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Rafael Ferro Salas
PINAR DEL RIO, January (www.cubanet.org) - The cities of Cuba have lost
their personality. Each one had its own idiosyncrasies, but it isn't the same
now as before. The elderly say the city has prostituted itself. The main street
of this city, Pinar del Río, looks like a cabaret dancer. Night falls and
the street puts on makeup to hide all the bitterness that the day has pasted to
its skin.
The day gives off a total racket of old cars. They move away with sadness,
as if their motors were crying for the splendor of years past. They are part of
the scrap iron that survives from the Fifties, when Cuba was on the threshold of
the civil war that would change everything. All of a sudden everything was
turned on its head, as if pushed by a slap from God.
Men and women are learning to hate with their city. The grudges of the
city's lost years are in all the hatred that it bears. All the parks are marked
by vice. On every bench there is a place for the hopeless. The informers wait in
the shadows, laying in wait for new victims.
The city refuses to be an accomplice of the traitors; that's something for
which you have to thank it. In the half-light a drunk vomits the pains of his
foggy memories. His eyes cry. He says in a low voice that he misses his drinking
buddies who died of cirrhosis. He is sure that, too, will be his path.
Misery is beating the rhythm of life. A woman looks with sadness at the
clothes in a shop window. All the fabrics on display appear distant to her.
There's a hole in one of her pockets nearly as big as the sky. With a tired
step, she moves on in the direction of the helpless.
On the other side of the street, a veteran of foreign wars rubs the place
where his missing leg was. He longs also for the shadow of the friend who didn't
come back among the living, and feels an enormous desire to go with his dead
friend and look for the baseball trapped in the ceilings of their infancy.
An ambulance speeds by with someone dying inside. In the middle of the block
there's a party in a house. Two women kiss each other on the lips in front of
two elderly men. Inside the ambulance, the dying person smiles, thinking of all
the good things he had. He grips the hand of the woman who accompanies him on
his trip without return. Later, he dies giving up a long sigh like a kiss.
Perhaps a poet appears in the middle of the night, trying to pierce the
silence. No one can triumph over the silence of a city wounded by the bitterness
of its people. The columns prepare to await the dew, and they give the poet hope
in his crazy race to capture silences.
But tonight the silence of the city runs through the breasts of the girls
who kiss each other. It will be a cold night of mourning. You realize this is
the true face of life. Everything can start with a kiss and end with a sigh
dedicated to the dark side of the moon.
Everything carries the same moral. In the end it is destiny: there is always
more time for dying than for giving a kiss.
Versión original
en español
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