by Wendy Guerra
I’ll meet García Márquez, I thought as I shivered from the cold. We crossed under Martí’s shadow on the esplanade, breaking with the ghosts of the patriots who’ve always paralyzed me. I yank down these specters, I rip them up as if they were cellophane; in my mind, I tear them up. I push and crush them. They fall in my way as I run, run, run under the downpour trying to flag down a taxi, latched on to Gerónimo’s hand, who, little by little, learns how to hold me and guide me between the rain and these fictions.
* * *
—
To ask for a visa for a Cuban is to beg.
To ask for visa for a Cuban is to plead, to feel helpless before the face of a Mexican woman who doesn’t want to believe you do anything else with your life except sleep with a foreigner so you can run away from the socialist inferno.
What is a consul?
In Cuba, a consul is not a public employee, a consul is a king treated with reverence because the consul has the key to that other dimension.
To ask for a visa in Cuba fills me with such shame.
They ask me things that have nothing to do with the matter at hand. Do they ask the same questions of all the citizens who make it this far?
It’s been a long time since I’ve been out of Cuba. I need to breathe a little. I need to meet that Nobel winner. But I hate going through this. Is it worth it to talk about yourself, to turn yourself in just to get the entry permit for anywhere else in the world? I’d give it all up if I didn’t have to respond to one more question.
The Mexican consul has doubts about me, and I, honestly, doubt these questions are necessary. Your privacy, your integrity is on the table.
What would happen if I requested asylum in Mexico? Thousands of citizens flee Mexico daily.
What would happen if I used Mexico as a bridge to the United States? Thousands of Cubans cross that border daily. I’d be one more tear in a sea of emigrants.
The letter of invitation says I’m going to one of my book releases, but that’s not true. My last book was already released and promoted in Mexico. Why am I lying? Why do we lie? Is lying the only honest way to get out of Cuba? We lie to Cuban authorities, we lie to international authorities. From the time we’re kids, we Cubans are taught how to sharpen our doublespeak to survive.
Gerónimo is on the other side of the office talking to the ambassador. Only glass separates us. I can hear everything. They’re talking about a story that was never filmed concerning Trotsky’s assassin. Would Leonardo Padura sell the rights? Who would direct the movie? I’ve always wondered. Gerónimo and the ambassador talk freely. When you’re born in captivity, you have a very precise set of gestures. But when you’re born free, you have a certain looseness, a way of being without reservation or anxiety.
The interview is long. Now and again, the ambassador glances my way. The consul takes delight in my vulnerability during the interview and savors torturing me.
“How many times have you been to Mexico? How many books have you sold there? What cities have you been to? Do you have family in the United States? Where did you meet Gerónimo?” asks the consul, knowing my letter and I are lying.
“At my front door,” I say, telling the truth for the first time.
“What did he come to Cuba for?”
This is the kind of situation that stirs my paranoia and I cease to care about anything. I get up from the chair, ready to walk out the door without having gotten my exit to the sea. This is precisely the point when you can’t take any more, the impasse when you can’t tell anymore if the diplomatic corps is at the service of State Security or if this woman just wants to pick up some typical tabloid gossip.
“Visa granted!” she says in a loud voice as she greets the ambassador with a wink. Gerónimo comes in and shakes her hand. She leans her face forward and steals a kiss, and then a photo, and with the photo, his soul.
We leave the embassy in silence. One more complaint and Gerónimo is going to run.
I’m imprisoned, completely imprisoned; my freedom always depends on so many circumstances, people, positions, institutions, goodwill, and political will that, even with visa in hand, it’s hard for me to believe that in one week I will finally be able to leave again. This time, with Gerónimo.
On my desk—which was for decades my parents’ desk, this dark and horrible looking monstrosity, an essential part of the so-called “Spanish remorse,” that dose of bad taste generations of Cubans inherited and have in our homes without ever knowing who could have ever loved something so somber—on this enormous piece of furniture with polished lions on the drawer handles and plumes and helmets and conquerors with invasive looks on their faces assaulting our kingdom; here, on this desk, where what was inside human skulls and their experimental fates was jotted down in the clinical histories of the dead patients my parents analyzed; right here on this horizontal plane where I stop to work every morning, that’s where I drop the two poetry collections I picked up from the Book Institute.
They weren’t accepted for publication. Why? Censorship and the censor have a singular partnership in Cuba. No one ever knows who evaluates you, and no one will ever know why that unknown person has censored you. A secretary receives and returns your original or originals as she talks to her daughter on the phone about what to make for dinner tonight.
Are they punishing you or your books? Is it your ideas or your attitude they’re censoring? Is there actually somebody in that office of prohibitions, or is it just a secretary who receives and returns books that are never read?
Is it you who’s persecuted or is it really that they’re after you for your ideas?
And what ideas? I have a lot of ideas about each of these matters. Is poetry really a threat to this country? Aren’t you really persecuting yourself?
