HIJOS DE GUERRA: MAGDA BANDERA
RESUMEN
Este segmento del libro "Hijos de Guerra" por Magda Bandera consiste de una introducción prologando las intenciones generales de escribir su obra, sucedido por una selección de las cartas que escribió a varios compañeros que conocía en su trayecto por Irak, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cuba y Argelia. La introducción brevemente expresa su perspectiva pacifista y censuradora de la globalización y la “Guerra”, su propia terminología por el concepto de la cultura de la violencia y la hipocresía de las entidades internacionales que presenció en sus viajes a estos sitios turbulentos y hostiles. También se analiza las ocurrencias naturales e inevitables de la guerra y sus consecuencias ocultas ambas psicológicas y físicas. En sus cartas a sus colegas de Irak, Belgrado y Cuba, comenta las situaciones políticas y sociales de estas lugares respectivas a través de anécdotas personales, observaciones y conexiones transculturales. Discute la condición de una país durante la guerra, como la queda después de la guerra y como vive la gente local en una ambiente bélica, inseguro y suprimida.
Este segmento del libro "Hijos de Guerra" por Magda Bandera consiste de una introducción prologando las intenciones generales de escribir su obra, sucedido por una selección de las cartas que escribió a varios compañeros que conocía en su trayecto por Irak, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cuba y Argelia. La introducción brevemente expresa su perspectiva pacifista y censuradora de la globalización y la “Guerra”, su propia terminología por el concepto de la cultura de la violencia y la hipocresía de las entidades internacionales que presenció en sus viajes a estos sitios turbulentos y hostiles. También se analiza las ocurrencias naturales e inevitables de la guerra y sus consecuencias ocultas ambas psicológicas y físicas. En sus cartas a sus colegas de Irak, Belgrado y Cuba, comenta las situaciones políticas y sociales de estas lugares respectivas a través de anécdotas personales, observaciones y conexiones transculturales. Discute la condición de una país durante la guerra, como la queda después de la guerra y como vive la gente local en una ambiente bélica, inseguro y suprimida.
DECISIONES DIFICILES
1) TO: “Se llama El Mejunge y allí actúan semanalmente artistas que esquivan la censura y juegan a rozar sus limites y drag-queens que se hacen las locas para no trangredirlos” (113).
TT: “It’s called El Mejunge and there, artists who dodge censure but play to push the limits perform weekly, and drag queens camp it up to deceive the limits.”
2) TO: "No lo digo yo, que en mi vida he visto un mortero y, lo confieso, ni siquiera un muerto. Lo dicen quienes la conocen de veras, los que la viven y, luego, cuando callan las bombas y los microfonos, se pasan el resto de sus dias intentando sobrevivirla: el horror es ese perro cojo cuando tu ya has cerrado las puertas del Toyota y las ruinas siguen en el mismo sitio diez anos mas..."
TT: "It’s not me who stated this, as in my life I have yet to see a mortar, and I confess, not even a dead body. That’s what they say, those who truly know war, those that live, and later, when bombs and microphones fall silent, spend the rest of their days trying to survive: horror is that limping dog when one has already closed the doors of their Toyota and the ruins remain in the same place ten years after..."
1) TO: “Se llama El Mejunge y allí actúan semanalmente artistas que esquivan la censura y juegan a rozar sus limites y drag-queens que se hacen las locas para no trangredirlos” (113).
TT: “It’s called El Mejunge and there, artists who dodge censure but play to push the limits perform weekly, and drag queens camp it up to deceive the limits.”
2) TO: "No lo digo yo, que en mi vida he visto un mortero y, lo confieso, ni siquiera un muerto. Lo dicen quienes la conocen de veras, los que la viven y, luego, cuando callan las bombas y los microfonos, se pasan el resto de sus dias intentando sobrevivirla: el horror es ese perro cojo cuando tu ya has cerrado las puertas del Toyota y las ruinas siguen en el mismo sitio diez anos mas..."
TT: "It’s not me who stated this, as in my life I have yet to see a mortar, and I confess, not even a dead body. That’s what they say, those who truly know war, those that live, and later, when bombs and microphones fall silent, spend the rest of their days trying to survive: horror is that limping dog when one has already closed the doors of their Toyota and the ruins remain in the same place ten years after..."
Traducción
Children of War by Magda Bandera
Extracts from some of the included letters to real people
I decided to get off at the second to last station. It didn’t matter where, I just wanted to assure that I was a little early to arrive. It wasn’t worth suffering nor risking, above all bearing in mind that my destination was unattainable: nobody can go to “War.” One doesn’t go to war. It is war that comes and, despite many warnings that have preceded it, always seems ill-timed. Wars are provoked or are suffered, but one does not “visit” war. Neither press passes nor blue beret credentials are of any use. Because it is not the same to fear for one’s life than to also do it for one’s children, one’s lover, and one’s land. Hence, correspondents know about combats but not about wars.
