Waiting for Snow in Havana (26 page)

Gone back to Miramar. To the beach, at the Club Náutico. I saw clouds, beautiful white clouds, hovering over the turquoise sea. I heard the waves, and in the distance, from the club bandshell, a live orchestra playing a soft and sweet cha-cha-cha, the kind King Louis despised. I smelt the saltwater, even tasted it, and felt the sting in my eyes. I felt the sun on my skin and the warm breeze. I felt the wind whip through my hair, just as it had that
Nochebuena
when we made our way home past the seawall of the Malecón.

When I got home to our apartment building on the southeast corner of Winthrop and Hollywood, Marie Antoinette was peering out the basement window, her head level with the sidewalk, waiting for me, as always. She had struggled mightily for three years to get to us, given up everything, including her husband, mother, father, brother, sister, and homeland, only to find herself spending all day and all night in an empty apartment. She cooked for us and cleaned the house and did our laundry, which was a welcome change from what we'd grown used to, but aside from showering us with love, that was all she could do.

My brother and I became her guardians. We supported her. We found our apartment. We bought our furniture. We found the used TV, the radio, the dishes. We spoke for her. We read newspapers for her and interpreted movies and television programs. We took her places on buses and trains. She could never give us advice on anything that mattered, or so we thought. And we barely spent any time in her presence.

Her love for us was boundless, even when we were blind to it.

That night I hugged her when I walked in the door, as always, took a shower, scrubbed my knee raw with a washcloth, and went to sleep on my sofa bed in the living room, under the pipes, below street level, no more than twelve feet away from the rushing traffic on one of the busiest streets in Chicago, a stone's throw from the rumbling elevated train.

Three hours later, Marie Antoinette would be up making breakfast for Tony, as always. And two hours after that, I'd be back at school again, as always.

I never told my mother about the pervert. It would have broken her heart. She still doesn't know, and, unless this is translated into Spanish sometime soon, she will never know in this life.

Thank you, Fidel. Thank you very much.
Muchas gracias, compañero.

Whooooosh! Fffrrrrrrrggshhhh! Sssswrrrrooosshhh!

“Fullerton. Next stop, Fullerton.”

Whrackettetat
…“Good night.”

T
he bullets were wonderful. Bullets in all sizes, from harmless-looking .22-caliber midgets to huge, armor-piercing monsters. The ones we liked best were those with pointy tips. They looked more lethal than the rounded ones.

Any time we saw a bearded guy in fatigues, we'd say,
“Tienes balas?”
Got any bullets?

There were plenty of bearded guys in fatigues roaming the streets those first few weeks after Batista fled and Fidel took over. Most of them were on the young side and, in our neighborhood, they were usually the grown children of affluent parents, or friends of theirs. Hard to believe, but there were well-to-do idealists in those early days of the Revolution who genuinely thought that Cuba could become a much better place. Idealists who set themselves up, and everyone else, for the ultimate
desengaño.
Some of them came back to our neighborhood after triumphing up in the mountains of Oriente province and sweeping through the island in a matter of days in January 1959.

Those bearded guys didn't stick around much past 1959, if that long. They either shaved and put on regular clothes, or they went back underground, to fight against a gathering dictatorship known as the Revolution. Or they fled elsewhere, usually to Florida. Some of them would return with the Bay of Pigs invasion. A few became the new ruling elite, taking over abandoned houses even bigger and better than those of their parents.

Those who simply shaved and sat down to dinner with Mom and Dad each day, and danced the night away in nightclubs, smelling of Old Spice and Brylcreem, those heroes, they didn't necessarily “sell out” as American hippies might have said around 1968. No, they'd fought the good fight and now got down to the business of living in a halfway normal country.

Isn't that why most young men fight revolutions, so they can dance the night away, fall in love with the girl of their dreams, and feel great about it?

I fell in love with three blondes that year. Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, and Eva Marie Saint. Eva Marie was a distant third, Kim a mind-blowing second, and Marilyn was so close to God that it was hard not to confuse the two.

Forget that bitch Tinker Bell, and even Doris Day, who had also struck some very deep chord in my soul. Forget Brigitte Bardot, too, that French tart. Couldn't feel the pull, not the same way.

I loved those three blondes. They were much too old for me, I knew that—real love, real sex had little to do with it. I didn't know anything about sex, except that there were dirty magazines and that chauffeurs loved them. These women just tugged on my soul as if it were a wide lapel, and pulled me close to their heavenly faces, and I could almost smell them.

Poor Jimmy Stewart in
Vertigo,
I knew just how he felt about Kim Novak, and I didn't even have to practice looking as lost as he did. It just came naturally whenever I thought of Kim.

