Mona and Other Tales (9 page)

1965

In the Shade of the Almond Tree

“WE'VE GOT TO CHOP IT DOWN,” one of them says. And I rush out to the street. The other two burst out laughing, let out a snort of relief, and applaud. “We've got to chop it down,” they echo in a circle around the first one. Finally they leave the dining room and head toward the patio. But I'm already on the street. It's cool. The brutal September sun is gone, and autumn settles in the trees. It feels almost pleasant to stroll on these streets. From here I don't see their prancing about, their intolerable shouting, their constant running back and forth through the house, unsettling everything, questioning everything, wearing down the patio tiles. They never stop even for a second, and when they got it into their heads to chop down the trees (complaining that too many fallen leaves kept them sweeping forever), they took to it with such eagerness that in a week all of them had been cut down. Only the almond tree, the one at the back of the patio, was still standing. Without realizing it, I'm walking into the heart of the old section in Havana. I cut across to Obispo Street, and, even though I'm not interested, I glance at the store windows, and stop for a moment by a few, looking without seeing, or reading absentmindedly even the titles of scientific books. I stand there looking at these unappetizing volumes for a while, until I realize that someone else is also looking at them, apparently with great interest. A gorgeous girl. I look at her from head to toe, and feel the urge to touch her. She takes a large comb out of her purse, fixes her hair, looks at me, and starts to walk, swaying her hips a bit. Her dress, short and tight, moves in rhythm with her body. Yes, I'm sure that she looked at me and that she even gave me a brief signal. Or I imagined it. . . . Anyway, I'm going to follow her. Next I find myself by the only almond tree still standing. I lie down on my back, and stay there in its shade all day, half-asleep. I feel the moist leaves falling on my face. But now this tree is also in danger. Its leaves sometimes land in the hallway, or worse, they end up in the living room. A few days ago a leaf circled down like a dying bird right onto the lap of one of my aunts, who apparently was mending a pair of pants in a rush. “This is the last straw!” she cried, throwing the pants on the floor and grabbing the leaf with such fury that it crumbled in her hands. Now she's walking ahead very slowly, maybe giving me time to catch up. I follow her closely down Obispo Street until we come to La Moderna Poesía. She stops briefly and then goes in. And now I'm really sure that she looked at me. She glances at the shelves, leafs through a few books, skims some of the pages. This is the moment to speak to her, before she gets bored and leaves, and since the almond tree is now the only one standing, all the birds in the neighborhood seek shelter in it. At dusk the din of the cackling birds reaches up to the house. My mother covers her ears with her hands and looks out angrily at the patio. All the birds have now settled in the tree. Cautiously I get closer, careful not to frighten them. I finally reach the tree trunk. Lying on my back, I listen to them screeching until it gets dark. Now she comes out of the bookstore, walking fast. Maybe she's offended because I didn't speak to her. Next she goes in the Manzana de Gómez shopping arcade and stops in front of a store window; then she crosses Central Park, and gets lost in the crowd. I speed up because I don't want to lose sight of her. I remain very still, listening to the uproar of the birds. The leaves are falling constantly and I try to collect them, to catch them up in the air before they clutter the ground. But there are too many. We are in October and the leaves fall. And fall. And fall. And no matter how much I leap about and hurry to catch them in flight, one always escapes, slips in through the window, and, skipping over the chairs, rolls softly and lands at the feet of one of my aunts. It's impossible to catch all the autumn leaves, and following her through this crowd of people is getting more and more difficult. It seems as if all of Havana has gathered on San Rafael Street. The endless lines, the bustle of people darting here and there, the cars and buses that spare no effort to run me down. But I manage to cut through the crowd. I race after the blue patch of her skirt. Suddenly I lose sight of her. I look all around for her. She's gone. And undoubtedly there is no spot in the world more pleasant than here: in the shade and close to the trunk, which remains moist as if it were constantly shedding its skin. Many new shoots are beginning to sprout. The new leaves are a tender green. Sometimes I'm tempted to eat them. And I do. Surprisingly, I discover her again in front of the Duplex. I almost bump into her. She looks at me. I'm bathed in perspiration. She starts walking and I follow her closely. And this is how we get to the Five and Ten. For half an hour we stand in line waiting for a seat. We finally sit and, as she crosses her legs, her skirt rides up above her knees. She asks for a malted soda. I ask for the same, and pay for both. Now she's truly looking at me. I'm all excited. It's so difficult for me to get up again. When I am there, dozing in the shade, I always dream about the same thing more or less, the same dream, the same dog. Because it's a dog I'm dreaming about. I'm in an enormous house, full of people talking and talking (I don't know who these people are because I can hardly see their faces, and I can't make out what they're saying either), and when I'm about to leave, the dog appears at the door. It looks at me with its shiny eyes. Without barking, it comes up to me and sinks its teeth into my ankle. I go inside the house again. The people are still talking and talking. With my hands in my pockets, I try to leave as casually as possible, without