“The first guard I saw [in Personville] hadn't shaved for several days. The second had lost two buttons from his unclean uniform. The third ordered traffic at the most important intersection in the city, that of Broadway and Union Street, with a cigarette in his mouth. At that point I stopped caring about them."
Dashiell Hammett: Red Harvest.
The grass had dew on it, adding to the color. It was 7:40 in the morning. The light was transparent, the air too. We are in the former Frank País García School of Social Workers, which now serves as a Field Hospital for Covid-19 suspects. The blinds, white; the sheets, white; the television, new; mattresses comfortable.
It was a bright, brisk day. The bright and agile days are the days of madness. The Journalist opened WhatsApp, received a message. A friend from the Netherlands asked her how she was doing. He replied that the PCRs were not there yet. She was shocked: "How was it possible that the results were not there yet?"
She wasn't having a bad time. It was a perfect day, but it was also a crazy day. Something inside him said, "Enough is enough." And it ran through his joints, shaking his legs, his arms, a strange and violent euphoria accumulated in his body, as if he had abused caffeine, and he bolted from the bunk, yanked open the blinds and began to shout: “I love me iiiiiirrrrrr! I have rights! I'm here against my willuuuuu!!”
Then he sat down. Then she stood up again and screamed again. He was like that, screaming, for about 15 minutes until he lost his voice. The gorge was one of those white quarries for stonecutters in prison, with sores on their hands, on the walls, in the sky. His father looked at him scared, with love, but without surprise. He knew of his son's sudden hysteria, because he knew of his own hysteria.
He humbly asked her to calm down. In another scenario she would have started yelling at him. Why didn't you do it now? For the peace achieved with the beloved son in those days of tax income? Because of widowhood?
The Journalist walked in circles, his hands shaking. Someone hidden behind the windows of another building began to laugh and imitate his shouts in a girlish voice.
A worker from the Field Hospital service who was passing by, in blue overalls and a ski mask, stopped and from the sidewalk called the Journalist a “clown”, ordering him to shut up, because he was waking everyone up.
The Journalist did not understand, he felt that his protest was sacred. He returned the insults until they became vacuous. Empty as the insults of two subjects tied up or buried up to their necks. The worker left. Both seemed easy punches, but if one of the two had physically assaulted the other, he would have been charged with a violation for spreading epidemics. The fence between one and the other was a Decree-Law.
The Journalist organized his things a bit, he told the father where each one was, where the money, where the cards; the father would have to be more zealous as a custodian if they took his son prisoner. I knew that there was a policeman at the door of the hospital, and that the Decree-Law existed.
One hour and the policeman didn't come, three hours later either. The nurse went up twice and both times the Journalist yelled at her with what little voice he had left.
Waiting for them to take him to prison, the Journalist thought of the worker. The way he looks, the way he talks, the gold tooth of him. His strutting, his handsomeness, his heraldry. The neighborhood boy with a towel on his shoulder and walking sideways, who lets himself grow and takes care of his little finger nail as if he were growing an orchid.
He remembered Naipaul, he remembered Hobsbawm. The outcasts of a society are crowned princes. They invent a parallel kingdom to grind misery and gather glory.
Why did the worker confront him? Why didn't you join him? Because he was purifying himself, joining the world's first narrative ring. Like an expatriate, the worker searched for meaning in a foreign landscape; like an orphan, the worker was looking for a mother, a home.
The Journalist's anger, which was probably the anger of the handsome man, of the marginal, was subaltern, small compared to the greatness of the Main Objective of which the worker felt like a soldier: eradicating the pandemic.
***
On Saturday, December 5, the Journalist's family together with their neighbors, eight in total, were transferred to different health care centers in Santiago de Cuba on suspicion of Covid-19.
They had been warned and warned for three days. They already had yellow biohazard tape in front of their house. Some faceless men, wrapped in green clothes with pneumatic tubes that sprayed chlorine dissolved in water, had already entered their homes. The referrals had already been written by the young doctors from the corresponding doctor's office, but even so the neighbors did not accept the situation.
For years the three homes, separated from each other by unfenced yards, had been robbed. Some during the day, others at night, others at the uncertain time when the objects simply vanish to be remembered after months, when they are needed again and are no longer there.
Animal thefts: a pig, several chickens, a horse. Theft of food: bunches of bananas, avocados, and other products of the land. Theft of items: a bicycle, a hose. Sporadic robberies but enough to become a theme, a prevention, an army of subjects crouching behind the bushes.
They were sure: the police were not going to look after their property.
They were certain that in the event of thefts, it was unlikely that these items would be returned and the criminals caught. Nothing like this ever happened.
They had no symptoms of the disease. They lived in a green area, shaded by fruit trees and carob trees, without stables or urbanization. They felt that their homes were safe, and that they were the best place in the world to spend those days of danger and isolation. There was enough space between one and the other, between housing and housing, between the area and the city.
***
The Journalist was pacing the room. He went to his wife, who was frying chicken thighs, and told her as if to say to himself: “We are not carpenters or turners, they are not going to bring us a workshop, or equipment, or a file, or a vise; We are going to take the most important thing with us, they cannot steal it, because it is here”, and he touched his forehead with his index finger.
But he wasn't telling the truth. She was thinking of a dresser-sized freezer with drawers that she had recently purchased. An object impossible to move or hide, a problem without remedy. He didn't know what to do with that thought, he felt a kind of embarrassment about himself.
Inside the freezer were about 40 pounds of chicken that they bought from three different places. One half was thigh-high and had been "fought" by him and his father in a lawless queue; the other two parts were pieces with thighs, obtained through a friendship; plus those who have just arrived at the warehouse, through the old State ration card, after a week of delay. They were freshly stocked up, including yucas, sweet potatoes, and frozen malangas.
They had enough supplies to stay home for a month or more, and not go out for anything. The city exploded into crowds, queues without police escort, speculators without a sense of honor or solidarity who lived by buying and reselling. They would be safe from the street, and from a kind of massive failure that was, ultimately, the most damaging.
