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For years I’ve
been trying to get out from under all the shit that’s
been dumped on me. And it hasn’t been easy. If you follow
the rules for the first 40 years of your life, believing everything
you’re told, after that it’s almost impossible
to learn to say “no,” “go to hell,”
or “leave me alone.”
But I always manage... well, I almost always
manage to get what I want. As long as it isn’t a million
dollars, or a Mercedes. Though who knows. If I wanted either
of those things, I could find a way to have them. In fact,
wanting a thing is all that really matters. When you want
something badly enough, you’re already halfway there.
It’s like that story about the Zen archer who shoots
his arrow without looking at the target, relying on reverse
logic.
Well, when I started to forget about important
things–everyone else’s important things–and
think and act a little more for myself, I moved into a difficult
phase. And it was like that for years: I was on the margins
of everything. In the middle of a balancing act. Always on
the edge of a precipice. I was moving on to the next stage
of the adventure we call life. At the age of 40, there’s
still time to abandon routines, fruitless and boring worries,
and find another way to live. It’s just that hardly
anybody dares. It’s safer to stick to your rut until
the bitter end. I was getting tougher. I had three choices:
I could either toughen up, go crazy, or commit suicide. So
it was easy to decide: I had to be tough.
But back then I still didn’t really
know how to get all the shit off my back. I just kept moving,
strolling around my little island, meeting people, falling
in love, and fucking. I fucked a lot: sex helped me escape
from myself. I was in my claustrophobic phase. Even in an
ever-so-slightly cramped space, I’d immediately feel
I was suffocating and I’d take off, howling like a wolf.
It all started when I was trapped in the elevator in my building.
It’s an old machine, manufactured in the thirties, which
means that it has a grate, and it’s open on the sides.
It’s American, and ugly, not like those beautiful old
European elevators that still run smoothly in the hotels on
the boulevard de la Villette and those other old Parisian
neighborhoods. No. This elevator is a cruder, simpler piece
of junk. Very dark, because the neighbors steal the lightbulbs,
with a permanent stink of urine, filth, and the daily vomit
of a drunk who lives on the fourth floor. You go up or down
slowly, watching the scenery: cement, a slice of stairway,
darkness, another slice of stairway, the doors to each floor,
someone waiting who finally decides to take the stairs, because
the elevator stops whenever and wherever it wants. Often it
decides to stop without lining up with any of the exit doors.
There in front of you is the rough cement wall of the shaft,
and you can hear the people scream, “Get me out of here,
goddamnit, I’m stuck!”
Like an old person with hardening of the
arteries, the elevator is forgetful, and it moves up and down
very slowly, shivering and snorting, as if it no longer has
the strength for so much work. And so, at one of those unexpected
stops between two floors, I stuck my hand out between the
door grate and the wall of the shaft, knelt down, and felt
for the edge of the door on the floor below to line the elevator
up properly. That was the only way to get the machinery working
again to keep moving up. And I did it: I closed the door tightly,
the elevator started again, but there was no time to get my
arm out of the way. It was jammed between the wall and the
grate, in a three-centimeter gap (in order to write this,
I’ve just measured it). It was horrific: my arm and
hand scraping along, at the elevator’s leisurely pace,
all the way to the seventh floor. I was screaming bloody murder,
doubled over in pain, and I was sure my arm and my right hand
were a mash of bones and blood and shredded skin. But no.
No broken bones. It was a burn, my whole arm and hand raw
flesh, bleeding, the nerves scraped into a festering puree
of dirt and dog shit. So from that moment on: straight into
the pit of hell. Rampant claustrophobia. When I got out of
the elevator–or when I was gotten out–I stayed
trapped inside myself. And I was trapped for years, trapped
inside myself. Collapsing inside.
The claustrophobia was so awful that sometimes
at night I would wake with a start and jump out of bed. I
felt trapped by the night, by the room, by my own self, on
the bed. I couldn’t breathe. I’d have to pee and
get a drink of water and go out on the roof
and watch the dark immensity of the sea, and breathe the salt
air. Then I’d calm down a little.
Oh, it wasn’t really just the broken-down elevator.
The elevator was the last straw. But lots of other things
happened before that, which I’ll tell little by little.
Later. Not now. I’ll tell them the way a person talks
to a dead man through a santera, and dedicates flowers and
glasses of water and prayers to him, so that he’ll rest
in peace and not fuck with those of us left on the other side.
Well then, that’s where I was, in
a state of claustrophobia, overwhelmed. Squashed like a bug.
And I walked a lot, all over the place, anywhere. I was always
running away. I couldn’t be at home. Home was hell.
And one day I went to a seminar for film people. If it turned
out to be the right kind of thing, I could write something
up for the stupid but pretentious weekly magazine I worked
for then.
The seminar, in a film school on the outskirts
of Havana, lasted four days. From the very first instant,
I noticed Rita Cassia: a golden-skinned Brazilian who wanted
to make lots of money writing scripts for soap operas and
who had beautiful legs and was eager to get over her recent
divorce. Basically, she was looking for a happy Latin lover
type to cheer her up.
And that’s how it happened. All of
her eroticism was concentrated in the looks she gave me. She
had almond-shaped, honey-colored eyes, just like in a bolero.
And when we looked at each other, it was like kissing with
lots of tongue. From that moment on, things moved fast. We
ignored a famous Cuban documentary filmmaker who made great
films but didn’t know how he did it. The guy was so
intuitive he had no idea where his own intuition came from.
