My dear departed uncle, the Cuban artist Micah Carpentier had a great talent for idleness.
Dolce far niente was his cris de coeur lourd and he insisted that his inactivity should never be confused with listless indifference.
As the jóvenes say, whatever ...
The fact is that despite an oeuvre that boasts over four-thousand paper bag drawings, old-man Carpentier loved nothing better than to play dominoes.
For 35 years he lived in a cramped two-bedroom flat in a nondescript housing project at 23 Puerta Cerrada. Most days he would position himself on a beige canvas beach chair in the vacant lot in front of his building and listen to broadcasts from North Korea on his tinny transistor radio. As a Cuban cultural treasure he was always flush with Mexican cigarettes and even the more severely rationed Russian Korkunov chocolates that my aunt Adelgonda loved so much.
As an artist, what he did would never be considered by today's standards as anything resembling a practice much less a praxis. Yet he mastered the art of living well and living slowly and up until the day he died I believe he was a contented man.
He never wished to emigrate and always felt fortunate to be an artist living in a place that was far, both geographically and temperamentally, from Paris or New York.
"My work is my life and not my profesión," was how he used to put it. Beach chair, chocolate and the customary paper cup of his Havana Club not withstanding no one would ever accuse my uncle of being an amateur.
