My Bicycle and Me
By Veronica Vega
HAVANA TIMES – Lately, I often find myself remembering my bicycle, and how it shrunk the distances in Alamar, the community to the east of Havana where I still live.
Ah, those trips where every bend brought a new landscape! The joy of childhood games, the autonomy, my privacy intact even as I rolled by, looking at everything. The effort of pedaling, climbing the hills, attention focused on avoiding the potholes, the obstacles, the reckless drivers or pedestrians. The heat and the fatigue paled before that magical sensation of freedom. My sturdy red-and-black bicycle was an extension of myself.
Behind me on the back fender grille, with metal brackets fitted to the rear wheel for him to rest his feet on, sat my son. Holding tight to my waist, we talked, joked, or merely rode in silence, each one sunk in their own thoughts.
There in the school backpack sustained in his little hands, our cats traveled to their veterinarian visits.
How I miss those days! The beach was only a few minutes away, and the ride was a luminous whirlwind. The center of Havana was right there as well, once we’d passed through the tunnel on our bicycle bus. Nothing was very far away. Nothing was impossible.
I felt that life belonged more to me. That I had a dose of control over that mini-universe where public transportation means waiting, crowding, and enduring whatever unexpected conflicts might arise. Where distance isn’t measured in minutes, but in uncertainty.
Nowadays, moving around Havana province from one city to another has become an agonizing experience. For the ordinary Cuban, the most accessible vehicle has always been a bicycle, but even so they’re expensive and, as such, sought-after objects.
We suffered a robbery at my mother’s house, one rainy night during the hours when sleep is heaviest, between 5 and 6 in the morning.
Apparently, everything had been planned out: how to get onto the balcony; how to open the locks; how many valuable objects there were in the living room – a new television set, a video player, a tape recorder… and my bicycle.
It was a forced entrance and burglary while the residents were inside the house. They had to have acted with precision, before anyone awoke. We never learned how they managed to keep the dogs from barking. Far from their usual behavior – barking even at their own shadows – they remained completely mute, and the next morning acted strangely, as if they were very frightened.
For the thieves, it all went perfectly, up to and including the rain that erased their fingerprints.
I still get a lump in my chest when I think of the yell my mother let out, when she got up and discovered what had happened. What a storm of confusion, rage, sadness. And how could we even begin to console her?
We filed the complaint, and months later the police caught them, since it was a gang with a long list of similar burglaries. I must admit, the police were very kind. Following the legal protocol, we even received compensation for the loss, and I recovered the cost of my bicycle.
However, circumstances have changed: my son is now a teenager, I have a partner, and one lone bicycle isn’t enough for three.
I’ve once again accustomed myself to walking long distances, although the trips are no longer as dazzling or as much fun.
I haven’t stopped looking enviously at other people’s bicycles, that seem to fly. Or at the electric scooters, increasingly more common, with those blinking blue lights, almost surreal, like a rocket ship. Maybe because of the layering of gallium nitride over sapphire, they look like pixels floating in the air. They seem to have the power to take you – not to another geographic location – but to a place where happiness isn’t relative. Or selective.
Lately, I have the persistent notion that a vehicle has the power to change our perception of time. And even of reality.