Appetite

Inside/Outside

37 Inside/Outside From the street came the noise of all that was passing, upside down, in the room: an infernal row. For the first time, I experienced the dizziness of solitude, the distance between objects, my own size. —Wilfredo Lam Wind gives changing tremors over the island, shifts leaves’ adumbrations the sun letters over ground. Wide and uncontrollable drafts engulf voices from the avenue, the city speaks shrills along your spine, spiky as fishbone spearheads. Young Wilfredo, only a painter in spirit, slumbering in a tight blind room: outside the Cuban sun beats on the streets full of the din of passersby, and sellers haggling, “an infernal row” you recall. A ray stretches luminescent shadows at every plank in the wall. Sifting between your eyelids, light inverts images the fan grinds in the turnstile of your camera obscura, slow merry-go-round trailing the ceiling while mirror, dresser, bed, all surrender to an impassible immobility summoning you to join them, and erase your name to a shape in-between shades: your limbs, weightless—Willfredo— each surrendered to bones and marrow, knuckles and nerves —Lam—you lie like an untouchable statue, swabbed Pharaoh exposed and distant inside a glass case. ...