Picked-Up Pieces (57 page)

Not that Pinget is old-fashioned; he has put himself to school with Robbe-Grillet and Beckett. The novel’s premise is a Beckettian stripped situation: an infinitely garrulous old château servant is being quizzed by an infinitely curious investigator. Both are nameless. Punctuation marks are abjured. A shadowy secretary is in the room, typing up all three hundred and ninety-nine pages of meandering testimony. The object of the investigation—the disappearance of the château secretary—is never clarified. The dialogue, initially full to bursting of visual measurement and
quidditas
, ebbs into a fatigued exchange, laconic and baffled. All this circumstantiality protests against circumstantiality, both as an adjunct of the novel and as the illusory stuff of life: “Another twenty rooms and then there’ll still be more and you’ll tell me to describe them, and more and more kitchens servants tell-tale tittle-tattle secrets of the bedchamber families mile upon mile of streets and stairs and lumber-rooms and junk-shops of antique-dealers grocers butchers of skimping and scraping everywhere in our heads how dreary it all is always starting all over again why.” The investigator is in a sense the all too ideal reader, asking again and again, “Go on,” begging, “Describe the longest route.” And the answerer, with his omnivorous memory and solipsistic deafness—the questions put to him must be written on slips of paper—is the aboriginal storyteller, whose enterprise is essentially one of understanding:

Pinget’s very avant-garde novel of the absurd incorporates the full French novelistic tradition. Like Proust, he has a curé who dabbles in the etymology of place names; like Balzac, he avidly traces the fortunes of little provincial shops through all the ups and downs that gossip
traces. The number of anecdotes, of miniature novels, caught in his nets of description cannot be counted; presumably some are expanded elsewhere in Pinget’s
oeuvre
. In this book, the curve of interest moves through the château itself (the two “gentlemen” who own it, their wealth, their homosexuality, their fussiness, their decadence, all implied by lengthy humorous descriptions of their house-furnishings), and then out into the social and geographical composition of the region as a whole (“The main resources of the district are in the soil and always will be”), and finally into the character and philosophy of the narrator himself. He has lost a wife and child; he is immensely lonely; he believes in diabolism and locates direct access to Hell in a quarry region called Vaguemort. Heaven’s counterpart appears with the revelation that in the medieval section of the château lives a third employer, Monsieur Pierre—“a few intimate friends used to call them the Holy Trinity but to be frank the only holy man is Monsieur Pierre”—who is a hermit and an astronomer. So by the novel’s end this district, into which enough historical allusion has been insinuated to render it an analogue of France, serves as a model of the world, with all human possibilities somewhere touched upon. Grove Press will, I hope, publish more of Pinget’s work, which seems not only highly accomplished but thoroughly masculine, quite without the eunuchoid air of distress with which too much modern fiction confronts its bride the world.

All praise conceded, it remains to confess that none of these three books was hard to put down and that it is hard to imagine very many Americans, except for reviewers and students of the “art of the novel,” reading them. All partake of that resistant modern motionlessness, so different from the lightning speed of Biblical chronicle or the tidal roll of Homeric narrative or the bustling forward march of the 19th-century novel—a motionlessness present in the circular structures of
Finnegans Wake
and
Remembrance of Things Past
, in the unconquerable distances of Kafka and the unconscionable length of Bloom’s day, in the final “Let’s go” of
Waiting for Godot
, followed by the stage direction “(
They do not move
).” The avant-garde novel itself has been saying “Let’s go” for forty years, and has not outdistanced Joyce or left Kafka behind. There is an enfeebling doubt as to
ends:
Do stories end? Do novels have an end, a purpose? To entertain? To educate? To exasperate? To dehumanize literary idiom? To facilitate the author’s onanism? The characteristic movement
of modern narrative is of prolongation, of postponement. Novels end but do not
have
an end.

Thus
The Inquisitory
concludes. It is an honest, inconclusive conclusion. In an age of waiting (of, Christian eschatology would have it, a between-times), we find our loss of teleological sense reflected in books whose intricate energy, like that of barbarian designs, is essentially static.

T
HREE
T
RAPPED
T
IGERS
, by G. Cabrera Infante, translated from the Spanish by Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine. 487 pp. Harper & Row, 1971.

