The Man Waiting for the Bus

I noticed Rafael before I knew his name.

That is how some stories begin. Not with knowledge, but with suspicion. A body appears in the corner of vision and refuses to leave. A man sits above a dance floor. A man leans against a rusty metal stand. A man waits for a bus. The scene is ordinary, almost forgettable, but something in it starts to glow.

The night before, I had seen him sitting near the circular staircase beside the Iglesia Parroquial, above the Casa de la Música. He was looking down at the crowd, watching the dancing from a height. At first, I thought I understood the scene. A handsome local man. A colonial square. Tourists. Music. Salsa. Waiting. Hunting. Seduction as economy. Seduction as survival. Seduction as theatre.

Then he left alone.

That small correction stayed with me.

The next day, I saw him again.

He was leaning against the metal stand with a bag on his shoulder, waiting for transport out of town. I was about to leave Trinidad, heading east toward Holguín and Camagüey. The road was already becoming an idea in my head. I had no plan for him. I had no plan for the story. But when our eyes met, something moved from the night before into the present.

I stopped the car.

I often wonder whether photography begins before the camera is lifted. Perhaps it begins in the decision to stop. The body recognises the image before the mind agrees. The foot touches the brake. The car slows. Other people rush toward the window. The scene suddenly gathers around you. You become visible. You become responsible.

I told him I was going to Camagüey. One seat only.

Of course, it was not one seat only. It never is. The world entered immediately in the form of an old woman carrying Che Guevara souvenirs, bags, pain, loneliness and her own history. She pushed her way into the journey as if she had been written into it before I arrived. Rafael knew her from his village. He looked ashamed, apologetic, trapped between courtesy and opportunity.

So he sat behind me. The old woman sat in front. Rafael held her bags on his knees.

This arrangement already contained the whole film: the stranger behind me, the old woman beside me, my eyes divided between the road and the rear-view mirror. I was driving forward and looking back. I was leaving one town and entering another memory. I was outside the frame and inside it.

Walter Benjamin's idea that memory is a theatre, not simply an instrument, has stayed with me because it describes the way scenes arrange themselves before we understand them. Nothing in the car was symbolic yet, and yet everything was already waiting to become so: the mirror, the road, the woman's hands, Rafael's silence, my own attention pretending to be practical.

In the mirror, I could see Rafael listening, answering briefly, withdrawing from the old woman's questions. She spoke with her hands, with her body, with the authority of someone whose loneliness had become public. Her children had left. Her husband had died. Her life seemed to be packed into bags and complaints. She reminded me of women from my own family album, women whose destinies had been explained by others after they were no longer able to explain themselves.

The camera was not in my hand, but I was already recording.

Road. Voice. Hands. Mirror. Sweat. Plastic bags. Che Guevara boxes. A man behind me. A woman beside me. A country passing through the window.

This is the strange cruelty of looking. I can be moved by someone and still turn them into material. I can feel tenderness and still observe. I can offer a lift and still become a detective at the scene. The ethical line is never clean. The artist is not innocent. The traveller is not innocent. The lover is not innocent. The witness is not innocent.

Sontag understood that photography has something possessive inside it. To look is not simply to receive. It is also to take, to frame, to choose, to exclude. Even when the camera is absent, the photographic mind is already making decisions.

I dropped them at the station in Sancti Spíritus.

The old woman kissed my hand and disappeared into the crowd. Rafael stepped out slowly, apologising for her. He hesitated before closing the door. I waited for him to look back. He did not. He walked toward the bus.

That should have been the end.

But the image was not finished with me.

I drove away, saw a restaurant, turned back through traffic and sat on the veranda opposite the station. From that dirty balcony table, I searched for him with my eyes. This is where the scene became openly voyeuristic. I was no longer pretending that the encounter was accidental. I was watching. Waiting. Testing whether the image would return my gaze.

And it did.

He noticed me. We gave each other a thumbs up, a small gesture pretending to be goodbye. The bus arrived. He climbed on. He sat near the back. The vehicle started moving. Then our eyes met through the window, and I stood up.

I waved for him to join me.

The bus stopped abruptly. Cars screamed. Horns sounded. Rafael stepped into traffic and walked toward me.

Looking back, I think this was the true beginning of Cuba, Love Story. Not the first sight of him at night. Not the second sight at the bus stand. Not the lift. The beginning was the moment he stepped off the bus into traffic because a stranger had waved.

A small irrational act. A dangerous interruption. A cut in the film.

Chris Marker understood that travel is not a straight line. The journey becomes an essay when the image begins to think. A bus window, a hand, a man stepping into traffic, a stranger's decision to follow a signal that might mean nothing. These are not simply events. They are edits. They move the story from documentary into memory.

In cinema, this would be easy to overstate. The bus, the horns, the body moving through traffic, the watcher rising from the table. But memory is more complicated. It does not preserve the scene in one clean shot. It preserves fragments. His hesitation. My hand. The bus door. The road. The noise. The impossible feeling that one life has briefly leaned toward another.

I did not yet know his name.

I did not yet know about the football field, the horses, the broken car, the river, the accident, the father-memory waiting inside his gestures. I did not know that his body eating chicken with his fingers would return me to my father's body at the kitchen table. I did not know that Cuba would become a mirror in which Israel, childhood, shame, masculinity and desire would reappear in altered form.

I only knew that he had stepped off the bus.

This is how the Reminiscence Narrative often begins for me. A small event happens in the present, but it contains a future memory. It has not yet revealed what it knows. Only years later, through photographs, moving images, writing and return, I begin to understand that the image was already carrying more than I could see.

A man waiting for a bus becomes a stranger. A stranger becomes Rafael. Rafael becomes a mirror. The mirror becomes an archive. The archive becomes the place where the unfinished story continues to look back.

John Berger wrote that seeing comes before words. I think that is why some encounters are dangerous. We see before we know what we have seen. We desire before we have language for the desire. We stop the car before the mind has prepared its defence.

The photograph stops time, but it does not stop the decision that came before it.

The moving image gives time back to the scene, but it cannot explain why I stopped the car.

That remains the mystery.

Why that man? Why that road? Why that second glance? Why did I wave? Why did he come?

Perhaps this is why I keep returning to images. Not to answer the question, but to keep it alive.

Some encounters do not begin when we meet. They begin when we decide to look again.