La Reparadora

I remember the Grand Moment with so much precision that it feels made-up. How can I recall dust behind a sofa in the neighbors’ apartment? I don’t know, but I do. Come, let me show you. It happened during one of Havana’s interminable Sunday evenings, in that especially tedious hour when the neighborhood kids are all bathing or doing homework or serving punishment for having gotten caught being rascals.

I was on the gritty floor of Apt 1C, which belonged, since the early sixties when apartments were handed out pell-mell, to a pair of sisters who were now in their seventies, or Cuban-eighties (folks age faster in a communist country, you may understand). Mercy y Asunción, always a compound, always in that order, though I do believe Asunción was the first-born. She was the sort of woman who teased her hair with a very fine comb every day and on weekends. A ritual of meticulous chafing and pulling to achieve hair volume that would be enjoyed by few— she never got past the living room, and the bathroom mirror had broken before my family moved into the building. Asunción had a collection of firebird lipsticks for over-painting that left a tingle on your forehead when you leaned in for the hello kiss. 

Mercy was not much of a kisser. I thought she kissed me once, then realized she was whispering get out of my house it’s been four hours in a volume that Asunción wouldn’t detect. Mercy asked for what she wanted, for sure. But in communism a determined woman (even one clever about volume) isn’t guaranteed results. Mercy mumbled what she wanted often, as if to tell herself this is not the way things should be for eightysomehting year olds. Before my eleventh birthday, she would stick her head in the oven and call it quits, her way, while Asunción napped in their teal bedroom. But this was way before then, when I still watched toons on her floor (no unbathed children allowed on Mercy’s sofa though the floor was a dust storm).

There were two channels on Cuban TV at the time. One ran a ticker of State accomplishments and reruns of Fidel’s speeches; the other ran, between six and seven, reruns of a few dozen toons and music videos. TV reruns were decidedly less interesting than overhearing adult conversations (if you could crack a fancy word here and there, you could spin out the knotty themes and have an honest-to-goodness epiphany on the floor) but on this dull evening, right about 6 o’clock, Asunción was in bed with some fatigue and Mercy kept her mumblings low. The house murmured sounds of old age: snoring, dragging, grunts and the occasional fallen item. It was dreamy like a field full of crickets. Then, a whistle came from the TV box. Then, a familiar piano riff. I had listened to this song before. Dozens of times, surely. But this time, I heard it.

The song is called “El Reparador de Sueños,” penned by who would become my favorite poet-songwriter but that doesn’t matter. It didn’t at the time. The song is about a little elf who repairs the world. Look, see for yourself, everything’s on YouTube these days. The animation is not particularly imaginative, and for context, the Reparador smashes/punctures would-be breeding grounds for dengue-carrying mosquitoes. The video is half inspiration to not hit your dog with a bat, half public service announcement. So how, exactly, did it contain my Grand Moment? Because of one sentence.

There is a stanza in the song that set me on fire, “Siempre, llega hasta el salón principal donde está el motor que mueve la luz”. 

I will not attempt to translate that because it would be like placing a soul, carefully, into a cadaver. Just know that it touched me profoundly, this idea of a motor que mueve la luz. I heard it that day on that floor for the first time.

Until this moment by the TV box, I had been an organism of inputs and outputs: things happen out there, you gather the bits and formulate a response in here… Boom! Retort. Up until this evening, when I felt the input within. There was no in and out, or out was in, or who knows I was just a dumb kid hiding away in Apt IC avoiding my evening shower.  Or— what I said about the language of the heart, remember? The instant you hear it you can speak it. I heard my heart speak. It was quiet epiphany on the floor.

