Traveling by train is like a poem, but more exciting. It is like committing murder, but less morbid; and as daring as dancing a strange song, in a strange room, with an unknown couple .
The train starts and you do not even notice . Suddenly you think the world is moving (although in truth the world is always moving), that things are moving outside, that houses and buildings and street lighting start, slightly, moving. Perhaps this is what always happens, but only on a train, in a specific type of train the multiple coatings of the facades get revealed, and also the sinister tricks of the cities .
It is about nine in the evening and the country, quietly, drains under the railway line of Havana- Santiago train. Crossing Cuba from one side to the other, on the wagons of return and longing, takes just under twenty four hours, almost a day. You start the trip with a sun, or preferably with a moon, and end it with another. Nothing that has happened during that time in the world has happened to you, because your trip is not a linear journey, nor a progressive journey, or even a journey, with safe destination. Your journey is, from any sense, an anomaly, a non-trip, the unconscious and instantaneous forgetting of recent events. Something not sensed from the platform, even when the platform of the very old terminal of La Coubre to be much more conclusive and gloomy than Penelope’s platform or the platform of one of the far western movies, those in which a wise or avenging cowboy blows his shiny philharmonic for anybody.
If modern life, the plane is the dazzling transport, and car is the one of the custom, the train is, without doubt, the transport of nostalgia, but not those subway coaches plying the hasty and cold nights of the First World, no, but Cuban trains, which move as if it cost them, as if not wanting, rhythmically slow, as if fatality or centuries or heaviness of Cuban morning to stop their march. We could say each country, despite its development and evilness, has the transportation that history allows it. That is why the Havana-Santiago train stops in lost stations, near modest provincial parks or close to four houses which only success is the curious passing, at a precise time, of hundreds of unfamiliar faces that violate with uncalled-for comments and rude greetings the intimacy of rural communities, terminals, municipalities.
A scene that in the tight schedule of a day is reproduced countless times, which raises, after all, a tenacious suspicion. We’ve begun to repeat ourselves and lose, as applicable, the sense of space, or in Cuba, the people and their routes are always the same. If so, we would not have to worry about traveling because there would not be a place where to arrive and rail transportation would be, so to speak, an imposture. The compass of reason, then, would be disrupted, and maybe at some point, due to so many meridians, would remain stopped or suddenly start and left us, sleepy and exhausted, at the wrong time and mass.
I, for example, noticed that each lost light in the distance denoted the same intensity and that every scream of the locomotive was nothing but the shouts that woke me up as a child and scared me to death between the sheets because there, in the distance, on that route, another time could elapse, a parallel sequence in which I, as now, would be traveling and were an old man or old enough to remind myself as boy and feel nostalgia for that innocence that will not return because the truth is that at that time I could not remember nor suppose anything and just now I come to notice the excitement, curiosity and daring contained in a train and that under no circumstances you should not look out the window, because from the window and due to confusion of wind and haze you cease knowing if you are in the window or the aisle seat and from where the metal sliding of the wheels on the lines comes and I also noticed, anaesthetized of fear, before, now and later, a certainty that will always accompany me, more than twelve hours still remain, in the weakness of the real, and the noises that are eating us while breaking the present and without effort rise in the concord of the night.
Author
Carlos M. Álvarez