And therefore, on September 11th, 2001, Americans felt as threatened as the Afghans have over the last twenty years. War, which until then had only been broadcasted on their television sets, also entered their homes. Even if nobody had seen it before, didn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. There are many peaces that conceal wars.
It is not necessary to wield a weapon to destroy a town, because it is not the bombs that fall on Iraqi soil weekly that have murdered nearly 600,000 children over the past twelve years, but rather the medicines that remain on the other side of the border. Statistics say that one person dies every seven minutes, but the more I try, I still do not understand it. I count seconds around me, I search for them multiplied in the length of a movie, in line for the theatre, in a nod on a train, in a long kiss. I can calculate time, play with it, lose it and win it, but I do not know what it means to not have it.
If I measure the words that I have written until this point, they sum to a minute and a half. Ninety seconds is a long story in a newscast.
In what I happened to see, they spoke about Palestinians and Israelis, about elections in Zimbabwe, and about the failure of the peace plan in Colombia. In what one will see within a few hours, perhaps the headlines will be about Chechenya and Pakistan. Thus there is not much sense to talk about concrete wars; they vary as much as stock quotes.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte explained it very well in his Territorio Comanche:
“People think that the summit of war is the dead, the guts, and the blood. But horror is something as simple as the gaze of a child, or the empty stare of a soldier who is going to be shot. Or the eyes of an abandoned and lonely dog who follows you limping through the ruins, with its foot broken by a bullet wound; and you leave it behind walking fast, embarrassed because you don’t have the courage to shoot it.”
Only one critique: he should lengthen this paragraph. Not with words, but rather with time, because real war is what comes afterwards.
It’s not me who stated this, as in my life I have yet to see a mortar, and I confess, not even a dead body. That’s what they say, those who truly know war, those that live, and later, when bombs and microphones fall silent, spend the rest of their days trying to survive: horror is that limping dog when one has already closed the doors of their Toyota and the ruins remain in the same place ten years after. And it is the vacant expression of the shot man when filled with earth in a mass grave that his widow doesn’t manage to find. And it is the look of that child who in his adolescence does not see beyond the holes in his shoes and they lead him to become a chauvinist, gangster, or chronic depressive. Or all three things at the same time.
Extract from the letter addressed to Mr. Haddad
Dear Maurice Haddad:
Before anything, I want to thank you one more time: your painting still sits beautifully in my study. I have listened to you and haven’t placed it in a frame. When my friends asked me what technique you used to paint it I explained to them what you told me; that they are old Iraqi “Mesopotamian” tricks and that you employed them not only by taste, but also by necessity. Upon discovering that it is prohibited to export paint cans to Iraq, as they are chemical products and therefore potential ingredients to manufacture weapons of mass destruction (WMD), my friends were as surprised as me.
Here we encountered some anecdotes about products that are not authorized to pass the Iraqi border because in addition to their “logical” use, they could have a pernicious “dual purpose.” We know that the money obtained by means of the “Oil-For-Food Programme” could not be spent in buying pencils whose charcoal turned out to be lethal, the same as the gas utilized in cryogenic cameras in a country where a temperature of 140° F is not news. I once heard that art can be combative, but I never suspected that watercolors could be chemical weapons.
Reading the article that you dedicated to that Japanese journalist reminded me of some transvestites I met in Santa Clara on the island of Cuba. They had the same problem as you to obtain “color.” I don’t know what your opinions are of homosexuals, but Fidel Castro doesn’t like them at all. Nevertheless, a small “oasis” exists in the city that Che Guevara was buried in. It’s called El Mejunge and there, artists who dodge censure but play to push the limits perform weekly, and drag queens who camp it up to deceive the limits. If you saw the imagination they have to invent costumes, recycle sequins, repair heels and sew the stockings that foreigners give them as presents, sometimes in exchange for conversation and others for some more action. It isn’t “fássssil” as they like to say when talking about the daily battle to eat something more than rice and beans.
The word transvestite resonates with those actors more than anyone. By the year 2000, the situation had improved a little. Yet in the worst years of the American embargo, when the Soviet support ended, there wasn’t the economy for make-up so they invented egg white based creams mixed with cake makeup coloring. Within a few hours, the visual wonder became odorous and the love and smoke decorating their sets faded. Do you know how they create that effect? By hiding ovens on stage and heating flour with them that disperses everywhere. Thankfully El Mejunge is open to fresh air and the bad odor is confused with kerosene, that sweet combustible that sticks to your skin just as it lands on the airport in Havana. Cubans have more problems with fuel than Iraqis do.
The embargo against Cuba is an old American initiative, not a United Nations initiative. Moreover, the UN General Assembly has articulated repeatedly and largely against the economic war to which this island has been subjected to for over forty years. The virulence of the sanctions is so profound that it causes similar effects to those that Iraqis endure without reaching, of course, the degree of genocide. In any case, it would be best that I don’t get dramatic and explain to them what I found in common between their country, the Caribbean, and old Yugoslavia.
