CAMAGÜEY.- It was 1868. They ran into each other by coincidence in a crowded square, exchanged looks and immediately felt an imperious desire. But, of course, talk to each other would have been too much for that first encounter, and by nightfall all they had left was the memory of each other’s face scrutinizing the other’s soul.

Next morning, his father left for the incipient war with his best horse, his best revolver, with his only son. Her family fears the conflict and flees to the capital, in a desperate attempt to save their bourgeois necks.

During the hard campaign nights, he drew sketches of his loved one in the scarce pieces of paper he could obtain. She would cry all the time, same if she was strolling through the avenues on sunny Sundays, or having dinner at home on drizzly Mondays. But one day a rider appeared carrying a letter, a clandestine letter, send from the very heart of the eastern part of the country.

From the very hand of her loved one, who had used his father influence to send her, by writing, the words they never said that day in the square. It was written as a final goodbye, with a bit of a depressed mood and almost certain that such message would never reach the so desired recipient. She ran then, like crazed, to her bedroom and wrote her reply for four days and four nights, overwhelmed by happiness. She would wait for him, she would wait until that cursed war was over, and they could be together forever.

From that moment on, the letters would come and go from a extreme of the island to the other. He would write in the light of a bonfire, surrounded by mud and mosquitoes, risking an orthographic error or staining the paper with the blood of his wounds. She would read them carefully, afraid of being discovered by her father, and kept each letter in an envelope that she secretly went over when she felt that she could not wait anymore. Many letters were lost in the way, others took months to get there, but they always herd news from one another, they reminded themselves that the war would be over and they would not miss the chance to consummate their affective pretensions. And it happened.

He arrived on a horse, wearing shirt and boots, just like the first time they saw each other while walking on the cobblestones. He snook her out of the house, and they got lost in the infinite roads of that no so old Havana. She and him. The moon and its sea of stars. Their eyes and an incontrollable desire fed during ten eternal years. They saw the impact of time in their bodies, that had changed so much. They said what could not be said in letters. And, finally, they made love with the imperfect synchrony of two fleeing horses, galloping a race where there is no winner nor looser, where all it matters is to be happy.

I was 2019. He saw her from across the sidewalk. He asked a friend for her phone number. He send her a text in the night: Baby, wanna make out tomorrow?