Waiting for Snow in Havana (22 page)

I remember most of the stories
el profesor
told us in third grade, along with the beads of sweat that appeared on his face while he told them. I have to share two of these with you.

Here's the first one. A little boy once fell in with the wrong group of friends. He had been a very good boy up to that point in his brief life, but these bad boys started to twist his soul towards the devil. One day, these evil friends encouraged him to take God's name in vain, and he did it. That night, he went to bed as usual, but in the middle of the night a huge, terrible, smelly black dog came into his room and took him away. The next morning his parents found his bed charred beyond recognition and no trace at all of their boy. The devil himself had come to drag him down to hell.

Of course, the specific words uttered by the boy were never revealed. This made it more suspenseful, and brought you almost to the brink of coming up with your own execrably vain name taking.

Now for the second one. A little boy once fell in with the wrong group of friends. He had been a very good boy up to that point in his brief life, but these bad boys started to twist his soul towards the devil. One day, these evil friends encouraged him to blaspheme, and curse the Virgin Mary, and he did it. That night, he went to bed as usual, but in the middle of the night a violent thunderstorm erupted, and a bolt of lightning came right through the window and struck him as he slept. The next morning his parents found his bed charred beyond recognition and no trace at all of their boy. The devil himself had turned into a lightning bolt and dragged him down to hell.

I warned you about the repetition.

How about one more? One that involves beads of sweat.

One night a monk is praying in his cell. This monk has not exactly been living up to his vows. (Once again, no specific mention of what was being done, or not done, by this monk.) Well, there he is praying away but not feeling too sorry for his sins, and
whooosh!
one of his fellow monks, now dead, shows up, enveloped in flames. The heat and the stench are unbearable. The live monk asks the dead monk: “What are you doing here?” The dead monk says he's been sent up from purgatory to warn his fallen brother to stop sinning, repent, and go to confession, lest he too end up in the flames. The live monk asks: “Are you in hell, then, brother?” The dead monk replies: “No, brother, I'm in purgatory.” The live monk makes the mistake of saying: “Well, then it can't really be all that bad for you, brother. After all, it's only purgatory.” Wrong thing to say. “Hold out your hand, brother,” says the dead monk. The wayward monk puts out his hand obediently, though he is frightened out of his wits. The dead one wipes a single drop of sweat from his brow. And then he lets this tiny, lone drop of sweat fall upon the open palm of his live brother. Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! That drop of sweat sears a hole the size of a host in the monk's hand and then hits the cold stone floor, fizzing and hissing. Then, as expected, comes the lesson from the dead monk on a five-minute furlough from purgatory: “If that's what a single drop of sweat from purgatory can do, imagine what it will be like for you to endure these flames for thousands and thousands of years. Then imagine how much worse hell will be! Amend your life, brother, and pray for me, so I may be released from this torment.”

Snuck in hell, didn't I? Just like my third-grade teacher used to do.

Second grade had been a different kind of hell. I've told you about this already: that's when we learned to distinguish between venial and mortal sins. What I haven't told you is that it was in second grade that we learned about hell on earth, too.

Hell on earth was our classroom.

Practically every inch of space on our walls was taken up by dead animals that had paid a visit to the taxidermist. And the taxidermist was none other than our teacher. Most of the animals were native to the island, but there were a couple of common dogs and cats too. I remember bats, iguanas, several kinds of rodents, birds, turtles, fish, and, in the left front corner of the classroom, a large
majá,
or Cuban boa, curled around a suitably sized tree limb. You can imagine how much I liked that boa.

We never heard a word about these animals. Not a single lesson on Cuban wildlife. I think the teacher just wanted to intimidate us. Cross him one time too many, and the next item on the wall might be your carcass.

And it was so easy to make this guy mad. Very irritable, this man with the big black moustache and the thick glasses. Any time something happened that he didn't like he would punish the whole class. For instance, if he heard a noise he didn't like but hadn't seen who'd made it, he'd ask us all to turn in the offender.

“Who did that? Who whistled? Tell me now, or no one gets to go to recess today.”

Most of the time we squealed willingly on one another. Then
el profesor Taxidermista
would design some punishment for the guilty boy and let us off the hook. One of his favorite penalties was to make the malfeasant stand in the corner of the classroom for the remainder of the day, next to the boa. If the offense was committed just before lunch or late in the afternoon, this wasn't too bad. But if the punishment was inflicted when the whole morning or the whole afternoon yawned before you, the consequences could be dreadful. You see, so long as this reprobate stood in the corner, he wasn't allowed to go to the bathroom at all. Not even during recess.

I don't know how many times I watched my classmates holding their crotches, dancing in pain by the boa, and pleading with
el profesor
to let them go pee. But the more they squirmed or pleaded, the angrier he became, and the more he threatened to extend the torture to the next day, and the day after that, and even for a whole week. Naturally, no seven- or eight-year-old boy will persist in the face of such threats.

I don't know how many of my classmates I saw pee in their pants, up there by the boa. I lost count.
El profesor Taxidermista
would then ask one of us to fetch the janitor. The janitor would show up with a bag of sawdust, a push broom, and a large dustpan. After heaping some fragrant sawdust on the yellow puddle, he'd allow it to sit there for a minute or two, and then sweep it all up and take it away. Then he'd come back with a mop and wipe down the floor under the boa. Meanwhile, the boy with wet pants was not allowed to move for the remainder of the morning or afternoon.

They stood up there, all these boys with wet pants, their shame on display. We were too young and untamed to feel sorry for them, or at least to let others know that we did. We laughed, sometimes, and made fun of them afterwards.

