Translator: Unstated, Yoani Sánchez
Will there be microphones here? You ask me while poking your head into
every corner of the room. Don't worry, I say, my life goes on with my
guts on display, letting it all hang out. There is no place dark,
closed, private… because I live as if walking through a gigantic X-ray
machine. Here is the clavicle I broke as a child, the fight we had
yesterday over a domestic trifle, the yellowing letter I keep in the
back of a drawer. Nothing saves us from scrutiny, my love, nothing saves
us. But today — at least for a few hours — don't think about the police
on the other end of the phone, nor the rounded eye of the camera that
captures us. Tonight we are going to believe that only we are curious
about each other. Turn off the light and for a moment send them to the
devil, disarm their eavesdropping strategies.
With so many resources spent on watching us, we have conjured away from
them the primordial facet of our lives. They don't know, for example,
even a single word of that language made for twenty years together, that
we can use without parting our lips. They would score a zero on any test
to decipher the complex code with which we say the trivial or urgent,
the everyday or the extraordinary. Surely none of the psychological
profiles they've done on us tell how you comb my eyebrows and jokingly
warn that I'm going to end up looking like Brezhnev. Our watchers, poor
guys, have never read the first song you sang me, much less that poem
where you said one day we would go to Sydney or Baghdad. Nor will they
forgive us every time we escape from them — without a trace — on the
diastole of a spasm.
Like Agent Wiesler in the film The Lives of Others, someone will listen
to us now, and not understand us. Not understand why, after arguing for
an hour, we come together and share a kiss. The astonished police who
follow our steps can't classify our embraces, and they wonder how
dangerous to "national security" are those phrases you say only in my
ear. So I propose, my love, that tonight we scandalize them or convert
them. Let's take the ear off the wall and in its place oblige them to
scribble on a sheet: "1:30 am, the subjects are making love."
14 February 2012
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