Infante's Inferno by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

First published:La Habana para un infante difunto, 1979 (English translation, 1984)

Type of plot: Fictional autobiography

Time of work: The 1940’s

Locale: Havana, Cuba

Principal Characters:

• The narrator, a sex-crazed cineast
• Zoila, his mother, the head of the family
• Juliet Estévez, a liberated woman who is the narrator’s first lover
• Honey Hawthorne, a lustful ballerina
• Margarita del Campo (Violeta del Valle), a one-breasted beauty who entraps the narrator in a consuming passion

The Novel

Cabrera Infante’s inferno centers on women or, rather, on their ultimate inaccessibility even when attainable. The twelve-year-old narrator, an Alexander Portnoy avant la lettre, dreams about love and cerebrates about sex in a rumpled, one-room tenement apartment. His father, one of the founders of the clandestine Cuban Communist Party, has recently moved the family to Havana and there started to work in the newly created party newspaper, Hoy. It is 1941, and the spindly adolescent has the impression that he has died and gone to heaven. He is mesmerized by the trolley cars, dazzled by the lights and by the equally luminous characters who people the tenement building, veritable walking novels who enact the human comedy a mere step from his door. Life can well imitate art because art is so much better than life (at least in the hero’s mind) that it need not fear the competition. One art form, especially, has thrilled the narrator ever since a friend of the family took the narrator and his brother to see a double feature one memorable Sunday. From then on, films become the only lasting passion that he will know. They are made even better because, in the womblike darkness of seedy and not-so-seedy theaters, the films become amalgamated with erotic experience: “In the pitch-black theaters, platonic caves before the screen, the pursuit of sex interfered with my passion for films, the contact of flesh awakening me from my movie dreams.” Watching and feeling his way simultaneously, the hero fulfills the screen dreams that whet his appetite: picking up women in the dark, rubbing elbows, and squeezing thighs.

Time passes, but the heart is a lonely hunter. One passion leads to another, and all that remains of these afternoon loves are memories. The tactile memories become literature (as in Infante’s Inferno itself); the visual memories are churned out as film criticism when, not surprisingly, the narrator becomes the film critic for a well-known Cuban weekly, Carteles. Age can barely keep pace with the hero’s ever-mounting lust (even if he seldom gets the many women for whom he pines). His cronies’ attempts to initiate him (in a brothel) turn out to be “sour gropes,” a complete failure. It is not until he meets a generous, liberated woman—Juliet Estevez—that he shifts his scrimmages from the dark theater to the clear light of the bedroom. The love affair with Juliet is a turning point in the novel. When it is over, the narrator continues his love hunt, but in the instances described thereafter, the liaisons evolve far beyond the casual squeeze in the dark that typifies relationships during the first part of the novel. He marries, but this alliance is portrayed as an event that is peripheral to the action (which is, after all, about pursuit and not about fulfillment). One such pursuit, the relationship with the actress Margarita del Campo (“Daisy of the Field”), is, in fact, the culminating adventure in the narrator’s eventful life.

The last section of the novel describes in frenzied detail their tempestuous encounters during one hot Havana summer. In the end, they part ways: Margarita (who works for Venezuelan television) invites the narrator to leave everything and return to Caracas with her, but he refuses, steeling himself against the love that they both feel. The impossibility of sustaining love becomes more explicit in this episode than ever before in the novel. It is clear that quests in Infante’s Inferno are always frustratingly unfinished, and one cannot help seeing the novel as a tragicomic meditation on the incompleteness of human experience. As the narrator discovers, “the tree of knowledge of good and evil, because it is forbidden, won’t let you attain any knowledge and they’ll kick you out of the garden if you insist on tasting its fruit.”

It is impossible not to feel the hero’s profound dissatisfaction, to get a sense that he will never obtain what he covets from an ever-disappointing reality. Yet if facts are frustrating, fiction is an exhilarating experience (as the novel makes amply evident). The power of the imagination channeled through art allows the protagonist to transcend the commonplace and transform it into a lasting experience. This transformation is the substance of the long epilogue, an oneiric journey into one last movie house. The narrator enters a theater in hot pursuit of an alluring blonde who seems to give him the eye from the ticket booth. He sits next to her, and their conversation promptly evolves into a fanciful dialogue suggesting, in every way, a return in utero. Transported from the theater to a soft cave where the color varies “from deep purple to pale pink and the floor was first grainy and then striated,” the narrator finds a mysterious “book about books,” which contains fragments from a ship’s log, tales of seamen in hot pursuit of a huge, waterspouting creature which may well be “a projection of the mind, a monster of the id in a forbidden land.”

Suddenly the cave begins to heave and toss, the narrator falls, and his body begins to move along the floor, now flooded with a mudlike, red substance. He fears that he is going “to be thrown out, expelled, rejected. . . .” The book concludes with a vivid description of the experience of birth culminating with the hero’s pivotal observation, “Here’s where I came in.”

