Yesterday, while walking down a path cutting through a field of grass, I saw a little girl coming towards me and, all of a sudden, I felt my own past and future strike me like an enormous wave. I remembered what I was like when I was that age, recalled how I looked at and what I expected from the world back then.
I don’t generally like to say that I believe in “God”, because the concept has too often been abused. I also don’t like telling people to “stay positive” – not only because the expression has become a cliché, but also because I’ve had to go through some rather rough patches myself, and I don’t take people’s problems lightly.
Many dramatic scenes are played out on Cuban buses. A space one if forced to inhabit for a relatively brief period of time, it tends to create a false and circumstantial sense of intimacy among strangers. There, we breathe the same air, become privy to the conversations of others (sometimes even their thoughts), rub bodies, share smells and emotions.
I was in a truck-bus with my son headed for Havana’s municipality of Cotorro. On the way, a couple, two teenagers who had shown signs of friction when they got on at the stop, began to argue.
I don’t doubt a visit the family planning clinic can restore a couple’s hopeful outlook on life, but, once they step out of this clinic, this couple is going to need much more than hope to build a future for their child.
Every time I see plane-lights trailing across the night’s sky, I imagine it is Antoine de Saint Exupery, the author of the “The Little Prince”, travelling on the back of a comet, looking down at this old world and reflecting on how little humanity has changed since his disappearance from the physical universe.
The air has been filled with strange vibrations these past days, there’s a murmur among people who live on the ground floors of tenement buildings in the neighborhood of Alamar, people who have expanded their homes into the common areas surrounding these buildings.
They say truth is relative. At least, this is one of the maxims that people tend to defend the most, with good and bad intentions. I confirmed this impression after seeing images of the Russian pop-rock band t.A.T.u for the first time. I had heard the band’s most popular numbers some years back…
After watching the film “One Night” by the British director Lucy Mulloy, I’ve made three resolutions for the future: I won’t be so willing to jump on a bandwagon. I will doubt the verdicts of juries. I will distrust dynamic rhythms, “natural” acting and fidelity to raw reality.
That the pangs of nostalgia can deceive us, painting our memories of the past with bright colors, is a feeling I had for the first time some years ago, while reading a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As I’ve grown older I have become slightly more suspicious of any romantic perception of the past.