Handwritten on a Page Torn from a Book of Poems
HAVANA TIMES – I walk around the city without a camera, which is like saying that I feel incomplete, because my memories will die sooner rather than later, maybe even tomorrow before I open my eyes in bed. The light today on the cobblestones speckled with yellow flowers that fell to be seen, because we look ahead, determined in our daily goal rather than looking up. The color of the orange or strawberry ice cream cones against the green trees of the park; and the smile of that woman, holding her teenage daughter’s arm, smiling as she passes by the long faces of those waiting and waiting for the impossible, which is to get money from where there is none. Everything deserved to be turned into photos, not just left in these words.
Words, I tell myself, that have lost their wings from being misused by all sides. There is a black bird in the ceiba tree of the wheel that did not return at dawn with its flock to the mountain. There is a man dozing on a bench with his legs stretched out. There is the smell of 300 peso hamburgers and 20 peso coffee coming from different places. And then this lady, extending her thin arm, her thin face, her nose that doesn’t perceive the signals of danger (careful, you could be rejected, ignored, criticized), asks another woman, not much heavier, for any kind of help. And she gives her a bill. And the other rips a page from a book and hands it over. The one who gave the bill walks away from the exchange with a win. She reads aloud:
–Your eyes are made of honey, your lips of syrup.
That sweet metaphor, the synesthesia that will allow her today to take a bitter plate of food to her stomach – never a 300-peso hamburger or 20-peso coffee, because they aggravate her ulcer – is written by hand in the blank space at the bottom of the page, with blue pen ink and perfect spelling.
The thin woman, who was the owner and carelessly parted with such words, lives on Cuba Street, but with unsure steps, she moves in the opposite direction, as if in doubt, until she stops on a couple of yellow, withered cobblestones. Then she looks for a few seconds at the branch that dropped its flowers, and turns around. Her eyes have that haze of age, that bluish gray of cataracts.
–In a brass drawer under paint brushes, CDs, and sleeping pills, there is a paper with my supposed ownership of a wine-colored Studebaker that today drives along [Havana’s] Fifth Avenue, in other words, it travels through time.
It’s printed with industrial ink over the blue ink, on the page that the woman with the bill received, who will not travel anywhere, by the way. Like that specific US car, born and called Studebaker before 1960, this woman is a new Frankenstein, still fighting, circulating with its original body, but with European, Chinese, or even Soviet parts inside. Anything to avoid going to the scrapyard just yet.
There is a Book Fair in the city. Sigfredo Ariel is the author of the poem that talks about the impossible journey through time, as Stephen Hawking once wished, that giant mind in a deformed body. Neither of them is here anymore. They died. However, their words remain. Words and language are not to blame for what happens to us.
Another woman, whom I don’t photograph, rests in her bed. She is missing three meters of intestines after that abdominal pain that bent her will one afternoon last week. I go to her house to give her a printed photo I made. It’s like bringing her a poem. I don’t know if she will understand it, if she will like looking at herself in that mirror.
This 76-year-old woman lives in Cuba, in Matanzas, in the neighborhood called Ojo de Agua, in a hallway, in a small room with peeling walls, like the needle inside the egg, inside the duck, in a wooden cabin, in a forest, and so on. But she is bent over herself and surrounded by other women who have come to help as they can. One brings a liter and a half of yogurt. Another brings a broth where a chicken thigh and pieces of malanga float. A third carefully takes out the bedclothes to wash them when the water and the electricity come. The fourth strokes her hand so that the old woman stops saying it hurts, that God should come and take her. I would have taken a picture of those hands, never of the faces, nor of the sound of lament. The children playing outside, far away, that’s the order, the only shout of the matriarch of the hallway, where for now there are no stable men in the picture. These women have learned to take care of each other and to have each other.
The four writers sat down to drink wine on the bench where a man stretched out his legs while dozing more comfortably than they did, because they haven’t invented a C-shaped bench here where they can all see each other’s faces without the two on the edges having to lean while the others stay with their backs straight. The wine was made from rice, homemade by the mother of a little friend from the science fiction writer’s school, who tells how her grandmother has been taken care of every day for ten years by a robot that does it perfectly without needing to be paid. At the end of the story, you find out that the robot is the grandmother’s daughter, the writer’s mother, and that it is not a robot, of course, even though she’s not paid for being a caretaker because it’s supposed she does it for love and simply because it’s her duty.
The second writer laughs. Why not laugh, if she deserves it? Why not write, if she too owns thousands of words she can use to her advantage, if in a way the grime of coal under her nails is beautiful, or if the damn smell of kerosene in her hair gives her the malignancy she lacked, the bravery of a female truck driver on the highway who looks men in the eye in the bar and then confesses she is a poet. Good luck with her dilemma if anyone dares accuse her of romanticizing the misery of these times, if she sees freedom right in front, turned into a statue, with bronze breasts for all to see. Without honey in her eyes. Without syrup-melted lips. But she broke the chains.
First published in Spanish by Joven Cuba and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.