Forgetting the Bodies

Abstract

44 With David, in Havana I wanted to forget the bodies just as I have forgotten the doors, the half-closed books that I held against your chest and mine, during a summer that I knew was going to be final and eternal. I looked at the stairs of the Hotel Monserrate. And I thought: Reinaldo Arenas was the light in its darkness. The music in the bar on the hotel’s ground floor was now unbearable. Darkness and noise. A black page to also understand Cuba. I’ve never felt such breathlessness in any other setting. The asthma born in my childhood returns, like a mood. If I could bequeath it to one of my characters, I would write it a frail and sudden death: a tragic oxymoron for its disappearance. An operatic ending. I now understand how I’ve lost the peninsula, the pretexts I held before streets and professions that I misplaced. Profiles on the map. You believed that life was a color. And you now understand: it’s the absence of color. A chiaroscuro. I know that I’m repeating the movements of someone now absent, that my steps in Havana are nothing new. That my words, in the glossy magazine that you’re reading admiringly, were already spoken by someone. That this urgency is a fallacy. That I’m as dead as the man who, in a few years, will copy my last gesture. You used to read your diary softly so I could hear the silences instead of the words. The way you erased my presence from your life. The hushed formula by which you annulled my love. I no longer have an embrace against that cruelty. Tell me that you need me, here, in Havana. In the photo torn from the album of your dead. That this delirium is love, and that you’re with me as we enter the theater, for a performance that is only light. Mere atmosphere. Without actors or dancers. Emptiness and dampness. Tell me that the dampness is your need for me, that I drain like water, and like water I’m oblivion. A last word and I’ll have forgotten everything. On a corner of Havana, as the Hotel Monserrate collapses behind me, I know that the word will be your name: Reinaldo. Arenas I drank to imitate you in the darkness. And thus forget the bodies. Forget. Forget myself. Translation from the Spanish By George Henson Poet, playwright, and cultural critic Norge Espinosa Mendoza (b. 1971, Santa Clara) holds the distinction of being the first Cuban to participate in the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program. Founder of the Jornadas de Arte Homoerótico and co-organizer of Cuba’s annual Jornada contra la Homofobia, he is widely considered one of Cuba’s most important LGBT activists. His poem “Vestido de novia” was the first poem on a homoerotic theme to win the Premio de Poesía from Cuba’s state cultural magazine El Caimán Barbudo and has since become one of the most anthologized poems by poets of his generation. His most recent book, Cuerpos de un deseo diferente (Ediciones Matanzas, 2013), is a collection of poems, reviews, and essays on topics related to LGBT life in Cuba. For a biographical profile of George Henson, see page 42. Editorial note: Visit WLT’s website for another poem by Norge Espinosa Mendoza. Forgetting the Bodies Norge Espinosa Mendoza cover feature top photo : zoriah ...