The Dying Animal (13 page)

The photographs. I'll never forget Consuela asking me to take those pictures. To some Peeping Tom peering in from outside, it could only have looked like a scene from pornography. Yet it was as far as you could get from pornography. "Do you have your camera?" "I have my camera," I said. "Would you mind taking pictures of me? Because I want to have pictures of my body as you knew it. As you saw it. Because soon it won't be as it was. I don't know anybody else I could ask to do this. I couldn't ask this of another man. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered you." "Yes," I told her, "we'll do this. Anything. Say what you want. Ask for whatever you want. Say everything to me." "Could you put on some music," she said, "and then get your camera?" "What music do you want?" I asked. "Schubert. Some Schubert chamber music." "Okay, okay," I said, but not, I told myself,
Death and the Maiden.

Yet she hasn't asked me to send her a print. Remember that Consuela is not the most brilliant girl in the world. Because then the photographs would be another story. Then there would be tactics involved. Then her strategy would be something to think about. But with Consuela, there's a semiconscious spontaneity in whatever she does, a rightness, though she may not know quite what she's doing or exactly why. Coming to me to be photographed, that's very close to nature, to an original drifting thought, to intuition, and there is no deliberate reasoning behind it. You could make up the reasoning, but Consuela wouldn't have. She feels she has to do this, she says, to document for
me,
who loved her body so much, the quality it had, how perfect it was. But there was much more to it than that.

I've noticed that most women are unsure about their bodies, even if, like her, they are altogether lovely. Not all of them know they're lovely. It takes a certain type of woman to know that. Most have complaints about something that they needn't complain about. They often want to hide their breasts. There's some shame whose source I can never fathom, and you must reassure them for a long time before they expose them with any real pleasure and take real pleasure in being looked at. Even the most fortunate of them. There are only a few who show themselves freely, and these days, because of all the politicizing, they're often not the ones with the model of breast you would have invented yourself.

But the erotic power of Consuela's body—well, that is over. Yes, that night I'd had an erection, but I couldn't have sustained it. I'm fortunate enough to have a hard-on and the drive, but I would have been in great trouble if she had asked me to sleep with her that night. I'll be in great trouble when she asks me once she is recovered from the surgery. As she will. Because she will, won't she? Try it out first with someone familiar and someone old. For the sake of her confidence, for the sake of her pride, better with me than with Carlos Alonso or the Villareal boys. Age may not do what cancer does, but it does enough.

Part Two. She asks me three months from now, she calls me and says, "Let's get together," and then she takes her clothes off again. Is that the disaster to come?

There's a painting of Stanley Spencer's that hangs at the Tate, a double nude portrait of Spencer and his wife in their middle forties. It is the quintessence of directness about cohabitation, about the sexes living together over time. It's in one of the Spencer books downstairs. I'll get it later. Spencer is seated, squatting, beside the recumbent wife. He is looking ruminatively down at her from close range through his wire-rimmed glasses. We, in turn, are looking at them from close range: two naked bodies right in our faces, the better for us to see how they are no longer young and attractive. Neither is happy. There is a heavy past clinging to the present. For the wife particularly, everything has begun to slacken, to thicken, and greater rigors than striating flesh are to come.

At the edge of a table, in the immediate foreground of the picture, are two pieces of meat, a large leg of lamb and a single small chop. The raw meat is rendered with physiological meticulousness, with the same uncharitable candor as the sagging breasts and the pendent, unaroused prick displayed only inches back from the uncooked food. You could be looking through the butcher's window, not just at the meat but at the sexual anatomy of the married couple. Every time I think of Consuela, I envision that raw leg of lamb shaped like a primitive club beside the blatantly exhibited bodies of this husband and wife. Its being there, so close to their mattress, becomes less and less incongruous the longer you look. There's melancholy resignation in the somewhat stunned expression of the wife, and there is that butchered hunk of meat having nothing in common with a living lamb, and, for three weeks now, ever since Consuela's visit, I can get neither image out of my mind.

We watched the New Year coming in around the world, the mass hysteria of no significance that was the millennial New Year's Eve celebration. Brilliance flaring across the time zones, and none ignited by bin Laden. Light whirling over nighttime London more spectacular than anything since the splendors of colored smoke billowed up from the Blitz. And the Eiffel Tower shooting fire, a facsimile flame-throwing weapon such as Wernher von Braun might have designed for Hitler's annihilating arsenal—the historical missile of missiles, the rocket of rockets, the bomb of bombs, with ancient Paris the launching pad and the whole of humanity the target. All evening long, on networks everywhere, the mockery of the Armageddon that we'd been awaiting in our backyard shelters since August 6, 1945. How could it not happen? Even on that very night, especially on that night, people anticipating the worst as though the evening were one long air-raid drill. The wait for the chain of horrendous Hiroshimas to link in synchronized destruction the abiding civilizations of the world. It's now or never. And it never came.

