My afternoon classes are over. The students have dispersed quickly. I leave the protective shell of the old seminary and step out into the night, watched by the busts of Caballero and Varela, who stare at me with indifferent eyes.
It’s only ten meters to the corner and ten minutes until the taxi I called arrives, but the wait spares me ten minutes of terror. I am surrounded by the dark old city of Havana, and even though the nine o’clock cannon shot has not sounded, it is long past the time to be out. Stories of violence abound. The dilapidated buildings, the man smoking leaning against a wall, the purple bay in front of me without a single boat light, all make up a gothic novel with its ghosts and vampires. It’s impossible to turn on a cell phone flashlight or call someone, because someone who’s been hiding behind a streetlight or a rusty car chassis will immediately come and snatch it away, even if it’s the oldest phone in the Western world.
The car arrives. The driver asks me two questions and we fall silent. He’s found out I’m a teacher. That allays his fear that I might rob him, and at the same time he feels uncomfortable having a customer who will barely pay the established fare—which is half my pension, but traveling in relative safety has its price—and I’m one of those who doesn’t ask for extra services: no cigarettes, no stops at restaurants that pay commissions, no women. I’m just an old man in a hurry to get home.
We make our way in silence. Quiet and in the dark, we leave behind the lonely terrace of the Cabaña bar and, in front of the Spanish embassy, now with its doorways deserted, without the morning crowds that gather to demand visas, I can barely make out the outline of the monument to Martí, because the streetlights in the park on Avenida de las Misiones, now run down, are out.
Further on is the Parque Central, where only the Louvre café shines, no longer Maceo’s or Casal’s, but a place where a couple of dozen tourists gather, constantly accosted by vendors selling flowers, stuffed animals, photographs, or invitations to a livelier night. Then, the Gran Teatro de la Habana, lit up from the ground to the towers, deceptive like an old woman wearing makeup. Its legendary hall has been closed for years. They say it is being devoured by termites and there is no way to stop them, but the shell keeps up appearances. Finally, polished and solitary in its pride, the Capitol shines. In its dome, the gold of Moscow burns like nonsense.
When you reach Reina Street, the glamour begins to fade. Destruction upon destruction: suspicious water seeps from the El País newspaper building. It has long been abandoned to the ghosts of Alfredo Hornedo and Pablo Álvarez de Cañas. Each doorway poorly conceals the filth, the crowds, the misery.
Some prefer to spend the blackout at their front doors, waiting for a redeeming breeze, and there are even those who, in the middle of the night, want to sell you fried food, candy, condoms, and unmentionable substances.
Just the journey from the Aldama Palace, victim of a historic curse, to the Church of the Sacred Heart, with its tower surrounded by scaffolding and bandaged perhaps until the end of time, would have been enough for Lezama to write another novel to complete a trilogy with Paradiso and Oppiano Licario. It would be deconstructive baroque, the vicissitudes of a city falling apart: the ruins return to the original landscape of mangroves, coves, and precarious villages, yet the human landscape, dirty and dystopian, slips through a hole in the kingdom guarded by Minos and Radamanthus. A filthy city where ghosts applaud those who roll around in the mouth of hell under the weight of so many sins, their own and those of others.
If the old Tacón theater ever reopened its doors, it would have to be with Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust, if not with Oedipus Rex or Ubu Roi, which is almost the same thing.
I must tell the driver not to drop me off right at the door of my building, as its entrance is surrounded by a wide ditch of black water—my own personal Styx—but rather at the corner, so I can jump out almost safely from those currents. Behind me, the car door closes with some violence. Another passenger pays the exact fare. Another bad night for that doctor who survives behind the wheel after a night on call, unless he is a retired soldier whose exploits in Africa are now only remembered by a few comrades when they stand in the endless line to buy chicken or detergent.
I shouldn’t be surprised when I climb the stairs with the help of my phone’s flashlight. The power has been out for a long time, and of course, it’s quite uncertain when it will be restored. I am alone, alone enough to hear the microwave and the rice cooker in the kitchen. It’s not hard to find a forgotten can of corned beef in the pantry. Not forgotten, but relegated, which is why it’s the only one in that space. It’s easy to predict that it’s a brown, sticky, and spicy substance. And eating it straight from the can with a soup spoon—the rules of etiquette have been repealed in view of the darkness and precarious daily life—makes the experience even worse. That’s why I decide to eat it on the terrace.