Some things are more lost in translation than others; jokes and Racine, for instance, lose more than newspapers and de Maupassant. In its original Spanish,
Tres Tristes Tigres
, by G. Cabrera Infante, won the Biblioteca Breve and contended for the Formentor Prize; in French, it won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. In English, however, as
Three Trapped Tigers
, the novel comes over as a tedious, verbose, jejune, self-delighting mess, and unless the publisher decides to distribute good-sportsmanship awards to those few readers who persevere to the end it should generate no prizes. One can deduce that the life of
Three Trapped
(though “sad” is what they originally were)
Tigers
lay in its skin of Spanish, and that a creature so ectomorphic, so narrowly vital, was bound to perish away from the nurture of its native climate. Or one might, less kindly, conclude that the novel was derivative, that its excitement derived from the translation of the methods of
Ulysses
into Cuban idiom, and that, restored to Joyce’s mother tongue, it shows up as a tired copy.

Three Trapped Tigers
offers to do for the Havana of 1958 what
Ulysses
did for the Dublin of 1904: wandering itineraries are mapped street by street, minor characters reappear in a studied interweave, a variety of voices abruptly soliloquize, a kind of “Oxen of the Sun” procession of literary parodies is worked on the theme of Trotsky’s assassination, an
endless “Nighttown” drunkenness episode picks up the deliberate hungover banality of the Eumaeus sequence, and a female interior monologue closes the book. Unlike Joyce, however, Cabrera Infante packs most of his pyrotechnics and montage into the novel’s first half and winds down into a more natural narrative tone. And, instead of attentive, soft-spoken, gradually solidifying Bloom,
Three Trapped Tigers
has for its hero an insubstantial, logomaniacal trio of would-be writers—Arsenio Cué, Bustrófedon (who is dead), and the principal narrator, Silvestre. As these three compile reams of undergraduate gags (“
Crime and Puns
, by Bustrófedor Dostowhiskey,” “
Under the Lorry
, by Malcolm Volcano,” “
In Caldo Brodo
, by Truman Capone,” “
The Company She Peeps
, by Merrimac Arty,” etc., etc.) and tootle around Havana in a convertible (Bustrófedon is there in spirit, like the Paraclete, or—as Infante might say—Parakeats), they make little significant contact with the nonverbal world around them. Havana of this era was notoriously full of prostitution and pickups, but the only instance of achieved intercourse throughout four hundred and eighty-seven pages occurs in some
tableaux vivants
staged for tourists. There is a good deal of partial undressing, and the work of one long night of seduction does jimmy a girl loose from her underpants, “
but
, BUT, where old Hitch would have cut to insert and intercut of fireworks, I’ll give it to you straight—I didn’t get any further than that.” Later, Silvestre and Cué pick up two street flowers and proceed to bore them silly with puns and nonsense. One of the girls at last cries out, “Youse weird. You say real strange things. Both of you say the same strange things. Youse like twins, youse somethin’ else. Whew! And you talk and talk and talk. Whaddya talk so much for?” To which the reader says, “Amen,” and to which the author says, “Could she be a literary critic in disguise?”

A fearful air of congestion, of unconsummation, hangs over this book. Which may be deliberate: Batista’s Havana is about to go under to revolution. Cabrera Infante, we are told by the dust jacket, served Castro’s government as head of the Council of Culture, as a director of the Film Institute, as editor of a weekly magazine called
Lunes de Revolución
, and as a staff member of the Cuban Embassy in Brussels; in 1965, after returning to Havana, he “decided to leave Cuba,” and he now lives in London. So his involvement was not trivial, and his viewpoint cannot be simple. Yet the coming storm impinges on the action of
Three Trapped Tigers
only once, when Cué drunkenly announces his intention to “join
Fffidel.” Silvestre argues that he is crazy, it’s like joining the Foreign Legion. “Nashional,” Cué answers. “The National Leshion.” The topic is then dropped, and the two spend another hundred pages driving and drinking and punning and remembering the palindromes of Bustrófedon. An American reader, especially now that Cuba is remoter than China, longs for a more anatomical portrait of this Havana that has vanished. In the first pages, such a portrait—a cross-section of corrupted and dissatisfied lives—seems to be promised. A sharp imitation of a night-club m.c.’s bilingual prattle lifts the curtain on some monologues by a kept woman, a movie-struck child, an underpaid printer. We read a letter written back to her village by a recent emigrant to the city; we eavesdrop on a psychiatric session that reappears throughout the book. Silvestre introduces himself:

