INTRODUCTION
The End
I thought I was going to die in the winter of 1987. For months on end I had been having terrible fevers. I finally went to a doctor and he told me I had AIDS. Feeling worse every day, I bought a plane ticket [from New York] to Miami and decided to die close to the sea. Not exactly in Miami but at the beach. However, due to some diabolic bureaucracy, everything we desire seems to be slow in coming, even death.
I really cannot say that I want to die; yet I believe that when the alternative is suffering and pain without hope, death is a thousand times better. Besides, some months ago when I entered a public rest room I became painfully aware that my presence failed to arouse the old expectant feeling of complicity. Nobody paid any attention to me, and the erotic games going on proceeded undisturbed. I no longer existed. I was not young anymore. Right then and there I thought that the best thing for me was to die. I have always considered it despicable to grovel for your life as if life were a favor. If you cannot live the way you want, there is no point in living. In Cuba I endured a thousand adversities because the hope of escaping and the possibility of saving my manuscripts gave me strength. At this point, the only escape for me was death. I had been able to correct most of the manuscripts smuggled out of Cuba, and they either were in friendly hands or had been published. During six years of exile I had also written and published other works: a book of essays on what was really happening in Cuba, “A Need for Freedom”*; five plays under the title “Persecution”; “A Trip to Havana” [three long stories] and I had just finished [a New York City novel,] The Doorman, although while writing it I was already beginning to feel ill. My main regret, however, was to die without having been able to finish my “pentagonía,” a cycle of five novels of which I had already published Singing from the Well, The Palace of the White Skunks, and Farewell to the Sea. I was also sorry about leaving some of my friends, such as Lázaro, Jorge, and Margarita. I felt sorry for the pain that my death would cause them, and my mother too. But death was knocking at my door and the only thing I could do was face it.
When my friend Lázaro found out how sick I was, he flew to Miami to bring me back, and delivered me unconscious to New York Hospital. Getting me admitted, as he told me later, was an ordeal because I had no medical insurance. My pockets were empty except for a copy of my will, which I had just sent to Jorge and Margarita in Paris. I was practically dying, but hospitals refused to admit me because I did not have the means to pay. Fortunately, there was a French doctor at the hospital who was acquainted with Jorge and Margarita, and he helped to get me in. In any event, another physician, Dr. Gilman, announced to me that I had only a ten percent chance of surviving.
In the emergency room all the patients were in the throes of death. I had tubes coming in and out everywhere—my nose, my mouth, my arms. I looked more like a being from another planet than a patient. I will spare the reader all my vicissitudes at the hospital. The important fact is that I managed not to die that time as expected. The same French physician, Dr. Olivier Ameisen (also an excellent composer), suggested that I write the words for some songs and he would set them to music. With all those tubes and a mechanical respirator I managed, as best I could, to scribble two songs. Once in a while Olivier would come to the intensive care unit, where all of us were dying, and he would sing the songs that I had written, for which he had composed the music. He accompanied himself with an electronic synthesizer, a device that imitates any instrument and produces all kinds of notes. The sounds of the synthesizer and Olivier’s voice filled the room. I thought he was more talented as a musician than as a doctor. I, of course, could not speak, having in my mouth a tube that went down to my lungs; in fact, I was alive only because that machine was breathing for me. But, with some effort, I had been able to jot down a few words for Olivier’s compositions. I really liked the songs. One was called “Una flor en la memoria” [A Flower to Remember], and the other one, “Himno.”
Lázaro came often. He would always bring with him an anthology of poetry, open it at random, and read to me. If I did not like the poem, I would move one of the tubes stuck in my body and he would change to a different poem. Jorge Camacho called me from Paris every week. The Doorman was then being translated into French and Jorge would ask my advice on this word and the other. At first I could only babble a reply. Then I improved a little and was transferred to a private room. Although I could not yet move, I was lucky to be in a room and have some peace. By that time the tube had been removed and I could speak. That is how the French translation of The Doorman was completed.
Three and a half months later, when I left the hospital, I could hardly walk. Lázaro helped me up the stairs to my apartment, which unfortunately is a sixth-floor walk-up, and it took a lot of effort. Lázaro left utterly dejected. Once at home, I started to dust here and there as best I could. On the night table I unexpectedly came upon an envelope that contained Troquemichel, a rat poison. That made me very angry, because obviously someone had left the poison there for me to take. Right then I decided that my suicide, which I had secretly planned, had to be postponed for the time being; I was not going to play into the hands of whoever had left that envelope in my room.