Her neighbors, mostly women, were in the same room. Tied to their washing machines, to their flat screen televisions, to their ovens, to their microwaves, to their refrigerators, to their fans, to their decoder boxes, to their air conditioners, to their refrigerators, to their chickens, to their fish, to their eggs, which they would not know how to get back in case of theft.
The Journalist thought about calling someone close, but he answered himself: “How would a friend or relative feel if they discovered that they were being exposed to the disease, to a hospital, to interrupting their normal life for taking care of a handful of groceries and electrical appliances?
***
The entry warrant for the three families was issued when a neighbor tested positive for Covid-19. Her house was connected to the others by some paths. When they took her to the hospital and the news spread, the neighbors remembered: the contact with her had happened more than a week ago.
The neighbor brought the peas that the father had ordered. She arrived at the door of the house with 5 pounds in her hands. He did not cross the threshold, he spoke for a few minutes. He left the package on a stool and continued on his way. The Journalist remembers his silhouette against the light at the door. At that point, it was probably already contaminated with Covid-19. His son, a private sector carrier, contracted the disease from a US resident with whom he had dealings.
***
Before the announcement of the flu, the virus and the origin of the infection in a Chinese city called Wuhan, there were already streets without cars in Cuba due to a fuel blackout, and a crisis of general shortages that worsened.
In the empty streets and avenues you could play baseball or promote barbecues, but nobody did either one or the other; there was no encouragement, only fear. Social networks, the independent press, recalled the deep crisis of the nineties of the last century, while the official mass media, and even President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez himself, dedicated themselves to denying that it was a crisis similar to that, of deep blackouts, acute problems with food and medicines.
It was not called “Crisis”, nor “Neo-special Period”, but “Situation”. And with the situation, they wanted to highlight a transience that was not going to last that dark, suffocating and autophagy five-year period that occurred after the collapse of the USSR.
The Journalist's mother, who fell ill during the months parallel to the contagion in Wuhan, suffered the consequences. Not only had the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Cuba's main ally, bankrupt, but the United States embargo against Cuba had intensified during the term of President Donald Trump. In the hospital, syringes, sheets and other supplies were in short supply; in the currency shops, the only ones supplied, there were no juices or meat. The currency to buy in these foreign exchange stores rapidly lost its productive support. And with that came the virus.
***
There are no beds for “contacts”, the two doctors who remained healthy in the office said on December 3. A third was isolated and had a diagnostic test in progress, which ended up coming back positive.
With only a fraction of the team active, the doctors were in a cold sweat. They finished work every night, sometimes in the rain, isolated by the lack of public transportation that normally affects that community in the middle of the Central Highway, at a point between the City of Santiago and the Santuario del Cobre.
On December 4, they said that the field hospitals were still without beds for contacts of contacts, as was the case. The next day the doctors were gone, replaced by a young and curvy doctor, with the appearance of a recent graduate, who introduced himself as a substitute, covered with a mask and a PVC plate around his face.
On December 5, in the morning, a dilapidated yellow Lada taxi parked under an almond tree at the entrance to the three houses.
A stocky doctor, with the belly of a brewer, and a short woman, dressed as if for long tasks in the sun, with a cloth visor and long-sleeved shirt despite the heat, got out of the car, walked to the carousel yellow and yelled.
Neighbors leaned out of their windows. They were officials of the Ministry of Public Health. They said that they were going to transfer all of them, although for the moment – they commented – there were no beds for contacts in the field hospitals.
The neighbors said they wouldn't leave; their arguments emphasized that: a) they were healthy, and hospitals could be threats to them, when coming into contact with a sick population, and b) that enough days had passed to be almost certain that they had not been infected.
The Journalist and his wife did not participate in the debate. They looked through the blinds, then went out into the portal. They thought the same as their neighbors, but felt that in the current circumstances they had very little chance of making a claim. They were “conformed”, they were trying to achieve something similar to floating without receiving damage, but they were using a device of conformity and internal order different from that of the father.
The father, sitting in the living room of the house, looked at some old brown leather loafers as if repeating a mantra: “You are the only thing I will take with me; You will be the only one, I will not take anything else but you. Not only had he internalized that health was fundamental, but he had to surrender to a system, to the wisdom of a Protocol.
The small rebellion manifested in his neighbors had, however, points of contact with that of his father. They supported the government and its campaigns, they were people subject to its hegemony, the idea that there was a Power outside of them meant nothing to them, for which they were civilly and politically satisfied.
The feeling of the Journalist was then in a delicate coordinate, stunned, as if compared to his neighbors he, for his profession condemned and persecuted by the government, suffered from a kind of political virus that weakened his immune system as a citizen .
The Public Health official did not offer exact arguments, but rather probable ones. His strongest response to why they insisted on transferring them 13 days after contact without showing symptoms was the word Protocol.
The Protocol was like some kind of huge agrarian harvester, extractor, and tuber packer, doing its job with a certain degree of efficiency. A leviathan fed by numbers, expenses, income, in which buses, drivers, paramedics, police officers, officials, doctors and nurses were tightly adjusted pieces, trapped in the gear as much as the patients, without will, without any right to take of decisions.
The neighbors took the lead in the debate. As the old Lada lurched away, amid the sounds of rusting seat springs and popping, there was a sense of a battle won. Battle won where? In the air. A battle won in the air.
***
A neighbor, whose voice the Journalist did not identify, warned them on the phone in a low voice: "Take care, they are coming for you."
The Journalist hung up and the bus was already snoring along the road that led to his house. He notified his wife and father. He returned to the kitchen, crossed the dining room, looked through the blind: the vehicle was under the almond tree, backing heavily to face the driveway that led to the highway.
A thin paramedic, about 30 years old, got out, walked heavily and stopped in front of the first house, the Journalist's house. He seemed fed up with everything, with the clothes, with the Covid-19 task, with the suspects treating him as the messenger of evil.
