Havana Year Zero

by Karla Suárez

  Can you imagine how I felt? In the course of a few moments, Ángel had told me that he’d used me to get to Euclid, that he wanted me to move in with him and, what’s more, that he’d slept with that Barbara woman because he had no idea how to avoid it. Do you see? I didn’t know whether to shower him with kisses or beat him to a pulp. Ángel always disconcerted me. Right from the start, he always managed to disconcert me. I often asked myself whether my obsession with him was real or I was falling into the trap of this country, the trap of the single man, the apartment in El Vedado, my frustrations, of searching for something I could hold on to. No. In the end the answer was always no, because my feelings for him bore no resemblance to anything I’d ever experienced. How can I put it? There are people who have a strange effect on others at deep, natural, instinctive levels. It sometimes happened when I was watching him talk, and would hardly be able to follow his words: I wasn’t listening, I was simply looking at him, watching the movement of his lips, his facial expressions, his hair, the look in his eyes, and then I’d discover that I hadn’t the least idea of what he was talking about, and it wasn’t that I had no interest in his words; it was just that looking at him was like escaping to somewhere else, as if the sound had suddenly been cut in a film and you sit there watching the lead character’s lips moving, as if everyone had disappeared from the cinema and you and the hero were alone, with you looking at him. Moreover, Ángel had that damn habit of touching me, simply putting his hand on my shoulder, my arm, my forearm or my hand, like someone trying to stress what he’s saying, but my whole body would start to vibrate; it was a chain reaction originating in the patch of skin he was touching that spread through the rest of my body, and I’d even begin to sweat, feel my heart beating fast, my skin would rise in goose pimples and shivers would course through my body, plus dampness, I also felt dampness, something I couldn’t quite define, but at the mere touch of his skin my flesh triggered a furious, animal revolution. It was as though his body were emitting a wave on a frequency in tune with mine. Do you see what I mean? When the resonance frequencies of a system match, it can cause destruction, and that’s how I felt when I was with him: overwhelmed, smashed to pieces.

  And that’s exactly how I was feeling when he finished his speech that afternoon. I know I sighed deeply and avoided looking at him: anything might happen if I did. All the strength I thought I possessed due to my horizontal encounter with Leo had either melted or was racing away through the park, far from me. I remember that I heaved another sigh, this time to stop another disobedient tear trickling from my eyes. Ángel was looking at me, waiting for some reaction, a word, a slap, an embrace, a yell, something to show that I was still alive, but I was too confused to speak coherently. Albert Einstein is credited with saying something I really like: ‘If you want different results, don’t repeat the same things’. In my case, that would mean the two of us trying to reason things out together, asking questions, understanding, but none of that made sense then. I sighed a third time and got to my feet, saying the best thing would be to meet up some other time, he was not to worry, but I needed to walk for a while. I’d call him later, of course I would, but first I needed some air. I needed to be alone. Ángel rose and stood before me. I saw his face. His eyes were still shining and his expression was downcast. I love you, Julia, he repeated. I love you too, I said as I walked away from him.

  17

  I know very little about classical music; there are melodies that sound familiar, but I don’t know where they come from. I can only identify the most popular ones, Beethoven’s Fifth, things like that. Yet there’s one that I’m never going to forget because it’s linked to my childhood, and to the childhoods of so many other people on the island: Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2, which was the background music of one of the Russian cartoons we used to watch when we were young, the story of the greedy piggybank that bursts from trying to swallow a coin bigger than itself, while the cartoon characters gaze at a rainbow with Rachmaninov’s piano in the background. It’s a really lovely concerto. Do you know it? That was what CMBF was playing when I arrived, downhearted, at Euclid’s apartment the day after my conversation with Ángel.

  Euclid was in his room, repairing a fan with the radio on, and as soon as he saw my face he wanted to know what had happened, but I wasn’t in any mood to talk. The truth is that I was feeling too dispirited and the music seemed so marvellous that I said I’d prefer to lie down for a while. I was tired. He thought that odd, but nodded, so I stretched out on his bed with my eyes closed to listen to Rachmaninov.

  Ángel had, quite literally, done for me. I’d had a plan, a project, but Barbara’s appearance in the plot had triggered a series of minor repercussions that, in a matter of hours, had turned my world upside down. I’m aware that mixing emotions and concrete objectives can lead straight to chaos, but I’m also aware that sometimes it’s inevitable. What was I going to do? I had a whole heap of cards on the table that had to be organised, but some of the elements were contradictory. In fact, many of them were. By that time I’d obtained information from Euclid, Leonardo and Ángel. They all coincided in the story of the legacy; the problem lay in which of them had the document. The author had managed to convince me that it wasn’t Euclid, but after discovering that Ángel’s initial approach to me had been motivated by his desire to gain access to my friend, I was back where I’d started: not understanding anything. If Ángel had the document, if he did in fact love me, if, as he said, his relationship with Barbara was based on his intention to sell her the document, then why insist that Euclid had it? I already knew the worst: he’d slept with that Italian woman. So what was the point of keeping up the farce? What did it achieve?