Maybe that's what everyone was celebrating—that it hadn't come, never came, that the disaster of the end will now never arrive. All the disorder is controlled disorder punctuated with intervals to sell automobiles. TV doing what it does best: the triumph of trivialization over tragedy. The Triumph of the Surface, with Barbara Walters. Rather than the destruction of the age-old cities, an international eruption of the superficial instead, a global outbreak of sentimentality such as even Americans hadn't witnessed before. From Sydney to Bethlehem to Times Square, the recirculating of clichés occurs at supersonic speeds. No bombs go off, no blood is shed—the next bang you hear will be the boom of prosperity and the explosion of markets. The slightest lucidity about the misery made ordinary by our era sedated by the grandiose stimulation of the grandest illusion. Watching this hyped-up production of staged pandemonium, I have a sense of the monied world eagerly entering the prosperous dark ages. A night of human happiness to usher in barbar-ism.com. To welcome appropriately the shit and the kitsch of the new millennium. A night not to remember but to forget.

Except on the sofa where I sit holding Consuela, my arms encircling her where she is naked, warming her breasts with my hands while we watch New Year's Eve arrive in Cuba. Neither of us had been expecting
that
to materialize on the screen, but there before us is Havana. From an amphitheater corralling a thousand tourists and calling itself a nightclub comes an embalmed police-state embodiment of the Caribbean hot stuff that used to draw the big spenders in the days of the Mob. The Tropicana Nightclub of the Tropicana Hotel. No Cubans to be seen other than the entertainers in no way entertaining, a lot of young people—ninety-six of them, ABC says—wearing silly white costumes and not so much dancing or singing as circling the stage howling into hand-held mikes. The showgirls look like leggy Latino West Village transvestites walking around in a huff. Atop their heads are overdeveloped lampshades—three feet high, according to ABC. Lampshades on their heads and a rippling great mane of white ruffles down their backs.

"My God," Consuela said, and she began to cry. "This," she said, and so angrily,
"this
is what he gives the world. This is what he shows them on New Year's Eve." "It
is
a bit of a grotesque farce. Maybe," I said, "it's Castro's idea of a joke."

Is it, I wonder. Is this unconscious self-satire—is Castro so out of touch—or is it intentionally satirical and consistent with his hatred of the capitalist world? Castro, so contemptuous of the Batista corruption, corruption that you would have thought to be symbolized for him by tourist nightclubs like this Tropicana, and that is his millennial offering? The pope wouldn't do this—he has great public relations. Only the old Soviet Union could have equaled the tawdriness. There are any number of things for Castro to choose from, any number of old-fashioned socialist-realism tableaux: a celebration at a sugar plantation, in a maternity ward, at a cigar factory. Happy Cuban workers smoking, happy Cuban mothers beaming, happy Cuban newborns nursing ... but to present the crappiest sort of entertainment for tourists? Was it deliberate or stupid or was it thought to be an appropriate joke on all this hysterical celebrating over a meaningless mark on the historical grid? Whatever the motive, he will not spend a dime on it. He will not spend a minute thinking about it. Why should Castro the revolutionary care, why should anyone care, about something that gives us a sense that we're understanding something that we're not understanding? The passage of time. We're in the swim, sinking in time, until finally we drown and go. This nonevent made into a great event while Consuela is here suffering the biggest event in her life. The Big Ending, though no one knows what, if anything, is ending and certainly no one knows what is beginning. It's a wild celebration of no one knows what.

Consuela alone knows, because Consuela now knows the wound of age. Getting old is unimaginable to anyone but the aging, but that is no longer so for Consuela. She no longer measures time like the young, marking backward to when you started. Time for the young is always made up of what is past, but for Consuela time is now how much future she has left, and she doesn't believe there is any. Now she measures time counting forward, counting time by the closeness of death. The illusion has been broken, the metronomic illusion, the comforting thought that, tick tock, everything happens in its proper time. Her sense of time is now the same as mine, speeded up and more forlorn even than mine. She, in fact, has overtaken me. Because I can still tell myself, "I'm not going to die in five years, maybe not in ten years, I'm fit, I'm well, I could even live another twenty," while she...

