A Home, a Country, a Life

By Veronica Vega

HAVANA TIMES – I love seeing people remodel their houses; replace windows, doors, transform their homes to fit their needs or whims.

The smell of paint is like a rebirth. A facet of experience that’s mostly foreign to me. After nearly twenty years in this apartment, we’ve made some repairs for the first time. We did so only because they were urgently needed (two architraves with deep cracks, one of which collapsed one night, sending enormous pieces tumbling down.)

Thanks to the invaluable economic aid of a relative outside Cuba, and to an efficient group of masons, I can finally sleep without fearing that an insistent rainfall might cause a chunk of cement to break off and endanger the life of someone down below.

It always dazzles my mind what can be done with that noble substance called cement, its malleability under expert, nearly devout, hands.

To personalize the place that comprises your refuge from the world – delicious details come to mind, that I aspire to make real some day: a garden, a fountain, some steps covered in moss.

If not that, then at least some pictures, a curtain, some potted plants that flower every morning. Invoking the spirit that, mysteriously, transforms a dwelling into a home.

I remember when we moved into this apartment; my son had recently started attending his first school, less than a block away.

The seduction of that railing, that left us hanging on the edge of space when we leaned against the low wall. Our gaze that struggled to see over these ugly, identical, and monotonous buildings to the ocean… The profuse vegetation in a clamor of beauty and freedom.

We felt a happiness difficult to describe. The promise of a future in a house that finally belonged to us. The security, the trust in the sacred circle of the family.

My son and I didn’t know then that this circle would be broken within a few years; that his father would become our enemy, and our cohabitation a nightmare that forced us to flee.

Sometime later, by the strange twists of fate, we were able to return here with my current partner. Our reencounter with this apartment was moving. Every room, although still neglected and without furniture, belonged to us once more. And we received the first rain on the balcony, with noisy joy.

Once again, the certainty of an unfailingly glorious future.

Now that I can look backwards with the precision of a movie camera panning in, I realize how naïve we were. And doubtless still are. You never imagine the road ahead intertwined with sorrows, losses, betrayals.

We matured by force of blows, instead of unhurriedly like the internal evolution of a fruit or seed,

The same unpardonable precariousness as this wall, this railing, that always posed a danger to my cats. When I lost Shining to that vertical drop one fateful Sunday, the sight of which still makes me shiver, I understood that we’re all absurdly fragile.

Nothing of all that we believe we earn, control, possess truly exists. Only the merit of recognizing that we’re vulnerable and accepting that we have no idea what destiny has in store for us. We’ve gone through everything here: cold, uncertainty and even hunger.

We’ve also experienced the harassment of the police patrols when my husband and I joined with a group of artists protesting for independent art, a change this Island needs as urgently as those cracked walls we were recently forced to take down and replace.

The anguish, the neighbors’ cruel lack of solidarity. To discover that this ancient struggle against injustice is cyclical and no one can do anything alone, but only as a part of tectonic movements that build on the restless souls, fed up with selfishness. These struggles, these groups, are also activated in cycles.

Freedom, and real changes, are produced when the moment arrives, and no one can take the credit; it’s the collective life and its remote warp and weft, weaving and unraveling history.

At its own pace. At its own rhythm. While our desperation crashes into that blurred future that we interpret over and over again according to our own criteria.

Like the waves against the reefs.

It’s the game of time that we obsessively calculate and measure, while hidden underneath, the infinite breathes. Without fear of remaining suspended, of letting go.

And we, with our outsized desires to be heroes, stars, or hedonistic gods, keep forgetting that we have only the present – before it’s lost in the tangle of days and happenings already written.

Read more here from the diary of Veronica Vega.