Christmas of 2012
By Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo Translating Cuba December 30, 2012
(Translation from the original Spanish “Navidades de 2012″ of OLPL by El Niño Atómico, juanrpollo@aol.com)
Photo Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
This prayer is actually a plagiarism.
It was read ten years ago her voice cracked with anger by a girl who was dying of cold by a spring without a name in Matanzas.
It was the Christmas of 2002 and we were saying goodbye to ourselves. None thought we’d survive too long.
It was Cuba and the illuminated sadness of each December and new year’s eve crackled in our desolate sexes with a silence so atrocious.
She wanted to die but dared not as much sitting alone in her long table without parents after days of fears which ended in decades of betrayals.
I would have liked to bring death closer to her with my hands of loving her of smearing the wonders and lies of love but I dared not, either and that mediocrity was our pettiest fear and penultimate betrayal.
I remember her now as then reading her poem “Christmas of 2002″. A fucking awesome poem. Inalienable instinctive unpronounceable.
She read and wept. She unread herself in tears rather physiological for no other reason than hearing herself reading in Cuba her own poem without a country.
In a tin cup we toasted with bodega wine that became the blood of the child God in every sip and every kiss without lips without even a drop going down our throats.
The naked walls like us. From the ceiling hung a dim couple of saving bulbs. In the neighborhood TVs rang the hollow laughter of a proletarian country that demonic grin that is all homeland in perpetuity.
We were excited. We were crazy. We could give birth to creatures taken out of our heads. We starred in a domestic gospel.
Never before the abyss of the sacred looked at us from so deep. Each slightest act was immediately inscribed in eternity.
At twelve o’clock she lowered his head on the Formica table and surrendered.
Dead tired. Dead of words. Dead time. Dead of us. Dead of treason. Scared to death. Really dead.
I carried. I put her in her bed as if in a womb or a coffin.
I turned off the lights in her house or crib or manger in a river neighborhood of Matanzas. I laid at her feet.
The window open to the sky’s clockwork. The stars turned always counterclockwise.
Then I began to cry with that dirty silence that scares even the suicides. Crying of beauty crying of gratitude crying of humility crying of perfection and of being ephemeral. How long will I take to be able to tell this?, I thought.
Ten, a hundred or a thousand more new year’s eves? How many more times will in Cuba again be those Christmas of 2002?
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