I am indulging in memories. I have returned to the old sugar cane hut where I lived for a few years as a child. My mother is lying on a wooden cot with rubber pulleys, reading aloud to me. In the adjoining rooms, separated only by flimsy cardboard walls or wooden boards, Haitians and their descendants listen or pretend to listen and understand, but they do not speak. They are tired from long days in the cane fields preparing the harvest.
What can be heard, however, is my mother’s sweet, slow voice that pierces the shack from which the cane cutters and planters will emerge the next day with some story in their heads. It is a Cuba that I cannot read about in the books of many of my country’s distinguished writers. In a few, yes.
It is a piece of Cuba that has remained only in my ears.
It is not yet the 1980s, and my mother—at most 36 years old—reads some afternoons and evenings La reconquista de Mompracem, excerpts from La piel de Onagro, or pages skipped in large chunks from Kazán, perro lobo, by James Oliver Curwood. I think I fall asleep amid the first commotion coming from the next room. Sometimes giggles, sometimes a question in their Creole, already softened with many Spanish words. My mother always answers the questions of the most curious.
The Haitians soften their Creole by mixing it with a little Spanish so they can communicate with my mother. “Nena,” they say, and I understand that it sounds the same in the two Caribbean languages that intersect in San Germán, next to the cane fields that in turn border the Cauto River. Languages that know nothing of politics or hatred intersect, but rather of borrowed lives that find life beyond literature, in the spoken word.
The spoken word always finds a shared homeland.
Maquilí, Yebá, Licofén, Tití… were common names to me, the names of my childhood neighbors until I grew up and understood that they were the nicknames of some Haitians who had arrived in Cuba in the 1950s or shortly thereafter and who formed my closest circle.
At some point in my early childhood, I was taught a few words of the sweet Creole so that I could greet them when they returned from their exhausting days in the fields where the cane burned to be cut by arms or machines. I must have learned to say “Good morning!” or “Goodbye!” or some spicy or insulting word, because I do remember that I was the center of the chorus they formed to make me repeat those sayings that made them laugh out loud at the 4- or 5-year-old boy who was giving them back the magic of their own language spoken far from the land where they were born.
Two decades later, Evaristo Lambert cleans shoes near Plaza de Marte in Santiago de Cuba. Under the box with the bottles of ink in various colors, he keeps El hombre mediocre by José Ingenieros. One day, when I tell him about a movie, I just saw at the Cuba cinema, he shows me the worn and shoe polish-stained volume. He reads it three or four times a year, he says. Shortly before, during the so-called Special Period, it was his bedside book and lifeline.
My aunt Eloína turns on the radio from ten in the morning until two in the afternoon in Pilón, a Cuban village hugged by the Caribbean Sea. She listens to Radio Progreso, a station that broadcasts several novels in a row, including works by Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Molière. There are also Creole versions of impossible love stories and political ramblings disguised as radio soap operas. I am nine years old, and she is looking after me for a few months due to family circumstances.
My aunt serves me two lunches: one she has made with her own hands and the other, which comes from the national radio and for which she asks me not to make any noise. You could miss the invented dialogues for the lives invented by William Faulkner, or the lucid hand that gave us One Thousand and One Nights. Years later, when a former lover stabbed her to death, one of my memories and lifelines was listening to the radio soap opera announcements. It seemed as if she came out of there to greet me on every broadcast with her little woman’s voice.
It is 1994 and I am already taking Universal Literature classes at the University of Oriente in Santiago de Cuba. I am a brand-new student of literature. I think I am a brand-new student of literature, that is what I believe, and that is how I introduce myself wherever I go at that time. The class is taught by Professor Serafina Prego Ducás, and in front of her I can almost recite entire passages from the aforementioned works by Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Virgil. I must have looked like a boy with a wealth of bookish culture.
My memory doesn’t fail me then; the sound of the words spoken by my mother and stored for years in some dark corner of my mind make me seem like a smart kid.
And there, at least once in my life, I take advantage.
It’s 1994 and I haven’t read half of the books that are making me look like a know-it-all, but my ears have. They have been passed on to me by radio scriptwriters, my mother’s comments, the Haitians in the sugar cane barracks, and the sweet, quiet voice of my aunt who was stabbed to death.
The rest of my life I’ve tried to read with the tone of those words sharpened for me, but I’m only halfway there.
I’ve read a lot; I’ve listened even more. Books and people’s voices make a fuss so that the words swirl in a cyclonic gust toward me, and I don’t miss the stories that were invented to be heard.
I like the oral gesture, the noise of books.
[Chapter from book of the same title]
