Gospel & Universe ⛱ Señor Locke
Cuba
Asylum - Ambos Mundos - Memories
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Asylum (Playas del Este)
I: Crisis
The patient checked himself in for a week. The lady at the reception took his name, address, identification, and clipped a little green plastic band around his wrist. It read: Club Atlantico, # 0592.
Incapable of doing anything, he did nothing. He abandoned himself to the care of the doctors with their white suits and slicked-back hair.
Club Atlántico, Playas del Este
None of the cares of the outside world, which led him to the asylum in the first place, could reach him here: the countless (yet always counted!) economic details that nagged him on every corner, at every bar, in every restaurant. Even in the pizzeria he was at the mercy of the crass communist marketeers of Cuba, the paradox of socialist rhetoric awash in American bills. Luckily, these hucksters with their excruciating smiles weren't allowed through the asylum gates.
Attended to by nurses in black aprons with white lace, he forgot about his guilt and his obscene decadence.
II: Relapse
On occasion he regressed to his earlier state, imagining his finger on the lace, slowly lifting the uniform of Nairobi the serum dispenser, who was so eager to talk to him, to escape for a minute the interminable orders of the Italians who ran the asylum and jumped in and out of the pool and spoke in a language that sounded like Spanish but made no sense at all (although Nairobi told him that of all the peoples in the world the Italians and the Cubans deserved each other, in the best and in the worst of ways).
He managed to convey in his broken Spanish (his mind shattered by Economics but determined to pick up the pieces and glue himself together) that he would recover more quickly if he were back in his room, away from the salsa dancing lessons and the Napoli gyrations, and closer to the protective care of his nurse, in his room with his TV and his white cotton bed there would be room for them to relax and get away from the dispensary where she worked and gave injections of Añejo 7 Años to whoever swam up to the bar
her constant administration of Mayabe serums having stirred the sugar of his blood, they could lie back and forget about the doctors or that odd Quebecer who expected everyone to understand his plight (even the French patients just said Quoi?)
together on the white sheets they could forget about language and politics altogether, forget about their cares, her clothes, throw it all to the wind of the air-conditioner, and let their minds slip into a more friendly foreign exchange of principles, and re-arrange.
III: Recovery
The nurse closed the door behind her, and the patient asked himself if that was her black body he floated in, or had he confused himself with the ice in the last of his cuba libres that swam in the caramel and dark of the sweating glass, his love like ice cubes served at the poolside bar.
Were all those gyrations in his mind in fact Italian tourists beside the pool in the hot sun, two golden-haired signoritas revolving their hips together, breasts bouncing in their tight bikinis?
The patient began to understand that he was in Cuba, in a tourist resort, and that everyone there was crazy. They were Italians and he loved them for that, for the fact they weren't English, Canadian, German, or even French; that they rumba’d and salsa’d and merengue’d like Cubans and that he had found one more place in this serious world where women could go topless and laugh, as one of the inmates did yesterday evening on the beach as she took her top off and jumped on her sleeping boyfriend. She rubbed her face into his neck, her bronze breasts dropping onto his back, and she poked him in places that even a Roman would consider rude. As he turned over, they fell together sideways off the beach chair, her breasts all over his powerful arms as he lifted her up and into the chrome blue sea.
IV: Check-out
The head nurse clipped off his plastic green bracelet. He walked toward his waiting cab and was cured.
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Ambos Mundos (Havana)
When you think of leaving this island, you exaggerate the horrors of Canada: that frigid Hell where the women have taken to impersonating the men and no one speaks to anyone unless their interests intersect. You tell yourself that you understand why, after fishing and fucking, Hemingway returned to Idaho and put a bullet through his head.
But then you realize that there's no way you can ever escape the band singing Buena Vista tunes in every bar in every town in every province because even when you think you've escaped to the Terrace Café of the Ambos Mundos Hotel to view the harbour and the castle and the rooftops of Old Havana in quiet
even when you think you’ve found a quiet place far from the drums and tin clanking things of the troupe on stilts and the hustlers and the stench of sewers and those big garbage bins
even when you think you've taken the elevator to another world, past the famous Hemingway Room to the Terrace Café with its green and brown tablecloths and its thatched vine roof and its ferns and shrubs swaying in the breeze of a long, sought-after calm
even after you order a café americano and tilt Coffee Mate into it, wisps drifting over the tablecloth, the guitar starts up, the drum bangs ten feet from your ear and you yearn for that calm den seven floors in the Vancouver air.
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Memories (Havana)
The day before you go, you wonder what will become of the memories, of places locked inside your mind: the grids and topographies, the friendly faces,
Plaza Vieja, the green hills of Viñales, the red earth of Pinar del Rio
the beauty of Trinidad and the packed streets of Santiago with its weekend party, six blocks long; the crazy Dutchman and his Bolivian wife, the Italian girl in the red bikini
a night at the Tropicana with your friend Greg
the girls whirling in your mind, threatening the equilibrium in your ear
that could almost make you fall away from your chosen world
that cold and orderly, northerly world, into a land of rhythm and blood
but it all remains locked within the network of grey cells and winding circuits, only raising slightly the count of oxygen in your red blood cells and the strength of your pulse as you finger your apartment keys
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Next: Aura 3: Inside Van Gogh’s Ear
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