looking down. She walks ahead of me and seems aware of my situation and rather amused by it. And this is how we reach the sidewalk. And sensing that there was little time left, I spoke to my mother on one of those days when she was almost calm and not even smoking. “At least we still have the almond tree,” I said, “or else we'd be suffocating.” She looked at me absently and then said, “If we let it be, one day we'll all indeed be smothered, buried under a pile of leaves.” I say nothing and walk out to the patio. There, my three aunts, brooms in hand, are sweeping fanatically. For a moment I stop to look at them: they are all of the same height, tall and skinny, and have a frightened air as if anxiously expecting someone to come from behind and hit them. The three are sweeping together, making the same motions. The tree seems ablaze in its resplendent gold. A bird hidden in the branches is singing its heart out. And now it's raining. People crowd the arcades. She is on a corner, apparently looking at the street. It's not a violent downpour, just one of those endless showers. The trees in Fe del Valle Park glisten through the drizzle. Finally she starts walking toward the bus stop. A bus goes by, so crowded its door won't open. Another one comes; she takes it. I get on just as the door closes. But the conspiracy continues and there is nothing I can do. I thought about it over and over again but couldn't find a way to come to the rescue. Sometimes I felt like screaming or setting the house on fire. Finally I decided to speak to my father. “Papa,” I said to him, “they want to chop down the only almond tree we have left. Don't let them do it.” My father stopped reading (I have always thought that this little man who sits on the porch every evening reading the paper is not my father, though I have never dared to tell him). “So you too are carping about the almond tree,” he tells me, “Let them chop it down and be done with it.” “But I don't want that. I don't want them to chop it down!” I say. “Chop it down, chop it down,” he insists. “I don't want to hear one more word.” And the bus is really crowded. The heat and the noise are unbearable. A woman carrying a monstrous handbag is incessantly torturing me. I keep watching the exit so she won't be able to get away from me, but I can scarcely see her. I can't even find room for my hands. And to complicate everything, an enormous man is now behind her. What a nerve! If he keeps it up, I'll have to call him to task. But why doesn't she move away? She's being raped in the middle of the bus, and she doesn't even protest. And her home must be at the end of the world. We've already reached the beaches. Here, inside the bus, the heat is intolerable, and that woman keeps harassing me with her handbag and the big man keeps pressing against her, while the council got together at last and one of my aunts said, “We've got to chop it down.” And the others, dancing around her, took up the chorus. My mother, unmoved, was smiling from the kitchen. Then suddenly, they all began to shout: “Yes, we've got to chop it down.” And I felt the surge of a new hatred. I felt like killing them. And that's why I rushed out to the street. All the streets to the beach look the same, bordered by trees that look alike but seem to be something else, not worth identifying. We walk three more blocks to the seashore. She finally stops by a house identical to all the others. She opens the door and stands there, looking at me. I walk past her with my hands in my pockets, whistling and looking at the tips of my shoes. “Come in,” she says, and at that moment I look up; the council is over. One of my aunts goes to the kitchen and brings the ax; the others cheer. And now they all parade into the patio. We begin in the living room rocking chair (there is no time to waste, she says; her family is coming back any minute). She takes my shirt off and leads me to the bedroom. Already in bed, she undresses eagerly and then strips off my trousers and my underwear. The cortege parades across the patio, military style, toward the tree. One of my aunts wields the ax while the others, holding hands, dance in a circle around the trunk. They are silent. Then my aunt grabs the ax with both hands and starts to swing it. With utmost care she first slides her hands over my body, then her lips, and then her teeth; but it's pointless. The first blow of the ax thunders, shattering the afternoon. Birds take flight or seek refuge in the upper branches. My mother wipes the perspiration off her brow, snatches the ax away from my aunt, and, in a rage, begins to strike. The tree is shaken up. My aunts, still whirling around the trunk, now squeal in triumph and jump about, while tearing off the lower branches. Mother swings again; panting, she raises her hands to her hair; in defeat, she sits on the side of the bed and feels her face with her hands. I see her naked and for a moment I have the urge to talk to her. But I don't know what to say. Immediately I stand up, get dressed, and at the doorway I await the brutal comment, the insulting words I deserve. But she says nothing. And that is the worst. I rush out, cross the identical streets, and on Fifth Avenue, I take the first bus. Perhaps I can still come to the rescue. I run into the house, cross the hallway, and bolt out to the patio. There she is, swaying in the late-afternoon breeze. I come up and stare at the trunk in ecstasy. “For today you are safe,” I say. And I lie on the ground, on my back. The noise from the birds is quieting down. “I wish there were something I could do. I wish there were something I could do,” I repeat. But she says nothing. Her enormous silhouette is projected against the twilight. Then she gives me a few moist leaves that fall on my face, slide through my hands, and end up being caught between my legs. “I wish there were something I could do,” I say. And she keeps covering me with her leaves. And this is how we spend the night.

