We enter the eighth month of the year dealing with Covid-19. We would have wanted to live all this time in a capsule, in a hyperbaric chamber, in hibernation, and go outside only when it all happened. But so many things have happened in the global village in these seven months… And what is life without the experience of everyday life, of what happens and happens to us.
No matter how isolated we were, we couldn’t be without hearing the beating of the world, the multiple stories, from the origin and spread of the new coronavirus and the follow-up to the health crisis, to the social effects of an African-American suffocation by a cop in Minneapolis. Isn’t that quite one story?
On the island we have not been oblivious to the events outside, but also inside things have happened. And for everything there are criteria and positions that cause dissequents and shocks when intolerance emerges, the voices that scream louder because they want to be the only ones heard, the ones who believe themselves to be bearers of the truth.
Word New wanted to share the expressions of a group of diverse voices to offer to its readers as a sample of the personal and collective experiences that have been lived in this peculiar and amazing leap year, this twenty-twenty turned quarent(en)a.
We have asked these people to tell us about their experiences in these seven months, how their days have elapsed, how they have faced the challenges, and what reading they make of what happened, what their ideas are about it.
The survivors’ pandemic
By Carlos Esquivel
Noah appears in the dream of a novel that is not my novel, but works as such (dreams are unfinished novels).
Cuba detached from its ocean anchors. Something similar to what happens in José Saramago’s The Raft of Stones.
Cuba feeds on small fish, colourless weeds, like a pitiful whale.
Safe from a virus that kills. Aboard delayed survivals.
Do we run away from ourselves?
Here escape the saved copies of terrestrial and divine miseries, strange honors and honors as simple as kissing the hand that gives you (wrong) eating. A whole commoner chewed by supreme degrees. Saved species, native species. Perhaps the only paradise they know is the devastated one. They cannot move because the media is scarce, or because strange land means, despite how rare it is to believe it, strange adventures, strange lives, and they assume, just and genuine, to preserve that something they believe of them (even if we know that nothing belongs to them).
Since we were running out of country, we made our own country and turned it into a rolling ark that could go through what was still left of what was world.
Noah was a fragment, a waste, of all of us.
The devastation occurred beyond land. The ineffable virus was also the virus of others.
An ark to write and live. A rolling country for equals, or simulated, trances. Read: Fydor Dostoyevsky, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, Ezra Pound, Robert Musil, Jorge Luis Borges, César Vallejo, Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Kjell Askildsen, Mario Levrero, Jennifer Egan, Joan Didion.
We were taking glorious dead. From here and everywhere.
We sheltered them in heroic graves, the ones they deserved.
There was no flag because they all had the same colors and signs.
There were no hymns because they were desoed chords of the music Satan listened to at Dante’s house.
I wrote something other than the run-over novel all the time. I suffered from the pandemic they wrote (and died) species neighbors. A haiku is here. Two:
In my evasion
escaped with me
other ghosts.
Survival
one-on-one.
Eternally.
My autarchy starts and ends in the same place: I can’t give up living the way some people want me to live. It’s simple, inside me life is dark and slow. Independence goes beyond a philosophical role, as beautiful as it is unpredictable. Dying someone else’s disease seems like a romantic event that happens away from us.
Are the ones who give up the run?
The disease is extreme oxygen. One applies to the other site, but the narrative of posterity does not appear in any dictionary.
From a very old personal interview: Cuba is something else, the space where my mistakes converge, live my illusions, the place where I necessarily have to be, stay and die.
A acquaintance disputes my idea that coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) is an overly contemporary variant of world warfare (World War II), even as if we were going through an unnamed and degraded film in which the enemy is invisible and, worst of all, invincible.
That every day there are wars everywhere, he says. That wars are the true virus of humanity (what could influence an admirable and terrible opposite: humanity is the real virus).
I hate wars (I landed as a fallible soldier in the jungles of Angola one day I don’t want to remember), but a pandemic in a century of lights is like a war in which you fight with insignificant weapons.
Because it seems impossible to replace what lies impossed as a slogan.
Delirium also develops into disease.
We’ve gone into a country bunker, isolated by influences that are impossible to contain. Mother, son, wife.
My mother lives in a country where logic seems drawn from a fable of wolves with Nietzschean scars.
He wants the food I can’t give him.
He wants me to go outside and fight.
The actual fable is dystopian. She doesn’t know. Maybe some of those around us.
I’m thinking about how I don’t look like your son.
From a very recent personal interview: “I have dedicated myself to resisting, to invent survivals that others invented for me. I read like a foolproof loser, with no other account to celebrate. I watch the movies I’ve never seen (the list is impressive and chaotic). I share the time I despised before with the people I will never despise: family, friends. I write three novels at the same time, at similar speed. I finished a book of poetry and play with the possibility of decreing from this eraser that seems endless. Literature can’t save what she didn’t get sick, but it does help us be closer to ourselves.”
What sustains or surrounds the mortuary act. Which even looks dead before he dies.
We’re hiding from our own country. Those trances look like the ominous repetition of a silhouette of repetitions. The country is hiding from me.
My sister lives in Spain. His stories descreen of normal terror, which an artist can assume away from his art nightmare.
My sister talks about rotting bodies. I’m talking about rotting countries. The economy against chaos. Hunger against the disease.
We face realities. None of them win. Everyone needs what they don’t know.
Cuba is something else, the space where my mistakes converge, live my illusions, the place where I necessarily have to be, stay and die. Looks like she’s the one talking.
Other haiku:
I saw who was dying.
Then I saw who was killing.
I saw myself twice.
Sister Jeann, Hegel, Baudelaire, Gauguin, Apollinaire, Tolouse Lautrec, Gustav Klimt were victims of epidemics.
I apologise to Baudelaire and imagine his death.
Spitting blood is the pinnacle of literary disease. Let’s talk to Baudelaire, Charles, wherever there are. The ugly and the immoral lie under his whip. He loves a Bizca and Jewish prostitute from the Latin Quarter, rejects politics, is, for many, the greatest French poet of the century. Statement of veering principles. Or a veering statement of principle.
If he had been in Baudelaire’s body expelling the blood that belongs to him and that which belonged to wandering poets. Thoughts often go through unforeseen drunken ones. I sense it out of denial.
Surviving, even after the fulminant vomit of blood, is what a cursed writer deserves the least. And the commitment (or commitment) is a playful scale that someone invented as a transitional cure (the ultimate disrelents with the sentimentality of today’s, or almost current, literature, which is what we deserve).
Cure or disease. Baudelaire’s silhouette sways over an endless allegory of reincarnations that I cannot avoid. From inside the blood.
Novels are unfinished dreams.
I mean, it’s all the other way around, as if when we left we were actually coming.
Getting where?
Where we’re not going.
Not all stories have a terrible ending, but this one, which doesn’t end yet, has shallow stretches, a drama colored by bloody biology. We’re actors, no one recognizes. The script talks about facing madness, with or more madness, or letting yourself be dragged. Flow as if you were an ark anywhere, in an unrecognizable sea. May the night erase you. Or name you again. Ω
Carlos Esquivel Guerra (Elia, Camaguey, 1968). Poet, narrator and essayist. Distinguished with multiple national and foreign awards, he has published thirty books. His texts appear in anthologies and magazines in more than twenty countries in Europe, America and Australia.
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