ALCIDES, THE UNPUBLISHED
He looks like a god, but he is a heretic. He looks as though he is carved from stone, but he is a live wire. He looks like the first man, but he is the ultimate survivor.
Writing about Rilke, the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva said that he ‘is neither a command to our time nor a display of it – he is its counterweight. Wars, slaughters, churned-up flesh of dissension – and Rilke. Because of Rilke the earth will be absolved of our time.’
At the age of eighty-two, Rafael Alcides is Cuba’s counterweight. Political lackeys, a population consumed with cynicism and cowardice, wasted, fruitless lives heading nowhere, shot through with bitterness or fear – and then Alcides. Thanks to Alcides, our country will be forgiven.
At the age of eighty-two, in sacred communion with the world, reconciled in equal measure to defeat and to light, Alcides is both all that he appears to be and all that he is. A poet. Someone who once wrote: ‘When a funeral cortege with only two cars / passes and no one turns to look, I tremble, I shudder, / I quiver; I feel afraid to be a man.’
—
He lives in a garage he has turned into an apartment – almost a cave – on the corner of a quiet street in Nuevo Vedado in Havana. This is not the shambolic home of a tormented genius. This is not the ostentatious home of a famous writer. This not the suffocating home of a bureaucrat. This is not the empty home of a suicide. It is the quintessence of ‘seasoned homes, / where action does not allow itself to be usurped by word.’
The force of will that is Rafael Alcides is contained within an ideogram. The narrow sofa, almost at floor level; the cushions decorated with small tremulous flowers; the still lifes in ceramic vases; the chairs of polished wood; the rattan furniture; the wax candles; the austere paintings of the everyday and the funereal; the fading light; the tentative cold of Havana winters; the plasticity of evening; the vague murmur of seemingly uninhabited places; and the inconstant barks of a raw-boned dog with mismatched eyes and drooping ears.
Regina Coyula – his wife, twenty-three years his junior – is brewing coffee in the kitchen, when, through this aroma of domesticity, Alcides emerges from the depths of the apartment. A man who can only be described by an interjection that these days, from anyone but him, would sound ridiculous: Oh!
He is wearing heavy, grey trousers, a Prussian blue sweater, black socks and slippers. His full white beard, his elegant bald pate, his weathered copper skin, his wrinkled brow, and, set deep in his face, howling, a pair of feverish dark eyes.
He is reciting a poem by Darío.
‘Margarita, how beautiful the sea is: / still and blue. / The orange blossom in the breezes / drifting through.’
The deep, booming voice combined with his quick gestures commands a certain fascination.
‘The skylark in its glory / has your accent too…’
His hands seem to break into a little dance, urged on by dizzying rhythm. The long, gnarled fingers tell the words like beads, as though all his powers of expression are connected, as though nothing in Alcides is discrete. When he speaks, he does so with his whole body.
‘Here, Margarita, is a story / made for you.’
His ears are filled with water, he cannot hear his own voice, and at a distance of a few metres, can see only shadows. He has spent the past two months in bed, except for the days when he goes to the hospital to be examined by doctors.
This is how he has come to find himself in a city he no longer wanted anything to do with, one he has consciously avoided in its final stages of destruction.
‘For more than twenty years, Alcides has lived his life within a radius of a single kilometre,’ says Regina. ‘From the apartment to the market, from the apartment to the winery.’
Last November, surgeons operated on Alcides for colon cancer only to discover it had metastasized, and fitted him with a colostomy. He still has not decided whether to undergo chemotherapy. Apparently, he would rather live out his last months peacefully, no matter how few, rather than dragging things out between bouts of vomiting and nausea.
But what is surprising about all this is that it has rekindled his ability to celebrate concrete details that others would dismiss as minutiae. It is something that no cancer – not the cancer of power, nor the physical cancer he now suffers – can rob him of. Today is 19 January 2016, and Alcides has just read with delight a recent review of his work by a devoted reader.
