The
Son of the Zero or Eudoxia’s Way:
In
Search of Lost Cuban Literature
Orlando
Luis Pardo Lazo
“The
bathroom mirror is almost always the last memory of a suicide, or a person who
dies without knowing it.”
Mysterious
words for a mysterious moment: Death, the end of Life or the beginning of Afterlife.
It depends. Death itself depends. Death is always pending upon life. Not Death
the leveler, then, but Death the raiser.
Reflections
on death, deaths reflected. The words of Ricardo Fronesis pretend to simply answer
a question of Jose Cemí about Eugenio Foción: “Who is Foción, what’s his family
like, what happened to him in his life that makes everything seem hidden?” (312).
Fronesis,
Foción and Cemí are not biographical beings. That’s why their respective
biographies are so indelible. They are three literary characters who are the
protagonists of Paradise,
the 1966 novel written over two decades by José María Andrés Fernando Lezama
Lima, or just José Lezama Lima, one of the greatest of all Cuban authors.
Paradise is a book which immediately
became the epicenter—epic center?—of the Cuban literary canon, including a very
early episode of censorship by the Cuban State, which ultimately led to the
ostracizing of Lezama Lima until his death a decade later in Havana, in August
9, 1975.
About
this monumental novel, the Literature Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz
commented: “Paradise has transformed
the world of preexisting symbols through an inventory of the past, altering
history and even the orthography of Spanish language”
(316).
The
critic and professor Juan Pablo Lupi, in the 2011 book Foundational Texts of World Literature,
acknowledges that Lezama Lima has been “variously portrayed as paradigmatic
representative of the Neobaroque, Catholic bellestrist, mystic, or postmodern
and queer theorist avant la letter,” but in any case the Cuban poet, novelist
and essayist for Lupi is “widely regarded as one of the greatest Latin American
writers of all time,” “one of the major figures of the canon, both within and
beyond the intellectual field of Latin American literature,” as well as “one of
the most opaque and difficult writer in the Spanish language,” (215) in part because of Lezama Lima’s “highly
imaginative mode of engaging with ‘worlds beyond his own place and time’” (225).
In
his canonical 1994 book The Western
Canon. The Books and Schools of the Ages,
Harold Bloom included Lezama Lima’s novel Paradise
as part of “The Chaotic Age: A Canonical Prophecy” (560). While in his essay “Lezama Lima in the Paradise of Poetry,”
Jean Franco inserts this book in “a Latin American tradition that was initiated
by modernism and German Romanticism in Europe:” that is, “the tradition that
considers poetry to be a privileged genre, where language flees from
utilitarian daily discourse” (240).
Franco
believes that “the theme of his novel Paradiso
(1966) is the poet’s search for the ‘invisible’ world that is beyond the
tangible” (239), in “an ascent
toward poetry by way of the material world,” from the very “family placenta” to
the “opening of an exterior world, the time of friendship,” and then to the
final ascension “through an oneiric and symbolic landscape toward his encounter
with poetic destiny” (241).
Foción,
Fronesis and Cemí are friends. Three imaginary young men in some time period
impossible to define precisely, but certainly during the historic period called
The Republic in Cuba, maybe not long before the communist Revolution of Fidel
Castro, whose Rebel Army overtook power on January 1, 1959, only to remain in
power for life.
As
with most classics, Paradise opened
and closed a door. A secret door. Technically, a concealed one. An entry/exit made
of mysterious words that Lezama Lima assembled as if it were literally—more
than literarily—a hidden passage: Eudoxia’s way.
For
our purposes, it is of little use, for example, to google “Eudoxia’s way.” In
fact, most web search engines will take us to modern vampires’ chronicles and
related best-sellers of The New York
Times, as well as to references to a Roman empress from the fifth century. Not
a single hint or hit about any Eudoxia in a Cuban novel called pretentiously or
perhaps pertinently Paradise. In this
respect, the question of Jose Cemí that Ricardo Fronesis tries to answer could also
be asked about “who is Eudoxia, what’s Eudoxia’s way, what happened to life that
makes everything seem hidden?”
Maybe
not even Lezama Lima was fully aware of his own Eudoxia’s way when he was
writing it down in a few paragraphs of Paradise.
We can now envision his vision as an encrypted message that the author was perhaps
unconsciously leaving for us. A miraculous bottle that Lezama Lima tossed into the
sea of his future’s readers—i.e., today’s readers—with some symbolic keys inside
impossible to decode as much as to deconstruct.
