THE SEA

My grandmother was also the one who first took me to the ocean. One of her daughters had managed to get a permanent husband, and he worked in Gibara, the seaport closest to our hometown. For the first time, I took a bus. I think that for my grandmother, who was already sixty, it was also the first time. We went to Gibara. My grandmother, and the rest of my family, had never seen the ocean, although it was only twenty or thirty miles from where we lived. I remember that once my aunt Carolina came to my grandmother’s house crying and saying: “Do you realize what it means that I am forty years old and have never seen the ocean? I will soon die of old age without ever having seen it.” From then on, I thought of nothing else but the sea. “The sea swallows a man every day,” my grandmother would say. And I felt then an irresistible urge to see the ocean.

How could I explain what I felt the first time that I saw the sea! It would be impossible to describe that moment. There is only one word that does it any justice: the Sea.