Literature is duplicity: one cannot write without conversing with the evil twin, the hypothetical, the quantum double.
14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 6 April 2025 — In Spain, I gorge myself on the childhood I had in Cuba, but especially the one I didn’t have. Tintin, Corto Maltese, The Rabbi’s Cat, tin soldiers, drawing—now with prodigious Staedtler pens that I gazed at in catalogs from the 1980s—pencils the same dark green as a figurine of Boba Fett, the intergalactic mercenary, all of that on the desk. Toys, Toblerone bars, books. It’s still a sad obsession, but how can I live without it?
In the end, we are vain, diverse, and fluctuating animals, Montaigne would say. I get excited and spend hours in toy stores, stationery stores, browsing the shelves of an antique dealer. I recognize myself in all of this, even though I never possessed it. Did its absence shape me? I wouldn’t be surprised. There are Cubans who become true Malaysian tigers when faced with a beef tenderloin, and others who would stab Willy Wonka to keep his chocolate factory. Why give up the harmless, less expensive world of paper?
I reconstruct, for my own good and that of my novels, the child I was and the one I wasn’t. Literature is duplicity. You can’t write without conversing with the evil twin, the hypothetical, the quantum double, the one waiting for us on the other side of the Time Machine. And if this reconstruction can have an anesthetic effect along the way, so much the better.
Who can forget their toys, or the things that served as toys?
Who can forget their toys, or the things that served as toys? A cigar box from which I cut out an entire paper city, which I assembled and disassembled in my living room. Some plastic soldiers from World War II—they appeared under my bed one Three Kings’ Day, a tradition that communism failed to eradicate—with binoculars and flags, rampant or rolling in the trench, belonging to imaginary states.
A pair of astronauts, with their spacecraft, armed with detectors for lunar dust, who I now remember as the forerunners of Daft Punk. (Much later, on the beaches of Valencia, I saw dozens of searchers moving their instruments on the sand, like those little figures in spacesuits.) I also had a crossbow, a bow that shot arrows, coloring books—one of them only had the frustrating silhouette of Lassie, the collie—light swords made from radio antennas, magic wands.
There were toys left behind in Cuba that I should have brought. Toys that were so old they were considered relics. An American wooden box with ten miniature bowling pins, which one could knock down with a ball hanging from a pole. The Lone Ranger, whose hat eventually became toasted in the tropical heat, harder than the Western one. To keep it covered, I put a bottle cap on it: it looked like a horseman with his charro or an Arab with his fez.
George Washington, in a blue jacket and tricorn hat—that one survived—was his unlikely expedition companion, both on horseback. There was also a clarinet, made of fine black plastic, with a small notebook of melodies. Almost everything else was lost.
At least once a year, my entire town allowed itself to indulge in toys and imaginary life.
At least once a year, my entire town indulged in toys and imaginary life. It was the month of revelry, March, although in some years it was held in August. I hated and still hate that atmosphere. At seven in the morning, the hammering and welding began. The sparks from the tips of the rods crackled on the iron frames. When everyone left, I went out to play in that rusty fortress, on top of which the carriage was built.
In none of my novels have I recreated that world, which has brought so much money to the cheap folklorists who proliferate like midges in that place. Everything frightened me. The crush of people, the glitter, the makeup, the immobility of the characters in the wings.
There were always half-naked girls – often classmates, the only incentive to go and see the float – and a voice- over narrating some corny legend: Troy: Blood and Fire, The Sun of Austerlitz, Sissi Empress, Prayer in the Desert, The King and I, Beyond the Sea , A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a thousand silly things, all financed by the exiles.
I didn’t like going out but staying in my room, knowing that all the houses in the town were going to be empty at that moment.
I didn’t like going out, but rather staying in my room, knowing that every house in town would be empty at that moment. What a wonderful feeling. I’d take out my toys, my books, whatever, and start inventing that phrase whose wickedness only a Cuban can accurately gauge. Then the firecrackers would explode, rise into the night sky, and descend like kamikazes onto the rooftops. Scared to death. My cats would protest. The neighbors’ dogs would howl.
Five in the morning. Total drunkenness, trash, urine. Toy enthusiasts—and sometimes me too—scaled and looted the float. They stole cranes, cobras, monkeys, tea and smoking tables, marvelous lamps, thrones, and dragons. Everything stuffed with Styrofoam, an entire world of Styrofoam. Everything designed to shine once and die, like naked girls, like flying cars, like the child one once was.
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