Echoes of Havana
“All noises swell to form landscapes.”
—Walter Benjamin, On Hashish
HAVANA MORNINGS seep into my bedroom. There are no glass panes on my windows and the poorly fitted wooden shutters allow the sounds of the city to permeate my half-sleep. The streets come to me, impatient. I am equally impatient with their intrusion. Montreal still inhabits me, and there sleep is sacred, the interior impenetrable to other people’s noise. In fortifying against the cold of winter we also fortify against sound. But here the heat of September is stifling, and the hum of the fan only contributes to the sounds that populate the streets. Shouting, laughing, singing, blaring music from a slow-moving car, a bicycle taxi with no passengers. In its passing the music swells and begins to fade in time to the city. The next ambulant stereo approaches, weaving reggaeton with salsa, son, and the distant sound of a barking dog. People call out: women from balcony to balcony, men from the street corner in the direction of a pretty girl, a woman in a red dress on a humming scooter. She clicks her tongue in annoyance. Wooden wheels rumble down the uneven pavement: a fruit cart is overtaken by hungry customers in the middle of an intersection, blocking traffic in all directions and eliciting outbursts of profanity, witty retorts drowned out by honking horns.
Queues are an important part of Havana street life. In Montreal one is accustomed to immediacy and efficiency. Buses run on a strict schedule; banks have enough tellers and markets enough vendors that there is no need to settle in, make eye before its doors open, eager to claim this month’s goods, subsidized by the ration book, in use since shortly after the Revolution. By 10 A.M. the line is halfway down the block. Workers joke with one another as they slice ham, pour cooking oil, tear open boxes, calling out product names and weights with every order. The noise coming from within provides a stark contrast to the quiet reflection of the people forming the queue. Food is not to be taken lightly and is shrouded in silence; abundance fosters thoughts of a time of scarcity when the country verged on famine: the unspeakable horror of the euphemistically named “ or “Special Period,” the years of economic crisis following the fall of the Soviet Union. People run over their checklists, the chores to be completed that day. A mother needs rice and beans for dinner, soy yogurt for the children’s breakfast. Laundry has piled up because she’s run out of soap. As the heat of the afternoon approaches she becomes impatient and shouts for the workers to hurry up, creating a domino effect of exclamations of discontent down the line.