1967

Something Is Happening on the Top Floor

A bird is singing, perched on
the high electric wires.
If I could, I would also sing,
until my voice gave out.

 

NOW THE MAN LOOKED down on the street, which appeared to be trapped in a thick network of wires of all sorts. And he started thinking. On the top floor, no city blare reached him to interrupt his thoughts. There were voices rising from the street, and the drone of motors, unintelligible conversations, vituperations, shrieks, music that was not music but clatter adding to the total disharmony, fragmented echoes of marches and demonstrations, gibberish, and whistles. . . . But all that cacophony gradually faded as it passed the lower floors, so that on the top terrace, where he was, only the reverberations from a truly extraordinary noise could reach him, which never happened. . . . A bird was singing, perched on the telegraph or telephone wires or electrical cables. The bird seemed to be glued to the wires, and the man stuck out his tongue and made a threatening gesture, but the bird did not leave and kept on singing. “It doesn't matter; it will be dark soon, and you'll have to go away,” the man said aloud. The bird raised the pitch of its singsong, and the man then had to make a great effort to put his thoughts in order within the set time. But the afternoon,
except for that stupid bird,
was a good one for reflection. Standing next to the void, the man felt his ideas come and go; sometimes they stayed for a while playing in front of him, and he saw them coming at him like tiny sunbursts. Once again, it was time to start the story.

