The House of Rumour A Novel

14

art





Although I should feel honoured to find myself described in a recent essay as the first and foremost of the post-utopian Cuban artists, I am duty bound to defer to the greater accomplishments of my contemporaries. Of the many exponents of this beleagued aesthetic that emerged from the Special Period, I could point to the work of Carlos Garaicoa, particularly in his use of architectural models; Kcho’s installation Regatta that caused so much controversy at the Fifth Havana Biennial; and the video performances of Alejandro López. All these artists (and many more) have engaged with themes and forms attributed to me with more intelligence and wit than I could ever muster.

It is not false modesty that seeks to assert a diminution of my talents or reputation but a desire for clarity. My ambitions have always been, quite deliberately, on a smaller scale. My only real desire in artifice was to make models of things. And though critics have insisted that my sculptures reflect a millennial anxiety, the impulse behind them was a futile attempt to achieve a sense of calm. As a child with his toys, I wished to impose an infantile theology on my surroundings and, in imagining absolute control over a miniature world, avoid engagement in the real one. What has been called art was merely my wish to exert this sense of moderation on my surroundings.

But even before my work gained recognition, my friend Nemo Carvajal insisted that I was part of a tradition; that Havana has always nurtured elements of a temperate culture amid its tropical climate. He also suggested that my calling as a miniaturist had a political context. That our little island was like one of the dots in the yin-yang sign surrounded by the capitalist empire, just as the other dot, West Berlin, was engulfed by the communist bloc. This was one of his favourite analogies back when the Cold War was still coldly raging: of a Taoism that determined that neither system was entirely separate from the other, each containing its opposite in diminished form. These dots are jonbar points, he explained to me. When I asked him what he meant, he told me this was a science-fiction term, that a jonbar point is where history is finely balanced and can go in many directions. Apocalyptic, he said with a wistful smile, remembering the Missile Crisis he had lived through in the early 1960s. I remember nodding with anxiety at this, hoping then and always for a focal point that would reduce rather than escalate.

As a child I had been making models out of wood and Styrofoam for as long as I could remember, my most treasured possession being a Chinese plastic kit of a MiG 19 fighter plane (a present for my ninth birthday), but my epiphany came on a school trip to the Havana Marqueta in Miramar. I remember gazing in calm awe at the 1:1,000 scale replica of our native city spread out over 144 square metres, my known universe reduced to dimensions that allowed me a childish omniscience. I mistook a gasp of delight for my own, and turned only when I heard the word that followed. Incredible. It was softly muttered on the lips of Lydia Flores, a tall and intimidating girl with cropped hair and thick eyebrows, standing transfixed beside me. Had I not been in a partial trance myself, I probably would have kept quiet. Lydia scared me (and most of our class for that matter). But her wide-eyed stare seemed benign and beatific. I imagined, quite wrongly, that we were sharing a moment and I whispered some inane praise of the diorama before us.

No, no, she murmured absently. Not down there. Up here. It was then I realised that she was far above it all. Some of our party marvelled at the baroque wedding cake that was the old city; some followed the broad swoop of the Malecón or picked out the prosaic honeycomb of blocks that marked out our own neighbourhood of Playa. Meanwhile, I tracked down a network of streets to find the effigy of the very building we were in, a tiny box in which, I mused, another even more microscopic simulacrum of the city might reside. But, with outstretched arms, Lydia looked beyond, to the painted horizon behind the panorama.

You’re flying? I asked her and her absent smile gave me the courage to carry on asking stupid questions. You want to fly? To be a pilot?

Well, she replied nonchalantly, I’ll have to do that first.

First? I retorted.

If I want to become a cosmonaut of course, she declared, turning to me with those magnificently frightening eyebrows. I’m going to be the first Latin-American woman in space.

It had been the year before, in 1980, that Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, our first cosmonaut, had blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome and spent eight days orbiting the earth. Not only the first Cuban in space but the first from any country in the Western Hemisphere other than the United States, and the first cosmonaut of African descent. A street kid orphaned at thirteen, who had worked as a shoeshine before the Triumph of the Revolution had given him an education and trained him as a pilot, Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez was living proof that almost anything was possible under socialism. We have gone from fiction, announced Fidel Castro, our Maximum Leader, in his celebratory address, because space flights were fiction when many of us who are not so old now were still children.

