EVERYTHING GOES WITH TIME

My childhood years with Alegria flew by, taking my grief as an orphan to a small corner of my memory. I spoke Spanish fluently then, and I blended in completely with a population who had been conceived in silence and shame like me. Through our birth as bastards, we had rewritten the definition of the word dignity, and we had decided that the supernatural beauty of our bodies of multiple origins would no longer take away our humanity.

While Alegria and the multiplicity of the Cuban population invited me to turn the page, I sometimes managed to forget the why and how I had landed among them on the island. It almost seemed to me that I had always lived there and that their manners, which had appeared strange to me at first, had become rather ordinary to my eyes as a teenager. Although I was different, I belonged undeniably to them. The more I accepted it, the better I felt in my new skin. Even the nature around me gave the impression of having adopted me as its worthy heir. Far from the city, in the countryside where the energy of life could run freely, I could watch without restriction or reserve life go on its course in the only way it has ever known: free, without judgment, without guilt, nor shame.

For all children like me who grew up close to nature and in harmony with animals, life has never kept any secrets. Desire, conception, birth, survival, illness, fight and death manifest themselves openly before our voracious and curious little eyes. Living my early years on my grandmother's land somehow told me that the adults in Katowice and urban Cuba had probably lied to me about the true nature of human beings. Even though we were so much more than animals and nature because we had the intelligence to control them both, the fact was none the less that we ate one and depended on the other for our survival. Wasn't that enough to make us mere equals or at least equal rivals? Wasn't our desire to conceive, to conquer, and to overcome diseases, starvation, and death the same as that of the horse, the rooster, or the dog. You are laughing and yet...

I spoke weekly to my mother and my sisters over the phone, and we sent each other letters and photos regularly as well. Just like me, time was leaving its indelible marks on their faces, pulling us all against our will into another stage of our lives until the finishing line. Meanwhile, my father still refused to see me or talk to me. He was supposedly always very busy, at work, not at home, already in bed, out doing some odd job. My mother and my sisters used staging skills and remarkable ingenuity to avoid admitting to me that in fact, he was standing or sitting right next to them. I guessed so as not to hurt me. However, I had already been deeply hurt, and even many kilometres away, several countries, two continents, an ocean and two seas away from him, the bond that connected me to him was being stretched to its extreme. Yet, it still held firm. Like a powerful computer, I was keeping in memory the smallest scraps of recollections of my childhood with my family in Poland: the afternoons and Sundays at my paternal grandmother's house, the pieces of furniture of our home, the smell of every room, Ania's toys scattered all over the house, the gusts of raindrops with the crash of thunder during the summer torrential rains, going to school on a sleigh during the winter. With each memory, the shadow of my father appeared in the background, his silhouette all blurry like in a dream, his face barely distinguishable. Nevertheless, he was real, and not only in my head. He had just decided to keep me away from him temporarily, at least that was the thought that reassured me.