I Was Never the First Lady Page 2

  It was and is Donato Poveda. “Like a Crystal Ball (Como una campana de cristal).”

  Night is here with its cruel silence . . .

  There have been no calls tonight. This early morning, there are no hurricanes, no strong winds to knock down the wires. It’s not raining. There are no celebrations in the city, but the phone is dead. Maybe no one hears us. We’ll go on. We’re going to call a forever friend—maybe she can tell us if we’re on the air or not.

  “Operator, please connect me with Maya’s number. Let’s put her on the air and see if she’s listening.”

  “Hello.”

  “Abuela, sorry about the hour. Is Maya home? We want to talk to her.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Nadia, Abuela. We’re on the air, doing our show, and we want to know if we’re being heard.”

  “Oh! Nadia, I was asleep, child, and I didn’t recognize your voice. You sound far away. Maya left for Madrid. She didn’t tell anyone. You know how discreet she is.”

  “Abuela, I’m sorry, I didn’t know. Are you listening to my show today? We’re on the air.”

  “What show? Maya calls on Saturdays. Come by—don’t leave me alone.”

  “A kiss from our sound booth, Abuela. Of course I’ll come by. Ciao.”

  “A sound booth here or there? Where are you, child?”

  “Sweet dreams, Abuela.”

  Maya, another one who left without saying goodbye. We’ll go on. If anyone can hear us, please call.

  In 1979, when I was nine, Silvio Rodríguez wrote this love song I can’t forget. Let’s listen to it.

  Today my duty was

  to sing to the homeland . . .

  I’d like to tell you how I got here. It’s been six months since we began broadcasting this show, and I’ve never confessed, because someone like me, who comes from the world of visual art, with exhibits and performances, who is afraid of being ridiculous, afraid of the night’s frailties and decadence, terrified of catchphrases, of the old ways of communicating . . . Why do I—someone without habits or traditions, not dependent on any ritual—come here every day to be with you?

  My mother was a brain, a voice. Twenty years ago she had a program at this station: Words Against Forgetting. She recorded some gorgeous songs; she preserved lost voices, voices that had already died in our memories but were still alive in the country’s culture. My mother did all she could to preserve a phenomenon as big as old Cuban music, what we know today as the Buena Vista Social Club. But she disappeared. Maybe she listens to me from an old lighthouse on a lost beach. Mami, are you listening?

  Maybe it’s better if we listen to some of the old scratchy recordings she didn’t forget to leave behind, like this one, which she saved before leaving forever.

  Don’t fall asleep, and if you do, dream of us. This sounds better all the time . . . It’s the great Barbarito Díez singing about absence in these wee hours of the night when it seems no one is tuned in to us.

  Absence means forgetting,

  means shadows, means never . . .

  That’s why it’s now my turn to stand guard with you in these early mornings, no matter how ridiculous or marvelous it may seem. They’re our secret and, at the same time, our small oeuvre. Coming back here is like coming back to my mother.

  This discourse is like a matryoshka inside another matryoshka. It’s also like the guffaw from those who sang me to sleep with prayers and what one friend called “our communist pamphlet.” I’ve been educated in such a way that no matter how much I may reject the lessons, they haunt me like a stigma, an attitude toward life, toward justice and destiny. Truths, lies. No matter my expression, it’s obvious how I was built, structured for others. Abstract but real. However they could, along the way. That’s how I am, how so many of us are—we’re contaminated. To deny it makes us cynical, dishonest, crafty, alienated. Or did we kill my mother and that’s why I’m here, playing with her cards against forgetting?

  I have a sense no one’s listening to us today. The phone hasn’t rung all night. The audio engineer and I have been alone here, separated by only greenish glass (from the 1950s), sharp and cold, like this booth. Waiting for a response from the other side of the hermetic city, patched up, marked by its past. Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or Monday, I’ll be with you. You’ll listen to me, lying down or wandering around the house, around the empty factory or as it’s about to open, around the abandoned movie house you take care of as it slowly crumbles in solitude, or maybe you’re listening to me while in a taxi no one can ride in because by now everyone’s home or not out yet . . . It doesn’t matter. Tomorrow we’ll still be Daybreak with No One. You can go to sleep with me now. Until tomorrow, I’ll leave you with this marvelous guaguancó in Celeste Mendoza’s voice:

  If I lose your love,

  it won’t matter much.