She opened the paper and read aloud the first and last names of all the neighbors. Then he lumbered on to the other houses and did the same.
As people confirmed that they were so-and-so, the paramedic would put a cross on the paper next to the name. The air of victory that had remained just a few hours ago fell to the ground and shattered.
The paramedic sat on a tree trunk and stared into space. Neither the wife nor their one-year-old baby were on the list; Still clinging to the idea of taking care of the electrical appliances, the Journalist told his wife to be happy, he would stay at home. Then she made perhaps the only manifestation of free will in all those who would be evacuated: she did not allow her 11-year-old daughter to be taken away; she sensed that they would send her to a hospital, to another hospital; the Protocol would take her somewhere, and in that place the service would be insufficient, and she would arrive in that place unarmed, and there would be no necessary benefits, and she would need some kind of support, help, assistance with her baby.
The Journalist's wife told the paramedic they weren't ready; they had been told they would not be picked up today. The paramedic replied that in that case he would wait for them to get ready, that he had time, that he had all the time in the world.
***
Illustration: Jaume Mora
The 8 neighbors, including the father and the Journalist, got on the bus without offering any resistance. The driver and the paramedic, lined in white, with hats, masks, shoes, pants and shirts made of antiseptic fabric, had no identity, they did not display or promote it.
On the bus, the neighbor who had been most opposed to leaving home began to cry. Her husband looked at her, did not console her, but kept a silence, a silence of mourning or reasoning, as if she were looking for a solution or a way to present the matter to him in a positive way.
El Periodista recalled the crying of certain war displaced persons and could not help perceiving a similarity. He did not exaggerate that comparison, because at that point he was still under the influence of not finding back the home he had left. He was, like his neighbors, still preoccupied with finding a technical solution to the problem of guarding their threatened properties. She would intermittently feel brief outbursts of sentiment towards the objects she left behind, as if these affective ties were a rearguard army, which really articulated her material fears.
The bus did not go directly to the hospital, it entered the streets of Santa María, a neighborhood of large and meager lots, state-owned auto repair shops with the smell of spilled oil, houses that had been broken into pieces and had not been finished for decades, with front or rear patios fenced with cardonas and small vegetable plantations.
The driver stopped the vehicle in an open area in the sun, opened the door, and the paramedic got out to look for more people with a new list in hand. The passengers asked the driver to get close to a shadow. The driver refused, saying that he was also in the sun and did not complain. The journalist's father walked to the door and asked that he open it so he could get out and look for a shadow. The driver refused, telling him that he couldn't get out, that he had to stay inside the vehicle.
The father turned to the driver, he had no luggage, just a nurse's coat that an ex-wife had given him; he was ready to cooperate, but not to be mistreated. There was a silence, and in that silence everything he left behind seemed to fall: the empty house, his articles, his routine, his past, his integrity; It was about to explode, but it didn't explode, and it didn't explode because someone raised their voices and mentioned the driver's name: “What's up Carlito!” he said, and repeated the name again: “Carlito!”
The appeal had the tone of a gentle rebuke, a call to cooperate. The driver did not turn around looking for the one who had spoken, it was enough that they named him. He moved to the steering wheel, restarted the vehicle, accelerated, pulled up to a shadow about 10 yards away, slammed on the brakes, then jumped onto the sidewalk, skirted the vehicle, and headed down the street in search of the paramedic. .
***
The Journalist's wife is 36 years old and not exactly a wife. She has a master's degree in Cuban Culture, she is the winner of literary contests and oppositions for filmmaking; is organized, uses an agenda and puts popcorn on each completed task; it is capable and imposing, while peaceful and resilient. From now on we will call it the Master, which will have a subtle impact on what is narrated.
It hadn't been 30 minutes. The Master was washing the dishes that were left over from lunch, after the departure of the Journalist and his father, when an ambulance stopped under the almond tree at the entrance. A white-robed paramedic got out of the vehicle and walked toward the house. Called. The Master came out to receive him. The paramedic held up a crumpled sheet and read the baby's name aloud.
The paramedic's tone was kind to the Master –she narrates–, he had been looking for her to take her to a pediatric hospital. The Master asked for time. The paramedic replied: "How so, she should be ready, she's known for three days." The Master said yes, she had known for three days, but in the morning some officials said that there were no beds in the hospitals and she had not enlisted for this lightning collection. He said his diapers were dirty; He said that he had not packed for the baby's arrival. The paramedic replied that he could only wait 15 minutes for each patient; she asked for an hour to prepare. The paramedic accepted without resistance and the Master read that he was shaking her for comfort. "He couldn't demand 15 minutes from us if he came like that suddenly," recalls the daughter who thought.
The Master finished washing up; she washed and boiled diapers while the daughter watched over the baby, who had just learned to walk. The Master told the daughter to try to pack her suitcase too. It had been his turn to wash the dishes and diapers. For some time now he had managed to make the Journalist take care of the diapers, and he had divided the cleaning tasks in two. This time it was all up to her.
Getting ready included not only packing, but the patio; He entered the house two stairs of three meters each, some iron seats, a hose. He stopped inside the room. He visualized the hypothetical thief and tried to follow him around the house, he decided to make it difficult for him. Changed places knives, spoons, pots. He went to the freezer and placed a tablecloth and a vase on it so that he could mistake it for a table, he did other tricks.
The Master went into the bathroom, she was soaping her armpits when the paramedic returned and yelled at the house. She threatened to call the police. The daughter got nervous, she hurried her mother. Still wet, with her head wrapped in a towel, the Master came out of the bathroom, got dressed, walked to the door, left the house, talked to the paramedic and told him to stay calm, she wasn't ready yet, she had to prepare things for the baby The paramedic asked for it again, how much was he preparing?, how much was he looking for? In the hospital there was everything for the child: bottles, milk, clothes, towels.
