At the end of December 2021, after a couple of years prevented from traveling by the pandemic, we hugged again in Cuba with my mother, Marlene. For four weeks the two of us lived together under the same roof. The last ten days a positive result for COVID-19 He kept me locked in the house. Of course, my closest contact was my old lady. So luckily, both of us asymptomatic, we shared a memorable quarantine.
During that time of isolation I photographed my mother in her daily life at home. We share talks, we go through family snapshots, we delve into memories, we evoke with great joy and nostalgia my father (who passed away a few years ago) and we even get hooked on the endless and cheesy chapters of a Turkish novel.
I am grateful for something to the disastrous and devilish pandemic that made me slow down and dedicate time to create this photographic profile of Marlene, which I am now sharing about Mother’s Day celebrations.
For more than a decade, there has been an hour or two difference between her and me, depending on the season of the year in which we find each other by our side. 7 thousand kilometers separate us. She lives in our archipelago, in the midst of suffocating heat almost all year round. I, longing for the cold in a few months and I make my life through the streets of a country in the Latin American southern hemisphere.
At the beginning of this distance it was only possible to be apparently close by means of a telephone booth. His voice was heard in the distance and broken by a telephone every Sunday. She shouted to my dad with emotion: “Jesus, run, run, it’s a call from the child!” Then, both of them put their ears to the dilapidated device to listen to my news from foreign lands. This is how a few minutes of happiness passed from Cuba to Argentina and vice versa.
Then the emails appeared. While my mother sent me long letters, I answered her with telegrams. Among those letters I keep a few that are true jewels of the epistolary genre from a mother to her son. I make public a fragment of one of those emails classics:
“My little lanky: (…) I see your photos and I constantly feel close to you, your struggles and joys. I am very proud but, mijo, take care of yourself. Look, all the monuments are already done and the streets of Cuba and Argentina have names (ja).
Write me and tell me about your life that what I receive are telegrams. The woman who loves you the most and will love you in this world and other constellations: Your MOTHER!
PS: Try to get me and send me a tube of ash blonde dye with the first one that comes, because my hair is on fire.”
With such a declaration of love since then it has never lacked its quality tint again.
With the appearance of social networks, my mother and my aunts soon opened their respective Facebook profiles. Quickly and in a cataract I received their requests from friends which, as is logical, I could not resist not accepting.
On Facebook my mother is very active. I don’t know how she does it, but almost always, a few seconds after I post a photo, whatever the theme, her like and commentary, where in the most dissimilar ways it is coined that the undersigned is a proud mother of her son.
Definitively, the new technologies for communication have shortened geographical distances with affections like never before in the history of humanity. Right now, while I write, the apparently cold little screen of my cell phone gives me live and direct the voice and warm image of my mother. We are in a video call on WhatsApp. While she chats with me, she walks around the house, waters her plants or swings in the kitchen-dining room in front of the TV where she, for sure, has paused one of those Turkish novels that she brings The package to serve me for a few minutes. Before we say goodbye, he throws me a string of good-sounding kisses and, immediately afterwards, emphasizes: “Take care of yourself. I love you”. I go back to writing.
The same scene will occur at any time (preferably at night) tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, every day of the coming week and the months to come. So I will return again and again to enjoy a tender daily life with my mother who seemed lost.
In short, my dear old lady has the enormous capacity, the superpower, to shatter any distance. It makes me feel so close that always, always, I walk with the feeling that when I turn any corner, no matter what country I am in, my house will be there and she will be at the door, smiling and with open arms.
