“Havana, City and Writing”
Ana Margarita Metao Palmer (Cuba)
The violet sea yearns for the birth of the gods,
for being born here is an incredible feast.
José Lezama Lima: “Insular Night, Invisible Gardens”
Surrounded by the walls of old fortresses designed to defend the city from pirates and corsairs, still protected by castles erected on top of the rocks, always beseiged by the turbulent sea, the city stands up. The name of this city, of indigenous origin, has always been associated with that of the voluptous and aromatic plant, whose smoke erects cathedrals on the air and evokes the enraptured rituals of the ancient inhabitants of the major island in the Caribbean Sea. Since then, its language began to take shape as vivid legend, always in dialogue with nature that would beseige and nurture it. The city’s enclosed bay, like a coul-de-sac, became the preferred location for sailors when they arrived to the newly discovered continent. It became the place for encounters, key and portal to the New World, gate of the West Indies, threshold of adventures, and also, a place where ships met, a place of confluence, the last port before the long voyage of return across the Atlantic, the place for good-byes and farewells.
Havana Bay is one of the most magnetic areas of the city, space that is configured symbolically by the overlapping of real stories with fictional ones woven by popular imagination and by that of its writers. Hernando de Soto, Governor of Cuba, departed from that port to conquer Florida, in an enterprise that led him not to encounter the mythical Fountain of Youth, but his own death. The Castillo de la Fuerza , located across the bay, is inhabited, according to the legend, by the ghost of Isabel de Bobadilla who waited for Hernado’s return year after year from the watchtower of the tall stone palace, always looking at the horizon, fruitlessly searching for the ship that would bring her husband back. The fortress across the bay today speaks in an enchanted language that is translated to writing in the words of its poets:
The same fortress, La Fuerza, seemed to have been created for farewells, meetings and weddings which the newlyweds left before their first night of passion. It was a stone that received the lunar tide in its entirety. It was something like a mirror made to reflect the invisible. Someone would show himself, and the sheet of the bay, with affectionate concentration, reflected the image offered by the prepared well.[1]
Focion, the unforgettable character of Lezama Lima, also delved into the deep and dark waters of this harbor, defying the voracity of sharks, to imitate a vessel departing to Europe towards the longed for encounter with his loved one. Nevertheless, that same port shows a cheerful face more in acordance with the boisterours, festive tone that embraces the city in the first novel of this author:
The porgies who listen in stupefaction to the ships’ motors, the naked young divers who swim up with coins in their mouths, the santería temples of Regla with cornucopia of fruit to calm the gods of thunder, the interpenetration of the fixedness of the stars and the incessant mutations of the marine depths that form a gilded zone for a man who can resist all the possibilities of chance with an immense, complacent wisdom.[2]
The constant dialogue of the city with nature adopts other shapes and expresses itself through a language that is renewed through time, yet still maintaining its peculiar mode of expression. The air –its variations, its most tenuos ruffle, the pounding of the breeze, or the absence of wind circulation-- acquires a special form in the capital of Cuba, where the heat of the tropical climate seems to govern all the expressions of its inhabitants:
It was a town constantly exposed to the invading air, thirsty for land and sea breezes, with its shutters, lattices, doors and flaps open to the first cool breeze. Then the tinkling of lustres, chandeliers, beaded lampshades and curtains, and the whirling of weathercocks would announce its arrival. Fans of palm fronds, Chinese silk,or painted paper, would be motionless. But when this transient relief was over, people would return to their task of setting in motion the still air, once more trapped between the high walls of the rooms.[3] (16)
The fluctuations and movements of the air constitute one of the axes around which the city life rotates, attending to its mildest oscillations, trained to perceive its minimal variations, competing for the corners of fraile on which to build their houses. The god of the wind seems to rule the destiny of the inhabitants of a city that has been subordinated to his whims, built according to his mandates, bent to his powers, attending to his most delicate swirls, open to his refreshing power. The variety of objects and forms related to the air, created to favor its circulation, eager to transmute into music and sound –-symphony of tempered shades and echos— the breath of the whimsical divinity, exhibit the uninterrupted dialogue of man and wind through a language of peculiar sonorous symbolism.
The wind that sometimes abandons the population that longs for breeze and gusts, manifests itself with all splendor through the violence of the hurricane, the deity most feared and revered by the primitive inhabitants of the island. The god Hurricane, with his destructive gusts of wind, abruptly disturbs the gentle flow of the dialogue between man and wind, unleashing a quarrel that turns the dialogue into a funeral chant, language that transmutes into the fatal announcement of the proximity of the storm:
As an inmense incantation, the city hammered a coffin. Everywhere were the nails and the wood in a hammering that retraced its steps as in a ritual of magic to exorcise the wandering demons riding on a northeastern gust of wind that had just started to howl.[4]
In contrast, during the previous truce that the demons of the wind offer to their victims before unleashing their fury, the city exhibits a contagious, festive mood, since this exceptional day is like a gift for the habaneros, who in the proximity of the hurricane that will disrupt the everyday boredom, celebrate the arrival of the hurricane “with jest, with laughter, with flying fruits, with double pay in the bars.” This first display of jocularity and sensuality in the face of the encroachment of an unknown god, is represented by the naked teenagers who swim in the Malecon. The tendency to dissipation in the face of the storm stresses the generative and erotic sense symbolically attributed to the hurricane:
The proximity of the hurricane would be a substitute for the ancient Sicillian phallic rituals. Just before the arrival of the irate god, we prepared a gigantic half-moon shaped mirror with a flickering phallic flame in the middle. (140)
As a moment for leisure, for transgressions, as a moment in time that stands still by the menace of nature, the announcement of the coming of the hurricane breaks all established habits, promotes excesses, subverts idleness, turns the world upside down, and transforms it into an unrestrained carnival resembling a pagant ritual.
