As you can see, A week passed by after the announced end of the world, and although bad signs keep surfacing, I’m still here; Havana is still in the same place and the world is too…I’m afraid we all were the victims of a macabre joke of innocent saints, just a week ahead of time…
On December 21, I began to suspect about it when I did not here any apocalyptical trumpet sounding, but the hammering alarm of my clock at 5 a.m. A different clue about the end of the world did no show that specific day, however. I began to suspect about it when I went to bed some hours earlier, In Australia they were already on the 21 of December and not even a single kangaroo suffered from asthma. But, I did not want to kill the story, since we had waited for the event for several millenniums, so why not wait a little longer. Perhaps God is as punctual as Cubans are!
It happened that the nigh went through in a calm that was only broken by the noisy fart of a early rising neighbor, whose farts are as punctual as the Havana cannon shot that takes place just at nine sharp every evening. No meteorites, no acid rain, no frog invasions..at most I saw some bags with garbage, urine pools and yonki mosquitoes requesting on-time fumigation to fly away. But nothing about the world’s end…
I had spent that evening at my brother’s. since the day before in the afternoon I wanted to leave for Santa Clara city to spend Christmas eve with my parents. But since I am eternally optimistic I got my things together and went to La Coubre bus terminal, perhaps thinking of getting a bus seat to my hometown, as if nobody else travelled during year’s end in this country, where everyone migrate somewhere, and few remain where they were born.
I hardly stayed three minutes in that so-called place… What the hell!
Instead of waiting in that hell I would better stay for some hours until the world collapsed, knowing that it would be my last night, with my fiancé, instead of being in a crowded bus terminal on the waiting list, watching my bags and the bus departures, and under the torture of not knowing when I would get out of that place.
And this is truth, I was clear that I would go away on high class, maybe because of this last hedonism that I stood on the balcony and in a symbolic gesture I took off my almost worn out underwear and I threw it on the air.
For some moments I felt I was God myself, ready to meet my creator as he sent me to the world. It was some nice feeling, or at least better feeling that what I felt the next morning while walking along such a disappointed on me, as much as I was disappointed on the Mayans’ predictions.
And that way, that day ended and other days went by. Many things happened and actually we had everything but the end of the world. And without an explanation, I was feeling infernal hot temperature in December, seeing the cracks on building fronts a the victims of secret quakes, deteriorated street pavements, kids with earphones listening to a bad-quality music, reggaeton listeners with airs of Frank Sinatra, busses full of people that break down just a their second bus top, the Isle of Youth now the leader in baseball..you know, a chaos that at time is irreversible, but you know, this is what time is like, something we Cubans enjoy.
I was upset, but relieved at the same time because I’m in no hurry to move out. In the end, each passing day, each passing minute and each second could be the end, and instead of looking paranoid about the end of the world, we have to live in the only way possible, which is by thinking that the world could reach its end any time from now.
Author
Charly Morales Valido
