Let me open up by saying that it is always challenging to pick a favorite book among the wide array of fascinating titles surrounding the topic of Cuba. More difficult still is choosing a book that fulfills several roles at once. For the Editor’s Debut Pick, I wanted a title that would symbolically allow us to look back at what has been published in the last few years (Posar desnuda en La Habana was published first in French in 2010); a title that would also signal to future publications (forthcoming English translation); a book that—as books often do—came attached to a personal anecdote (Wendy, Anaïs, Cuba, Vincennes, & I); and, finally, a book (and a story) that would dialogue or, at the very least, resonate with some of the sections that make up CUBA COUNTERPOINTS: LEGIBLES, TRANSLATION MAGIC, and MEMORIES, among others. Several books came to mind, but only one story seemed worth telling.
Wendy Guerra and the Apocryphal Diary of Anaïs Nin
I met Wendy Guerra in the town of Vincennes, in the eastern suburbs of Paris. It was on the occasion of the 2010 Festival América (September 24-26) and Guerra was due to introduce the publication in French of Posar desnuda en La Habana / Poser nue à la Havane,(Stock 2010) [Posing Nude in Havana], the apocryphal diary of Anaïs Nin. At the time, I had never heard of Guerra; in fact, my trip to Vincennes was due, in large part, to the presence of Zoe Valdés, Leonardo Padura, and Eduardo Manet, a motley crew of Cuban writers and political perspectives, as far as the Castro regime was concerned. I had already been in Paris for at least a month conducting archival research at the Bibliotèque Nationale de France on the links between the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) when I was notified of the event. As it has often happened with Latin Americans in France, I, too, would see the lights of home in the French capital, or, more appropriately, rediscover Cuba by Vincennes.
The Festival in Vincennes coincided with the local street market. I walked through sidewalks crowded with vendors, pushing my way through a field of carts and kiosks with as many pardon-pardons, as I could muster. I stopped to buy an umbrella—it had started to rain. With some degree of difficulty and delay, I arrived at the hospitality table and purchased my entrance ticket. I was handed a program. Disoriented, I stood staring at the paper for a few minutes, hoping to discover—somewhere on the first page—a clear marker: Les Cubains [The Cubans]. No such luck.
The Cuban panels at the Festival had been divided into at least two distinct groups: those who left (Zoe Valdés and Eduardo Manet) and those who stayed (Leonardo Padura, Wendy Guerra, and Karla Suárez). I, ambivalent about my own position with respect to the island and its politics, attended both panels. Spoke to Valdés briefly—a pleasant conversation that included a revelation on her part that someone she knew was also from Bauta, a small town about thirty minutes to a couple of hours from Havana, depending on economics, the weather, and the method of transportation. I never spoke to Manet.
I left Valdés (who had already left me) and rushed to the next panel under what was now a light, but cold drizzle—cold enough to remind me that it was fall in Vincennes. I was late. Padura and Suárez were done, but still in sight; and Guerra—a tragic, frail silhouette in black, pale except for the blue-red lipstick that, in the dimly lit room, became a wine red—sat cross legged at the furthest end of a table. I squinted. The French interpreter contorted her lips into a smile, as she stood at Guerra’s side, pretending to understand the rhythmic aspirations of the speaker’s Cuban Spanish and, more often than not, botching everything Guerra said. I entered the room and adjusted my eyes, struggling to reconcile the speaker’s familiar idioms with the locale and the French interpreter’s impeccably French (mis)translations.
The place was crowded. I sat on the floor, creating a diagonal, a perfect triangle made up of Guerra, her interpreter, and I. Unknown to anyone in the room, I had become a mediator who—by force of geographical and newly-born affective ties to the speaker—revised the “official” French interpretation, crossing out and replacing this and that phrase in my mind. Guerra was introducing the publication of her new novel Posar desnuda en La Habana, a book that, in the tradition of Latin American letters had been published first in French and not in its original Spanish. It is worthwhile here to point out that, in Guerra’s case, her new novel more specifically followed the trajectory of Cuban literature in the 1990s which, by virtue of the repressive conditions on the island and the scarcity of paper (among other things) had found a market in cities like Madrid, Barcelona and, of course, París. In the fall of 2010 (I was thrilled to discover), Cuba was still in vogue.
Guerra spoke: “Posar desnuda en La Habana, bueno . . .,” [Posing Nude in Havana, well . . .] she paused briefly and continued, was the result of one, her own affections for the diary genre and two, her old fascination with Nin. Nin, she explained to a crowd of French intellectuals and hipsters who gawked at the exotic Cuban girl-woman with a mixture of desire and condescension, was the daughter of Cuban pianist Joaquín Nin. She had been born in France, visiting the Caribbean island for a brief period in 1922, at the age of 19.
