Tell Me I Don’t Love You

TELL ME IT´S NOT TRUE

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Wait for the spring, Bandini.

The sparrows are universal, birds as strong as warplanes. The squirrels are cats, distrustful and tame, crazy and quarrelsome. The snow is sensual and warm (mmm, sorry, this is something that no Cuban in any other century notes). The sun is blue, translucent, treacherous: the temperature remains stuck at zero degrees Celsius, a unit of measure unknown in the USA. Just as Google Maps has created the city of New York, so the Weather web announces it will continue snowing this Monday beyond the equinox. For the first time in the world, it is a spring delayed.

Wait for the Spring, Pardini…

The subways are the filth of freedom. They are accurate and it is impossible to get lost if you look at the ever-present arrows and maps. They play guitars, pianos, saxophones, for tiny tips. Perhaps even mercy here bets on the profitability of repetition, as in Pop Art, so endemic. Everyone flees the car when there is the aroma of homelessness. I flee too, I also smell of never again having a house to hide myself in in Cuba peeking out at the spasms of New York.

It is a noble people. They look pretty. There is the light of a future. Strangers smile at me. I mostly know Cubans, they are my new neighbors. The waitresses are a genre in themselves, all seeming to be intellectuals working part-time while finishing their great New York trilogy (because it’s obvious that one novel is not enough).

The bridges rise and fall with the tide. I have seen pigeons over the Times Square traffic (like the sparrows they are also formidable birds, wearing suit and tie). On the iPhones there are applications to position the stars, making it virtually unnecessary to look at the sky. The sky is a hallucination, better to buy an insipid hamburger (I know nothing of food in the USA). I walk forests and parks with skating rinks. I would be delighted to break a leg (in theater it’s very good luck to say this and, also, I wouldn’t have to go so fast, because my bones would be sealed with the American new-nationality.

The public libraries are a magnetic pole, cloisters removed from the anomie of the kind drunks of American literature. They leave just a few used books for sale. So time outside the soul of my nation is slipping away. I’m at the point, but I still don’t offer myself in a showcase for hire.

New York, magical and evil stepmother, tell me it isn’t true. Tell me I’m not in love with you.

25 March 2013

From Havana: Video @RosaMariaPaya @OswaldoPaya

Desde La Habana http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gok1Pn07dhQ @RosaMariaPaya @OswaldoPaya, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

January 17 2013

 

Havana Miami New York

March 7 2013

My 2 Planes…

March 7 2013

Facing Love and The United States and Death, in That Order

There is a photo of Raul Castro so very young. He is tying a rag around the eyes of a Cuban they are going to kill. They’re in a grove of trees. The night is so pretty and the Revolution so young.

Today it is night again. The deep night of the world. We are all tied to the mast of an island that isn’t about to sink, with our eyes covered with that same rag that does not let us see the essential. Death.

I arrive home devastated. It’s the depths of night. Drizzling. I’ve spent weeks crying for no reason. For joy, for sorrow, for being real. My mother sleeps. Her mouth open as if she were dead. Breathing from the depths of her ribcage. It’s the last throes of winter. It’s March, soon it will be spring and the solar radiation will survive terribly in this country.

The United States is stuck in my head. Leaking. A limitless line. An illusion of I couldn’t say what (the illusion is always this, impossible to name). My heart is not leaving Cuba. It is in Cuba where I love my love. If you like, I can direct myself mentally to our end-stage President (in five years he should kill himself), you can put me in the eyes of that seller of lies and then kill me for real. I love to love my love in Cuba and would wait here for the day of resurrection of all the dead, when the security forces will go into the street to kill in cold blood and out of pure envy that no one survives them.

In the kitchen, a pan with a steak. It’s the ultimate test. No gourmet restaurant in the free world could offer me such plenitude. The grease on the lid, the badly cut meat, a couple of peppers, fat and suspiciously hued, the smell of the gas balloon (a blue mystery that burns orange), and my cats will die of sadness without me and will be so gentle that there won’t be the slightest complaint (except in their eyes). I am free. And so I love you so much my love, because my freedom is atrocious and authorizes me to love better than anyone in history my love.

In the United States are there pans with lids ingrained with the grime of successive family meals? In the United Stats is there barbarically cut meat, with the intimate flavor that is almost like a conversation where life and death turn out to be our contemporaries (I don’t know which side I’m on)? In the United States are there cats that speak of a coup with their pupils?

I’m sorry. I’m going to be old, I suppose. In fact, I am witness to an era that thankfully disappeared. That started with an execution at the hands of the last president of the Revolution, that ended when he had my death again on his hands. I’m ready, as the slogans of our childhood said. Barbarism is my human realm, too human for me to risk a civil life. Here I am beautiful and good, with no need to triumph. I have the word, albeit ephemeral. And my body, albeit eternal.

The United States will be removing my head. There is nowhere to flee. No limitless biography. The illusion is this, illusion. My heart will not move, Cuba will be its scaffold. They kill, if they are going to kill, the slaughterers. Also my mother killed and served me this tortured flesh, and I ate it like an ancestral blessing.

I am alive until dementia. Not delirium, but I don’t recognize myself. Leave me alone, I’m home. My love needs to continue loving from now to eternity (forgive the redundancy).

March 2 2013

The Death of Paya Was Murder

Oswaldo Paya’s daughter (Rosa Maria) and wife (Ofelia) at his funeral.

Disgusting freedom of expression.

The assassins always return to the scene of the crime.

Today I feel ashamed to be Cuban and that a Cuban coward can behave so criminally against another Cuban now incapable of defending himself, thanks to the “democratic security forces labor” of other Cubans.

www.cubaencuentro.com/opinion/articulos/la-muerte-de-paya…

All this is just proof that the truth is about to come out.

And that more good blood of innocent Cubans and Europeans will run.

February 28 2013