‘I’ll make a handsome corpse,’ he says, ‘lovingly remembered.’ But Alcides is not dead yet. He is Cuba’s greatest living poet, and probably its most honest, its most unfairly silenced, the one who has paid the highest price for his nobility, the one who has never been swayed by fashionable trends or corrupted by the small change of politics.
His work, published intermittently, has brought rewards that cannot be classified. The fact that, in the 1980s, prison inmates traded packs of cigarettes for copies of his collection Agradecido como un pero [Grateful as a Dog]. The fact that his books – wrapped in nylon to protect them from the sea – were the only thing taken by the migrants who launched themselves on rafts into the Straits of Florida. The fact that, after reading his work in a second-hand bookstore, young people from the province would make a pilgrimage to his home.
He is not a champion of exile. He is not a victim of the quinquenio gris – the five grey years of censorship that blighted the 1970s. He is not part of the system. He did not become cynical, or bitter, or resentful, or wary, or violent, and he never submitted. For some inexplicable reason, his personal fortunes matter less to him than the death of his country.
—
‘If I lose my book, after all the years I’ve spent writing it, I’m the only one who loses. It is a personal defeat, whereas we are talking about the defeat of a people. And that’s something sacred, it’s a tragedy. Cuba is a patchwork of capitalism and socialism that is worse than useless. Go try to buy some food. You won’t find any. Just look at the prices. Is the blockade to blame? It’s fucking ridiculous. It’s just not serious. Does our food come from London? Do yams come from Paris? No. Life is constantly in motion and it’s like a game of chess. With every move, the board changes. You can’t stay still. Things are the way they are because Fidel and Raúl are in a standoff with the United States. And the whole thing is a barefaced lie. Raúl says: “We can hold out for another fifty years.” Well, yes, obviously, you can hold out. But the people can’t hold out. I don’t feel proud at all. I feel like the construction worker who’s helped build a prison. I’m one of those bricklayers. But if I had to live my life again, in the same circumstances, I’d fight that war all over again, I’d do all the things I did. I’d sign up for this adventure again. We thought we were heading somewhere. But in the end, we got nowhere.’
‘What about your writing?’
‘I’m not talking about my writing. My story is simple. At the end of the day, I’ve only ever written first drafts. In my filing cabinet there are three or four metres’ worth of novels, and that’s where they’ll stay. More than thirty years ago, when I moved into this house, I burned another couple of metres.’
‘Doesn’t that upset you?’
‘There was a time when it upset me, because that was what I lived for, that was what I spent my life doing, but after a while it doesn’t bother you so much. Why? Because there have been greater losses. The greatest loss has been the Revolution itself; for people like me, that was the dream. There was an opportunity, we had an opportunity, but that train has gone, we won’t see it again.’
—
Previously, in an interview with critic and writer Efraín Rodríguez Santana (Cuba Encuentro, No. 36, spring 2005), Alcides admitted that he burned his novels to unshackle himself from a future burdened by so many drafts he could never complete. In that sense, you might say the Revolution is the great unfinished, total novel that authors keep trying to write at the wrong time. Politicians are politicians precisely because they cannot comprehend the generosity of true poets.
—
‘Cuba needed a revolution. The problem is that the Revolution quickly stopped being a revolution and became something else. Fidel started doing whatever he pleased, he was waging wars around the world, wars in which he didn’t fight the way Alexander, Hannibal or Napoleon did. His children didn’t even fight.’
‘If you had to pinpoint the moment when the Revolution stopped being a revolution…?’
