CABRERA INFANTE, G(uillermo)

Pseudonyms: G. Cain; Guillermo Cain. Nationality: Cuban (im-migrated to London, England 1966; naturalized British citizen). Born: Gibara, Cuba, 22 April 1929. Education: University of Havana, Cuba, graduated 1956. Family: 1) Married Marta Calvo in 1953 (divorced 1961), two children; 2) Miriam Gomez in 1961. Career: Writer; professor of English literature, School of Journalism, Havana, Cuba, 1960-61; cultural attache, government of Cuba, Cuban embassy, Brussels, Belgium, 1962-64; charge d'af-fairs, 1964-65; scriptwriter, Twentieth-Century Fox and Cupid Productions, 1967-72; visiting professor, University of Virginia, 1982. Lives in London. Awards: Biblioteca Breve Prize, 1964; Guggenheim fellowship for creative writing, 1970; Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, 1971. Member: Writers Guild of Great Britain.

Publications

Short Stories

Así en la paz como en la guerra: Cuentos [In Peace as in War:Stories]. 1960; as Writes of Passage, 1993.

Delito por bailar el chachachá. 1995.

Novels

Vista del amanacer en el trópico. 1965; as View of Dawn in the Tropics, 1978.

Tres tristes tigres [Three Trapped Tigers]. 1967; translation by Donald Gardner, Levine and the author, 1971.

La Habana para un Infante difunto. 1979; translated by Levine and the author as Infante's Inferno, 1992, translated by Kenneth Hall with the author, 1994.

Play

Screenplays:

Wonderwall, 1968; Vanishing Point, 1970.

Other

Un oficio del sigtlo veinte [A Twentieth-Century Job]. 1963.

O. 1975.

Exorcismos del esti(l)o [Summer Exorcisms and Exorcising Style]. 1976.

Arcadia todas las noches [Arcadia Every Night]. 1978.

Holy Smoke (English text). 1985.

Editor, Mensajes de libertad: La Espana rebelde—Ensayos selectos. 1961.

Translator, Dublineses, by James Joyce. 1972.

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Critical Studies:

Modern Latin American Literature by David Patrick Gallagher, 1973; Seven Voices by Rita Guibert, 1973; Major Cuban Novelists: Innovation and Tradition by Raymond D. Souza, 1976; Narrative Irony in the Contemporary Spanish-American Novel by Jonathan Tittler, 1984; Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Two Islands, Many Worlds by Raymond D. Souza, 1996.

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As always with Guillermo Cabrera Infante, genre creates a quandary. Only his earliest work, the severely etched, politically resonant tales of Havana under Fulgencio Batista collected in Así en la paz como en la guerra (1960), fits easily into the category of short stories. Two later volumes might be called collections of short stories, although the designation is problematic. Vista del amanecer en el trópico, translated as View of Dawn in the Tropics (1974), traces Cuba's history through a series of grim and sober vignettes, most no more than a page long and some even shorter. The vignettes capture characters, events, and deaths, each sharply individuated and most unconnected. The vignettes can be read singly and out of order, but they are composed as a sequence. The volume is shaped to return on itself, ending as it begins with "the long green island" out of history. The later Delito por bailar el chachachá (1995) seems to promise three stories with three different titles. Yet the first two tell the same story, with variations in detail and denouement, and the third begins in the same place but goes elsewhere. This shared, minimalist design Cabrera Infante describes as an ostinato, a repetitive, figured ground that continues under a wandering melody. Each story can be read separately, but they are designed to be read together.

There are other works—fables and lists, "exorcisms" and parodies—that are short but not quite stories, that is, works with characters, a conflict, and a resolution. In sum, Cabrera Infante's short stories represent an exacerbated version of the generic difficulties presented by his novels. Genre may also change in translation. When the novel La Habana para un Infante difunto became Infante's Inferno, one chapter was omitted because another, "The Amazon," had doubled in length during translation. The omitted chapter appeared in English as the short story "After the Fuck" ("Salmagundi"; 1989). Does this imply that Infante's Inferno should be regarded as a collection of short stories, independent episodes linked like the vignettes of View of Dawn in the Tropics by a single common element? Biography or history, sex or violence, love or death—choosing one set of themes produces Infante's Inferno, the other View of Dawn in the Tropics.

So too, Cabrera Infante's collections of film criticism might be read as a series of stories. Supplied by the plots of the films, the stories are then strung together by commentary and biography, creating yet another story supplied by the changing relationship between the author and the text. Or does such a complicated nesting of stories within a larger story create a novel? Translation may even create a possible protagonist. Does the title A Twentieth-Century Job refer to a job, as it does in the Spanish title, Un oficio del siglo veinte, or to a person, Job, the biblical character?