The paramedic continued to rant. The Master's daughter, 11 years old, slim, already had her clothes ready. She clumsily packed her backpack, went to her mom and declared she was ready. He left the house with his brother. The calls of the paramedic, the horn of the ambulance sounding, made her scream urging the Master. The paramedic threatened to call a patrolman. The Master sent the daughter to the ambulance. With the children inside, he thought, they would not dare to leave. The baby in the arms of an 11-year-old girl, somewhat whiny and puny, resembled a grain of rice on an ant.
The Master finished all the basic packing, but at the last minute, in front of the kitchen, she discovered that she hadn't made any food for the baby. There will be no food, she thought, but she had no more time. He calculated positive. If it was around 3:50 p.m., there would be time to get to the hospital, wait for some paperwork, and be already settled before 5:30 p.m., the usual dinner time; According to the paramedic, the Protocol, the system, had known about them for 3 days.
The Master entered the ambulance, but she still had her senses and instincts in the house. Had she closed it? Had she loaded everything? At the same time, she was acutely aware of a new space opening up in her chest since they had been notified that they were to leave home, a sensation that needless to describe as the Reader walks away from her with her inside the chest. ambulance.
***
The novels of the famous French author Marcel Proust are not built on challenges or vital tensions such as life or death, but on nostalgia and the reconstruction of the past through an inventory of sensations, colors, smells recreated with impressive skill . Reading Proust is a walk through atmospheres common to the sensitive reader, caused by the exercise of memory, as if this were the dust that comes out of a carpet that the writer hits.
When she was younger, the Master had been able to read a book with a red, hard cover, that her boyfriend the Journalist couldn't stand or understand. The book was On Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust. The girl had a vital predisposition towards Proust.
Proust described his method with a famous example: when a biscuit soaked in tea falls on a person's palate, the taste can explode a universe of memories, sensations, experiences, desires, loves, anguish, linked to the past, adolescence, childhood...
The cookie that now fell on the palate of the Master was the one of uprooting. She left at the expense of looting a sacred site, linked to her well-being and that of her children. She left behind a sentimental structure: the memories of her recently deceased mother-in-law, the tenderness that left with her, the still impossible replacement of that tenderness..., the peace built after mourning.
She felt sad, describes the Master. And the sadness grew.
There were two cats and two dogs left in the house to feed. Carmelita the dog was with newborn puppies. The (unnamed) cats were rat-catchers, the invasion of which poses a danger to both health and material resources. The dogs were alarm devices, or persuasion, if someone outside approached night or day. They weren't exactly affectionate animals or slaves, they were a kind of service personnel with whom the humans in the house had a relationship more of symbiosis than affection, but in which affection also had a place. If someone got sick, they tried to cure them, food was separated, milk, blankets and vitamins were separated. With the house empty for an indeterminate time, they would be left without shelter or food.
The Master's anguish grew due to the tearing of a spiritual ecosystem into which life has been breathed to make it a comfortable nest, a living island with physiognomy and identity. She felt that sacred, resplendent acerbic accumulated in the home. So as he walked away he experienced loss, mourning, felt that he would not return to a similar place or, in any case, that he would return to a place desecrated by the presence of a stranger, the thief, the thieves, the looters.
***
The paramedic turned to the Master and launched: “We are waiting for you…”. The Master did not understand, until later, that they would have to wait, and that the baby would not have his dinner on time.
The ambulance returned to the city with the patients inside and entered the Yarayó neighborhood in search of an address, a name, a suspect. They couldn't find the subject. They passed houses without plaster, bare blocks, painted but smudged with soot; potholed streets, multicolored clothes hanging from balconies, passers-by stopping and staring at them. The search was stretching out, taking longer than the Master had calculated. The ambulance would go out onto Patria Avenue, take a breath, and plunge back into the neighborhood over and over again. There was a power outage and the darkness revealed that night had already fallen.
The baby began to cry. The Master informed the paramedic that the time for her dinner was approaching. A man who had been picked up, and who was upset by the entrance, became emboldened when the crying of the baby was more intense, and rapped with his knuckles on the glass window that communicated with the driver's cab.
The anguish for the house and the belongings left to their fate dwarfed the problem of feeding the baby and some concern about the conditions that awaited them, but she still had the ability to transmit serenity to her children. Although the presence of this stranger in the ambulance made her uncomfortable, she opened her blouse, removed one breast, and nursed the baby.
The paramedic gave up the search. The ambulance took the opposite path of Patria Avenue and went to the Manuel Fajardo Sports School, where they were receiving pediatric patients. There were no capabilities there. Then they went to the North Pediatric Hospital, known as ONDI, where the first thing the Master reported was: "My son needs milk."
***
The cubicle they were in was about 4 meters wide by 6 meters long; One wall consisted entirely of white Miami-shuttered windows, the frame of which began three feet from the ground and went up to the ceiling. The walls were of a light color and the door was not made of bagasse or veneer, but rather strong and precious wood. There were three bunk beds, six beds with foam mattresses, two fans, and a hybrid plasma TV, with remote control and USB port.
The father and the Journalist had no worries, someone paid for everything, they felt like they were in a hotel. It is true, the pajamas came without buttons or too small, and after they were returned they were not replaced. True, the towels were stained with grease. It is true, sometimes one of the boys who brought them food would throw the snack bread on the mattresses without sheets, with the sweet smells of hundreds of accumulated sweat during the eternal summer of the tropics (a negligence that was eradicated after two scoldings). severe of the Journalist). But the service was prompt and not exactly grumpy. Those in charge of bringing food, the concierge, changing sheets, towels and toilet paper, making jokes, exchanging pirated movies, and at daily cleaning time they pushed and pulled the mop singing.
