Before Night Falls celebrates a rebel Cuban writer. Gaby Wood looks at the man behind the film
In 1970, two novelists shared a literary prize. Gabriel Garca Mrquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Hallucinations by Reinaldo Arenas won joint first prize for best foreign novel published in France. The first of these people, a Colombian, was a supporter of Fidel Castro. He won a Nobel Prize and became the most famous Latin-American writer in the world. The other, a Cuban homosexual who was imprisoned by the revolution he had initially sought to join, died 11 years ago and remains virtually unknown.
But painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel’s movie about Arenas, Before Night Falls, based on the memoir published after the writer’s death, is a beautiful film, and received quiet praise until Javier Bardem, who plays the lead role, was nominated for an Oscar. Suddenly, the world paid attention both to the actor and to the man himself.
Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who left Havana in 1965 and knew Arenas, says Bardem’s performance is “the work of a chameleon. I don’t know how he did it he imitated Reinaldo in ways he couldn’t have known about his voice, that languid way he walked … It really is uncanny.”
Arenas was born in Holgun, in the eastern part of Cuba, in 1943. He was a self-professed guajiro, or hick, who grew up eating dirt and climbing trees; he had never known his father, and lived surrounded by generations of women. Soon, this idyll gave way to another, which was to govern the rest of his life, what one critic called his “pansexuality”. The erections of uncles and horses are remembered graphically and with equal fondness.
As the economic situation worsened under the Batista dictatorship, Arenas’s family had little food and no electricity. He decided to join Castro’s rebels when he was 15.
When Castro was in power, Arenas was given a scholarship to study agricultural economy. He was able to continue his studies in Havana, but his career made a permanent detour when he won a short-story competition in 1963 and was given a job at the national library. He became a protg of two of Cuba’s best writers, Jos Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piera. His first two novels won prizes from the Cuban Writers’ and Artists’ Union, but only the first, Celestino Before Dawn, was ever published in his own country.
The second novel was Hallucinations, about an exiled, 18th-century Mexican monk who is tortured and imprisoned. It was interpreted as a political analogy, of course, but even more offensive to the regime was the fact that Arenas somehow managed to smuggle the manuscript out of Cuba and have it published in Mexico and Europe.
According to Cabrera Infante: “It all started with his manuscript of Hallucinations. Really, they should have been more intelligent, because, after all, he was a product of the revolution. He was a peasant, incredibly poor, and he was educated by the revolution. But they didn’t take any of that into account and turned his case into a cause clbre . They were stupid more than criminal.”
The French prize that book won only had the effect of placing Arenas under continual surveillance by state security. They wanted to know who his contacts abroad were, how he had got the manuscript out, where he kept the rest of his writings. He hid his manuscripts in cement bags and gave them to various friends. One friend destroyed what he was given, another turned out to be an informer.
In Before Night Falls Arenas reflects on what has happened to the talented young writers of his generation. They were executed, or became alcoholics, or killed themselves, or turned into informers. Those who kept going had to read to each other in secret, arranging clandestine meetings in people’s houses or in rented rowing boats out at sea.
Writing, as it comes across in the memoir, is a life force, the only thing that enables Arenas to “endure a 1000 adversities”. He writes one novel three times, refusing to give in to the continual disappearance of his manuscript. These papers lost, destroyed, salvaged, smuggled become a kind of talisman, a tangible way of thinking about freedom. The last piece of advice he receives from his mentor, Lezama Lima, before Lima dies is: “Remember that our only salvation lies in words.”
Salvation lay in sex too. The variety of Arenas’s encounters is so extreme it seems improbable (at one point, some boys become aroused while they are trying to mug him; they all have sex before the boys run off with his wallet). And their frequency is such that had Schnabel shown them all his movie would have been pure porn. Sex, for Arenas, was a kind of revolution, a life force against the oppression of politics. “He could no more change his sex than he could change his nature to be a writer,” Schnabel explains, “and the combination of those two things at that moment in history was very, very volatile.”
