That Monday in March I gave my class at the Faculty of Art of the Audiovisual Media, and then we students and teachers were informed that classes were suspended until further notice. That same day they came to get me from the San Antonio de los Baños International School of Film and TV (EICTV) to give a workshop on film genres in the production chair, and replace a foreign teacher who could not come because of the ravages of the pandemic in Spain.
During the following weekend, several students showed symptoms and were detected as positive, thus the teacher was classified as a suspect and sent into isolation, restricted to his room at the school. On the afternoon of April 2, my PCR tested positive. I was taken that same day, at full speed, to the Naval Hospital. Not only my entire family, but also part of the work team of the television program Te invito al cine, which I went to record on Saturday March 28, just after the conclusion of the workshop at the EICTV, were part of my chain of contagion, and they went into confinement in the Lenin school or in Casablanca.
The anguish began that day, because in addition to the feeling of guilt, lacerating, over the possibility of being the vehicle of illness for loved ones and co-workers, you begin to live attached to the mobile, to know how they are doing with the isolation, when they are tested and what has been the result. Meanwhile, my hospital colleagues and I resigned ourselves to the Interferon injection every other day, and the morning Kaletra and Chloroquine pills, in the hope that the next PCR would be negative.
Optimism and pessimism take turns while you are hospitalized. I started perceiving, in the neighboring wards, several young patients with symptoms, who had greater confidence than I, who would be discharged in a few days. When I started getting infected by the confidence of the doctors and nurses, of the dozens of friends who called me or sent me beautiful messages of encouragement, on a sleepless night I looked out into the corridor-balcony of the hospital and saw the unmistakable funeral car pass by. It was approaching a door on the first floor, through which those who did not withstand came out. The black car was driving away from the hospital on the same street as the half-empty buses with those privileged with a discharge who were leaving.
Nor did I find a way to avoid depression when I found out about the case of an 18-year-old boy, from a neighboring ward, whose tests insisted on being positive, after several weeks of being hospitalized, and more and more noticeable symptoms appeared after applying the same treatment as me. You go to pieces because you crash against the possibility that the same thing happens to you and your chain of contacts.
The conviction that I could come out unscathed from all of this was reestablished when the doctors verified that I was still totally asymptomatic. However, I was mistaken: all the human beings that inhabit this moment, absolutely all, sick and asymptomatic, healthy and contaminated, we will bear scars of the pandemic. The marks start being noticed, no matter how closely you follow the protocols to try to heal or stay healthy, you assume extreme hygiene with all discipline, and you manage to extract something positive, in spiritual and moral terms, from this period of face masks, smell of chlorine and bad morning news.
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The greatest joy of the hospital period came when I learned that the tests of all my family and my co-workers on television were negative.… Thus the last possibility of being guilty of others’ contagion was extinguished. A few hours later, at night, when I was not expecting something new to happen, I heard a doctor with a rumba voice and vivid eyes (everything else was understandably hidden under protective masks and layers of green cloth) who jumped for joy as she shouted the bed numbers of discharged patients.
Back home, the isolation was extended for 14 more days, with the same treatment as in the hospital. Every other day I was visited by a chubby nurse, my age, talkative, Christian and very skilled, who together with the Interferon shared with me the highest doses of optimism and faith that anyone can have these days. Then I was discharged from home, thanks to a negative PCR test. Checkups began at the polyclinic to study the possible consequences of the disease. Nothing. I suffered no sequels, other than bad memories.
This is how April, May and June, which should have been spring months, passed, all of them back home and going out as little as possible. The very slow routine went by; nothing more like a Sunday than a Wednesday. One was distinguished from the other only by television programming and the soap opera of the moment, Cuban or Brazilian, although neither of them interested me too much. Summer arrived, with a certain opening and the consequent (apparently inevitable) increase in the number of positive cases, deceased and sick, which caused the current regression to the stage of closure and isolation in Havana.
Five months after my discharge from the Naval Hospital, pessimism has taken a tithing, the applause at nine o’clock at night diminishes and there are few stores where to buy what is necessary (due to the reintroduction of numerous establishments that sell in dollars, or due to the consequent downturn of national production and import). The firm parsimony of Dr. Durán, in his daily television appearance, already seems like a gloomy ritornello, inventory of setbacks, bad news and stagnations.
The song “Resistiré” is no longer heard, and although it was put on the air 30 times a day, that verse that millions of human beings sing very quietly, or at the top of their voice, has lost its essential meaning: “I’m like the reed that bends, but always stays standing.” Nobody dares to predict when or how we will get up again to recover our lives, and many of us were overcome by uncertainty about a better future, which will come who knows when.
Everything is dull, difficult, and people are enraged, frightened by scarcity, or overwhelmed by routine. Electrical equipment continued to break down, there are a thousand plumbing or carpentry repairs that need to be made and now they are impossible. The need to fumigate against pests and viruses (that men and women not only die from COVID) was in crescendo. There are plenty of basic needs in short supply, while affordable outlets dwindle and a currency exchange is announced. Only the lines grow.
So, faced with a tense, depressing panorama, it is hardly any consolation to be healthy and to have withstood the onslaught of the virus, because Cuba and the rest of the world (as some Cuban television announcers say pretentiously and chauvinistically) show a rather bleak outlook, and they may never be the same again. This is a certainty that one refuses to assume in all its dimensions. When you understand it thoroughly, it feels “like a desert, like a book forgotten in the dust, like a broken chair,” to put it in the words of Ballagas, one of the Cuban poets who best knew how to express sadness and helplessness.
In such a state of mind, unable to share the joy and enthusiasm of some friends from a distance on Facebook, I also feel my inability to join in the triumphalist speeches, which appeal to the traditional and epic resistance of Cubans to place their trust in a promising and undefeated future. I must clarify, to avoid misunderstandings, that I recognize the gigantic effort that my country is making to control the disease and its worst effects. One would have to be blind or too ill-intentioned and ungrateful not to.
I only demand my right to feel desolate, and to try to alleviate the pessimism of these days, in mid-September, when 15 more days of isolation in Havana were announced. I seek a tenuous consolation: to share my state of mind with others, to see if we can gather the diminished rations of trust and hope that we have left, to comfort ourselves in the certainty that everything, at some point, will have to improve. Perhaps we will be able to convince each other that humanity, smiling, will dictate the end of these planetary ailments next year, and that in January or February 2021 the calm, or boisterous quality of a new light will return, capable of overcoming the darkness imposed by the disease, despondency and closure.
