Cuba [antikvár]

he felt tired; he had run out of ideas. and he was waiting for a phone call that never seemed to arrive. maybe it was because of that endless delay: an unhappiness as light as silk filtered into his soul. he got up from the desk where he had been trying to complete an article that seemed to resist all efforts to pin it down. to find a good ending, and he walked over to the window. the window: a harmonious midway point between the indoors and the outdoors, between the self and the city, the confusion, the welter of sounds that was impossible to decipher. The silhouettes of the buildings were growing gray. the day was verging on sunset, slowly. Slowly; the exponential speed of his life, dominated by an ironbound grid of dates and deadlines, had always kept him from stopping, from having time to think calmly. In this he was no different from everyone else, perhaps. AnD now, suddenly, in that minuscule moment, hidden in the drab gray of the evening, he was aware of something new. without his notice, time had accumulated on things like a transparent film. What he was feeling was, perhaps, something more than just exhaustion. he was growing old. it was as if the vital energy of youth was slowly trickling away. the slow inching of the shadows, extending imperceptibly, was actually marking his own private sunset. it seemed to him that the wave of darkness that was filling the streets was pushing him willy-nilly toward the final, closing chapter of life. He had been kidding himself. he had believed that he was moving in an absolute continuum, free of all the chains of time-but that had collapsed now. and in this, too, perhaps, he was no different from everyone else. HE was unable to capture the essence of time, and he was drifting helplessly toward distant lands-as if the wind had suddenly dropped, leaving him in the doldrums, in unknown waters. The phone rang just as he was floating in this melancholy limbo. it was his editor at the newspaper: "are you interested in taking a holiday in the tropics? in just a couple of days, you are leaving for cuba. destination; la isla de la juventud, the Island of Youth. i am not sure where it is-check the atlas. ThERE is a young cuban woman named deborah something-or-other who is about to break some world record for breath-held diving. in the photographs, this woman looks to be a genuine, blonde mermaid. I am absolutely indifferent to her athletic records-tell me about this person. Why the silence? Why don't you answer me?" "Got it," he answered. "Okay." He had never been to Cuba and he had never heard of the Island of Youth. But the word youth made an impression on him. precisely when, tangled in the usual existential toils, he had glimpsed the furthest point of the horizon and sensed the frequency of the shadows. destiny was propelling him elsewhere, into a sudden burst of light. the gravitational forces of being: absurd and perfectly logical. But why the Island of Youth? Seventy-two hours later, he found himself at the antipodes of his world. framed in the window. the landscape had changed completely. the brilliant, hot sunlight had burnt away the shadows of sunset. in the dazzling light of the caribbean. every last fragment of nature stood out sharply and clearly. The evanescent shapes of sunset in the city were taking new form in the virgin splendor of an exotic dawn. even the white shapes of the hotel colony, the only tourist accommodations in the luxuriant wilderness of the little isla de la juventud, seemed to be made of solidified light. And he had a feeling that the light