MANKIND AND COURAGE

Feliz questioned me with her smile and it was with great courage and pain that I found the strength to tell her about my dilemma. She listened to me calmly without interrupting, her face looking serene. Maybe just like my father, she always expected the worst, bad news, and misfortune. She didn't flinch at my story or the choice she suspected I would make. Where did this certainty of misfortune come from? From the future or from the past? How many men in her life besides her father had also abandoned her? What would make me the exception to the rule, and the first man to stay?

'We can always write to each other,' she said knowing perfectly well that it wouldn't be the same.

I wanted to make her understand how difficult the choice was for me. I leaned over her to get closer to her lips. She pulled away immediately. Alegria's words came back to me: "Lust is easy, but always fleeting; complicity can come quickly, but it requires courage; loyalty requires trust; and not everyone knows how to appreciate or give affection to others."

Before I even left the island, I had already lost Feliz. Unlike me, she knew that I wasn't yet brave enough to fight for her.

Why do we have to fight for the women (or the men) that society forbids us to love in broad daylight?

Probably for the same reasons the military defends us against an enemy or an invasion. Shame, fear, guilt are men's worst enemies. They invade a man's soul from an early age and make him a living dead. And yes, the living dead too can have a brilliant career, a beautiful wife or husband, and cute healthy children.

***

A week and a half later, I was hugging Alegria very tightly before boarding with my family on the plane that was going to take me back to Europe, flying off to a whole new chapter of my life. Alegria didn't shed a single tear, her face confident and smiling. From the moment I had made the decision to follow my parents, she had carefully uprooted me from the hot land of Cuba to pot me and hand me over to my parents. She hoped that the land of Poland where my father wanted to plant me would be as fertile as that of her island. She had given me everything she held most precious: her wisdom, her tenderness and her strength. I held the responsibility then to make good use of them wherever I went.