Gordiano Lupi, “L’Avana amore mio”
Whether it’s Piombino or Havana, the nostalgia for what is lost tears Gordiano Lupi in the same way. In the first case it is about something distant in time, which cannot return because it no longer exists, that is, the hometown of when the author was a boy. In the second it is a place that cannot be regained, because it is distant in space and forbidden, the Havana that Lupi must not visit as an “unwelcome person”, the Havana that his wife Dargys brought with her in abandoning it, aware that getting on the plane meant cutting the past, breaking ties with family and with the whole known world up to that moment. It is the same Havana of many exiled poets and writers, hated by the regime and eager for freedom, a freedom that tastes sweet, almost cloying, while the memories are tinged with the bright red of the flamboyant trees, with the blood of the sunsets, of the crumbling wall of Maleςon.
Whether he is talking about Piombino or remembering the lost days of Havana, Gordiano Lupi has the same poignant march, the same melancholy that grabs you, the same style made up of exhausting repetitions, of repeated words, which makes me think of how Anne Rice describes her New Orleans.
Havana is a beloved place because you have loved in it, a place that, to fully appreciate it, you have to miss, perhaps dying in exile in the London mists. Lupi recognizes himself in the pain of the writers, especially the proscribed ones, Carpentier and Cabrera Infante, he tells us about the city through their words, paraphrasing them, taking them up here and there as in a counterpoint, a sad and sensual melody.
Havana overlooking the sea, crumbling, dilapidated, fetid with smells warmed by the sun, yet beautiful for those who can see, for those who love things as they are and not as they should be. Merciless sun, beautiful women with sensual hips, mischievous jineteras, alleys and columns, facades of old colonial houses never restored, ruins of the time of Baptist and painful billboards of a regime that has “nationalized misery”. I was in Cuba and I can confirm that there is social justice, in the sense that everyone is poor in the same way.
“The ideas of hunger propagandists make you smile, everyone is happy. Happy shit. I’d like to see you, you idiot, live on ten dollars a month in your pocket in a place where you need at least a hundred dollars to make a decent living. Cubans have a good character, this is true, but let’s not forget that those who take life the right way also suffer. “ (page 84)
That’s right, Cubans are serene and kind, one said to me, with a melancholy look where the opposite was read: “I don’t miss what I don’t know”. But life on the island is hard if you don’t have money in your pocket, if the shops are empty and lacking everything, if the best is reserved for visitors, if being a graduate means starving and you have to invent a tour guide to make a living.
Leaving, however, involves the risk of perennial pain, of renunciation, of the disappointment of a consumerism that fills the belly but not the heart, of losing forever “the happiness of a full moon night with a bottle of rum and a recorder that plays a Spanish bolero. “