A chorus of fixed ideas surrounded the man and left him naked. One of them, very wrinkled and heavyset, jumped at his head from the roof of the building, and the man shrank, turning into a boy. Looking down, he saw himself in the street, running, hawking newspapers from his battered bicycle, and trying to escape from his mother, who was chasing after him with a long mop. He laughed uncontrollably and dreamed he was falling. . . . Up high, ideas would appear and disappear, changing their garb and instruments, sobbing or letting out strange bursts of laughter, dragging themselves on the floor or soaring up in the sky, singing or playing trumpets, shaking their buttocks or making undefinable gestures. It all resulted in a struggle among unusual furies which, in their wild commotion, kept falling into the street and, though invisible, crowding the sidewalks. . . . It was noon, and his mother was sitting on the couch, in the middle of the living room. “Your father is dead,” she said when the boy came in. “Your father died,” she said. The boy walked to the washstand to wash his hands, but there was no water; the bowl was empty. He stood on tiptoe to see if there were any drops left at the bottom, and the bowl went crashing to the floor, its enamel cracking and chipping off. “Whose father?” the boy asked. The mother walked over to him and hit him on the head with the bowl, chipping it even more. It looked totally ruined. So much so that its screams were heard as the chips were flying away. “You broke the bowl,” said the mother. “You broke it. . . .” It was that particular time of day when it's neither day nor night, the time when things change shape, growing bigger or smaller; the time when all the shadows lying at the bottom of things, which had been in hiding during the day, can now escape and stretch until they touch each other and form one single shadow. From his lookout the man could see the sun gasping as it sank into the sea in a cloud of vapor. Below, the boy managed to get across the street without being run over by the heavy traffic. He slid between two tractor-trailers, caused several cars to collide, and knocked down an old man, who, upon reaching the corner, dropped dead in a rage; but the boy was not hurt. . . . He got home, ran to the bathroom, and to his horror verified that he was turning into a monster: he was growing a lot of hair in some unimaginable places. With arms raised, he walked to the mirror, then ran to the sewing machine, picked up the scissors, and did away even with his eyebrows and eyelashes. More at peace, he got out into the patio. But it was the same the next day, and though he couldn't tell anybody, he felt an enormous urge to start screaming. . . . The screams, which never left his throat, reached up to the man who was struggling with his thoughts on the top floor, since they were extraordinary sounds. The man, outraged, threw a cluster of thoughts into the void, and the boy was transformed. That's how he flashed back to the distressing period of his adolescence when, without even a dime to go to the movies, he was smoking in secret and masturbating while looking at a girl with a shaved head. “You have to work,” said the mother. “With the English that you know, you could find a job.” “Young man,” his ad read, “fluent in English, seeks position. . . .” The man above had started pacing. He was walking fast from one corner of the terrace to the other, occasionally leaning over the railing. The city lights were beginning to appear. . . . The following day he received a response from a distillery that made cheap rum—firewater, or
aguardiente,
as people call it. And on his way there, even though he kept telling himself,
Damn it, you are not really going to do that to me
and start sweating now,
by the time he arrived, his hands were already dripping wet. He walked between the columns of bottles that obstructed his path, leaving little puddles behind him. But the job did not work out. Yes, it was true he was fluent in English, but that was not the issue. His knowledge of the language was fine, but just broken English would have been enough; what's more, it was not useful to know it too well, and especially not with a Shakespearean accent. Of what use was that Elizabethan thespian diction coming from the throat of a youth whose job was (“no matter how”) to persuade tourists from cruise ships to go with him to the firewater distillery, and, once there, to get them drunk? “That's what your job is. To convince them, lure them, drag them here so that they drink our rum. It pays twenty pesos a month. . . .” The terrace clouded over for a moment with hundreds of ideas of all sizes, their membranous wings grazing the man, lifting and shaking him, raising him up to the ceiling and dropping him again to the floor. The man finally got hold of himself and continued walking. Breathing heavily, he cleared the way with his hands and lit a cigarette. . . . The first day he managed to drag along an American tourist, an old teetotaler who thought the boy was taking him to a museum; the next day he carted away two young men who didn't drink but were eager to get to a brothel; on the third day he took with him two very leggy, lanky women who did get drunk, didn't pay, and wanted to have sex with him. On the fourth day he was fired, though he got paid for his three days of work. “He's no good for this kind of work,” he heard people say while he hid behind the rows of bottles. “The boy has no drive. . . . We need someone lively who can bring people here, no matter how, and doesn't shy away from anything.”