At each meal there was a piece of meat, poorly prepared, but meat, dessert, rice, soup or stews, and about three snacks a day, modest but decent. In order not to fall into petty details, the term "dignity" expressed here has an egalitarian nature, not quality; it was the dignity that springs from an egalitarianism in times of acute economic crisis or entrenchment. Out of consideration and respect for all the economic attacks that the country had received since before the pandemic; Out of consideration and respect for all the attacks and aggressions that the country had received in its quest for independence, first from the colonial yoke, then from the neocolonial one, the United States of America being the enemy indicated by the textbooks, neither the father nor the Journalist they stopped to criticize the watery stews, the insipid soup, the almost boiled meat and the rolls of sweet flour and carmelite color in the shape of aboriginal arrowheads that, given the time they were not sold on the street, tasted heavenly.
***
The Master had no chance to believe she was in a hotel. His cubicle at the North Pediatric Hospital was approximately 3 meters wide by 5 meters long and was a space within a space.
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The first space had the sign “Ophthalmology” nailed to the door frame, and was some sort of secretary's hall, or doctor's office, but now fitted out with beds set up and occupied by anxious children and their companions.
Master's cubicle was the second space and was below, opening and closing a white interior door. Within it, subdivided into two inviolable territories, the Master's and hers, two of her sons, lived under a mutual regime of distancing with another mother and her son, sick with tonsillitis.
The wall with Miami windows that faced the street had 80% of its space blocked off by smoked glass or black paper to prevent natural light –it was probably an optometry room–, and said cloistering also affected the ventilation.
The open blinds were used during the morning to hang underwear, masks or towels, which interrupted the air intake; however, the factor that made the cubicle a sauna was the permanent sunburst that penetrated and overheated the aluminum sheets of the blinds and fell on the Master's mattress like a drill throughout the day. Since the baby had to be perched on the mattress all the time, the physical solution was to move the bodies away as the yellow lightning strike progressed on the bed.
***
The Journalist looked towards the windows, a lot of light came in. He felt like he was in a spa, useless, rotting. He had lost something, and that something, he thought he recognized, was his libido. He had a WhatsApp chat with a brother.
Brother: Have you already done the PCR?
Journalist: Yep. But the exams haven't arrived yet.
H: Here [Brazil] it takes 7 to 10 days to deliver results.
Q: Communism works better, here they say they deliver it on the third day.
H: Yes, exactly, they have to keep people alive to sustain the system.
Q: Heh heh heh.
H: Covid-19 gives an indicator of the most disciplined and subdued countries. In the freest ones, people die in droves.
Q: OK.
H: If we were truly free, half the world's population would already have died.
Q: I'm going to use these dark carvings that you mention in a chronicle that I write. I'm not going to say your name, I'll just say: “My brother told me this and that”.
H: We live in times where freedom has been confused with irresponsibility and ignorance. It's a mad race to earn and spend on whatever shit to get a false impression of freedom and well-being. That is why Covid-19 appears. A filter for the foolish. Most of the dead are donkeys.
Q: Yes?
H: There is a fajazón here and in the US for classes to return. But, why study if later you become an idiot whose function is to earn to spend? It's all backwards. In Cuba it is more noticeable. But it happens all over the world, one way or another. Humanity is on a wrong path.
Q: Yes, very bad. I think of my children. Very hard.
H: That's why Covid-19 appeared. And this scenario will be more and more often. In Cuba, those who earn the most are those who are in contact with capitalism. That is, those of the government, or those who work in a hotel, etc.
Q: Yes.
H: In capitalism, those who speculate earn more, those who invent things that sell more, even if it's to eat shit like cell phones... Those who work and fight have the dream of being a millionaire to go to an exotic country to provoke a pandemic eating weirdos and rotten inside.
Q: Yeah. The world is screwed. And there is no other.
H: No people to straighten it out.
The Journalist chatted on WhatsApp with a friend who lives in the United States:
Friend: Oh my son, but the attention to Covid-19 in Cuba, despite everything, is good; one has to be thankful that they come to your house and care. Here none of that exists; here you have Covid and solve them… And as you can, Carly, and people are not even aware that you can have the disease, people walk the streets without masks; cases are raining, deaths from Covid-19 are brutal, brutal. That thing over there... I think it's called community health care...
Q: Primary Health Care…
A: Yeah, that. Primary Health Care, that is not even a possibility here. Please..., here the most privatized thing is health. If you don't pay me, I don't go to any community to see anyone...
The Journalist turned to his father and told him that the State had invested money in the pandemic, and that this was good.
The father said that of course, we had to invest, the pandemic was no small thing.
The Journalist wanted to penetrate more, he wanted to blow something up. He added that it was cheaper to invest in time. A "friendly income", taking it seriously, giving good food, having white sheets - as if the "culture of detail" were fulfilled (category-slogan used by political commissars and the official press to show concern for the quality of services of the State)–, it was a good thing in itself and to prevent the pandemic.
An uncontrolled epidemic –continued the Journalist–, exacerbated by the sloppy culture that had generated massive nationalization in all its socialist-Marxist-Leninist tradition, could be ten times more expensive; it could saturate hospitals, shift treatment to conditions that would not be stopped by a pandemic, and in his view that was the logic of everything: make it cheaper. But, at the same time, minimally pleasant. Pleasant regarding the deficiencies that were now lived in the houses, and that, thinking about it coldly, in politics, was not bad.
The father was yelled at this last way of analyzing the problem. He did not show it, but the Journalist saw the grimace, the fixed and uncomfortable look of the Father trying to reabsorb the corrosive liquid thrown on him. The father wanted altruism to come first. Did the Journalist want to punish the father? In his internal forum no. She was trying to let him know that her criticism of being there against her will, leaving home alone, was not angry or blind, and that she could recognize a common point of light.
The Journalist wanted to be positive, but his tests were aggressive: the father expected affectionate, friendly, homeopathic tests, but the Journalist was invasive, risky surgery. They would have a few days locked up facing each other, they would have to do it with peace and understanding, they would have to look for each other, establish meeting points where they could camp. Fighting for political positions between three blue walls and a large white window suddenly seemed futile, meaningless. The Journalist used to remember something pleasant that happened during the crisis of the nineties: long blackouts, long periods without electricity or television, long nights that united the family around an oil lamp or a kerosene lantern, in which stories of the Revolution that everyone believed.
