José Lezama Lima

 Paradiso seems to be an impossible novel but nonetheless it does exist.

Then he felt the syllables again, spoken next to him, but without clearly perceiving his shadowy bulk, his existence resting on an age-old boredom. And yet the phrase, walking like a centipede, tail like a serpent’s head, head with the indentations and outcroppings of a key, of a clue to a puzzle, would give him the labyrinths and bays of other years that Chronos would offer him. The key to his first-born and genetrix happiness, a shadow of depth to slip along his street.

This is exactly the language of the book: sentences are like centipedes and serpents, paragraphs are like impassable labyrinths and the text is full of rococo convolutions.

Time, a liquid substance, a mask, goes on covering the faces of the most remote ancestors, or, just the opposite, time drags along, almost lets itself be absorbed by earthly games, and enlarges a figure until it receives the texture of a Desmoulins or a Marat with clenched fists beating on the variants, the echoes, or the tedium of a Thermidor assembly. It seems that after those imprecations they will disappear under the sea, or at last freeze when they react like the drops of blood that live after them, giving a great slap to the star reflected in the bathroom mirror.

José Lezama Lima thoroughly ploughs all the cultural layers and the novel is fraught with references to antiquity, mythology, philosophy and art. He wields time and space freely so the narration frequently turns into the surreal mescaline-induced visions and the characters descend into the depths of their subconscious and unconscious planes as willingly as Ulysses descends into the underworld.

New York is a mixture of adolescent Moses, aged Cain, and Whitman’s phallic walking stick, producing sacred children. The saxophone, penetrating the Bible, tears it into innumerable scraps of paper that fall from the tops of the skyscrapers.

In the modern world, Paradise hardly can be distinguished from Hell…

Severo Sarduy

from Firefly

So no one will know i’m afraid 

Wait, who is that guy with the big head? Firefly? My god, I thought he’d be more developed, not so skinny. I had imagined him sort of like a tiny Greek athlete with clear glass eyes and gold nipples. I find him like this, all of a shocking sudden, squatting on his clay chamber pot, the pale gray one with two handles, atop a dark green cistern in the shade of a royal poinciana collapsing from the weight of the cockatoos. The first thing I see is his oversized head. And his eyes are so Chinese, he might as well not have any. A bald Chinaman. When he spreads his little arms, his chest is really scrawny: a spidery map of bones. Instead of getting off the pot, he holds tight to both handles and lets himself slide down the cistern, and the basin shatters into more bits of ceramic than you’d find in a Julian Schnabel self- portrait. The cheeks of Firefly’s bottom are two purple splotches when he dashes across the various blues of the floor tiles, screaming at the top of his lungs.The three aunts are in such a tizzy from his descent you would think they’d seen a polka-dotted bear cub riding a chariot down a steep brambly slope.The aunts: all in shining silk. There must be some baptism to attend, or a small parish celebration. They gleam so in the noonday sun that you have to squint to look at them. That isn’t all: crocodile-leather high heels with red platforms and over their shoulders see-through handbags like round canteens for a thirsty outing. The make-up is simple: a bit of powdered eggshell does it, plus a purple touch of Mercurochrome on the lips. Yes, it must be a catechism klatch, or maybe the arrival from the mother country of some buff parish priest whose photograph they’ve seen, the longed-for replacement of the insipid confessor of bilious believers his predecessor turned into after half a century of evangelizing against the tide

Severo Sarduy

 

“Recounting”

Today, I’m not like yesterday, time passes.
My verse has turned transparent.
In the afternoons, come to me
sudden longings to go home.

Consuming passion, passion that burns
left me; now its my mind
that delights, indifferent night,
in those bodies that day turns away.

I do not deplore love, now left for someone else;
only desire, which redeems, inverts
and alters all it touches.

Writings, passions, and poison
were missing in my life and my death.
And the touch of some hands, and a mouth.

                                                TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY DAVID FRANCIS 

Severo Sarduy

 

“Rothko”

To Andrés Sánchez Robayna

Not the colors, nor the pure form.
Memory of ink. Sediment
that decants light from its pigment,
beyond the canvas and its framework.

Not the lines, not the shadow or texture,
nor the brief illusion of movement;
nothing more than silence: the feeling
of being in its presence. The Painting

between parallel fringes whose mist
crosses the intact canvas, though tinged
with cinnabar, with wine that fades;

purple, vermillion, orange…
The red of spilled blood
sealed his exploration. And also his life.

 

                            TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY DAVID FRANCIS 

Alejo Carpentier

 

In the quarter where the sun should have appeared, the sky was covered by a strange reddish cloud, like smoke, like hot ashes, like a dark pollen that had arisen swiftly, stretching from one horizon to the other. When the cloud moved overhead, it began to rain butterflies on the roofs, the water jars, our shoulders. They were little butterflies, deep amaranth in color, striped in violet, which had come together by myriads in some unknown spot behind the immense jungle, frightened, perhaps, driven away, after multiplying frenziedly, by some cataclysm, some awful occurrence, without witnesses or record. The Adelantado told me that these swarms of butterflies were nothing new in the region, and that when they took place the sun was almost blotted out for the whole day. The burial of the father would have to be carried out by candlelight in a day that was night, reddened by wings.

                                                        from The Lost Steps

Reinaldo Arenas

               Egon Schiele. Young boy (1918

Viejo Niño

I am that child with the round dirty face
who on every corner is bothering you with
his “can you spare one quarter?”1
I am that child with the dirty face
—no doubt unlucky—
that from far away contemplates coaches
where the other children emit laughter
and jump up and down considerably
I am that unlikable child
—definitely unlucky—

with the round dirty face who under giant
streetlights or under the grand dames
also illuminated or before the little
girls that seem to levitate
project the insult of my dirty face.
I am that sullen child, even more gray,
that wrapped up in lamentable
combinations puts a dark note on the snow
or on the carefully trimmed lawn
that nobody but me would walk on,
because I don’t pay fines.

I am that angry and lonely child of
always, that throws you the insult of
that angry child of always
and warns you: if hypocritically you pat
me on the head I would take that
opportunity to steal your wallet.
I am that child of always,
before the panorama of eminent terror,
of eminent leprosy, of eminent fleas, of
offenses or of the eminent crime.
I am that repulsive child that improvises
a bed out of an old cardboard box and
waits, certain, that you will accompany
me.

New York (October 1983)
 

Reinaldo Arenas

from Before Night Falls (Antes que Anochezca)

 “In those days I had a different idea about sexual relations; I loved someone and I wanted that person to love me; I did not believe that one had to search, unceasingly, to find in other bodies what one body had already provided.” – 64

“The gay world is not monogamous. Almost by nature, by instinct, the tendency is to spread out to multiple relationships, quite often to promiscuity. It was normal for me not to understand this at the time; I had just lost my lover and felt completely disillusioned.” – 64=65

“We would all bring our notebooks and write poems or chapters of our books, and would have sex with armies of young men. The erotic and literary went hand in hand.” – 101

“The ideal in any sexual relationship is finding one’s opposite, and therefore the homosexual world is now something sinister and desolate; we almost never get what we most desire.” – 108

“The sea was like a feast and forced us to be happy, even when we did not particularly want to be. Perhaps subconsciously we loved the sea as a way to escape from the land where we were repressed; perhaps in floating on the waves we escaped our cursed insularity.” – 114