It was a brave kid who openly challenged Lydia’s ambition, but, even so, she had learnt to detect doubt on the faces in the schoolyard. I decided that it was my mission to have absolute belief in her aspirations, to be ground control to her soaring dreams. And with my encouragement she confided in me. Her plan was to be a straight-A student in science and sport. She would take a degree in physics at the University of Havana, train as a pilot with the Cuban Air Force Academy, then apply to join the Intercosmos Programme at Star City in the Soviet Union. She would have to be a good communist too, of course. My first gesture was to make her a model of the Soyuz 38 that had taken Méndez up beyond the stratosphere. It looked like a huge insect: a spheroid module head with a docking proboscis, cylindrical body and filmy solar panel wings. She took me under her wing, me, the geekiest kid in the class. We constructed balsa-wood gliders and launched home-made rockets. I was entranced by her adventurous obsession with flight and followed doggedly when she suggested that we go investigate the Space-Man.

The Space-Man was one of those legends that gets passed around by kids in any neighbourhood. There were many stories about the eccentric Nemo Carvajal who lived in a run-down Art-Deco house on the corner of Ninth Avenue and Calle 19, the most absurd and intriguing being that he had come from another planet. Lydia and I dared each other to take a closer look at this alien’s habitat, a decrepit shell with its strange curves and ziggurats styled in the 1920s version of the future, a relic of ancient modernism that indeed had the air of a fossilised spacecraft. Through a partly taped-up window we spied his study by the dim glow of bare neon strip lights. Posters of American science-fiction films and lithographs of mystical symbols lined the walls. There was a desk cluttered with papers and arcane electrical equipment, a bookshelf crammed with gaudy paperbacks and, hanging from the ceiling, a silver model of a flying saucer.

Where’s the Space-Man? whispered Lydia.

Here’s the Space-Man, came a soft voice behind us.

We turned and there he was. Tall and thin in a Hawaiian shirt, long grey hair swept back in a ponytail, a gaunt face framed by a goatee beard and green bug-eyed sunglasses. I shrieked the loudest and moved the slowest, and the Space-Man grabbed me by the arm.

What do you want? he demanded, his voice still soft, calm.

With my free arm I pointed at Lydia. She, I began, implicating my companion with a combination of cowardice and ingenuity, she wants to be a cosmonaut.

The Space-Man’s laugh was a deep rumble. So, he went on, so you want to find out how it’s done? He let go of me and started up the front steps. He turned and gave us a casual cock of the head. Come on then.

Nemo Carvajal was a writer of speculative fiction whose work had mostly been banned since the mid-sixties. He had finally been expelled from the Cuban Fantasy and Science-Fiction Union after he distributed a story titled ‘The Hive’ in 1971. Featuring ant-like visitors from another planet addicted to sugar for which they trade for an energy source, it was seen as a vulgar satire both on our Soviet allies and on our economic dependence on them. In his defence Nemo Cavajal insisted that earth had been visited by aliens and claimed to have seen evidence of it himself. He told us that he had often spotted UFOs hovering over the Florida Straits.

It could be the launches from Cape Canaveral, Lydia suggested, re-entry flare from discarded rocket stages. Nemo Carvajal smiled and nodded, obviously happy to have a guest so knowledgeable on space exploration. But he urged us to consider the importance of finding out about extraterrestrial activity, and would do so again during the further visits we made to his house. We soon learnt that he had once been a member of the Revolutionary Workers Party, a Trotskyist group that followed the teachings of the charismatic Argentinean, Juan Posadas. Central to the doctrine of Posadas was the necessity of making contact with UFOs. If such things exist, it was argued, they must be piloted by socialists since only the most advanced form of society would be capable of interstellar flight. These beings should be called upon to intervene and assist in building a world revolution, Nemo Carvajal declared. I was captivated by such cosmic imaginings but Lydia grew cautious. The Posadists were a prohibited organisation, denounced by the Maximum Leader at the Tricontinental Congress of 1966 as a pestilential influence. Lydia had joined the Union of Communist Youth and hoped to be accepted by the Young Pioneers Air Cadet Force. She didn’t want any association with subversive elements to get in the way of her application. Eventually I went to see Nemo Carvajal on my own.

Counter-revolutionary? he retorted indignantly when I explained the reason for my solitary presence. They tell her that I’m a counter-revolutionary? The Revolutionary Workers Party called for an attack on Guantánamo, to get rid of the Yankees for good! He shrugged and bemoaned how the Stalinists had betrayed the Revolution. I don’t think he ever felt betrayed by Lydia, though. He continued to enquire after her, curious about her ambitions for space travel. And she would ask after the Space-Man too, on the now much less regular occasions that I would see her.