Coño, qué mierda.

But it didn't always work that way.

Sometimes none of us knew the identity of the offender. Then there was hell to pay. No recess, or even worse. Like the time someone left an offensive drawing on
el profesor Taxidermista
's desk during lunchtime, while he was out of the room.

“Who left this on my desk? Who drew this? Tell me now, or no one gets recess for the next three days. And no one gets to go to the bathroom either.”

Silence. None of us knew who had drawn whatever had offended
el profesor
so very much. We didn't know what had been drawn, either, since he wouldn't show us.

“One more chance, boys. Tell me immediately, or it's three days without moving from your desks all day, except to go home for lunch.”

We all looked at one another, hoping the guilty party would confess. Having the burden on your conscience of seeing all of your classmates punished for what you alone had done was often enough to make the offender buckle. It was an old Nazi trick. We knew it from American war movies. Sometimes, in these films, the Nazis would wipe out a whole town full of people as punishment for the wrongdoing of one individual. Maybe
el profesor
had seen the same films?

But this wayward artist must have had no conscience at all. Or maybe too much fear. Whatever his reasons, the little bastard sealed his lips and allowed us all to be sentenced to hell. For three whole days.

I was one of the first to pay the price. I paid it that very first afternoon. I'd had a lot of lemonade to drink with lunch. Really good lemonade, made with freshly squeezed lemons and tons of sugar that you could see at the bottom of the pitcher, a thick, cloudy sediment even after you stirred it. Someone had brought us a whole basket of lemons that morning.

Afternoon recess came and went and there we were, still in our seats. My bladder had been sending me signals since before the time that would have been our recess. Very soon after our non-recess, the signals began to intensify. Then they turned to pain. Enough pain to make me raise my hand and beg for a chance to go to the bathroom.

“No. No one gets to go anywhere. No exceptions. Maybe
you
can tell me who drew this awful picture?” He held it up backwards, so none of us could see it.

“But…but…I don't know who drew it. Could I please step out for a minute? Please? I really need to go. It's hurting a lot.”

“No. And if you keep asking I'll extend the penalty for two more days for the rest of the class.”

Dirty looks from everyone.

By that time, the pain had become so unbearable that I lost control completely. And what a sweet feeling it was to let go. I think that might have been my first genuine ecstasy, emptying my bladder, right there at my desk, feeling the warm pee trickle down my legs.
Gelassenheit
. That's what it was. I let go, completely, utterly.

But the ecstasy faded fast. I looked down at my feet and noticed, much to my surprise, that a puddle was forming at my feet. The yellow puddle kept growing and spreading to my left and right, across the narrow aisles that separated my desk from those of my immediate neighbors.

I tried to pretend nothing had happened.

The guy to my left, however, noticed soon enough.

“Eeeww, Carlos wet himself. Look at the puddle: it's huge!”

Everyone craned their necks to look at my feet. And I panicked.

“It's not me,” I said. “It's Pepe, there, in front of me. It's his puddle. Remember, he has trouble holding it. He wet his pants in the corner of the room a couple of weeks ago.”

Pepe, of course, stood up and showed everyone his pants were bone dry. And he asked me to do the same, while he gave me a dirty look. I gave up pretending then. Those seated around me could see my wet pants.

Meanwhile,
el profesor Taxidermista
sat back and watched my humiliation with detachment. When everyone was done laughing at me, he asked Pepe to fetch the janitor. After the sawdust had been spread and swept and the floor had been mopped, I sat there all afternoon with wet pants and a red face, looking out the window and trying to pretend I wasn't there.

The classroom had a beautiful view of the Gulf of Mexico and the cloud-dappled tropical sky above it. So did my third-grade classroom. Such beauty, such peace in sea and sky.

Not always, though. One rare stormy day in third grade, a kid said he had spotted a tornado over the water and we all rushed to the windows. Much to our disappointment, no one saw anything that resembled a twister or a water spout. The kid swore up and down that he had seen it, but I didn't believe him. Neither did most of the class.

False prophet.

But maybe he had seen something else. Maybe, I thought, he had seen Jesus returning to earth, on his way to judge everyone and destroy the world.

El fin del mundo.
The end of the world. The words sent shivers up and down my spine, and still do. I'd seen illustrations of it in my religion book, even though we skipped over that lesson, and also in a popular magazine at my grandmother's house. Long-haired, bearded Jesus seated on a throne up in the clouds, surrounded by armies of angels. Chaos and utter ruin on earth. People frightened out of their wits. The earth opening up, mountains crumbling, the seas full of giant tidal waves. The dead rising from their graves, all bare-ass naked. Very scary stuff. Especially the part about being naked in front of God and everybody.

The article I had seen in that magazine,
Bohemia,
was entitled “Will the World End in the Year 2000?” And it contained all sorts of information that had been neglected by my teacher,
el profesor Infierno
. There were umpteen quotations, taken straight from the Bible, that proved without a doubt that the end was very near indeed. I subtracted 1958 from 2000 and came up with forty-two. Forty-two years!

If I'd been a girl I might have said,
“Ay, Dios mío.”

Instead, I sank into a silent panic. I thought about that article for months, all through third grade. And I kept all the fear and worry tightly bottled up. As I saw it, the world was scheduled to end in my lifetime. I would be old, yes, a gray and wizened fifty-year-old geezer, bent over, perhaps confined to a wheelchair, but I'd live to see it.

I began to wonder whether the prophecies were off by a few years. What if the experts had miscalculated by a decade or two? How about three decades? Four? Maybe the end could take place at any moment?