  Everything was a mess of random and premeditated events. My meeting with Euclid and Ángel in the street, Ángel’s desire to get to know me better, Barbara’s appearance, Leonardo’s invitation to his party. By that point I was incapable of identifying which had happened by chance and which were planned. What’s more, there was one point that greatly worried me in the three men’s confessions: Margarita, who was like a hand moving things around beneath the Ouija board. According to Euclid, she’d said that Leonardo had the document; according to Leo, Ángel had it; and according to Ángel, it was in Euclid’s possession. A perfect closed circle. In the case that they were all telling the truth, Margarita – despite being physically distant, thousands of kilometres away – was the demiurge who had constructed the labyrinth in which we found ourselves. I could no longer find reasonable explanations for anything, and you know how mortifying that is for me. Losing the thread drives me crazy because I know there’s a logic behind everything, even if I don’t know what it is. There’s always a theory to explain things, even those that are unpredictable.

  In the view of determinists, everything in the universe is governed by natural laws and a chain of cause and effect. Everything, including human thought and actions. Therefore, chance doesn’t exist. This implies that, being aware of situation A, and given the laws that govern the process that leads from A to B, then situation B is predictable. If we can’t predict something, it is simply because we don’t know the laws governing the process. It’s ignorance, not chance, that makes certain situations unpredictable. That’s what determinists say.

  From the viewpoint of chaos theory, however, the universe is governed by a mixture of order and disorder; in other words, it doesn’t always follow a determined, predictable model. Some systems, like the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, display fairly predictable behaviour, and so are termed ‘stable’. But these are in the minority because, in fact, there are a whole host of unstable systems in the natural world whose behaviour can be chaotic, which often means that they begin to manifest disorder for no known cause. Take the weather, for instance; it’s practically impossible to accurately predict it over a matter of days. These completely unpredictable instabilities aren’t determined by knowledge of the laws that originate them, it isn’t the observer’s
ignorance that prompts us to call what we don’t understand ‘disorder’; disorder exists and manifests itself in this way, without further ado, when we’re least expecting it. Why? Well, because it depends on a great many uncertain circumstances that determine whether a small variation at any point on the planet generates substantial effects on the opposite side of the world. That’s what is called ‘the butterfly effect’; the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in some distant place is later capable of producing a hurricane somewhere else.

  Something like that was at play here: Margarita was the butterfly who had fluttered her wings years before to produce the hurricane we were experiencing. Margaritatheseaisbeautifulandthewind, Margaritabutterfly, Margaritapieceofshit.

  Why fall prey to the Margarita effect? It was suddenly as if my thinking had blossomed. Like I said, there’s always a theory to explain things, even unpredictable things, and I swear, it’s not that I need two and two to make four. For heaven’s sake, there’s nothing more inexact than the exact sciences, you can take it from me. Bertrand Russell defined mathematics as ‘the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true’, so figure it out for yourself. I don’t need – and I didn’t need then – the accounts to be completely clear, it was simply a matter of not losing the thread, of finding a system that would in some way allow me to explain what was happening. Chaos theory was also perfect for that because, in addition – as I realised that afternoon – it was the only one capable of interpreting what was going on around us. Why Ángel had slept with Barbara, why I’d slept with Leonardo, why Euclid was lying, why Dayani wanted to leave the country, why I had to sleep in the living room, why Margarita was toying with us remotely and why we were all collectively obsessed by Meucci. All those situations were nothing more than manifestations of chaos. Margarita was just one more butterfly who had fluttered her tiny wings, another disorder in a system that was already behaving chaotically. Because it was the whole country that was going through a chaotic moment. A butterfly had fluttered its wings on the other side of the Atlantic, bringing down a wall in the beautiful city of Berlin, and the effect of this gradually materialised on this side of the world, on this island, in this unstable system. Do you get it?

  I’ll try to explain it more clearly. According to chaos theory, the universe is governed by cycles, with an orderly one being followed by a disorderly one, and so on. For change to occur, a certain amount of instability is necessary, so it’s in the disordered or chaotic periods that alterations in the system take place. Are you following me? Now, chaos tends to be progressive, by which I mean it gradually increases. Sometimes small events occur that have no apparent meaning – we hardly notice them – and yet later on their effect continues to expand and become more visible. This type of evolving chaotic system is increasingly susceptible to the influence of the surrounding environment, which means anything that happens outside the system is capable of influencing its behaviour. The fact that the Berlin Wall fell and Cuba went into a state of crisis shows that Cuba was an unstable country, which isn’t at all difficult to demonstrate in the light of our economic development.

  So far, what we have is that, on the one hand, the chaos is progressive, and on the other, external influences accentuate it. Then, of course, comes the culminating moment when the glass is full and we reach what is known as the point of bifurcation. Boom, bang, whoooosh, whaaaaam. That’s where the system, whatever its name, has to change, eee-volve. After that point there are two possible consequences. One: return to the point of equilibrium that preceded the mess, attenuating or correcting the changes produced en route. Two: allow oneself to be carried along by the chaos until it begins to self-regulate and change the situation, building a new structure, an evolution, which, if I may say so, doesn’t necessarily mean reaching a more favourable state; it’s merely that the system, whatever its name, reconfigures into a new structure that is different to the previous one. Do you get it?

