Waiting for Snow in Havana (3 page)

“Your little blond sons are gems. How do you think they'll enjoy our own very special playground? You know, there are plenty of dirty old men in Havana who would pay a fortune to spend time with them every night.”

“Your dear old mother and aunt are so frail. Have you ever wondered how easily their necks might snap when we kidnap and rape them?”

“Quiz time, Your Honor: How would you like to watch your children tortured before you, and then to have your eyes plucked out and fed to them?” And so on.

God only knows how many bribes were offered along with these messages. At one point, some government minister showed up at our house, and a long cortège of cars filled the entire street. Dad and the Minister-of-Whatever went into his study and closed the door. I have always wondered whether Dad showed the minister his Jesus-with-the-moving-eyes during that visit. In the end, my dad, Louis XVI, prevailed. Or maybe Eye Jesus had something to do with it. Dad sent Red to prison and nothing happened. After a while, the police stationed around the clock outside our house simply vanished. Red was eventually killed in a shoot-out, after escaping from prison, but I didn't find out about it until I was thirty-eight years old.
El Colorado
lingered in our household after his demise, kept hostage in a perverse afterlife by my own parents. Other children's parents used the Bogey Man—
El Coco
—to frighten their children into behaving. My parents used
El Colorado,
who seemed as eternal and omnipresent as the Bogey Man.

“Stop doing that or
El Colorado
will kidnap you!” “Finish up that soup or
El Colorado
will shoot you!” “Look, there he is at the window!” “Look at that big gun he's holding! Oh, my God, he's about to pull the trigger!” “Go to bed now or we'll call
El Colorado
to come get you!”

I never saw a picture of
El Colorado
. But I imagined him being fat and red-faced, much like a sunburned American tourist I had once seen walking down the street. I can still see him in my mind's eye, clinging to the iron bars that covered my bedroom window, grinning fiendishly, his face glowing red, his Hawaiian shirt popping at the buttons. The God's honest truth is that he wasn't nearly as scary as Maria Theresa of Austria. Or Eye Jesus.

After
El Colorado
's usefulness in behavior modification wore off, when I was slightly older, my father would occasionally take me with him to court in the summertime, when I was not in school. Sometimes he would take Tony too. Louis XVI began doing this when he was the judge of Regla, a poor district on the eastern side of Havana Harbor. Getting there was a lot of fun.

First we would take a bus all the way to the harbor. My father, the well-to-do art collector, former King of France, always rode the bus. Always. Even though we had a very nice car. This was one of his many quirks, like putting on his shoes before his trousers, or remembering his past lives and knowing about the past lives of others. The other judges made fun of him for this. “Hey, Nieto, did your chauffeur quit again?” “Nice bus, Nieto.” “What's the matter, Nieto, too many girlfriends to feed and clothe?”

I don't remember him having any comebacks, especially for the jokes that had to do with sex, which in Cuba always outnumbered other kinds of jokes in a billion-to-one ratio, roughly. This was another quirk of his. He never spoke of sex and he loathed dirty jokes. This made him a rare bird among Cuban males. From first grade on, every boy's reputation as a genuine male was constantly tested through sexual humor and the free exchange of “bad” words. Anyone uncomfortable with that in first grade was taunted as a
mariquita,
or sissy. By third grade the insult was upgraded to
maricón,
or queer. And it couldn't ever get any worse than
maricón
. Even suffocation and entombment in a giant sandpile was better than that.

Anyway, back to the ride to Regla and my father's courthouse. Once off the bus, we would catch a small launch, jam-packed with people, and cross the harbor. At dockside, on either end, poor boys dove for coins thrown into the water. Most were my age, some even younger. The water was way past murky. Once the coins hit the water, they would quickly disappear from view. No turquoise here. This water was a deep, dark green, smudged with rainbow-hued oil slicks, and it smelled worse than it looked. My father's musings as we crossed the harbor made the boat ride scary.

“Just think of all the sharks swimming under us right now.”

“You know, I once saw an old black woman fall off the side of the boat and drown, right here. And the guy who dove in after her was eaten by a shark. It was horrible.”

“You know, one of these boats capsized once during a rainstorm, and everyone drowned. No, no, I take that back. Some drowned. The rest were eaten by sharks. It was horrible. What a tragedy.”

“You know, some crazy man once drilled a hole into the hull of one of these water taxis and when it was about halfway to the other side it sank. It was horrible: those who didn't drown were eaten by the sharks.”

