Image courtesy of Tim Goos. Shared via a Creative Commons license.

 

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I left my heart in Cuba, shattered in a million pieces. I cried on a balcony as blue as my death-cold body, and watched my tears turn to ivory flowers that blew off in the wind. I numbed myself to ugliness. I threw myself into fantasy, and if my heart was glass, I willed it to shards; and it became shards that pierced the earth and stained it red.

The gush of Hurricane Isaac’s vicious breath had sanded my senses to extra awareness. He blew at me with such force that he shook the very soul in my body and made it float loosely inside of me like a butterfly in a jar.

I remember walking the streets of Havana with drenched clothes, feeling the gushing rain and wondering if its force would turn me to tornado, or drown me in the waves crashing over the Malecon. I remember holding on to the slim frame of my beloved, trying to add my weight to his small size, so that we would not be blown away like one of the palm fronds cluttering the slate sky.

Strains of guitar and drums molded by Cuban fingers are in my steps now when I walk. The sound of Isaac hissing like a serpent is what I hear now in the night as I lie in my bed. I hear him in the crevices of the glass windows and doors here at home just as I heard him at the casa particular where I stayed in Havana. Call me soft. Call me delicate. My husband Manuel, a Cuban, calls me ultra-sensitive, with a wild imagination. He says it must be tough being me; and it is.

The taste of Isaac still grazes me like a  nightmare. No number of duty-free Ghirardelli Raspberry dark chocolates can wipe that taste from my tongue. Mouthfuls of Guanabita del Pinar liquor cannot numb the Isaac from my taste buds. I had only felt his breath. It was only a slight peck on my cheek by hurricane standards – what if I had felt his thrust? What if I had known his intercourse and felt him possess me in the way Manuel possessed me.

Manuel is always shaking his head and laughing at me. Though we have been married for over two years, I can not tell him how I am still being tormented by dreams of the tempestuous waters rushing over the Malecon, stirred to heights and spitting at me with cold, salty vapors.

I can not tell him of my nightmares – filled with lurching, white-water giants whispering in Spanish and laughing like red, screeching macaws. It has been a month since we came back from our trip to Cuba but I am still living and breathing the scent of the hurricane.

Manuel calls me insane. He always asks me what is wrong with me. He wants me to make my skin thicker for it is too thin, he says. Sometimes when he says my skin is too thin, I shout to him, ‘Do you want me to be a cold-hearted bitch?’ He never answers, and he generally says nothing most times.

I am a writer by day, and an artist by night, playing with colours and trying to paint a work of art that elicits a response from my unresponsive husband.

Manuel is much older than I, but it makes no difference to me as I am an old soul. His appearance may not be impressive to most, as he is quite slim; but to me there is much beauty to him. He is often too quiet and he tends to ignore me most times – but to me he has a charming personality. He is a strange man. Very conservative with his hard earned money, yet he will splurge on expensive music concerts and plays. A throwback to his Cuban upbringing no doubt.

I tell my friends he has more man in him than ten men put together. I love looking at him. I love to watch him sing.  I love the sound of his voice. To me he is a work of art, inside, outside and in every way.

Manuel is my muse, my fuel and my breath. I see his face when I look at myself in the mirror. I think of him and smile, for he is the embodiment of every quality I want in a man. My friends say that my love is blind – but I know my love is quite discerning as I see everything he does and says quite clearly. I love my frail, wilting flower of a man.

I tell him everything; he is my best friend. Yet he can be my worst enemy. He is a realist. He is logical. We are the total opposite of each other at times. He does not believe in the supernatural. How can I tell him I brought something back with me from our trip unknowingly? How do I say Cuba fastened to my soul, snaking roots in me that extend over oceans, opening doorways and dimensions; and creating a cusp in my reality like a goblet of intoxicating rum.

No, I cannot tell Manuel my new secret. I cannot tell him I am being haunted. I do not want to admit that I am possessed. How can I tell him a Cuban spirit speaks to me at night when I lie in our bed, waiting for him for hours while he drifts in and out of slumber on the couch in front of the television?  He would not believe me. He might want to take me to a mental health institution, instead of giving me a therapeutic fuck.

One might think that I, Jasmin, a thirty-three year old woman of East-Indian descent, who practiced abstinence until the age of thirty would be more restrained – but sadly this is not the case.