First of all, the cab drivers. In all three countries, they ask their customers to not slam the door otherwise the windowpane could shatter like confetti; especially those that are repaired with plaster and scotch tape, which aren’t rare. Next, the potholes in the streets that cabs frequent. The puddles of Belgrado are identical to those in Santiago, Cuba; as well as the chipped paint on their walls. But above all, it’s the gaze of the old folks that is most similar. While chatting with them, if you concentrate solely on their eyes, you cannot distinguish if they belong to an Iraqi or a Cuban. From one side to the other, they seem to feel like hindrances and feel guilty of not really knowing the issue in their country or about anything.
Did you know that I had a guy in Havana like Graham Greene? I would’ve liked to send him a letter and do what I had promised him: describe the difference between the palm trees in Bagdad and Vedado. But right before beginning to write it, a mutual friend called me to tell me that he was not going to be able to read it. And it’s not his fault, although if it had been the same Ricardo who held that pistol.
It must have occurred in December of 2001, although Albert didn’t know exactly. His nephew, Vladimir, did not want to clarify the date. I had met him a year and a half before, during my first trip to Cuba. I saw him for the first time in Plaza de Armas, the night in which the boy Elian came from Miami, and the rainbow that covered the Malecón like a giant door converted Ricardo to “the religion of beauty” after seventy-five years of militant atheism.
I remember when he explained the colors that flooded his Habana that afternoon with his hands, “I hadn’t seen anything like it in decades.” The old man’s diction included the correct pronunciation of the “C’s” to emphasize his careful education and he accompanied his words with a disproportionate smile, that converted into a jocose guffaw when he disclosed a secret to us: the musician that played the timbales so well beside us coordinated his rhythm with the other three that were performing in a restaurant on the sidewalk in front of us, because in the past they had done it together within less distance and with no hidden motive, when instead of being a trio they were a quartet. Since this complicated things, there were too many to distribute tips, and ultimately they “just left”
Ricardo complained about the political and economic situation in such abstract terms that it forced his interlocutor to include many parentheses and impede the crazy progression of ellipses with a new sentence. Theirs used to end with “so it seems.” He used this tagline to downplay the stories he told and knew with exquisite detail because he worked for the police, reporting everything he saw on his nighttime patrols. He was sad those days because he had to “give part of a handsome young man and good person, who in his desperation to make a few dollars was spreading aids to many foreign women. Now he should be cared for in some hospital,” he confessed to me.
We had a chat about the Cuban police and he assured me they were there to protect us, “so that when people go for a walk, nobody stops them to ask them for pesos, and they spend it well.” Immediately after, he rushed to excuse his compatriots saying that “they did not do it with bad intentions, but that the situation was not easy.”
Ricardo never asked anything of me. Or almost, because he confessed to me with a face of infantile confidence that made him tremendously eager to read The Sun Always Rises by Hemingway. He had been told that he represented Pamplona very well and he was there soon after the Revolution. I don’t know what he went to do in Spain nor how he did it, he only added that he was one of “those who could travel.”
On my return to Barcelona, I searched for the novel about Sanfermines, a week long festival in Pamplona that is central the plot of The Sun Always Rises, but it was unlisted. Thus, on my next trip to the island I brought him a photo book by National Geographic to help him in his prayers to the God of beauty. A Madrilenian friend of mine in love with Cuba bought it as he wanted to contribute in some way to the “natural cause,” the Cuban movement to return to its Spanish roots. And now I don’t know if it was the copy that spread the photo on the cover of the famous Afghan girl with green eyes, because he gave it to me wrapped and Ricardo open it alone, once again attesting to his careful education. Those who saw it were his friends from his neighborhood, because the book remained displayed alone in a showroom for fifteen days.
Something must have happened in the latest months, because last fall the old communist ended up asking Albert for ten dollars. My friend had told me that to do it he kept it away in a corner and lowered his gaze. Albert wanted to play down the importance of it, reminding him of all of the presents that Ricardo had given him since they had been in contact the prior Holy Week: from cigars to a flag that his mother had embroidered a century earlier during the Cuban War of Independence. His arguments served him poorly, something had happened to Ricardo and there was not any medicine to cure him, not even in the best pharmacy in California.
I suppose that he knew mountains of similar stories, dear Maurice. During my brief stay in Iraq I heard more stories than a European civilian from Javier Solana is capable of absorbing.
One of them explained the head of information of the Federation of Iraqi Women to me. Abbas Humdi lost his father in an absurd way. He suffered from an enlarged heart and the doctor told him that he could easily save him if he obtained a concrete medicine, but there wasn’t a single dosage in all of Baghdad.
Abbas is one of those women who has renounced her family life and has concentrated solely on her job. It surprised me how many of these women there were, many more than in my country, but afterwards I understood it. The head of the Spanish diplomatic delegation in Iraq explained to me that it is very logical that these women don’t think twice about marrying someone they barely know and leaving their parents house to live in their father-in-law’s house, because there are actually very few women who can have their own home in this country. For this reason, Sadam occasionally makes use of one of his televised speeches to the nation to ask women to not demand such high skills, and ask if they know that men cannot pay them.