At least I can see that two blocks away someone has lit up their house as if it were in a chronicle written by the aforementioned Álvarez de Cañas. Not only do their rooms shine, but so does the three-armed lamp that presides over their empty balcony. It is a categorical imperative because he happens to own a petrol generator and not only needs electricity like everyone else, but is also obliged to display his possession for several miles around, like someone showing off a coat of arms. This is no longer a society of workers and peasants, nor of bourgeois and proletarians, but of people who have light and others who are in darkness. It’s that simple, with apologies to sociologists and the press, official or independent.
When you’re sitting in a rocking chair, eating alone and badly, you start to ruminate. I am reminded that Cintio Vitier began the prologue to his 1953 collection of poems, Vísperas, with these words:
Publishing poems in our country has been reduced to the category and majesty of the pure act. No vanity, illusion, or complacency can be mixed in with it, and if it were not based on the splendor of the gratuitous, of what belongs to the most disinterested forces of the spirit, it would be impossible to justify it in any way.
Ah, Cintio! I prefer to retain the “pure act”—although at this point our purity is doubtful—and that of the disinterestedness of the spirit. At least you wrote in the light of the impossible, but being a writer in Cuba today is even more of a gratuitous act. It’s like drawing water from a well and immediately pouring it back in.
Just thinking that what you have written will become a book is a risky operation of the spirit: either there is no paper at all to print it on, or there is none in relative terms because your lines are not worthy of publication among the chosen few, or perhaps it is you yourself who is not relevant to those who decide what place you will occupy in the republic of letters. Of course, social media today allows what Arenas or Piñera longed for: to send books with a click of a button to another place where they will take on a glorious form in the labyrinths of Amazon and perhaps a friend or a curious reader will buy them, even if no one in your country finds out or is interested in finding out.
And here the old Tallet intrudes to remind you with one of his verses that anyone who is a poet here is considered by almost everyone to be a “shit-eater,” and on top of that there is the weight of daily life: you can win a prize and even get your book published, but you’ll still have to do other things, confessable or unconfessable, if you want to support your family and put food on the table every day; they may elect you an academic, but you won’t have enough money to get there and back on public transportation because it hardly exists anymore, and a taxi is only for getting home alive on a particular day when you leave work.
If you’re even luckier, you might be able to go to a foreign book fair, but your books and you yourself are invisible to almost everyone, and the only reason anyone is interested in you is to ask you, in public or in a corner, with malice or condescension, or both, why this or that happens in your country…
In reality, writing here today in this city, on this street, in this dark apartment, is an irrational gesture of stubbornness, an old man’s occupation, something my ancestors would describe as “a bad habit” that not only has little future, as Cintio and José Zacarías already anticipated, but no present whatsoever. It’s like playing front tennis and the ball bouncing again and again, not off your racket but against your face. In the end, it’s a solitary vice—like that of teenagers, so condemned in the past—or an impertinente desire to figure in the literary world, that supposedly exclusive society that every day looks more like a nursing home, and not just any nursing home, but the one on Calzada de la Reina that smells of filth and dead dreams.
Sometimes I think I live in a painting by Antonia Eiriz. One of those where fate strolls across the canvas. That’s why she was condemned to work with papier-mâché and color it with substances as elegant as mercurochrome. Horror.
I’m about to finish that mess that will make me wake up with heartburn tomorrow when I first see one light, then another. It’s not the plane that passes a little after ten. They are more like lights that appear out of nowhere and then fall. Those who didn’t know about meteorites called it a meteor shower. I don’t believe in shooting stars, let alone making wishes. I simply wonder if the apocalypse is coming, even if it’s a small one, specific to the island, and I remember Daniel’s prophecy that I read a few days ago in the temple:
But at that time Michael, the great prince who stands guard over your people, will arise. There will be a time of distress such as has not been since nations first came into existence. But at that time your people—all whose names are written in the book—will be delivered. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise will be on their feet and will bring the righteous to justice. Their wisdom will be seen, their integrity will adorn them, and they will be called by their names.
It is a beautiful text, written to restore hope, first to the Israelites who were in captivity in Babylon, then read with optimism by the early Christians, and surely today by others in Haiti, Ukraine, and on both sides of the Gaza Strip. However, the question of the end of time is a complicated matter even for doctors of eschatology and cannot be savored with a mouth full of the worst Russian corned beef.
Absurdly, I am reminded of my recent departure from the hallway of the old San Carlos Seminary and especially the two busts, that of José Agustín Caballero and that of Félix Varela, and I think that they, with their blind eye sockets that have witnessed scenes of tears, farewells, assaults, and even murders, may have been able to pierce the Havana darkness and see those lights falling, like a sign of minimal change, perhaps the one we deserve.
