You never read like you did in childhood and adolescence. With such faith, with such a capacity to transport yourself, to transmute, to transform, to disappear. With such dedication. Youth is also a good time, let’s say, until you’re twenty-five, although it’s not the same. Then it’s all downhill from there.
I read compulsively. Where I come from, a book has never been an artifact made of paper and printed letters; a book has always been a door. A way to ascend, to declare yourself different, to separate yourself from your limited environment; a book has always been a hope.
I no longer believe in God, but for most of my life I have lived convinced that God could be nothing other than a book.
For years, I devoured five, six, even seven books a week. I stole hours from sleep and time from any other activity that, compared to reading, always seemed unimportant. What could compare to all those worlds at my disposal just by opening one of those extraordinary objects?
Quite often, I would wake up and still be clinging to a book.
I read while walking, I read on the crowded bus, I read in classrooms, at the School in the Countryside, in military units (even in formation while the officers were giving some lecture), and in workplaces and at rallies and in the cane fields and in the Plaza de la Revolución while the endless harangues of the Maximum Leader resounded. I read while I ate, while I defecated, and, although it may seem impossible, while I bathed with a bucket and a tin can, since running water had disappeared like everything else.
I read, read, read.
Captive to a fury and anxiety whose origin I did not fully understand, but which I obeyed without question. I read for pleasure, because everything around me flowed in the opposite direction to the books. And I knew that the only way life is worth living is by doing the opposite.
I read because imagination and freedom were sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss of military-ideological vulgarity, and in books I could rebel against that by being someone else.
I read to save myself. At that time, I still believed that salvation existed.
I read everything, Greek theater and Sholokhov’s drivel. Marcel Proust and the terrifying Chapaiev. The Road to Volokolamsk and One Thousand and One Nights. The Odyssey and The Communist Manifesto. The whiny Pablo Neruda and the mysterious Ezra Pound.
I cannot fail to mention here the impression made on me by reading Peter Pan and Wendy by J. M. Barrie.
At last, someone had done it: not growing up!
Peter Pan is one of the books that has accompanied me throughout my life, like the Iliad, the works of Aeschylus, or Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita; one of those books I always return to. Again and again.
It’s surprising how many supposedly educated people haven’t read Barrie’s book and only know the character from the awful Disney movie. I find it very amusing to see the haughty contempt with which some intellectuals listen to my apologies for Peter’s adventures.
It’s not Barrie’s prose, which isn’t that great, that keeps me coming back to his famous work. Why do I do it? Because of the character, because of the emotion he provokes in me despite the years and the re-readings. I, who consider my mother a goddess, feel an irrepressible attraction to this child who had the courage to escape from his mother.
One of the most extraordinary moments in literature is when Peter rejects the grown-up Wendy in horror:
“Back, back! No one can catch me to make me grow up!”
It is Peter’s cry and mine.
It is the cry of all betrayed children. That is to say, of all children.
Competition between siblings worked wonderfully as a spur. If someone mentioned an unknown author or a book that the others had not read, it was interpreted as an insult.
It still is today.
The ignorant immediately ran and still runs to read everything available by the author in question.
There was nothing more intolerable than not knowing a book that another human being (especially one of my brothers or our friend Reinaldo Arenas) had already read.
I read to escape.
I knew that the only history that exists is that of literature. What is history without literature but a bloody quagmire?
I had the precocious conviction that any universe made of imagination and words is superior, immensely safer and more beautiful than the one in which we happen to live.
[Chapter from the new edition of Debajo de la mesa, Editorial Ladera Norte, 2025].
