Self-Portrait of the Other/My House Is on Fire

...and I want to hear again the clang of horseshoes coming from the horses of your poetry...

...In Cuba, fortunately," Raul had said in his laughing, lighthearted way, "there are very few intellectuals, and those there are do nothing but get bogged down reinventing the wheel...

...The stories in this resonantly titled collection are less fictional than they are extended cries of pain at the desolate spectacle of ashes that were once luminous landscape: Allende's Chile after Pinochet...

...Saul Malof f In a concluding scene of the saga of Heberto Padilla's life from the rhapsodic beginnings of the Castro years to the bitter, exhausted, maimed end in 1980, Fidel summons the poet to his palatial office and tells him very well, then, if he wants so desperately to betray his native land by leaving it for the gringo cesspool, he is free to go...

...The two men had known each other since their student days...

...Anyone who had been burned, in spirit or flesh, by the Stalinist perversion of Utopian hope, might have cautioned Padilla, provided him with maps of the territory he was certain to traverse on the way to becoming yet another case history in a failed revolution that by the nature of the beast will sooner or later devour its own children...

...Torture, anguish, devastating poverty, widespread unemployment, illiteracy-above all, a hollow hopelessness...

...But his ordeal, after all, was neither the gulag nor death...

...Even theology had been mustered in the war against those who had deviated from the one true cosmology...

...Early in that wretched decade, for no particular reason, he had been arrested, imprisoned, and hospitalized for thirty-seven days...

...The "rite" had attained this status during the great purges in the USSR in the 1930s when deviant intellectuals cleansed themselves of their heinous responsibility for the Peloponnesian War and leprosy on their way to the firing squad...

...Che himself had said that "all writers are in a state of Original Sin...

...Do not search Self-Portrait of the Other for anything remotely approaching a systematic account of the poet's relations with the Cuban revolution, though they compose a loose narrative thread...

...The epigraph to this story cites a hope-filled 1917 address by Luis Emilio Recabarren, the founder of the Chilean Communist party, and Salvador Allende's last words to the Chilean people in 1973: "These words are, above all, for the poor women of this land...

...Here is a desert land populated by collaborators, loyal servants of the regime, torturers, and their victims, while the ladies of the great houses, having composed menus for the staff, serve afternoon tea...

...Gravely wounded he was...

...Later, along with other writers whose ideas and work displeased the supreme leaders, Padilla was broken on that crudest wheel, the public confession of "error," the "classic rite," as Padilla calls it, of self-degradation...

...He was "ostracized" and reduced to the status of "marginal person...

...Ariel Dorfman is another displaced person, a Chilean citizen living in exile in the U.S...

...Otherwise, here is Padilla recalling what can never be forgotten...

...The Havana Padilla returned to from his sojourns in the Soviet Union and Europe was "oppressed by caution and fear...

...In this miasmic atmosphere, Padilla had abjectly confessed that he had indeed written those verses, that novel, those translations...

...detailed sketches of writers in Cuba and elsewhere who were the important friends (and antagonists) of those triumphant and ruinous years...

...the poet Jose Lezama Lima discoursing on literature...

...Interrogated, though about what we do not know-sufficient that he should be known as an opponent of the regime and subjected to treatment for which our century is justly celebrated-he was beaten, scorched, drugged, treated for his wounds, and in due course released...

...Extended to include all Chilean people, those words might serve as an epigraph for the whole collection...

...Padilla arguing politics and art with Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, and others...

...The Writers' Union had been densely infiltrated by state security...

...The Russian poet, Padilla's longtime friend both in Cuba and in the USSR where he had been' based as a journalist, knew something about purges and the gulag and poets condemned to silence...

...And at the time of the Soviet tempest boiling around Solzhenitsyn's revelations, none other than Raul Castro had spoken in Prague to the diplomatic and commercial mission to which Padilla was attached...

...For ten years prior to this final meeting, the poet had been under close scrutiny by state security, by camera, tape, direct surveillance, under virtual house arrest...

...Padilla's crime: He had ceased to be a believer in the redemptive powers of the revolution- the revolution he had once seen as a vessel of infinite promise...

...In "Godfather," an illiterate woman, acting for her missing husband, seeks to register her newborn son by the name of Luis Emilio and is told by the weary clerk that she cannot do so as her other son already bears that name...

...and homosexual members of the union were to be cured of their accursed affliction by the principles of Pavlovian psychology in the concentration camps of Camaguay...

...decadent Europe had infected visiting Cubans with a corrupting taste for the dolce vita...

...but "wounded," as his friend Yevtushenko wrote him consolingly, "isn't dead...

...whole collection...

...since 1973...

...Moments and portraits: Shostakovich weeping upon being notified by the Soviet commissars of culture that his new symphony will not be performed after all...

...The tale is tragically familiar: by the sixties such tales were old hat...