  Notes from My Diary

  Of course they canceled my show, but no one expected anything different.

  It’s all part of the game. I’m interested only in the finite. I’m a professional provocateur.

  They heard rumors; at that hour, everyone’s sleeping. It looks like my suspension is for one month. The mystery continues: “Victory is certain.” I’ve applied for two grants. If I get one, I won’t be able to keep coming to the radio station every day. I’ve thought about building a studio at home, something artisanal where I can even record noise.

  The exhibit at Reina Sofía in Madrid, even though it included a boatload of other artists, was much talked about. I’m still part of Everyone, never a protagonist. Once more, my individuality hurts, narrows, and flows like a river trying to map its course. The critics talk about the White Library I’ve built, a flawless space filled with books, papers, documents, spines, flaps—all white, unblemished. It’s ready for reading, ready to inform, but there’s nothing there. Saúl talks about this exercise in literary silence: Is nothing really written or, on the contrary, is it a staging of the Literature of Nothing? Does the existence of a typology—a library—in and of itself guarantee access to its content? Or, rather, does every predetermined structure censor the possibility of generating a free and subjective experience?

  They come to interview me and leave with something in their hands or on their tape recorders. They try to manipulate things, but I don’t know anymore who manipulates whom. I had control once, but the steering wheel’s come off since then.

  Havana’s humid cold is upon us. The sea splatters my window with salt; the drizzle cuts right through to the bone. I inhale, exhale; I look out the window. Inhaling ideas into my stuffed-up head, but it’s contaminated by egos, so the ideas won’t work. With each passing day I see the real world less clearly. Everything is hazy, wet from rain, and looks like something pulled out of a painting by Gustavo Acosta.

  My work is exhibited far away. I’m part of all that, but I won’t move; my work travels for me. Goodbye, White and Black flags! Goodbye, White Library!

  The radio show is my work too; it’s been my best work these last few months. I wanted to expose myself to the quotidian life of the nighttime programs. Wherever we are in the world, we’re assailed by the mournful voice of the speaker in a kind of neuro-vaginal tone as we doze.

  When I couldn’t resist anymore, when its anachronistic aesthetic began to suffocate me, I blew it up with truths in a place where truth can be a bomb. I launched the show at dawn, as if I was free to say what I wanted with my own mouth, but I knew there were consequences. As someone who covers a canvas following orders from someone else, or axes her favorite sculpture to pieces. That’s how I got firewood from my fallen tree. We all know how far we can go, where the limits are on a modulated frequency. The radio plagues me, between cars, windows, parks, on buses running their routes. There’s a news story, a song, a sound in my head. Asleep or awake, I hear voices from the radio. We’re not dumb, dear listeners; we know how far we can go when we say “Wow.”

  For the time being, I’ll stop broadcasting for “others” an
d begin exclusive transmissions I can later give as gifts to my friends. Homemade broadcasts, alternatives. I’ll fill my radio shows with songs and commentaries as personal as the entries in my diary. I’ll do a program with my own ideas and music. No one can censor my autonomy. It’s not that I want to broadcast but that I want to express myself. That’s how it’s going to be from now on. I don’t want to give up the radio because it’s part of me. But the radio can give up on me, at least given these grave circumstances to which I’ve made myself vulnerable.

  I was born somewhere between radio and film. That’s me: sound and image; rebellious, tropical; socialist, surrealist, hyperrealist. Special effects are a kind of Dadaism that transports and defines the limits of any body and the sounds inside my sick head.

