DENSITY OF HISTORY

The photos were the last ones to go. Besides some kind of identification that had to be kept until the last breath was exhaled, it was not difficult to get rid of the rest of the ch'ull mass: furniture, art pieces and most of the documents that linked me to the State were already gone. Less easy to handle were the photos. Each one had a specific recorded moment in history, pictured: the boy with the cowboy outfit next to the wooden horse made by his uncle -the family could afford to buy the outfit for a Christmas’ gift but not the horse; the one where the guayabera shirt was the focus of the visual composition, the new one sewn by my sister; my parents in military pose; a party with friends in Manhattan. Not all triggered the same emotion. Some were too painful, too much poverty surrounding the moment. Some were joyful and liberating, testaments to the capacity of a man or woman to overcome limitations and have a rather comfortable and, and as much as possible, a life worth to be shared with others. All had to go. Their collective mass needed a different corpus, and became part of one when burned in the building incinerator.