The regime was already on his case, but when Arenas was finally arrested, it was on a charge of corruption of minors that was later to prove unsubstantiated. Still, for this he was put in El Morro castle, a colonial fortress that had been converted into the country’s toughest prison. His descriptions are harrowing there were 250 men to a cell, the stench was unbearable and, at one point he was put in solitary confinement with no food in a room too small to stand up in. After years of repeated interrogation, Arenas agreed to sign a statement promising that he would from then on only write “optimistic books”‘.
El Morro is now a tourist attraction. There is no sign at all of its having been a prison. You can walk around the ramparts, climb to the top of the lighthouse and wander around the roof where the prisoners used to be let out into the sun once or twice a month. From there, Arenas wrote, “we could look at the city of Havana, the city of our suffering, but which from up there seemed like paradise”.
When I went there last month a man beckoned me to a small cabin on the roof. “You’ll get the best view of Havana from here,” he said.
In 1980 Arenas managed to get to Miami in the Mariel boatlift. He was inteviewed by the BBC, and that film is an extraordinary portrait. Arenas chats about his childhood, speaks lightheartedly about the ironies of his life and shows the interviewer around his kitchen. He eats baby food, he explains pragmatically, because when he’s writing he just has to open a jar from the fridge and he gets all his nutrition from there.
Cabrera Infante met him then, too, and says Arenas was “very well, delighted at having escaped and having got the better of the police who had persecuted him. He became a hero of exile I wish you could have heard him at a conference in Washington. He was extraordinary, improvising before an audience. He was applauded like mad.”
Arenas was able to write and publish what he wanted in exile, and his criticism of the Castro regime though always ironic and Kafkaesque became more open. He was deserted then by people from whom he might have expected support. In The Colour of Summer he wrote what might be seen as a coded self-portrait from these times, in which a man who is born too big for an island is expatriated. His voice is so loud and his speech so beautiful that his friends as well as his enemies are jealous and he is killed. Later in the same book Arenas wrote a parable about Cuba: an island comes unstuck from its base and floats away like an enormous ship. The islanders are ecstatic, but they can’t agree on which direction to steer their country in and they argue for so long that the island and all of its people sink.
Arenas later moved to New York. “But he had a problem,” says Cabrera Infante, “which was his sexual promiscuity. We saw him at a film festival in Miami, and my wife, Miriam Gomez, told him he had to be careful because if he got ill it would be terrible for him, but a source of great joy for those in Cuba. He said, ‘Don’t worry, my little black friends are very clean.’ His idea of sexual hygiene was just a quick wipe with a towel or something, I don’t know! It was ridiculous, but also pathetic. That was what cost him his life.”
Arenas contracted Aids. He raced to write his memoirs, before “the dark night of death” fell on him.
“You’ll never find a copy of Before Night Falls in Cuba,” Schnabel says of the book. Of his own film, he says: “This movie is made for the Cuban people; I wish they could see it.”
I tried to find Arenas’s memoir in Havana, asking all the booksellers on the street and in every shop. The answer was no, but from time to time there would be a rumour someone had “The Book” but wasn’t there today; someone had them all but didn’t want to sell them.
I had resigned myself to the fact that none of Arenas’s words had survived with those for whom he had written them, when I heard a hiss across the street.
“Pssssssst! Psssssssst! Seorita!”
The man was holding a copy of Celestino Before Dawn, Arenas’s first book, whose name so perfectly mirrors his last. It was a first edition, one of 2 000 copies published in Cuba in 1967. Although it was not exactly contraband (that book was not censored there), there was something moving, somehow, about the find, a symbolic message, perhaps, about the true freedom of Arenas’s speech.
In 1990, Arenas ended his own life, leaving several addressed letters behind. Each envelope contained the same words:
“Dear friends,” he wrote, “Due to my delicate state of health and to the terrible emotional depression it causes me not to be able to continue writing and struggling for the freedom of Cuba, I am ending my life … You are the heirs of all my terrors, but also of my hope that Cuba will soon be free … I already am.”