Jodeifa’s wife, my cab driver, assured that she did fall in love with her husband, although she met him through a photo six months before the wedding and until the moment came had barely saw him on a pair of occasions.
After getting married, this English teacher had preferred to continue working at her school. Her salary is symbolic, but she says that if she stays at home it would all fall apart, and that she has to do something. The school can allow it because her salary supports her daughters. They all live together: two grandparents, eight adults, and eight children. At nightfall the most unsuspected objects become beds and the adults try to be silent. At least the toys do not take up space, because there aren’t any. I think they should include this fact in the collateral damage statistics. Those are real.
They should also introduce other hidden costs of wars, like the level of singles I had spoken to before or the amount of divorces wars cause. An economist from Belgrado who is part of the G17 group, a liberal-conservative political party in Serbia, surprised me by telling me that divorce was one of the country’s worst consequences of the embargo. He was neither conservative nor did he defend the traditional family, but rather simply supports the return to normality, the end of the battles that don’t make ends meet. A popular Spanish song says this with simple words: “When poverty enters through the door, love jumps out the window.”
I forgot to sing it to some girls I met at a private party on a boat that ploughed through the Tigris. They wanted to know something about Spanish music and from Andalusia more than anything. “In the past we were family,” we reminded ourselves, and thus in the end, our Top 40’s were somewhat theirs, equally as the songs that the musicians played in those moments were mine. The band being the only men authorized to board that barge aside from young children who had come with their mothers.
In exchange for my musical information they showed me the real meaning of “going wild”, because that was what they literally did. As soon as we moved away from the jetty, they put their hair up and started dancing one of the most sensual dances I’ve have ever seen in my life. They forced me to join them; you can imagine the laughs. You know better than me how Iraqi women are.
We had a really good time and ate phenomenally. Each one of them had brought a home-cooked meal, with that supreme care they have when decorating trays and remembering that this land is worthy of the stories about Sherezade and to have been chosen by God to plant Eden here, just as the most important studies of biblical geography have suggested.
It was a dream come true to view dusk between the reeds and palm trees. But without a doubt, the most beautiful thing was sharing the joy with those forty-something women of all ages. The collective frenzy had the children feeling somewhere between scared and happy.
I remember that one fifty-year old woman didn’t stop saying “poor thing” to refer to a child who didn’t move from the seat next to the impromptu dance floor. The dancing continued until the boat came across a line of a handful of soldiers standing guard and the women began to cat call them, tease them, and wink from a distance.
“Poor thing, poor thing…”
One girl approached her and said:
“If he is poor, are you trying to say that I’m rich?”
She will go far.
If they let her.
Letter to Dagmar:
Now I clearly see that this was the origin of my final trips: the recipes that my grandmother Annemerie tried to quickly teach me when I began to plan my return. So I didn’t see anything abnormal in adding a small postscript to specify each of the ingredients necessary to make an apple pie: “You need a cup of yogurt, but if you don’t have any you can substitute it with milk. Then add a little butter and if you’ve run out use something greasy. If you are missing apples, take advantage of the skin.”
Years later, I am not really sure how, I decided to write a book about economic wars, about what results when gasoline, analgesics, books and apples suddenly disappear. I could see this in Cuba and Iraq, but I think that I truly understood it on the day in which Borjana, one of the girls I met in Belgrado, took a break from studying and made burek to distract herself. While I licked my lips, she began to explain: “It is very easy. You only need yogurt and if you don’t have any use milk. If you are out of oil, look for some butter.”
It was strange to realize how similar that college student with dyed hair and the quinceañera in the photo that Annemarie showed me last year were. I found it hard to recognize her; she was so beautiful in her uniform:
“This was my office. I worked for the police.”
She waited for my response.
“For the police, grandma? Wow, wow, wow.”
“Yes, wow, wow, wow.”
And we stopped talking. We smiled for five seconds and Annemarie told me the story of her first year. I shut up about what I already knew and what I had already seen a few years before in a documentary about the Berlin women who were raped over the first days that the soviets overtook their city. And about the children they later gave birth to and did not want to know, who now live with central European families, most of which having never even imagined their origins. And I also didn’t mention that Berlin woman that remained on the side of the Wall without neon lights and that were as Trummerfrau as Annemarie was, one of those “rubble women”, those who reconstructed the country when it was rare to see a man between the age of 20 and 50 in Germany. And I didn’t say anything to her because I don’t know anything; nobody has ever explained to me how post-dramatic stress affects those who contracted it fifty years before. I didn’t speak up because these kinds of things are alive and known, or they aren’t alive and can only be perceived.
Letter to Edu:
In the end, in any case, flying is no longer what it was. And I am going to confess something to you, Edu: my last time flying was fatal. It was on the return from the Sahara. The estates on the farms were perfect and the returning flight with Algerian Airlines was acceptable for once. The downside was the air shuttle. I found only one offer, a plane that flew the Madrid-Barcelona-El Cairo route.