The pain was awful and the tiredness overwhelming. After a short while René Cifuentes arrived and helped me clean the apartment and get something to eat. Then I was alone. I did not have the strength to sit at my typewriter, so I started dictating the story of my life into a tape recorder. I would speak for a while, take a rest, and then continue. I had already started my autobiography in Cuba, which I had titled Before Night Falls. Being a fugitive living in the woods at the time, I had to write before it got dark. Now darkness was approaching again, only more insidiously. It was the dark night of death. I really had to finish my memoirs before nightfall. I took it as a challenge. And so I continued working on them. After filling a cassette, I would give it to a friend, Antonio Valle, for typing.
I recorded more than twenty cassettes, and night still had not fallen upon me.
In the spring of 1988 The Doorman was published in France. It was both a critical and a commercial success, and was chosen as one of three finalists for the International Medici Prize. The publisher sent me a plane ticket when I was invited to take part in Apostrophe, the highest-rated cultural program in France, telecast live throughout Europe. I accepted the invitation without knowing whether I could get down the five flights of stairs and make it to the airport. Perhaps the enthusiasm of my friends Jorge and Margarita helped me. When I arrived in Paris and showed up at the studio, few people knew that as I was speaking on that program for an hour or more, I was really close to death. After several days in Paris I came back to continue working on my autobiography. At the same time, I was also reviewing Liliane Hasson’s excellent French translation of La loma del Angel [Angel Hill, published in English as Graveyard of the Angels], which I had written as a sarcastic but loving parody of Cirilo Villaverde’s novel Cecilia Valdés [a Cuban literary classic].
My physical deterioration did not ease up; on the contrary, it advanced relentlessly. I came down once more with a type of pneumonia called PCP, and the probabilities of my surviving this time were diminished with my weaker body. I got over the pneumonia, but while at the hospital I developed other terrible diseases—cancer (Kaposi’s sarcoma), phlebitis, and something horrible called toxoplasmosis, which is a kind of brain blood poisoning. The physician in charge of my case, Dr. Harman, seemed to be so grief-stricken that I sometimes tried to comfort him. However, I survived again, at least the worst attacks. I really had to finish my pentagonía. While in the hospital I had started working on the fourth, and for me essential, novel in the series, El color del verano [The Color of Summer]. I still had some IVs stuck in my hands, making writing somewhat difficult, but I was committed to continue. Instead of beginning with Chapter 1, I started with the chapter called “The Turtle-Buses.” I finished my autobiography after leaving the hospital (except for this introduction, of course), and continued working on “The Color of Summer.” At the same time, with the help of Roberto Valero and María Badías, I was also revising The Assault, the fifth novel of the pentagonía. The manuscript had been written in Cuba in great haste so it could be smuggled out of the country. Roberto and María had to transcribe it from my almost unintelligible scribblings into readable Spanish. The novel was finally typed and added to my other original manuscripts, in the Firestone Library at Princeton University, where all of them can be consulted.
Around that time my mother came from Cuba to visit, under one of those permits that Castro cunningly grants to old people in order to obtain U.S. dollars. I had no choice but to fly to Miami. My mother did not notice that I was dying, and I accompanied her while she did all of her shopping. I did not tell her about my illness, and I haven’t told her yet, even as I write this, in mid-1990. In Miami I caught pneumonia again and returned directly to the hospital in New York. After my release I decided to go to Spain, to Jorge and Margarita’s country house, where I could breathe clean air.
This was during the fall of 1988, and while we were at Jorge’s retreat, a farmhouse called Los Pajares, the idea came to us to issue an open letter to Fidel Castro requesting him to hold a plebiscite similar to the one held by Pinochet [in Chile]. Jorge asked me to draft the letter, and we worked on it together and both of us signed it. Even if we were unable to get additional signatures, we would send that letter to Castro on our own. As it happened, thousands of signatures poured in from all over, including those of eight Nobel laureates. We worked furiously in that farmhouse without running water or electricity. The newspapers published the letter, and it turned out to be a terrible blow for Castro; it proved that his dictatorship was worse than Pinochet’s, and that he would never allow free elections in Cuba. Those who still naively believe that a dialogue with Castro is possible should remember his reaction to that letter: first he called all who signed it agents of the CIA, and then, SOBs. Obviously, there is only one thing Castro can do now in order to remain in power: promote a dialogue and accommodation with the Cuban exile community in the United States. It is unbelievable that many exiles, even many of those who consider themselves intellectuals, are in favor of establishing this dialogue. Such a view completely ignores Castro’s personality and ambition. Of course, Castro himself has created pro-dialogue committees, and their members pass themselves off as presidents of human rights committees. On the one hand, there are agents of Castro, operating in and out of Cuba, busy on his behalf; on the other, ambitious people looking for any position of prominence; and there is yet another group, the scoundrels, who are into this business of dialogue strictly for personal gain.