The Characters

Infante’s Inferno is composed like a film, in a series of vignettes, readily comparable to stills or to cinematic portraits. Read as a series of character portraits rather than as a series of events, these vignettes give the illusion of flow, of motion across time and space. They are further harnessed together, since all the portraits are shot by the same camera, which is the narrator’s eye. He is twelve years old when the action starts and in his thirties when it ends, but since the narrative (ostensibly autobiographical) is presented from an adult perspective, the boy has many of the perceptions of the grown man and all the foreknowledge that only hindsight can provide. He is lustful, hilarious, perpetually unsatisfied, a body hunter in the dark jungle of theaters. As he grows older, he trades the classroom for the school of life, careening through Havana in hot pursuit of skirts. Most women escape him; they are described in fleeting, if memorable, vignettes. At least three of them accept his overtures, however, and their character portraits are the longest and most developed in the book. The first is Juliet Estévez, the girl who provides the narrator’s sexual initiation. An ardent devotee of art and a body worshiper, Juliet is both liberated and liberating, a free spirit whose deepest physical pleasure comes from making love to the accompaniment of Claude Debussy’s La Mer. The next woman to fall for the hero’s fanciful line is Honey Hawthorne, a lustful ballerina whose strong penchant for fiction (her ostensible virginity; her hair color) is equaled only by a fiery penchant for making love. Yet neither character is as charismatic as the passionate, complex, two-named and one-breasted Margarita del Campo, a green-eyed Amazon who makes Tom Jones’s most lubricous adventures pale by comparison. Besides her prowess in bed, Margarita offers the narrator a companionship that goes far beyond the sundry brief encounters which fill the pages of Infante’s Inferno. In the end, however, the hero turns cad and turns away from her. Momentarily doubled up with grief, he is swiftly consoled by Margarita’s sister.

In the epilogue, the hero goes back to his first love (from which he has never strayed very far): films. It is here that he finds contentment and a sense of fulfillment. It is here, in this dark womb, that he mimics a return to the soft and pliable “caves” (both reminiscent of Plato’s construct and allusive to maternity and birth) before concluding with a last quip, as affirmative of life as Molly Bloom’s “yes” at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Critical Context

Infante’s Inferno is undoubtedly the finest work written by Cabrera Infante since his ground-breaking Tres tristes tigres (1967; Three Trapped Tigers, 1971). Erotic tableaux are central to the development and understanding of this novel as a whole, but they must be seen as vehicles or motives for reflection: on the nature of relationships, on the incompleteness of human experience, and, not least important, on man’s (and woman’s) artful penchant for fantasy. Like Georges Bataille and William Burroughs, Cabrera Infante portrays sex as a form of expenditure, as the most primal form of expression. This does not mean, in any way, that his erotic fiction should be seen as pornography; he makes evident that the body is in every way the mirror of the soul, the most tangible evidence of being. By depicting the coming together of man and woman and the profound loneliness of both, he has chosen to ponder essential questions, ontological in nature, from a philosophical perspective but with the acerbic wit typical of Menippean satire.

Eroticism as the raw core of human experience is essential to understanding Infante’s Inferno, but the reader must keep foremost in mind that sex in this novel is always remembered—lived in the past and re-created in the present. For this reason, Infante’s Inferno is also a witty meditation on that most Proustian of preoccupations: the act of remembrance. Yet, whereas the French novelist believed that an accurate, untainted retrieval of the past was possible through the senses, Cabrera Infante makes clear that to remember is to re-create, a notion that he develops with relish as an inquiry into the role of the artist (transformer of facts) and the relationship between life and art.

The fact that Cabrera Infante is, as he himself states, “the only British author writing in Spanish,” adds yet another nuance to this art of transformations. The excellent translation from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine was done in collaboration with the author. It is in most ways the same canvas, but painted with a different brush or, at least, with a change of varnish. Naturally, many of the puns and even proper nouns have had to be altered and, in some instances, completely recast. The further addition and transformation of sentences makes Infante’s Inferno more a brilliant transcription than a translation, a phenomenon as rare in the history of fiction as the novels of Vladimir Nabokov.

Bibliography

Cabrera Infante, Guillermo. “Wit and Wile with Guillermo Cabrera Infante.” Interview by Suzanne Jill Levine. Americas 47 (July-August, 1995): 24-29. In this interview, the Cuban-born author discusses his career and the influences that have shaped it. He talks about his Cuban and British roots, his love of puns, and his interest in film and music. A good source of background information.

Rogers, Michael, et al. “Classic Returns” Library Journal 123 (September 1, 1998): 224. Offers brief reviews of reprinted books, including Infante’s Inferno.

Souza, Raymond D. Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Two Islands, Many Worlds. Austin: University of Texas, 1996. An informative and lively biography of one of the most prominent contemporary Cuban writers. Souza’s work offers intriguing insight into Cabrera Infante’s family history as well as his literary career.

Steinberg, Sybil, and Jonathan Bing. “Notes.” Publishers Weekly 245 (June 15, 1998): 44-45. This article reviews several books, including Infante’s Inferno. Although the review of Cabrera Infante’s book is brief, it provides valuable insight into the novel.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. “Touchstone.” The Nation 266 (May 11, 1998): 56-57. Vargas Llosa offers a tribute to Cabrera Infante, commenting that “from the typewriter of this harassed man . . . instead of insults there poured a stream of belly laughs, puns, brilliant nonsense and fantastic tricks of rhetorical illusion.”