The Halfway HouseBy Guillermo Rosales
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Reviewed by Anis Shivani
The house said “BOARDING HOME” on the outside, but I knew that it would be my tomb… I’ve been admitted to more than three psychiatric wards since I’ve been here, in the city of Miami, where I arrived six months ago, fleeing the culture, music, literature, television, sporting events, history and philosophy of the island of Cuba. I’m not a political exile. I’m a complete exile… It’s one of those halfway houses that pick up the dregs of society. Beings with empty eyes, dry cheeks, toothless mouths, filthy bodies. I think such places exist only here, in the United States. They’re also known simply as homes.
Thus begins Cuban writer Guillermo Rosales’s short novel Halfway House. First published in 1987 (after winning a contest judged by Octavio Paz), the book gained recognition only this decade, with its publication in French. Rosales (1946-1993) was an exile from the Cuban regime who arrived in Miami in the late 1970s, having already been diagnosed with mental illness.
Our typical image of the Cuban American exile is of one who arrives gratefully on the shores of Florida, eager to leave behind the oppression of Fidel Castro’s regime. However, Rosales’s hero, William Figeuras, like Rosales himself, is a partisan of the revolution, and cannot so easily leave behind his baggage; moreover, like Rosales, Figueras is a writer (“by the age of fifteen," he says, "I had read the great Proust, Hesse, Joyce, Miller, Mann”). So his arrival in America is less an escape and more a passage from one hell into another. As with other novels of confinement written by writers who have experienced oppressive political systems, Rosales raises radical doubt about how we understand mental health and illness—and by extension, society’s health and illness.
By placing the doubly-exiled Figeuras in a halfway house—not an outright prison or mental asylum—Rosales vastly complicates the moral calculus as it operates with regard to choice, victimization, testimony, articulation, defeat, and escape. The halfway house is where those difficult to absolutely categorize—whether as criminals or psychotics or whatever—end up. The halfway house, then, mirrors the wider society in many respects, whereas the same cannot necessarily be said of the mental asylum or the prison, where normal rules of exchange and value are more greatly distorted. The characters assigned to the halfway house are not the extremes we are morally comfortable with, but the more ambiguous in-between states: “It was one of those marginal refuges where the desperate and hopeless go—crazy ones for the most part, with a smattering of old people abandoned by their families to die of loneliness so they won’t screw up life for the winners.” The denizens are outcasts because they aren’t addicted to the same rules of success as those who fit into the mainstream.
Upon arrival, Figueras meets Curbelo, the ruthless manager who runs any number of scams to exploit the sponsors, private or public, of the residents, and his mafia-like assistant, Arsenio, who together manage such residents as:
René and Pepe, the two mentally retarded men; Hilda, the decrepit old hag who constantly wets herself; Pino, a gray, silent man who just glares at the horizon with a hard expression; Reyes, an old one-eyed man whose glass eye constantly oozes yellow liquid; Ida, the grande dame come to ruin; Louie, a strong American with greenish-yellow skin who constantly howls like a mad wolf; Pedro, an old Indian, perhaps Peruvian, silent witness to the world’s evils; Tato, the homosexual; Napoleon, the midget; and Castaño, a ninety-year-old geezer who can only shout “I want to die! I want to die! I want to die!”
A commonplace of confinement literature is for the protagonist to think of himself as normal, and others as criminals—or “the nuts,” as Figueras thinks of the others. The conditions are filthy and disgusting, the food scarce and repulsive, and Curbelo and Arsenio feel free to take sexual advantage of the residents, no matter how unattractive they are. Sheer necessity of survival dictates that the refined Figueras think of himself as a victim, yet because he is technically free to leave anytime—that is, as long as he satisfies the state that he is no danger to himself or others—we know his self-presentation must be skewed. On the one hand, he has read and understood the greatest literature. On the other hand, the Miami Babylon of that era—and Rosales captures that late seventies/early eighties spirit perfectly, even in the few glimpses we get of the outside world—pushes him to seek refuge in just such a place as the halfway house. The old revolutionary is a cipher without his anger, but the targets of anger, in America’s capitalist society, are elusive, and, moreover, forlorn and unreal themselves.
When the love interest appears—Frances, who lets Figueras touch her anywhere, saying only, “Yes, my angel, yes”—Figueras’s confidence, in dealing with Curbelo and Arsenio, and the outside world, rises immeasurably, as it must. He starts dreaming of a cozy domestic setup with Frances. A state-assigned psychiatrist is impressed with Figueras’s knowledge of literature—“In this damned city, I don’t think anyone has read Hemingway the way you have”—and gives him a clean bill of health, so that the halfway house is no longer compelled to keep him. Figueras and Frances figure that with their combined monthly government checks they should be able to rent a small apartment.
We know, of course, that this ending cannot possibly come to fruition, but for a short while, Figueras dangles a dream of normality before himself. Getting the psychiatrist to believe in his sanity is a major step forward. Whatever he witnessed in Cuba—his presumed betrayal, or perhaps his excess of loyalty, which may amount to the same—keeps spoiling his mood, but the possibility intrigues him that with the love of a good woman, he can set matters right. In the end, he is worse off than before for having had his glimpse of happiness.
In this short, fiery novel, Rosales raises the ultimate questions of human freedom and happiness in a world insanely corrupted by the disciplinary motive. The genre in which Rosales makes his contribution is one of the most important and pervasive in Western literature, yet Rosales discovers deep strangeness within a pattern that ought to be utterly familiar to us by now, suggesting that we still haven’t begun to comprehend the reasons why we all collude in the evil bargains to compromise our humanity.