If it hadn’t been that way, it would have ended the same. The rest is details.— Italo Calvino
For Juan and Carmen Márquez
Every morning, before arriving at work, Carlos Luis has a coffee at “La Maravilla.” He reads the newspaper and chats with friends. Today, however, he decides to go to another café. They say they have good coffee with milk and buttered toast. After finishing breakfast (at 7:30 a.m.), Carlos Luis gets in his car and heads to work. Lost in his thoughts: the news of Stalin’s death from a stroke, not forgetting to lubricate the lathe, checking Vallejo’s plans, picking up his suit at Albión before they close. He passes Cristo and Villegas. “Hey, don’t forget the Bayer aspirin for Mom and the Alka-Seltzer” (Anora’s voice in the morning). He passes Aguacate. “Should I stop at Sarrá?” he says aloud. He slows down. He looks at his watch. He fries an egg. He turns right at Compostela—when you’re driving, you’re thinking about anything but driving. He passes an orange vendor. How beautiful. He turns right. He doesn’t think about it. He just does it. He barely has time to see a truck speeding by on the left.
Radio Reloj announces the time: seven forty-four.
The doctor on duty informs the wife: “Your husband has a skull fracture. There may be bleeding. We don’t know. There is hope.“ They cannot imagine that Carlos Luis can hear them perfectly. He feels a deep stillness; something has stopped flowing—the air, even the pulse of time. In the stillness, Carlos Luis asks himself ”why,” and that is equivalent to going back to the beginning of everything. He has to retrace the chain of causes that preceded the accident, particularly those that seem significant. Things are analyzed in parts. One does not dwell on the trivial: why smoke a cigarette after coffee and not before? Should he have buttoned his shirt while yielding the right of way? One searches one’s memory for everything that could have been done differently. Carlos Luis’s first question: why did he change his morning habit?
Things have to change; the same thing always gets boring.
He remembers that Cabrera, a friend from the workshop, recommended the new place. He thinks about the twenty-peso bet on the Havana Lions winning the Caribbean Series. Is Cabrera responsible for the accident? No, if anyone is to blame, it’s him for listening to Cabrera. He reproaches himself for thinking about it. Now it turns out that, if he continues down this path, he may end up believing that the coffee with milk was the worst he had ever tasted, just to justify not going to “La Maravilla” and making the fatal right turn. Dwelling on this detail gives him the satisfaction of a certain capacity for self-criticism (something his uncle Fermín recommended). Carlos Luis takes a deep breath and delves into his musings.
What about those things that seem less important, like the moment when, reading an ad for “Apartments for Rent” in the newspaper, he thought of José Ángel, who had just divorced his wife and needed a small apartment. He thought about calling him, but the phone was busy, so he decided to do it from work at lunchtime. And he remembers that, once in the car, he thought about bringing some bread and butter for Lucho, the old man he always plays checkers with before the bell rings. He also pondered something he couldn’t remember if he had done: braking before making the damn right turn, braking for no reason, why not? Do you have to have reasons for everything you do?
He couldn’t tolerate something like that happening, with no other option available.
The ironies of life! If, before turning right, Carlos Luis had found a suitcase in the middle of the street and had stopped the car, opened the suitcase, and found it full of jewelry, then, even if he had turned right and crashed, he could at least enjoy the fact that it was worth not going to “La Maravilla” this morning. That never happens. Luck is worse than better. One says, “What happens has to happen” — and the thought is clouded by the obtuse repetition. If what happens has to happen, why object to it?
It is difficult to admit that what happened has to happen for the mere fact — “mere,” because we question its legality — of happening. The infallibility of the matter weighs on him like a stone in his chest. There is no way to argue with the past, declared and stamped. However, every event contrasts with an alternative. We can always speculate about that unrealized possibility. The discovery is that what was could always have been different: he saw the car coming toward him and braked just in time to avoid the collision. He feels a bright twinge, as if his mind had opened a window to clear air. He arrives at work and finishes the two pieces he left yesterday. After work, the first thing he does is pick up the suit for his friend’s wedding at the Albion tailor’s. He stops by the “Brazo Fuerte” in Galiano to buy fresh bread, ham, butter, and two pounds of rice. Then, a quick stop at the “Polo” for a vermouth and that’s it. Isn’t he forgetting something? The aspirin! One oversight can ruin everything. He goes to the pharmacy around the corner. “Carli, are you there?” Anora’s voice calls from the kitchen. Carlos Luis sniffs the fragrant steam of rice with chicken (a Tuesday tradition). “Yes, I’m here.” He enters and leaves his keys on the table. Anora smiles, “I forgot the aspirin.” A resigned smile, not quite a smile. “What am I going to do with you?” The family sits down at the table, voices mingling with the clinking of cutlery, homely laughter easing the fatigue. Background music: Zoraida Marrero in Cabaret Regalías.
