That Hidden Korda's Photograph

By Leandro Estupiñan.

The grandmother’s mother, a fat and white-haired madam, like the Russian refrigerator she had first than any in the family, was a sensitive woman. Although she feigned a strong character, tinged with certain humor and good imagination, she looked, according to my child vision, a sentimental woman, face-steeled because of the time she lived in a place once called Tacámara, far away from the present-day Holguín.

I knew about her sensitive spirit by chance one day when I stepped into her room and I discovered the photo in a small wooden frame, shielded by a nylon bag if I remember well. The girl in the portrait held in her arms a wooden piece resembling a toy. She had big eyes and the face, innocent, discovered her possible distrust towards the one taking the snapshot in front of her.

As the girl in the photo would be the age that I was in those days I felt attracted by her image. I found her funny, simple, pretty as girls are for all children. I possibly even felt a tickling sensation of infantile love and swore sometime than she, the girl in the photo, only watched by those allowed in the room, was my girlfriend. The photo of the girl holding the wooden piece turned an obsession.

After I grew up, enough to be almost sure that the girl in the photo was not my own great-grandmother, that is, my grandmother's mother keeping her own image amid two or three Saint's images and the images of some small angels inside a plate to crown a shrine. I thought that having a picture taken was that easy for somebody who had spent her life in the countryside beginning the XX century, as it was for me in the eighties’.

I was then seven or eight years old. I lived unaware of those days when the Soviet Union seemed our best friend; and although it was a distant country, it was sort of dream that made some achievements come true such as the ones belonging to my neighbor Guanchi who, after going away to study I do not know to what socialist Germany, came back with a Suzuki motorcycle with no roads here to drive on. Guanchi was made into our hero (dearer than Flipper, or the London, the wanderer dog) and we looked up to him as an ET could be looked at if it landed on your back yard.

My grandmother's mother had then a son living in the United States and family members talked about him with certain mystery for a simple reason that I came to figure out when she turned an old-dying-of-cancer woman that we always saw on her old spring bed. She died a few hours after her son arrived from New York, the city where she had herself stayed next to her husband, my grandmother's father, my great-grandfather, and came back with candied- peanut bars and teddy-bears for boys.

I ignore what happened with the portrait after my grandmother's mother death. What I definitely know is the great intensity of my surprise the day I ran into that image that I believed so familiar. I was searching in some old newspapers and suddenly, the girl, with all the brusqueness I had acquired in my adulthood, emerged from the paper pages. I was an adult, a well-made man, as the phrase goes, while she continued to be a girl. She had remained unchanged to time thanks to Korda's lens, the true author of this portrait.

That day, when I discovered who the girl in the portrait really was, I felt happy: we were not family-related, but we grew up together. She had become a real and beloved person in my life and I, perhaps, had gotten stuck in the day when I met her, small, distrusted like she herself.

I reminded my mother’s grandmother. I saw her again in bed, at nights, with the eyes fixed on the portrait in the piece of newspaper on the wall. And I saw in her eyes the pain of a cruel past, and I saw death, and I saw non grown-up children. I saw the road's mud, and I saw horse footprints on the earth, and I saw frustration. That was all I saw in the photograph. Nothing more than that. Nothing else.