Much like Guerra, I had read Nin obsessively during my mid to late teens—I had read everything, the diaries and their often (un)fortunate indiscretions, as well as those texts that I hid from my mother with the likes of Lolita and Lady Chatterley’s Lover: Delta of Venus and Little Birds. At the time, with Paris always on my mind, I had imagined myself riding on the train to meet a lover whose name I couldn’t yet decipher. I, too, aspired to be indiscrete but, most of all, I had dreamt of a diary, one that, unlike Guerra and Nin, I had never truly kept well. Enter Wendy Guerra, a Cuban writer who never left the island, only a year my senior and wearing that shade of Chanel red that I still carry at the bottom of my purse. She had returned Nin to Cuba—a task I had thought impossible but that, over the years, I had often entertained.
Wendy Guerra was born in Havana in 1970. She is a poet and a novelist. In 2007, she was included, along with Junot Díaz (The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), Alejandro Zambra (Bonsái), and Daniel Alarcón (Lost City Radio) among others, in Bogotá39, a collaborative project between the Hay Festival and Bogotá: UNESCO World Book Capital City 2007 that identified 39 of the most promising Latin American writers under the age of 39. Posar desnuda en La Habana was Guerra’s third novel and continued her dependence on the diary genre, deepening her resolve to highlight the limits between the real and the fictional, a relationship that had been integral to her first work of fiction Todos se van [Everyone Leaves], published by Bruguera in 2006. Todos se van constitutes the rewriting of Guerra’s childhood diaries (1978-1990). The diaries, she has confessed in one of her many interviews, were carefully rewritten, manipulated, and dramatized in the Aristotelian sense (with introduction, conflict, and resolution), and later burned. Although Posar desnuda en La Habana comes years later, in it, Guerra returns to the diary form—this time, however, the diaries are not entirely hers, but also Anaïs Nin’s—and now, to some extent, also mine.
Back in the French salon, Guerra summarized the story for her captive audience: In 1922 Anaïs Nin travels to Cuba in search of traces of her father. The 19-year old is engaged to Hugh P. Guiler (Hugo), a rich banker, whom she would marry in Cuba, 1923. Although only nine entries were actually written while on the island, after her return to Paris, Anaïs begins to write the diary that will make her famous. Using references from this period, Guerra fills in the blank diary entries, imagining what Anaïs may have felt on arriving to Cuba, her objections to a conventional life as the future wife of a banker, her dreams of becoming a writer in Paris, and her resolve to live driven only by the pull of desire. The novel constitutes a decade of research in archives in Havana, Paris, Barcelona, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles in order to create an apocryphal diary that takes us one step closer to the enigmatic figure of Nin. Guerra found Nin’s home in Havana, her documents, and began a journey into the past that departed from the blank pages in the original diary preserved at the Anaïs Nin Collection (Anaïs Nin Papers, ca. 1910-1977), at UCLA—a collection I myself had visited several times during graduate school, in search for a clue about Nin’s Cuban past.
“En Cuba, yo no existo,” I heard Guerra confess. À Cuba, Je n’existe pas, the interpreter had gotten it right, for once. Moi aussi, je n’existe pas, I thought. I had left Cuba at the age of 9 and wouldn’t return for another 25 years. My return, much like Nin’s in Guerra’s novel, had been characterized by misgivings, gaps, blank pages, and an always-present suspicion that I had left something of great importance behind, in the past. Posar denuda en La Habana, above all else, is about exile and return or, perhaps better said, about that moment whereupon we realize that returning constitutes a kind of exile. My return to Havana had been no different.
What follows is an entry from Guerra’s novel, one of Nin’s letters to Hugo, the lover left in Paris. The italicized passage is Nin’s original. Guerra’s apocryphal continuation of the unfinished letter follows seamlessly behind. Were it not for the difference in font treatment used throughout the novel to distinguish Nin’s words from Guerra’s, we wouldn’t know the difference. I have double-spaced between entries to make the distinction clearer. Included is my English translation of the passage, as well as what I consider a kind of coming home: a continuation (in italics) of the passage in my words:
Lettre à Hugo de retour de la ville
Finca La Generala, Luyanó, Havana
À Hugo:
On m’a transportée au Pays des Fées et j’habite en ce moment un Palais Enchanté! Toute ma tristesse et mon appréhension se sont envolée des que j’ai aperçu La Havane et, tandis que le bateau se rapprochait du port, je me sentais émue bien au-delà des mots par tout ce qui m’arrivait. Tu peux a peine imaginer ce que c’est que de découvrir une ville nouvelle, d’entendre une langue nouvelle, de voir de visages qui sont bien d’une autre race et cependant de reconnaitre que tout cela correspond à une part de soi-même. Tout mon côté espagnol a refait surface et je sais lire dans ces grands yeux noirs des sentiments auxquels je peux répondre et deviner des caractères qui correspondent au mien. Je suis sous le charme magique du Sud et je sens la douce caresse de l’air sur ma peau, la lumière chaude et vibrante du crépuscule et toutes mes pensées sombrent dans une rêveuse indolence…