To start, the hostess that collected boarding passes seemed very familiar and after much thinking I managed to identify her. It was the girl I had seen in line at a supermarket in Lavapiés the last time I was in Madrid. Her face stuck with me because I spent twenty minutes talking to her about a nice store where you can find shirts that are usually 26 pesetas for only 24. A very unimportant and bearable coincidence.
What I didn’t enjoy as much was seeing her again on the bus. We were about to pull up to the plane when she came inside and said:
“Mr. Mohammed Fulano and Mr. Abdullah Mengano, please, come out.”
As I knew, when someone announces your name in an airport it is to tell you that either you come immediately at the gate or stay on the ground, but never the other way around. That December afternoon in 2001, I decided to search for a stable job and leave my other offers forever. After everything, the kind women said, this time very plainly:
“It’s alright, Mohammed and Abdullah, I’m leaving. But I know you are inside.”
And she left without saying anything else. You can imagine the faces of those who had not been raised along the Nile. Two minutes later, they drove us to the plane and upon arriving to the plane, a van of National Police was awaiting us. I was the last to get inside. They were latching onto the stair railing like ticks. I am going to save you part of the torture we endured while the flight attendant asked for some of our tickets, when a pair of 2 meter tall strapping men entered plane to look at our faces.
But the worst part was when the pilot, in attempt to calm us, shakily let out some incongruity along the lines of: “We will take off within ten minutes and upon arriving enjoy the good weather in Barcelona, where the temperature is 10 kilometers Fahrenheit.” You can only imagine.
Luckily, this incident did not affect me very much, because it was intended for the Muslim next to me, who at that moment began to pray. The poor man was cramped, and on top of that, as it was in the middle of Ramadan, he couldn’t touch me, so I almost fell out the window trying not to disturb him. And honestly, under those circumstances, I had not minded that much. In any case, we arrived to Barcelona alive and I was close to regaining my old Catholic faith because upon setting foot on the ground I began to mimic the Holy Father and almost kissed the ground for landing in one piece.
Afterwards, I spent three days x-raying all the Arabs that I came across in Barcelona. I would die of shame if my Iraqi friends found out. There is a lot to brag about that my family comes from Valle de Abdalajís, but there is a xenophobic part of me without realizing it.
Children of War by Magda Bandera
Extracts from some of the included letters to real people
I decided to get off at the second to last station. It didn’t matter where, I just wanted to assure that I was a little early to arrive. It wasn’t worth suffering nor risking, above all bearing in mind that my destination was unattainable: nobody can go to “War.” One doesn’t go to war. It is war that comes and, despite many warnings that have preceded it, always seems ill-timed. Wars are provoked or are suffered, but one does not “visit” war. Neither press passes nor blue beret credentials are of any use. Because it is not the same to fear for one’s life than to also do it for one’s children, one’s lover, and one’s land. Hence, correspondents know about combats but not about wars.
And therefore, on September 11th, 2001, Americans felt as threatened as the Afghans have over the last twenty years. War, which until then had only been broadcasted on their television sets, also entered their homes. Even if nobody had seen it before, didn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. There are many peaces that conceal wars.
It is not necessary to wield a weapon to destroy a town, because it is not the bombs that fall on Iraqi soil weekly that have murdered nearly 600,000 children over the past twelve years, but rather the medicines that remain on the other side of the border. Statistics say that one person dies every seven minutes, but the more I try, I still do not understand it. I count seconds around me, I search for them multiplied in the length of a movie, in line for the theatre, in a nod on a train, in a long kiss. I can calculate time, play with it, lose it and win it, but I do not know what it means to not have it.
If I measure the words that I have written until this point, they sum to a minute and a half. Ninety seconds is a long story in a newscast.
In what I happened to see, they spoke about Palestinians and Israelis, about elections in Zimbabwe, and about the failure of the peace plan in Colombia. In what one will see within a few hours, perhaps the headlines will be about Chechenya and Pakistan. Thus there is not much sense to talk about concrete wars; they vary as much as stock quotes.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte explained it very well in his Territorio Comanche:
“People think that the summit of war is the dead, the guts, and the blood. But horror is something as simple as the gaze of a child, or the empty stare of a soldier who is going to be shot. Or the eyes of an abandoned and lonely dog who follows you limping through the ruins, with its foot broken by a bullet wound; and you leave it behind walking fast, embarrassed because you don’t have the courage to shoot it.”
Only one critique: he should lengthen this paragraph. Not with words, but rather with time, because real war is what comes afterwards.
It’s not me who stated this, as in my life I have yet to see a mortar, and I confess, not even a dead body. That’s what they say, those who truly know war, those that live, and later, when bombs and microphones fall silent, spend the rest of their days trying to survive: horror is that limping dog when one has already closed the doors of their Toyota and the ruins remain in the same place ten years after. And it is the vacant expression of the shot man when filled with earth in a mass grave that his widow doesn’t manage to find. And it is the look of that child who in his adolescence does not see beyond the holes in his shoes and they lead him to become a chauvinist, gangster, or chronic depressive. Or all three things at the same time.
