VIRGILIO PIÑERA

Virgilio Piñera, in spite of his extensive published work and all his renown, fell under the category of collar gay; in other words, he had to pay a high price for being homosexual. He was picked up at the beginning of the Revolution and imprisoned at El Morro. He was released thanks to the intervention of highly influential people (among whom, I believe, was Carlos Franqui). After that, he was always treated with suspicion and constantly censored and persecuted. As a collar gay he was a really genuine person and one willing to pay the price of being genuine.

I would visit Virgilio Piñera at his home at seven in the morning. He was a man who worked incessantly. He would get up at six, make coffee, and then we would work on my novel El mundo alucinante. We would sit facing each other. The first thing he said was, “Don’t think I am doing this because of some sexual interest; I do it for reasons of intellectual honesty. You have written a good novel, but there are some things that need fixing.” Virgilio, sitting there in front of me, would read from a copy of the novel, and where he thought a comma should be added or a word changed, he would tell me. I will be forever grateful to Virgilio for that lesson; more than a lesson in writing, it was a lesson in editing. This was really important for a wildly impulsive writer such as I have been, lacking a good college background. He was my college professor as well as my friend.

Virgilio wrote nonstop, although he did not seem to take literature very seriously. He hated to have his work praised; he also despised high rhetoric. He detested Alejo Carpentier with a passion. He was a homosexual, an atheist, and an anticommunist. He had dared, at the time of the Republic, to praise the complete poetry of Emilio Ballagas, which was basically homosexual. Virgilio had dared to refute Cintio Vitier’s foreword when Vitier tried to cover that profoundly sensual and erotic poetry under a cloak of religion. Virgilio expressed it clearly. Vitier never forgave Virgilio for his daring approach.

Around 1957 Virgilio parted from the literary magazine Orígenes and, together with José Rodríguez Feo, started another one, almost entirely oriented to homosexuals and much more irreverent, right under the eyes of Batista’s reactionary and bourgeois dictatorship. The first thing Virgilio did in the new magazine, Ciclón, was to publish The Hundred and Twenty Journeys from Sodom and Gomorrah by the Marquis de Sade.

From the start of the Revolution, Virgilio was already marked for his homosexuality and his anticommunist reputation. He wrote and published in Ciclón “El muñeco” [The Puppet], a lucid anticommunist story of dire foreboding. This story was systematically deleted by the Fidel Castro government from all anthologies and collections of stories by Virgilio Piñera.

Virgilio was also ugly, gaunt and ungainly, unromantic. He did not take part in typical literary hypocrisies of the Vitier kind, where reality is always shrouded by a sort of violet cloud. Virgilio saw the Island with terrible, desolate clarity; his poem “La Isla en peso” [The Island Up in the Air] is one of the masterpieces of Cuban literature.

During the time of the Republic and, according to Virgilio, as a result of poverty and the cultural restlessness in the country, he emigrated to Argentina, where he lived for more than ten years, working at minor bureaucratic jobs, as sort of a Kafka of underdevelopment. There he met the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. Both emigrés, they became friends and buddies in cruising and erotic adventures. Gombrowicz, as Virgilio used to say, was very handsome then; to survive he became a male prostitute at the Buenos Aires baths, letting himself be fucked for a few coins. According to Virgilio, on one occasion his friend met an Argentine with a huge penis; the man had already paid and insisted on fucking him and, of course, he did. But, as Virgilio told it, the man ruptured Gombrowicz’s anus to such an extent that he came home all bloody. Virgilio filled the bathtub with hot water, took the clothes off his friend, and got him into the tub to ease his pain. Virgilio said Gombrowicz spent two days in the tub until his wounds started healing.

I think this friendship influenced Virgilio considerably, making him more daring, more irreverent. Or perhaps they influenced each other. Their lives were similar, uprooted and grim; they did not believe in institutionalized culture, or in taking culture too seriously, in contrast to Jorge Luis Borges who, even then, was already the most important Argentine writer. They made fun of Borges, perhaps a little cruelly, but they had their reasons. When Gombrowicz finally left Argentina to settle in Europe, someone asked him what advice he would give to the Argentines. He answered, “Kill Borges.” It was, of course, a sarcastic reply; when Borges died, Argentina stopped existing. Gombrowicz’s reply was his revenge for all he had suffered in Argentina.

According to Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Virgilio was unlucky in love. I do not happen to think so. Virgilio had a preference for black men, and I am witness to the fact that he had opportunities to enjoy relations with formidable blacks. One day a black man with a cart full of lemons walked by, offering them for sale even though such street vendors and their cries were already illegal. Virgilio brought him up to his apartment, bought all the lemons, and then they made love. I think that black man kept coming back with the pretext of bringing more lemons, and Virgilio always took him to his room.

Another black man with whom Virgilio had a pretty deep sexual relationship was a cook who, according to Virgilio, had a huge penis. Virgilio enjoyed being fucked by him even while the cook kept moving pots and pans around and did not stop cooking. Virgilio was really a fragile gay, who could be impaled and held up by that powerful Negro’s penis.

Even before the Revolution, Virgilio’s sex life in Cuba had been intense. He had a house in Guanabo Beach and frequented the male brothel that José Rodríguez Feo operated in the town. It was a brothel where strong men worked as bartenders and, on the side, engaged in such other activities as clients might request. Tomasito La Goyesca also worked there.

Rodríguez Feo belonged to a wealthy family that had left for the United States after the Revolution took over. He gave his properties up to the Revolution and stayed, perhaps feeling that he would be regarded as an important person. In fact, he ended up becoming an informer for State Security, a culture policeman, and had a small apartment next to Virgilio’s. Rodríguez Feo, mediocre and degraded, had refused to talk to him when Virgilio lost favor with the regime, and did not even attend his funeral.

Rodríguez Feo and Virgilio shared the same balcony to the street. The story goes that Rodríguez Feo once had several friends over and Virgilio went to the balcony to put something out to dry. When someone asked, “Is that Virgilio Piñera?” Rodríguez Feo replied, “No, that was Virgilio Piñera.” That is why he did not attend the funeral; once Piñera lost favor with the Castro regime, he was dead for Rodríguez Feo.

These things happen because under a sinister political system a lot of people turn sinister as well. Not many can escape that wild, all-embracing evil which destroys those who are not part of it. Before the Revolution, Rodríguez Feo was a sort of Maecenas; he financed Piñera’s Cuentos fríos [Cold Tales]; he bankrolled Orígenes magazine, and later Ciclón. Of course, there were personal interests and small vanities on his part, but there was also generosity. Other Cuban millionaires never paid for the publication of a magazine or helped writers.