The city’s dialogue with the implacable tropical sun requires another language. The power with which the sun thrusts its scorching rays over the island at midday seems to respond to an evil will to chastise men and women, injure their bodies, and drive them to the limits of their sanity. One has to be protected from its golden arrows, flood of flaming darts that irritate the skin. One has to defend oneself from the brightness that wounds the retina, that injures the pupil, and hurts the sight: apotheosis of light, excessive fulgor that in poignant irony does not improve sight, but forces one to close our eyes searching for darkness:
The skin tries to cover its brightness with palm leaves,
With palm fronds absent-mindedly swept by the wind,
The skin furiously covers itself with parrots and pitahayas,
Covers itself in absurdity with gloomy tobacco leaves
And with remains of tenebrous leyends [...}
One has to cover! One has to cover!
But the brightness advances, invades
Perversely, oblicuosly, perpendicularly,
The brightness is a huge suction cup that sucks in the shade
And the hands slowly move towards the eyes.[5]
The sun rays saturate the atmosphere of heat, make the temperature rise, and fuel the dormant fire within the objects. The sun glare seems to seize the universe. Everything burns. It is necessary to design new strategies to battle against the smothering brightness and diminish its scorching effects with an enormous variety accessories: hats, caps, blinders, berets, handkerchiefs, umbrellas and parasols. More and more continuous front porches are built to shelter the pedestrians. The side of the street that is lashed by the rays of the sun is jestfully called the sidewalk of the idiot, where the unaware pedestrian cannot escape the pounding of the sun. The city of the columns is linked to this need to ameliorate the punishment of the sun and offer the pedestrian a path sheltered from the sun:
It is well-known that here in Havana any pedestrian could depart from the site of the fortresses of the port and walk to the oustskirts of the city [...] by following the same and renewed columnal arcade, in which all column styles are present, mixed or mingled to infinity.[6]
Inside the houses, the sun speaks through the Cuban semi-circular arch with its colorful stained-glasses, that transform the excessive shining into reflections that ameliorate the scorching violence of the sun rays, becoming a feast of shades of color that delicately illuminate the semi-darkeness. When the sunshine passes through the stained-glasses, the metamorfosis takes place: the miracle of a sun fragmented into a rainbow of scintillating colors that cheerfully multiplies the gamut of tints that sparkle the objects. The cristal fans of the Cuban mansions, as pointed out by Alejo Carpentier, act like interpreters between man and the sun: They provide sunglasses to obtain clemency from the sun.
The city also expresses itself through the names of the streets that evoke distinctive features of the urban space. If the mythological thought conceives the name as expression of an internal essence that not only reveals some of the fundamental features of what is being designed, but also has an influence over its nature, and even more, over its destiny, then the identity of some of the streets of Havana seems to translate the history of the city into picturesque denominations. Thus, the memory of long gone buildings is kept alive. These buildings were once the center of the streets that take their names: Bell Tower, Little Well, Quarters, Slaughterhouse, The Wall, Prison. In some instances, the memory of activities that characterized the locations were kept alive: Industry, Factory, Foundry. At time, as has been pointed out by Graziella Pogolotti, the names of the streets serve the purpose of governing the customs in acordance with the colors of the moral world. Thus, a person living in the street address Perseverance and Virtue or in Loyalty and Concord receives a symbolic legacy of integrity. Street names also show the dark and somber side of human nature, associated with a space whose identity is touching: Solitude, Bitterness, Closed Door, Refuge, The Forsaken.
Certain streets, with their peculiar rhythm and physiognomy, appear in Paradiso as fables that nurture the legend they evoke. Bishop and O’Reilly, favorite streets of the character of Jose Cemi, in reality
…they are one, in two stretches of time: one to get to the bay, and the other to come back into the city. Along one of those streets, one seems to follow the light to the sea; then, on the return, by a kind of lengthening of the light, one goes from the brightness of the bay to the mysterious pith of the elder stem. The bishop goes down the street under a canopy, surrounded by lights. He is bringing extreme unction to an ensign dying on a galleon. Going up the other street is a general of Irish blood, a blond man, deeply tanned after long service in the Lebanon, carrying a flowery ace of clubs. He acquired the habit of wearing earrings during the Naples campaign. The two streets are a little like decks of playing cards. They are one of the wonders of the world.[7] (p.233)
The language of this maritime city takes shape in constant dialogue with nature and history, with the buildings and the imagination of the human beings that inhabit a city poundered by the wind under the poignant light of the tropical sun that does not give truce to its inhabitants. Man-made creations, overlapping and modified throughout time, leave imprints of their aspirations and sufferings, of its legends and desires, as a testimony of the language with which the dreams of this seashore city are woven.
[1] José Lezama Lima: Paradiso. (English translation by Gregory Rabassa). Dalkey Archive Press, 2000, p. 241.
[2] ídem.
[3] Alejo Carpentier: Explosion in a Cathedral. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 2001, p. 11
[4] José Lezama Lima: Oppiano Licario. La Habana, Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1977, p. 139.
[5] Virgilio Pi?era: The Whole Island. (translation by Mark Weiss). United Kingdom, Sherasman Books Ltd., 2010, p. 29 and 31.
[6] Alejo Carpentier: “La ciudad de las columnas” en: Tientos y diferencias. La Habana, Ediciones Unión, 1974, p. 54.
[7] José Lezama Lima: Paradiso. (English translation by Gregory Rabassa). Dalkey Archive Press, 2000, p. 233.