Luckily, he never tried to explain anything serious. He was
a nice guy, and he told stories. We ignored him anyway, and
went to walk in a little grove of trees, making silly small
talk until the electromagnetic field between us was supercharged
and we kissed without exchanging a single word of love or
desire. Then she told me that during Carnival in Rio she puts
on her skimpiest outfits and goes out dancing samba every
night, which I guess might have something to do with her eyes
and her electromagnetic field.
It was already evening and the little grove
wasn’t very dense, and there were people there, because
the students were very promiscuous, as you’d expect.
Near us, two boys were kissing madly and in an instant they
had their zippers down and their dicks out, and they were
on the ground, frantic, sucking each other in a sixty-nine.
That made me even hotter, and we left. We went to the small
apartment Rita Cassia was renting, and I made her suck me
before I was even out of my clothes. On the table she had
a bottle of seven-year-old rum. It had been a long time since
I saw those sweet bottles of good rum. I made myself a big
drink, with ice, and then another, and I was amazed: I was
able to give her dick for more than an hour, everywhere, without
coming. She undulated her hips and pelvis, getting her kicks,
and sprinkling me with rum. She’d take a mouthful and
spray it over me and then she’d run her tongue along
my skin to collect it. Sometimes rum makes me last longer:
my prick stays stiff, but I don’t come.
When I finally focused myself on coming–I
was getting very tired–I managed to accumulate enough
will power to pull my dick out in time to shoot all my come
on her belly. And there was lots of it. It had been two or
three weeks since I had last fucked, and I had lots of jism.
And Rita Cassia was carried away and she kept repeating, “Lovely,
lovely, ahhh, lovely.”
From then on it was one long orgy, because
after the seminar came the Festival of New Latin American
Cinema, and Havana–as far as we were concerned–was
paradise: lots of movies, lots of fucking, lots of rum and
good food. Cuba was just then at the beginning of the worst
famine in its history. I think it was ’91. Nobody had
any idea of all the hunger and crises still to come. I certainly
didn’t. All I cared about was my raging claustrophobia
and the urge I had to eat. That same year, in just a few months,
I had lost 40 pounds, the cause, it would seem, being lack
of food.
We also amused ourselves by eluding Maria
Alexandra, a successful writer of Brazilian soap opera scripts.
That fine lady was a big dyke, and she besieged Rita Cassia
with a splendid display of seduction tactics: morning, noon,
and night she would show up at Rita’s room with flowers,
she invited her to all the cocktail parties and banquets,
and she promised her incessantly that she would help her write
a good script–to sell to O’Mundo, no less.
Another of her gentlemanly tricks was to
play cold war with me, alternately striking one of two poses:
either she ignored me majestically, or she treated me with
a fatherly yet distant condescension. Maria Alexandra loved
Rita Cassia so passionately that she demolished every obstacle
in her path, any way she could. She was sure I couldn’t
bestow on Rita Cassia even the tiniest iota of the enormous
pleasure, sexual and sensual, that she was capable of giving
as soon as she got her hands on her. Rita Cassia, in her feminine
way, stayed loyal to me, but she would turn kittenish, charming,
and witty whenever the dyke with the keys to the golden doors
of O’Mundo appeared.
And that’s how the time passed. We had fun. I felt happy
and ignored the fact that I was a pathetic sponger. A proud
and romantic beggar. Well, as I’ve said, it was the
beginning of the crisis and our hunger was getting sharper,
but a person always sees the dirt in the other man’s
eye and says, “Everybody’s starving and getting
thinner every day.” It’s hard to tell it like
it is, “We’re all starving, and we’re all
getting thinner every day.” Rita Cassia paid for everything,
because I didn’t have even a dollar in my pocket, and
I calmly accepted that she would always pay. The only other
option was for me to stay home, bored, eating rice and beans
and missing out on all the fun. That’s how it was, until
one day it was over.
I was on the bed, with the last shot of
seven-year rum in my hand. Rita Cassia was getting dressed,
so we could go walking along the Malecón and say our
good-byes by the sea, late at night, as two good lovers in
Havana should. It had to be a cinematic ending, under the
stars, maybe even under the moon. She had already packed her
suitcase. She would be leaving for the airport at three in
the morning. Then I noticed that she had left some valuable
objects scattered around the room: rubber thongs, worn but
still in fine shape, half a bottle of shampoo, some jars of
jam, notepads, slivers of soap, a disposable razor.
“Are you leaving all this here?”
“Sure. None of it’s any good.”
“Oh, yes it is. Those rubber thongs,
the shampoo, the soap. Everything’s worth something
here, even if you think it’s junk.”
“Fine then, let’s put it all
in a bag and you can take it with you.”
A little while later, we were strolling
along the Malecón, saying our good-byes. We’d
never see each other again. She had already told me that it
pained her to witness so much poverty and so much political
posturing to disguise it. She never wanted to come back. We
sat for a long time, listening to the sea. She could smell
it, I couldn’t. Maybe my nose was too used to it. I
like to listen to the sea from the Malecón, late, in
the silence of the night. We kissed and said our good-byes.
I went walking off toward home, carrying the bag. Slowly.
I felt good. And I kept on slowly, without looking back.
© Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
'Claustrophobic Me' appears
in Dirty
Havana Trilogy
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