"Night Train"

 

from Figuras tendidas. By Alejandro Aguilar

Translated by Cristina de la Torre

 

 

 

… The corridor's a dark ribbon pierced by lights and stirring shadows, a piano keyboard in motion, shattered by the abrupt opening of a door, stoked by awkward cries escaping through unseen cracks. The corridor and he. And the night. Someone steps out to share the restlessness. A silhouette with slightly myopic eyes, like separate beings. They come close. Rays of light pierce windows beyond. Sarah speaks softly, casually throwing him lines. His polite assistant, efficient, aloof. Sarah, framed by the familiarity woven during endless hours at the office, now talks openly of her admiration for the man standing before her. Sarah laments the shallowness of her colleagues who will stop at nothing. Sarah denies all possibility of on-the-job flirtations. Sarah comes closer, too close. Entering into the game of advance and retreat, he uses neutral tones to compliment her competence while steadily reducing the space between their bodies. She mumbles something about his style and leaves no room for the lips to answer, as her tongue decisively ends the separation. The tongue as bridge between two shores, uniting, joining, linking. He, alert to the emptiness of the corridor, reaches for a thigh emerging from her dress, ascends to her hips and clasps her buttocks, clinging with the desperation of a choking man gasping for air. And the sustained, sort of jerky, rocking motion cradles them both, and the train, and the night outside. They disappear into the darkness, into the silence. Silent corridors, compartments. Brief friction and electrifying bolts to the torso. Their bodies balanced gleefully on two wobbly legs. Stifled sighs, muffled kisses. The corridor's intermittent darkness, the evenness of the breath on his throat. Panting, the word "thanks", the surrender. The nape yields, then the back. A curtain decisively torn quickens the union of the sweaty torso and the ardent back. Relentless night, unappreciative of the circles tremblingly traced by small breasts on the glass of time. They refuse to gaze at the indifferent forest. They deny themselves the glance and the moan. They hold and bolster each other, relax. And now the whispers, the recovered breath giving back the word "thanks". Sarah regains her  composure. Sarah embraces him, kisses him goodbye. He, in grateful astonishment, remains in the long corridor of night. Cozy inside. A refuge for two in the uncharted geography traversed by a train. And the snow.

 

 

Havana, 1997

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Story with Epilogue for Another Friend in Flight

 

(from Figuras Tendidas)

Translated by Cristina de la Torre

 

    

I don’t know how long we’ve been here, forming a triangle of bodies adhered to the stinking space of this room. A bit further, beyond Mario, the bullet resting on the floor another point of reference, an additional one suggesting a square, like in the game of spatial constellations (“game” is a word as foreign to what is going on here as “return” might have been for the cosmonaut wandering on board his ship as his country was vanishing). A level plane, static as everything surrounding this shack, from its corroded walls all the way out to where the four points of the nautical rose dip their tips into the sea. And even ourselves, this threesome hovering one step away from nothingness. Seen from above, Mario’s figure flattens against the floor, on the spot where his hand rests fingers curling idly around the weapon. Between there and his arched leg tears are falling, two, three, four...

- “I can’t, I just cannot.”

A tumultuous silence develops. His back explodes and his voice bounces off the floor, the walls, our bodies Aramis’ and my own, still incapable of movement.

- “But why…?  Why?”

Mario mutters in a single cellophane sound. Gone is the ferocity with which he pulled the trigger of the gun he was digging into his temple just an instant ago. With the metal click a door closed and the only remaining option was flight. He’s defeated, limp somehow. Was he left or right-handed? I couldn’t tell.

- “Afraid, huh?”

Aramis taunts grabbing the gun and pulling the trigger over and over with the barrel deep in his throat in an interminable Russian roulette that also denied him the grace of a shot. Later the purring barrel spit out the bullet and Mario collapsed, faint and furious. End of scene. The charge dissolved like lightning without thunder.

Then came my turn, the third point of the triangle in space. No death farce for me, just an attempt to say something, to move, and my mind playing tricks... constellation, triangle, cosmonaut. Jesus no, that’s wrong. It’s sea, water, immensity, panic, death...

