On a fall afternoon in 1983, I interviewed the exiled Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas at Princeton University’s Firestone Library. I was writing my senior thesis on his work and, as part of my study, translating some of his fiction. (My translation of “La Vieja Rosa,” a novella, was later published by Grove.) Though I was nervous about meeting the great man, one of Cuba’s most admired writers, Arenas immediately put me at ease. “Encantado,” he said, smiling and taking my hand. Forty years old at the time, he had thick, curly black hair and enormous, sad eyes; his face was lined and leathery.
We talked for a while in the library and then went for a drive to a nearby apple orchard. “Ah, a day in the country!” Arenas exclaimed, happy to see the trees and smell the fresh air. We concluded our conversation a couple of hours later on the platform of the train that would take Arenas to Princeton Junction and then back to his derelict apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. In a soft, melodic voice, Arenas answered my questions about his writing process, his influences, and the experience of exile with a natural eloquence and often startling profundity. Below is an edited and condensed version of our conversation, which is being published on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Arenas’s brilliant memoir, “Before Night Falls.”
Arenas was born in Cuba in 1943, in the eastern province of Oriente. An only child, he spent his time roaming the fields and forests around his family’s farm, captivated by the natural world. In 1959, he joined Castro’s rebels in the mountains, but he soon grew disillusioned. After toiling as an agricultural accountant at a chicken farm, he studied politics and economics in a government-sponsored program at the University of Havana and began working at the National Library, a job that allowed him time to write. His first book, “Celestino Antes del Alba” (published in the United States as “Singing from the Well”), won second prize in the 1965 UNEAC (Cuban Writers and Artists Union) competition, and was published in 1967. It was the only book Arenas was allowed to publish in Cuba. “El Mundo Alucinante” (published in the United States as “The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando”) was smuggled out of Cuba and published in France in 1968; a collection of short stories, “Con los Ojos Cerrados,” was published in Uruguay in 1972. Persecuted by the Castro regime for his homosexuality, counterrevolutionary writings, and publishing activity, Arenas spent two nightmarish years in prison. He was released in 1976 and, in 1980, he escaped to Miami, slipping away in the chaos of the Mariel boatlift.
Unhappy in Miami, which he would describe in his memoir as “a caricature of Cuba,” Arenas moved to New York after a few months. There, in addition to writing poetry, essays, plays, and stories, he continued work on his semi-autobiographical “Pentagonía,” a passionate indictment of tyranny consisting of five novels.
In 1987, Arenas was diagnosed with AIDS. He worked at a furious rate, finishing “Pentagonía” and dictating “Before Night Falls” on more than twenty cassettes. In December of 1990, near death, he committed suicide. In his final letter, sent to friends and newspapers, Arenas wrote, “I end my life voluntarily because I cannot continue working … I do not want to convey to you a message of defeat but of continued struggle and of hope. Cuba will be free. I already am.” “Before Night Falls” was named one of the Times’ best books of 1993, and, in 2000, was adapted by Julian Schnabel into a film of the same name.
What are you working on now?
In my typewriter at the moment is a heretical novel that I’m calling “Cecilia Valdés.” It’s a rewrite of Villaverde’s “Cecilia Valdés,” a nineteenth-century Cuban classic that’s out of date. I’m interested in how to revalorize things that are suggested but not stated in the original, maybe because at that time you couldn’t state them. And I’m using irony, mocking that whole century, which was a terrible century, pro-slavery but at the same time with a very great society. I’m really enthusiastic because I’ve returned to a more imaginative theme, departing somewhat from the Cuban reality, which is the kind of thing that interests me a lot. I also have some stories, tales that unfold in New York, and I’ve written a novella called “Journey to Havana.” It’s about a person who returns to Havana in the year 2000 to revisit the past, after having lived here for about thirty years.
All in all, I’ve been quite busy.
It seems like it.
In spite of everything. Even though I’ve moved.
The ceiling of your apartment …
The ceiling was horrible. It got waterlogged, started leaking, and collapsed. Luckily my papers didn’t get wet. But in my new place, I’ve been waiting one month for them to connect the telephone.
How would you describe your writing process?
I never keep a fixed schedule. I like to write for a while, move around, read, drink something, come back. But when I’ve entered the world of the novel, that demands more concentration. It’s hard to even write a letter, because it means leaving that world. To put aside the typewriter and take out letter paper, or stop because you have to pay the phone bill, is terrible.
