Reinaldo Arenas – Viejo Niño

Wonderful Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas was born on 16th July 1943 and I celebrated his birthday by thinking about him and his amazing autobiography called “Before Night Falls” which has been my source of inspiration and strength ever since I read it three summers ago. His poem called “Viejo Niño” was written in 1989, just a year before Arenas died on 7th December 1990, and it portrays his childhood so well, in a direct, sincere and amusing way; a childhood of poverty and magic, spent in the Cuban countryside, with a single mother, her family and the all pervading awareness of the mother’s sadness and yearning for the man who had left her soon after they married and Reinaldo, a little boy sitting on her lap, was a reminder of that. A childhood of fascination with all things of nature, mud and rains, chasing roosters and playing with other children under the vast treetops, hiding from the burning sun of the Caribbean. Arenas was all too aware of how unlovable and unwanted he was, but it never stopped him from enjoying the little wonders his childish eyes saw around him.

Egon Schiele, Young Boy, 1918, 45.5×27 cm, gouache, pencil, watercolor on paper

Viejo Niño

I am that child with the round, dirty face

who on every corner bothers you with his

“Can you spare a quarter?”

 

I am that child with the dirty face

no doubt unwanted

that from far away contemplates coaches

where other children

emit laughter and jump up and down considerably

 

I am that unlikeable child

definitely unwanted

with the round dirty face

who before the giant street lights or

under the grandames also illuminated

or in front of the little girls that seem to levitate

projects the insult of his dirty face

 

I am that angry and lonely child of always,

that throws you the insult of that angry child of always

and warns you:

if hypocritically you pat me on the head

I would take that opportunity to steal your wallet.

 

I am that child of always

before the panorama of imminent terror,

imminent leprosy, imminent fleas,

of offenses and the imminent crime.

I am that repulsive child that improvises a bed

out of an old cardboard box and waits,

certain that you will accompany me.