To Be So in Love with Life
A Lesson From the Plaza
By Amara Amaryah
10 February 2020
I fell in love about eight times in Havana, give or take. I likely stopped counting after the third day, perhaps after realising that everyone was doing it. Children played improvised baseball in the trash-lined streets like their lives depended on it, the cool of Tuesday nights were for partying with rum-drunk neighbours, reggaeton was made to be spilled out from every second taxi and no-one was ever too tired to dance when the music blended into the evening air and it is as if to say, here, we are so heavy with love that we hang over balconies shouting lyrics, sharing jokes and yes, we laugh until we are emptied. Life, I have learnt, is truly intended to be a daily ritual of falling in love. To be so in love with life and all of its people and avenues and moments, that you wake expecting the romance at some point before sunset. Without having had the language to say so, this is why I used the last of my annual leave days to travel solo to Havana for my 24th birthday. I wanted to see what life would give me if I, stranger and dreamer, offered myself up so expectantly.
On my final day as a 23 year old, I met Eduardo in the plaza. Eduardo walks with a bounce too big for his body, stays sweat-less while wearing a coat in Caribbean heat and sings in your direction before actually introducing himself. After wandering around Centro habana and meeting more people than I had expected to, I chose la plaza José Martí to host me as I sat down to be alone for what felt like the first time in the day. Eduardo’s song lulls to a hum, just low enough to ask me ‘where in the world are you travelling from?’. When I say that I am travelling from the UK his eyes suggest quiet interest, more so when I share that I am actually Jamaican. Eduardo, now deciding that I should call him Ed, takes a seat beside me. I practically came here to let my Spanish surprise me and others and Ed is musical, maybe even theatrical, in his melodic Cuban-Spanish but entirely whimsical in English, and proud of it. He is also an elder, a reasonably charismatic one at that, so after responding to each other in our preferred languages, Ed wins. He asks me in my language, “Do you know much about the relationship that Cuba and Jamaica had?”. I share the little that I had heard. He tells me more about Jamaicans coming to Cuba to work, how the relationship once was between the islands and how many of them stayed here in Cuba. He even goes on to discuss the migration of Japanese people in Cuba and how that international relationship played out. Sometimes he stops his stories to tell his friends, deep in discussion about dominoes, or baseball, to keep it down so we can speak. Other times he interrupts his own stories to agree or disagree with a particular point or companion. There is something so delicate about this version of life, this meeting of friends to shout at each other over a board of dominoes, unphased by time and unlikely to tire of returning tomorrow to live this same slow way together.
“What kind of music do you listen to in England?”, his smile whips out of his mouth as fast as his question. Ed is a small and quiet looking man and yet his huge smile doesn’t look out of place. His dark skin glistens and ripples when he smiles and his grey-blue eyes almost disappear into his face. Everything he does, whether walking in his dancey way or smiling at you or inviting you to share your music taste, is intended just for you, so that you might laugh or love in this moment. I rack my brain for something he might know. After my silence is filled with a dominoes related victory shout, I finally remember; ‘Reggae’, and now we’re both smiling. After reeling off the reggae artists I grew up listening to, one of Ed’s friends joins the conversation and lets me know that he also loves reggae, specifically romantic reggae, but he can’t remember the name of the artist he loves most. My upbringing prompts me to immediately say Gregory Isaacs: it’s an immediate no. I then offer Beres Hammond but he doesn’t recognise this name either. We toss around names and Ed and I even move on to talk about salsa music until eventually, and without reintroducton, we hear ‘Gregori Eesics!’ and I smile out a laugh, let him enjoy the quiet surge of a memory rushing back and, of course, I don’t correct him.
I ask Ed what type of music he likes and he tells me proudly that there are many artists but none are worth mentioning before Marc Anthony. This name only pulls a half-smile out of me and Ed notices. “What, you don’t listen to Marc Anthony? You mean you don’t know him?” I smile and that is my way of saying I had never listened to his music before. Ed speaks fast and pulls out his phone to play me his discography right here in this evening heat. So we sit there, listening to Marc Anthony play tinny from a mobile phone in the middle of the plaza. Ed sings along to the chorus and harmonises ecstatically at random points of the song. While we listen, people walk past playing reggaeton and the two songs fuse for a few seconds until it is just us again and then a group of young cubans walk past and their voices mingle with the dominoes group’s deep, erupting laughter and then quiet and then it is the birds in the palm trees singing over us until the Havana sunset fills the space with gold and the entire plaza is alight with sun and verse. Ed flicks through his phone for the next song, says that it is better if I listen through headphones so I can feel the rhythm more. I take one headphone and he takes the other. Ed checks in a few times to ask if I like the song, I nod and sometimes hum where I can catch on but in truth I am incredibly distracted. I know now that this is how fullness behaves. It is impossible, useless to hum away happiness when it has caught you, as if for the first new time, staring at it.
Five tracks later, and a rewind of his favourite, Ed says that he has to leave. He has a hospital appointment and, despite the doubt that only old friends can casually issue, he is adamant that he won’t be late. Later in the week, I will learn of the old-world importance that punctuality still plays in cuban livelihood and how therefore, I might never make it here. He takes a few swigs from what seemed like a once Pepto Bismol bottle filled now with water and makes his song-filled exit.
I think of how fortunate I find myself. To be alone and not really alone, sharing international, intergenerational discussions about history, reggae-infused salsa and memory. How sacred it is to have a stranger share time and music with me. How precious it all turned out to be. Without spending any money, without checking the time, without telling the internet, I had felt the simple silent joy of being.
And now I’m back in England, almost 25 and falling in love with the way the sun slips in through my kitchen window or the way I am noticing myself more, like the journey my laughter takes from my gut up my throat, tumbling out through my lips and eyes without shyness. Yesterday, I fell in love with the way a sentence in a Joan Didion essay made me feel; too young for this or maybe too excited and absolutely full of unspent experiences. I remember Ed and la plaza, the noise and the stray pets, the dancing, the open front doors and me, in love and caught in the act of living. It reminded me of that day and of the life I now have evidence enough to believe in and recreate wherever I find myself.
