Alex is the breakfast cook at the hotel where I work some mornings.The first day I met her, she gave me a container of gnocchi with cream that almost rivaled my grandmother’s.
It was love at first sight."Don’t you want to come live with me?" I asked her.
She’s from the Dominican Republic, and this morning, she’s the official DJ. So today, not argentinian music—today, it’s Caribbean music, and she dances.
That music has it all: rhythm, flavor, charisma, swing, joy. It’s movement. Something vibrates in the air, as if the walls themselves were suddenly swaying like jelly to the beat.
Alejo and I talk politics, complaining about Argentina’s political mess. The same old topic, but now from another country, with different advantages and new problems.
Alex asks us what’s going on. We give her a quick summary of a major political feud and how the phrase “love conquers hate”, which once filled our souls, has now been twisted into madness. That we’re about to have as president one of the aliens from The Simpsons in a leather jacket, who wants to abolish the state and—once again—sell our country to the U.S. That he denies the 30,000 disappeared from our unforgettable civic-military dictatorship and basically shits all over the rights we’ve fought for—right in front of us.
Alex looks at us, confused. She can’t understand how anyone would vote for that. Alejo and I don’t get it either. We think it’s a cocktail of the right wing, hate, insensitivity, ignorance, and exhaustion—all shaken up in a horror-themed cocktail shaker that finally exploded. And they didn’t have enough love to reconsider.
She tells us that in Haiti, people have nothing to eat, that they survive on rice day and night, but even then, they wouldn’t sell their country—not even drunk. Their people don’t bow down. These voters aren’t “the people,” I think.
She tells us that in the Dominican Republic, everything is unbearably expensive, much worse than in Argentina. “It’s almost impossible to live there,” she says. Alejo and I convert the prices into Danish crowns, our currency, and she’s right. Alex sends money to her four-year-old daughter back home—and to her family. As she chops ingredients with a giant knife for breakfast, she talks on speakerphone for hours with someone from her family. I never know if she’s talking to me or to them.
"Life is beautiful!" she suddenly shouts—both to me and to the person on the phone. When I look at her, she repeats it, making sure I know she meant me too.
"Life is beautiful!" I shout back, as she smiles at me with an inexplicable truth.
Then, her daughter calls. She switches to English, telling her to behave, not to give her grandpa a hard time. She says goodbye to her little girl, who’s on a bus, wrapped in a fluffy white hat, heading to school. She tells her she loves her and misses her—probably the same conversation they have every morning. The wounded hearts of exile, I think.
Who says it’s easy to be away? Far from home, far from those we call family. I ask if she misses her country. -"Every single minute," she says.
Instagram doesn’t tell these broken stories. It doesn’t talk about what we’re doing here, the restlessness that led us away, the frustrations, the longing, our personal histories—what happened to us and how we ended up where we are now.
When I was little, my parents used to fight a lot—sometimes, to an extreme. Every time things got rough, when everything felt bleak, my dad would look me in the eyes and say, “Don’t think this is life. Life is beautiful. We have to keep going,” and he’d smile—a smile more natural than sadness itself.I didn’t know that, with that simple gesture, he was planting hope in me for a lifetime.
Alex hangs up. She says nothing. She just turns up the speaker volume and starts singing. A gray-faced man sitting in the hotel lobby turns his head. The kitchen glows in fluorescent colors, and the music takes over the space.Her endless braids, reaching down to her waist, sway like a pendulum as she moves her head. She breaks her hips with a rhythm rarely seen. It’s not just Latin—it’s Caribbean.
Her movements are almost magical. Beautiful to watch.I don’t enjoy the music as much as I enjoy her—dancing.It’s not commercial hits. Not reggaeton, not hip-hop, not cumbia. Or maybe it’s a bit of all that—blended into an incredible style, the kind that makes you picture a dark-skinned girl in shorts, knees bouncing, laughing out loud in the middle of a Central American street.
And the music fills the kitchen again—a tiny kitchen in a hotel on the outskirts of Copenhagen, but suddenly, it stretches and transforms, teleporting through the air into the heart of the Caribbean. And she moves her hips, she breaks—not from sorrow but from music, from movement, from dance. She and her thousand braids.
And Alejo and I watch, in awe, as she shines again, warming up the world, while her knife keeps clashing against the metal tray of vegetables.
I could almost feel the heat of the sun on my skin.
It felt like we were on the beach, or inside a bubble of golden sunlight.
Then, someone calls me from outside—I have to get back to work.I step through the door into the main dining room.Almost unintentionally, I glance through the glass windows toward the street—and the illusion shatters.
Reality, in grayscale.The sky, the subway, the sidewalk, the rain.Copenhagen being Copenhagen. It looks like 1984, Orwell’s novel—only missing the men in dark jumpsuits with their lifeless faces. And that’s when I realize, in retrospect, that five minutes ago… we were in the Caribbean.
The sharp sting of appreciating things only after they’re gone. That’s something we’re really good at…
_______________________________________
So don’t tell me music isn’t half of life.
Don’t tell me the people you choose to walk beside don’t shape you.
Don’t tell me the way out isn’t collective.
Don’t tell me we weren’t in the Caribbean.
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