There are people who have lived a lot in a short time. There are those who collect experiences for years with more attachment and dedication than those who collect old stamps and family tableware. And there are those who tell you their whole life in a cellar talk, at a party, in a hospital emergency room, on a Havana-Matanzas trip. Asking for directions can be the start of a Talk about yourselfthe awakening of that strange empathy that is created between two strangers.
Only one ship passed. That day was kind of gloomy. There were no guitars, no vendors. Not even the sea showed signs of joy, flat as an empty plate. There are days like this even on the Malecón. Days in which, despite having the Caribbean joy in the center of the marrow, one does not feel like laughing, or dancing, or talking to anyone. That’s how I was. Shuffling down Malecón.
Since my walk was being so bland, I crossed the street to see if the “Hello Wave” was selling ice cream. They are not cheap anymore. Now it’s expensive ice cream. He returned to the Malecón with more reluctance than before. I had to wait in the middle of the street for six white cars to pass by, all identical, like something out of a futuristic hallucination. Then I saw it with my myopic eyes. A very rare guy, sitting facing the world. When I got closer I corrected my first impression. He was not a guy, he was a gentleman and he was not sitting vulgarly, he was perched on the wall, on his lotus-flowered legs.
The Malecón is a place of endless stories, of black comedies, tragicomedies and historical dramas. A place to connect with parallel stories. Inexplicably, the superficial and the deep, the masks and the essences, the amazing and the everyday intermingle. It is possible that, after a talk on the wall, you think you have found the love of your life, or that, in three or four hours, a stranger will dazzle you with his anecdotes of travels in Japan. Perhaps you will never again see that red-haired girl with long braids who seemed a little like the character of your favorite youth series. Perhaps, after a while, you will discover that the travels of that stranger coincide with the adventures of Hervé Joncour and that the stories of him only exist in the pages of a novel. But no matter, those extraordinary encounters will be in your memory forever and you will return to the Malecón with your eyes wide open, in case you meet the girl with the red braids or the simulated silk merchant.
It happens more often with solitaries, because those who go in groups already know their lives and even reincarnations. There are the questioners, like me. And there are those who tell you their entire story from the creation of their world to the final judgment that is upon them. So it was with the Great Meditator. I did not notice if the soles of his feet rested on his groin, as the laws of the Padmasana dictate. Nor did I wonder how many years it took him to find the concentration necessary to meditate facing traffic.
The Great Meditator told me his whole life in one hour. If time could be measured in the form of the Malecón, he would say that he told me about his entire life in three seagulls, two small glasses of rum and a boat. I was abducted by his stories. Trapped by an epic tale of grandeur and survival. From time to time, we would look at some romantic couple who followed by and in that impasse I tried to define if everything he told me was true. Yes, it was true. At least on that half-dark day, at that hour when the sun didn’t bother so much, the Great Meditator and his stories were real.
As I was leaving, four children surrounded him, like Koi fish surrounding a lotus flower. So I walked away and for the first time he turned to me to ask me a question: “Are you a journalist?”
– No, I’m a writer.
Then he looked at me with a feline face. I would say a Turkish angora, and he told me: “If you are going to write my story, put ‘A seven lives teaching four cats’” A great title for a story that I am not going to tell. If I wrote his whole life in a text it would have more than a hundred pages and not a single one of them was true. But if you shuffle down the Malecon one day, you might run into the Great Meditator. Hopefully he himself will tell you his stories so real and so amazing that they can only be narrated in the first person, in lotus flower and in Malecón time.