Those poor boys diving for coins in water so dark that one couldn't see a shark coming seemed to me the bravest humans on earth. Or the most desperate. At the time I didn't know that desperation and bravery are usually one and the same thing. My dad would always give me a coin to throw in, usually a nickel. Sometimes it was a Cuban nickel, sometimes an American nickel. (Back then the currency was interchangeable, for the peso and the dollar were often nearly on a par with each other.) And the boys would scramble and fight one another to get to my nickel. The look of glee on the face of the boy who burst forth from the filthy water holding my nickel was priceless.

From the dock we would walk to the courthouse, a few blocks away. These were grimy streets, I thought, full of disgusting old buildings and poor people. The only color I remember seeing in that neighborhood was brown. The buildings were brown, the streets were brown, the people were brown. Even the statue of the Virgin Mary enshrined in the chapel of Our Lady of Regla was brown. The blazing sun remained far above, in its pure realm, unable to pass through the narrow streets. Not one tree in sight, at least on the way to the courtroom.

The courthouse seemed indistinguishable from the other buildings on that narrow street, probably because there was hardly enough room to step back and take a good look. The door seemed ancient and weathered. It was brown. The policeman guarding it was also usually brown. Once you made it past the door, you knew this was no ordinary building. It had jail cells, the only real ones I have ever seen. And there were people in the cells. Mostly brown people. We had to walk past them to get to Dad's chambers. They looked sad and angry and dirty, and they eyed me with malice, or so I thought. I was very glad to see policemen in that jailhouse corridor on the way to Dad's chambers. These were obviously bad people who had done something wrong. Who knew what they could do to me if my father hadn't locked them up? The jail cells reminded me of the lions' cages at the zoo, and the people inside looked about as happy as trapped beasts.

The most amazing discovery I made by visiting the courthouse was that my father was not just a goofy fat man who made kites and drove us through giant waves. He had power. Real power, the kind that makes other men grovel. Inside the courthouse, Dad was treated as if he really were the King of France, and my brother and I as if we were Bourbon princes. The court clerks would literally trip over one another fawning over him, and over us. Since I was always at the very bottom of the pecking order at school and at home, the attention and respect focused on me came as a shock.

The questions came at me fast and furiously from every man who worked for my father. Grown men with moustaches and slicked-back hair. “Can I get you a Coca-Cola? Or would you prefer Royal Crown? How about Pepsi-Cola? Orange Crush? Materva? Cawy? Maybe you'd like a milk shake? Should I turn up the speed on that fan over there? Is it too hot for you in here? Maybe you'd like some comic books?”

Once I had answered any of these questions in the affirmative, the man graced by my request would then snap his fingers and order some other man around. “Ñico, go across the street and get the judge's son a Coca-Cola.” “Hey, Argimiro, run down to the newsstand and get the judge's son the latest Superman comic book.” “Chucho, Chucho, Chucho! Snap to it! Go get this fine boy some Juicy Fruit gum!” A few minutes later, the request would be fulfilled. Being a child, I never thought about who paid for these items.

These very same men hovered around Dad's desk like worker ants, bringing papers and taking them away after he signed them. They asked if this or that had been done properly. And they always responded with a nod and a
“Sí, señor”
to each and every one of Louis XVI's orders. What a revelation that was each time I saw it. In the courtroom, the veil would lift momentarily to reveal a world of hierarchies, in which all five senses could detect power and discern its effect upon men. Lucky me, I was on top of the heap. And I thought it would be like that forever.

I knew this for sure when I got to sit next to Dad on his judge's bench. Yes, I could sit up there, next to His Honor. Those obsequious men would pull up a chair for me. There I would sit, elevated way above everyone else in the room, looking down on the guilty and innocent and on the victims. I told you Havana was not in the United States of America. My kite-making, wave-crashing father would hear testimony, question witnesses, uncover the truth, pound his gavel, and decide what was just, with his son sitting right next to him. In a world full of wrongs, it was his job to put things right: to absolve and to punish, to vindicate and to turn loss into gain.

It was amazing to watch him work. He dispatched his cases with great speed; even the most tangled arguments and disputes gave him no pause. I had heard of Solomon in school, and about the two women and the baby, and how Solomon had dispatched that case in the wink of an eye. Split the baby in two! Good God, my father was just like Solomon. He could spot the guilty ones in an instant by asking just one or two questions and render judgment in a flash. A fine for you: twenty pesos. Jail time for you: twenty days.