I slept very little that evening. I dodged the shower in the end, and was sticky with dirt (wiggling powdery toes was a prerequisite for a good night’s sleep, as much as I hated baths) but it was my head this time, wiggling and waggling with thoughts-on-fire. Look, I was about eight, but this is Cuban-eight plus numerous floor epiphanies, which comes out to fifteen, at least. I had heard too much. I had seen too much. There was too much life condensed in small areas in those days. Come to think of it, the radius of my life was limited to the single block my building was on. That block contained it all: apartments for living and loitering, bodega for the hard bread, derelict corner building for adventures, abandoned construction project for malfeasance, santería house for spying, newlywed house for spying, Karl Marx theater for lucky weekends, street for running, deserted synagogue with the big columns for children-of-the-block official gatherings (my brother was still an infant). What I mean to say is that a child living on this block is not the kind who waggles at night with thoughts of the Reparador. This was not the kind of place that bred such children. And yet, the experience of that evening and the previous circles ‘round and ‘round and ‘round the block summed up to one word. Me.

It’s going to be me. I’m going to become La Reparadora, I finally said and fell asleep.

Ridiculous ideas tend to fade by morning, but I remember the mirror expanding as I spit out the allotted smidgen of toothpaste. I could be it why not; I could walk to Apt 1C right now, right before school, and right into the teal bedroom, and see Asunción with her little comb and Mercy not wanting to see people, and I’d smooch the crap out of her (Mercy). Two kisses. Boom!

I don’t remember if I did it. I may have, but the bathroom vision of doing it was so vivid that I may be remembering that. Let’s say I did, because it would have been my first official act as Reparadora. And my last.

My classroom (is it at or in?) (my English is still not what it could be) Arturo Montori Elementary School, on the converse side of the block, started every Monday morning with The Weekend Updates. Our teacher, Violeta (who we called, plainly, Violeta) loved funny stories of things other adults did, and she loved in-class smoking interludes. She sat by the open window, sucking and smiling, as kids revealed their families’ hilarious difficulties/shortages/improvisations (it resolves nothing, the complacency of humor, but it is an indispensable skill for living in Cuba). “What else, who else!” shouted Violeta from the window. Her cigarette had fumes for one more anecdote. I rocketed my hand with the conviction of a right answer. Me. 

“You know that song ‘El Reparador de Sueños’” asked a younger voice within “I’m going to be that. With my life. Work.” There was a contained silence as everyone waited for humor (how we dealt with impossible things) but I nodded and straightened my spine. Retort: a discharge of voices, disorganized, flying in different angles, tones, pitches, teeth, ugly buck teeth all over the room. Violeta walked through the clamor and it came to an end. She reached the smack-middle of the room where my desk was and spoke right into my nostrils. “That’s not a profession.”

Actually, I’m lying; she didn’t say that (in translation) at all. This was post-Soviet Bloc Havana— teachers smoked by the window if they wanted to, and threw erasers full of chalk at your head if they were fed up with your bullshit. She said, actually, ven aca mija tu seras monga o anormal como tu vas a decir esa barbaridad con el chucho que hay aqui? Nevermind the specifics, just know that el chucho was El Chucho, a legalized schoolyard bullying that only the most loving teachers helped you avert. Violeta loved me a great deal (my mother gave her our quota of cigarettes since my stepfather had stopped smoking) and she engaged me in bogus work during recess that whole week.

Something about being Cuban-eight or six or four: you will invite formidable torment if you come off as naive (we were being socialized for an adulthood of survivalism, after all). Something about being Cuban-period: you don’t up and make a profession. This will have been thought out for you, taking into account test scores, not predilections. You certainly don’t materialize Sunday evening cartoons, for godssake.

I snuffed out the idea in that moment, under Violeta’s carbon-pepper breath. Still, I hoped that one day another child would see the video and decide to do it. It was my last thought about it.

Of course, one cannot place a hope like that outside one’s own heart. I didn’t kill my Reparadora, I just placed her back inside the magenta flower which closed like a tiny fist (if you saw the video this makes more sense). Nothing that we dream ever goes away. Nothing.

I couldn’t condense what has happened to me-and-the-dream in the decades since. My days are not summarize-able because I would have to include what has been relevant to the dream, and I’d have to leave out what’s been extraneous. What if all of my life has been relevant to this silly dream? What if each one of my days has been a pair of eyes looking back at this morning?

I now know that this is my most vital story. The loss of this dream and my eventual return to it IS what it means to be me, living this life, in this dazzling world.