What kills censored writers, whether expatriated or ostracized, is autophagy. Many end up stuck between political envy and literary envy. You have to learn to fly over the country’s literary and political map to heal your mind and write without fear, but the only way to do that is by working.
How do you know if you’ve been officially censored?
The writers who don’t see our work published in our homelands in a timely way, who are kept apart from the cultural process of our countries of origin—we end up talking to and about ourselves, making protagonists out of our tormentors. We end up sealed like a strongbox, fighting with invisible enemies, writing about this very thing in all our novels, stuck in the elevator of fear, breaking off communication with everything that connected us to that other reality, the one where the rest of the mortals live. Monothematic and neurotic, we Cuban writers go crazy or grow ill with irreversible conditions. We lose our center, we get lost, we give up, we’re beaten by mediocrity, by terror, and, above all else, by the sickness that is Cuba.
In my parents’ conceptual lab, I open the censor’s cranium and, like in Fantastic Voyage, I enter the officer’s displaced brain. In his Turkish saddle palpitate the suspicions that only he knows about. Bit by bit, my images encircle his head as if it were a plaza under siege. Perhaps my genetic material will contaminate the diagnosis; the chemical weapons to silence me are in the medical prescription.
A decade or two from now, under another censorship landscape, when my words have aged enough for this military administration that’s been forced to work in culture, then I’ll be able to publish my verses. For now, silence and fear.
As if in a museum, two poetry collections rest on my parents’ desk, translated into various languages…except Cuban Spanish.
Censorship doesn’t exist, my love; censorship doesn’t exist, my; censorship doesn’t exist; censorship doesn’t; censorship…shhhhhh.
* * *
—
With the equipment Gerónimo brought for the interviews he hasn’t been able to set up because he can’t find the right witnesses for his story, and with some things I had at home that were my parents or mine, Russian or German Democratic, and including two gadgets Alberto gave me, we’ve built
an installation in the living room of my house.
The poets’ voices hang from the ceiling, banned Cuban writers reading their own novels or censored poems. In the very middle, my voice reads the two poetry collections prohibited or simply ignored by the Book Institute. Fifteen headphones sway overhead. The voices are activated when you touch the headphone and stop to listen.
Not all censored writers are represented but you can hear Reinaldo Arenas, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Heberto Padilla, and José Lezama Lima in their crudest silence. You can also hear voices that sound familiar but never were, because of censorship. Gerónimo has also read some of these writers’ works in English. His voice is deep, pained. It’s stunning to hear them in a different language.
People knock on the door at all hours to listen to the voices. At dawn, we become aware of the bell: some young people want to hear the banned texts. Because our private exhibition is called “Censorship,” we open the door no matter the hour so nothing is “censored.” The wires move like pendulums wanting to scream their truth. Under the headphones, someone gets the idea.
How long will this installation make sense in this living room, this city, this island, in me?
In the living room, a murmur of voices invades the silence. The murmur recalls a mantra to keep the censorship at bay; it can be heard on the streets. A group of young people waiting in a short line are dispersed by the neighborhood cop; that’s why it’s better to come at night, when the silence lets you listen, without repression, to the details and the voices of the lost poets.
It’s worth it to go through the distasteful experience of being searched and questioned by the officers who serve at José Martí airport in Havana. It’ll always be worth it to feel those eyes going over your life and those hands burying themselves in your luggage or your body. It’s worth it to explain yourself to a camera or military officer who doesn’t understand, who can’t tell the difference between the rule and the exception. It’s all worth it, absolutely all of it, just to get out and breathe for a while.
When I travel, I imagine different ways of being free. I pretend to be a citizen of the world. I make myself up as a common woman, I disappear into the crowds and try to be happy. I cross the streets and talk about anything while I consider life could be that way too, lived not as a personality but as a person. Yes, I seem like a free woman, but I’m not, because Havana is always waiting.
When I travel, I have access to the Internet again. I begin to speak the truth in a normal tone of voice. I can, in fact, shout what I believe…Yes, one hour of scrutiny is worth it, in the end, to fly free for a while. Because I know—we all know—I was born in captivity and now it seems I will never know any other way of getting older. My mouth shut, anguished tears falling on an imagined plate of food.
Two, maybe three generations will pass and we Cubans will still be looking over our shoulders.
An hour of control is worth it if, as soon as the plane doors close, you can enjoy the luxury of forty-five days away from the island and its neurosis.
Sometimes, already up in the air, I fear the plane will turn around, come back to earth, and taxi on the tarmac just to leave me there, in front of a battalion of uniformed men.
Deliriously self-referential, that’s how I feel.
But I’ll meet García Márquez. I’ll see his eyes, his hands. I’ll be able to read him another way. Maybe I’ll understand why I’ve chosen to write, despite the fact that, because I write, the solitude makes me feel a peculiar annoyance, as if the page is refusing to obey and resists my texts: once written, the ink poisons them, devours them. But I’ll meet García Márquez…The plane is in the air and I take Gerónimo’s hand. Cuba looks so small down there, while it’s so big inside me…My problems follow me wherever I go. They’re like a hat that travels with me; they’re a crown.