And doesn't shy away from anything. And
doesn't shy away. . . .
Now it all became a dizzying return to the same point where his storytelling had started, or rather, to the point where he would end it. . . . He saw himself going in and coming out of one restaurant after another, one drugstore after another, one cafeteria after another. In short, a whole parade of useless and implacable jobs that would only atrophy the beautiful images of the future that he had envisioned for himself in times past. During the whole review of his life, the most peaceful moment was that of the death of his mother. As soon as he found out, he went out into the patio (the place where he used to let off steam when something important happened). “She died,” he said. “She is dead,” he said. He went back inside and saw her face, so serene: a look that he never had been able to see at all while she was alive. He carried the coffin himself, and paid for the funeral. All his aunts gathered around her tomb, all in black. The scene made him think of vultures devouring a rotten carcass. “Come here, kid,” the vultures said, in tears. And he ran away, in between the crosses, and disappeared into the last bustle of the day. Something was telling him that he had been saved. Someone inside him was shouting at him that he had been liberated, that he would no longer need to become an obscure man who bites his lip, and who often gets phone calls saying that everything is fine. And he ran into the crowd. And he wanted to start screaming, “Mother died at last.” And he did. And he felt as if an enormous carapace that had been crushing him since the moment of his birth had been lifted. . . . He got married, changed jobs, had children, left the country. He kept on moving from one place to another, trying to escape relentless hunger, and eliminating the possibility of any relief, of any chance of doing a genuine act. Always tied to the damned routine that ruled his time, but waiting. . . . And old age was creeping up even into the most minute corners of his body. The press was reporting exciting stories about the latest events in his country. A revolution, what could that be . . . ? So he returned with all his relatives. Up there, the battle against those membranous beings was coming to an end; the majority of them had fled; others had accepted defeat and were vanishing in the air. Only the very largest ones remained, unforgiving, their beaks threatening. Sounds of children yelling were coming from the living room, and of the mother closing the door to the hallway. “They are back,” said the man. And with a gesture, he made all the vermin disappear. But the most powerful ones quickly climbed up the walls, up the drainpipes, and quite intent on staying, they positioned themselves between the man and the door. The clamor of children's voices was no longer audible. Now only the woman was speaking, but he didn't hear her either. “I am sure,” he said. “I am fine,” he said. “I am at peace.” And he shooed away the ideas that, adopting mosquito shapes, were buzzing around his ears and biting him on the neck. With great effort, he delved into the retelling of the present days. He had been able to review all of his life in the grip of those vermin, and now he found himself at peace, with the triumph (was that the word?) that alleviates the horrors of getting old. Again he could hear the children's yells.
I am doing
fine. Here is home, my home, and behind the door are my wife and
kids. I have a decent pension. Here is home.
And his hands caressed the walls, as if the house were a domestic animal. . . . The voice of the woman could be heard, calling him. “I'm coming,” he said, “I'm coming, I'm coming.” And he groped in the dark trying to find the door. “This is peace: a home, a pension, and the kind of weather that always remains the same. Always remains the same,” he repeated as if trying to accelerate his steps by means of words. “And the kind of weather that always remains the same,” he said once more, and stopped. Then he leaned over the railing again. Way down there, beyond the jungle of cables, the rush-hour lights were swarming. . . . There were voices that the man did not hear. Moving like a performer, he passed his feet over the railing and, once on the other side, he held on to it with only one hand. Then he let himself go, without haste, like someone sliding in from the edge of a swimming pool. “Aren't you going to come in?” his wife asked from the dining room as she came out on the terrace. “Oh,” the woman said, raising one hand, not to any part of her face but to her neck. Like that she went into the dining room, and in a reassuring manner, began to serve dinner. . . . The man, bursting through wires, flagpoles, and neon signs, was coming down with an impish smile. Shattering the last lightbulbs, he fell headfirst on a car top, and bounced three times. . . . The boy, standing on the sidewalk, saw him hit the ground and smash into pieces. Then he took his battered bicycle, and continued hawking his newspapers, but with a little more verve. He was glad to have watched that spectacle, which he had seen only in an occasional movie when he had money (rarely) for the ticket.

The bird, frightened by the thud, flew away, circling the deep red sky that was already fading slowly into the horizon. The bird finally landed, perching on the telephone wires of a neighborhood street. Its song was heard for a while in the dark of night.

La Habana, 1963