Things and Images: Essay, Photos, and Film

Figure 1.

Edmundo Desnoes. Courtesy of Jennifer Boles.

Things and Images: An Essay

Edmundo Desnoes

We are all naked. Born without a stitch. We surround ourselves with things and images, to dress up and attempt to mean something.

I can’t help seeking to discover the real and yet I am only able to cover my flesh.

Surface is a slippery body, content and meaning punctuate my existence. I’m always nailing my fleeting contact with the world in layers of meaning. Recovering life and nailing death.

My first love and desire was the Virgin Mary, my mother had the image above her bed. I craved to be under her feet or at least was willing to accept suffering so long as I wasn’t nailed to the cross. And her feet were naked, stepping on the snake, the index toe longer than the others . . .

I was born in Havana and lived in Spanish streets but spoke English indoors with my mother. Opposites touched me: the absolute certainty of Don Quijote and yet the doubts of Hamlet.

Fidel Castro trapped and enriched me with an impossible dream. This photo shows the two pressures of the quixotic endeavor: you don’t know if the Cuban people are supporting Fidel or whether Castro is crushing them. I later discovered that the tango and Carlos Gardel will survive Che Guevara, the mambo rhythm create by cacão will outlive the Castro brothers. Music is the existential greatness of the Cuban people. We will always live in the present.

Martí helped me believe in the impossible dream of the revolution, but his passion for women and his poetry are in my guts. I visit his tomb when I visit his monument. It’s the only equestrian monument where the hero is not mastering the horse but falling off, dropping. He died the first time he went into battle. Martí wanted to show he was not only a man of words but a man of action. Yet words are a form of action. Even mine although they might be useless.

A typewriter is a typewriter is a typewriter.

I placed the revealing bottle with the two roses, one looking at me, the other at itself. The eternal feminine is half of myself. Again, always wanting to mean something, I needed to display my masculine side: the cobblestone with the castaway seed of a peach.

The hammer and the sickle of communism, of my commitment to the Cuban revolution, became a sickle that severed my individual writing hand and, and the hammer knocked down the red rose. My blood is black ink.

I discovered that Whistler’s model for “Symphony in White” was also Courbet’s nude horizontal “Woman with a Parrot.” Joanna Hiffernan was modest and pure and innocent for Whistler and horizontal and ripe for Courbet. The bragging display of sensuous flesh and the inward power of a restrained waistline. Opposites can both be true because they’re real. Reality in two faces.

Stupidly I sought meaning in religion and politics. Religion left me in the clouds and politics enriched my cross-eyed commitment to the Cuban revolution. Left me once again alone.

Art was the closest I’ve ever been to helping me embrace my delicious ambiguity. So I took the star on Che Guevara’s beret and placed it fully on old Rembrandt’s headgear.

I met Felicia Rosshandler as an adolescent in Cuba. Hitler had thrust her into my arms. We danced in Havana and I had an erection as we danced cheek to cheek. She was my first girlfriend. In 1948 she left the island. Decades later, in 1980, when I defected we collided again in New York. We were together in the early dawn and again together as the sun set.

The neck is the most attractive area of a woman’s body, free of the apple that chokes me and deepens my voice.

Barbie’s plastic flesh is as real as classic marble. American flesh. Yes, and where am I?

Before writing...