At
the turn of the 1970s in Cuba, more than censored and ostracized, Lezama Lima was
being spied on and harassed by the Cuban government. They were listening to his
conversations and at least once they interrogated him, humiliating the novelist
by making obvious that they had complete access to his private life. They took
private documents from his own apartment, the emblematic home at Trocadero
#162, in Centro Habana. And a file with Lezama Lima’s supposedly disaffected
opinions and disloyal actions even managed to reach the archives of the Federal
Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service in the German
Democratic Republic: the much-feared Stasi which, like every Soviet-like
intelligence organization, was in practice the bedrock of all socialist
societies.
Lezama
Lima can be read as the most prolific perpetrator of permutations in Cuban
literature. His author’s alchemy can be compared with a labyrinthine game of
beheadings. Consequently, we cannot expect Eudoxia to be Eudoxia from the
beginning. In fact, she was simply Celita, a very common Cuban name for quite a
common Cuban woman from early-20th-century Cuba: Celita, the tender diminutive
nickname of Celia, who almost without knowing how ended up sexually involved with
two men who happened to be brothers.
Celita’s―not
yet Eudoxia’s―men were Juliano Foción, the younger, and Nicolás Foción, her own
husband. In Paradise,1 both brothers had been
silently in love with Celita since her family moved next to their home, in
Centro Habana, where “the two of them lived in Industria, almost at the corner
of Neptuno. Their house, on one side, faced a street with a lot of movement
from morning on; on the other corner, a neighborhood of a strange silence” (313).
The
home of the Foción family was soon to become the vortex of the founding event of Paradise that we are trying to reimagine
or reinvent with our peculiar approach to this novel. As expected, such a
literary house had to be located by its author only a few blocks away from
Lezama Lima’s real address, for the continuous connection between life and language
is intimately indistinguishable both in his fiction and his poetry. Perhaps the
literary critic Jean Franco6
is somehow referring to this quality when he detects in Lezama Lima’s Paradise the “intention to hypostasize
poetry” (244).
Juliano
and Nicolás Foción were supposed to be the uncle and the father, respectively, of
the still unborn Foción about whom Fronesis and Cemí will talk many years later,
in Chapter 10, in the middle of some highly sexualized chapters that immediately
turned Paradise into a scandal for Fidel
Castro’s quasi-Calvinist regime at that time, whose cultural authorities predictably
accused the novel of being pornographic.
In
different moments of his life, Lezama Lima replied to such arguments in his
private correspondence with his sister in exile:
“Some with insolence have affirmed that in my works there are pornographic
elements, but not only this is unfair but it can also be vileness, since precisely
if some author is characterized by the gravity of his works, that’s me. My work
could be censored for flaws of style, but never for ethical reasons, as in its
roots is essentially a sacramental act (21).
And also to the Spanish intellectual Juan Goytisolo:
“The only pornographic books I have read are the Bible (Genesis) and Plato…” (783, 784).
Sexuality
always tends to be tragic in Paradise.
Probably sex is meant to be tragic in all true-to-life paradise, where everyone
lives at risk of being expelled at any time. The Cuban Utopia had thus its own
share of dystopic para-paradise, particularly when it came to pleasure, maybe
because of the competition for uniformed bodies in the Ministry of the Interior
and Ministry of the Armed Forces, which kept three armies running on the Island
and exported thousands of troops to Africa, Asia and Latin America, in a sort
of humanitarian imperialism officially called proletarian internationalism.
The
exception as always was Fidel Castro, who promiscuously violated his own dictum
against literary sensuality, to the point of publishing two extensive interviews
with the American magazine Playboy, forbidden in Cuba for being American
in general, for being specifically Playboy,
and perhaps for being a magazine as such: a printed compendium of images and
texts well outside the control of the P.C.C., the only political party which—according
to the Constitution—is legal in Cuba until today.
“Smiling,
with that semi-demoniacal malice that pleasure bestows,” only once Celita made
love in Paradise1 to the younger brother Juliano of her husband Nicolás.
That first time was also to be the last, for “they had both incorporated
themselves as happiness in eternity.” Literally, in eternity: as “Celita was
closing her eyes” and “ascended through ecstasy to sleep,” “moments later Juliano
was opening his in death” and “descended to the cold grottoes of Persephone.” Just
“after seeing her face,” “the face with red flowers in its hair,” “now he had
to die” and, in fact, Juliano was definitely dead in Celita’s “serpent’s
embrace,” probably while he was still inside her after their first and last fruitful
orgasm: “the two sweats, the two salivas, the two essential dampnesses drowned
in their complementarities” (316).