The unthinkable possibility that a book of film criticism might be called a work of fiction is ample evidence that Cabrera Infante does not write short stories or anything else in conventional shapes or arrangements. Happily, however, one of the short stories from Así en la paz como en la guerra can be taken to epitomize the author's practices as novelist, fabulist, critic, and translator. Translated by the author himself into English, "Un nido de gorriones en el toldo" (A Nest of Sparrows in the Awning) became the brilliantly multilingual, multicultural "Nest, Door, Neighbors."

In translation this story of broken domesticity turns into a witty meditation on language, translation, sex, marriage, memory, architecture, and Havana, a perfect miniature of the dominant themes of Cabrera Infante's oeuvre. The plot is simple. The protagonist's wife notices that a pair of sparrows have built a nest in the awning of the old American couple with whom they share a balcony. Although the Americans never use their awning, the woman is concerned that they may open it and destroy the nest, and so she urges her husband to tell them about it. When he finally does so, he finds at home not the old couple but an American girl being sent home the next day. He shows her the nest, they chat, they flirt, they kiss, and she cuts his lip with her braces. When he feels for the blood, she laughs, cries, and throws him out the door. A few days later the awning is opened by one of the old couple, and the sparrows' eggs break on the balcony. The wife is not happy. A chaste and somber story of betrayal and psychosexual misadventure, the story opens up in translation into wild confusions that suggest the intimate linkage between language and sexual arousal, language and culture, language and deception, language and aggression, and language and memory.

The setting is Havana in 1957, but the story takes place in a building and neighborhood destroyed in 1965. All of the nests are gone. The protagonist is invited by his wife to save the birds as he reads a book on translation for an essay on "living dead languages," languages alive somewhere but dead here and now, like an exile's Cuban. The translator, he reads, must decide many different issues; sometimes he may have to begin even with the title, UN NIDO DE GORRIONES EN EL TOLDO. The Spanish words march in large capitals across the English page.

Although the text is translated, it remains bilingual. The wife speaks Spanish, but sometimes her Spanish is translated into English and sometimes it stays in Spanish. The hero speaks English, but in conversation with the American girl it sounds like Spanish. "I must live," he proclaims when he is trying to say politely only that he has to go now. When the girl says "Silvertray" for his name Silvestre, English readers learn that the second s is lisped or swallowed and that they cannot say it right either. In the same conversation words move from foreplay to orgasm. As he pronounces his name as Silvestre, she demands that he do it again and again, culminating in an explosive "Sayitsayit say it." The story ends with the birds frantic, the wife enraged, the protagonist pensive and silent. "Many years and a few translations later," he wonders what the girl said about "our finally common awning." In an insignificant episode Cabrera Infante unfolds worlds of linguistic and temporal division, sexual conflict, and cultural loss.

If "Nest, Door, Neighbors" epitomizes Cabrera Infante's work in English, the chaster Delito por bailar el chachachá illuminates his practices in Spanish. The book consists of three stories, "En el gran ecbó," "Una mujer que se ahoga," and "Delito por bailar el chachachá." A more delicate, refined line, a purer, cleaner style, and a defter touch with characterization replace, in the first two stories, or supplement, in the third, the exuberant, dazzling, even blinding linguistic play characteristic of the translated works. The first two stories work from small differences to large. In Havana sometime in the 1950s, a man and a woman in an empty restaurant order and eat and discuss their affair by indirection. In the first story they then go to an African rite of the Santeria cult, the gran ecbó of the title. There the woman is warned to leave the man. In the second story the woman leaves the man at the restaurant, the affair finished for the moment. Both stories are told in the third person and from the point of view of the man watching the woman.

The third story begins in the restaurant with the couple, but with " Me miró " ([she] looked at me) the story shifts to the first person. The relationship also changes, for the woman leaves for the theater, and he waits for her to return. He meditates, he puns, he contemplates marriage, and he looks at other women. He resists political pressure from passing revolutionaries as politics twines around a history of Cuban music and dance, and the fiction ends with a loss yet to come and a renewed vision of love. Because Spanish allows Cabrera Infante to swallow the pronoun in the story's first sentence, so the protagonist, it develops, is regarded and watched by others, apart from the woman, who care less for his affections than his politics. These people are invisible in the first sentence, but from the previous stories we expect the woman. When they emerge later in the story, they propose the changes of allegiance, the shifts of desire, and the artistic choices to be made that will obliterate the world about which the stories were written.

In the epilogue Cabrera Infante explains his structure as modulations inspired by Cuban music: Santería rhythms in the first, a bolero in the second, and the inimitable cha-cha in the third. The allusive texture of the fiction increases from text to text as the third story puns and plays, jokes and twists. Stylistically, the stories reproduce Cabrera Infante's progress as a writer from Así en la paz como en la guerra to Three Trapped Tigers (Tres Tristes Tigres) and Infante's Inferno. They enact his transformation from a writer of representational, realistic fiction to an experimental celebrant of Havana's nights and memory and love.

The story of Cabrera Infante as a short story writer is, then, a story of form in the twentieth century and a story of linguistic travel. It is a story of choices between art and politics and between love and language, and it is finally a story of memory and possession.

—Regina Janes