One day, eventually, the people will overthrow Castro, and the least they will do is bring to justice those who collaborated with the tyrant with impunity. The ones who promote dialogue with Castro, well aware that Castro will never give up his power peacefully and that a truce and economic assistance are what he needs to strengthen his position, are as guilty as his own henchmen who torture and murder people. Those who are not living in Cuba are perhaps even more to blame, because inside Cuba you exist under absolute terror, but outside you can at least maintain a modicum of political integrity. All the pretentious people who dream of appearing on TV shaking Fidel Castro’s hand and of becoming politically relevant should have more realistic dreams: they should envision the rope from which they will swing in Havana’s Central Park, because the Cuban people, being generous, will hang them when the moment of truth comes. The only consolation left for them will be to have avoided bloodshed. Perhaps such an act of justice would be a good lesson for the future, because as a country Cuba has produced scoundrels, criminals, demagogues, and cowards in numbers disproportionate to its population.
Back to the plebiscite: A number of constitutionally elected presidents and many intellectuals of every political persuasion signed our petition.* This brought me additional problems of a practical nature; my small apartment was bustling with photographers and newspaper reporters. Speaking made me very uncomfortable because cancer was beginning to spread to my throat, but I even had to make an appearance on television. In the meantime, I had not been able to finish “The Color of Summer,” which covers a good part of my life and especially my youth, all of course in a very imaginative, almost defiant manner. It is also the story of an aging and crazed dictator, and it deals openly with homosexuality, a forbidden subject for most Cubans and for almost the whole human race. The story develops during a carnival, when the people manage to dislodge Cuba from its island platform and sail off as if they were on a ship. Once on the high seas, no one can agree on where to land, or on what kind of government should be instituted. A frightful, Cuban-style free-for-all ensues and in the midst of all the stomping, the Island, having no supporting platform, finally sinks into the sea.
While still writing this novel, over six hundred pages long, I was also going over my poetic trilogy Leprosorio [Leper Colony], which is now in print, and the excellent translation into English, by Dolores M. Koch, of The Doorman, to be published shortly.
Now I see that I am almost coming to the end of this introduction, which is also my end, and I have not said much about AIDS. I cannot. I do not know what it is. Nobody really knows. I have spoken with dozens of doctors and it is a puzzle to all of them. Illnesses related to AIDS are treated, but the actual nature of AIDS seems to be a state secret. I can attest, though, that as a disease it is different from all others. Diseases are natural phenomena, and everything natural is imperfect and can somehow be fought and overcome. But AIDS is a perfect illness because it is so alien to human nature and has as its function to destroy life in the most cruel and systematic way. Never before has such a formidable calamity affected mankind. Such diabolic perfection makes one ponder the possibility that human beings may have had a hand in its creation.
Moreover, all the rulers of the world, that reactionary class always in power, and the powerful within any system, must feel grateful to AIDS because a good part of the marginal population, whose only aspiration is to live and who therefore oppose all dogma and political hypocrisy, will be wiped out.
And yet it seems that the human race, the long-suffering human race, cannot be destroyed so easily. Despite all my suffering, I am grateful that I was allowed to witness the fall of one of the most sinister empires that ever existed, the Stalinist empire.
Besides, I am fortunate to leave this world without having to endure the insults of old age.
On my return home from the hospital, I dragged myself toward a photograph I have on my wall of Virgilio Piñera (who died in 1979), and I spoke to him in this way:
“Listen to what I have to tell you: I need three more years of life to finish my work, which is my vengeance against most of the human race.”
I think Virgilio’s face darkened, as if I had asked for something outrageous. It is almost three years now since that desperate request. My end is near. I expect to keep myself calm and collected until the very end.
Thank you, Virgilio.
REINALDO ARENAS
NEW YORK, AUGUST 1990