The Countryside That Lives Within Me
Photo Feature by Fabiana del Valle
HAVANA TIMES – Sometimes the city weighs on me. It’s not because of the heat, the smoke from the cars, or their roaring engines. It’s that useless rush that envelops everything, the feeling that here time runs fast and yet nothing changes.
When my chest feels tight, I seek refuge in a wildflower growing from a crack in the sidewalk, and that sprout becomes, for me, a door to my childhood.
I close my eyes and let myself drift. I return to the country, to my bare feet on the grass, my brother’s voice calling from afar, my cousins—no longer children now—who in my memory still run beside me.
The countryside is once again our home; it belongs to us. With bare feet and dirty knees, we create worlds that are born and die with the sun. Dry leaves and twisted branches become swords, treasures, amulets.
Where the coffee grove grows thicker lies the pirates’ cave, an impregnable fortress for guarding diamonds made of broken glass. A meeting place for alliances, blood pacts, oaths made with trembling voices that time has carried away.
With branches like open hands, the witch’s tree calls to us. Someone has told us that at night she comes down to comb her hair with a thorn comb while she waits for a brave child to come near. None of us dared to find out.
Beside the stream, leaning over the meager thread of water, “the trunk woman” awaits us—a perfect silhouette frozen in a pleading gesture, as if searching among the dampness for a lost treasure. Sometimes she seems to move, or perhaps it’s only the wind playing in her branches.
The countryside keeps such things, lets them be—things that seem small but are not. A dry leaf’s crackle is not noise, the fallen trunk is a bench, a game; the wildflower is a miracle, the swaying palm a clock that measures time in leaves.
And although reality sometimes presses heavy on my shoulders, I will always have that place to return to, even if it exists only in my memories. I now live far from that land, but it never leaves me.
When I return to the city, I look for its shadow in the butterfly fluttering its wings above the asphalt, the seed growing in the crack of a sidewalk, the rays of sun filtering through my window, the smell of wet earth the rain carries.
These details save me; they have become my map home. The invisible cord that ties me to my countryside, where my cousins smile before the pirates’ cave as coffee flowers fall like snow, where the witch combs her hair at the foot of the ceiba tree, where the stream wets the roots of the wooden woman who keeps searching, and where the wildflowers bloom without asking permission—reminding me that the essential never stops blossoming.