I sat up there transfixed. Everyone in the courtroom stared at me quizzically, as if asking “What the hell are you doing up there, boy?” One woman found guilty of something and fined fifty pesos looked at me pleadingly after my father pronounced her sentence. What did she think I could do?

I don't think the court sessions ever lasted more than two hours. After stepping down from the bench, Dad would sign some more papers and we would head back home. Back on the water taxi, back on the bus. Now that I think about it, my father's work day was about three or four hours long. No wonder he had time to do so many other things, such as typing out full descriptions of each and every one of his art objects on little cards, or building dioramas, or driving us to the seashore.

Once, after the world had changed and my father had been reassigned to a remote rural courthouse, we rode there on the train. It was the farthest I would ever get from Havana until I flew away for good. The train ride was very exciting, especially because the train was almost derailed. It took us about two hours to travel what must have been about thirty miles. Once he got to his courthouse, a small wooden building, Dad signed a few papers and back home we went. There were only two men working for him at that courthouse, and they were just as obsequious as the men at Regla. The only difference that the Revolution made was that there was nothing they could offer me. No sodas, no chewing gum, no comic books. Nothing. Not even a
guarapo,
a cold drink made from crushed sugarcane. Yet they still brought papers to my dad to sign, and took them away, and sought his approval.

Power is always power, and men are always men.

What a nice job being a judge. What a nice thing being the son of a judge. What a place, my Cuba. Lucky me.

Long before I rode the water taxi to Regla, many wise men and women had already discerned how best to approach such luck. One of these sages was Saint Jerome, the man who translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin in the fifth century. Legend had it that Saint Jerome used to say, “Have mercy on me, Lord, I am a Dalmatian,” while he beat his breast with a stone, struggling to suppress his own will and make his soul ready for God's abounding grace. What a wise man. He knew how deeply sin dwells in our skin. My own worst instincts still lead me to turquoise water, tangerine sunsets, and the judge's seat. I, too, find myself clutching jagged chunks of granite, beating my breast, seeking redemption. But I have to make a slight alteration in Jerome's prayer—a small change that makes a world of difference:

Miserere mei, Domine, Cubanus sum.

“Have mercy on me, Lord, I am a Cuban.”

W
ho discovered Cuba?”

Easy question. Nearly all of the boys raised their hands. Except those who thought it was too easy, and froze.

“Felipe…can you tell us?”

Felipe had not raised his hand.

“Christopher Columbus, in 1492.”

“Very good,” said our teacher, “but I didn't ask for the date. Good to know you weren't daydreaming. Now here is a tougher question: what was the first thing Columbus said when he set foot on Cuba?”

A couple of brownnosers thrust their hands into the air with more enthusiasm than anyone else. One of them even grabbed his upraised right arm with his left, as if to push it farther into the air. The teacher, as usual, called on someone who was sitting on his hands.

“Daniel, what did Columbus say?”

Daniel winced, and stuttered: “Uh…uh…uh…Thank God for land…at last?”

Laughs and snickers. A few more hands went up. The teacher shook his head and pounced on another seemingly distracted boy who hadn't raised his hand.

“Miguel, can you get it right?”

Looking the teacher straight in the eye, Miguel answered: “Columbus said, ‘This is the most beautiful land ever seen by human eyes.'”

“Excellent. I'm glad to see not only that you were paying attention, Miguel, but that at least some of you have had a proper upbringing and were told about this at home, before we got to today's lesson. You know, what Columbus said is very, very important. It may be one of the most important things ever said about our island, and one of the most true.”

“Yes, Cuba is a paradise,” said Ramiro, unbidden. He was the one who had been holding his arm up higher than anyone else. “My dad told me that the Garden of Eden was here in Cuba, and that Adam and Eve were not only the first humans, but also the first Cubans, and that the entire human race is kind of Cuban. And he also said that this is the reason we don't have any poisonous reptiles at all.”

“True, Ramiro, Cuba is a paradise, and it very well might have been the original Paradise, the Garden of Eden. How many of you have heard this before?”

A good number of hands went up.

“Yes, Cuba is a paradise. There is no other place on earth as lovely as Cuba, and that's why you should be so proud of your country. You're all very lucky to live in a paradise.”

