I Promise You the Apple, My Love
JOSÉ CARLOS DE SANTIAGO SAT DOWN WITH RAIDEL HERNÁNDEZ, HUSBAND OF LATE CUBAN POETESS CARILDA OLIVER LABRA, FOR THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
José Carlos : On Wednesday, August 5, the city of Matanzas was shaken by grim breaking news: the death of Carilda Oliver Labra, a creature who has remained reluctantly in his verses to encourage that vital source of poetry, a poetry that stands for a legacy of faith in words, love and life. What has it meant to you to have accompanied her as her husband for almost three decades?
Raidel Hernández : That is a question that can not be answered with a few sentences. For me, it is almost a goldsmithing job to separate the words from the memory, to remove them from their physical dimension to make that discourse, that world that can imitate with much imperfection the what has been lived. The fact that her hand, her hair, her warm clothes, all that made her in the physical being within reach of the senses, has suddenly become a handful of melancholic signs. What we call a word is a way to “rebuild”, never to resuscitate the woman that had not a single atom missing, the one who laughed with her throat and extended her hand to my hand. I cannot. I am unable to describe another episode that does not happen in life. Keeping it with me is a party, a celebration in which we only sleep by force. She is the happiest spirit I have related with. Depression, and even sadness, belong to others. Those are things that take away from others and then are thrown onto the streets and into the verses.
J C : Some wonder how two people so generationally apart had the necessary energy to defend a common life project over the years. There were fifty years apart, which represents half a century. I guess this has given way to misunderstandings and myths of all kinds.
RH: Sometimes people don’t trust or tolerate what they can’t explain, although in appearance any anomaly that interferes with the rules of coexistence does not affect them. I tell you this because living outside of some social norms not always has a negative impact on the group. However, it is inevitable that any variation in the dynamics of coexistence will be perceived as a threat. If this threat is sustained successfully over time, the myth is well founded. The myth has multiple faces; it either demonizes or idealizes the circumstance. In our case, this is accomplished with impeccable fidelity. It has always seemed strange to me that some people do not understand poetic attitudes. Why not explain that in the same way that any human being would argue it? We fell in love. Poetry is given in what many consider an impossible love; that of a young 19-year-old man could fall for a woman who was 68. This type of complicity is usually inexplicable for those who live within generationally-conserved patterns.
J C : Raidel, you are currently presiding over a Cultural Project called Al Sur de Mi Garganta (South of My Throat). We have seen month after month, through the media, the work that unfolds inside Tirry 81. Tell me just a little bit about how this idea occurred to you, this idea you took along with Carilda. Tell me about this space and how it has become, in nearly eight decades of work, an indispensable reference for cultural promotion in Cuba.
RH: I have the satisfaction of having contributed very humbly to the dissemination of its work, and therefore to its defense. The name of the project, South of My Throat, refers to her second book, winner of the 1950 National Prize of Poetry. The gathering named after that book title and that was conducted on a regular basis at Museum Palacio de Junco, entered a moment of crisis. It was already very difficult to hold it with Carilda's presence because, for health reasons, she was not in a position to move out of her home. I was then working as a psychologist at the Carlos Verdugo Outpatient Clinic in town. I had to make a very delicate decision: restore the house and enable the spaces; to spend more time with my wife and properly care for their health, quit my job and profession, and start everything from scratch.
A few months later, I got many satisfactions and the most delicious one of all: I managed to take the cultural world to Carilda. She no longer had to leave her home to enjoy the artistic and literary environment that she herself helped to forge in the city. She was the hostess of cultural activities and received countless friends and artists who came from all over to share the music of Lecuona and her poetry.
Currently, the project goes on. Surely as you have heard through the media, the ashes of my beloved wife will remain in this house. I took this decision not because of a selfish need to keep her by my side, but because it is the way I have found to pay tribute to her life, to the honor and the joy that always accompanied her. She will be with us in each concert, in each verse reading, in each gathering, with the friends that remain here accompanied by her white mariposas, her cats that keep looking for her in every corner, right between the hanging clothes that I don’t dare take off from their hangers, which still carry her perfume.
J C : Of the moments, which are many because thirty years endure a lapse of time that is immense in terms of human life, of those innumerable instants that you have had the privilege of sharing with her as your companion, your support in times of illness, what can Raidel underscore as an unforgettable circumstance?
RH: It is a tough question to answer. I would be bound to choose skillfully among all the joys, untangle them from their skein, weigh them, and especially handpick those that no matter the time, remain fresh in my memory. I remember the first time we traveled together. About 17 years have gone by since then. Mexico had the smell of flour tortillas and the ghost of chili wafting up in the air. We were invited by Mr. Fredo Arias de la Canal, a writer and president of the Frente de Afirmacion Hispanista Foundation, to attend lectures on the occasion of the cultural festivities of Morelia. Our visit lasted only five days, but it let us know a little bit of traditional Mexican food and visit some areas of the state in which we stayed.
It was on that first occasion that we touched with the tips of our fingers a very high level of happiness. We got it back to Cuba, just when the car that drove us to Matanzas approached the bay and we could make out our city, many small multicolored lights shimmering in the fledgling night. We just looked at each other and she said: “do you already want to be in the house?” “I'm dying to turn on the hall lights,” I answered. And that was it. It was the homecoming joy. Not even a week had passed by and there we were, as if we were returning from all the cities around the world.
J C : The attention that you have given to the promotion of Carilda Oliver’s work had panned out to be her a source of encouragement that allowed her to live, with that vitality and fullness, for 96 years, haven’t it actually driven you away from your own literary creation?
RH: Maybe yes. Maybe I would probably have a dozen books put out at this point, but I would have never understood what the dimension of the souls. Even so, I dare to ask you this. What would you say to Carilda right now?
RH: You just can’t finish a dialogue that has stretched out for decades. How could I suddenly end the conversation we started so many summers ago? I confess that during those endless talks we had many times, I consoled her for the absence of his family, for the death of a beloved animal, for multiple miseries that we had to cope with as part of our learning process on the road of the human experience. It is now her turn to comfort me. It’ll be easy for her who was always ready to give tenderness and the gift of love.
Now it’s up to Carilda to help me out down this long and winding road. It’s up to me to learn to see her without these eyes made of earth and touch her without these hands of mine that are so used to dusting off old books and scraping the scabs on the walls. I do not ask for anything, who am I to ask when I’ve given everything I had? If she can teach me to give, if she can now that eternity is all hers, now that she’s staying aloof from the sadness of the rain or the pain that suffer, then that would be good enough. Although there is something I have already received: that apple she promised me in one of her poems, the apple that the world’s first lover once bit.
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