This
is a magical and intense instant of epiphany. It’s also the complicity of
conception between two minor characters of Paradise,
whose names and sagas seem unworthy of remembrance for most Cuban cultural experts,
both locally and worldwide. A genital Genesis, a fertile fornication, a
critical creation beyond Good and Evil, yet eluding none of either. And it is also
the cruelest coda conceivable for love—and life—: a sort of Apocubalypse according to Lezama Lima, who
tells us about this adulterous rapture that happened one instant before the
fecundation of Foción, through the dialogue between Fronesis and Cemí many
years later.
It
is implicit in this sensational scene of Paradise1 that we are witnessing the
conception of the fetus of Foción:
“in the center of her tree Celita received the weight of imposing distances,
agglomerations of ants, gloomy distributions of Mongolic emigrations, howling
voices among snow animals, whispers turned into pounding tides,” while her
lover “from the twilight’s swell he sprang like a titanic carpet that enveloped
the moans and all those fragments of the moon as it splintered” (316).
This
brutal beauty crystalizes in its purest state as infinite wonder and infinite
pity, in a reminiscence of Jorge Luis Borges’s short-story The Aleph,
where this Argentinian writer confesses that “I arrive now at the ineffable
core of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set
of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past.”
In
fact, in his unique enumeration of memories and objects that recombine past,
present and future, Borges resembles Lezama Lima in naming “tides,” “all the ants
on the planet,” “snow,” “multitudes,” a number of animals (“horses,” “tigers,”
“bison”), “a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a
tree,” “daybreak and nightfall,” “the coupling of love and the modification of
death,” and “unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror:” indeed “all
the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.”
And,
again, Borges’ enumeration in his aleph could then be read as a mirroring reminiscence,
in return, of Lezama Lima’s paradise. At this point one is tempted to believe—without
the vulgarity of further evidence—that both narrative passages were being
written simultaneously by Jorge Luis Borges and José Lezama Lima, two
procreators of alephs and paradises who never met each other in life but did so
many times, unexpectedly, in their respective literatures.
The lover
triptych of Paradise1—Juliano/Celita/Nicolás—seems
to move from delight to death to delirium, when we realize that “a third figure
was lacking in that tragic composition: madness.” It all happened because the
older brother, Doctor Nicolás Foción, arrived back home all of a sudden, from a
medical trip to Mayabeque in order to consult a patient who coincidentally died
that same day. Unavoidably, the doctor in his family house of Centro Havana was
shocked to insanity as he opened the door of Juliano’s room, only to see two familiar
bodies lying naked, in an almost posthumous peace. Instinct or premonition? In
any case, there were two domestic bodies divinely asleep. But, given his
proficiency in the medical profession, “the doctor interpreted his brother’s
paleness correctly.” Nicolás knew before Celita did that Juliano had died while
making love to her. A truth twice terrible for a doctor, so that “at the end of
that labyrinth he would find the hammer blow that would destroy his life as a
reasoning animal” (315, 316). He was suddenly out of his mind,
from one of Paradise’s lines to the
next.
When
Celita finally woke up, between the dead brother Juliano and the mad brother
Nicolás, she was no longer Celita, of course, but already Eudoxia, even if she
still ignored her transfiguration. The abrupt madness of Nicolás Foción rebaptized
her as Eudoxia, while he still held “his brother’s pulse in his hand, shaking
his head, facing up to the crisis with an incomprehensible scientific
seriousness.” Nicolás just said to her: “Eudoxia—that was the name of his
nurse—this patient has died in the office, he had a bad heart, take care of the
patients who are waiting, tell them that I am indisposed, and then we’ll notify
his family” (316, 317).
Doctor
Foción, as swift as his brother’s death, had simply “lost his mind.” “This time
the bull wouldn’t sink its horns into the man’s groin, as if seeking out and
enshrouding the secrets of his sperm, but it would proclaim that its horns were
carrying off the trophy of his reason, which was kept in his horns from
supporting the balance of the stellar collections.” It was a kind of kind madness—maybe
Horace’s amabilis insania?—that in the
surviving doctor “took the form of receiving non-existent patients in his
office in the morning,” always accompanied by Celita, who “had to play her role
as the nurse Eudoxia to perfection” (315,
317).
From
then on, every single day, during two whole decades, “shut up in his office at
ten in the morning,” the doctor unfailingly “would talk to Celita, transformed
now forever into Eudoxia the nurse, and tell her: ‘Bring in the first
patient.’” And then he would carry out a detailed clinical questioning,
evaluation, and finally a precise diagnosis of the virtual disease affecting
each and every one of his imaginary patients during each day (317).