Extract from the letter addressed to Mr. Haddad
Dear Maurice Haddad:
Before anything, I want to thank you one more time: your painting still sits beautifully in my study. I have listened to you and haven’t placed it in a frame. When my friends asked me what technique you used to paint it I explained to them what you told me; that they are old Iraqi “Mesopotamian” tricks and that you employed them not only by taste, but also by necessity. Upon discovering that it is prohibited to export paint cans to Iraq, as they are chemical products and therefore potential ingredients to manufacture weapons of mass destruction (WMD), my friends were as surprised as me.
Here we encountered some anecdotes about products that are not authorized to pass the Iraqi border because in addition to their “logical” use, they could have a pernicious “dual purpose.” We know that the money obtained by means of the “Oil-For-Food Programme” could not be spent in buying pencils whose charcoal turned out to be lethal, the same as the gas utilized in cryogenic cameras in a country where a temperature of 140° F is not news. I once heard that art can be combative, but I never suspected that watercolors could be chemical weapons.
Reading the article that you dedicated to that Japanese journalist reminded me of some transvestites I met in Santa Clara on the island of Cuba. They had the same problem as you to obtain “color.” I don’t know what your opinions are of homosexuals, but Fidel Castro doesn’t like them at all. Nevertheless, a small “oasis” exists in the city that Che Guevara was buried in. It’s called El Mejunge and there, artists who dodge censure but play to push the limits perform weekly, and drag queens who camp it up to deceive the limits. If you saw the imagination they have to invent costumes, recycle sequins, repair heels and sew the stockings that foreigners give them as presents, sometimes in exchange for conversation and others for some more action. It isn’t “fássssil” as they like to say when talking about the daily battle to eat something more than rice and beans.
The word transvestite resonates with those actors more than anyone. By the year 2000, the situation had improved a little. Yet in the worst years of the American embargo, when the Soviet support ended, there wasn’t the economy for make-up so they invented egg white based creams mixed with cake makeup coloring. Within a few hours, the visual wonder became odorous and the love and smoke decorating their sets faded. Do you know how they create that effect? By hiding ovens on stage and heating flour with them that disperses everywhere. Thankfully El Mejunge is open to fresh air and the bad odor is confused with kerosene, that sweet combustible that sticks to your skin just as it lands on the airport in Havana. Cubans have more problems with fuel than Iraqis do.
The embargo against Cuba is an old American initiative, not a United Nations initiative. Moreover, the UN General Assembly has articulated repeatedly and largely against the economic war to which this island has been subjected to for over forty years. The virulence of the sanctions is so profound that it causes similar effects to those that Iraqis endure without reaching, of course, the degree of genocide. In any case, it would be best that I don’t get dramatic and explain to them what I found in common between their country, the Caribbean, and old Yugoslavia.
First of all, the cab drivers. In all three countries, they ask their customers to not slam the door otherwise the windowpane could shatter like confetti; especially those that are repaired with plaster and scotch tape, which aren’t rare. Next, the potholes in the streets that cabs frequent. The puddles of Belgrado are identical to those in Santiago, Cuba; as well as the chipped paint on their walls. But above all, it’s the gaze of the old folks that is most similar. While chatting with them, if you concentrate solely on their eyes, you cannot distinguish if they belong to an Iraqi or a Cuban. From one side to the other, they seem to feel like hindrances and feel guilty of not really knowing the issue in their country or about anything.
Did you know that I had a guy in Havana like Graham Greene? I would’ve liked to send him a letter and do what I had promised him: describe the difference between the palm trees in Bagdad and Vedado. But right before beginning to write it, a mutual friend called me to tell me that he was not going to be able to read it. And it’s not his fault, although if it had been the same Ricardo who held that pistol.
It must have occurred in December of 2001, although Albert didn’t know exactly. His nephew, Vladimir, did not want to clarify the date. I had met him a year and a half before, during my first trip to Cuba. I saw him for the first time in Plaza de Armas, the night in which the boy Elian came from Miami, and the rainbow that covered the Malecón like a giant door converted Ricardo to “the religion of beauty” after seventy-five years of militant atheism.
I remember when he explained the colors that flooded his Habana that afternoon with his hands, “I hadn’t seen anything like it in decades.” The old man’s diction included the correct pronunciation of the “C’s” to emphasize his careful education and he accompanied his words with a disproportionate smile, that converted into a jocose guffaw when he disclosed a secret to us: the musician that played the timbales so well beside us coordinated his rhythm with the other three that were performing in a restaurant on the sidewalk in front of us, because in the past they had done it together within less distance and with no hidden motive, when instead of being a trio they were a quartet. Since this complicated things, there were too many to distribute tips, and ultimately they “just left”
Ricardo complained about the political and economic situation in such abstract terms that it forced his interlocutor to include many parentheses and impede the crazy progression of ellipses with a new sentence. Theirs used to end with “so it seems.” He used this tagline to downplay the stories he told and knew with exquisite detail because he worked for the police, reporting everything he saw on his nighttime patrols. He was sad those days because he had to “give part of a handsome young man and good person, who in his desperation to make a few dollars was spreading aids to many foreign women. Now he should be cared for in some hospital,” he confessed to me.
