65: The penultimate days of a house

In “The last days of a house,” the Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz speaks of a “strange silence,” a “silence without shape, without edges, that penetrates me like deaf water.” No one captures as she does this gentle muteness, this crippling silence, this mutation of the Cuban soul that seemed too extroverted only to end up being so paranoid.

Fifty-five years after that poem of an era’s end, the era continues without end. It’s like living in the precarious present where we are pedaling without understanding why. And we relish it: a time boisterous to the point of dementia, that pretended to say everything just to say nothing, from socialism to squalor to deafness.