Havana Cuba. – I, how would I say Reinaldo Arenas, I am a “non-person”, even though my tribulations are not even similar to those suffered by him, that Reinaldo who very well made us note each of the stab wounds to which he was subjected, and also the bleeding. I was not a fugitive from the government of Fidel Castro, at least not in the way that Reinaldo was. I was not forced to hide in Lenin Park, nor was I a victim of the accusations that harassed him. I was not blamed for seducing budding youngsters. I, although I was once beset by many tribulations, did not commit suicide, at least not until today, much less in New York, but still I am “a non-person”.
I am “a non-person”, and not because the Government despises me and watches over me, which it does… I am also a non-person for domestic reasons. I have been a “non-person” since that fateful morning when I made the decision to stand in line at a store on Ayestarán Street, that store assigned to me to buy the chicken. Without a doubt, it was not the first time that I faced a queue. Who could say what, or when, was the first time he made a long queue, an endless queue, an endless queue, on this Island? I had queued a few times, but I gave up most of the time for more than obvious reasons: the sun, the heat, the sweat, the fights, the shouting, the gossip, the scam, and all the atrocious things that queues bring to Havana or in any part of our brief insular geography.
And it is that our queues are Dantesque, and they also have the appearance of a “vanity fair”, especially in that last moment, the one in which the long-awaited package of chicken, or the picadillo, or the soap for the bathroom was obtained. , or toilet paper. And it is that at that moment everyone comes out so graceful, so euphoric, even so vain that they give the appearance of carrying the diamond of the National Capitol in their backpack. That moment after buying the chicken could be celebrated by singing to that white meat: “Thanks to the life that has given me so much”, by Violeta Parra, or “The glory is you”, by José Antonio Méndez.
“The glory is you”, that’s how we sing in Cuba when you get the short chicken drumsticks. The bad thing is that I hardly ever sing, perhaps because luck rarely accompanies me, especially when I submit to the noise, the disorder, the heat, which is always the fault of the very high temperatures, but above all of “humanity ” Cuban, that “humanity” that was born with a revolution that became the owner of power from 1959 to the present day… And perhaps that is why I could not sing to the chicken the only time I tried in the last three years. I didn’t sing “You are the glory” on the way home.
It turns out that when I was at the table in front of the two clerks who carefully review the documents, meaning supply book and identity card, we discovered, they and I, that my supply book had disappeared, and that I could not buy that chicken, and neither the one that comes in the basic basket, and that is bought in that space that we call “butcher shop” and that opens only a couple of times a month: when the chicken drumstick comes, when the five eggs come and, exceptionally, when it arrives some of those “donations” in some ship that crossed a long ocean.
So once the supply book was lost, there would be no chicken for me, or anything at all. And the worst thing was when I saw the huge queues at the Internal Trade offices, those that we Cubans, the kings of acronyms, call “Oficoda”. Just remembering that queue at the Oficoda, in that food distribution commercial office, makes my skin stand on end, goosebumps appear on me, and goosebumps are hard, and even more so if it is an old hen, That’s what we Cubans say.
And after all that I have told, I think that the reader will not object to my condition of “not a person”, that condition that, with more traumas and in all areas, Reinaldo Arenas had to assume. Undoubtedly, whoever does not have a supply book does not exist, who does not have a supply book is not identifiable when it comes to taking home “regulated” products, which are all or almost all, even if they are few. Who does not have a supply book does not exist, is a “non-person”. The other option is to pay with dollars, pounds sterling, euros and other niceties, but not even those very strong coins will save you from that old karma that we Cubans have: the presence of queues and the supply book in our lives.
After a few weeks they must give me the “duplicate”, a fragile piece of paper in which the loss is warned and the winemaker is authorized to give me what I have. A piece of paper that makes me a fourth category being, who must take care of that piece of paper as if it were “the apple of his eye”. The piece of paper should not get wet, not even with the sweat of the hands, not even with a desperate or furtive tear, so that the ink does not erase, that which seems “the blood ink of the heart”.
From now on, and for a few weeks, maybe months, I will be a non-existent individual, a drifting ship, a non-person, a man without a supply book. My story could be the center of a new version of “The death of a bureaucrat”, the one that Tomás Gutiérrez Alea bequeathed to us. My lost supply book is the closest thing to the “employment card” with which I was buried, but without the music of Leo Brouwer, that old worker from the José Martí bust factory. My lost supply book is that card in the depths of a cold vault, and it is also the widow who cannot collect the pension that corresponds to her after the death of her husband, if she does not show the work card of the deceased, that card with which the dead was buried.
Am I or am I not a non-person? Do I even exist? I am now a living dead. “I am that fever of your skin, I am the forbidden”. I am a dark being, without light and also without gas, a non-person, a non-person…, to infinity, which is death. This is how we walk on this Island that seems to be ruled by a thousand demons, this Island in which its Government does not quite understand that existence comes first, and essences a little later, but I still do not know which comes first, my existence, or the supply book.
OPINION ARTICLE
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