O.K., fine; rather lengthily said, but we obediently settle down for a tour of tropical night life. We meet a bongo drummer; we don’t quite catch his name, but it doesn’t matter, since he talks in Silvestre’s voice, though he seems to be hung up on a little gringo chick called Vivian Smith-Corona, whereas Silvestre is hung up on Cuba Venegas, a local singer who looks better than she sings. We go back to Silvestre, who is trying to tell us about a great Negro singer, La Estrella, but the story keeps unravelling on him—maybe because this is “an island of double and triple entendres told by a drunk idiot signifying everything.” Our eyes begin to sting in the smoke and stale air. Now an American tourist, a writer called Campbell, writes a funny story about a walking stick he
bought fresh off the ferry from Miami, and about taking another off an outraged native because he thinks it’s his, and then his wife produces
her
version of what happened, and he rewrites it (or perhaps this is meant to be a translation by somebody called Rine), and the wife does a second version, and then we get pages of the anti-works of the late Bustrófedon, and the above-mentioned parodies of Cuban authors on Trotsky’s assassination, which might be the best part of the book if you’re Cuban (it seems funny even in English), but by now Arsenio Cué is revving up his convertible, and we blearily realize that, whatever happened in Havana in 1958, this book isn’t going to tell us. “Mare Metaphor is loosed upon the world. Rhetoric of the nation?” Cabrera Infante asks, as if hopeful that his stream of literary consciousness will somehow apply to Cuba. He applies it, but it doesn’t stick. Though his translators work furiously to shore up the slippage, throwing in anachronisms like space-shot terminology, the slang word “gig,” and “Agnewsticism,” they can’t keep the gobbets of “Esperanglish” and the limp avant gardisms and the liquorish 4 a.m. foolery from pulling loose from any reality we care to recognize or consent to care about.

The eclectic culture of Americanized Havana, Cabrera Infante seems to be saying, deserves an eclectic novel as its nostalgic monument. But eclecticism is itself a borrowed method by now.
Ulysses
, static and claustrophobic enough, is energized throughout by the tactful, evocative prose of a master short-story writer, and it draws for its allusions upon the immense perspective of European culture since Homer. Cabrera Infante writes run-on, like Faulkner but without Faulkner’s intensity of self-hypnosis, and his perspective extends little farther than the mass culture of the giant nation to the north; the horizon of felt history for him appears to be Trotsky’s murder in 1940. The book crucially lacks tact—the tension and economy that enforce themselves when method and material are in close touch. A mass of memories and a heap of verbal invention have been hopefully tossed toward one another, but confusion isn’t fusion.

That Latin America can produce adventurously original novels has been shown many times over, from Machado de Assiz on. A recent striking instance, and an instructive contrast to
Three Trapped Tigers
, is Gabriel García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. Here an array of fantastic premises (substantial ghosts, everyday miracles, magic that
works, a village so isolated only gypsies can find it, a man tattooed on every inch of his skin, a man who fathers seventeen sons by seventeen women, a family of repeating names and insatiable incest) is breezily set forth by topic sentences that seem jokes, and then maintained with an iron consistency and kept rolling until the amusing becomes the magnificent—a magnificent symbolic contraption expressing a family’s fate, a continent’s experience, and Time’s impenetration of humanity. The novel’s Olympian ease and its catholic acceptance of horror and splendor as they arise in this our “paradise of misery” could not have been achieved in the United States, and no European novel would contain its joyous emptiness, its awed memory of a world “so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” The book even has a texture all its own: a dense translucence, a flow of long paragraphs that yet do not linger, that feel laconic, like stories the teller and listener already obscurely share and that are being not so much invented as called from the shadows. Such a novel, unlike Infante’s sophomoric farrago, has learned from other novels how to become itself.