THE JOURNEY OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
by Julio Carrillo

When David Svensson told me about his Havana project, my first reaction was to question whether it was possible to carry it out. "Do you have a Plan B?" I asked. But David, being the tenacious, focused person he is, had no Plan B. He had thrown himself straight into the swimming pool without checking to see if there was any water in it. If you looked, you could see a glint in his eye that, at the time, I thought was determination. I had yet to grasp that this was the glow imprisoned within the chandeliers that he was seeing with his inner gaze.

But, even if my question might seem a trifle harsh, that did not mean I thought Havana was a bad project or that I did not find it interesting. Quite the reverse.

I was familiar with David's work and very much taken by his beautiful Black Tear. This struck me as the very epi-tome, the essence of Cubanness. I thought he had made it following his first trip to Cuba. At that time, I thought it bore witness to an ability to comprehend things extremely rapidly. To finding yourself spending a week in a place that you have no knowledge of in advance, so as subsequently, as he did, to transpose it into an image of its very essence. Later on, David relieved me of my misapprehensions. He assured me that Black Tear was not just about Cuba. But I still thought it was, and that he must have been inspired by Ignacio Piñeiro's Lágrimas negras (Black Tears), which is the true anthem of the Cuban night.

To return to the question of Plan B. I just wanted to be sure that David knew what he was doing, that he had weighed up all the pros and cons that he might come across. You have to live in Havana to know how much work it takes to accomplish the least little thing, the most minor formality. As the standard phrase goes: It won't be easy. It is an absolute nightmare getting anything going. There are two key words that precisely describe the way things are in Cuba: bureaucracy and Kafka. But, no matter how many times I said this and tried to warn David, it made no difference. He just laughed. It seemed that he had understood, but he carried on in his own way without allowing himself to be put off.

Miracles can happen, and who am I to doubt it. And it was in a fit of mysticism that I decided to help him. Inside myself I prayed a silent prayer that his disappointment would not be too great if God, for some unknown reason, did not want him to find his chandeliers.

I took it upon myself to search out antique dealers and junk shops. In the end, I had drawn up a short list of phone numbers and set about ringing them. I cannot go into all our adventures here. I did not live through them myself, except via what David and La dulce Ana - as we called his compañera, the photographer and artist Anna Nordquist Andersson - told us in the evenings when they got home. But one thing I remember is that some of the chandeliers that they finally bought came from a peculiar place that was a combination of an antique shop and a gym. I cannot imagine what magic spells the owners must have used to get the fragile glass from Lalique and Baccarat to coexist with loud music and vigorous exercise. I believe Anna surreptitiously took pictures of this extraordinary place.

Finally, the evening came when David's chandeliers arrived at my home and were unpacked one by one onto the old sofa. He was absolutely delighted. Now he had his chandeliers and he was looking at them entranced, like someone imagining a world of glass or who discovers the fragility of things for the first time. That is what he is thinking about, I thought. But I did not understand it at that point. It is only now that I am totally certain. I had confused rapture with dismay, ecstasy with dilemma, the dilemma of someone who has just seen all the difficulties.

All that remained was to get the chandeliers shipped, but, before that, they had to be packed. We rang up the master packers at a firm specialising in such things. I had warned David in advance that I wanted everything to be done discretely. Not that it was illegal in any way, but if you had lived in Havana, you would know what suspicions such to-ing and fro-ing with chandeliers in the hands of a blond Scandinavian could arouse.

Then, when I got home from the market one morning laden with fruit and vegetables, I was met by an enormous wooden box at the door of my home. I saw that people passing by were stopping and looking at it. I was immediately gripped by panic. A wooden box of these dimensions was at that time, and still is today, quite a rare sight in the streets of Havana.

I cannot deny that, at that moment, I lost "my natural calm". I took David to one side, to where the master packers could not hear us, and asked whether this was his idea of discretion. I can reveal that my outburst had no effect.

I did not succeed in provoking David, who I must say is the perfect gentleman, and never lost his cool no matter how much pressure I put on him. Fortunately everything was soon resolved, and, on this one blessed occasion, the master packers proved to be exceptionally capable professionals.

All that now remained was the final transportation to the airport. But it was then that the panic struck. I don't really remember what had happened. Something about the date, some discrepancies, I don't know. Finally, the solution was that David and Anna vanished off to Malmö, leaving me (ME!) behind with the job of ensuring that the enormous wooden box got onto the plane on the right day and at the right time. So, not just panic, but PANIC!

Understand me correctly. It was not that I did not want to help them. On the contrary. What transfixed me was the idea of arriving at the airport and being stopped; that, once again, there would be a missing paper, a form, an invoice or some wretched stamp that someone had forgotten. And that I, without being able to do anything about it, would be standing there beside this enormous wooden box and be forced to watch the plane take off like in a film, like in Casablanca itself. What was I supposed to do with a box full of dismantled chandeliers?

If I ever had the least doubt about the embassies of the Kingdom of Sweden abroad, if I ever imagined that they were filled with ineffectual officials who spent their time basking in the sun holding mojitos, I can unequivocally say here and now that I was wrong. If it had not been for all the help that I received from one of these suntanned officials, you would not be able to see Svensson's chandeliers today. The taxes he pays have, at least on this occasion, been put to the best possible use.

But I don't want to get bogged down in details. I will leave it to David to reveal the name of the anonymous benefactor who took it upon himself to keep an eye on the enormous wooden box containing the precious fruits of David's work until it landed in Malmö.