This Afternoon I Saw the Rain, I Saw People…
By Eduardo N. Cordovi Hernandez
HAVANA TIMES – In Cuba, it has become part of the new normal, as if it were a social protocol or daily routine, to replace the old expressions of greeting that we have repeated since time immemorial—things like “Good morning,” “How are you?” or “How’s it going?”—with phrases such as: “Hey, but how long is this going to last?”, “Things get worse every day,” or “What do you think of how things are?”
Communication during encounters has shifted from showing others our good wishes or interest in their health, to inquiring about the state of reality in the immediate future. This is because the daily grind offers us total certainty about uncertainty—whether dramatic or dangerous—over what the coming hours may bring.
Everything changes, constantly, and it has always been so. But we expect, and believe it normal, logical, or natural, that changes will be positive, pleasant, useful, or necessary to assure us that history fulfills what we call evolution, development, progress. Maybe we are misinformed, outdated. Perhaps there is something skewed in our perception of what we believe about the chain of universal events.
Most people, it’s very likely, don’t realize it, because they get stuck at the surface effects of events. Let’s say: if reality were a stage play, most remain caught in the emotion of the immediate impressions. They linger on evaluating the scenery, the colors, the beauty, the skill or the fluidity of the actors, the music, the entanglement of the plot… Very few “catch” what the playwright meant to say—or what others later discovered the work was really saying in itself, without the author even being conscious of it. Perhaps this is the importance of criticism or the emergence of the essay as a genre.
What I’m getting at is that magical moment when reality unfolds and we interpret it. It’s in that instant that we decide the fate of our present happiness or our future misery; because, in that interval, we either awaken from the fantasy or continue to sleep deeply under our social hypnosis.
See for yourself.
Last Saturday I was convinced since early morning that it was Friday. (I hope that’s not pathological yet.)
It was past two in the afternoon, and rain threatened, when someone called me asking if I was already on my way. That was when I realized my slip in time, and suddenly the minute hand was racing.
Generally, I spend the week at home, where I keep my studio in the living room to paint, do pyrography, and engrave glasses and cups; my little office in the dining room to write; and my workshop for wood carving, clay modeling, and where, for a time, I made doors, windows, and wrought-iron grilles to close off porches and patios. On weekends, I go to my partner’s house in Old Havana. I always go on Fridays, but that week, because of work, I had arranged to go on Saturday. The thing is, on Saturday, to me it still felt like Friday. Phew!
Transportation is a headache, and waiting for something that may never come drives me crazy. Not anymore. I’ve decided to go on foot. I walk about six kilometers in an hour and a half, and I even enjoy it; it makes me feel healthy. But this time I was carrying my new laptop as extra weight, under a sky darkened to a grayish-violet toward the west; strong winds, the smell of rain, flashes of lightning, and claps of thunder…
I reached La Virgen del Camino and found an A-50 bus almost empty at the stop. I didn’t know if it would help, so I asked, and indeed, it could take me quite a way.
The storm grew ever more imminent. That bus left me near Cuatro Caminos, and I set off briskly up Monte Street, toward the Parque de la Fraternidad…
Oh my God! In that area it had already rained, and now there was only drizzle. Constantly, at every corner, I had to step off the porticoes and sidewalks into the avenue to avoid the garbage dumps, the huge puddles, the mud, the braced-up structures propped to prevent collapses, all of which made walking difficult. Did I say it was a gray afternoon? It was even more so in some—several—of those Havana arcades, faded, ruined, foul-smelling, or offensively disgusting.
All of this unfolded in the silence of that rainy, miserable Saturday with no identity, where some people seemed to be waiting for a bus and others seemed to be weaving risky adventures, with mischievous, drowsy, or exhausted faces. The landscape was dreadful, and the stifling atmosphere reminded me of old black-and-white silent films that depicted the squalor of medieval cities where people tossed chamber pots into the street.
Suddenly! As in an epiphany, I remembered my childhood, hand in hand with my mother, walking along that same street crowded with stalls smelling of fruit, roasted peanuts, fritters, roast pork. That same street overwhelmed by sunshine, blaring car horns, and the cries of street vendors. I recalled the persistence of the shoemakers, who grabbed you by the arm just to make you stop and try on shoes for the sheer fun of it…
So many times, I have asked myself the “whys” of so many things. That Saturday afternoon that felt like Friday, I asked myself: What was it that had to change from those days when I was a child? Because this now, for a long time, has not been better in any way. I asked myself: “Now that I am living in the future of those childhood days: Where are they, where did they end up—the evolution, the development, the progress?”