‘The moment the body of laws was written. When it was set down that black and white were equal, that everyone had the same rights, that the State controlled the means of production, that’s the moment when the Revolution ended. At that point, there is a contract between the individual and the state, the individual and society, the same social contract that has always existed, in which the citizen produces and pays taxes, while the state collects and distributes, builds schools, pays the salaries of civil servants, soldiers, the salaries of Fidel and Raúl. This is the point when the state is responsible for giving you a scholarship if you have the right results, provides free education, which is absolutely crucial, provides hospitals, doctors. The Revolution ended in ’65 or ’66. And then what happens? Fidel is clever, he’s intelligent, he’s a genius, no doubt about it, but he’s malevolent, and he clung to the concept, the abstract notion of the Revolution.
‘Why? Because that’s the way to keep citizens owing things to the Revolution. But since the Revolution has no face, it’s not a person, you have to identify with someone. Your father was a garbage collector but you ended up becoming a doctor or a lawyer thanks to the Revolution, which is to say thanks to Fidel Castro. You owe everything to Fidel Castro. No! No! Fidel Castro owes everything to you, everything he is, whatever glory and power he has he owes to the people, to me as a citizen. I pay him a salary to govern, place my trust in him. This whole “The Commander-in-Chief orders…” thing is bullshit. No way! Sovereignty is vested in me, not you, you doff your cap to the people, they are the sovereign power, it is they who can grant and they who can take it away. This, obviously, is a state governed by the rule of law. Here you can’t take anything from anyone. But he can take things from you, he can take your life.’
‘Was there ever a time when you admired him?’
‘Of course, I followed him, he was the Chief.’
‘Did you love him?’
‘Love is a strange word. Love is one thing. Appreciate is another. You can respect someone, admire someone, feel part of something. I felt part of something. Besides, you have to think of yourself as a giant octopus, because you love people for lots of different reasons. You’re a leader, you’re a commander, you represent an ideal, and lots of your friends are also friends of mine, and they have died; we are all part of an ideal. And when I meet you, we are bound together by the affection of these people who love you, these people you love, or that I assume you love. We are all part of one big family. It’s not a question of whether I love you or not. You’re a part of me, and because I trust you and we’re part of a great venture, every decision is the right one. Besides, Fidel was the man who was making our country’s dream a reality. For example, one of the greatest things he did, one of the most beautiful, was the literacy programme. And giving land to farmers. Who wouldn’t agree with that? Anyway, it was a wonderful time, honestly. Fidel could have been one of the Christ figures in the history of mankind, he was headed that way. People loved him, they gave thanks to Fidel, Fidel your home is my home. All these things happened, things that could make you weep. Socialism seemed to be the political and cultural fulfilment of man as a species. Opening up the hospitals to everyone. Even though he didn’t build the hospitals, they had already been built, and then the doctors emigrated, he hounded them out. All wisdom drained away from the country, leaving it to begin again with people he trained from scratch, people who owed everything to him. But yes, it was a glorious time. And we were making history. You don’t take the money, you take the glory. We were rebuilding the world. Ushering in a great era.’
—
The life of Rafael Alcides is a pretext for nostalgia. Going back to Rilke, it seems fitting to say that Alcides embodies the last lines of the Eighth Duino Elegy: ‘Who then has turned us around like this, that we, whatever we do / appear like someone about to depart?’
The beginning – he was born on 9 June 1933 in a tiny village in eastern Cuba, ‘a sprawling savannah with only ten or twelve houses’ – the middle and the end of everything is this: ‘I can never stop being from Barrancas. / From a Barrancas that today exists only in my dreams.’ So it’s understandable that remaining true to his moral convictions has been a relatively easy task for someone who has succeeded in salvaging what is most important: integrity of self.
Alcides is a pillar of memories, and time has finally forgiven him. Regina, his wife, describes him:
‘One of the extraordinary things about him is how he looks. When we first got together, my niece, with the artlessness of a ten-year-old, asked whether I was dating the poet Eliseo Diego. Even then, Alcides was prematurely bald and had a white beard. His contemporaries looked like his younger brothers. He played a trick on them: he never got any older, while they gradually lost their looks, their hair, their physical and mental agility, sailing past him until eventually the roles were r...
