Waiting for Snow in Havana (18 page)

All this under the approving gaze of the Christian Brothers, of course.

One day we were having a monster almond fight, which was fairly common. We were divided into two camps, facing each other about twenty yards apart, throwing almonds at one another as hard as we could. I was enjoying myself as thoroughly as I always did when throwing hard objects at other children. Then,
WHAM
! I didn't see it coming, but I felt it hit for sure, right above my eye, that almond. A bright, bright flash of light and then utter blackness.

The next thing I know, I'm in the arms of one of the Christian Brothers. It might have been Brother Pedro, since I was in first grade. He was swabbing my forehead with a handkerchief, and it had red stains on it. My forehead hurt a lot. And so did my whole head. And I felt very dizzy.

The almond fight was over, and a circle of kids hovered over me.

“Hey, that's a nice hole.”

“Yeah, look, it's so perfectly round.”

“A hole? I have a hole in my head?”

“Yes,” said the brother softly, “but don't worry, it's not that big.”

I felt for it with my fingers, and found it. It seemed big enough to me. And deep.

“I think you'd better go home early today, Nieto. Have your mom take care of you, maybe take you to a doctor. You might need stitches.”

Well, as it turned out, I didn't get any stitches. But I did get to go home early and I spent the rest of the day in bed with a very bad headache.

Mothers of the world, imagine what might have happened if the almond had hit me directly in the eye, a fraction of an inch lower? That point was sharp. Very sharp.
Ay, Dios mío.

Yes, I was lucky most of the time, and so were all of us, come to think of it. We all took direct hits to the head and face, and no one lost an eye or a tooth. I did get hit in the eye by a rock once. Jorge threw it at me. I think what saved me was the fact that Jorge was only about seven years old at the time and couldn't pack much of a punch. I had a very nice black eye for a while, but no eye damage.

I also took direct hits to the ears, twice, and to the mouth, three times. I lost count of how many rocks bounced off the back and top of my head. How about the forehead? Just a few hits, but none as tremendous as that almond.

But Ernesto was not so lucky. No.

Ernesto didn't know what to do in a rock fight. He was so inexperienced. But every now and then, there he'd be, and he'd try to join in. Like that one day at La Puntilla, when my dad brought him along with the rest of us. On that fateful day we had a monster fight. Maybe Ernesto's presence brought out extra hostility in our rock throwing that day.

As always, we picked up rocks so fast we hardly had time to look at them. Some were on the large side. We scurried over those sharp-edged rocks like crabs looking for their lunch in the tidal pools, picking up whatever we could find and throwing it. Then we started to throw more furiously than usual. A few hits here and there. The requisite
“Ay!,”
the occasional, forbidden
“Coño!”
The laughter. You should have been there. We laughed every time someone got hit. We laughed when we missed. We laughed and laughed. If Adam and Eve hadn't screwed up so badly, and their children had been able to play in the Garden of Eden, they would have laughed just like we did that day, when we threw rocks at one another on the edge of the turquoise sea.

But we were in a different garden. And we were picking up larger and larger rocks to throw. Fist-size rocks at first. Then larger and larger and larger. We couldn't throw these big ones as far or as hard, but it was fun to watch them fly, and to hear them thud when they hit the ground. These big rocks were easy to duck, at least when they came at you one at a time.

But it was raining big rocks. And it was getting harder and harder to throw and duck at the same time. Experience was the key to survival.

My dad watched this all with a bemused look on his face. Not a word from the King of France. Maybe he had watched peasants doing this for amusement on Sundays and feast days. He seemed totally unworried.

Eugenio,
el Alocado
. Crazed Eugenio. You should have known better, nutty Eugenio. You picked up a jagged rock way too large, about the size of an American football, and you heaved it with both hands. We all saw it fly through the air, twisting and turning as it valiantly tried to defy gravity. All of us saw it except Ernesto, who had bent down to pick up a rock of his own. The rock began its descent just as Ernesto was raising his head. And it became painfully clear to all of us that Ernesto's face was in the path of the rock, and that it was moving too fast for him to avoid it.

I know it happened quickly, but it seemed to take forever, that meeting between Ernesto's face and Eugenio's rock.

Few noises in the world compare to that of a large rock breaking someone's nose. I won't even try to describe it; really bad things are better left to the imagination. Imagine the sound of a nose being totally flattened all at once. Imagine, too, the sound made by the consciences of seven boys who don't know if they feel all that sorry to see another boy's nose crushed.

Ernesto passed out. He was knocked out cold, just as I had been by the almond. But this was no almond. This was a small boulder. And it put out Ernesto's lights with fifty times the force of my stupid little almond. King Louis rushed over immediately, moving faster than I had ever seen him move before, and cradled Ernesto's head in his arms.

