As she stepped off the gangplank, high above the garbage-strewn harbor, her skirts tugged at her like she was wading into waist-deep water with her clothes on. The weight of the coins made it hard to walk, but it was better than gilding her teeth and pulling them out one by one with pliers like a traveling Roma. She wandered the greasy cobblestone streets amidst strange faces, humidity, sewage and factory smoke. It began pouring rain, as if all the moisture in the air had been leading to something, a necessary release. When the rain stopped, clouds wheeled out like theatre sets being replaced for the next act. Sun flooded in, virile and bright. She bought a glass of cane juice and sat on the cement benches of the Prado, under the causarina trees. Surrender yourself to the heat, she thought, her heavy skirts pulling, her dress sweat-soaked and plastered to her body. Women paraded by, their faces painted to resemble polished taffeta, streaks of creme blush glowing on their cheeks, their hair lacquered and coiled like ribbon candy into magnificent looped piles. She was watching them, these probably-prostitutes, and didn’t notice the young man walking toward her, carrying a leather valise. She looked up and there he was, blue eyes that were not an innocent infant’s blue, but dark as cobalt, like a shadow was passing over his face. May I sit here? he asked in a faint accent, from where she didn’t know.
That’s how it had started, she would later remember, when it was too late to say no, or that she was just leaving. He was too likable, too handsome, but attraction fused with trouble is a complex molecule, containing magnetic parts tempting her to find out just what kind of trouble. That she went to his rooming quarters unchaperoned didn’t matter. That he made actualities that were really fictions didn’t matter either — what could survive such a radical transition, from the vast unknowable world to a contained column of flickering light hitting a wall? He’d filmed the sinking of a Spanish armada in Santiago Bay. His footage was a puppet show, photographs of ships glued to paste board. The stage was his bathtub, with grains of turquoise-blue vegetable dye sifted into the water. The explosions, thimbles of gunpowder on little wooden blocks, which he detonated with alcohol-soaked cotton balls. For smoke, he blew cigar exhalations into the frame.
Ferdinand K figured she was probably not a prostitute, even if she seemed to come from nowhere, have no family, and gold coins hidden in her clothes. No one had followed them, no pimp or madam as far as he knew. A week after he found her wilting on a Prado bench, he ran out of money. She opened her hem, a savings account she withdrew with a seam-ripper. He made her a partner and changed the name of his company to Aloha Fantoscope. He and Aloha filmed more miniature sets, did things with mirrors, mirror facing mirror for a fake infinity (but what is “real infinity?” Infinity represented is still infinity). Sitting on the floor, cutting up film, they looked at each other, irises wheeling open. In between them was another infinity — the infinite distance, enacted by closeness, between two people.
In the distance between paper ships and cigar smoke, and what Ferdinand K had seen from a hill above the bay while he frantically tried to repair his camera — American marines blowing up Spanish vessels, a forty-five mile path of destruction and lakes of burning kerosene floating on the harbor — a broad space opened up, a place to maneuver with no accountability. Between battleships and sonic war and miniatures in dyed-blue bathtub water. Between bridal bed and brothel beds. The mirror of Aloha’s eyes and the mirror above him on a water-stained ceiling, which he avoided by keeping his pay-pleasure missionary. And then there was his dream of projecting advertisements into the low fluffs of cloud that drifted over the city like tugboats. Aloha Fantoscope! There was the distance between it and the traceless reality of where the last of Aloha’s money, generously invested in his cloud advertising scheme, had actually gone: into the childlike hands of harlots, who advertised not on clouds, but the balconies of Calle Belga. He had a weakness. Aloha’s last gold piece was spent on a pockmarked girl who’d simply grabbed his arm and said you — you’re coming with me. There was that joke about what a man needs to survive: food, shelter, papaya and strange papaya. In a world where papaya isn’t a fruit but the damp, warm syncline between a woman’s thighs.
* * *
Poor Aloha had believed him when he said the clouds above the city were like a film screen, but one that everyone could see. Penniless, she went to a bank to try to get a loan. She had nowhere to turn, and now she’d be having this child — The banker interrupted her. Why not just project your advertisements on the moon, hmm? He didn’t care about her sob story or any child. It was out of his hands, he said. The banks were American-owned now, decisions were made in New York and she should ask her own government to help. What could he do, if she had no collateral, no credit, no cosigner? She left in a hormone surge, weeping.
When she’d first seen him on the Prado, Ferdinand K’s cobalt eyes, twinkling and dark, had lured her to his room, unchaperoned. Now, they were turning a curdled yellow. His irises were frozen, hatches stuck in one position. Then he had oozing sores, one directly between his congealing cobalt eyes. His heart beat so violently that his fingertips pulsed in sync. A doctor came. He diagnosed the unmistakable symptoms of Flâneur’s Curiosity. She paid the doctor by breastfeeding him. There was no milk yet, it was a pantomime (but a pantomime of breast suckling is breast suckling, as a picture of infinity is infinite). When she returned to the room, Ferdinand was dead.
If you’re American, the banker had said to Aloha, then go to an American bank. The last Spanish dominion of the new world was supposedly erased by the war, by the end of slavery, the American marines, the newly consolidated sugar companies. But if the leaseholders were in New York, the banks themselves were Old World ornate, with silver doorknockers, gilded lobby mirrors and plush upholstery. Havana was a Paris of the Antilles, complete with colonnades, call girls, and French pornography. Gaming parlors, lobster palaces and luxury suites. The Prado was even lit by Parisian-style papillon, butterfly-shaped gaslights. But Paris transplanted to the tropics, with its humidity, deluges and brine, was an organ partly rejected. The scrollwork on the colonnades was crumbled and eroded by the Caribbean air sweeping through the porticoes. The glassined voluptés bizarres moldered on the display stands from dampness, and the butterfly lamps were caked with brine. Saltpeter turned all the doorknockers green. Silver sweated and a black lace of mold edged in around the mirrors. The plush collected bucketfuls of dust from the dense and chaotic streets. It clung to the creamy white satin and flocking in the luxury suites, turning all the walls a brick-powder pink.