Je suis exténuée et pourtant, dans vingt minutes, le salon va se remplir d’amis de la maison, de parents, de bruits et de pas. Je vais devoir m’habiller alors que la chaleur entend plutôt me déshabiller. Je préférerais rester à tâtons avec toi, mon Journal en blanc, et te raconter tout ce que je ne peux pas appréhender avec les sens. Je vais descendre et accepter. Ensuite, je dois écrire, il le faut. C’est mon luxe et je ne vais pas le nier même dans cet exile insolite. (Poser nue à La Havana 54)
Carta a Hugo de regreso de la ciudad
Finca “La Generala”, Luyanó, La Habana
A Hugo:
He sido llevada a “La tierra de la belleza”, ahora vivo en un palacio encantado! Toda mi tristeza y aprehensión desaparecieron en el momento en que tuve La Habana ante mis ojos, y mientras el barco se acercaba a la bahía; me estremecía más allá de lo que pueda expresar ante la maravilla de todo lo que me estaba pasando. Puedes difícilmente imaginar lo que es ver una ciudad nueva, oír un idioma nuevo, ver los rostros de toda una raza distinta y aun así reconocerlo como parte integrante de ti. Lo que sea que haya de español en mí ha emergido ahora, y a cada mirada de grandes ojos oscuros percibo sentimientos a los que puedo responder, y caracteres que comprendo tan bien como a mí misma. El hechizo des sur ha caído sobre mí, siento el suave y abrasador aire, y el cálido y vibrante toque de su crepúsculo, y mis pensamientos se aquietan en una indolencia ensoñadora.
Estoy extenuada y, sin embargo, en veinte minutos el salón se llenará de amigos de la casa, de familia, de ruidos y pisadas. Tendré que vestirme mientras que el calor más bien pretende desvestirme. Preferiría quedarme a tientas, contigo, mi Diario en blanco, y contarte todo lo que no puedo aprehender con los sentidos. Bajaré y aceptaré. Luego debo, tengo que escribir. Es mi lujo y no voy a negarlo ni por este destierro insólito. (Posar desnuda en La Habana 40-41)
Letter to Hugo upon returning from the city
Finca La Generala, Luyanó, La Habana
To Hugo:
I have been taken to “The Land of Marvels”; I now live in an enchanted palace! All of my sadness and apprehension disappeared the moment I discovered Havana before my eyes, and while the ship approached its bay; the wonder of everything that was happening to me moved me beyond all possible expression. One may only imagine what it’s like to see a new city, hear a new language, see the faces of an entirely different race and, even then, recognize them as an integral part of you. What there is of Spanish in me has now resurfaced, and in the gaze of big, dark eyes I perceive emotions I, too, share, and a character I understand as well as my own. The enchanting South has overtaken me; I feel the soft and enveloping air, and the warm and vibrant light of its sunset and my thoughts are appeased in dreamlike indolence.
I am fatigued and, even then, in twenty minutes the room will be filled with friends, family, noise and footsteps. I’ll have to dress myself, even as the heat works in earnest to undress me. I would rather stay alone with you, my blank Diary, and tell you all that my senses struggle to take in. I will go down and accept. Later, I must write. It is my luxury and I will not betray it even for this unwonted exile. (My translation) […] Unwonted, in what sense? If I could only confess without the burden of shame that exile has followed me, or I it, for the last nineteen years. I seek but find no trace of my father in these walls. I must write. I want to write. I make the promise to write to everyone I meet and quickly fall in love with, but I know that, once in Paris, Hugo’s time will devour mine and these days of marvel in Havana will be left blank. Yes, my dear Diary, blank—you will be tongue-tied for once. Havana will become my secret, a past that I will not, cannot share—even with you. (My words)
In response to her candid confession of “nonexistence,” Guerra was asked several questions, one of which stands out, even three years later: Did she ever consider leaving Cuba? Yes, but she couldn’t—her mother was ill and she didn’t want to leave. She either said or I very possibly imagined her saying that she had often wondered what her life would have been like had she left. I stared at her in the distance, moved by a similar question always on my mind: what would my life have been like had I stayed? At that moment, for me, there were only three women in the room: Wendy, Anaïs, and I—three women who had, at some point in the course of their life, been faced with the possibility of return. Guerra continued to say (with a twinge of irony in her voice) that perhaps, at the impossibility of escaping the current situation in Cuba, she had—instead of traveling forward in time—traveled (under the guise of Nin) to a time in the past: Cuba in 1922.
Posar desnuda en La Habana is a worthwhile read. Guerra’s voice is sensuous and alluring and Nin’s, well, what can I say—I’m a fan.
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In a conversation with Wendy over e-mail soon after I returned from Paris and she to Cuba in 2011, I expressed my interest in writing the English translation of the novel—unfortunately, time and other such impossibly unavoidable commitments have gotten in the way. Posing Nude in Havana is due for publication sometime in the future—with or without me.