I won’t say that I write every day, because I don’t, but I’m always thinking. Often I don’t write anything and instead go to the gym or take a walk. But I’m always with my characters. They start to dominate me and occupy my life, so one way or another I’m working. For me the act of writing, of bringing a certain world to the typewriter, is only one moment of the writing. There are other levels, like investigating the lives of the characters and knowing what it’s like to be with them, seeing what they’re thinking and feeling and then quickly starting to write, so I don’t lose any of it.
There’s a very beautiful moment in the creation of something when you have no idea how far it will go. It’s an almost magical moment, when you’re constructing something from nothing, when this thing comes alive and you feel the characters start to live and you no longer have to live for them.
What would you say about your formal influences or the style that you use?
It depends on the situation. If there’s a moment—as in my novel “Farewell to the Sea”—where you want to satirize all the uniforms, swords, and so forth of a dictator, you can do a caricature of the baroque. If you’re describing the characters’ nightmares, that may be the time for surrealism. All of these techniques or styles can come into play as you realize your vision. For me, an entirely surrealist novel, for example, might end up being of little use because, since anything can happen, nothing has meaning. But there’s a moment for every style. That’s why I advocate an eclectic technique.
One of the most important things in the books I write is rhythm. In poems, short stories, novels. Silence is also very important. I wrote “Farewell to the Sea” in cantos—and silences. And I’ve never been interested in telling a story in a purely anecdotal or linear way. “Realist” literature is, to me, the least realistic, because it eliminates what gives the human his reality, his mystery, his power of creation, of doubt, of dreaming, of thinking, of nightmare.
Is there such a thing as a Cuban novel?
I wouldn’t go so far as to categorically state that a Cuban novel exists. If we compare the Cuban novelistic tradition with the French or English or North American ones, there hasn’t been an accumulation of really impressive works. But Cuba is a surprising and mysterious case, because such a small island that’s rather unfortunate in every way has, in each generation, produced very good poets, novelists, and short-story writers. There’s been an important Cuban literary tradition that, in spite of—or maybe because of—so many hardships, has shown an unusual continuity. This has been demonstrated over two hundred years, in a country where almost nobody reads. With the exception of the police, who read your manuscripts.
Do you prefer writing short stories or novels?
I’ve always been very interested in the short story. Compared to the often exhausting world of the novel, the short story offers a quicker reward, and there’s something appealing about its greater spontaneity. Writing a novel can be a very heavy undertaking, and you never know if you’ve really finished. Often you can’t pull it off. With a short story, you aim and you fire. If you hit the target, you have a good story; if not, you have something worthless, but at least you obtained it in a relatively short period of time. While with the novel, you either build something new or end up completely destroyed.
What do you think about poetry?
Poetry is part of everything. You can’t have a really good work if it’s not touched by poetry. Poetry manifests itself in millions of ways: as rhythm, metaphor, mood. Sometimes it’s a type of emotional outpouring or necessity that’s not expressed through characters but through feelings. To me, poetry is the tragic sense of man. It’s a way of seeing things in the most complete way, the most absolute, and, to a certain extent, the most perfect. Where there’s no poetry, there’s no beauty, and without beauty no kind of artistic work can exist.
Unfortunately, as you grow more aware of the craft of writing, you often write fewer poems, maybe because you know it’s not easy to create a good poem. So when you lose your innocence, you write less! When I was younger, I wrote a lot of poems—too many. All of them have been lost, and that may be a good thing.
Which of your books do you like best?
I was thinking about that a few days ago, and concluded that what I’ve written is just one book with a range of epochal and, to a certain extent, emotional variations. For example, “Singing from the Well” is about the childhood of a character who later becomes the teen-ager Fortunato, who later becomes the adult Hector in “Farewell to the Sea.” But that same character is the one who writes the books of poems, the one who wrote the epic poem “El Central,” and is to some degree the main character in “The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando”: persecuted, suffering from a revolution he himself helped bring about, falling prey to persecution again. In the end, they’re like pieces of a single universe. What I really like of what I’ve written are fragments scattered through everything I’ve done.
Is there something that you’d like the reader to understand or see after or while reading your work?
It’s interesting—no one’s ever asked me that. What I want is for people to both think and enjoy while reading. To experience an esthetic enjoyment, pleasure through beauty, rather than through a simple anecdote or social critique. I’m interested in readers perceiving a certain depth, not just something superficial that could be conveyed in a pamphlet. I want them to feel a delight attained through mystery and, of course, I don’t want them to feel they’ve wasted their time.
In general, you have to believe the reader is eternal. If a work of yours that people are reading now endures, it will be read in a hundred years or—optimistically—a thousand. You have to think that way because otherwise you don’t write or you only end up writing newspaper articles.
