By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Nov 6 2001 (IPS)

The Gentleman from Paris, for decades Cuba’s most famous madman, has returned to the streets of the Old City of Havana to mingle with passersby.

He no longer presents women and children with gifts of flowers. Now it is he who receives roses from people who chat with him and affectionately squeeze his shoulder, as if he were still flesh and blood rather than a bronze sculpture.

The legendary Gentleman from Paris appears in his habitual black cape, carrying the bag that was always slung over his shoulder, along with his portfolio of newspapers in French and Spanish that he read and reread lying on a bench in one of Havana’s parks or curled up in a corner of the city.

Those who still remember his black-clad figure say he was never aggressive and that he never begged. The Gentleman from Paris only accepted help in exchange for flowers, postcards that he himself had coloured, or pencil stubs decorated with multicoloured strings.

The statute “is very pretty,” singer-songwriter Angel Quintero told IPS on his way back from the San Francisco de Asís plaza where the latest work of sculptor José Villa Soberón was placed.

But not everyone was equally pleased with the artist’s aim to make people feel the famous homeless man was still wandering among them. “I felt as if he were falling on top of me. I almost tripped over him,” said Milagros Ramos, an employee in a state enterprise who confessed that she did not enjoy “the sensation of closeness, as if he were just another person among the living.”

The idea, according to Villa Soberón, was “to perpetuate in Havana an image that for decades was an unavoidable legend in the city, and to which cultural references have been made in music, films, the plastic arts and literature.”

When “you looked at him closely, he inspired great tenderness, and I tried to capture that expression. The most difficult thing was to give him a warm, kind expression that emanated tranquillity,” said the artist.

Villa Soberón also made the sculpture of John Lennon that sits on a park bench in Havana. Another of his works, representing Mexican movie star Germán Valdés (Tintán), is in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez.

The artist’s intention was for the sculptures of Lennon, Tintán and the Gentleman from Paris to be “within reach of the people,” without any obstacles between them and the public.

The Gentleman from Paris’ real name was José María López Lledín. He was born on Dec 30, 1899 into a wealthy family in the northwestern Spanish region of Galicia, and came to Cuba at age 14 as part of a wave of European immigrants.

It is said that in the early 1920s he was accused of participating in a robbery at the grocery store where he worked as a cashier. By the time he emerged from prison a few years later, he had lost his mental faculties.

Another version has it that López Lledín was sent to jail for accidentally killing a man. Yet another account says he became deranged after losing his family in the wreck of the Valbanera steamship off the coast of Havana in the early 20th century.

Whatever his real story, he was already a well-known figure in Havana by the 1950s, when singer Barbarito Diez made popular a song that said: “Look who’s coming over there/the Gentleman from Paris.”

López Lledín’s specific psychological disorder, one of whose symptoms is “delusions of grandeur”, led him to utter unforgettable phrases like: “Tell Emperor Hirohito that I am the emperor of peace, which is more important than being king.”

Another of his memorable claims was “I come from Lugo, the walled city that the moors were unable to enter, the land of the kingdom of León. King Alfonso XII hunted there, and at times we hunted together.”

When he was admitted to the Havana Psychiatric Hospital in the 1980s due to poor health, the institution’s directors respected his imaginary titles, and assigned him a private room.

“I am in my earthly paradise, in my country house, and they (the nurses) are my chambermaids,” he would tell anyone he ran into while wandering the extensive hospital gardens.

But shortly before he died of a lung ailment in 1985, he confessed to his doctor: “I am no longer the Gentleman from Paris. These are not times for aristocracy.”

Only musicologist Helio Orovio attended his funeral. Five years later, Orovio, a group of academics and the chief historian of the city of Havana transferred López Lledín’s remains to the old temple of San Francisco de Asís.

The centenary of the birth of the Gentleman from Paris was celebrated in Cuba and Galicia, and even by the Cuban exile community in the United States, which organised an exhibition of plastic arts on the legendary madman.

“His elegance, dignity and the nobility of his soul were such that they won the admiration of Havana residents, to the point that he became a kind of symbol of the city,” the Cuban daily Juventud Rebelde wrote after his death.

Excerpt: