Waiting for Snow in Havana (30 page)

And if anyone received anything adequate from the Revolution, it was purchased with blood money.

I should have had a frank talk with my school bus driver. He looked like the sort of guy who would have benefited most from the Revolution. More so than Aulet's chauffeur, who wore a neatly pressed uniform all the time. Our driver on bus number two was a walking, talking tattoo museum. Both of his arms were totally covered in tattoos from the wrist up. Since he wore his short sleeves rolled up, and his shirt front open to mid-chest, we could also see that the tattoos were everywhere. Sometimes, when his pants were hitched up a bit too high, we could see tattoos on his legs too. Blue and red markings all over. Images of the Virgin Mary. Hearts entwined, pierced by one arrow. Women's names. Flowers. Diagrams and pictures of all sorts. Some animals. A Cuban flag.

I'd never seen tattoos before, except on cartoon characters.

Someday, maybe, I'll get up the nerve to get one. I came close to doing it a few weeks ago, but backed off. One of these days, a few beers too many might push me through the threshold, from this world to that. The world of the tattooed. The world of truth.

They are different, you know, tattooed people. Could liars or hypocrites ever etch anything permanently into their skin? I bet Fidel doesn't have any tattoos.

That's why I wish I had talked to our driver on bus number two. He would have told me everything I would have ever needed to know about the Revolution.

Bus number two made a wide circuit through Miramar, picking up most of us who were refugees from my former school. The very last stop was somewhere in a brand-new neighborhood, where the trees were still very small and the sunshine was blindingly bright. Our last passenger was a kid whose father owned a soft drink company. His family's name was on every bottle of soda they sold. Imagine that: having people call out your name when they ask for a soda.

“I'd like an orange Cawy,
por favor.
”

Would that make you feel special or totally ordinary?

Anyway, Cawy and all the other soft drinks went down the tubes soon enough. The Cawy boy and his family lost everything. Confiscated. Nationalized. Everything from Coca-Cola to Cawy and Materva and Ironbeer, everything taken over by the state. Excuse me. Taken over by the Cuban people.

And the soft drinks went to hell.

Che Guevara must have had a tattoo or two, I bet. Once, when asked on television about soft drink production in the newly nationalized bottling plants, he admitted that they had no clue as to what they were doing, that they didn't know how to get them to taste good. The owners had been forced to turn over their bottling plants but not their recipes.

“Forget about Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola,” said Che. “Forget about them. We'll keep bottling something that looks like them, but we don't have the formulae. The Yankee Capitalists took them. You can keep drinking the stuff, if you want, but it's never going to taste the same.”

Every one of those Che Cokes or Pepsis was an adventure. No two bottles ever tasted the same. Awful, every bottle, every sip. I stopped drinking them altogether and stuck to seltzer, which was very hard for the Revolution to screw up.

Bus number two made its rounds until June, the end of the school year. The route had shrunk a little by then, and there were more empty seats on the bus than there had been in September. Seats vacated by kids who suddenly vanished without saying good-bye. Not many, but enough to make me aware of an emerging pattern. People were beginning to leave the country.

And we were staying.

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette never spoke about any of this. They had a way of keeping all conversations about the Revolution to themselves. They also had a way of surprising us with decisions about our future.

“You won't be going back to La Salle del Vedado next year. We think you kids need a change. Besides, we think you should go to a smaller school that's not directly affiliated with the Church. We don't know where we'll send you yet, but we'll take you to visit some schools and you can tell us which one you like best.”

That was a big change. Asking for our opinion.

We visited four schools. One was just a few blocks from our home, and it was small enough to fit into a twelve-room house. It had very stupid-looking uniforms. One was a military academy that looked so awful, it made Tony and me pray out loud spontaneously for the very first time in our lives: “Please, God, no, no, not that school!” The third school I can't even remember. The fourth, however, was great.

A school with girls. Imagine that. I knew they existed but never dreamed I'd be going to one. Like death, or illness, it was something that always happened to other people, not to us.

But it happened. Our parents were shaken up enough to enroll us in Colegio del Salvador for the following year. It wasn't very far from our house, and we'd be allowed to ride our bikes back and forth. No Cadillacs, no chauffeurs, no buses. Just bikes. And there'd be girls, and women teachers, and no monks at all. All of this in a beautiful mansion on Fifth Avenue, with a very large tree-shaded yard. And, to top it off, I'd get to wear a different uniform, which included brown shoes. What a concept. Unbelievable.

This was worth every bad Che-Pepsi and Che-Coke I'd had that year. Maybe this Revolution wasn't all that bad.

I wasn't wrong about the school. It proved to be better than anything I could have ever imagined. But I was wrong about the Revolution.

That night of July 26, 1960, when I walked with my fellow fireflies down Fifth Avenue, I was so happy to be rid of my fourth-grade enemies, and so taken with the way in which Bat Masterson used his walking stick.

The palms swayed in the breeze that night, and the flames of our candles danced. They danced the cha-cha-cha, and laughed merrily, those flames. They threw a party, those candles, as they licked the slightly salty air and inhaled the perfume on those veiled ladies and the Brylcreem on those men.

Don't ask about the scent on those few boys and girls who were there, walking along with their parents. Maybe they smelled of hope and eternal distraction. I know I must have. And I know I swayed with the palms and danced with the flames, even though dancing was forbidden in my house, and I wielded my invisible walking stick like a stunted Quijote against all of my invisible enemies. I also know that I reveled in being a firefly for one night.

Fireflies were so much nicer than lizards.

Saint Anne, up in heaven, eyed this procession through the dancing flames with great curiosity and no small measure of delight. She always loves a good procession, as does every saint. Imagine that: perfect strangers out for a transcendent stroll in your honor, nearly two thousand years after your death. We should all be so lucky, and so good.

But these people down there in Havana were so odd. Saint Anne smiled and wrinkled her perfect, immortal brow. Flames never danced like that for other people. How did they get the flames to do that? The music didn't come from the doleful hymns these fireflies were singing, but from the atmosphere itself, and from their bodies. And why were the drums in that music so loud? Did the drumming have anything to do with those other flashes of light you could see around the city nearly every night? Those bright explosions set off by young men who also oozed that music from their pores?

Looking down from heaven, Saint Anne saw the lights. All the lights. And she heard the music. All the music. She saw, as one can do only in heaven, how the lights and the music were all of one piece, connected by love and zest for life itself.

The insects, the parties, the candles, the bombs. All connected.

And as she smiled she also wept, as one can do only in heaven.

T
he sunlight slammed onto the front steps of the Miramar Theater with the same ferocity as ever and the same inaudible shriek. We bounded up the four terrazzo steps and into the air-conditioned lobby while Louis XVI flashed his I'm-a-judge-and-I-get-in-for-free card at the lady in the ticket booth.

A few months before, there had been a yo-yo demonstration in the theater, sponsored by Duncan Yo-Yo. They had interrupted the ritual, those Duncan iconoclasts, taken precious time out of the afternoon matinee intermission. They had thrown the switch on all the lights in the house, desecrating the hallowed darkness. Naked, revealed for us to see, the lush interior of the theater and the color of the velvet seats and the curtains in front: some kind of turquoise, like the sea. But worst of all, behind the large white screen that contained all of our important memories, a stage. A stage filled with talented children who could make their brightly colored yo-yos do wondrous tricks I could never hope to master. Children who had sold their souls to the devil, no doubt, in exchange for a walk-the-dog or an around-the-world.

I couldn't even get the yo-yo to go up and down three times before the string stopped working for me and the damn thing just hung there, like a horse thief on the gallows.

But those kids up on the stage, the traitorous stage that spoke of a secret past, those kids made me want to buy every yo-yo made at the Duncan factory. I pleaded with King Louis to buy them all for me, all the models, but he reminded me that I already had one and that it never obeyed my commands.

I understood envy fully for the first time that afternoon, and betrayal too. The Miramar Theater was for movies only, for darkness and a world beyond the flesh. That stage behind the screen, now crawling with yo-yo masters, had once harbored flesh-and-blood actors, traitors to the screen, enemies of truly otherworldly fantasies.

We were there to see a very special movie, and these yo-yo masters were keeping us from it. We were there to see Kirk Douglas, and the sea, and a very special machine.

You see, before he was a Viking, Kirk Douglas was a sailor. A sailor with a very tight striped shirt, trapped inside Captain Nemo's submarine, the
Nautilus,
in Walt Disney's
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

So there we were at the Miramar Theater, as always, but this time we were waiting for the yo-yo demonstration to end. How we loved to watch Kirk harpoon that giant squid right in the eye, hitting him square in that evil, vacuous pupil, despite the huge waves washing over the
Nautilus,
and despite his tight shirt. (This scene probably made it necessary for Kirk to suffer some payback in
The Vikings,
with hawk's talons.)

And there we were at the Miramar again, about a year later, sitting in air-conditioned comfort, watching Kirk hack off one of the squid's tentacles so he could free Captain Nemo from its deadly grip.

And there we were at the Arenal Theater, watching Peter Lorre look goofy, no matter what he did. He wasn't a cretin in
20,000 Leagues,
only a nerd. There we were at the Ambassador Theater, watching the
Nautilus
ram a ship and sink it. There we were at the Maxim Theater, a few doors down from my grandmother's house, watching Captain Nemo get shot. James Mason really knew how to get hit by a bullet. You knew he'd been hit. No doubt about it. There we were at the elegant Trianon Theater, watching Kirk Douglas cavort with Captain Nemo's pet seal. There we were at the Roxy Theater, the stinking, stuffy, hot Roxy, watching Captain Nemo open that giant round window of the
Nautilus,
stunning Kirk Douglas, Peter Lorre, and some other guy with the beauty of the undersea world. The world we all wanted to visit, to live in someday. I, for one, knew I'd be buying scuba gear as soon as my parents would let me. Maybe when I turned thirteen?

None of us ever got to scuba dive.

But we did get to see
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
over and over again. Whenever any theater in Havana played it, we'd be there. Sometimes we even went to theaters that didn't let us in free. Such a shock, to see Louis XVI paying at the front booth. But it was always worth it.

By the age of eight I had learned to memorize the newspaper movie listings on a weekly basis. I once knew the names of all the theaters in Havana, even those to which we never went and never would go. I didn't memorize the times, just the bookings—even for Mexican cowboy films, the very worst kind of entertainment, as far as I was concerned. Even worse than stupid films about romance, with lots of kissing scenes.

I first started liking the kissing scenes while watching
Queen of Outer Space
at the Miramar Theater on a Saturday in early 1960. I remember that it was sunny and hot outside the theater that afternoon. But that's a cheap carnival trick: it's so easy to remember the Cuban weather. Much harder to remember what the weather was like for every movie you've seen in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Paris, or Madrid. But I can do it. I'm like the character of Mr. Memory in Hitchcock's second version of
The Thirty-Nine Steps
(which I first saw on a balmy, starlit summer night in July 1974, on a thirteen-inch black-and-white television set, in my apartment, about fifteen miles from where I am now sitting).

Anyway,
Queen of Outer Space
set my head spinning. It was a lousy science fiction movie about earthmen who end up on the planet Venus, which is peopled only by women and is led by its chief scientist, played by Zsa Zsa Gabor. There was a lot of kissing up on that screen, and the usual smooching sounds and loud cheers from the Cuban audience.
“Ay, dale, chupa! Chupa duro, mami!”
Hey, go to it! Kiss hard, baby! I walked out into the bright, blinding sunlight thinking more about the kissing in that movie than about the robots. It wasn't just that the actors who kissed seemed to be enjoying it so much, it was that the very idea of kissing a female on the lips for a long time suddenly seemed so appealing. I felt possessed by an alien spirit, but it was a good feeling. Very good. It made me want to take a rocket ship to Venus—a
cohete,
of course.

The
Nautilus
was so far from Venus, so different. No kissing between men and women; only between one man and a seal. Not one woman in the submarine, or the entire movie.

But Fidel saw something worse than kissing in that film, something awful. He must have, for he prevented all Cuban children from seeing it.

And so it was that one day in 1960 we went to see
20,000 Leagues
at the Roxy Theater and were told that it was not suitable for small children.

“You can't see this movie,” said the woman in the ticket booth.
“Lo siento, prohibido a menores.”
Sorry, forbidden to minors. You can't come in. Go away.

My dad was puzzled and asked a number of questions. But he didn't get very far with the woman. All she could do was recite the new rules to the old judge.

“
Lo siento.
This movie is forbidden to minors.” Over and over, like some kind of automaton reciting a mantra.

I raised a fuss right there on the sidewalk outside the Roxy Theater. I must have asked a thousand and one questions, all of them variations on one theme: “Why?” Just like Dad. My brother and friends asked the same question.

I crossed the line, too. I told the lady at the booth what was on my mind. This was much worse than the Duncan Yo-Yo interruption of ages past. This was heart-crushing, mind-numbing betrayal.

“This is so stupid. So stupid. And…and…it's…it's unfair, too.”

The lady looked at me with the oddest mixture of emotions I had ever seen. I couldn't tell if I had gotten myself into trouble or nearly brought her to tears.

Louis XVI, thinking maybe of the Paris mobs during the Reign of Terror, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Don't bother. Don't argue with her.”

So there we were, barred from seeing a movie we had all seen many times before. Expelled, banished from our own past. All that the lady in the ticket booth needed was a flaming sword. This was not Eden, though. Far from it. No, it was a crappy theater, the worst
cine
of all. No air-conditioning, just fans on the ceiling. Hard wooden seats. And a bathroom so filthy that my dad always told us never to sit on the toilet.

“All you can do at the Roxy is pee,” he said. “You don't know what you might catch if you sit on the toilet.”

I thought long and hard about what I could catch from the Roxy's toilet seat, especially any time I had to pee so badly as to risk a trip to the bathroom.

“You might catch parasites,” Louis XVI revealed once. “If there are any parasite eggs in the toilet water and it splashes up at you, that's it. Forget it.
Lombrices.
Tapeworms. Worms in your intestines.”

Needless to say, only the worst of stand-up emergencies would make me go to the bathroom at the Roxy.

Still, the Roxy holds a special place in my memory. It was there, on that sidewalk, standing next to a well-worn poster for
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
bathed in the light of the marquee, that I first felt that repulsive feeling of someone trying to invade my mind and soul. It was the first lancing. The blade of Fidel's scalpel had attempted the first incision, the first step towards the gradual head transplant.

“Sorry, you can't bring these children into the theater. Sorry, it's not suitable for minors. Sorry, the rules say I can't allow anyone under eighteen years old to see this movie. Sorry, I don't make the rules. Sorry, sorry, sorry…go home.”

I know many non-Cubans won't believe me, but I swear to God this happened. May I be split in two by an evil lightning bolt if I am not telling the truth, as Cubans are wont to say.
Mal rayo me parta.

And ever since that night I have given a lot of thought to why Fidel might have done such a thing.

Was it Captain Nemo? Was he so evil a character that we had to be protected from him? There he was, James Mason, sporting a beard, commanding the
Nautilus
to wreak havoc on the high seas. Seeking vengeance against those who had hurt him earlier in life, hell-bent on making the world's imperialist powers pay for their exploitation of the human race. Or was Nemo too much like Fidel? After all, there he was, Fidel, sporting a beard, commanding an island that looked a lot like the
Nautilus,
long and narrow, with a spear tip at one end.

Disney hadn't made Nemo a very likable character. Having no real food for his crew, he forces them to eat all sorts of disgusting things. He thinks nothing of killing people for the sake of his warped view of justice. And worst of all, Nemo sinks the
Nautilus
and forces his entire crew to die along with him.

Too close to home for Fidel. Too prophetic.

No. Too simple. Too obvious.

Was it the giant squid? Was it the seal? Was it Peter Lorre and his frog eyes? Was it Kirk Douglas and his constant desire to get off the
Nautilus
and escape from the clutches of Captain Nemo?

No, it couldn't have been any of these things. The only scenario I can come up with for what went on inside Fidel's mind is not very pretty. So brace yourself. I am about to think like Fidel—to think as if the head transplant he tried to give me had been completed.

I had no way of knowing this at the time, but Kirk played a gay man in that film. As gay as they come. There he was, Kirk/Ned, strumming his handmade turtle-shell ukelele in his small cabin aboard the
Nautilus,
flirting with a seal. Flirting with a fish-swallowing pinniped, kissing it, even. Could any straight macho man ever do that? Make a musical instrument from a turtle shell and then serenade a seal while wearing a shirt so tight that you wondered why it didn't burst at the biceps?

Never. Forget about it.

Walt Disney was gay, you know. Just take a look at
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
if you have a chance. Disney was an evil genius, and gay.

If you doubt this, just take a closer look at Peter Pan. Gay. As gay as they come. Just look at his costume. Forget all this deception with Wendy. He had no real interest in her. The real reason Tinker Bell was so pissed at Peter was that she knew he was gay and could never be hers. All those Lost Boys…forget it. And Captain Hook? Take a close look at Hook and that pirate crew, especially his personal assistant, the limp-wristed guy with the striped shirt and the sandals. Good God. They call this a children's movie?

And why was Pinocchio's maker, Geppetto, that old man who lived alone, so interested in having a little boy in his house? Think about it.

Holy Moses. Jesus H. Straight-talking Christ.

I was oblivious to all this as a child. Of course,
20,000 Leagues
and
Peter Pan
were two of my favorite movies, and so was
Pinocchio.
I must have seen each at least seven times.