I like to paw at my husband. As he sits reading the newspapers I enjoy asking in a serious tone, ‘Can I suck a part of you?’ Sometimes he obliges me and raise his t-shirt, then allow me to suckle on his nipple while he continues reading. Manuel is extra-special when he humours me, and these unpredictable occurrences make my love blaze, especially after he has been acting cold and restrained for many days.

He does not know how impressionable I am. He does not know my imagination takes me to unimaginable heights. I don’t only see things that are not there, I dream them into being. I create and construct dimensions in the sands of silence he heaps on me. My hunger for him spans many levels.

He has no sweet words for me. He will not reach out to me, or show love. I am hungry for love, for hugs and kisses, sweet words and romance. I want him to reach out to hold my hand like he used to in the beginning when he was wooing me. I want him to make me feel wanted. But he has grown so silent over time.

Sometimes I lean against his chest and listen to his heartbeat. In that sweet sound I translate the beats into words and I hear all the words I want him to say, and sometimes the words I hear in his pulse move me to tears.

In his long periods of silence, I am invisible. In the beginning he would talk to me while I lay on his chest on the couch, but now he has distanced himself from me, losing himself on his computer, watching videos and checking emails until the early hours of morning. On our first Cuba trip I had hoped that we would bond and enjoy ourselves, instead he spent the entire time taking photos and visiting friends, totally ignoring me. It disgusted me how he kept saying that life in Cuba was better than life in Trinidad as he smoked on huge cigars with the men and drank Havana Club rum. I felt betrayed.

But now Cuba is in me. A spirit entered me one night on that fateful trip as I took a deep breath, trying to follow my always-hurrying lover; as I walked the streets of Obispo and the old clocks in antique houses struck midnight. It was then that my heart beat erratically against my ribs with a supernatural force, and I felt myself swallowed by the swipe of a silver entity, warm and clear like sunlit waterfall-foam.

I was possessed once. So I was told by my pastor and my mother. In church or at night, I used to feel my body twisting into contortions and I was unable to stop myself. It was as if something else had taken over. I used to cavort almost every night in my bed groaning, in the throes of wonderful sex dreams.

I had a recurring dream in which I was naked and my legs were opened and tied to two palm trees in a forested area while a huge black bird like a corbeau pecked the petals of my vagina until I reached orgasm. I used to wake up groaning, and sweat-drenched to see my parents looking at me with horrified expressions on their faces.

I remember when the pastor and the Elder came to see me I took one look at them and took off in full speed out of the house into the yard and ran out into the street. They followed me around the block as I ran barefoot in my old pink nightgown with holes. I remember a thirst so sickeningly painful that took over my body and made me guzzle water in tremendous proportions. The spirit inside of me was thirsty, Papi had said. I remember being mesmerized unnaturally by Poui trees in bloom, so much so that I felt they spoke to me in encrypted messages; messages that made me want to stick my head out of the window in my father’s car and strain my ears to listen and decipher.

The streets of Port of Spain smell like the streets of Havana when it rains. Manuel has retreated into his television realm and I don’t want to disturb him. I leave him and resume my painting in my studio. It is the name I have given to a spare room in the house in which we live, where I lose myself in my painting. As I sit in my studio, trying to paint pictures and censor myself, my paints become a Cezanne blur that whispers in a medley of voices.

I paint taut nipples, paint swollen vaginas, paint jutting penises, paint sexual suggestiveness. I look at my watch, a black, digital relic that I’ve had for years. I feel the urge to write and I reach for my journal. I take my leather journal from under a stack of papers with poetic jottings and ideas. I turn to a fresh page and begin to write. I let my writing hand dance in a stream of unconsciousness.

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Kavita Ganness is a literary and visual artist from Trinidad and Tobago. Her collection of poems, Emerald Journey was published by the New Voices Press. She has been published in Generation Lion Magazine, The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, She SEX Prose & Poetry Sex and the Caribbean Woman, as well as Susumba’s Book Bag. She was a participant in the Cropper Foundation’s 8th Residential Creative Writers Workshop in Balandra, Trinidad, and has mentored with renowned Caribbean writer Earl Lovelace. She is a member of the Writers Union of Trinidad and Tobago (WUTT).