So it was Nemo Carvajal who inspired in me the determination to become an artist. Without him I might still have come across this perfect alibi for my unsociable obsession, but he certainly gave it form. Artists and cosmonauts, he insisted, both seek to conquer deep space. He sought to tutor me, finding Spanish translations of the classic science fiction of H.G. Wells and Arthur C. Clarke, and citing the work of Alejo Carpentier and Jorge Luis Borges as proof that fantasy was at the heart of the Latin-American literary tradition. But the imagination is the biggest threat to the state, he told me. The state wants a monopoly on utopia; it cannot accept any competition in creating new worlds. And it demands an earthbound idealism. He quoted Carpentier at me: by creating the marvellous at all costs, the thaumaturgists become bureaucrats.

Thaumaturgists? I asked, not knowing the word.

Magicians, he replied.

You believe in magic? I demanded incredulously.

No more than I believe in realism, he declared with a sigh.

But it was clear that it would be the plastic arts, not literature, that would be the discipline I would follow. I had already shown great interest in the silver model that hung from his ceiling, a trophy of a flying saucer film he had worked on when he had lived in California in the forties and fifties. And when I told him about the moment I had looked at the Havana Marqueta and imagined a model within the model, he nodded sagely and went to his bookshelf. The abyss, he muttered, yes, yes, the abyss. He found a passage in an essay by Borges titled Partial Magic in the Quixote that made reference to the mapmaker Josiah Royce, and he read it out to me. I remember the vertiginous sense of recursion, of continuous regression, of echoes as he spoke, quoting a writer quoting another writer, and so on. Let us imagine that a portion of England has been levelled off perfectly, he droned. And on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect: there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain the map of the map, and so on to infinity.

By the late 1980s there seemed a world of possibilities for Lydia and me. I had started studying sculpture at the Juan Pablo Duarte Elementary College of Art. Lydia was taking her degree in physics at Havana University and had been accepted by the School of Military Aviation at San Julián. The Mir space station became operational, the first consistently inhabited, long-term research base in orbit, offering even wider opportunities for the participation of guest cosmonauts from countries friendly to the Soviet Union. But everything was about to change.

The crisis in Russia and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc at the end of the decade was greeted first with indignation, then with bafflement by most of us in Cuba. Nemo Carvajal was at first enthusiastic, declaring that Stalinism was being overturned and a true revolution was taking place. He got particularly excited when, in an apparently overzealous moment of glasnost, the Soviet news agency TASS authorised a report of an alien spacecraft landing in the town of Voronezh in October 1989. However, his great Posadist expectations were never substantiated. Then the Soviet Union cancelled its economic obligations to Cuba, the Maximum Leader announced the Special Period in a Time of Peace, the shortages and power cuts began, and before long Nemo Carvajal became as gloomy as the rest of us.

It was hardest for Lydia; just at the moment that she was due to take her first pilot exams, all flight training was suspended owing to fuel scarcity. But my world of symbols, of shadows and representation, was strangely enriched by our new circumstances. Perhaps there was a desire to find hidden meanings in an age of uncertainty, a desire for some kind of divination. Maybe the sense of artistic freedom was merely a mirage allowed by the authorities in a time of drought. There was certainly a surge of interest in Cuban art from the outside world during this period but we did not know the reason for this curiosity. More than anyone, I was utterly unconscious of what can now be seen as trends or greater influences, but that is what made my work possible.

I had my first major show in the winter of 1991, as part of the Fourth Havana Biennial: a series of sculptures, assemblages made from found objects glued or welded together to form model spacecraft, prototypes of a deranged imagination, effigies of a lost futurism. They were constructed in a bricolage of Soviet memorabilia, revolutionary propaganda, Catholic iconography and Santería fetishes. A tail fin of a 1950s Chevrolet jutted out from one like the sleek wing of a jet fighter. It is entirely possible that the phrase ‘post-utopian’ was first used to describe this exhibition, a term that later came to describe a whole movement of Cuban art, but I had then no awareness of such a concept. I merely carved out these clumsily graven images from the transcendent hope of Lydia Flores and the mad dreams of Nemo Carvajal.