Since you’ve been here, have you noticed a difference in perspective? What’s the perception of life compared with in Cuba?
It’s completely different in that here, you don’t feel the weight of a flagrant and inescapable evil. I’m much more relaxed in this sense; I can work more peacefully and my imagination can roam more freely. On the other hand, the experience of having lived in Cuba is also very important, because it’s given me an understanding of history that people who haven’t suffered like that lack. You can no longer see anything with innocent eyes. You know that behind every political system there’s a series of political interests that are what shape you, and people more or less work in agreement with these interests or against them. Knowing this has given me a critical ability that I’ll always be able to use.
Would you like to continue living in New York? Is it a good place to write?
Well, I don’t really know. Frankly, since I was born in Cuba and lived there, I think I would have to live there if reality did not condemn me not to live there. Every person who lives outside his context is always a bit of a ghost, because I am here, but at the same time I remember a person who walked those streets, who is there, and that same person is me. So sometimes I really don’t know if I am here or there. And at times, the longing to be there is greater than the necessity of being here.
I’m working on a few stories that take place in New York and will reflect, above all, the sordidness and solitude of life here. I want to create a new body of work now, a literature of uprootedness about someone who’s living in an environment that’s not his own. In truth, this isn’t a personal calamity but a universal one, because the world is full of people who aren’t living where they should be, and if they are they have to run away. All the literature of this century is somewhat burdened by the theme of uprootedness.
I was thinking you could live somewhere more similar to Cuba.
I’ve thought about that, yes, I’ve thought about that. I don’t know what to do. I’ve been to Puerto Rico, Spain, other places where there’s Spanish of one kind or another and, up to a certain point, the tropical sun. But I don’t know if I could live in those places, because the Spanish is Spanish in a frightening way and, in the end, they’re too specific. The Puerto Rican is alarmingly Puerto Rican, with his concept of nationalism and a range of things that are practically nineteenth-century but, O.K., maybe valid. For someone who’s been through so much, though, those things aren’t very important. It doesn’t interest me at all that the E.T.A. terrorists think Catalonia should separate from Spain. Those things have such little universal relevance, since freedom is more than a sense of nationality.
In the end, for me all of those things are almost childish, you see? But not for them. And so I would feel like a stranger there, while in New York I don’t, because everyone is a stranger. So here, I don’t feel better, but I feel less bad than in those places where there are these provincial notions.
I really like the solitude of New York, and the people. It’s a city that allows you to have both people and solitude. In other places, you suffer the people or you suffer the solitude, and both are terrible. But New York allows you that equilibrium: you write, you mix with the multitudes, leave them, jump back in. Still, I don’t know where I can settle. I really don’t know. It’s something that worries me a lot, and surely I’m never going to find the place. But that’s the way it goes.
When you think about what you love or what you hate, what would that be?
In what, literature?
No, in general, in life.
What I love most is life itself. I’m very afraid of death. Nevertheless, it seems to me that it’s a solution. It’s the only thing that gives meaning to life! (Laughter.) I really like people in general. People, the mystery of the human being, and the sea above all. The sea is a mystery.
What I don’t like is … well, just imagine. There are so many things not to like. Stupidity, which is something terrible, and the militarization of the world. Dogma. When someone talks to me about some dogma, I can no longer talk with that person. Dogma can be religious as well as political; it’s the same. You can’t engage in any dialogue because the person is already wielding an absolute truth. It’s like pounding on a rock—there’s no way in. I think that, in the end, what I hate most in the world is fanaticism.
Does a writer have a duty to himself and to society?
The writer has a fundamental responsibility to write well or to write the best he can, because if he doesn’t he’s not a writer. And when a writer writes, he’s always referring to a social and historical context. It’s impossible for Argentinian writers not to write as Argentinians, because to be Argentinian is a circumstance of fate, like it is to be Cuban. When you analyze the bourgeois writer’s novel, you see the shortcomings of bourgeois society. Even when you try to write a fantasy story, in some way that fantasy is going to be connected to a reality. But regardless, if someone is a true writer—not an opportunist who wants to be in favor with the government of the day—that person is always going to be for freedom. Because the simple truth is that without freedom, the writer cannot exist. And the writer who is for freedom is, by definition, not for any totalitarian system. So the duty of the writer is to write well and champion freedom. And he champions freedom because he has an obligation—what better obligation than this?
Ann Tashi Slater’s translation of Reinaldo Arenas’s “La Vieja Rosa” was published as “Old Rosa” (Grove). She is working on a novel based on the Tibetan side of her family and a travel memoir set in India.
Photograph: Louis Monier/Gamma-Rapho via Getty
