infante
November 26, 2007
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Sour Grapes is sad to announce the recent death of a seminal influence on the words you see before you. No, not Hunter S. Thomson, obviously, since no writer who placed himself at the very epicentre of the events he was reporting could have much relevance for such a self-effacing columnist as singing star and renowned after-dinner speaker Ian MacDonald.
No, I’m speaking, you see, of Guillermo Cabrere Infante, the Cuban novelist who died in London, aged 75, at the end of February. Apparently he went into hospital for treatment for a hip fracture, and while there he caught the dreaded staphylococcus infection British hospitals now dish out the way posh hotels give out chocolate mints.
Infante was, as everyone knows, a former Brussels-based expat. In fact he lived here from 1962 to 1965, as cultural attaché at the Cuban embassy, now situated in the Rue Roberts-Jones in Uccle, though where it was back then is anyone’s guess.
His sojourn in Brussels was brought about by a little bit of political dissent. Born of parents who were founder-members of the Cuban communist party, he had been made editor of the Castro revolution’s mouthpiece magazine Revolución. But then a documentary made by his brother was banned by the regime, to which Guillermo objected. And his goose was cooked. He was forbidden to publish from that moment on, yet for some reason he stayed in the Castro camp, and came to these shores.
And it was while he was here that he created his masterpiece, Tres Tristes Tigres, known to us English-speakers as Three Trapped Tigers. That came out in 1967, but was clearly written before then. The unpublished manuscript won an award in Spain in 1964 (Biblioteca Breve) and was nominated for the Prix Formentor in 1965.
And it was in 1965 that Infante severed his ties with the Castro regime. In that year his mother back home fell ill and died, and on his return to his homeland it became clear to Guillermo he could never return to live there. He then quit his job, in effect defecting, and moved from Brussels to London, where he spent the rest of his days.
Three Trapped Tigers, which takes us on a Dantesque trip through the Havana nightlife his brother had been banned from documenting, is the crowning achievement of his career, and one of a few seminal Latin-American novels that appeared in English in the early 1980s and, along with Borges’ Labyrinths and Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, changed our way of looking at the possibilities of fiction. It would be impossible to read any of those books without undergoing a fundamental shift in the way one approached reading, and consequently writing. The fact that some of us ended up down the cul-de-sac of humour columns is our own fault, and not Infante’s.
• And while we’re in obituary mood, may I pay a belated tribute to someone whose presence in Brussels left a deep and lasting impression on many expats. I don’t recall now whether I first met Mike Cockburn in the context of the Shakespeare Society or Cefic, the chemical industry organisation he worked for and which I covered for McGraw-Hill back in the early 1980s.
His theatrical persona is likely, let us say, to be more familiar to readers than his chemical one. Mike was a mainstay – and for once the term is not only a handy cliché – of the English-speaking theatre scene, which as any Bulletin reader will know is massive and pervasive. Mike worked with I think I’m right in saying all of the English-speaking theatre groups, as well as setting up his own TIE (Theatre in Education/Theatre in English) group.
And of course he also strayed over into the musical arena. I found out about his passing (to put myself in the centre of the narrative for a second) from a fellow choir member, who had come across him in one of his many musical outings: narrating The Snowman annually, or Peter and the Wolf, or the Carnival of the Animals, or Tubby the Tuba.
Most of us, including us professional attention-seekers, would be glad to earn one-tenth of the admiration and warmth of feeling Mike enjoyed during his long career here. Our best wishes go to his family, his colleagues and collaborators, and to everyone else for whom his passing will leave a great chilly gap.