It’s a shame that you think about all that afterwards and not before.
Doing and thinking are very different. Carlos Luis enjoys the first time he can ponder something like this. “You’re always so busy in life that you don’t stop to think about it.” There are possibilities beyond, things you do that take you by surprise. Still inert in the hospital bed, he watches a movie in slow motion: the car he crashed into, slowly passing by him, and the poor man—poor nothing, it was his fault—shouting, “Do you know where Compostela is?”
Life holds the unpredictable.
For example, you can’t avoid an earthquake while sleeping in your bed. There’s nothing to reproach yourself for, unless we thought that the earthquake happened because you were there. Does that mean that without Carlos Luis there would have been no crash today on Compostela Street? Isn’t there a necessary relationship between the car, Carlos Luis, and the crash? Could any Juan Miguel crash in the same place at the same time driving another car? Come on, not every time someone makes a right turn on Compostela Street does they have to crash, and without that necessity, everything could always have been different.
What we never do in this life is think about how many other things happen, despite what must happen. Such as suggesting that there is no clear cause for the accident (hence the meaning of the word). What caused the diabetes that killed his mother? Sugar? How much of a sweet tooth she had? A mysterious predisposition? Her sour disposition? Can’t someone just let go without knowing why? An image crosses his mind: we could subtract the accident itself from the accident and get the following: He turns right, parks the car, arrives at work, and everything is as usual. At 5:30 p.m., he arrives home and there are his wife and Julian. He calls José and meets him at 9 p.m. at the bar on the block. They have a few beers, then he listens to COCO and goes to sleep. The end!
Seen this way, we could conjecture that every moment of life is the moment of an accident that has not yet happened. If I am at the table having lunch, it is because I did not slip in the kitchen a minute before, and if I am pondering all this, it is because I am still alive. For the first time, Carlos Luis finds this sequence of events terrifying. What is the point of going back and recreating a life—his own—if it has to end precisely in the crash? Why believe that, by not going to “La Maravilla,” he will arrive at work safe and sound? In this world, that’s the way things are.
There are events that seem outstanding and necessary—also irrelevant and superfluous. Let’s say they are as legitimate as other equally possible scenarios. It is then a matter of the contingency of the world, which is the world after all. Is there another “better possibility” than that of Carlos Luis at home with a suitcase full of jewelry? Let’s say there is. However, being where he is, lying without the slightest pain, without any trace of the obfuscation that is everyday life, allows him an examination that would otherwise be impossible. To ponder the offer of the inevitable. What is unique about this matter is not its contingency but its necessity. How can anyone imagine that turning right on Compostela Street at 7:44 a.m. could be fatal?
Everything is connected. Today’s crash is part of the world and its history.
For not going to “La Maravilla” and also for going to work, for going to work six years ago in that workshop, for having that profession, for not having been a bricklayer instead of a lathe operator, for liking so much to go to his uncle Fermín’s workshop when he was a child, for having been Fermín’s nephew, for being his father’s son, because his father married his mother after a very long courtship, and because of everything that had to happen in the world before Carlos Luis, who had to end up with that right-hander today on Compostela Street.
If his grandparents’ emigration from the Levante has anything to do with the crash, then the migrations of peoples around the world are somehow connected to the accident. And so are the lives and adventures of those great men in history, whom his uncle Fermín used to tell him about. This world, with its history, is the world of the crash in Compostela. And now, Carlos Luis does not know how to react to that idea to which all the annals of the world point: the unforeseen moment when he made the right turn. He feels like an essential part of a whirlwind of events, favored by the unusual, and accepts that he has a new role to play, a feeling that separates him from himself, from his serious condition in that hospital bed, to become an impartial, even prodigal, witness to his own misfortune.
Carlos Luis enjoys the deep calm of not having to ponder a “why” or think about anything else related to the accident. He will not have to keep pondering, because all the causes in the world are connected to each other in such a way that none can fail to cause the other. There is no reason for pain, only a deep stillness. Every cause in the world, before and after today, is part of Carlos Luis’s crash, and he therefore becomes the cause and effect of everything.
