She is back, The girl with the short hair. She doesn’t say where she has been Or how long she is staying, She only waves and beckons From across the street, Points at her open sandals And summer tan, Laughs with her Forest-honey eyes.
Her hand plays with The bristle of her hair Uncovered by hat, Her long bare arms, Like half-moons, In a magic swish Pull a screen of indigo Across the sky Sprinkling a winking Star or two.
She whistles of far-away places, And squints to spot The fanned-out horizons Through lowered lashes, Trailing behind her Gurgly children, brass bands, And cat gangs, Ignoring the ringing phones In empty booths Along the way.
“It’s me,” (She doesn’t have to say,) “Where have you been?” And suddenly the surprise Of my own absence Unfurls like a scarf of grief, And I have no answer But open my arms And “I am back,” (I don’t have to say).
"He knew he was beaten now finally and without remedy and he went back to the stern and found the jagged end of the tiller would fit in the slot of the rudder well enough for him to steer" (Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea).
He is bent by about 45 degrees in the waist, and walks with small shuffling steps. He reminds me a little of an old woman I saw several years ago through the car window, in Zajecar in eastern Serbia. In her case, the upper body formed a clean 90-degree angle with the lower parts due to some deformation of the spine. But, doubled-up as she was, she walked with a purpose, firmly going about her business despite the body's betrayal. This man has no visible purpose about him. His elongated face peppered with grey stubble, houses two hole-like eyes and a half-open mouth which reveals long horsey teeth (Munch's first sketch of "Scream"?). Glazed over by a fine film of absence, his eyes move minimally and slowly. In shoes a couple of sizes too big and gaping around his heels with each step, and pants a few centimeters too short for his angular frame, flapping like flags of failure above his ankles, he seems to be making only nominal motions that happen to be on a trajectory. The long strip on the front and the inside of his trousers on both legs is wet from where he has pissed himself -- an incontrovertible fact in the blaze of the noon-hour.
We are on Obispo street, the main tourist artery in Old Havana, connecting Parque Central with Plaza de Armas, dotted with hotels, small restaurants (where from early afternoon live bands play salsa and son), tourist stores, tourist information bureaus, and close to our hotel, the famous old and elegant Farmacia Taquechel, and the sweet refuge of Panaderia San Jose with all kinds of pastries, cakes and bread. It looks perfect -- except that it's not real. This street, and a select handful of adjacent streets and squares (Mercaderes, Obrapia, Plaza Vieja...), are like a studio-village built for the shooting of a period film. Not exactly a Lego-land but certainly a Tourist-land. Here the sombre and dignified colonial edifices have been restored, the hotels have been repainted into their pre-revolutionary selves, and streams of pale northern tourists pace up and down happily flaunting their creased summer garments. The currency used around here is unreal too -- almost all the stores charge in CUC, or the convertible pesos, the money invented for the tourists. The fantasy of it all, though, holds well, especially if you never stray from the studio-village streets. Just how sadly fantastical it all is becomes clear only when an unscripted character from real life walks into this lala-land. Like the bent old man in the wet trousers.
He brought trailing behind him a breath of other streets, an acrid smell of dust and mold, a scent of limping dogs, skin-diseased cats, and dead puppies, glimpsed in passing at dusks gathered around unlit street lamps. A laborious exhalation of a life wearing its only shirt. An emptiness in the day and in the stomach that eats up the leftovers of Dignity.
On the Malecon
I think of a morning in the 80s in north-western Bosnia, when I went with my mother to our local 'supermarket' -- an ugly white-and-yellow concrete cube with a grocery store inside. In front of it were a few makeshift stands, and people selling anything they could sell. That day there was a new figure among them: a thin, old peasant-woman, with a handkerchief around her head neatly tied up under the chin. Unlike the other vendors who had slumped down anywhere they found convenient, she was standing, her hands clasped in front of her apron, her eyes lowered, a shy shadow of a smile tingling around the mouth. She was selling flowers. They were from her yard, and were bound into little bunches by a simple piece of string. That's all she had. Flowers were nowhere on our shopping list (they were almost never on shopping lists, and were relegated into the category of occasional luxury); but, murmuring something about the "poor soul," my mother bought a bouquet, her face spreading into a smile as bright as the sunny day we inhabited. In her eyes I saw the reflection of her own aged parents, in a small inert Serbian town, suffocating in the mire of downspiralling socialist economics, where that strange but essential parameter of Dignity was slowly dying out. Where, for example, my grandparents weren't able to afford buying clothes any more, and had to depend on my parents' old garments, which we brought them every year during our summer holidays.
My mother told me once never to be ashamed of old clothes, as long as they are clean. And I remembered it. But keeping them clean implies the minimum presence of mind and willingness to get up in the morning and carry one more day on your shoulders even when your collarbone is broken -- to make an effort to pick the flowers and go sell them, like the peasant-woman, or to fix the boat and return home empty-handed, like Hemingway's old man. And the others? Those bent by life to a point of no return, roaming like specters in wet trousers the streets that used to be theirs but are now leased to strangers who pretend not to see, or take notes for their blogs? Those who can't do what Silvio does in his song, who don't have it in them any more to fight and kill, one after the other, the eternally appearing snakes, each one bigger than the one before? Who don't have "a verse with the truth" to lodge into the snake's intestines?
An hour later, I see the old man again on the same street. His trousers have dried in the sun. He continues to roam with no apparent memory of having been here before.