The Journalist told the father that a year ago he had been admitted to the same place with dengue fever and the provisioning was different: the pajamas, the sheets, the mosquito nets, were holed and worn, and that these new sheets in any way they were an injection of oxygen, of pure air for the health system in Cuba. It seemed good to him that the pandemic had oxygenated, shaken the health institutions, and it seemed good to him that the scientists spoke at the Round Table with lights and bursts in their eyes, with a particular euphoria, as if lost in a jungle to whom a body of ranger would have found by chance, making routine walks.
I was sure –and that is our data, what the Journalist thought and said there– that this pandemic had generated new technology, laboratories, cars, investments, infrastructure. He was sure that the pandemic had put them back on the map and that various lines of research, various scientific egos would be activated illuminating cures for other ailments as long as the euphoria, the drive, the emphasis on further improving public health lasted. Just as sheets, towels, mopping quilts had appeared, equipment had appeared; projects had been dusted off, lines of research financially reactivated, etc.
It was not a good atmosphere. Everything that came out of the Journalist's mouth was bitter. He got up from the bunk and walked to the door. She wanted her libido back, artificially back in the bathroom. He walked to the bathroom door, but he didn't go in, he returned to the room, to the bunk, and stayed as he was, he was going to feel very sad.
***
The cubicle where the Master, the daughter and the baby lived was shared with a 2-year-old boy suffering from tonsillitis. His companion was the mother, a mulatto woman of about 35, slim and short, who had brought with her everything she needed: a laptop to entertain herself and the boy, a fan, a water heater, a bucket, and even a reserve of milk. from which she took the Master's baby upon her arrival on the first day.
When a hooded doctor told them not to let the child gain the floor, they were already convinced not to do so, because during the weekend they did not clean the cubicle; because on Monday a nurse "suggested" that they organize everything, an inspection would come, and a while later a janitor came in to clean; because later they found that the bathroom was clean from the hangover of dirty papers and fecal marks on the walls of the toilet bowls. This relaxation of discipline caused both of them the effect that the novelist Dashiell Hammett describes in the exergue of this text: they stopped taking the hospital seriously. They began to take themselves seriously.
The child could not be bathed without special care in the common bathroom: it was a piece of pipe embedded in the wall from which a thick, cold stream came out, the temperature of which the baby was not used to.
The Master undressed and entered the shower with her back turned and carrying the baby. She with her back blocked the stream. With one hand he held the soap in a soap dish and with the other he squirted water that he obtained not directly from the pipe, but from his body, from the heat that his organism generated. Then he would ask his daughter for the towel, wrap it up and give it to her; then she got dressed and they both walked to the cubicle within another cubicle where they slept.
This grooming method could have been solved by asking for the bucket from the woman they shared space with, however, both were aware enough that they should try to reduce contact, the possibility of contagion, to zero.
By Monday, she had a solution: call a sister-in-law who lived near the hospital and ask her for a bucket, a heater, and a fan; ask him for some milk. He only got the bucket and the milk. With the bucket he removed the cold shower. She filled it with water, placed it near the neighbor's electrical outlet, and she was the one who inserted the heater inside. Neither one touched the heater, nor the other the bucket. The water was ready, each one removed her accessory and then the Master and the daughter raised the baby in a sink built into the wall that had been left on their side in the cubicle, and they bathed him there.
The baby's grooming was taken care of, but not the cleaning. The daughter, who had almost immediately learned the hand washing protocol issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) –including the 20 seconds of soapy contact that disables the virus from being able to penetrate the cell–, and who never opened a door except with his elbow, and that he never touched the faucet with his hand –he also did it with his elbow–, he was so alert not to get contaminated and expose himself that he spent the 7 days after admission without defecating.
***
The Journalist, aware of the difficulties his wife was going through at the North Children's Hospital, asked the nurse who was treating him if it was possible to arrange a transfer. She replied that it was not possible. If she had a baby, it wasn't possible; they needed specialized treatment.
The journalist explained that at ONDI his children were not receiving good service, that they lacked food, that they lacked toilets, ventilation and space, and that they were under stress.
The doctor, a scrawny mulatto of about 28, intervened; She said that when a patient entered isolation in a hospital center it was risky and it was forbidden to transfer him to another similar center, because he could contaminate that other place. The Journalist understood.
Then the nurse, a blue-eyed woman in her 50s with a short stature and a flattened body, as some people predisposed to obesity who somehow manage to lose weight abruptly tend to have, did something she probably shouldn't have done. . She did something that in the long run the Journalist –rightly or not– links as the beginning of the outburst described at the beginning of this text, in the same way that the kick of a mule can be linked to the passage of a fly through its snout.
The nurse told him not to pretend to be worried, because no man cares about his family, men leave the house when they want to and leave their wife, their children, and go live their lives. The father laughed; the doctor laughed; The nurse didn't laugh, but her eyebrows relaxed; the Journalist laughed, but narrowed his eyebrows.
I thought that was an honest outburst from the nurse. He believed that he was speaking from a corner and that he was pulling a long weight, a stinking tail of cans, garbage and mud. Then the Journalist spent a while –perhaps too much for the mental stability of someone admitted to a health institution– thinking about it. In itself he was a man like the one the nurse described.
What would then be, effectively, his real motive? a) Something related to the guilt generated by not protecting their children enough?, b) questioning the Protocol?, c) questioning the political system?, d) questioning the repression of a young rapper who had been imprisoned for contempt in those days?, e) question the obligation of his stay there, and the discretion that the State had to do similar things?
What was his real motive? She did not know. They mixed. They got confused. How to unravel the skein, unlink one drama from the other? He paced around the room. They were waters that polluted each other.
