Waiting for Snow in Havana (37 page)

I see myself leading a better, sweeter life than the one God has graced me with.

Forget about it. Nothing is that simple. Not even when you're a hypnotized Worm.

I loved my walks to the library with Tony, and our search for bottles, and that dead maggoty possum as much as I loved the bombs that fell from the sky and nearly killed us.

I swear it. May I be cleft in two by a wicked lightning bolt if I'm not telling the truth—preferably one that zigzags in nice, straight angles, and is thick and sulphur yellow.

Lo juro. Mal rayo me parta.

A
nother day in Limbo. No school. No place in particular to go. No plans for the day, except to play, soak up the sunshine, deny the present, and wait for the exit permit.

Shafts of light streamed through the shutters, as always, knifing through the swirling galaxies of dust. On this day, there was also a mosquito net in view when I opened my eyes. The shafts of light poured through the net as if it weren't there at all, filling the space around me, defining it. Each and every thread in the net was aglow.

Sweet world,
I thought. Safe sweet world, in the light. It felt as if I were inside a cloud, floating above the earth, far removed from all trouble. No mosquitoes trapped in the net this morning.

I was waking up in my parents' bed that morning, not my own. I'd had the terrors in the middle of the night and had asked to sleep there. I'd been doing that a lot lately. Louis XVI was a very large man, and there really wasn't enough room in the bed for three of us, so he got up patiently, as always, and shuffled off to my bed in his baggy boxer shorts. I was ashamed of my night terrors but couldn't do much about them.

I was fine during the day. The sunlight was grace itself, and I could ignore everything that troubled me.

But nighttime was different. At night, it was hard to keep evil at bay. That choking darkness, full of lizards you couldn't see. The shadows you didn't want to see. The fears. The awful dreams. Not about Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, or my fifth-grade love. These were dreams that allowed the hidden lizards to escape. Like the one about the voodoo witch.

It was that dream that started the terrors. In it I was chased by a large African woman who looked a lot like the legless lady who had begged outside of church for so many years. She chased me in the same way that Torso Lady and Candlestick Lady had done when I was younger, but she was much worse. For one thing, she had legs and could use them. Worse than that, she was evil incarnate, seeking me out, longing to capture me and annihilate me slowly and painfully. And she wasn't just after my body. No, she craved my soul. She wanted to possess me totally and bring me down to hell. In the dream, she would almost catch me, but just as she'd be about to grab me, I'd find myself in bed, awake, and see her clinging to the iron grillwork that covered my bedroom window, giving me the evil eye and laughing madly. She didn't have to speak. I knew exactly what she wished to do to me. And she knew I knew, and she loved it.

Of course, I had plenty of facts from which to spin this dream. We'd recently had a maid, Caridad, who threatened me with voodoo curses. I knew she hated me. I knew her daughter, who often came to the house with her, hated me even more. Both of them taunted me whenever my parents were out of earshot. They'd tell me how much they were going to enjoy the day when I'd be cleaning their house and shining their shoes, and then they'd threaten to fill my life with voodoo curses if I ever told my parents about what they had said. I thought maybe Caridad had sent this witch to plague my dreams because my parents had fired her for stealing.

Maybe she had.

Then there were the dreams about all the things that had actually happened to me, or were about to happen. Those were bad enough to compete with Voodoo Woman.

Some kind of indescribable terror possessed me totally, smothering the life out of me. I now know it was fear of death. In so many ways, I was about to die, and I knew it, at least at night. Marie Antoinette had decided that she had to get us out of Cuba as quickly as possible. My father didn't agree with her, but somehow he was persuaded to agree with her plan. We were to be sent to the United States on our own.

It was the only way to get us out quickly. Children didn't need security clearances to enter the States and were given visa waivers. The parents had to wait many months for their visas, sometimes a year or more.

Thousands of families were doing this. By the time Fidel and John Kennedy put a stop to it in October 1962, fourteen thousand children had been sent to the States all alone. So it wasn't too weird, as far as these things go. But, of course, when a world falls apart, everything is so strange that nothing is strange. So two pampered boys who have never spent a night away from home can be sent to live in another country, where they don't know a soul.

I was ten years old, but I had just learned how to tie my own shoelaces, and I had never cut my own steak or buttered my own toast. I'd never lifted a finger to do anything around the house. No chores. No responsibilities. No clue about what it took to survive.

All of my friends were in the same fix, and all of them were being shipped off too.
Niños bitongos,
Fidel called us. A bunch of pampered boys. He loved to make fun of us in his speeches. Manuel and Rafael, Eugenio, Gerardito, my new friend Ciro and his sisters, my other new friend Daniel, Jorge, and Julio. Each and every one of us,
niños bitongos
on our way to the United States, to enroll in the school of hard knocks.

And in the meantime none of us were attending school, despite all the pressure our parents received from the busybodies at the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. Not since the Bay of Pigs, when all private schools were closed down. I didn't go to school for an entire year.

As we waited for our exit permits, we spent our days playing furiously. We knew the end was around the corner.

But what a year that was! In so many ways it was every child's dream come true. No school. No tutors. No attempt by any adult to educate us in any way. No books. No lessons of any kind. Not even English language lessons.

Well, I take that back. I should say no formal lessons.

We learned how quickly you can get drunk on Scotch whiskey one day at Eugenio's house, when Manuel downed a small bottle on a dare. He got so drunk that he couldn't get up off his chair and babbled nonsense. We thought it was one of the funniest things we'd ever seen. But when he passed out, we began to worry and had to ask for help. His dad had to come get him, and we all got into trouble. Eugenio's dad wasn't too mad about the whiskey he lost that afternoon, even though it was now as rare and precious as gold. He knew he'd have to leave it behind anyway. He was mad because we were far too young to be getting drunk.

We learned to thank our parents for keeping us out of school by looking at the books of an unlucky friend who wasn't in limbo, like us. One math problem will remain forever burned in my memory: “Before our great Revolution Ramiro Gómez used to pay his scumbag capitalist landlord thirty pesos a month for rent. Now that our Maximum Leader Fidel Castro has made the Urban Reform possible, Comrade Gómez only has to pay twenty-five pesos. What percent reduction in rent has the Revolution granted him?”

We also learned how to break windows in all of those houses that had been abandoned, and to cruise through them, looking for treasure. But all we ever found of value was a huge box of fluorescent lightbulbs and a set of old
National Geographic
magazines (which everyone knew were highly valued by chauffeurs and teenage boys).

The houses were stripped bare, for the most part. Cleaned out. Trucks would pull up and clean house, literally. And there were so many of them in our neighborhood. Everyone was leaving, or so it seemed. The world was being emptied of people and filled up again with replacements. Some of the houses were filled with poor children from the provinces. Most were filled with new families, all members of the Communist Party, who brought along furnishings taken from other houses. Very, very few of these new families were African Cubans. None were Chinese. Very, very few were dark-skinned.

Before anyone left, government officials would come to the house and inventory all of their belongings. This could take days. Then, shortly before leaving, these inventory takers would show up again and make sure that every single item was still there. If anything was missing, the exit permit would be revoked. No one was allowed to take any belongings out of the country, you see, save two changes of clothing, three pairs of underwear, a hat, and one book.

The books were the only hint of mercy. When my turn came, I got to take with me a copy of Thomas à Kempis'
Imitation of Christ.
Not my choice, of course. What normal boy would choose a devotional manual from the fifteenth century as his only reading material? It made me think of Eye Jesus and Window Jesus. My parents insisted I take it along, and I grumbled. But five years later, it would change my life, perhaps even save it. Wait, I'll take back the “perhaps.” I know it saved my life. Why deny it?

Anyway, we amused ourselves the way we always had. Those fluorescent lightbulbs, for instance, were wonderful. We took dozens of them to a vacant lot and hurled them like spears or javelins. We watched them fly, fall, and explode with a loud bang—a good substitute for firecrackers, which had become extinct on our island.

The bombs had stopped since the Bay of Pigs. Every now and then something would happen, but there were very few active dissenters who were not already in jail, and those who were still at large had little to work with. A bomb here and there. Some shooting here and there, but not much.

Well, not much if you're not one of those involved. If you happen to be there when the shooting starts, then it might seem like too much. Why deny it?

A boy who lived across the street from my grandmother was just standing around outside his house when he was hit by a stray bullet. He almost died. I heard that he didn't know he'd been hit by a bullet and that he kept asking “Who pushed me?” as they rushed him to the hospital. Some militiamen had been chasing a guy and shooting at him. Too bad for the boy. He lost part of his stomach.

And I almost lost my life. Yes, once again, I came close. Why deny that too? I remember it better than so many other things.

There I am at the park with my friend Jorge. At almost exactly the same spot where we'd tried to launch our lizard satellite years earlier. Both of us are collecting plants and flowers for our moms. There are all these flowers at the park, and since they belong to everyone, we take them with glee. Anyway, there we are, minding our own business, when suddenly a big black car stops at the curb about twenty feet away. I pay no attention. Then another car comes along, moving very slowly. And then a guy in the first car pulls out a machine gun and points it out the window at the oncoming car.

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat…

The guys in the second car pull out their guns and start firing back. And another gun comes out of the first car, and more from the second one. And a small war erupts a few feet from us. Jorge and I look at each other with that look I've already told you about, the one you're better off not seeing.

I'll spare you the sound effects this time.

Bullets are flying all over the park. That whizzing is hard to forget, and I'd heard it before. Jorge and I drop our flowers rudely and start running away from the cars as fast as possible.

In the bright, cell-soaking sunlight I run for my life, bullets whizzing past. With every step I think of the boy who got shot near my grand-mother's house. I wait for the feeling of being pushed. I cross the street without looking in any direction. Better to be hit by a car than a bullet, no matter how much my family has warned me of the perils of being run over.

I see the garden wall ahead of me. The wall with the hedge behind it, at the house on the corner at the end of my street, the house where the medical student used to keep a real skeleton in his room. I keep my eye on the light green wall. Details jump out at me. The nubs of the stucco on the wall. The ledge on the wall. The hedge behind the wall. The leaves on the hibiscus plants, so dark green. The serrations on the edges of the leaves. The blood red hibiscus blossoms, fully open, partly open, and not yet open. The sound of the gunfire, still going on behind me. The strange sensation of my legs moving so fast. I can't believe it's possible to move this quickly.

I've taken off. I'm flying, head first, over the green wall and the hibiscus hedge. I'm Superman, at last. I've outrun bullets, and I'm staying aloft forever. I clear the wall and the hedge. I'm descending now. I see the lawn approaching my face. I can count every blade of that coarse grass. I see an anthill. Looks like fire ants—better stay away from them. My hands hit the ground and I roll over. Nice somersault. Didn't know it was in me.

I'm still alive. And I missed the fire ants! I'm Superman! But where's Jorge? He runs into the garden through the gate, huffing and puffing. I'm relieved to see him.

Immediately, all sorts of people show up. The people inside the skeleton house come out. Other neighbors. They begin to ask us questions, all of them stupid.

“Are you all right?”

“What happened?”

What's the matter with them? Can't they see we're in one piece and that the shooting is over? We can still hear a few shots in the distance, getting fainter and fainter. I'm not the least bit scared by any of this. No way. I'm a veteran bullet dodger.

I remember thinking that those two cars must have had a lot of ammunition. And that none of the men firing the guns knew how to aim. I also remember wanting to ask if they still had the skeleton in the house, and whether I could go in and see it.