EXITO Magazine, Nov.
1997
Por Itziar Bilbao
Cuban writer Zoé Valdés is finally coming to Miami and she says she's very nervous because there are so many people here she wants to see. Has she written down a list? ''No'', she says, ''The list is in my heart.'' It was 1 a.m. in Paris when we reached her and she had just gotten home from a dinner for a writer friend. Her voice was measured, a touch monotonous, as if she were trying to stay calm despite the upheaval around her. In addition to getting ready for her first trip to the United States, she's also moving from one apartment to another in Paris, the city she calls home. Surely she wouldn't forget to pack Café Nostalgia, the novel published by Editorial Planeta which she's planning to present November 23 at the Miami Book Fair. As its name implies, the book is about longing and loosing your roots in the presence of exile. Miami Cubans will understand perfectly its constant references to ''that island'' and to what has been lost. But Valdés prefers to stress the universality of her work. ''It's a novel about exile, a novel for anyone who has had to give up his childhood, his memories, his streets, his friends,'' she said. ''We Cubans are not the only ones who have had to suffer through that, although it's been our reality for 38 years.'' Although at the very end of the book there is a reference to the Cafe Nostalgia in Miami's S.W. 8th Street— described as a happy gathering place for exiles— those who haven't heard of it won't notice she's writing about a real place, said Valdés.
''It's a novel, not a travel guide,'' said the writer, who has heard about Café Nostalgia from friends, but has yet to see it. Because of visa problems, it wasn't clear until the last minute whether Valdés, 38, would be able to participate in the 14th Miami Book Fair. At first, the U.S. embassy in Paris told Valdés she could have a visa, but not her husband, film maker Ricardo Luna, or her daughter, Luna, 4. Valdés then decided she wouldn't come without her family. Finally, U.S. authorities reconsidered and issued visas for the three of them. In New Jersey, Valdés will be reunited with her father and brother, both named Gustavo Valdés. Here in Miami, her sister María del Carmen is waiting to see her. Their mother, Gloria Martínez, remains in Cuba.
Also in Miami are many friends of Valdés, some of whom have inspired characters in her novels. Among these is Pepe Horta, owner of the real Cafe Nostalgia and Luna's godfather, actress Lili Rentería, and Ricardo Vega. Café Nostalgia gives some the impression of reading a fictionalized account of real events, and some critics have described the novel as autobiographical, but Valdés denies it. ''It's not true,'' she said. ''I don't see how anyone could know that.''
Valdés acknowledges that some of her characters have been inspired by real people, but the novel's central character, Marcela, is pure creation, she said. Marcela means sea and sky and that is the essence of her soul, said the writer. ''Being Cuban, the sea has a very special meaning in her life. And the sky too, because she can't manage to make herself at home upon the earth, where it has fallen to her to live in exile,'' said Valdés. ''Two years and 10 months,'' Valdés answers at once when asked how long she has lived in Paris.
''Exile is very hard and unpleasant for everybody, and it has often been so for me,'' said Valdés. ''Right now, I'm going through a terrible depression, because there are so many places I miss. I dream I'm walking in a street in Paris and when I turn the corner I'm in a street in Havana.'' Would exile have been easier in Miami? ''Exile is exile everywhere,'' said the writer. Despite everything, her exile has been a fruitful one because of the books she has published, said Valdés.
When she traveled to Paris to teach a course on Cuban poet and independence leader José Martí, Valdés took with her the 175 page manuscript of her novel Te di la vida entera. She has written two novels since, Cólera de angeles, and her most recent effort, Cafe Nostalgia. That she has done a lot of her writing outside Cuba is very much in the Cuban literary tradition,'' Valdés pointed out. ''Even Alejo Carpentier did his writing in exile.'' She might also have mentioned José Martí and almost every Cuban writer of note in the last 40 years.
Before she left Cuba, Valdés wrote three novels, Sangre azul, La hija del embajador, and La nada cotidiana, which has been translated into half a dozen languages and is here her best known work. La nada cotidiana, in which she describes female sexuality with total frankness, earned Valdés a reputation as an erotic writer. ''Women writers are often prissier about describing a woman's sexual pleasure than male writers. "I'm not afraid of the body,'' said Valdés. ''Women have gained a lot of ground in science, sports... and literature, you're now seeing women breaking taboos.''
As for her style, she said: ''I think there's a direct way, a beautiful way, a mysterious, painful and funny way of saying things, a way of saying things directly that gets deeper into feelings.'' Has her use of a Cuban idioms contributed to her success? ''The fact that I'm a woman and that I use in my writing the way Cubans talk today has met with a lot of acceptance, but I'm not the first to have done that,'' said Valdés. ''The way Cubans talk is in the novels of Lezama, Cabrera Infante, Reinaldo Arenas...''
Before she left Cuba, Valdés worked for four years as assitant director of the Revista de Cine Cubano, the only job she ever held. Before that, she worked toward degrees in physical education and Spanish philology, but gave up on both. However, she read a lot on her own, and that is what she considers to have been her real education, ''very disciplined, very rigorous, but with pleasure,'' she said. ''I've read a lot, but I have a lot more to read,'' said Valdés. Her love of reading got her in trouble once when she and a classmate sneaked a couple of books on politics from the university library. They were both suspended, she said.
Valdés wide-ranging reading also led her to the works of Marcel Proust and there is an echo of the great French master in Cafe Nostalgia. ''When I was very young, someone loaned me the seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past, annotated by José Lezama Lima and they fascinated me. Later, I read them again, and that was how...'' Zoe Valdés will present her novel Café Nostalgia at the Miami Book Fair on Sunday, November 23, at the Chapman Center, Wolfson Campus, Miami-Dade Community College, 300 N.E. 2nd. Ave., 6 p.m.
Copyright 1997, Exito Online, South Florida Interactive, Inc. and Sun-Sentinel