The island, in (convertible) pesos
Water in a basket *
The island, in (convertible) pesos
By Dalia Céspedes
HAVANA – The damned circumstance of water all around forces me to sit at the coffee table. Thus begins Virgilio** his most famous poem and I could now curse the damned circumstance of the anniversaries and tributes that also surround us like a body of water and forces me to concentrate on Virgilio.
But that’s not the case. He hasn’t been with us for many years now, with his ironic glance of unfathomable sadness, his lucidity, his laconic wisdom.
I want to comment about the poem only as an exercise in understanding, a conversation with a friend I never met. “La Isla en Peso” is not the bitterest of his poems, not only because it is a youthful text but also because it celebrates a discovery, that of a territory in the Cuban psychological magma.
[Translator’s Note: The poem’s title means “The Island, on Balance” but, as modified by Ms. Céspedes here, it translates to “The Island, in (Convertible) Pesos.”]
Just like the body is basically composed of water, psychology is made out of words. Who could then be the most skillful psychologists but the poets, who are princes (not to say scientists) of the word?
Once I heard a historian friend say that the best treatise on Cuban psychology was not written by Ortiz or Mañach or any other national anthropologist or ethnologist but by a poet named José Lezama Lima in his novel Paradiso.
Virgilio’s poem, then, is an awakening to the tremulous national conscience. It’s meaningless to say, with a solemn contemptuous gesture, that it was written in 1943, when so many portentous changes in our social structures remained to be made. The mental structures, according to Virgilio, remain untouched, but for a few scratches.
In an earlier time, I lived like Adam
What brought about the metamorphosis?
Two questions leap at me: Who is the “I” who previously lived like Adam? What metamorphosis is he talking about? I don’t attempt to interpret poems as if reading the lines on the palm of a stranger. I still remember, from my years as a student, my repugnance to the question “What did author So-and-so mean?” Evidently “The Island, on Balance” doesn’t mean. It states.
My country, so young, you don’t know how to define!
Every poet knows that words are deceiving, that they lead us into a space of suggestions, many of them even, behind which there isn’t the slightest contact with what we call reality, only a new deception resembling a traffic light in a circular road.
The memory of a natural poetry, not codified, comes to my lips
Virgilio, like a good Virgil, knows that once we cross the verbal deception, as in a limbo, the paradisiacal hell of reality shows us its truest masks, its most exact incongruities.
In confusion, a people escape from their own skin,
Becoming drowsy in the light,
The fulminating drug that can initiate a deadly sleep
The mountain is our skin, according to Virgilio, a mountain that machete-wielders clear “with mortal luxury,” while other voracious employees of progress engage “in the rancorous task of trimming back the borders of the world’s most beautiful island.” The clarity, not as a symbol of mental elevation but as a kind of electrical fumigation that covers everything with exaggerated lights, is the tropical noon and also the seductive effort to convert, to transform what’s natural into something sophisticated, poverty into wealth, rusticity into development. A fundamental role in this artificial illumination that interrupts the Antillean night “without memory, without history” is played by the European,
the inevitable transient personage who leaves us his illustrious turd
Virgilio died in 1979, when the nation was deep into a huge mimetic effort that would end 10 years later, without consultation, without a warning, by the mere force of a collapse. Today, the island’s mimetism again resembles the one the young Virgilio knew when he wrote “The Island, on Balance.” One island with two currencies, one more phony than the other; two economies, two societies, like two islands that drift apart, an archipelago of political opinions and a reef of blunders of every type.
My country, so young, you don’t know how to organize!
My country, so young, divinely rhetorical, you don’t know how to narrate!
Men and women continue to meet on the plantain fields. Of the noontime showers, the siesta, the canebrake and tobacco, only the latter remains in the select place bestowed by life upon natural divinities; the others have retreated, pushed by circumstances called “global.” The dark women will continue to dance with a glass of rum atop their heads but perhaps not everyone will become so serious “when the timbal starts the dance.”
Who knows if Virgilio would grow serious when seeing how many of the people he worried about have gone from the revolution, the historical materialism and the socialist realism to the rumba of the convertible peso, the carnival of an allegedly organized selfishness and the informality of prevarication. Maybe not. Maybe he’d smile and reply with an enigmatic verse:
No tiger is passing by, just its description.
* “Water in a basket” is Dalia Céspedes’ blog, currently being constructed in Progreso Semanal.
** Virgilio Piñera Llera (Aug. 4, 1912 – Oct. 18, 1979) was a Cuban author, dramatist, poet, short-story writer and essayist.
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