Lizards darted through my mind, and I stared through the window at the boy who was out on the playground, kneeling on the gravel under the bright blinding sun. I looked at the crucifix on the wall above the blackboard and the blood on the wounds. Few things scared me more than crucifixes, except for the Jesus who showed up in my dreams. And voodoo curses.

This is paradise? I strained to believe the teacher, and my own father too. Louis XVI had told me about Cuba being the Garden of Eden many times. I think he believed it, even though he couldn't remember ever having lived in Eden. It was one of the few things he didn't claim from memory. Could it really be?

Jesus H. Traitor-picking Christ. I didn't know it then, but that so-called Eden was far too close to the one in the Bible, and too close to what followed in that story, including the bit about Cain and Abel. I would have no foreigner to blame for the loss of my country, my home, and my family, or for all of the worst moments in my life. There would be no barbarian hordes I could point to, or invaders from beyond the sea. I would have only my own people to thank for my deepest scars, down to the most recent. But I would also owe a lot to them. Those fellow Cubans who would strip me clean, give me the Judas kiss, and crush me would also inch me towards paradise.

Loss and gain are Siamese twins, joined at the heart. So are death and life, hell and paradise. I struggled to deny this axiom as a child, and strain against it still on bad days.

Stupid of me to put up a fight. All along, I should have heeded what the Christian Brothers taught me. I didn't know it at the time, but those monks explained nearly everything to me. I owe them a lot, including my fear of chauffeurs.

Lucky me. I attended the finest primary school in Havana. El Colegio La Salle de Miramar. The Christian Brothers ran several schools in Cuba, but their outpost in the plush suburb of Miramar was the flagship, not just for their order, but for all private schools on the island. President Batista must have thought so, for he sent his children there. They were my school-mates, as were the sons of many of Batista's ministers and generals. The sons of those who owned the sugar mills, tobacco factories, mines, department stores, and nearly everything else of value were my classmates, too, along with the sons of doctors, lawyers, and judges.

This was a Catholic school for boys, of course. It was run by stern monks, many of them from Spain and France, whose sole purpose in life was to make us aware of our base instincts and turn us into God-fearing Christians. Aside from a handful of Jewish children whose parents had come to Cuba from Europe fleeing Hitler and the Nazis, all of us were Roman Catholics. The Jewish kids would be excused from taking part in religion class, but they still had to sit at their desks while religion was taught. We all thought it was strange, but whenever we dealt with Bible stories from the Old Testament, they would chime in. And they knew all the answers. We couldn't figure out how they knew so much if they weren't taking religion class, but somehow they did. It was a mystery the good brothers never bothered to reveal to us.

You see, they didn't really explain everything. They only explained nearly everything.

The principal of this school, Brother Néstor María, was short and stout and spoke Spanish with a very thick French accent. You can imagine how much fun we good Christian boys had with that. French accents are just as funny in Spanish as in English. He would visit our classroom often and stand near the door with his hands behind his back, his huge belly testing the strength of the black buttons on his cassock. He boasted about the school to all the parents, and my mother still talks about it. “You know, that Brother Néstor María would always say that his school was attended by the
crème de la crème
of Cuban society.”

The
crème de la crème
. Sure. We might have been at the top of the heap, but all of us were little thugs, putrid vessels of original sin. Not an hour went by without some kid being bullied or ridiculed. Not a day went by without a fistfight on the playground. Sometimes there would be two or three fights going on simultaneously during recess, each attracting a circle of spectators. The brothers would stand back and watch, intervening only at the first sight of blood. When more than one fight took place at the same time, the spectators would rush from circle to circle, trying to find out who was fighting. Some fights were better than others, depending on the reputation of the participants. What you wanted to see was a fight between two really tough guys. Watching a tough guy beat up on some
mariquita
was not much fun. The only kids who watched those fights were the
maricones
.

I wasn't counted among the
mariquitas
or
maricones,
but I was constantly tested. Abstaining from foul language placed me uncomfortably close to the line between
macho
and
mariquita,
and this invited all sorts of challenges to my budding masculinity. In the process, I came to be at the bottom of some pecking order I still don't understand. And I also took more punches than I care to remember.

I do remember winning one fight, though, and with merely one blow.

One fine day in second grade, out in the blazing sunlight, I was approached on the playground by the son of one of Batista's chief henchmen. Even at that age, I knew that his father was rumored to be in charge of all of the torturing in Cuba. No small task, on an island crawling with rebels. As often happens, the son tried to emulate the father. So this boy whose name I have forgotten was one of the worst bullies in my class.

