Before Night Falls

Arenas’s first memory is of eating dirt with his cousin Dulce María when they are two. Arenas’s teenaged mother, Oneida Fuentes, raises him after his father abandons his promise to marry Fuentes. Arenas and his mother live in poverty in rural Cuba in his grandparents’ house, where other abandoned women from the family also live. Arenas learns to hate his father for seducing his mother.

Arenas’s mother remains celibate and never marries to spite his father. She contemplates suicide but refrains because of Arenas. Whenever she tries to comfort Arenas, she invariably picks him up too violently and drops him onto his head; his head is covered with wounds throughout his childhood.

Arenas’s grandmother, the matriarch of the house, fascinates Arenas because “[s]he peed standing up, and spoke with God” (37), who she beseeches to explain the many misfortunes that befall her family. She raises 11 daughters and three sons. Her husband, Arenas’s grandfather, is a former promiscuous playboy who beats her, talks to himself, and blasphemes to spite his wife.

In the bustle of his grandmother’s house, Arenas feels lonely and unloved: “My existence was not even justified, nobody cared” (39). The advantage of this inattention is the freedom to explore the forest and fields. Climbing trees in the forest, Arenas enters a refuge from life on the ground: “To climb a tree is to slowly discover a unique world, rhythmic, magical, and harmonious, with its worms, insects, birds, and other living things, all apparently insignificant creatures, telling us their secrets” (39). Arenas populates the fields with imaginary figures for companionship.

Arenas escapes death many times in childhood. At five, he contracts meningitis, then considered fatal. He recovers after his grandmother brings him to a psychic healer. Arenas also survives falling from the top of a tree, getting bucked by a wild colt, and falling down a well.

The figures Arenas imagines in the fields begin to haunt him, following him to the nearby river, Río Lirio. The river scares and entices Arenas: people say that a white dog whose apparition spells death haunts its banks.

At six, Arenas realizes he is gay when he sees a group of young men swimming nude in Río Lirio. Soon thereafter, Arenas discovers masturbation. Despite his shame and fear that it will kill him, the pleasure is so strong that Arenas becomes addicted to masturbation, preferring it to sleep.

Arenas begins attending school at the age of six. He develops crushes and friendships with boys, through whom he learns that masturbation is common. Nevertheless, Arenas does not have any sexual encounters with the boys. Instead, Arenas has sex with hens, goats, and sows. At eight years old, he and the other boys regularly have sex with a mare.

Arenas’s first sexual encounters with people are with his cousins. He regularly plays doctor with Dulce María. When he is eight, Arenas has sex with his 12-year-old cousin Orlando. The tryst satisfies Arenas’s curiosity but leaves him feeling sexually unsatisfied and guilty: “It seemed to me that we had done something terrible, that in some way I had condemned myself for the rest of my life” (48).

The day after he has sex with Orlando, Arenas attends a séance with his mother and aunts. He worries that the spirits ventriloquizing the attendees will expose his tryst, but to his relief, they do not. Orlando later marries a woman and has children.

One of Arenas’s chores is to fetch water from the well, where one day he sees his grandfather bathing. His grandfather’s testicles, enlarged by a hernia, disturb and entice Arenas. Thereafter, a vision of his grandfather raping his mother haunts him; simultaneously, Arenas becomes jealous of his grandmother and aunts because they have husbands with whom to have sex.

Arenas treasures Christmas Eve, a joyous family party of special food, drink, and music presided over by his grandmother. Arenas enjoys watching the festivities from a perch in a tree and riding down a hill on Orlando’s bicycle into the party.

Another occasion Arenas treasures is the village corn harvest. Everyone husks the corn on one evening over giant cloths. For this special evening, Arenas’s grandmother prepares coconut sweetmeats: “This delicacy was served at midnight, while the cloths were still being filled with kernels and I was rolling around and around on them” (56).

Arenas feels like an outsider in his family: “I always thought that my family, including my mother, saw me as a weird creature, useless, confused, or crazy; a being outside the framework of their lives” (59). Cuba’s torrential tropical rains and lightning storms console Arenas in his alienation: He loses himself playing naked in the storms.

Arenas sometimes fantasizes about throwing himself into the river engorged with rainfall, believing he would find peace in the torrent: “Those waters were turbid and restless, powerful and lonely. It was all I had; only in those waters, in that river, had nature accepted me and now summoned me in its moment of greatest glory” (58). He never realizes this fantasy.

Alone in the fields, Arenas extemporizes operatic songs. In these impassioned performances, Arenas escapes his loneliness and confusion into temporary peacefulness.

His family shares four bedrooms in his grandparents’ house. Arenas and his mother sleep in a room abutting the pigsty that is infested with chiggers, which sometimes prevent Arenas from sleeping.

Arenas thinks that he always had a large sexual appetite. Between the ages of seven and ten, he has sex with animals and holes he carves in trees; his cousins do the same. He claims that this is common in the Cuban countryside: “life in the country is lived close to nature and, therefore, to sexuality. The animal world is always ruled by sexual urges” (62). He adds that this rural sexuality is unbound by inhibitions and taboos: “In the country, sexual energy generally overcomes all prejudice, repression, and punishment. That force, the force of nature, dominates” (63). When he is eight, Arenas often rides into town in the same saddle as his uncle, who becomes aroused and ejaculates in his pants. Both ignore this. Arenas enjoys these rides and in retrospect sees nothing wrong with them, writing that upon their return, he, his uncle, and his wife (who would come to greet them) were all very happy.

Violence is everywhere in the country, in both the husbandry of animals and in nature. Livestock are slaughtered and butchered in the open. Bulls are castrated with wire and hammer. At night Arenas hears predators killing prey in the jungle.

Animal violence is often linked to sex. Un-castrated bulls fight and injure each other for sexual supremacy over the herd. Once, Arenas and his mother have to dismount their mare because it wants to have sex with a stallion that appears: “We had to jump off and allow them, right in front of us, to complete their copulation, a sexual encounter that was both powerful and violent and really so beautiful that it would have aroused anybody” (67). As they ride in silence afterwards, Arenas imagines that both he and his mother wish they were the mare.

The morning fog brings a wondrous peacefulness to the country, cloaking its harshness: “The fog covered and ennobled this rather desolate and barren land, giving it a kind of aura” (68).

The country is also magical at night. Arenas’s grandmother introduces him to the mysterious nighttime world, seeding in him the sense for the fantastic that later inspires his writing. Arenas’s grandmother lives in a rich metaphysical world. She forecasts the weather and predicts the future in the stars. She performs rituals to appease spirits and ward away witches. She questions and argues with spirits that inhabit trees.

Arenas’s grandmother raises 14 children—all of whom she ensures become literate—manages the family farm, and endures her husband’s frequent beatings. Unlike Arenas’s mother, to whom Arenas was a reminder of his father’s betrayal, his grandmother treats him affectionately.

Country life is rooted in the earth. The village midwife rubs dirt into the bellybuttons of infants after cutting the umbilical cord. Arenas’s first crib is a hole in the earth, in which he eventually learns to stand. He and his cousins play with dirt, throwing it at each other, mixing it into mud, and digging in it for treasure. His family works the earth at their farm. Finally, the dead are buried in the earth, where they transform into new life: a flower, a tree, a plant (76).

Though they live 30 miles from the sea, most of Arenas’s family have never seen it. Arenas’s grandmother has a saying: “‘The sea swallows a man every day’” (77). This saying only heightens Arenas’s fascination with the sea. His grandmother takes him to the nearest seaport, Gibara, on a visit to his aunt and uncle. Seeing the sea for the first time is an indescribable experience.