and forth ever so gently, and a shiver spread from the center of my back down to my fingertips.

All that following week, I had to keep fighting the urge to fill the canvas with blue spirits and monstrous flowers, the world now small and only partly real. I listened for every sound in the hall, but that week even the children were quiet. On Friday, I left the studio early and went for a walk. The air was still cool, the sky blue, and it occurred to me that for us in the tropics, winter is the season of renewal.

Small pink flowers burst from the smallest patch of grass, the leaves of the flamboyan were a young, glossy green, and even the broken glass on the sidewalk, alive with sunlight, spoke of new things. I walked through the Chinese neighborhood, with its narrow crooked alleys, the hanging laundry, the water that sluiced through the streets. I had no purpose in my walk, was looking for no one. But the streets were full of the young bearded soldiers and I couldn't help the turnings of my heart when I saw one from behind.

After a time, I found myself in front of the old offices of
El Tiempo.
The sidewalk in front of it was still littered with paper and filing cabinets and desks. The windows had all been shattered and I supposed that vandals had taken whatever of value had been inside. There was an incongruous
little ladder in front of the place, and I stood wondering what it was doing there when suddenly the entire scene went flat. It was a strange effect, perhaps brought on by my anxiety over the commission, and it lasted mere seconds. But for that small moment the scene was reduced to a surrealist impression—the ladder, the bits of newspaper, the wonderful sign above it all: TIEMPO. I wonder now if we had not all gone slightly crazy by then. And when I started to laugh, for no reason other than my own irrational one, the small group of men who had gathered in front of the ruins laughed with me.

I stood there at the destruction of
El Tiempo's
offices for a very long time, drawn to the strange, disordered beauty of it and of the city. It was as if we had performed an ancient bloodletting on ourselves and afterward everything would be well.

I took the long way home, walking up Carlos III so that I could stand for a while in front of Castillo del Principe, but when I got there I found the place full of military and the view mostly ruined, so I continued past the hospital up and over one street and before long I came to the house with a square tower and a turret and ornamental scallop shells. Two Doric columns supported a thin balcony. I recognized it as Eddy's house because of the small crowd of die-hard Orthodoxos standing in front of it. One of them, a clean-shaven man in his thirties, carried a sign that said, THIS IS MY LAST CALL!

The next morning, I arrived at the studio very early. The light was slanting in and it was almost cold. I stood there in the spot of sunlight for a while. Always, when I stood before a canvas, I was seized with a terrible fear, and I would do anything—order my brushes by number, sweep the floor, fiddle with the blinds—to avoid going back to the work.

Entire days could go by with me not coming within two feet of a painting, and on those days I would hate myself so intensely that I could scarcely glance in a mirror. How worthless I felt much of the time! Sometimes I wondered if I painted more to stop these terrible feelings of irrelevance than I did out of any joy for the work. But that morning, after standing for a while in the slanting light, I went to the canvas hungry, eager, as never before, for the touch of the brush, the smell of paint, the heat of work. I painted all day, without even stopping for lunch. The next day was the same. And the next. Over the course of that week, the Miami Beach scene changed gradually, rather like a storm approaches, and almost without my willing it, the couple on the beach came to be framed by palms blown sidelong in the wind and white ocean sprays—bits of life that I took from my own experience,
the same white spray that came over the malecón in bad weather. By the end of the week my arms and neck ached and I spent a long time in a warm bath thinking that there was no way that El Mono was going to take that panel and lying there in the water all the strange exhilaration of that week—for I had genuinely thought myself a genius—ebbed away and I was left with a profound and inexplicable sadness. This melancholy seemed to pull me closer to its breast minute by minute. The next morning I spent several hours unable to move, staring only at the sliver of light through the closed blinds, and in my imagination the light was a solid thing gently trying to pry open the windows.