We had a chat about the Cuban police and he assured me they were there to protect us, “so that when people go for a walk, nobody stops them to ask them for pesos, and they spend it well.” Immediately after, he rushed to excuse his compatriots saying that “they did not do it with bad intentions, but that the situation was not easy.”
Ricardo never asked anything of me. Or almost, because he confessed to me with a face of infantile confidence that made him tremendously eager to read The Sun Always Rises by Hemingway. He had been told that he represented Pamplona very well and he was there soon after the Revolution. I don’t know what he went to do in Spain nor how he did it, he only added that he was one of “those who could travel.”
On my return to Barcelona, I searched for the novel about Sanfermines, a week long festival in Pamplona that is central the plot of The Sun Always Rises, but it was unlisted. Thus, on my next trip to the island I brought him a photo book by National Geographic to help him in his prayers to the God of beauty. A Madrilenian friend of mine in love with Cuba bought it as he wanted to contribute in some way to the “natural cause,” the Cuban movement to return to its Spanish roots. And now I don’t know if it was the copy that spread the photo on the cover of the famous Afghan girl with green eyes, because he gave it to me wrapped and Ricardo open it alone, once again attesting to his careful education. Those who saw it were his friends from his neighborhood, because the book remained displayed alone in a showroom for fifteen days.
Something must have happened in the latest months, because last fall the old communist ended up asking Albert for ten dollars. My friend had told me that to do it he kept it away in a corner and lowered his gaze. Albert wanted to play down the importance of it, reminding him of all of the presents that Ricardo had given him since they had been in contact the prior Holy Week: from cigars to a flag that his mother had embroidered a century earlier during the Cuban War of Independence. His arguments served him poorly, something had happened to Ricardo and there was not any medicine to cure him, not even in the best pharmacy in California.
I suppose that he knew mountains of similar stories, dear Maurice. During my brief stay in Iraq I heard more stories than a European civilian from Javier Solana is capable of absorbing.
One of them explained the head of information of the Federation of Iraqi Women to me. Abbas Humdi lost his father in an absurd way. He suffered from an enlarged heart and the doctor told him that he could easily save him if he obtained a concrete medicine, but there wasn’t a single dosage in all of Baghdad.
Abbas is one of those women who has renounced her family life and has concentrated solely on her job. It surprised me how many of these women there were, many more than in my country, but afterwards I understood it. The head of the Spanish diplomatic delegation in Iraq explained to me that it is very logical that these women don’t think twice about marrying someone they barely know and leaving their parents house to live in their father-in-law’s house, because there are actually very few women who can have their own home in this country. For this reason, Sadam occasionally makes use of one of his televised speeches to the nation to ask women to not demand such high skills, and ask if they know that men cannot pay them.
Jodeifa’s wife, my cab driver, assured that she did fall in love with her husband, although she met him through a photo six months before the wedding and until the moment came had barely saw him on a pair of occasions.
After getting married, this English teacher had preferred to continue working at her school. Her salary is symbolic, but she says that if she stays at home it would all fall apart, and that she has to do something. The school can allow it because her salary supports her daughters. They all live together: two grandparents, eight adults, and eight children. At nightfall the most unsuspected objects become beds and the adults try to be silent. At least the toys do not take up space, because there aren’t any. I think they should include this fact in the collateral damage statistics. Those are real.
They should also introduce other hidden costs of wars, like the level of singles I had spoken to before or the amount of divorces wars cause. An economist from Belgrado who is part of the G17 group, a liberal-conservative political party in Serbia, surprised me by telling me that divorce was one of the country’s worst consequences of the embargo. He was neither conservative nor did he defend the traditional family, but rather simply supports the return to normality, the end of the battles that don’t make ends meet. A popular Spanish song says this with simple words: “When poverty enters through the door, love jumps out the window.”
I forgot to sing it to some girls I met at a private party on a boat that ploughed through the Tigris. They wanted to know something about Spanish music and from Andalusia more than anything. “In the past we were family,” we reminded ourselves, and thus in the end, our Top 40’s were somewhat theirs, equally as the songs that the musicians played in those moments were mine. The band being the only men authorized to board that barge aside from young children who had come with their mothers.
In exchange for my musical information they showed me the real meaning of “going wild”, because that was what they literally did. As soon as we moved away from the jetty, they put their hair up and started dancing one of the most sensual dances I’ve have ever seen in my life. They forced me to join them; you can imagine the laughs. You know better than me how Iraqi women are.
We had a really good time and ate phenomenally. Each one of them had brought a home-cooked meal, with that supreme care they have when decorating trays and remembering that this land is worthy of the stories about Sherezade and to have been chosen by God to plant Eden here, just as the most important studies of biblical geography have suggested.
It was a dream come true to view dusk between the reeds and palm trees. But without a doubt, the most beautiful thing was sharing the joy with those forty-something women of all ages. The collective frenzy had the children feeling somewhere between scared and happy.
