Waiting for Snow in Havana (38 page)

A militiaman shows up about the same time as my father. He begins to ask us questions, less stupid ones, and I do most of the talking. Louis XVI, I notice, has his arm around me and is listening to me very attentively. He's letting the militiaman ask the questions, which I think is strange. Then Marie Antoinette shows up. Her limp makes it difficult for her to walk very fast, so it's taken her longer than everyone else to get there. The garden is quite crowded by now.

And I'm talking a mile a minute, showering the militiaman with all the details I can remember. The color of the cars. The number of people inside. The guns. What the men looked like. What the guns looked like. Even what we were doing at the park.

The militiaman takes down my name, address, and phone number. I also point down the street and say I live just a half a block away.

I go home with my parents. Jorge walks along with us. I get home, drink a glass of iced water, and start to cry.

I don't know why I'm crying. I can't explain it. But the tears and the sobbing bubble up like some unstoppable geyser. My dad hugs me tightly. I feel the stubble on his face, and I remember how he used to rub my face into it when I was smaller, and that makes me cry even harder.

“It's okay now. You're okay.”

“But I'm afraid of the militiaman…”

“Why?”

“What if he comes back and asks more questions and arrests me for stealing flowers?”

“No, no, don't worry, that won't happen.”

But I
am
worried, and in shock, and nothing he says can keep me from crying. I am scared about having confessed my crime to a militiaman. Maybe I'll end up like Uncle Filo or Cousin Fernando. I was, after all, taking the people's flowers. Foliage of the Revolution, which belonged to all and could never be owned by any one person or family. I had stolen from the Cuban People. It doesn't cross my mind at the time that the bullets had anything to do with my crying.

Denial has always been one of my greatest talents. But there are some things that just can't be denied. For instance, I can't deny Cousin Addison's iguanas. He has so many of them in the backyard of Aunt Carmela's house, and they are all so huge. It would be impossible to deny the existence of those monsters, or of Addison's bizarre garden.

Dozens upon dozens of banana trees, evenly spaced. Ponds in all shapes and sizes, stocked with exotic Cuban fish. Cages and cages full of iguanas. Addison catches them with his bare hands on the seashore east of Havana and brings them home to the cages that wait for them, cages he has built himself. Every now and then one escapes, as iguanas are wont to do when they're in small hand-built cages, and Addison has to go looking for it. Sometimes they show up on someone's porch, or kitchen, or living room, and Addison has to answer to his angry neighbors.

There, in the back of this gracious mansion, just a few feet from the giant Saint Lazarus statue near the kitchen, in one of the most elegant houses in Miramar, Addison, the half-Cuban, half-American former denizen of Hollywood, has built himself a banana plantation. He always acts as if it makes perfect sense. He sits back there in his comfortable wicker chair, sipping frosty drinks under the shade of the banana trees, looking very satisfied and immensely proud.

His iguanas are brown, not green. He says they are that color because they're seashore iguanas, from a rocky place. They are camouflaged to blend in with the rocks, not with foliage.

Lizards are bad enough, but these monstrosities are beyond belief. They are so unbelievably large. And so ugly. So hideous, in fact, that I soon realize they could be an argument against the existence of God. And that frightens me more than the iguanas themselves, though I, of course, deny it.

The scales, the folds on the skin, the mouth, the tongue, the claws, the spikes, the tail. And those eyes, those horrible eyes from hell. Everything about them is pure evil. I imagine that Ernesto's soul must look like that.

I have some trouble sitting in Addison's banana plantation because of the iguanas, but he has a way of making you trust him, and he has convinced me that in his Eden the reptiles are trapped in the prisons they deserve. He doesn't exactly trust those lizards, so I have to trust the guy.

Or maybe it's his weirdness that makes me trust him. Maybe it's because he is only half Cuban. Not many Cuban men are only half Cuban. Maybe it's because he looks a lot like Jimmy Stewart. Not too many Cuban men resemble an actor who has kissed Kim Novak and Grace Kelly. Maybe it's because he can talk about early Christian martyrs whose severed heads were used as balls in games at the Colosseum. No other Cuban man tells stories like that. Maybe it's because he once lived in Hollywood and went to parties with Charlie Chaplin. Very few Cuban men have done that. Maybe it's because he rides a bicycle everywhere. Cuban men don't do that, for sure. Maybe it's because he goes scuba diving and swims with sharks on purpose. Most Cuban men don't trust sharks. Maybe it's because he lives at his mother's house and shares it with a very young, funny guy who is an acrobat. He might be the only man in Cuba who does that.

The acrobat is about eight years older than me, the same age as Ernesto. He has lived at Aunt Carmela's house with Addison for a while and goes everywhere with him. He helps him catch iguanas and tends his banana garden. He brings us drinks from the kitchen when we sit out in the garden and shows me how to do all sorts of somersaults and cartwheels. Once I saw him leap over a very wide pit about thirty feet deep. I thought he would fall into the abyss, but he managed it with all the finesse of a jaguar.

I think that he and Addison are just good friends. Or maybe I deny some other thoughts.

Addison and my aunt Lucía have been spending a lot of time together at his house, along with the acrobat. Recently, Lucía, the woman without desires, has visited him almost every day. I think that maybe they are getting romantically involved. Maybe my aunt is harboring some faint, smoldering desire. Sometimes she brings me along to see Addison. By now I've lost my fear of Carmela's driveway. But I still haven't lost my fear of the inside of her house. Even a banana garden full of iguanas is preferable.