Ernesto was bleeding as none of us had ever seen anyone bleed, not even in a movie. Blood was streaming out of what had been his nose like two small rivers. Not at all like the champagne that had spurted out of Jorge's nose for a few seconds at that wedding where he and I got drunk. Not at all like the tiny rivulets that dribbled down Kirk Douglas' face in
The Vikings
when his eye was mauled by a hawk's talons. These were two swiftly flowing rivers pouring forth from Ernesto's nose, two strong red gods. And they had no intention of drying up, or going away anytime soon. But my dad managed to tame them, to slow down the bleeding with his handkerchief.

I've often wondered if cousin Fernando's nose bled like that when he was tortured by Fidel's men. Did his nose bleed more or less when he was beaten? About the same? Did anyone laugh while the blood flowed? I've also wondered: did Fernando's gums bleed as much when he pulled out his teeth with his own fingers, one by one, in his dark, dark cell, during those twenty-three years in prison?

Ernesto was out for a long time. King Louis tried to revive him, gently, but Ernesto just lay there, as limp as the
arrollado
I had seen get hit by a car. We all stood there speechless, examining Ernesto's face and my dad's. Antonio Nieto, my father, looked so pained, so worried, so angry. I was too green and too thickheaded then to know that love and worry are two faces of the same coin, and that if you flip that coin fast enough, you can also see anger. I just thought he was angry at us.

When Ernesto finally came to, my dad helped him into the car and rushed him home so he could clean up before going to the hospital. Only a Nieto would do something like that. God forbid you show up at the emergency room with a broken nose, and possibly a concussion, bleeding profusely, with bloodstains on your shirt. Clean shirts were a must. And you had to have that undershirt, too. A clean one.

It took a very long time for Ernesto's nose to heal, and it never looked right again, even after surgery. The doctors managed to give him a nose again, but it was all twisted, and he was left with the queerest whistling sound as he breathed. You could always tell when he was near because of that whistle. It was an angry whistle, I swear it was. Every breath Ernesto took from that day forward was filled with resentment, and each of those whistles, each and every breath, was a word of sorts. An angry word, each breath, forming sentences, and paragraphs, and pages, and books. Volumes and volumes of God knows what kind of bitter invective against us, Judge Nieto's sons, and towards all of our friends.

We who weren't Ernesto went on living our lives as always, under the blazing sunlight by day, under our white mosquito tents by night. We woke up almost every single morning to the sunlight streaming in, revealing dust in the air, swirling silently. If we had listened carefully enough, I'm sure we could have heard the dust and also the sunlight falling on each speck of dust. I know we could have, if we'd only tried. I know this as I know other things that are hard to prove.

Some mornings we woke up to find a lone mosquito trapped in the tent. The buzzing was loud enough to be mistaken for an alarm clock, or a car without a muffler, especially when the mosquito landed on your ear. And sometimes they did just that. Those mosquitoes didn't know when to quit. Trapped inside the tent all night, a whole human body all to themselves. They would gorge themselves so much they could hardly fly.

Too happy for their own damn good, those bugs. Too noisy too. Buzzing so happily, so deliriously. So loudly.
Vroooooooooommmm.

Maybe as loudly as the dust and the sunlight. Maybe as loudly as twenty watermelons hitting the ground all at once.

Those of us who weren't Ernesto, I repeat, went on living our lives as always, breathing through both nostrils, silently, waking up sometimes to find a lone fat mosquito in our tent. I don't know about the others in their beds, but I always made sure that the big fat mosquitoes who had spent an entire night drinking my hot red blood paid for their last supper. I squashed them all, flattened them like Ernesto's nose. They popped between my fingertips, and I loved to hear that sound.

And my own blood would go spurting out of their tiny little squished bodies, flying out in tiny droplets that stained my fingers and the mosquito tent in the same pattern as hibiscus blossoms. And I heard that, too.

I had no fears. Not then. Not yet. Pantheons,
embolias, arrollados,
bad people, rocks in the eye. Death. Heard about them all, and didn't really hear at all. All of them for others, not for me. What did I know, really? What did any of us know? We couldn't hear the dust specks. Couldn't hear the sound of our own end approaching, second by second.

Vrooooooooooooooooooommm!

“Hey, Carlitos, jump in! Let's go plant some bombs! Jump in, quick!”

Vrooooooooooooooooooommm!

How I wish you'd asked me, Fernando. How much, how deeply I wish you had.

T
hey appear suddenly, out of nowhere, when I least expect it. They float into view, and linger there longer than all the others, without changing shape, or changing so slowly as to fool me into thinking they can't change at all.

They claim a lot of the sky, always making sure that there is plenty of blue between them and all the others. In all directions. And they're never upside down. Sideways, sometimes. But upside down, never.

They come in all sizes. Perspective is their favorite language for kidding around. Some of them are foreshortened. Some are elongated. Some are compact. Some are almost abstract. Some are cubist. The cubist ones are my favorites because they know they are puns.

What to make of these clouds I see so often? These clouds in the shape of Cuba?