The exhibitions of the Biennial were taken down just as the great edifice of the USSR was finally being dismantled. For Lydia, bemused by the meagre scale of my vision, a more pertinent symbol was the fate of Sergei Krikalev, the remaining member of the last Soviet mission to Mir, marooned in orbit as the last citizen of the communist motherland. He would re-enter the atmosphere to a newly fractured earth, to a federation of independent states. He was the first interplanetary traveller, insisted Nemo Carvajal; he has voyaged through space from one absurd world to another.

Yet as so many fortunes seemed in decline, mine was in the ascendant. I had my first success. The renowned Catalan art dealer Gonçal Figueras bought my entire show and invited me to exhibit it in Barcelona the following spring. And so it was I, not Lydia, who ended up taking their first flight. I arrived in Barcelona to find the city in a great burst of renewal; so much was being built and renovated for the Olympics they were hosting that summer. Perhaps it is a city under constant construction, the great unfinished Cathedral of the Sacred Family its symbol, with ballistic spires poking up through scaffolding like stone rockets pointing at heaven.

On Nemo Carvajal’s instructions I visited the replica of Narcís Monturiol’s nineteenth-century submarine on display in Barcelona harbour. He was the first post-utopian, Nemo assured me. Having given up on experiments in communal living, Monturiol had turned to technological dreams and built strange prototypes for underwater travel. The model looked like some artefact of early science fiction. Nemo Carvajal said that Monturiol had inspired a motto that he and an American writer had once used: ‘If you can’t change the world, build a spaceship.’

I loved walking around the city. I felt sophisticated, cosmopolitan. But for all its triumphs of architecture, nothing in Barcelona inspired me as much as what I found in the concourse of the Estació de França.

Within the vaulted vestibule of that railway terminus, enshrined in a perspex box, a delicately crafted model of the station was on display like a holy relic. This, in itself, would have delighted me, but imagine my strange joy when I spied a model of the model encased within it. Here was a demonstration of infinite recursion as foretold by Borges, himself the consummate miniaturist. Thousands of miles from home, feeling lost and weightless, I suddenly found a sense of gravity and depth that offered refuge. A moment of calm in a turbulent world, the eye of the storm, the dot in the yin-yang sign. I knew now why I found such solace in models: though our experience of time and space is terrifyingly finite, that which we inhabit can yet be divided and subdivided continually into eternity. Whatever strange meanings might be rendered to others, my work could hold this simple purpose. It could be a place I could control.

My show in Barcelona was heralded a success and seen as an important international debut. Gonçal Figueras told me that if I wanted to stay he could sponsor my application for residence in Spain. Some even suggested that I seek political asylum, though as I had no convictions of that sort, this suggestion seemed ridiculous to me. Besides, I was keen to get back to Havana. I missed my family. I missed Lydia and Nemo Carvajal. But my time away ill prepared me for how hard things had become at home.

Living on short rations, everyone had learnt to hustle in some way. Even artists. I was approached by fellow practitioners to lobby the Cultural Property Fund, the centralised body that controlled the international sales of our work. They sold us for dollars and paid us in pesos (now virtually worthless) and some people hoped to get a better cut of the hard currency. The blackouts over Havana rendered the firmament above ripe with starlight and one could even make out the odd blink of a satellite passing overhead, which gave no comfort to Lydia Flores. Even Nemo Carvajal seemed to have given up hope in watching the skies. Perhaps they will never come, he murmured darkly, perhaps we are all alone in the galaxy.

I cultivated an air of indifference to the changing circumstances by withdrawing into my work but I feared for Lydia. Now that she had been betrayed by the optimism of the past, I felt that all her hopes and expectations were turning to bitterness. She had given up her studies and had left or been expelled from the Air Force Academy. I assumed that she would be greatly disappointed when, in April 1993, Ellen Ochoa became the first Hispanic woman in space on the NASA space shuttle Discovery. But my unworldly obliviousness made me inattentive to other changes that were happening in her life.

She had left home and was living with another girl in a run-down apartment overlooking Beach 16 in Miramar. Her hair had grown and a hydra of light-brown ringlets sprouted from her crown. Lydia was no longer the surly tomboy I once knew. Now she was a provocatively attractive young woman who wore expensive American street-wear. Make-up, even. The flat she shared was used for illegal parties and I dreaded that she, like so many others in those desperate times, had turned to prostitution. But when I reluctantly went along one night I found that, though almost all the guests were men, they were really interested only in each other. I saw as well, for the first time, open displays of close affection between Lydia and her flatmate Eva. The revelation that she was homosexual came like a distant memory: I must have suspected it somehow. But I felt a jealousy that was almost metaphysical: unconfined by any person or persons but rather directed at destiny. I hadn’t realised until then just how much in love with her I really was.