  NOTE

  Two pieces really had an effect on me at Documenta in Kassel. In the same show in which Tania Bruguera created a mirage in which you entered a dark tunnel and then were dazzled by a light and the only sounds you could hear were machine guns and boots marching, I also discovered a piece by a Jewish artist in which she’d reconstructed and compiled facts about her mother in a concentration camp. She’d never known she was part of a persecuted family. After many years, she’d found a numbered plate among her mother’s belongings and decided to investigate, to shed light on the lives of her parents.

  In fact, I don’t know if my mother’s still alive. We know she had Alzheimer’s. Someone witnessed her being out of her mind, but so much time has passed since then, we assume she must be dead. It’s better like this, after so much absence. I hate having to arrange my affections so it’s only by killing someone off that I can save them from their own existence, from their great miseries and mistakes. Maybe I’ll find her. For my father, it’s best to drop the subject, to assume my mother is lost. He doesn’t have any excuses anymore. He doesn’t have anything good or bad to tell me about her anymore. In his own way, my father is also dying. He doesn’t have secrets.

  Does anyone know where she is? Does anyone know why they give my father so many homages? At this point, why do they keep going over something that’s sealed and silent? Why do they keep pointing something out they used to consider off-limits: Hands off! Don’t touch!

  Many mysteries. This could be my next solo show: The search and rescue of my mother. My father’s final act.

  I’ve received another letter from a listener who usually writes to me in care of the station.

  His name is Eduardo, and he’s been a fan since the beginning of the show from which I’ve been temporarily suspended. I attach it to my diary because, though it hurts, he’s still right.

  Dear Comrade Guerra:

  I feel terrible about the void your program has left us with, your “lunatic” listeners. Believe me, we’ve missed you these days. For my family and me, it’s as if we’ve been abandoned by someone we hold very dear.

  The truth is, we need it every night as an incentive because of our many personal deprivations. By this I mean transportation, money squandered for entertainment, et cetera, although I don’t believe anything in life is eternal.

  My wife’s and my point about your departure from the show is that, really, you were a little irresponsible when you exposed yourself like that. Didn’t you realize you were playing with fire? How much of your discourse was really naive, playing the naughty girl while working at a place like that? That lack of responsibility is related to the abandonment with which you accuse your parents. You’ve also left us to ourselves. So please respect our rights as parents to abandon ship in turn. Here we’re all guilty of abandonment. I hope we can agree on that. Don’t be offended and try to understand it as a life lesson.

  Best wishes,

  Eduardo and family

  Eduardo and his family’s letter is clear. It’s not the first time he’s counseled me with that paternal tone, as if he sees everything about to happen and stops it. I don’t know who he is, but every time I’ve gotten in trouble, he seems to have seen it coming. Cuban paternalism has no limits. They take it seriously. They write to you even though they don’t know you. Maybe my friend the listener has gone through all this. I don’t know. It’s another one of those mysteries with which we live.

  I wonder who these people are who take the time to call a radio station, to write to shows and worry about those on the other side. My friend the listener makes me very curious.

  I remember one night when I was a girl, a man was waiting for my mother at the reception desk of the station where she worked. He had a VEF radio in his hands, Russian, heavy and black. He wanted my mother—specifically her—to pull the station out of it. He didn’t want to hear it coming out of that radio anymore.

  We were dismayed. Someone said he was abnormal. As far as I was concerned, he was brave, a crazy man who dared say what others kept quiet.

  Get this station out of my radio! I can’t take it anymore, comrade, I can’t take it . . . !

  At least he was looking for an irreversible solution, not just moving the dial from right to left.

  I’m still putting my homemade show together. I have to go to the station for an urgent meeting, which I think might be definitive.

  Meeting at the Station

  The moment I stepped out of the elevator, I looked toward the director’s office and saw my audio engineer coming out and looking like a scolded puppy. He kissed me, his eyes watering, and said goodbye. Was this a definitive farewell? It could be—I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m so irresponsible. And I started to blame myself.

  I waited, as if I were back in school outside the principal’s office.