I remember that one fifty-year old woman didn’t stop saying “poor thing” to refer to a child who didn’t move from the seat next to the impromptu dance floor. The dancing continued until the boat came across a line of a handful of soldiers standing guard and the women began to cat call them, tease them, and wink from a distance.
“Poor thing, poor thing…”
One girl approached her and said:
“If he is poor, are you trying to say that I’m rich?”
She will go far.
If they let her.
Letter to Dagmar:
Now I clearly see that this was the origin of my final trips: the recipes that my grandmother Annemerie tried to quickly teach me when I began to plan my return. So I didn’t see anything abnormal in adding a small postscript to specify each of the ingredients necessary to make an apple pie: “You need a cup of yogurt, but if you don’t have any you can substitute it with milk. Then add a little butter and if you’ve run out use something greasy. If you are missing apples, take advantage of the skin.”
Years later, I am not really sure how, I decided to write a book about economic wars, about what results when gasoline, analgesics, books and apples suddenly disappear. I could see this in Cuba and Iraq, but I think that I truly understood it on the day in which Borjana, one of the girls I met in Belgrado, took a break from studying and made burek to distract herself. While I licked my lips, she began to explain: “It is very easy. You only need yogurt and if you don’t have any use milk. If you are out of oil, look for some butter.”
It was strange to realize how similar that college student with dyed hair and the quinceañera in the photo that Annemarie showed me last year were. I found it hard to recognize her; she was so beautiful in her uniform:
“This was my office. I worked for the police.”
She waited for my response.
“For the police, grandma? Wow, wow, wow.”
“Yes, wow, wow, wow.”
And we stopped talking. We smiled for five seconds and Annemarie told me the story of her first year. I shut up about what I already knew and what I had already seen a few years before in a documentary about the Berlin women who were raped over the first days that the soviets overtook their city. And about the children they later gave birth to and did not want to know, who now live with central European families, most of which having never even imagined their origins. And I also didn’t mention that Berlin woman that remained on the side of the Wall without neon lights and that were as Trummerfrau as Annemarie was, one of those “rubble women”, those who reconstructed the country when it was rare to see a man between the age of 20 and 50 in Germany. And I didn’t say anything to her because I don’t know anything; nobody has ever explained to me how post-dramatic stress affects those who contracted it fifty years before. I didn’t speak up because these kinds of things are alive and known, or they aren’t alive and can only be perceived.
Letter to Edu:
In the end, in any case, flying is no longer what it was. And I am going to confess something to you, Edu: my last time flying was fatal. It was on the return from the Sahara. The estates on the farms were perfect and the returning flight with Algerian Airlines was acceptable for once. The downside was the air shuttle. I found only one offer, a plane that flew the Madrid-Barcelona-El Cairo route.
To start, the hostess that collected boarding passes seemed very familiar and after much thinking I managed to identify her. It was the girl I had seen in line at a supermarket in Lavapiés the last time I was in Madrid. Her face stuck with me because I spent twenty minutes talking to her about a nice store where you can find shirts that are usually 26 pesetas for only 24. A very unimportant and bearable coincidence.
What I didn’t enjoy as much was seeing her again on the bus. We were about to pull up to the plane when she came inside and said:
“Mr. Mohammed Fulano and Mr. Abdullah Mengano, please, come out.”
As I knew, when someone announces your name in an airport it is to tell you that either you come immediately at the gate or stay on the ground, but never the other way around. That December afternoon in 2001, I decided to search for a stable job and leave my other offers forever. After everything, the kind women said, this time very plainly:
“It’s alright, Mohammed and Abdullah, I’m leaving. But I know you are inside.”
And she left without saying anything else. You can imagine the faces of those who had not been raised along the Nile. Two minutes later, they drove us to the plane and upon arriving to the plane, a van of National Police was awaiting us. I was the last to get inside. They were latching onto the stair railing like ticks. I am going to save you part of the torture we endured while the flight attendant asked for some of our tickets, when a pair of 2 meter tall strapping men entered plane to look at our faces.
But the worst part was when the pilot, in attempt to calm us, shakily let out some incongruity along the lines of: “We will take off within ten minutes and upon arriving enjoy the good weather in Barcelona, where the temperature is 10 kilometers Fahrenheit.” You can only imagine.
Luckily, this incident did not affect me very much, because it was intended for the Muslim next to me, who at that moment began to pray. The poor man was cramped, and on top of that, as it was in the middle of Ramadan, he couldn’t touch me, so I almost fell out the window trying not to disturb him. And honestly, under those circumstances, I had not minded that much. In any case, we arrived to Barcelona alive and I was close to regaining my old Catholic faith because upon setting foot on the ground I began to mimic the Holy Father and almost kissed the ground for landing in one piece.
Afterwards, I spent three days x-raying all the Arabs that I came across in Barcelona. I would die of shame if my Iraqi friends found out. There is a lot to brag about that my family comes from Valle de Abdalajís, but there is a xenophobic part of me without realizing it.