Member-only story
Featured
MEMOIR|ESSAY|WRITING|CREATIVE WRITING
Remembering the Girl with the Mousy Hair More Than Three Decades After
What “Life on Mars?” meant to a Cuban teenager after the fall of the Berlin Wall
I must have been in my first year in uni. I heard the song before I read the lyrics. That was common in Cuba in those days. Music arrived in the most unexpected circumstances. Janis’s husky voice came via a classmate’s battered tape. Aerosmith’s Dream On landed at a friend’s house as part of the “filling” (once an album had been recorded on cassette from the original vinyl, we were asked if we wanted to fill up the remaining minutes with other songs).
Bowie’s Life on Mars? stumbled out of a set of poorly maintained speakers in the basement of the Students’ Club. I was familiar with the name, or rather the surname, Bowie. I still didn’t know that one day I’d be torn between pronouncing it /ou/ or /au/.
Without the benefit of words, at first I clung to the melody itself. The chords wrapped around me like a warm blanket. And boy, did I need a warm blanket in those days!
The news kept filtering through. The Wall had finally given way, and with it, each Soviet republic came tumbling down like domino pieces. It felt as if a rug had been…