Photos and Text By Nester Nuñez (Joven Cuba)
HAVANA TIMES – Sitting on the curb of the neighborhood, with my back against the post, I wait for the hours, the heat, and the shame of this dark night to pass. CarlitosMal, or Jotafinley, as we’ve called him since childhood, arrived a while later and sat beside me without saying a word… What’s the use anyway? One word says nothing, and at the same time, it hides everything, sang the other Carlitos, Varela, and we’ve already learned that complaining at the CDR (neighborhood watch committee) level is pointless; take my word for it.
So we continue quietly, trying to find something in the darkness to fix our gaze on. But all we manage to see is that these blackouts are the continuation of those from 1994. It’s unbelievable. Then I feel a column of air around me:
“As if it weren’t enough, the bugs have arrived,” I warn Carlitos, “I have one perched on my neck, right in the middle of a scar.”
I feel the pressure of its six legs and the odor emanating from its entire repugnant being. It moves slowly. It brings its feeler closer to me:
“Now it’s going to bite me. It’s a mosquito.”
“Don’t kid around, brother,” Jotafinley replies. “That’s less than ten millimeters, if it’s one of the big ones, and it weighs nothing.”
Maybe it’s the insomnia I’ve been suffering since the blackouts… Maybe it’s the lack of bread and the hunger for something more than food… Maybe the chicken no longer sits well, or the lack of transportation, the shoes that break, the crying of a child without toys, the pain of an old man without medicine, or the rest of the senses that awaken when you lose the ability to see…
“I swear I can feel it, it hasn’t gone away. Lately, I don’t know why, I’ve had this hypersensitivity to bugs,” I respond.
“Hypersensitive? You’re off, bro. You’ve caught the Beriberi epidemic, but in reverse. It must be the minced meat you ate.”
“Psss, shut up. It’s already biting me.”
The mosquito’s proboscis pierces my skin. I feel pain when the blood vessel breaks, and when the mosquito finally sucks, I know the exact number of cells, the exact amount of life passing from my body to its.
“It’s done. It’s about to burst from being so fat”
Then I perceive the immediate allergic reaction to the anticoagulant the mosquito injected me with, the inflammation in the epidermis, the formation of the rash where other mosquitoes have bitten me throughout my life. I don’t tell Jotafinlay so he doesn’t think I’ve gone crazy. Anyway, he suspects something:
“If that’s true, brother, you’ve become a masochist or an idiot,” he says. “You didn’t even try to scare it away.”
“I’d rather it bite me than sneak into old Fefa’s house and bite her, poor thing, with how gossipy and anemic she is; or into yours, and bite your kid. I understand mosquitoes must live off something. It’s the law of nature. What can we do about it?”
“Yeah, that’s true… There will always be mosquitoes. What’s happening is that lately they’ve become very gluttonous.”
“Don’t even mention it! This bug that bit me almost got an earful”, “Hey, man, with all due respect, step aside and give someone else a chance to suck too, come on. Remember you’re a mosquito, don’t try to fatten up like a tick.”
Carlitos laughs.
“Are you laughing? How many millennia was that thing there sucking my blood?”
“Mosquitoes take advantage because we let them. If you knew you wouldn’t even swat at it, you would’ve come out here wrapped in a sheet with your head inside and all, bro, like a ghost.”
“Oh, CarlitosMal, it’s unbelievable that you’re saying this. It’s impossible to be more ghostly than we already are. Yet, mosquitoes see us and go after us.”
The lights of a car suddenly blind us. When it passes, we see it’s a white Lada. A few meters behind it is a military truck, and a patrol car closes the parade.
“Do you know what I just remembered?” —I say to Carlitos—. “The insistent buzzing of the mosquitoes stuck there, in the ear. It was like a siren warning you of danger, and you had the option to defend yourself. This one that just passed by, it came, took what it wanted, and flew away, all the while staying quiet. That’s very odd.”
CarlitosMal looks towards the “wolf’s mouth” where the