2023-08-25 23:26:33
He lies on the bed with his back bruised. At peak, she dug, and dug, and dug; with shovels, she ripped part of the life from the virgin land, half wet from the recent rain. Her hands, with their hard skins, are still welded to her arms; her arms also dry, clinging to the body. To the skinny body like the wild reeds that escort some sections of the Tuinucú River. Now, her eyes wander over the white ceiling of the room; of course, much less white than the soul of her grandmother María Montesinos, may she rest in peace.
Today, in the morning, a journalist called him. From his voice, he sounded to her like a six foot guy and he knows God how many more inches. He wants to interview you.
“Me?!” he replied. No one teases him like that, so easily.
—Yes, yes, yes, they told him in a burst from the other end of the telephone line.
—But, if I am a simple undertaker.
The wellman who was and the fisherman who is
Omar Ávila Pentón has been between life and death for 23 years. And he experiences that sensation in the cemetery of the city of Sancti Spíritus, where he arrives, on a clean pedal, from Tuinucú; A town that dies —he believes— as soon as the sugar mill crushes the last whistle of the harvest.
Seven kilometers one way and seven kilometers back by bicycle. Almost nothing. He retracees them every day of the world. Not all. Four days in a row, not the fifth, because the gravedigger is also a being of flesh and blood and needs to give the body a ten.
So mismitico will tell the journalist. He thinks about it as he continues, looking up at the ceiling, lying on the bed, where he tries to guess what the guy with the announcer voice will ask him tomorrow. Because April always precedes May, he will surely be interested in what he did before becoming a gravedigger. Omar built wells. At that time, he would be in his early twenties; now, 50. he was a member of a drilling crew and spent his life in a truck. When he returned home and put the boots, with worn soles, to rest from the work, if he left them, they could return alone to the place where the wellman was that day.
The well driller works with the eye of a good cuber, and this did not please Omar very much. How many times did he and his people stay under the resistor there, drilling the earth and the rocks, trying to find the happy water, and nothing? It didn’t hurt only in the body. They were fuel, resources, time… All lost. One day he collected the tiliches, and eyes that saw you go.
At the beginning of 2000, one morning, Ávila Pentón visited a friend in the Kilo-12 neighborhood cemetery; the friend, who was alive and well, told him about a vacant gravedigger position. He didn’t even hesitate; except him who does not eat fear.
“No one leaves the cemetery happy, but they can leave satisfied with the service that one provides them,” Omar asserts. Photo: Arelys Garcia Acosta.
In truth, he does not eat fear; but on those who assume this office, inquisitive glances rain copiously. Omar doesn’t give a damn about prejudice. Even so, from time to time he draws an argument, with the same force with which the Cid Campeador wielded the sword that gave birth to medieval Spain: if everyone were doctors, there would be no peasants to grow food; if they were all peasants, there would be no teachers to teach; if everyone were teachers, then there would be no gravediggers. What would it be if there were no people who gave a dignified burial to the deceased?
But, seeing so many coffins carrying so many human beings has taught him another lesson: since a newborn screams at the top of its lungs: “Fuck, here I am!”, it must be taught not to waste time. To live decently. The tremendously hard thing is when that son leaves first. And this happens on many occasions.
Omar adapted to dealing with death; but his soul becomes fine crystal every time he buries a child. Where possible, he dodges doing it. They are the deepest scars that the trade has left him. Several examples come to mind; he has tried to erase them from memory, from that indelible memory.
For this reason, when he feels half heartbroken, he looks for the fishing rod and the tractor chamber, and he gets into the first puddle that crosses his path; although, to be fair, nobody thinks that Omar, the gravedigger, is a makeshift fisherman.
—I hope the journalist asks me about that. There I will have a banquet talking.
Almost all the dams in the country know this member of the Cuban Sport Fishing Federation. And if you want to give it string to tune it, talk to it about trout. He will describe them to you in detail: if their sides are silver, if they have red or black spots; he will draw them for you with the brush of the exact word and with such realism that, suddenly, it will seem to you that you are seeing the painting troutby French Gustave Courbet.
Obviously, the journalist will be incapable of bragging about being wise in front of the gravedigger. Here, in the world of the living, everyone carves and carries a light, their light. Also, what does Ojito Linares know about fish, if in his life he has never caught a guajacón, neither in Bacuino nor in the Naranjo stream, in La Sierpe, where he took a few dips as a boy.
Perhaps the reporter will confess it to Omar, who fishes more than he talks. With a hook it will be necessary to get him out of his mouth that in February he last caught a six-pound trout in the Minerva dam, Villa Clara, in a competition. Orondo took home third prize. But the day his wife, Esther María, saw that the joy was coming out of her clothes, it was her when she returned from that national tournament in Río Cauto, Granma. The specimen weighed eight pounds, which he took from the warm belly of the Leonero lagoon.
This is how this gravedigger endures time. One day fishing, another in a game of dominoes with residents of the neighborhood, and most, among graves, corpses and the silence of the cemetery; In short, surrounded by death, the death that humiliates us, that screams at us how small life is.
Few know this better than Omar. He felt it during the covid pandemic, from which he fell ill. Never before have the dead been so alone: neither those who lay buried years ago, nor those who died infested by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Hearses arrived at the cemetery until after midnight; On occasions, Omar was seen opening the door of his house in Tuinucú at one in the morning. He, the bicycle, the sadness.
And loneliness, too. Family members barely attended those burials from a distance. There were days when the gravediggers could not cope; there was no other option than to appeal to a backhoe.
I thought no one was going to be left alive.
my grave
In this trade, not only the grave is dug. Photo: Arelys Garcia Acosta.
On the bed, Omar with his back in tatters, his hands hard skinned, his arms parched, and his body bony. And grandmother María Montesinos awakening her grandson’s memory.
teacher was. Teacher who not only climbed the Escambray mountains with the primer in one hand and the literacy lamp in the other. She is also a teacher of life, which she taught him what one should do today; many times, tomorrow does not exist.
The grandmother physically left a short time after he assumed the office in the Spiritus cemetery. Swallowing the pain, she dug the small grave. Omar’s grandmother was very skinny; although her heart weighed what all the gold on the planet. Therefore, her grandson dropped the last flower that slept on the coffin. A white rose.
“Come here, Omar, and what will your burial be like?” the journalist finally asked him face to face, who wasn’t taller than six feet or anything like that.
“No, no, they’re not going to bury me.” My daughter Alejandra already knows it; they will incinerate me
“And the ashes?”
—My grave will be the sea.
Cover image: When the covid pandemic hit, Omar came to think that no one was going to be left alive. Photo: Arelys Garcia Acosta.
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