In the past thirty-eight years I've seen eight thousand nine hundred and seventeen clouds in the shape of the island of Cuba. I know this because I keep count, and the number is always etched accurately in my brain and in my heart. When I die, feel free to saw open my skull and paw through my brain. I bet you'll find a spot that looks like a cloud in the shape of Cuba. Feel free to open my chest, too. I bet you'll also find a scar on my heart that looks like a Cuba cloud.

You accuse me of making this up, or worse, of being insane?

Okay, yes, I'll admit it: I'm making up the exact number. I don't really keep count. Who could? I do see them all the time, though. As to being nuts, well, maybe I am—but not in the way you think.

I saw one of those Cuba clouds this afternoon, on my way home from work, hovering over the highway. If you'd been in the car with me, I could have pointed it out to you. And you would have been forced to say, “My God, you're right.”

The first time I saw one of these clouds was in the Pedro Pan refugee camp for kids who had come to the States without their parents, in Homestead, Florida. There we were, sitting outside the dining hall, another newly minted orphan and I, our backs against a chain-link fence, and this other kid says to me, “You know, the clouds in Cuba were so much prettier.”

“Naah, you're just homesick,” was my reply.

“No, I mean it, take a look. These clouds just don't compare.”

I looked up and inspected that Florida sky full of puffy clouds. I tried to find a difference between the sky I was looking at and the sky I had seen all of my life until ten days before that one, but I couldn't detect any difference at all.

“I don't really see what you mean,” I told my fellow orphan.

“You're just blind, that's all. This sky is very different. It just doesn't compare to the sky in Cuba.”

I started thinking how this guy was already well on his way to becoming a very bad poet, and then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it. A long cloud in the shape of Cuba, and it even included the Isle of Pines, that smaller island to the south of Cuba where my cousin Fernando was imprisoned.

I had never seen a cloud like that before. It came as a great shock to me then, and it still amazes me every time I see one. It's too grand a practical joke on the part of God, or nature, if you prefer.

They pursue me, these clouds. I've seen them everywhere. In Bluffton, Ohio, over a whole town without fences. In Reykjavik, Iceland, of all places, not far from the Arctic Circle. In Mexico, as I neared the summit of the Pyramid of the Sun. In Minneapolis, at sunset, through subzero air. In Wolfenbüttel, Germany, right above a pet store named
Vogel Paradies.
In Tarzana, California, over a freeway as wide as the Mississippi River. In Watseka, Illinois, suspended above one of the sorriest looking parks on earth. In Rome, while strolling through the Forum, just as a snake emerged from the ruins. I've even seen one in Kalamazoo, poised directly over a conference of scholars, unnoticed by a thousand and one medievalists.

Do they see me?

Under these clouds I pursue the life given to me. Under them I pine not for what I lost but for what I've never had and perhaps shall never have. What is always out of reach. These Cuba clouds are not so much reminders of my past as omens for the future. But what future? What could they possibly, silently, forecast?

Spun from dreams, they seem, in spite of themselves, in spite of their appearance and presence. Yet I won't be too surprised the day a bolt of lightning surges from one of them, cleaves me in two, and reduces me to mere cinders and vapor. I should expect it. Maybe even indoors, in the unlikeliest place, I'll be struck while my back is turned, when my guard is down. Maybe while I'm sitting in someone's wood-paneled office. Maybe in the presence of superiors, one of them will annihilate me. Those clouds are capable of the worst treachery, I'm sure.

Perhaps they are pesticide clouds. Exquisite breathtaking poison.

Time ran out on me this afternoon. Ran out with a vengeance. Short-changed, I shuffle off. Arriving at my home, I leave a Cuba cloud outside, allowing it to disappear on its own terms. If I can't see where they come from, I feel I shouldn't keep track of them or try to see where they end up. Besides, I don't know which one of them might kill me someday.

My youngest son emerges from behind a wall, as always, runs towards me at full speed and plows into me, head first. His hard little skull slams into my gut like a cannonball. I wince, as always, let out an honest
ummph,
and thank him for being such a brave charging bull, as he wraps his pure little arms around me.

“Good bull hug, Bruno. Great. One of the best, ever.”

My daughter Grace smirks and rolls her eyes. I wink at her. My oldest son, John-Carlos, smiles. I pray for that moment never to run out, as all the others have, as this afternoon ran out. I ask that the bull hug and the smirk and the smile never evaporate or turn into clouds, too.

But I know better.

Next time I emerge from this house in the woods, bound for some other point A, or point B, or C, or N, or Q, or Z, any finite point, another cloud might or might not be there. I never know when exactly, or where, but I know there will be one, for sure, when I least expect it, when my guard is down.

“There it is again,” I'll say when it appears out of nowhere, the crocodile-shaped island, my once and future lizard. So sublime, so ethereal, so far from reach, so clever and unfathomable, so supercharged with the power to enchant and annihilate me at the same time.

Such an odd, silent clue. Such rare evidence, so absurd, this, my fourth proof for the existence of God.