Days after this episode it began to become clear that there were problems with the delivery of PCR results. The Journalist's body did not send him any signs of discomfort due to this inconvenience, quite the contrary, he wanted them to delay. She could read, write, watch movies, spend all her time doing the things that interested her, away from queues, from the kitchen, from washing diapers. His favorite time of the day used to be early morning, nothing bothered him. In the Field Hospital the early morning was permanent, the ability to isolate, read, write and think about new projects depended on him, without distractions beyond his control.
This tendency to want to continue there, completely healthy and without obligations, away from his children, oblivious to them, began, however, to generate the opposite in his spirit. As if the nurse's words were a brutal confirmation of his nature and the mistake contained in her claim: a man doesn't care about his children, but rather feeds his egoism. This discovery did not generate peace, rather, it did not create a neutralizing or appeasing guilt; quite the contrary, more restlessness and anxiety, especially linked to the delay of the PCR.
One day when guilt was spinning, the nurse and the doctor from the ward suddenly entered to make a routine visit. The Journalist was not usually interested in the doctor, she was a stranger, she almost never spoke, she did not cast a shadow, it was probably what a doctor is expected to be. It was out. He had begun to develop, however, a certain empathy for the nurse. He was attracted to know their reactions. She seemed to him a frank woman despite herself, who did not hide her annoyance and her anxiety. He felt a certain affection for her, a certain erotic attraction, the affection that a man has for his shadow, or the affection that a man has for a calm pond that he knows can throw a stone and cause ripples, the ripple being continuous. of his spirit.
But in the nurse there was also an old affection, the one felt towards a mother, towards the deceased mother of the Journalist, in this case, the mother who scolds and questions systematically and conscientiously.
–Nurse, I would like to know how this works –asks the Journalist–. My wife has already been discharged, she is at home, when are they going to give her to us?
–I'm going to explain –impatient, as if clenching his teeth–, we have to wait for the tests to arrive. It is the analyzes that say if they can go, or not.
–I still don't understand.
"I'll explain." He turns to the predator-type Journalist. Without knowing what the test results say, you cannot be discharged.
–But if the tests arrive, does she, the doctor, release us?
The doctor had no opinion.
–No, it's not the doctor. They are the analyses.
–OK, but it's not the analytics. Let me explain better: for example, someone comes walking with a box, that box has the results of the analysis. Those analyzes must reach an office located somewhere in this three or four hectare center where someone reads them, decides, and says: “OK, they are out of here”. I want to know if it is so. Is it so?
–Yes, it is.
–Who is that someone?
–It is a main specialist who gives the discharge order.
–That means that she, the doctor, doesn't decide if we leave or not.
–No, it's not her. She is the main specialist.
The Journalist looked through the blind, he could guess where the main specialist's office was. He knew every corner of the old School of Social Workers and its surroundings. Knowing the area, he had even entertained the idea of escaping to his house to guard it at night, but at the entrance to the hostel there was a guard on permanent watch, and the building had no door or hole in the back. The nurse continued:
–The analyzes are delayed because there is no capacity in Santiago de Cuba to process the demand. So these PCRs are sent to other provinces, you have to wait for them to arrive. And you've only been here for a week, but it can happen to [you] like those down there, who have been here for about 20 days without their tests coming back. And who are the culprits? People. People on the street for being undisciplined.
The nurse's responses were as annoying as they were real. They were the blunt, blunt extension of the system the Protocol had created. The Journalist's true motive was also unfathomable. This phantom, this trough of doubts, was probably the beginning of a cavity, a kind of fenced pen that opened up inside itself. All the beasts generated by the family Via Crucis were gradually entering into it, the delay in the results, the lack of communication with the health personnel, the persecution of independent journalism, the death by starvation of the independent subject, and even a trip still to come. go to Havana to sign a work contract before January, the date set for monetary unification. They were entering and accumulating until they exploded due to overpopulation.
***
In a game of baseball, a batter performs the miracle of hitting the small 9-inch-circumference, 5-ounce ball with a club, without even looking at it. The ball is fired in a sharp parabola that a player from the opposing team will be in charge of decoding by walking forwards, to the side, or backwards; calculating factors such as the breeze, the sunlight, or fighting a blinding spotlight; waving away his teammates to give him free passage until raising an arm and opening his hand inside a long glove, he guesses the exact spot to catch the ball. This is how the Cuban health system works.
The third night of stay in the children's hospital, it was 9:00 p.m. and the nutritionist did not appear; The Master was unaware of the 9 ounces of milk for her baby. He remembered then, like someone who does a sweep of names, that he had very good relations with the pediatrician who attended his medical office, an affable, nervous, agitated and vulnerable woman.
The Master had made very good friends with her: she always brought her a cup of coffee, biscuits, mango or mamey milkshakes to the office when there was a harvest. The friendship had been built first as a way of drawing a circle of health around the little ones, but it was consolidated later, as she was the doctor who was sensitive to the attentive, polite and sweet aura of the Master.
It is a tradition in the most illustrious Cuban families to have one or several doctors close by, who are given everything from affection and concern for their fate, to food, resolution of paperwork, private stimuli morally dressed as "homage to the people", etc
This collective habit is monumental and exceeds the will of the doctor himself. It falls on him like a net, as robbery falls on a recently graduated young man at an institution where he arrives pregnant with moral principles, discovering that to oppose it is to oppose the direction in which the logs go down a river.
It is quite common then, in a consultation, to see at least one annoyed doctor, uncomfortable with this habit of buying, flattery and seduction. Patients, like blowflies, morally summon him all the time; and as if suffocated by it, by the vulgarity of the rite, the doctor usually tries to free himself, resist, compose himself using tricks, puns, ceremonial gibberish.
So it is not, in the best cases, a direct purchase, but rather a long job of seduction that will probably turn into true friendship and mutual affection. This was the case of the pediatrician and her friend the Master. Between the two they had found affinities that were not based on material things, but on lavishing mutual care.