We are the antisocial elements seeking our own Earthly Paradise, she announced, quoting a comment made by the Maximum Leader. I tried my best to be nonchalant, to assume the air of the bohemian artist. But I was short of breath; the party was crowded and hot. I found myself amid a group of men doing synchronised dance moves, a sign language incomprehensible to me. The atmosphere was intimate and suffocating. I left early and wandered down to the shore to feel the sea crash against the concrete and coral of Beach 16.

Lydia began hanging out with Nemo Carvajal once more. They listened to Sun Ra records together and composed samizdat leaflets for an anarchist organisation. Calling itself the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, it declared its intent of establishing a planetary network to end the monopoly of corporations, governments and the military over travel in space. They entered into a playful conspiracy that somewhat excluded me. I have always found it hard to understand humour, though people constantly seem to see elements of it in my work. I couldn’t help feeling that the laughter they shared so easily mocked me in some way. And I was so absorbed with my sculpture at this time, creating a number of intricately nested wooden cabinets sometimes referred to (incorrectly) as my Chinese Box series, that I didn’t see much of either of them for a while. I concluded that Lydia, like me, was finding consolation in the imagination and that this led her to engage with the insane fantasies of Nemo Carvajal. But any thoughts I might have had that she had lost her spirit for real adventure were to be proved quite wrong.

It was clear by the middle of 1994 that the Special Period had reached crisis point. As our economy collapsed in on itself and the US blockade was tightened, ordinary people in Cuba were driven to desperation. It was the summer of the balseros, the rafters who used makeshift vessels in an attempt to cross the perilous straits to Key West or Florida to claim asylum. It was hardly a new phenomenon, but the number of those willing to take the risk to get to America that year swelled to tens of thousands. Even I could not distance myself from a growing sense of panic and confusion in the air. Ferries and tugboats were regularly hijacked from Havana harbour, only to be recaptured or sunk by our National Coast Guard. In August there were riots on the streets; the Maximum Leader himself appeared at a disturbance on the Malecón to try to restore order. It was here that Fidel made his announcement, clearly to force the Americans to change their policy, which restricted official immigration while welcoming illegal refugees. He declared that those who wanted to leave could do so and commanded the Coast Guard to stand down. In these circumstances, he said with a brilliant and ruthless rhetoric, we can no longer continue to guard the borders of the United States.

The fact that rafts were now allowed to be launched openly, and the sure knowledge that this permission would not last forever, generated a clamour of activity. Crowds gathered to cheer on the balseros in an absurd carnival. Few could hope to survive a voyage across perilous and shark-infested waters and I was determined not to be witness to this cruel spectacle. Until I learnt that Lydia was one of the participants. I found her on Beach 16, already assembling her craft on one of the concrete walkways. I did all I could to try to persuade her not to go but Lydia was, as always, absolutely determined in her mission. She wavered for only a moment, when I asked her about Eva. She’s left me, she said, turning from her task to look at me with a terrible sadness in her eyes. I knew then that her heart had been broken too many times and that there was nothing I could do. She then quickly and very deliberately brightened her mood. Listen, she told me, when Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman cosmonaut, went up in Vostok 6, she travelled thousands of miles into space, orbiting the earth forty-eight times. Key West is only ninety miles away.

She had built a wooden frame with stabilisers made from plastic containers lashed around a huge Russian tractor inner tube and had improvised an outboard motor from a Ukrainian lawnmower engine. Good old Soviet technology, she commented wryly. I thought of what Nemo had said about Narcís Monturiol. Lydia certainly planned her journey carefully. She had rations of water, bread and salted coffee to restore lost sodium. Her vessel carried an extra tyre and a pump, a flashlight and a compass; there was a canopy to shield her from the sun and to collect rainwater. I couldn’t bring myself to help her but I found it intolerable simply to stand there and watch. Before I knew what I was doing, I had started to fashion something from odd bits of junk that were strewn everywhere from the preparations of the balseros. I think Lydia noticed before I did that I was making a model of her raft. She smiled and shook her head slowly.