I've gotten to know Addison pretty well this year, not just because he comes to visit Lucía at our house often, but also because he and Lucía have invited me to join them on some of their outings. I've seen movies I'd never seen before, most of them from the silent era. Addison knew some of the people who made them. I've also seen my very first live staged play with them:
El robo del cochino. The Theft of the Pig.
It was a brand-new play written by a Cuban, and it was set in the countryside. I'd never seen live actors before, or seen a story written by a Cuban, and I sat there, stunned, wondering how it was that they had memorized all that dialogue. Or maybe they were making it up? Every bad word in the book was uttered in that theater that evening, and some I'd never heard before. No one ever used bad words in movies. How could they get away with this on stage? No one would dare write a script like this, not even a Cuban.

It was a boring story, but an ear-opening and eye-opening experience. The whole play was about the exploitation of laborers, and the evil lives of the landowners, and the injustice of claiming ownership over anything. At the end of the play, of course, the pig got slaughtered. But since it was an invisible pig, there was no blood shed on the stage, and no squealing.

I may be missing a lot of school this year, but the play alone is worth about two months of formal education. The banana plantation, the ponds, the iguanas, and the circus acrobat are worth about another month. Addison's stories about Hollywood are also worth another month or so. That's about half a school year right there.

The shoot-out at the park is worth the other half, all by itself.

The fights between my mother and father aren't worth anything. Every now and then they scream at each other. Half of the time I don't know why, exactly. But the other half of the time I know exactly what they are arguing about: what to do with Tony and me.

Somehow Marie Antoinette has managed to wear down Louis XVI. She's gotten him to agree to send us to the United States. The catch seems to be that she is handling the whole thing by herself. He wants no part of it, and carries on with his life as if none of this were happening, collecting art and antiques by the truckload as other collectors flee the country.

So Marie Antoinette has set herself to the task of shipping Tony and me to the States. And somehow she is managing to do it, all by herself. She has stood in line for our visa waivers at the Swiss embassy. She has stood in line for our passports. She has stood in line to request our exit permits. She has hired a lawyer to draw up all the necessary papers, even though her own husband is a judge and attorney. She has talked to a thousand and one people on the phone and in person. She has taken buses and taxicabs everywhere.

One day she calls my father's friend Puentes Pi, the crime scene photographer, and arranges for our passport pictures to be taken. Puentes Pi shows up after dinner one evening with that old camera of his, the same one he uses to photograph corpses. His camera has captured a thousand images of people who've been murdered or run over by cars. It has also captured hundreds of images of Tony and me growing up. He is always there, it seems, taking pictures. Not just on birthdays, but throughout the entire year. He has the nicest old camera, with flashbulbs that explode like small firecrackers. He is a determined enemy of the candid photo, too. He makes us pose and pose and pose, as if he were painting a portrait. Maybe it's because he is so used to photographing corpses, which are always in their ultimate pose.

Nearly all the photographs I have from my childhood were taken by Puentes Pi and his crime scene camera.

Now he makes us pose for the very last time, at one of my eternal crime scene locations, under the portrait of Maria Theresa. I think he knows this is his farewell to us. We have to dress in a tie and jacket for our passports, since it is the ultimately serious document, but he's told us we don't have to put on the suit pants for the picture.

“No one will know what you're wearing below the waist. If you want, you can pose in your underwear, or your pajamas.”

So that's what Tony and I do. We put on our suit jackets, white shirts, and ties on top, and our pajama pants on the bottom. And our mom lets us do it, and it surprises both of us very much. You have to understand, this mixing of categories was unthinkable in my family. It could cause you to catch pneumonia and die of an
embolia,
or worse, maybe even land in hell for eternity.

We laugh so much about this, it forces Puentes Pi to work harder. We don't look very serious, knowing that we are wearing pajamas for our passport photos. But he finally manages to snap the perfect pictures, in which Tony and I look serious, amused, angry, and terrified, all at the same time. Absolutely perfect pictures.

Years later I still have that passport. It's in my desk drawer, right here, no more than eight inches from my elbow. I look at that photo whenever I think I am hitting bottom.

When I finally get to show that passport at the airport, on the day I leave Cuba for good, I feel a strong urge to laugh. There I am, about to be strip searched, and I'm showing these very important guys a picture that is a joke of sorts. I am not what I seem to be.

I'm turning into a chameleon, or into one of Addison's brown iguanas. I'm camouflaged. I blend in so well as a respectable Cuban boy from a good family, but underneath I am a rebel, a worm, and a refugee in the making. I'm wearing my God-damned pajamas.

If I'd been able to use swear words back then, I might have said to all the airport guys that day: “Go to hell, I'm wearing pajamas below the belt in this picture. Up yours, I'm not even wearing a belt, or socks, or shoes.”

But I don't say anything like that at all. Instead I say something stupid about my luggage. Why deny it?

It is very special, my bag. Marie Antoinette took a bus to the heart of Old Havana to find a woman who made luggage for kids such as us. Special canvas luggage, handmade from fabric once used for awnings. It's the only durable cloth available that is light enough. The bags are a special size. Just large enough to carry the only items we are allowed to bring with us: two shirts, two pairs of pants, three socks, three pairs of underwear, one sweater, one hat, one set of pajamas, and one book. The bags have to be that size and no other because there is a weight limit to what you can take too, and if you are one measly ounce over the limit, they make you take out one whole item. Or they seize your entire bag, we've heard.

That's what a Revolution is all about, you know. Ounces.

Although my mom could have made these bags herself in one afternoon, she didn't. Instead she took the bus to the bag maker's house, and even made several trips, because the woman didn't have a phone and didn't finish them on time. She was making hundreds of bags, this woman. She had so many requests she could barely keep up. We went right down to the wire on those bags. I think we got them about one week before we left.

I remember riding the bus with my mom and brother all the way to that house, climbing the steps to the sun-drenched rooftop apartment where this black woman made the bags. And I remember marveling at the finished product. Why had it taken her so long to make this tiny thing? It was so small. So small, and thin, my duffle bag. My
gusano,
my worm.