Equivocality

(English translation by Natasha Wimmer)

This is a truly dirty book, in that almost every one of its short vignettes contains some sort of sweaty, often grotesque sex. The author is a pervert, and not a terribly creative one, really – there’s far more illuminating writing on sex elsewhere. That’s fine. The sex is merely backdrop for his stories of desperate people and situations in a Havana slum during the mid-1990s. The author has a unique perspective on all of this, an educated man and a former journalist who is struggling to maintain some sort of equilibrium in the midst of starvation and poverty, and to find some pleasure somewhere, anywhere, in his miserable life.

At the time I had a little business involving empty beer cans. I’d pick the cans out of Miramar dumpster, especially the ones around the embassies and foreign business offices. Sometimes I’d collect more than two hundred cans in a morning. I’d scrape the tops off and sell them for a peso each at ice stands. The stands sold a runny, almost sugarless grapefruit ice, but people waited for half an hour to buy it, and they bought cans from me because the stands didn’t even have paper cups; they took the shitty stuff and thanked God for their good fortune, because that ice was like a blessing on Havana in the nineties. In the rest of the country, there wasn’t even water to drink., Nothing. Hunger from start to finish. But in Havana there’s always more get-up-and-go. Take this can business, for example, People would look at me with disgust when I rummaged through the dumpsters. A few times, Public Health inspectors cornered me. They said that the cans were dirty and hassled me about epidemics and things like that. But I wouldn’t fight back. I’m tired of fighting back. In the end, no matter what happens, I always get screwed. I don’t fight back anymore. I play half retard, half moron, and I’m left alone. Sometimes I think if you’re poor, it’s better to be stupid than smart. A little bit stupid and very tough (a clever beggar is either a brilliant candidate for suicide or a far-flung combatant in the world revolution, or both at once).

And no complaining. It does no good to indulge in complaints or tears or self-pity. Not for your sake or anyone else’s. Compassion for no one. You’ve got to train yourself, but it’s possible to achieve the right state of mind. After being kicked a thousand times in the ass the balls, at last your learn to be a little bit tough and to face things head on and go on fighting, no matter what. There’s no other choice. Is it possible to live any other way?

It is an amazing book, a record of a time and place that we rich white Westerners would otherwise never have access to. You can view it as a counter to Fidel’s communist propaganda, if you wish. The author himself repeatedly makes reference to how he lost his job as a reporter after refusing to toe the party line.

I had spent my life as a fucking journalist, imagining when I began that I’d be master of the truth, someone who changed people’s ideas, but I could think that way anymore.

For more than twenty years as a journalist, I was never allowed to write with a modicum of respect for my readers, or even the slightest regard for their intelligence. No, I always had to write as if stupid people were reading me, people who needed to be force-fed ideas. And I was rejecting all that. Damning to hell all the elegant prose, the careful avoidance of anything that might be morally or socially offensive. I couldn’t keep upholding propriety or behaving properly, smiling and nice, well-dressed, shaved, spritzed with cologne, my watch always keeping the right time. And believing all that was inevitable, believing everything lasts forever. No. I was learning that nothing lasts forever.

I felt at home in that stinking building, with people who weren’t the slightest bit educated or intelligent, who knew nothing about anything, and who solved everything, or fucked it up worse than it had been before, with shouts, insults, violence, and fists. That’s how it was. To hell with everything.

This book, then, is a collection of the “naked stories” he always wanted to write. His stories are short, at most five or ten pages, and each chronicles a brief arc in the wretched life of a whore, an old plumber, an aging former showgirl, a mother with six children, a nurse or policeman. No one is happy, at least not for long. Everyone drinks cheap “kerosene-tasting” rum, smokes marijuana, and has sex whenever possible without regard to consequence. Most of them are petty criminals, stealing from their jobs or selling food or goods on the black market – one pretty much has to be a criminal to survive that time and place. There are also detailed descriptions of assaults and robberies, collapsing buildings, traffic accidents, and an extremely graphic and violent rape. Even the consensual sex is often lifeless and desperate:

I drank a few shots with her, got plastered again, and lost control. My prick stiffened, and I rubbed it through my pants. I like to give women thrills that way. They all like it, even if they pretend to be disgusted. They like to see a man getting hot sitting next to them.

It was what the old woman was waiting for.

“You’re plastered, sweetie.”

She put her hand on my prick and squeezed.

“Feel that beast! He wants woman’s flesh!”

And just like that she pulled me out of my pants and took me in her mouth. She was a pro, naturally. We went into her room, and I spent an hour riding that huge bulk of warm, sweaty flesh. The two of us were sweating, sweltering. It was nice. It was really nice. She came five hundred times, and she kept saying, “That’s what I like, white boy, I like to come like a bitch in heat.”

When I finally came, I fell asleep right there in her bed.

Aside from the lurid detail with which he shows us these miserable lives, his greatest accomplishment is perhaps the battering which he gives his readers. After hundreds of pages of despair, bad luck, ignorance and filth, I began to feel somewhat hardened and despondent myself. Nothing ever works out for any of the characters in his book – all of whom were real people, one suspects. Eventually, I approached the state of mind that he describes so well, where nothing good is expected to last. Reading about an old woman who emerges from solitude to find a little happiness in the kindness of her new neighbors, I could only cringe as I waited for disaster. Sure enough, one of the young men in the building seduces her, shows her love for the first time in fifty years, gets himself written into her will, and promptly disappears. The poor woman dies of shock a week later.

But I am glad for the existence of this book. It shows me a time and place and state of being that I had suspected, but could never see up close. It’s real, very earnest and honest in its own way. And though he goes through great pains to show us how he’s hardened himself – wouldn’t you? – he hints eloquently that he’s been in love, that he knows what life could be despite everything he’s currently experiencing. If you look closely, there is a hidden tenderness in this book. For the author, writing is a way out. He lives in shit, but has managed to forge an aesthetic ideal:

Art only matters if it’s irreverent, tormented, full of nightmares and desperation. Only an angry, obscene, violent, offensive art can show us the other side of the world, the side we never see or try not to see as so as to avoid troubling our consciences.

I hold a different view, but then I live a life of full bellies and running water. If I ever meet Mr. Gutiérrez, I’m going to get drunk with him.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 8:39 am and is filed under Book Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.