AFFECTION

After we first met, Feliz and I often saw each other in town or at the beach to spend time together. Like many young people on the island, she had only one dream: to be able to leave Cuba to see the world, the United States, Europe, or anywhere else far from the Caribbean; anywhere else where possibilities were plentiful and the opinions of others, especially those of the family, were less important.

Before Feliz, I could have sworn that I had no attraction for women, my interest and my gaze hardly ever stopped on their shapes and faces, unlike Chris. I didn't seem to like men either. Despite the incident in my childhood, my fantasies as a young teenager weren't gay, or so I thought. With her encounter, I understood that it was both that attracted me to the other: neither yin nor yang, but both at the same time. The aggressiveness and simplicity of the masculine combined with the restorative strength and creativity of the feminine.

Although I only found out afterwards "what" she really was, to me she was made exactly the way I wanted: my choice, my preference. In addition to being curious, lovely and sincere, she also understood my grief having grown up without a father. Like me, she found a lot of comfort in the landscapes of her native island and its catchy rhythms. If I had looked at Feliz like the rest of society, I would have probably seen her as a masquerade, only possible in our century thanks to the magic of science. However, it was obvious to me that nothing about her came as a surprise to such an old world like ours. If the latter could speak men's words, it would probably tell us that it had already seen forms and possibilities of all kinds passing by. Therefore, it was prepared to see many more until the end of us. Its sole entertainment was to see us live and die in a diversity of forms. Its existence depended hardly on ours.

In my opinion, Feliz and I were both strange specimens and the fruit of the banality of the human mind. She had been born with a body and a sex, but she had never really recognised herself in either. She knew deep down that only somewhere in between she would become complete, perhaps. Some may have said with conviction that she was floating dangerously adrift in the current of nature. However, I could have also argued that if nature had made us, then we too were natural facts. But please, let me clarify! I don't deny the facts: a body and a sex already born both remain what they are unless science does its tricks. Nevertheless, the true being who resides inside a body (with one sex or the other) doesn't fully understand the facts of mankind. The reason being it comes from another universe.

It was Feliz's defiance of reality and of what other people were saying that fascinated me. This drew me madly towards her. Her dark and shining eyes saw beyond men's words, her own appearance, the waves of the Caribbean Sea, and the definitions that people liked to give to any being seemingly living or so-called non-living. In my opinion, she also belonged to a different world from this one, and it was in that world that I wanted to live.