- “You have no alternative”    

I barely make out Aramis’ words as I approach Mario who looking like a scolded child, lets out a yelp that further distorts the room’s air.

- “But Jesus I don’t want to go, this is where I belong,” and his head falls on my chest leaving traces of sweat, tears, slobber...

Why does Aramis pressure him? My mind wonders even as answers loom, the memory of broken bodies spit out by the waters of the bay...

- “You’ve been waiting so long, there’s no other way” I surprise myself saying. I, who long ago renounced all possibilities, who simply and quietly keep on waiting...like an angel in his prison cell... And so we stay a while longer, wordlessly conveying to each other what we’ve shared all these years, all that we know, all the tears we three have shed.

Aramis prays silently that his friend be spared the fate of his last lover, that terrible day when he missed the appointed time and the craft was already making its way in the water towards the mouth of the bay...

- “You will make it” I manage to say before letting go of the breath that held back my tears. And, after the cascade of pain, I proceed to measure the distances, weigh the risks, go over in my mind the plans we’ve made during these last nights of farewell. I recall the time spent glued to the radio listening for news of those who left after the gates shut back down, of the many who have been sent back, of the ones who made it, of those who continue flinging themselves into the sea not knowing how, what the weather, what their chances for arriving, but still alive. Then I squeeze his shoulder wanting to keep him, wanting to save at least that for the days to come without him, my friend, another one, one less, yet one more argument against my own inertia. And Mario stands up, embraces me and says

- “It’s do or die!”

And I can’t take any more of this shit.

When night falls the headless Ursa Minor etched by our bodies dissolves. The bullet has been put away, the gun rests wrapped in dirty rags at the bottom of a drawer. Aramis is weeping loudly. At times, his body rattles. I choke down all the pain flooding my mind and manage to clear my eyes only to watch Mario walk away, join the group on the raft, plunge into the immense question of the night...

...

 

 

 

Havana, October 1998

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Colonel’s Allegro

 

 

 

published by  La Habana Elegante electronic magazine

Translated by Cristina de la Torre

 

 

David has a colonel for a neighbor, a very nice man. Every morning the colonel greets him as he leaves for work in his spotless uniform and sunglasses; always admiring the shine of his own shoes that move with surprising ease despite his age. It is unusual to see a person nearing sixty come down the stairs so nimbly. Even more unusual is to hear him say “Buenos días” without so much as looking at the other. That is one of the colonel’s unusual habits, David has noticed, but so what, he still greets him faithfully as he leaves for work just when David is returning from his nightly jaunts. David answers with a somewhat tentative “Buenos días” uttered sideways so as to reach its mark on the rebound, in the hope that his alcoholic breath will cling to the walls and avoid the range of the colonel’s nose above his thick mustache and under his dark glasses. It never quite works, and when their paths cross, as David is on the way up and the colonel’s going down to his car where the chauffeur is waiting (or whatever the military term is for the person who drives the colonel’s car, who is the same person who lugs the shopping bags of the colonel’s wife, who comes in and out carrying either empty or full gasoline cans, bottles of rum and cases of beer, who shines the car, and stops by with his wife occasionally to pay a social call on Mr. & Mrs. Colonel), David has noticed that the colonel turns his torso ever so slightly to continue looking him up and down so accusingly that he feels a weight on his back that makes it hard for him to climb the steps. But if the colonel is thinking something horrible, it must not be that horrible because he keeps it to himself. Or he used to.