  Taking everything into consideration, I came to the conclusion that, in its recent history, Cuba had passed through two points of bifurcation. The first was in 1959, when the chaos into which the country had sunk sparked the revolution that overthrew the ruling regime. Gradually, over two decades, through readjustments, purges, laws and alterations of social consciousness, a new system was established and, with it, a new society with totally different values to the previous one. That was the society I grew up in. The second point of bifurcation was in 1989, with the beginning of the end of the socialist system, and that again changed our society. The government made an attempt to return the country to its pre-’89 equilibrium, but it was impossible. A butterfly had fluttered its wings in Berlin and the ensuing hurricane was inevitable. The chaos continued to progress slowly, enveloping us, changing our values, unsettling points of equilibrium. How can I explain it? In 1987, an egg was the most common thing in the world, but in 1993 we were only allowed four eggs a month. If before ’89 it was a source of pride and a point in your favour to be a lawyer or engineer, after ’93, that changed to being an assistant in a dollar shop or petrol station. And if before ’89 Euclid had got into trouble with his wife for taking me out to Las Cañitas in the Hotel Habana Libre, in ’93 nothing would have gone wrong because Euclid, I and every other person born on this noble island was prohibited from setting foot in the hotels. Do you see what I’m getting at? The point of bifurcation in 1989 produced a new society with new values that had nothing to do with the ones we knew. The construction of that society began in the nineties, and the work is still in progress. Fortunately, in some areas, chaos has given rise to a form of order: nowadays we can enter hotels and we eat better than we did in the early nineties. But in terms of everything else, we continue to float in a sort of limbo, a never-ending state of transition. The only thing that’s clear, at least to me, is that we changed our values and other values came into force. Remember that cartoon I used to watch as a child? The story of the greedy piggybank that burst when it tried to eat a coin bigger than itself, while the other characters gaze at the rainbow, and Rachmaninov’s piano concerto is playing in the background. Well, if that story were being told now, the piggybank would have worked out a way to swallow the coin, and the other characters would ignore the rainbow and try to sell someone the piano belonging to Rachmaninov, who, naturally, would have left the country years before. It’s that simple: new society, new values. What do you think?

  Don’t get the idea that coming to those conclusions helped me to solve anything; it just relieved my confusion, because everything, absolutely everything, took on a coherence I’d been unable to see before. If you think about it, the obsession with Meucci also started in ’89, on the hundredth anniversary of his death, when Granma published the article Euclid had first spoken of and now Ángel had mentioned too. I hadn’t even felt the need to ask Leonardo about it because, given the amount of documentation he’d amassed, there was no way he could have missed it. He later confirmed this assumption, and I learned that it was also the Granma article that had prompted Margarita to mention Meucci’s manuscript to him. In other words, at the point of bifurcation in 1989, Leonardo set out to write a novel about Meucci’s life with the silly illusion that the addition of his friend’s original document would make it a masterpiece. As for Ángel, imagining the future financial benefits, he got the idea of suggesting to his wife that they should sell the document. In the meantime, Euclid, who already had an eye on his daughter’s inheritance, began to worry that the document might attract the attention of others. That situation was the start of an evolutionary process that led to the point at which we found ourselves.

  That evening, I didn’t even notice when Rachmaninov stopped playing, but I do know that at some moment I opened my eyes and discovered that I was alone in the silent room. I’d evidently dozed off, which was no surprise, as I’d spent the night before pacing back and forth in the living room of our apartment – I’m incapable of sleep when I’m fret
ting about something – and between the piano and my thoughts I hadn’t been aware of Euclid leaving the room. I remember that I sat up on the bed and looked around me. I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep, but my friend had gone out, and I was alone. Days before, when I still believed he had the legacy, this would have been a golden opportunity, but now the idea made me laugh. Why would Euclid have it? Well, if my poor tutor had been capable of publishing my damned thesis just to gain a little weight, what wouldn’t he have done to get his hands on that blessed original document about the invention of the telephone? He’d already have been famous. Right? We’d have been calling him sir.

  What the hell! My former tutor definitely didn’t have it. Ángel’s version was looking increasingly thin, it was as if a flower were wilting and each fallen petal became a vote against him. I’d never before seen matter being so effectively transformed. Ángel didn’t care about Meucci, so the manuscript in itself had little value for him. His final objective wasn’t possession of the document; that was just a step along the road to obtaining something he needed more. The fallen petals of his version were becoming votes against him because they gradually revealed the veracity of what Leo had said: Ángel had the document. It was highly probable that he’d kept the paper at first, thinking that Margarita would return to claim it, but as that didn’t happen, he must have put it back in the place where she’d stored it. He’d become the custodian of Margarita’s legacy, just as he was the custodian of the life of the unknown person in the videos. Ángel and his stories. What was indeed clear was that, despite Leo’s insistence, he hadn’t initially thought of selling it. Ángel himself had commented that, even if he’d had it, he’d never have given it to the author. No, he wanted to preserve the legacy.