The house is up on the hill about a kilometre from town and the surrounding views are breathtaking. Cuba is captivating and this place, Vinales – a UNESCO world heritage site – is like being inside an old Western except this is Technicolor in real life. I have heard so much about the place and its people from my sister and her husband that I feel I know it. I breathe in the sights and smells. I am blessed.
Ever since I arrived I could not take my eyes off it. I was drawn to it as if some form of bizarre witchcraft were leading me there. I could see it from the bedroom window. Standing tall and majestic. For a couple of days I watched. What strength and power? What grace and elegance? There this tree stood, solid, imperious, like a High King, lording over mile upon square mile of lush newly-tilled tobacco fields and those arresting hump-backed Mojote mountains. I was its tongue-tied servant.
I began to go to the window like an addict for my daily feed of colour and to be sedated by my new master. Burnt orange, red, purple, green, brown, yellow, straw. Yet I could not figure out my master’s own hue from this distance. It seemed so far away. Black maybe? Black or dark grey against the blue sky and its surrounding verdant kingdom.
Having come from the smallness and greyness of Dublin, by comparison, I was almost afraid of this landscape. Its enormity. Afraid it might devour me whole. But this tree. It was more than a mere tree. It was treedom. I had never been so bewitched. I was building myself up to venture forth and make its acquaintance. For this I would have to enter the guajiro’s territory and negotiate the animals, sense my way through the orange and yellow caminos. The yellow brick road! It is hard to understand such a visceral reaction to a tree. I have experienced it for a plump, baked loaf fresh from the oven or fat, pink sizzling prawns oozing garlicy oil, the aroma of steaming coffee or the dark penetrating eyes of a handsome man – but a tree?
This was new. I guess you could say I am from the country - a townie really. But the town of my childhood, unlike now, did have hinterland farms close by. Quiet, unpeopled fields in which to roam and trees to climb or simply sit under while skinning a stick or blowing loud through blades of grass. Perhaps that was the pull. The blissful silence of my own Irish childhood echoing all around me in this vast Cuban landscape. The solitary innocent freedom of rambling through foreign territory – the town girl getting lost in the countryside for whole Saturdays at a time. Watching from a distance those thick-armed farmer-faced men lift things, lock things, push things and nod friendly like but going about their business. In all those hours meandering through the tall grass, I had never set eyes upon a tree such as this.
The third day, unplanned, out of sheer compulsion, I went in its direction. Early morning before the tropical heat, skipping the sweet and simple breakfast of coffee and toast with dulce de guayava. I walked out the back door. Down the dust tracks past cranky Noel’s Godforsaken shack (that was nearly destroyed in the Cyclone) and then the next plain house that belongs to La Pucha, his mother. A wizened old stick of a woman with a sunken face and a bad word for everyone. She owns all the land around and picks fights regularly. At night she eerily walks through my sister’s property – holding a medieval beacon of fire to light her way across land that was once hers. She is definitely a Cuban not to be meddled with. I walk quickly for fear she might come out on to her porch and I would have to look in to that awful face up close.
Next I pass Maria and Pepe Panchon’s immaculate blue and white painted, neat little bungalow. Neither of them about. Good. I’m in a hurry and do not wish to be distracted. Pepe is gone at dawn on his horse dressed in his army fatigues and has probably half a tobacco field tilled by now. Not bad going for a man of 70. Maria is probably peeling her garlic in the outside shed which all the Cubans seem to use for cooking. Her 40-year-old son Jose Felix is the only body present. He is sitting up in a squatting position on his rocking chair at the front of the house. He is blind so he cannot see me. He is deaf so he cannot hear me so I do not know what to do. I walk past him feeling strange that I have not greeted him but he does not know me yet and I do not want to alarm him on his own porch. He senses someone passing and I scurry along vowing to call in on my way back to introduce myself. At this moment though, I have no desire to meet humans. I want to get to my tree and see it in the flesh!
I cross the end of their garden and follow the boundary fence down to the lower field, balancing on the mucky tree stump I cross the river. Now I must pass two very thin horses. They look sad, tired and unthreatening but I am wary walking past in case they kick out in jealousy at my well-fed appearance. I head around by the opening towards the caves and know that if I take a right by the tall corn plants and go up the way that the tree should be on the other side. As I am walking steadily, steeply uphill it gradually comes into view.
Finally, I am face to face with this marvellous beast. Its trunk spreads wide like a wall - the girth of it is hundreds and hundreds of years of growth. I am breathless. I inhale and draw closer, surrender under the shade of its mighty branches. It dwarfs me like nothing has dwarfed me before. I am an ant. It is possibly 20 or 25 times my height. I have never felt anything quite like this here when I am standing beneath it. This tree is life itself. I am undone.
Amy Redmond (c) 2011
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