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Havana's
heart of darkness
Dirty
Havana Trilogy
By Pedro Juan Gutiérrez,
Faber,
stg£10
Coming to the end of
this semi-autobiographical novel set in Havana during the
mid- to late 1990s is like emerging, slime-covered, from an
endless, filthy sewer into the blinding light of day.
You're practically reaching
for a mental wire brush and carbolic soap, such is its sense
of toxic contamination.
If that sounds a touch
dramatic, you'll know what I mean by the third page of the
first
chapter, in which the priapic hero, Pedro Juan, graphically
describes sodomising the first of many women in the book.
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A
former Castro supporter and broadcast journalist who,
deeply disillusioned with the system, quit his state-run
job at 35, Pedro Juan likes to play mean and live dirty.
His version of sex isn't for the squeamish. It's "an
exchange of fluids, saliva, breath and smells, urine,
semen, shit, sweat, microbes, bacteria. Or there is
no sex. If it's just tenderness and ethereal spirituality,
then it can never be more than a sterile parody of the
real act."
In his ludicrously
sordid world, every female he meets is a slut at heart,
if not by trade. The only women who aren't gagging for
it are either lesbian or octogenarian -- even widows
in their 70s are considered fair game. His lewd physical
descriptions of men's and women's bodies are roughly
etched in the harsh, impoverished language of hard core
porn.
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For a book that contains
sexual encounters of varying levels of depravity every few
pages, there is precious little eroticism, just mindless,
desperately cliched copulation.
Living in a warren-like
slum peopled with starving no-hopers, Pedro Juan does all
he can to grind out a few pesos in a city where perversion
and prostitution walk side by side along the dimly lit Malecon,
Havana's once grand seafront promenade. He is beyond hope,
numbed by the pain of his wife and children's abandonment.
Now, he says: "The only feeling I have for women is in
my erections."
The Havana in this book
is a surreal and cruel place, riddled with crooks, murderers
and brutal plain-clothes policemen, amongst whom wander the
sunburnt, insouciant tourists, happily clicking the crumbling
colonial mansions in the old town, unaware of the rat-infested
hellholes that scrabble behind their elegant facades.
Other neglected buildings
in Havana have given up the ghost and are simply falling into
rubble. Everyone, it seems, is getting out. Swarms of natives
are abandoning their homeland on home-made rafts, heading
for Miami. Those who stay live in a limbo of hustling, queuing,
starving and waiting -- for Castro to die, for the stagnancy
to shift, at last.
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Gutiérrez
tells their stories with stomach-churning realism, his
beady eye fixed on the most viscerally revolting details.
It's in these details that art resides, according to
Pedro Juan: "I'm not interested in the decorative,
or the beautiful, or the sweet, or the delicious...
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 so
as to avoid troubling our consciences."
His obsession with ugliness, excreta,
onanism and opportunistic sex sit uneasily with his
avowed belief in God ("Every night I pray and I
always ask God to take away my fear and to clear up
the confusion in my head... He gives me signs that I'm
on the right path"), as does his dedication to
the 'santos', the spirit gods to whom he offers flowers,
cigars and rum. |
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In its brutal realism,
Gutiérrez's prose has been compared with that of Henry
Miller, Jean Genet and Charles Bukowski. There is a familiar
ring to the plight of the protagonist, caught in a dead-end
trap, a slave to a society that has lost all meaning and purpose.
Cuba is like a pubescent
child stuck in the worst kind of adolescence and forced to
remain forever in a hyper-hormonal state of resentment, disempowerment
and paranoia -- waiting for the 'old man' to die before there
can be any kind of evolution.
In the meantime, what
to do? As the tourists drift by on their yachts, all they
see are the white sandy beaches, turquoise sea and shady palms.
To them, Cuba looks like paradise. Their hotels serve buffets
with meat, fish and fruit piled high on platters; in the rat
holes where people try to live, even the cats have been eaten.
(One of the characters in Gutiérrez's book briefly makes a
good living selling 'pork' liver -- it turns out he's been
stealing human livers from the morgue where he washes cadavers.)
Although Dirty Havana
Trilogy is a symbolic work and not (thank heaven) to
be taken literally, there is a stench of authenticity about
many of its deeply unsavoury characters. But, despite its
allegorical nature, there are times when its repulsiveness
becomes unbearable -- a totally gratuitous rape scene, savage
in its graphic brutality, is stitched into the gruelling narrative
for no other reason than it serves to underline the author's
nightmarish vision of 'art'. "So. No peace or quiet.
Whoever achieves perfect balance is too close to God to be
an artist."
The only literature worth
writing, it seems, needs to brutally assault its readers'
sensibilities and to rip us from the plush cocoon of our capitalist
existence and fling us, head first, into hell.
See also The Post's comment about
Tropical
Animal
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