 

A few days ago the nice colonel neighbor crossed paths with David, like most mornings, on the stairs. David and Tom. David greeted him with the almost usual “Buenos días,” only this time it was projected towards the ceiling to avoid seeing himself reflected on the colonel’s dark glasses. And the colonel started to reciprocate with his almost usual greeting with his eyes fixed, as usual, on the shine of his own shoes. The routine was unfolding in its usual awkward way when, suddenly, everything froze and not just due to silence. It was Tom, who uttered a “Hello” which changed the peaceful course of the encounter, sustained with difficulty until then, so that in one second or perhaps even less, the sparkle of the colonel’s dark glasses abandoned the usual shine of the colonel’s shoes, climbed diagonally up the wall and came to a standstill on the limpid eyes and the unmistakably American face of the youth. Tom’s presence loomed. And never before had the silence of a withheld greeting sounded so much like the cannon shots that always signal the opening of hostilities in war. David’s nice colonel neighbor halted the passage of time, the motion of air and sound in one single look and, from that moment on, nothing would ever be the same, not even the sober greetings exchanged each morning as they met on the stairs when the colonel left for his duties and David returned from his nightly forays. What was it that altered the precarious balance, the subdued tension, the violence so far suppressed thanks to the wholesome habit of the reticent greeting? It was Tom’s American accent. That “Hello” that should never have been uttered. The enemy’s flagrant presence was seeping into zones already threatened by David’s existence; someone much too effeminate for the taste of the colonel’s other neighbors, much too cool, wild, and irresponsible, for the colonel’s own. But David was a homegrown product. How to put it? A sicko, a pervert, yes, but still someone perfectly controllable, limitable, repressible, disappearable even, in the closed circuit of the building, the neighborhood, the country, the nation. The homeland! But how to accept, admit, tolerate, apprehend, reduce, oppress, destroy, erase, an alien arrived precisely from there, from that region of the planet whose image had been, for the colonel, nothing less than the bull’s eye of the target on which all his regiment’s weapons had been trained, on which all the efforts of the men who obeyed the slightest sparkle of his dark glasses were focused? MEN, yes, straight, hard men, tempered by the ennobling endeavor of bearing arms in the service of their country… Men. Single-minded, inscrutable men, untarnished, imperturbable. Everything around David’s nice colonel neighbor had to be an extension of the untainted quality of his regiment; everything except for David, that inconsequential, insignificant pervert, yet nevertheless still tolerable as a neighbor. How long had his licentious ways been allowed, his coming home to sleep off the damage done by his shameless orgies just at the moment when the colonel, and all the other upright neighbors, were leaving for work? Much too long. And the proof was right there. In that muscled, rosy cheeked, insolent, aggressively handsome boy whose apparition tore through the dark surface of the colonel’s glasses thanks to a strategy that he knew only too well: surprise. Just as it had been conceived in order to compensate for an enemy’s numerical superiority, used to wrench away the initiative and control him, the strategy of surprise played a role in this encounter. The colonel blinked under the dark cover of his impenetrable glasses; he stumbled slightly, briefly lost his balance and, for the first time ever, had to reach for the railing in order to turn his torso and admire that boy escaped from enemy lines, that flawless gringo, as flawless as the majority of his men who, when standing erect swelled their chests out, tightened their buttocks and, as a result, the bulge between their legs became more evident than ever. And, as the colonel reviewed his troops one by one, his face before each of theirs, his eyes, hidden behind the dark curtain of his glasses, would plunge straight down to those succulent bulges that now accompanied the gallant stance, the aggressive, charging stance of his soldiers, untainted, unpolluted, invincible, untouchable… Once David’s nice colonel neighbor reached the street and the curving stairs blocked the vision of the two gorgeous guys cheerfully climbing, he let out a sigh. The rays of the morning sun blinded him momentarily, intensifying the arousal that still unnerved him. Once again he breathed deeply regaining his composure, and headed for the car where the person who drives, carries things in and out, comes and goes, where that who-knows-what-he-is-called-in-military-speak person was waiting. The colonel settled stiffly into his seat and, staring straight ahead, gave orders to proceed to headquarters. While he went over in his mind the things on that day’s agenda, his imagination fluttered toward those bodies just admired on the stairs, and, like every morning, the colonel let his hand rest languidly on the inviting and well-padded bulge on the soldier’s crotch, the same one who drives, carries things in and out, comes and goes, and no-one-knows-what-to-call-him when things like these go on between David’s nice colonel neighbor and one of his own regiment’s unpolluted soldiers. Just then, David opened the door to his place and, softly pressing his hand on Tom’s hip, invited him in.

 

 

 

 

 

Havana, May 2000