The other day, looking through old photos, I was reminded of the Interrupted Thinker. I found the ones I made for him the day we met him. I had, at the time, a Canon 60D with a 50mm 1.8 lens that had a bat, an anomaly. A kind of fungus produced a chromatic aberration and I loved it, because it was the photographic metaphor of the life we led.
That day we sat on the Malecón, around 1830, to do half-time until it was time to enter the Bertolt Brecht. We were going to see Interactive. So I photographed it on a Wednesday.
There were five of us on the picket line and none of us had a girlfriend. Those were those years when you tied up with a girl at a party and you thought, for the whole night, that she was the love of your life. And she was crazy about going with you, until you told her you were from Alamar. At that time, about ten or twelve years ago, we were DJs, romantics, geeks that we crossed the Havana tunnel and ended up in Vedado wanting to take on the world. We did not care a rumba in the alley of Hamel that a party luxury in a penthouse for Acapulco. A Silvio concert in Cayo Hueso served us as well as a delivery party in Habana del Este. But the Malecón was before and after all our nights. And any day could be crossed, except Interactive Wednesdays.
We arrived at the wall with a Soroa wine. We drank it straight from the bottle no matter how hot it was like chicken broth. A half cast guy, the Interrupted Thinker, who was just a thinker at the time, sat facing the sea very close to us. That’s when we started to interrupt his thoughts because we started playing movies. And look, that game made us laugh!
After a while, when the bottle was half full, the man, by then the Interrupted Thinker with all the letters, came to talk to us. “Asere, I’m ostinao, I have many problems and right now all of them are spinning in my head. They will not have a cigarette that they give me? Three of the picket were smoking and each one gave him a cigarette: a Criollo, an H. Upmann and a Popular. I don’t know what happened to the Interrupted Thinker; but when he found himself with three bats in hand, he forgot at least half of his problems.
He sat down again with his back to the street, until a Chinese man arrived; that surely it was not Chinese, but Korean, Japanese or God knows; we were not respectful enough to distinguish between Asians. El Chino came with a professional camera and, as the sunset was luxurious, he wanted to take a photo of the Interrupted Thinker, who looked like a character from Yan Lianke. But he didn’t want her to know. Every time the Thinker looked at him, he pretended to be Swedish and threw a picture into the sea. That’s how he spent a good time, in the simulation; because the guy looked at him from time to time, surely to ask him for a cigarette.
I don’t know if El Chino, finally, took the photo he wanted, but I gave tremendous leather and now I come back to remember that day, those years, when you could go to any kiosk to say to the clerk: “Hello, ¿ give me a 3.55?
We would discover that the Interrupted Thinker also liked to drink. He was one of those guys whose age you can’t tell. He must have been thirty something. He didn’t talk much, but he was cool. After the first day, we saw him a lot of times in the same area of the Malecón. Sometimes we would throw it right there on the wall, until 6 or 7 in the morning, and he would stay smoking cigarettes for those who smoked.
Other times he would go with us to a party and even got on the P11 for Alamar a couple of times. One day we spent more than 24 hours partying. We started at the Malecon and ended at Bacuranao. We thought he was not going to resist, but he was hard to kill, and we suspected that he took us a few years.
Little by little he opened up to us and we came to know that his problems were drinking and lovesickness. With us she felt good. One Wednesday we sacrificed two irons to buy him a ticket so that he could see Interactive with us at the Brecht. We strained the irons, because the expensive thing was not the 50 pesos at the entrance, but buying a drink inside.
When we introduced someone to the Interrupted Thinker, we said: “a member of El Malecón” and people were intrigued. Even some other girl took. We never found out where she lived or if she had any family. But we were a light in his life. We read Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Philip K. Dick, Bolaño, Rimbaud. We passed the books from hand to hand until the entire picket had read them. And he read them to them too, sitting on the wall.
I don’t know at what point we stopped seeing the Interrupted Thinker. We never miss him. I guess life was going too fast. I don’t know if it was that we matured, to the point of learning to distinguish a Chinese from a Japanese, or if the plachaos are over and with them that man’s will to live. The only life we knew of him was the one we shared for a time there, on the Malecón, around 1830.
From the picket line, only two of us remain in Cuba, married and with children. The rest is spread over three different countries. El Chino must continue to act Swedish on some boardwalk in the world. Perhaps the Interrupted Thinker has given up drinking and is married in another province. The only thing that remains from that time is the Malecón. And although it is no longer us, there will always be another picket and another thinker secretly wanting to be interrupted.