I’d forgotten that arriving here always gives me intense pleasure. Mexico City keeps you awake, anxious, like a nocturnal animal in the jungle; the stimulus comes from the danger: The risks you run as you navigate the city sharpen your instincts. The wildest smells and the most acute flavors assault your senses.
There’s nothing I can do to relieve the sense of insecurity that circulating through these streets produces in me, because my body still holds on to the strange pain of the kidnapping. I’ll never walk through this city again without feeling the fragility of being alive. Mexico City hurts me, and seduces me.
I run through the gauntlet of risks. I know I’m trained to survive anywhere, but the dangers in Mexico City make for uneasiness for someone like me, who can smell the gunpowder and can keep the adrenaline pumping and is in perpetual combat. Do Enzo and his friends still live in this city? I don’t know. It’s the same city, but I now perceive it so differently.
It’s only when I get to the airport that I remember Gerónimo is a famous actor. In my country, these things hardly register. People walk by you naturally. Who could be interested in a Hollywood actor when faced with the daily challenge of survival?
We can barely move from one space to another without his being called out, photographed, embraced. Autographs and selfies.
A huge armored truck transports us on the gray highways through this enormous city that always feels alien to me. On the radio, someone sings: “Lie to me again/your bad makes me feel good.”
Later, at the St. Regis, the danger seems to mute with the altitude. The silent city seems to be gagged below us, but the danger beats, it beats between the traffic, smoke, and fear of the gray.
Gerónimo hates to turn on the TV and detests the news; after so many people laying claims on him, he values and reveres silence. He loves to hear me sing old Cuban songs, unknown danzones and boleros, but today I keep silent too.
I shower to get rid of Cuba’s heat. Sweat and the smells of the tropics stream down my body like rancid makeup. As I leave the bathroom, I see Gerónimo stretched out on the bed’s white silk sheets. His naked body is so perfect, I feel I don’t deserve it. His sex has been designed for my mouth, and his mouth distills a lust my sex longs for.
I kiss his body in the night’s profound silence. He swells and shivers, lengthens, poisons me with pleasure, wets my neck, drips on my thighs. I wrap him up like a raging warrior. I advance on him, flying over the dangerous city. I don’t care about breaking the glass. I leap past the fear. I imprison his sex with mine and sink into the sharp sensation that produces such delight in me. He seems like he’s asleep but nothing about him is at rest. I pounce and plunge and shudder. Gerónimo throws me against the bed with a treasonous turn and reels me in. He kills me with pleasure, controlling the tension with three fierce thrusts against my matrix; a frenetic and labored spell holds him against my center, punishing him by taking him on an impartible and irreversible route, a one-way trip. Cornered, suffocating, we journey from inside him to inside me, from his limit to mine, until there’s no way out but to shatter. Two screams break the night’s silence. Two long cries devastate us as we fall on the sheets, that immense combat zone which is the bed splattered with our ardor.
There’s a knock on the door. The hotel security fears the worst. I’m experiencing the best of my body pouring into his.
Nude, we open the door. The waiter blushes. We’re in Mexico, and there are still norms amid the danger and risk. We offer apologies and order a light dinner.
Silence, kisses, cuddles…We put Havana someplace far away and exotic, though ten hours ago that exoticism was our quotidian existence. We fantasize about being in two cities at once as my tongue rescues some of his sweat, which is also mine.
We were trying to get to Fuego Street but the police stopped us. The taxi dropped us off at the entrance to the Pedregal Gardens because it couldn’t go any farther. An officer recognizes Gerónimo and tells everybody else he’s Spider-Man. I don’t recall him ever playing that character but, in the end, it’s the code that gets us past the rope. Just a few autographs, two or three photos, and that’s it, the way has been opened to us.
The meeting is supposed to be more or less at this time, but it’s getting dark. Is it going to rain or is it night? Something’s happening. An uncomfortable silence ricochets in the labyrinth of houses that look unoccupied. Perhaps this deep solitude is normal in this neighborhood.
I doubt García Márquez would want to write about Mauricio, about this man whom I can’t seem to understand. I don’t think we’ll find anything, but we’re on our way, and very excited.
Gerónimo thinks the story of my presumed father would make an excellent first novel. He asks me to think about it. He says I don’t have to stop writing poetry, that I can write in both genres and, of course, I can write the script about what we’re researching now. Whenever Gerónimo gets fired up about something, he starts talking in English. I don’t understand his other language so I stop listening and it becomes the background music between us.
I promise him I’ll write that novel, especially because of how thrilled I am when I think that, in just seconds, I’ll be before García Márquez.
“Call him Gabo,” says Gerónimo enthusiastically. “That’s what he likes to be called.”