What was that fire within, that burning? Why did I dream about them? It was such a relief to dream of women other than Maria Theresa, Torso Lady, and Candlestick Lady. And such a great gift to undergo that meltdown of the soul, to bask in their presence, to feel fully redeemed. Sorry, God the Father; sorry, Jesus and the Holy Spirit; sorry Brother Pedro, and all the other brothers, and
profesor Infierno,
and all my other teachers at La Salle, and every priest to whom I have ever confessed my sins. Bless me fathers, bless me brothers, for I have sinned: this was the only redemption I could genuinely understand. That attraction, that meltdown, that total invasion of the self by the presence of a beautiful woman.

Blondes and bullets in Havana. My world in 1959.

Hey, but those bullets. Once, Eugenio talked one of the bearded guys into giving us the bullet belt that he had strapped across his chest.

“Okay, kids, they're yours. I don't need them anymore.” He undid the belt and tossed it at us.

We collected them as if they were gems. We each had our own stash, though we often traded or, on rare occasions, shared our loot. And we did very dumb things with them. We loved to pull a bullet out of its shell with a pair of pliers, spill the gunpowder on the ground, and set a match to it, as close to our faces as possible.
Whooooosh!
We also threw the bullets down on the ground as hard as we could to see if they would go off. Or we pounded them with rocks and hammers.

We also threw them at one another, wondering whether we could actually toss them hard enough to tear through flesh, just like a gun. I had visions of my bullets sticking to people like darts.

Lucky for us, none of them ever exploded, or stuck into anyone, or poked out an eye. Much to our disappointment, of course. Not one bang. No wounds. Not even when Eugenio took a very large bullet and put it in a vice, and then struck it on the bottom with a hammer and a Phillips screwdriver, really hard. He thought that was as close as we could come to approximating the action of a real gun.

Good theory, but it didn't pay off. We wanted some bangs, and also some blood. Not too much, just some. Well, what we really wanted were real guns. But not even the craziest revolutionary would give a rifle or a pistol to a nine- or ten-year-old boy. We knew because we tried repeatedly and failed miserably.

It was a good start to a revolution. All these guys with beards and long hair, and all these kids playing with bullets. Kids who saw far too many war movies, and too many Westerns, and too many films with blondes in them.

I was lucky enough that year to see three Marilyn Monroe films. First
Some Like It Hot,
then
The Seven Year Itch,
and finally
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Something about that woman was unearthly. I've been trying to figure it out since 1959, and am no closer to understanding it now than I was then.

My lovely wife, fortunately, gives me no grief about Marilyn. Once, when we were living in Madrid, she asked a guy at a newsstand for a poster he had of Marilyn—an advertisement for Winston cigarettes—and the guy gave her a funny look, the kind only Spanish newsstand guys can give you. “My husband is in love with her,” she said, with an obviously American accent. The guy gave her look number two, a more intense version of the first funny look. “It's all right,” my wife said, “she's dead.” And the newsstand guy smiled from ear to ear, threw up his hands, nodded, took down the poster, and gave it to her, saying,
“Muy bien, entonthess.”
Very good, then.

At least this is what she tells me.

Kim Novak had more or less the same effect on me, but there was something too gloomy and menacing about the character she played in
Vertigo.
I felt the pull, no doubt about it, but there could be no comparing her to Marilyn. No way. Apples and oranges.

Years later, I ended up befriending a guy in high school whose father had dated Kim Novak, when she still lived in Chicago. “Did you know Kim Novak could have been my mother?” he once said to me. “Well, if she had been, then you wouldn't be you, would you, and it would be some other guy sitting in your chair, wouldn't it, if he were sitting here at all?” I said, applying as much logic as possible to raw emotion.

I guard my memories fiercely, especially when it comes to these blondes. Sometimes I think these memories are as religious as Fidel's men were in 1959.

Many of the bearded guys wore rosaries around their necks when they came down from the mountains. Some wore several of them, and religious medals, too, which they proudly kept in view, rather than tucking them away under their shirts. It seemed for a few days that these young men who had come from the mountains were saints. Selfless holy men, who prayed as much as they fought, modern equivalents of the Knights Templar, or Knights of the Order of Santiago. Good Catholics, all of them, devoted to the Virgin Mary and the Sermon on the Mount.

Come to think of it, many of them looked like Jesus, with their long hair and beards. One of Fidel's right-hand men, Camilo Cienfuegos, looked so much like Jesus I wouldn't have been able to tell the two apart if it hadn't been for the big hat that Camilo always wore. He looked just like Eye Jesus, especially. Maybe this is why Fidel made him disappear early on in the Revolution.

