WITCHES
Witches have played an important part in my life. First, there are those I could consider peaceful and spiritual, those who reign in the world of fantasy. This kind of sorceress, which came to me through my grandmother’s imagination, filled the nights of my childhood with mystery and terror, and summoned me later to write my first novel, Singing from the Well. But there is another kind of sorceress, of flesh and blood, who has also played an important part in my life. Maruja Iglesias, for example, whom everybody called “the Library Witch”: she was the influence that made possible my job transfer to the National Library, there to meet another sorceress, even wiser and more enchanting, María Teresa Freyre de Andrade, who gave me protection and also imparted her extensive, ancient wisdom. María Teresa had the habit of blinking, just like the great witch in one of Shakespeare’s plays. Then I met Elia del Calvo, so perfect a witch that she surrounded herself entirely with cats. Her character and personality were very important to me at one point in my life. A sorceress like her indirectly made it possible for me later to leave the country like a nonperson, like an unknown. In Miami I also met several witches dedicated to the traffic of words. Witchlike, they dressed in long black robes, and were thin, with prominent jaws; some of them wrote poems and, like Elia del Calvo, forced me to read them. The world is really of witches, some more benign, some more implacable; but the kingdom of fantasy, as well as patent reality, belongs to witches.
When I arrived in New York I met the perfect witch. This lady dyed her hair violet, wanted her old husband to die quickly, and flirted with everyone who would come close to her. It was a platonic flirtation; no doubt she was, only trying to fill the immense loneliness of her life, on the West Side of Manhattan, where she tried to communicate in an English impossible to decipher. This witch, a perfect “fag hag,” collected homosexuals and welcomed me as soon as I arrived. Though her son was homosexual as well, she, being a witch, had forced him to have a girlfriend and later to marry and even to have several children. This witch, whose name was Alma Ribera, told me I had to stay in New York. Thus she helped me fulfill my destiny, my always terrible destiny. She managed to find me an empty apartment in the center of Manhattan. “Rent it at once,” she said. And suddenly I, who had come to New York for only three days, now had a small apartment on Forty-third Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, three blocks from Times Square, the most crowded place in the world. I did rent the apartment at once and I entrusted myself, as always, to the mysterious, evil, and sublime power of witches.
A real witch was my aunt Agata, matchless in her wickedness; for more than fifteen years I had to live with her in terror and under the constant threat of being denounced to the police. But I cannot deny that I felt a strange attraction for her; perhaps the attraction of evil, of danger.
Another unforgettable witch in my life was Blanca Romero, who transformed Old Havana into a clog factory, and who gave up prostitution when her tits collapsed, and became an extraordinary painter while, at the same time, denouncing her admirers to State Security.
Witches have dominated my life: witches who never gave up their brooms, not so they would be able to fly but because all their longings and frustrations, all their desires were exorcised through their sweeping: sweeping the rooms, the passageway, the yards at home, as if in this way they could sweep away their own lives.
The image of one major witch stands out above all the others; that of the noble witch, the suffering witch, the witch full of longing and sadness, the most beloved witch in the world: my mother. Also with her broom, always sweeping as if nothing mattered but the symbolic meaning of the act.
Sometimes witches would assume a half-masculine form, which could make them even more sinister. Among the witches that were for so long part of my life, how could I forget Cortés, a fearsome witch with a perfectly witchlike shape, thanks to whom I had to rewrite my novel Farewell to the Sea so many times, and who branded my life with terror during the seventies. How could I forget Pepe Malas, another perfect witch, who seemed to be in a constant state of levitation, twisted and insidious in character, misshapen of body (and thanks to whom I landed in jail, in one of the most Dantesque circles of hell). And how could I forget the classic witch all in black, black gloves and black cape, with bulging eyes and wispy hair, the witch with the huge jaws and sinister smile: Samuel Toca, the frightening witch from whom I learned the real meaning of betrayal and who, witch-like, would materialize wherever I happened to be, even riding in the same car with me through the streets of New York.
Witches, my companions since childhood, will escort me to the very gates of hell.
I moved to New York on December 31, 1980, having had to return to Miami to complete the literature course I was teaching. Lázaro had come earlier and was staying at my apartment. I arrived at midnight, at the moment when the whole city was living the euphoria of New Year’s Eve. I had positive feelings about my arrival. The taxi driver—there probably are no more of his kind around—had the patience to load the more than twenty suitcases full of books, clothes, and manuscripts that I had brought from Miami. To cross the city on New Year’s Eve was a real odyssey, especially Times Square, where more than a million people had gathered. When I arrived at the apartment, Lázaro was not in and I had to go all the way up five flights of stairs, without an elevator, with all those suitcases and boxes full of books. The taxi driver told me to carry the suitcases up one by one while he stayed below until I was finished. When I was done and asked him how much, he said fifteen dollars. I was about to give him twenty and he said, “That’s too much money, too much money.” It was a really unusual, generous act, something that will probably never happen to me again, but with that gesture I felt the city was welcoming me. And during the years 1981 and 1982, living in New York was for me a true celebration. Winter and snow were a really new experience; I enjoyed watching the snow fall; it was a pleasure to walk around and feel it coming down; I did not even notice the cold. Snow has forever represented an unremitting longing for Cubans. José Lezama Lima, Eliseo Diego, Julián del Casal, all the poets who had never seen snow were always yearning for it, though those who experienced it came to detest it, like Martí and Heredia. One way or another, snow has played an important part in our literature. Lázaro and I now lived in the euphoria of the snow and of the great city that never sleeps: everything one could possibly want was available, day and night; all the fruit we had longed for in Cuba, much of it from tropical countries, could be purchased in the midst of a snowfall. It was really a dream come true and a constant celebration. I was writing a lot then, but New York was never more vital; it will probably never be again as it was then. I have the comfort of having lived those last years, before the plague came, before the curse fell upon this city, as it always falls on all things truly extraordinary.