Chief Torturer Junior approached me as I stood talking to another kid. He interrupted rudely, as bullies are supposed to do, and asked: “Why do you always stand with your hands on your hips, just like a girl?”

I looked down at my hands and, much to my horror, I saw that they were indeed resting on my hips. I had to think fast, especially since I had never heard that placing one's hands on one's hips was a telltale sign of femininity. But if this guy said so, it must be true. After all, the bullies were the lexicographers of
machismo
.

“I don't always do that,” I replied as I removed my hands from my hips.

“Yes you do. I see you doing it all the time.”

“No, I don't.”

“Yes you do. Ask anyone. You always stand there just like a girl, with your hands on your hips.”

Chief Torturer Junior turned to the kid who was with me. “Tell him. You saw it too. Doesn't he always stand like this?” And the bully struck a very feminine-looking pose, swaying his hips, placing one hand on his right hip and the other on his forehead.

“I…I…I don't know,” said the other boy, afraid that he, too, was being challenged.

“I don't always stand around like a girl,” I protested once more. “You're exaggerating.”

“Are you calling me a liar?” huffed the bully.

“Uh…no, no.”

“Yes you are,
maricón,
you're calling me a liar. You disgusting fairy.”

He had done it. He had used the word. And we were only in second grade. This was getting very serious.

Chief Torturer
fils
pressed on. “You know, you make me sick. You stand like a girl, and you never say bad words. Here, prove you can say a bad word. Say
shit
. Say it. Say
mierda.
”

“Uh…uh…I can't. That's a mortal sin. It's…it's against the first commandment.”

“See. I told you. You can't even say
shit
. You know it's only girls who don't say bad words. Only girls and
maricones
.”

“I can't say it. It has nothing to do with being a boy or a girl. I don't want to go to hell.”

“So you're calling me a liar again, huh? Well, you can't do it! Say
shit
. Say
dick
. Go ahead, say
pinga.
”

The next thing I knew my clenched fist was striking his head, right above his ear. It happened so fast he didn't have a chance to block the punch. He doubled over and stayed that way for what seemed like an eternity. Then he started to sob. I stood there holding my offending fist, which hurt a little, watching the bully sob. He sobbed and sobbed, and whined, and held his hand against his temple. I thought maybe I had ruptured his brain or something.

Then he spoke again between sobs: “You know,
sob,
you can kill someone by hitting them on the temple.
Sob.
That's a bad spot.
Sob, sob
. If you hit someone there,
sob,
the blow can go right to the brain and kill you.”

I thought of saying, “Sure, you know this because your father kills so many people. I bet it's your father who taught you this. I bet he punches a lot of people in the temple. That's why you're such an expert.” Instead of saying what I wanted to say, I simply stood there, breathing heavily. And I watched him weep.

The more he sobbed, the sorrier I felt for him. Waves of pity began to wash over me. But then waves of fear joined them. It dawned on me that I had hurt the meanest little bastard in class, whose father had the power to make people disappear. Now I'd done it. This meant death for me and my family.

Pity and fear twisted into a knot in my chest and forced me to say “I'm sorry.”

The bell rang, recess ended, and we went back to class. Though I went home that afternoon and warned my parents about our impending doom, nothing bad ever happened. No police ever came in the middle of the night. No one whisked me away in a big black car during recess. The bully stopped taunting me. He didn't exactly become my friend, but at least he left me alone from that day forward.

I didn't realize it at the time, but I had stumbled onto one of the fundamental rules of the universe. Bullies are the ultimate sissies.
Mariquitas
at heart, all of them, maybe even
maricones
. Much later, when I ended up at a public high school in a rough neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago, where the tough guys carried knives and used them, memories of that weeping bully saved me from a lot of trouble.

Of course, the good Christian Brothers had told us repeatedly about the Sermon on the Mount, loving our neighbor, turning the other cheek, and the meek inheriting the earth. But it just didn't sink in. Original sin had us by the throat. We were all under the same curse, slaves to sin, blind as bats, and as happy as bats in a cave. We fought like God-damned savages, the whole lot of us. We hurled insults with abandon, laughed at the less fortunate, and looked down on nearly everyone else on our benighted island. We were, after all, number one. And everyone else was number two or lower. We knew it. Our parents knew it. The brothers knew it. Pride was our worst sin.