  I didn’t know what the hell we were waiting for. Edelsa sat at her big black “Spanish regret”–style desk. She stared at me as if she were the school principal, but instead of scolding me, she started doodling a beard, mustache, and glasses on a picture in an old sepia-toned newspaper. I was disgusted to see that the top of her blue pen was chewed up. Didn’t she want to talk? Wasn’t she going to talk at all this morning? Why had she asked to see me, then? Finally, a “comrade” she had been waiting for arrived. Edelsa came to like a domestic robot. She threw the newspaper into the trash, and right then I realized the face she’d been doodling belonged to Captain San Luis. Oh, oh, oh. What madness!

  In contrast, the “comrade” arrived radiating happiness, sweaty and ready to chat.

  He tousled my hair.

  “So, little girl, what’s up with us now?”

  Oh, everything’s plural here, a kind of modest plural.

  “Nothing, nothing’s up with us,” I said, my voice as firm as a soldier’s, afraid of what might happen but still firm.

  Edelsa rolled her eyes. It was strange: she looked behind her, to the sides, and laughed ironically. They sat face-to-face, and Edelsa launched into a speech that seemed preprogrammed.

  “The word is ‘suicidal.’ I told you maybe it’s a biological problem; her mother had disorders. Since her training days we’ve helped her a great deal. They’re very similar, so I won’t blame the girl. What we, the counselors, suggest is that perhaps she can get help at the military clinic, so she’ll see how things are.”

  All of this was said in front of me without a thought to being discreet. As if I didn’t exist. I thought the idea was to scare me; I couldn’t think of why else they’d do that. I didn’t want to find out about my mother like this. My God!

  The “comrade” stared right at me. He emptied the ashtray into a trash can that was already full and then stepped out for something. Edelsa and I stayed behind, trapped and mute.

  In my mother’s defense, I tried to tell Edelsa something about her, but Edelsa just made this noise: Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. She pointed to the curtains or the ceiling—I’m not sure which—and opened her eyes wide. We fell into a deep silence.

  I didn’t say a word for six or eight minutes—for me, an eternity. I surveyed the office: the curtains a dirty mustard color, plaster busts of unknown martyrs, several marble trophies, and tin badges a little corroded by time
. Fake RCA mics and, especially, books in perfect Russian, which I imagined dealt with radio policies, thoughts about art and socialism, Spanish–Russian dictionaries, and vice versa. That’s when I remembered Edelsa had a degree in community communications from the Soviet Union. My father once told me it was Edelsa who’d had the idea of presenting Russian language classes on the radio. Anyway, I was still exploring the shelves, with their dusty matryoshkas and photographs. There she was, a Cuban mulatta between bridges and monuments buried in snow, wearing a ushanka, smiling in pictures all over the office. Everything was suspended in time, frozen on a Siberian steppe, the AC on max and Russian postcards on top of the icebox in order of size. The icebox was Soviet too, and not well taken care of, but still working. I doubted Russian bureaucrats kept a similar setup in their country. This was untouchable. It was loyal to what no longer existed, a second opportunity.

  Finally our man was at the door. Edelsa tried to hurry him.

  “Lázaro, we need to talk to the Party to take care of . . . that other thing. But let’s take care of this once and for all.”

  She turned down the cold coffee he offered her in a paper cup. I didn’t want any either.

  “You have two options, he said. Either you go and get tested and do whatever the psychiatrist tells you to do, so you’re calmer, more measured, in control of yourself, or we’ll let you go for medical reasons.”

  Edelsa looked at him, a bit confused.

  “But, Lazarito, if she doesn’t go to the doctor, how can she be let go from here for medical reasons? I’m unclear about that.”

  I stood up, took Lázaro’s hand, and shook it. Finally the person assigned to watch me had a name. I asked for some blank paper, in fact a few recycled pages with old scripts written on the back. Edelsa was confused but gave them to me. I took her blue pen from her mouth, gnawed and wet. While they looked on in a thick and almost lucid silence, I left my unmistakable mark. I wrote while standing, using clear print: “I’m leaving voluntarily because I don’t feel capable of doing this job in the way that’s being asked of me.” I signed it: “Nadia Guerra.”