When other rafters and their onlookers noticed what I was doing, several of them asked me if I could do the same for them. I obliged, knowing instinctively that these miniatures could somehow be endowed with the power of a fetish, to give a necessary sense of luck to their originals. Where I didn’t have time to create objects, I hastily drew sketches or made notes, with the urgency that there might be some spiritual record of this hapless armada. I was astonished by the creative ingenuity of the balseros with their constructions of rubber, plywood, plastic and aluminium. Many of the rafts had been given names: Yemayá, La Esperanza, Tio B, Santa Maria, and so on. Lydia named hers Vostok 94 in honour of Valentina Tereshkova, with the bitter irony that acknowledged this would be her own first journey into outer space. Nemesio Carvajal and I watched her launch on the following dawn, her little spacecraft cresting the waves as it headed towards another world.

The Maximum Leader’s gamble worked: the Yankees could not cope with an increasing flood of refugees. In a matter of weeks the American president ended the automatic right of entry for Cubans picked up at sea (they were taken instead to the US Navy base in Guantánamo) and an annual quota of twenty thousand visas was agreed for those who wished to apply for legal migration. Since a criterion for applications was unlikely ever to be agreed between the two countries, this was to be done by lottery. The Cuban Coast Guard went back on duty and the sad and euphoric farewell parties on the beaches came to an end. To this day no one knows how many thousands died that summer. And we had no idea whether Lydia had made it or not.

I gave away some of my models of the rafts, but more often than not people wanted me to keep them with the others I had made, as part of a collection. Everyone staggered back to some kind of stability with a sense that there had been a ritual release of discontent, and that maybe we had gone through the worst of the Special Period. But it was a topsy-turvy world compared to the one I had grown up in. People now relied on the black market, hard currency sent by families abroad and the now growing tourist industry. Those who had once held important jobs found that they could make more money doing the most menial tasks in hotels and restaurants where they might get dollar tips.

Nemo Carvajal told me a joke that autumn that I did understand. Two Cuban men are sitting on a porch. I hear your daughter is seeing a waiter, says one. I’m afraid he’s only a doctor, the other replies.

Even the Maximum Leader seemed cast adrift, lost in space. Before, we were described as a satellite of the Soviet Union, he declared at a press conference. Today we could be described as a solitary star, like the star of our own flag with its own light, but nobody could say we were a satellite. Now we could be told that we are nostalgic.

And my own situation seemed ridiculous. I was hardly known in my own country, yet I was an artist with an international reputation. My work sold abroad for high prices, converted into a meagre peso allowance by the Cultural Property Fund. But I was happy enough with the moderate living I could make, hoping that my vocation as a sculptor could render some stability to my life. Then I won the lottery.

Nemo Carvajal laughed out loud when I told him the news. It had been he who had persuaded me to put my name forward in the raffle for American visas. The Lottery in Babylon! he exclaimed, naming the Borges story where all state activities, punishments as well as rewards, are dictated by a game of chance. I wasn’t sure whether or not to accept this peculiar act of fortune but he urged me to do so. A marvellous fantasy, he said; it proves that all is speculation. Then he caught my eye and in a more sombre tone whispered: you must go, you must find Lydia. And I knew he was right. It would mean saying goodbye to my family, but it also meant that I would be able to support them properly. When Nemo came to say goodbye he had a package with him. It was a manuscript that he wanted me to take to the United States. On the wrapping was the name Larry Zagorski and a Los Angeles address. I asked him about America and the time he had spent there but he did not have much to tell me. It’s a failed state, he sighed, like all states. Go. I will stay here. My friends, he murmured, his eyes rolling skyward, they know where to find me.

I arrived in Miami an alien – a frightening identity but a liberating one. It forced me out of introspection. I now had a sense of purpose and I needed to connect. I got in touch with the Transit Center for Cuban Refugees and other exile organisations. None had any record of Lydia Flores. I consoled myself that the documentation of those who had survived or had been lost was as yet incomplete and that, after all, she could be in Guantánamo. Hope and fear are very close companions. My new circumstances filled me with a tremendous energy and with that I went to work.

Using the many contacts I had accumulated in the art world, I found a studio and a gallery space more than willing to present my planned exhibition. I duplicated from memory all the models of the rafts I had made, adding sketches, notes, fragments of testimony. I put it all together quickly; my own urgency and an acceleration of outside interest in what I was doing gave the work momentum. The central piece was a reconstruction of Lydia’s Vostok 94. But this was not to scale. For once I wanted to recreate the exact dimensions of my subject. Life-size, I found myself muttering, as if in prayer.