Over
and over, concise and touching: “Bring in the next patient.” And Eudoxia would
obey out of mercy, maybe also out of love. In any case, she “had to follow all
the details of that madness with tersest sanity.” “In that way he had ten
consultations in the morning and another ten in the afternoon,” so that “every
day twenty people who didn’t exist would file through; he spoke to the air.” At
the end of his office hours, “at seven or eight at night, depending on how much
time he had given each of the patients,” then Doctor Foción “would get his
reason back” for the rest of the evening, and only during those hours his wife
“became Celita again,” relieved from her daytime incarnation in the nurse
Eudoxia (317).
The
doctor “was that way for twenty years, seeing patients created by his madman’s
imagination, changing Celita into nurse Eudoxia from ten in the morning until
eight in the evening and the nurse into his wife for the remainder of the day,
changing the starched cap for the flowers in Celita’s damp hair.” In Lezama
Lima’s Paradise, Dr. Foción even
personalizes each of his twenty daily patients, shaking “hands with space”
while talking to them with absolute normality, charging them nothing for his
specialized services. For example: “I find you improved, your blood pressure is
near normal, keep talking the pills, most of all, don’t use any salt on your
food, come back at the end of the week” (317,
318), as if he meant come back at
the end of the century. Or at the end of life.
Only
“after twenty years in that office of shadows,” the doctor “reached
retirement.” And, “since he no longer had to see patients, his madness and his
reason were the same.” Reality had been restored. And the doctor dedicated himself
peacefully to practicing “chess,” to read devotedly the “Alexandrine Gnostics,”
and to taking care of his son’s education “with extreme zeal,” although Foción Jr.
was never sent to school. His father “himself took charge of teaching him, from
the history of zero to the variations of functions in trigonometry, passing
through an extensive cultural, metaphysical, and theological landscape, as he
fit in those variations between zero and infinity” (318).
Father
Foción used to say to his son Foción during all those years of truncated lucidity
intertwined with terminal lunacy: “Between the zero, which I am, and infinity,
which, according to the Greeks, I don’t want you to be, without exhausting all
the knowledge of the possible finite” (318).
His
growing son, Eugenio Foción, as he “was opening his eyes” surrounded by an
interminable exercise of phantoms,” “hearing his mother sometimes called
Eudoxia and other times Celita,” precisely for being so innocently “surrounded
by madness,” then “grew up without original sin.” And what happened was that “the
nurse’s cap and the flowers in the hair came to be like a clock to him which
warned of dementia and recovery, silence and chattering, minute reason put to
the service of madness and madness working with great care, with a slow zeal,
as if in the fullness of reason attained by the Greek.” So that Eugenio Foción,
the son of the zero Nicolás Foción, had but zero choice in this respect: “his
senses didn’t segregate concupiscent material, but data of knowledge that
advanced or retreated toward the image, floating like the peduncles of a Gorgon
that never learned to decipher the river’s clay” (318).
The
conclusion of Foción’s two friends, Fronesis and Cemí, is that Foción had an
“abstract development of his childhood and adolescence.” They imagine that
fatally for Foción all “those phantoms incubated a crystal homunculus who lives
inside Newton’s binomial or Pascal’s triangle and who breathes quicksilver.” Until,
of course, one day, when “suddenly the homunculus launches a clandestine
harangue into his subterranean palace and temptations begin to arise. The
larvae throw themselves onto a skeleton in the desert, leaving a calcinated
track where a cactaceous plant begins to bloom.” And thus “the homunculus
begins to play with the cactus, a rain of sand falls” (318, 319).
For
them this would explain why Foción from very early on “suffered from the
complex of the toothed vagina.” That is, “he saw a woman’s vulva as an immense
mouth that devoured the phallus.” For the son of the zero, “the edges of the
feminine cistern were converted into an infernal lagoon where a froth boiled up
that gave off monstrous little horns, now the tails of Neapolitan sirens, now
centaurs with prepotent members erect to the requirements of the god Pan” (319). There was no paradise possible
for Foción, according to his two friends in Paradise.
Thus,
Fronesis and Cemí assume that their mutual friend Foción is doomed: despite
being “in the bloom of adolescence,” he was “ending up in a noble cynicism,” as
when “he fell into homosexuality, led by the hand of that old connoisseur of
sexual relations between man and man.” The son of the zero, “without knowing
the penetrating energy, was an object penetrated by someone else’s barb,” in
part “because nature had given him a chaos but didn’t give him enough strength
to fight against it. He feels destroyed, but he has no destructive force” (320).
