Ramón Díaz-Marzo
HAVANA, may - On Friday, May 4, I thought of Robinson Crusoe, who, after the
shipwreck, understood that having saved his life and recovered some articles
from the ship, his situation was not so desperate. Because living for 40 years
under the tutelage of a police state is much like a shipwreck.
Some days before, I had made a mental list of the good and the bad, and the
first discovery I made was that the bad is guaranteed, but the good....
I hadn't gone to the theatre in twentysome years, due to a psychological
attitude of political rejection. But for some days now, National Musical Radio
had been advertising the performance of Verdi's opera La Traviata.
If I say that I love opera, that I have enjoyed the most famous ones on
videotape, and that, living, as I do, just 200 meters from the Gran Teatro de La
Habana, I have never seen one live, nobody would believe me.
Would some of my readers know what it means to go to the opera? Of course.
And even if I can't say I went to the Paris Opera, I can say that on that
marvelous Friday in May, along with an 81-year-old lady, my loyal friend on sad
occasions, arm in arm, like two lovers, we went up the marble main staircase and
I felt very proud.
We went to the opera with the best attire that we found in our wardrobes.
Even though I didn't wear a coat and tie, I felt like one of the gentleman
Balzac portrayed in Lost Illusions. Of course, I was not Lucien Rubempré,
nor was my friend Madame de Bargeton. Nor did we have to face the wiseman du
Chatelet, or fight to the death with word swords and knives against a slew of
intellectual assassins such as the monsieurs de Marsay, Vandenesse, Montriveau
and Canalis. But we did have to face the amiable ushers who, in the darkness,
using flashlights without bulbs, showed us to the numbered seats, and the
foreigners who walked in after the start of the performance, with their "jineteras"
(local prostitutes) in stiletto heels tap-tapping on the uncarpeted floor,
talking out loud, laughing, and who surely are people that in their respective
countries would never spend 200 dollars to go to the opera.
All the residents of Casa de Vecindad, at 521 Obispo Street, congregated at
the door at 7:50 p.m. under different pretexts. They saw us go out, Pilar and
myself, walking slowly to the theater, along the sidewalk of the Manzana de Gómez
and Central Park.
During the three long hours that the performance lasted, at the
intermissions, Pilar commented: "They must be talking about me, my good
neighbors."
"It's also possible," I told her, "that by the time we get
back, Mrs. X (her 81-year-old
neighbor) will be waiting at the front door of the tenement, shocked by your
daring to break the daily routine.
"It's hard to believe," said Pilar, "how Cubans miss the
opportunity of going to a grandiose spectacle like opera, which anyone can
attend for the reasonable cost of 5 pesos (0.25 dollar)."
"There may be several answers to that puzzle," I said, "but
right now only one occurs to me: Sensibility in humans is neither born nor
developed by decree of the State."
This idea of taking Pilar, the widow of Armando Miquelis, to the opera was
maybe the unconscious desire to have taken my own mother, as a present for
Mother's Day. But don't ask me why I can't take my mother to the theater. The
price of that answer would be one of the novels that remain to be written in a
suffering Cuba which, in the coming years, will need an army of writers at the
service of reality.
Versión original
en español
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