Fidel too looked a little like Jesus. Those first few weeks of 1959, a poster appeared, plastered everywhere, which showed Fidel in a pious-looking pose, gazing off into the distance, or heaven, or both, with a nimbus and a hint of a halo surrounding his head. There were even cardboard fans with this image on them. These fans were a necessity for many Cubans. Without air-conditioning or electric fans in the tropics, you'd better be ready to fan yourself a lot. And a cheap, mass-produced cardboard fan with a thin, flat wooden handle works just fine, sometimes better than one made from expensive silk and mother-of-pearl. All the poor people in Cuba had these fans. Too many to count. Fans for the fans of Fidel.

At that same time, some genius came up with the idea of teaming up that image of Fidel, the haloed one, with a catchy slogan. The resulting poster caught on like wildfire. It depicted Saint Fidel hovering over the words: “Fidel, this house is yours.” Cubans framed and hung these posters in their homes by the hundreds of thousands.

Fidel, I think, took the invitation a little too seriously. Within two years, every house was his indeed, literally, legally. No more private property.

Yes, I know, everything became the property of all Cubans, to be equally shared, according to need. Yes, I know, Fidel didn't expropriate anything all by himself, or for his own gain, not even a pencil sharpener, or a discarded shaving from a pencil stub. I also know that Fidel wasn't as interested in anyone's house, literally, as he was in their souls. He wanted to rule over every household, totally, and forever. He wanted to own all Cubans, not just their homes.

And he succeeded.

How different it was in Hollywood. Take Jimmy Stewart in
Vertigo
and
Anatomy of a Murder
or Cary Grant in
North by Northwest.
These guys wouldn't put up with any such crap. They didn't need to fawn over any revolutionary, or worship him, or cave in to his bullying.

I wanted to be Jimmy Stewart, not just because he got to be close to Kim Novak and Grace Kelly, but because he was so totally himself, always, regardless of the character. He reminded me of my grandfather. I'm sure Jimmy would have brushed lizards off his shoulder with the same aplomb as
Abuelo
Amador. I also wanted to be Cary Grant. He was so much in control in
North by Northwest,
no matter how absurd the world around him became. You can be sure that Cary and Jimmy would never have offered up their houses to Fidel, or to any other revolutionary simply because they were Americans. I knew Americans had no need for any such thing as charismatic leaders.

After all, everything was perfect in the United States. Americans were perfect, despite the ridiculous clothes they wore when they came to Cuba as tourists. They made all the great movies, didn't they? And they made the best cars, too, and Coke and Pepsi, and all the good comic books, like
Batman
and
Superman
. And they had snow at Christmas. And they had beaten the Germans, and the Japanese, and the Indians, and anyone who was an “enemy” in any really good movie. And they had women like Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, and Eva Marie Saint.

By 1959, at the age of eight, I knew I wanted to marry an American woman, preferably one who looked like either Marilyn Monroe or Kim Novak. Meanwhile, nearly everyone around me was worshiping a man with a black beard whose name was not Jesus.

We went to see Fidel make his triumphal entry into Havana on Epiphany, the day of the Three Kings, the feast that celebrates when the Messiah became known to the world beyond Bethlehem. Louis XVI wouldn't go, of course, but the rest of us did. We went with Inocencia, our maid. And we stood outside the grocery store where we did all our shopping, the store owned by Fernando Chan. Fernando was a very nice Chinese man who always gave us free olives and raisins when we went to his store. We loved shopping day because boxes full of stuff would be delivered to our house by Fernando, and we could make forts out of the boxes and the merchandise. Towers made from cans of condensed milk. Turrets made from cereal boxes.

That's what I thought about as I stood waiting for Fidel to pass by, those towers of condensed milk. Fernando was there with his children, who were about the same age as us. He was as excited as everyone else in that crowd, and so were his kids. Everyone was smiling and joking and feeling genuinely happy.

Fernando Chan and his family would end up in the United States, too, like so many in the crowd that January day. In less than two years, his store would be taken away from him by the state. About the same time, all of his savings would be declared nonexistent, too, just like everyone else's. It would be Che Guevara's idea, to wipe out all the bank accounts and level the playing field. His ultimate plan was to do away with money altogether, but that proved impossible.

Too bad for Che that Fidel set him up for a tragic death in Bolivia. He had such a nice Mercedes-Benz and such a nice mansion, just three blocks from my house. It was so huge an estate, it took up an entire city block. He should have remained in Cuba and danced the night away, smelling of Old Spice and Brylcreem, instead of inciting revolutions south of the equator.