The Master called the pediatrician's cell phone in order to gain influence in the hospital and for her to push a little in favor of getting her son's food for that night. The pediatrician did more, coincidentally she was on duty somewhere in the hospital: she took care of disinfecting a container, heated the milk and found a friendly doctor, with access to the isolation area, who could deliver the order to the Master. The operation ended at 11 p.m. With the bottle of milk at that time, the baby gained sleep three hours after its usual time, but disaster was averted; the portion that should have arrived through the institutional channel never appeared.
For what reason did the Master correctly intuit that the baby's milk was not going to arrive? Why didn't she calmly wait for the product to appear? Because of Dashiell Hammett's exergue? Exact.
Here is the first element: on Monday they told her that the milk that the baby had drunk on Saturday and Sunday night did not touch her, that is, that she had been the beneficiary of a favor. The nutritionist revealed that there was no nightly allowance of milk for children over one year of age, but that he was going to see how she could get him some. The Master was outraged, she was not a friend of the nutritionist, she did not want his favor or his mercy, nor his benevolence: that it was law did not mean that it was fair. Her son needed milk at night. He replied that saying, "I'm going to see how I get your baby's milk," was not the answer. The nutritionist's correct answer, according to the Master's, should be: "Getting the 8 ounces per day punctually at 8 or 9 pm is the responsibility and obligation of me and the hospital."
Second element: every morning the milk arrived at the cubicle, but irregularly. The first day they gave him the 8 ounces he demanded, the rest of the days they could get from 4 to 6 ounces, without any regularity. The anonymous, hooded pantrist would put a ladle in a bucket and say: "This is what we have today."
Third element: the food that the baby received did not correspond to its eating habits, based on breast milk, bottle milk and puree, and not whole foods such as grains, root vegetables and solid meats, which required chewing. The child did not eat, or ate very little, sometimes also due to the lateness of meals, which arrived between 12:00 and 14:00.
Fourth element: non-compliance with the promises made by the paramedics who went to pick her up at the house, together with the bad conscience generated in the Master's by having listened to them then, knowing the inherent efficiency of Cuban institutions. Falling prey to them freed any state of conscious passivity in her, and an instinct surfaced in its place, a certain attitude similar to that developed by a high-performance baseball player, ready at all times for his body, his fluidity, and his predatory ability, perform the miracle of looking for the ball, jumping, stretching and making the impossible an act of creation.
There is an enzyme in the Cuban health system between the service and the user, between the institution and the beneficiary, which not only prevents the disaster from consummating itself, but also prevents people from being cured, achieving survival and then forgetting, or remember only the best, including your abilities to overcome difficulties.
***
The Master was released on the night of December 11. A government-paid taxi dropped her home at 9:30 p.m. The house was as is. No thief had entered, all the equipment, the products, the properties laughed at her, the Journalist, the father. They were still in their hiding places, full of the dust of those days. If she had returned to the same home she left, was the weight of so much restlessness and stress in vain? If nothing had been stolen by the thieves, but the feeling of theft, of theft still remained, what was it, in any case, that had been stolen?
***
In the second discussion with the nurse, the Journalist came up with the word “I demand”. He saw her in the undergrowth like a zebra, and went to her.
There was an imbalance within the Journalist, and he breathed unity into everything. His senses were aroused. The objects, the light, had an inner glow, a suspension, a lifting of themselves that took them to the extreme of something, led them to SIGNIFY, because they were suspended, in crisis, off axis. It was about something, the inner glow of the suicide, the madman who receives confirmations of the drama that only he understands in each object he sees and touches; I had seen it in Van Gogh's Provencal paintings, in those of Edgar Degas, where there is a vibrating continuity, an absolute relationship with the cloud, with the sun, with the sound of the cicada, with the hat of the lady with lost in the tavern, with the murmur of the crowd, the cypress and the shuddering horse.
Inside the Journalist the murmur connected the extremities with the brain, causing a mutual consequence. The creature was waiting for it, really waiting for it, because it did not run, it was not saved, its beast's back shook and scared away the flies; her black eye looked at him restlessly; She allowed him to approach and mount her, even though she, the beast, knew that you can't ride a zebra, because if you did, it would be the beginning of the end of the zebra.
What led him to the zebra, to the word “I demand”, led him to identify that the nurse was in continuity with the hospital, and the hospital with the virus and the virus with control and control with power, and power with the virus. The hospital was an Island, and on the Island there were captives who were no longer totally isolated and who could be shaken by rights conquered outside the Island, from the hospital; hence, it was decisive, to shout, to find in the undergrowth the word "I demand", that message from her Dutch friend that made its way through continents and historical cycles, and made her wonder about her condition there: How Was it possible that the PCR results were not there yet? How was it possible that he was being held in a hospital without at least, at the very least, screaming?
The Journalist told the nurse and the doctor that he didn't want to talk to them anymore. That they stop treating him as repressors, as if they had some authority over him, or over someone, and that they behave like health personnel who offered a service of love and physical and mental care to the population. He said the word “I demand”. And he demanded an interview with the main specialist, on pain of continuing to shout, although he did not say the latter, but apparently it was left floating because the main specialist went.
After his cry, similar protests were heard in the building throughout the day. The subject who had been making fun of, who was – according to the location of his voice in space – the only one who applauded every day at 9 p.m. in honor of health workers, got tired of making jokes and in Instead, voices began to be heard demanding to leave and denouncing the slowness of the PCRs. Most of the patients had been there for two weeks, without knowing the results of any of the two or three tests performed.
After lunch, a woman confined to the same floor approached the Journalist's cubicle to thank him for the shout and also to warn him, in a low voice, that in the basement of the building there was a commission of doctors asking about the patient who he had screamed in the morning. The Journalist got nervous, sat on his bunk and tried to organize his defense. I wanted to report something, but what? Where to start? At the beginning or at the end?
In one of the fragments discarded for this text, the Journalist wrote that the Master had decided to keep quiet and remain calm with the paramedics who took her around the city, taking her away from the baby's dinner schedule, because explaining their rights to them would be like entering to a maximum security prison going through bars, controls, book signings and pat-downs, only to recover a forgotten rose on a bureau in an office.
