by Alejo Carpentier

THE WARDER NUN peered out distrustfully through the grate, pleasure transforming her face when she saw the Red-Head’s countenance: “Oh! Heavenly surprise, Maestro!” The door hinges creaked and the five men entered the Ospedale della Pietà, in complete darkness, the distant sounds of Carnival echoing in its long corridors from time to time as if carried on a frolicking breeze. “Heavenly surprise!” repeated the nun as she lit the lamps along the large music hall which was both monastic and worldly with its marble objects, moldings, and garlands, its many chairs, curtains, and gilt trimmings, its carpets and paintings of biblical themes: it was something like a theater without a stage or a church of few altars, both showy and secretive. They made their way to the rear, where a dome was hollowed out of darkness, candles and lamps stretching the reflections of high organ pipes accompanied by the shorter pipes of the voix celeste. And Montezuma and Filomeno were asking each other why they had come to such a place instead of seeking out wine, women, and song just as two, five, ten, twenty bright figures began emerging from the shadows on the right and on the left, surrounding friar Antonio’s habit with their lively white cambric blouses, dressing gowns, pearl earrings, and lacy nightcaps. And others arrived and still more, sleepy and sluggish as they entered, but soon playful and merry, whirling about the night visitors, testing the weight of Montezuma’s necklaces…

by Reindaldo Arenas

“IT’S GOT TO be chopped down,” says one. And I go out to the street. The other two split their sides laughing; they give a snort and applaud. “It’s got to be chopped down,” they repeat, circling around the first. Finally, they leave the dining room and head toward the patio. But I’m already on the street. It’s cool. The brutal September sun has departed and October has settled in the trees. It’s almost pleasant to walk these streets aimlessly. From here I don’t hear their prancing, their intolerable screaming, their constant running back and forth through the house, returning, questioning, wearing the shine off the flagstones of the patio. They just don’t stop for a minute, and when they got it into their heads to cut down the trees (saying that they were shedding their leaves and that they always had to be sweeping), they did it with such zeal that in a week they finished them all off. Only the almond tree at the back of the patio remained standing. Without realizing it, I’m already in the heart of Old Havana. I walk along Obispo, and, even though I’m not at all interested, I glance at all the store windows and I stop in front of a few for a moment, looking without seeing, or reading indifferently the titles of scientific books. I stand for a moment looking at these undesirable books, until I notice that somebody else is looking at them, and, it would seem, with great interest. It’s a gorgeous girl. I look at her from head to toe and feel the urge to touch her. She takes a gigantic comb from her pocketbook; she fixes her hair, looks at me, and starts walking, strutting a bit. Her dress, short and tight, adjusts itself to the rhythm of her body. Yes, I’m sure that she looked at me and that for a second she gave me a signal. Or maybe it’s my imagination….

by Lino Novás Calvo

THE CAPTAIN AMIANA! He’d been there for ten years. There were people in the world who had given him up for dead, people who had known him. Not the rest of us. We didn’t know anybody. Amiana used to keep a two-master over in Havana when he was busy hauling illegal immigrants to the United States. Poles, Syrians, Russians, Czecho-Slovaks, Germans, Armenians, Galicians, Portuguese, Jews. From all over. Amiana charged them for hundred dollars a head and then threw them overboard. Overboard, just like that. He knew the coast guard was out there somewhere watching, through gunscopes, and he couldn’t put them ashore. That happened sometimes. Then it was uncovered and Amiana had to take off. He unfurled his sails and disappeared. The papers said the coast guard had nabbed him and they published his picture. And meanwhile….

Ten years before, I mean. A crew went with him and they sailed leeward due west, and came upon the Island. There he folded his wings and never again was a bird’s cry heard on that island. The ship ran aground on the way in and he didn’t realize it was running on land until it beached in the mud, where some little branches, too green and too dry, were growing, spying like vermin, and farther on, the mangroves. The ship was stuck there to the hilt. Amiana gave orders to lower the topmasts and to cut a path inland to the bush. A path to nowhere. Everything was the same there, and there was nowhere to go. It was like cutting paths in the sea. The bush was low there, a little taller than Amiana, very thick and uniform. It wasn’t the jungle, with musical scales, with undulating terrain. It was the sea, a watery tortoise afloat on other water. To walk through that land men had to go by their inner compass, or by the stars. The men who weren’t sailors had to go out moored to a cable like divers, to be able to get back to the beached ship, their only guide. Which is why it all happened. Because the Island was not alive. It was an apparition, like the undead. One felt that beneath it something was fluttering that did not flutter, that did not have a dead life, that saw things through other eyes….