The show generated an immense amount of publicity, featuring in current affairs and opinion columns as well as in reviews and articles on cultural criticism. It became a talking point for debates on the function of art and on the discourse in international relations in a new world order. More importantly it became a place of contact and an information exchange for the recent Cuban exiles. But I was quietly determined not to become any kind of spokesperson. I relied on Tommy Bernstein, the affable, red-haired gallerist who so diligently curated my installation, to deal with the media coverage and requests for interviews. His Spanish was as rudimentary as my English but I found him easy to get along with and was relieved to have him as my protector.

I started to float in a kind of euphoric exhaustion. I found it hard to sleep. In the early hours, ghosts of the lost balseros would visit me, chanting their names, their stories, their innumerable tragedies. By day all the fresh opportunities that were now open to me as a successful artist, of course, offered no solace or peace of mind. The one personal outcome that I had sought from my exhibition remained elusive.

Then late one evening I received a frantic phone call from Tommy Bernstein. I was to meet him the next day at an address north of Miami Beach. His voice was agitated and I found it hard to follow all that he was saying, but he mentioned Lydia and Vostok 94. Just one phrase stuck in my mind and reverberated with the shock of hope. I’ve found her, he told me.

That night Lydia Flores came to me in a dream. It was just her voice coming through the airwaves, crackling with deep-space static carrying a simple message: I’ve made it, don’t worry, I’ve made it.

Tommy Bernstein was waiting for me as I arrived at a gas station at Biscayne Point, our designated rendezvous. He smiled at me as I walked across the oil-stained forecourt, and I wondered what strange miracle of survival had brought me here. But when I asked him where Lydia was, his expression slackened and I realised there had been a terrible misunderstanding. I had learnt that English does not usually use gender in the naming of inanimate objects, but I was hopelessly ignorant of some notable exceptions: that ships and seagoing vessels are always given the feminine article. When he had said: I’ve found her, he didn’t mean Lydia but her raft, easily identifiable from the duplicate of it I had made. And there she was, the real Vostok 94, lying outside the gas station restroom, having been found washed up on the shore earlier that week.

After months of waiting with no word, the discovery of Lydia’s craft was the closest I’d get to confirmation that she had been lost. I knew from conversations I’d had with members of the US Coast Guard that, after any rescue at sea, rafts would be burnt or sunk to avoid them becoming navigation hazards or false targets for other ships or helicopters. And in my delirious grief I felt that the meaning of my dream of Lydia that night was that she had made it in some other way. Into the outer space she had always longed for. I cannot think of her anywhere else but up there, somewhere in orbit above me.

I had to leave Miami and decided to give up my US citizenship. But I could not face going back to Havana. Besides the desperate sadness I felt, I found myself constantly being used in an argument I had no part of. Some claimed me in their attack on the iniquities of the Cuban Revolution, others to blame American imperialism and its economic blockade. I grew tired of insisting that I was a moderate. But I could no longer diminish the world with my art. My work had become a memorial and the number of those it commemorated continued to increase. I felt a growing sense of responsibility that I could not bear. I sought asylum from myself.

So I accepted the long-standing invitation of Gonçal Figueras and went to stay in Barcelona. And this is where I live now. I’ve managed to find some comfort in my work here, though nowadays it tends towards the abstract, despite the conceptual analysis that critics persist in applying to it. I try not to give in to disillusionment but to find the logical beauty of simple objects. But there are times when I feel completely alienated from the world and can no longer find any refuge in it.

Only last week I found myself in the Estació de França, on my way to Paris by train (I rarely fly now if I can help it). Passing through the ticket hall, I noticed that the model of the station was missing. I’d scarcely thought about the thing over the years. The glimmer of inspiration I had once felt before it had left little mark on my conscious memory, though it must have been deeply ingrained on my instincts. A brief regret for its absence gave way to something like relief: that I would be spared the inevitable disappointment when revisiting a moment of illumination. But then as I made my way to the train, I realised with dread that the maquette had been moved. It now stood near the entrance to the platforms and I could not stop myself looking once more into this miniscule abyss, though I knew that everything would be out of joint. The model of the model within the model was now in the wrong place. It is the carelessness of dislocation that so disturbs me and I am overcome by an incomprehensible weariness. No one knows (no one can know) the endless regression of loss and displacement.