This
is why that, when later in his “abnormal marital situation,” Eugenio Foción
finally managed to beget a son with his wife, despite his persistent practice
of “interfemoral copulation, as the Romans of the decadence said,” Fronesis and
Cemí again agree that this new Foción III, the grandson of the zero, will “be a
new homunculus, in the midst of mirrors, quicksilver, and sexual terrors” (320). It’s called faith in fate, an
abyss from which we cannot escape no matter which role we are bound to play in
the novel of our lives: reader, character, author.
Beyond
the applicability or not of Eric Berne’s sentence that “it takes three
generations to make one neurotic,” let’s imagine the environment of the Foción
family for a moment in Lezama Lima’s Paradise.
Let’s stop for a while rereading Cuban literature and let’s start once and for
all rewriting the whole of it:
Twenty
patients a day, during five working days, as it was usual in Cuba during the
capitalist period (after 1959, the Revolution was to force “volunteer works” during
most weekends). A hundred patients a week, during a whole year of incessant illnesses
in Havana arrived from anywhere on the Island (all of them dwelling exclusively
in the demented mind of Doctor Nicolás Foción, the zero). Over fifty hundred
patients a year, during two disproportionate decades, a whole chaotic age during
which other medical colleagues warned Celita/Eudoxia “to be very careful in the
distribution of the ideal consultations given,” because “one mistake, the
penetration of light into that errant mentality,” could clinically cause a
catastrophe: an “explosive attack,” an “ax blow,” the “interrogation of a
scalpel on her rosy flesh” (317).
In
total, over a hundred thousand patients, generously created and graciously cured
by the zero man. A deathless universe, myriads of unexplored biographies. An
allegorical aleph, a hermetic history with no hermeneutics. Error, Eros. Awe, horror,
awerror.
When
one realizes the poetic and political power of such a generator—and such a
formidable reserve— of characters for the Cuban literary canon that never was, other
literatures seem to faint in frustration, and not only in the Caribbean and
Latin American, where the most Cuban novel of Lezama Lima hardly belongs, for
its true tradition―like the 100,000 patients lost in our Paradise―is made of air.
These
are the thousand-and-one nights in which Cubans haven’t yet recreated a Cubanness
that was not, that is not ever to be, that is only becoming. Such is also the innumerable
number of doors and the undecidability of all exits and returns to the Island:
a panoply of plots to perform. A wasted territory so far, forgotten out of fear
of not knowing what to do with such a fundamental freedom, such a plea to explode
from within this novel condemned to constitute a complete cosmology in itself.
Maybe
this is connected in a paradoxical way, to what Raymond D. Souza
has seen as Lezama Lima’s anxiousness to build Paradise in “a denial or randomness and time” (21), combining “metaphoric and metonymic processes in his creation
of poetic figures” (36). Others
authors
have ascribed to Lezama Lima the term “aposiopesis (the interruption of
discourse, reticence, ellipsis)” (129)
in order to signify his “letting others do the political talk,” as a
“rhetorical figure of the unrepresentable” or “the poetic mark of that which
cannot be presented” (131). Still
others
assume that Paradise is but “the
fixation of an intangible otherness, authentic and truthful in itself” (134) but, “above all, an allegory of
the poetic recovery” of an “absolute and immobile Presence” as well as a “logos
independent from the universe, but which is at the same time its creator and
its reason for being” (137). And, of
course, some
also claim that “the elaborate hermeneutics needed to explicate some of
Lezama’s dense imagery and quirky metaphysics help reinforce the idea that to
read Lezama well one must choose to enter a Delphic circle which one may not
choose to leave” (44).
In
any case, José Lezama Lima at least must have known one thing from the
beginning, even unbeknownst to himself: the pristine perfection of his Paradise will be reached only when its readers
start to turn Eudoxia’s way into a cosmopolitan cathedral built upon a
magnificent zero. Not before, not after.
To
imagine and to incarnate, both in text and in the flesh, where might be wandering
around all those inconceivable Cuban characters is more urgent that, for
example, to describe the destiny of our nation after the death of Fidel Castro
and the concomitant disappearance of the Revolution. Politics as a footnote of fiction:
the dreams of reason may produce monsters, yes, but a monster of dreams―like
the author of Paradise still is―can
only produce reason.
