Exiles, Wanderers, and Travelers; or, Boy 1 Escapes Guantánamo Bay

Oh, happy days! 

Oldest boy got to Spain without a hitch. The planes were on time, he was able to get through customs with his visa that (thank god) barely made it on time, and he has settled in with his host family. After a couple of days of orientation, he will officially be a college freshman this week! 

Friends keeps asking me if I am worried about him. Well, of course. I'm sure my parents worried about me going to college, and I was only about 25 miles from home my first year. 

There is, honestly, a lot about Madrid that is very appealing to me as a parent. Things you don't want to talk about but I'm just throwing it out there: the homicide rate in Madrid last year was 1 (yes, ONE) per 100,000 people. In San Antonio, Texas, his #2 choice for college, it was 104 per 100,000. And less scary: he can use public transportation that is reliable, cheap, and safe. There aren't many places he could live in the U.S. for four years of college and survive without a car. Madrid is a great location for travel, and he can be on a plane and back in the southern part of the U.S. in about 11 hours, with probably one layover thrown in there, for about $600. Getting to GTMO is a whole other story; it took us almost that long just to get from the airport in GTMO to our hotel in Jacksonville. But that's another blog for another time, and honestly, I'm sick of talking about the ridiculousness that is travel on and off of this place.

So travel is done. I wasn't obsessing or anything, but I did manage to stay awake for most of his trip to Europe. 

He was able to enjoy the Reina Sofía Museum today (it's free certain hours of certain days) and saw one of my very favorite pieces of art, Picasso's "Guernica." It was painted for the World's Fair as a war protest painting. It protests the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica that was destroyed by carpet bombers during Franco's regime. Picasso was already living in exile in Paris (he never returned to his home country of Spain in his lifetime). 

image source and more info found here: http://www.pablopicasso.org/guernica.jsp

So here's my connection to Book Challenge #2: G. Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers 

Again, if you are only here for my snark about life in GTMO, year five, or occasional stories about my kids and other diversions and don't want to read about books, adiós, muchacho. Otherwise, read on, reader: 

It's weird my first choice for the book challenge I chose for this year, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, was about someone feeling trapped in his body ("locked-in syndrome"), and my second book is named Three Trapped Tigers. Is there a subliminal theme going on here? Feeling a little trapped on La Isla Bonita, maybe? I swear it was completely coincidental. 

This selection is "a book that's been on your To Be Read list for way too long"---before there was a husband and children, and Cuba wasn't even on my radar, I was taking a ton of undergraduate and grad level Spanish courses  and this book came up over and over again in class discussions. G. Cabrera Infante, like Picasso, lived in exile. He moved from Cuba to London after Castro took over.  Although this story takes place before the revolution and he wrote it while exiled in Europe, there is interestingly no mention of an uprising on any page. 

This novel is often called  "the Spanish Ulysses." Well damn, now I have to finally read that book (it's on this year's list) to see if it's true. It's divided into several sections, with much being stream of consciousness----think Benjy, the "idiot" in The Sound and the Fury. (As Macbeth says, "A tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.")  Much later in the book, a character explains Cuba as "an island of double or triple entendres, told by a drunk idiot signifying everything" (128). 

There are 3 main characters telling stories of the nightclub scene in Havana at the height of the tourist boom and pre-Castro. They are all artists of some sort---an actor, a writer, and a photographer. Are they the Three Trapped Tigers? 

I don't think so. . . it's just the weird translation from the original title, Tres Tristes Tigres, which if you've ever taken a Spanish class, you probably had to learn the trabalengua to help you roll your Rs: "Tres tristes tigres tragan trigo en un trigal." (Three sad tigers swallow wheat in a wheat field). The entire books is a tongue twister---Infante loves to play with words----one character calls an annoying guy who is always trying to hang out with his friends as they travel from nightclub to nightclub "peripathetic." And that's just one of 100s of examples and in a translation from Spanish---it's probably much funnier in the original language.

The book is split into several sections, and sometimes the characters are not directly connected to each other. There are nightclub singers, underaged heiresses, and lots of people scheming to get by. There are people of all classes, races, and sexual orientation. The backdrop is the cabaret/Jazz scene and most of the book takes place at night. You get the feeling that Havana was a never-ending party and wonder what it could have been, had the revolution not occurred. 

There's a travelogue from a husband, who is corrected by his wife, who then re corrects hers, and so forth and so on. In that section, the humor reminded me much of David Sedaris. There is a section called "Some Revelations" that are just blank pages. There are characters who make puns in literally every single sentence. It's smart and sarcastic, snarky and sometimes somnambulant (like that alliteration??)---there's a sleep-walking, half awake quality of the wanderings of the main characters from nightclub to nightclub all night long. 

Chapter title: "Some Revelations"

 

One of his narrators says this:  "Cuba. . . was not a fit hangout for man or beast. Nobody should live here except plants, insects and fungi or any other lower forms of life. The squalid fauna that Christopher Columbus found when he landed proved the point. All that remained now were birds and fish and tourists. All of these could leave the island when they wanted" (96). 

However, you know better. They love the nightlife, the sketchy characters involved, and even all these things they complain about. They also love the music, the dancing, the food, the many, many beautiful and complicated women, and even the tourist traps. It makes me sad for a place I never got to experience, and for what could have been for Cuba. If we ever visit, I seriously doubt it will be from this base. Instead, we will see a version of Cuba that's much different than what's explained in the book. But then again, are NYC or Miami or Paris the same cities 60 years later, either?

I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to most people just because of all the references to Cuban writers (there is one section where Infante parodies famous Cuban writers telling the story of Trotsky's assassination in Mexico---random, I know, but hilarious at the same time).  It can be tedious and it almost needs footnotes for anyone who isn't familiar with Latin American literature and history. Parts of the book are in Spanglish. I'm glad I finally got around to reading it 25 years (!!!) after my last Spanish class, and I'm happy that somewhere in my brain is a part that gets many of the cultural references and understands the language. Book 2 is down, only 30 or so to go. 

Next up: Nigeria and the amazingly titled book, Blackass.