The loveliest fairy tale of childhood is that everything happens in order. Your grandparents go long before your parents, and your parents go long before you. If you're lucky it can work out that way, people aging and dying in order, so that at the funeral you ease your pain by thinking that the person had a long life. It hardly makes extinction less monstrous, that thought, but it's the trick that we use to keep the metronomic illusion intact and the time torture at bay: "So-and-so lived a long time." But Consuela has not been lucky, and so beside me she sits, under the sentence of death, while the nightlong merriment unfolds on the screen, a manufactured childish hysteria about embracing the open-ended future in ways that mature adults, with their melancholy knowledge of a very limited future, cannot have. And on this insane night, no one's knowledge can be more melancholy than hers.

"Havana," she says, and she weeps more forcefully by the moment, "I thought someday I will see Havana." "You will see Havana." "I won't. Oh, David, my grandfather..." "Yes, what about him? Go ahead, tell me, talk." "My grandfather would be sitting in the living room..." "Go on." I was holding her in my arms while she began to speak about herself as she never had before, never had cause to before, as, perhaps, she'd not even known herself before. "With
The NewsHour
on, with
The MacNeil-
Lehrer NewsHour
on, and," she said, through her copious tears, "he'd suddenly sigh,
'Pobre Mamá.'
Who'd died in Havana without him. Because their generation, that generation, did not leave.
'Pobre Mamá.
'
'Pobre Papá.'
They stayed behind. He would just have this sadness, this longing for them. Terrible, terrible longing. And that's what I have. But it's for myself. It's for my life. I feel myself, I feel my body with my hands, I think, This is my body! It can't go away! This can't be real! This can't be happening! How can it go away? I don't want to die! David, I'm afraid to die!" "Consuela dear, you're not going to. You're thirty-two. You're not going to die for a very long time." "I grew up as an exile. So
I'm scared of everything.
Did you know that about me?
I'm scared of everything."
"Oh, no. I don't think that's so. Of everything? It may seem so tonight but not—" "It's so
always.
I didn't want my family's exile. But you grow up and you hear 'Cuba, Cuba, Cuba' all the time ... And look! Those people! Such vulgar people! Look what he has done to Cuba! I will never see it. I'll never see the house. I'll never see their house." "Yes, you will. Once Castro is gone—"
"I'll
be gone." "You won't be gone. You'll be here. Don't panic. There is no need to panic. You're going to be fine, you're going to live—" "You want to know the picture I've had? Of there? All my life? The picture in my head of Cuba?" "Yes. Tell me. Try to calm down and tell me everything. Do you want me to turn off the TV?" "No—no. They'll show something else. They
have
to." "Tell me the picture in your head, Consuela." "Not of the beach, not that. My parents had that. My parents talked about how much fun they had there, kids running around on the beach, people sitting in lounge chairs, ordering mimosas. They would take a house out on the beach and so on, but it wasn't that memory that I had. It was something else. I've had it forever. Oh, David—they buried Cuba long before they were buried. They had to. My father, my grandfather, my grandmother, they all knew they would never go back. And they never did. And now I never will." "You will," I told her. "What is the picture you've had forever? Talk to me. Talk," I said. "I always thought I would go back. Just to see the house. That it would be there." "Is the picture in your head of the house?" I asked her. "No. It's a road. El Malecón. If you see any kind of photos of Havana, you see a picture of El Malecón, this beautiful road right by the water. They've got this wall, and in the pictures everyone sits on the wall and hangs out. Did you see
Buena Vista Social Club?"
"I did. Because of you, of course I did. I thought of you when I saw it." "Well, it's the road there," she said, "where the waves were crashing. That wall. You see it for just a moment. That's where I always thought I would be." "The road that might have been," I told her.
"Should
have been," Consuela said, and again she was weeping uncontrollably while up on the screen, beneath their lampshades (each, we learn, weighing fourteen pounds), the showgirls parade aimlessly across the stage. Yes, this is definitely Castro saying "Fuck you" to the twentieth century. Because it's the end of his adventure in history, too, of the mark he made and did not make on the score of human events. "Tell me," I said to her. "You never told me this before. You didn't talk like this eight years ago. Then you were a listener. My student. I never knew this. Go ahead. Tell me what should have been." "That wall," she said, "and me. That's all. Hanging out there and talking to people. That's it. You're by the water but you're in the city. It's a meeting spot. It's a promenade." "Well, it looked pretty rundown," I said, "in the movie." "It did. But that's not how I've seen it all my life."