Waiting for Snow in Havana (4 page)

But all of us thought our worst sin was what the brothers called “dirty thoughts.”

Ay Dios mío
.

That's all I can say when I recall my formal introduction to sex in the classroom. I understand the good brothers wanted to warn us about storm clouds on the horizon, but in my case, at least, the warning and the storm clouds became one and the same.

In first grade, Brother Alejandro would come in and warn us not to have “dirty thoughts.” At first, all of us sat there as silent as corpses, not daring to ask what in the world he was talking about. I thought of smelly laundry. But gradually his talks became more explicit. He told us about our shameful parts, and that most shameful of all male traits—erections—the gnawing, inevitable constant that led Saint Augustine to say,
“Ecce unde!”
(Behold the place!) If you want proof of original sin, said Augustine, just take a look at your penis. It has a life of its own. It can't really be controlled by reason. Behold the place. But don't behold it too much, and certainly don't hold it for too long after you're done peeing. And don't hold it at all any other time.

How Brother Alejandro came to be a sex education teacher for first graders I'll never know. Maybe because he was one of the few Cuban brothers at that school. He was the toughest of all the monks, the school disciplinarian. You didn't want to have him riding on your bus, if you rode the bus. And you certainly didn't want to get sent to Brother Alejandro if you misbehaved. He kept very strict discipline and was feared for his special bare-knuckle blows to the head. He also seemed to spend every single afternoon overseeing detention, making kids write phrases on the board hundreds of times. Some of the statements had a negative spin: “I shall never do X, Y, or Z again.” Some were positive: “I shall always do X, Y, or Z.” If he gave you more phrases to write than could fit on the blackboard, he would count up the lines, write down the number, ask you to erase the board, and keep going. If you complained, he would make you start counting all over again or ask you to return for more the next day. I learned all this from my brother Tony, who was sent to detention often. Sometimes Brother Alejandro would make the worst offenders kneel on gravel outside, in the hot tropical sun. These malfeasants knelt out there for what seemed an eternity. I could see them from my classroom, and I'd look at the clock on the wall. Every time one of those kids ended up out there on his knees, the second hand seemed to slow down. I was lucky, or perhaps even good. I never earned his wrath.

But I began to fear his visits to our first-grade classroom. There we were, six-year-olds sitting in a room decorated with Disney characters, listening to a monk talk about sex. I'm sure I wasn't alone in thinking that if we were being warned
not
to do something, it must have some pleasant side to it, like all of the other fun stuff you weren't supposed to do. One fine day, Brother Alejandro opened entirely new vistas of perversion and delight to all of us. “Don't ever look at your chauffeur's dirty magazines,” he warned us.

One brave boy dared to ask the fundamental question on my mind: “Brother, what's a dirty magazine?”

“It's a magazine with pictures of naked women.”

Naked women? Why would anyone want to look at pictures of naked women?
This must really be twisted,
I thought. All I could think of was old Inocencia and her eggplant breasts. Yuck. Why would chauffeurs keep dirty magazines within the easy reach of children? Maybe all chauffeurs were weird, like dwarves and cripples? Or maybe there was something I didn't know. Well, I didn't have to worry; we didn't have a chauffeur. My father rode the bus to work and drove his own car at other times.

Then it hit me. Although our family didn't have a chauffeur, my brother and I were driven to school by one every day. Each and every day we rode to school and back home in a chauffeur-driven, air-conditioned Cadillac, along with the son of the owner of one of the largest nickel mines in Cuba, who lived down the street from us. Four times a day we got into that car: to school, home for lunch, back to school, and then back home again. From that day forward I entered that yellow Cadillac with great trepidation. At any moment, I expected the chauffeur to whip out a dirty magazine and throw it to us in the backseat. This would be worse than a grenade, of course, since it could send you to hell for eternity. Instantly. All you had to do was see a naked woman and die the next moment, without a chance to repent. What if the magazine landed open right next to you, or on your face, and you actually got to see a picture of a naked woman just before the chauffeur, laughing insanely, crashed the car and killed everyone inside? Pretty soon I began to suspect that taxicab drivers also had these dirty magazines, since they, too, were called
choferes
. And I developed a fear of taxicabs as well.

I often wondered what kind of special treatment President Batista's children got at my school. Were they ever picked on by other boys? Were they subjected to the same sex talks? Did they ever have to write anything on the blackboard a hundred times? “I shall never forget my homework again,” or maybe, “I shall ask my father not to torture anyone again.” Did Brother Alejandro ever smack one of them on the back of the head?

I don't know. All I know is that the school was full of their bodyguards, outside and inside. Men who stood around all day, pacing back and forth, wearing suits or sport coats, even on the hottest afternoons. We knew they carried guns, and that they kept them concealed under their jackets. One day, on the way to recess, a boy in my class had the nerve to sneak up on one of the bodyguards and lift up his jacket, to see the gun. The bodyguard just smiled, and buttoned his jacket. I was lucky enough to see the gun in its holster and it looked huge.

I don't know about the other kids, but I thought that the bodyguards were there to protect the president's children from bullies. To protect them from me, maybe. And one afternoon in second grade I came face to face with the chance to be shot by a bodyguard. It happened suddenly. I was running down the hallway towards the grassy yard at the back of the school. Vendors of all sorts hung around back there all day, waiting for the kids to come out. Ice cream, candy, baseball cards, switchblades. These guys sold just about everything. Yes, switchblades. I told you Havana was not in the United States. If you had money, the brothers would let you buy any kind of snack that these men sold, or any size switchblade. One of these guys made the best popcorn I had ever tasted. He sold it in pastel-colored paper bags that would very quickly soak up the oil. They were a beautiful sight, those greasy bags. Anyway, I was running to buy something and—boom!—I ran into a first grader! Knocked him down. His popcorn went flying all over the place. I fell to the floor too, stunned by the collision.

When I saw whom I had knocked down, I froze. It was Batista's youngest son, the first grader. He looked a lot like his father.
Uh, oh,
I thought.
Now I did it.
The bodyguards will surely come and shoot me. Or maybe take me to jail, rip out my fingernails, and smack me on the temple. But before I had a chance to get really scared, Batista's son looked at me, and holding out his half-empty bag of popcorn, asked, “Would you like some?” He had the look of an angel on his face, the look of grace. I expected death or torture, or at least imprisonment, and instead I was offered the very same popcorn I had spilled.

The bodyguards never used their guns on me or on any bully, but they did need them after all. I found that out one sunny afternoon in second grade, when the school was suddenly surrounded by dozens of police cars. Brother Alejandro entered our classroom and handed a note to my teacher, who asked us to remain calm and wait for our parents to come pick us up. School was canceled for the rest of the day; we had to go home immediately. One by one, our parents showed up, looking troubled. One by one, we were plucked from our classrooms. My mother, Marie Antoinette, had the same look on her face that day as on the night of the shoot-out near the Quinta de los Molinos. As we were getting into the car, I noticed the switchblade salesman was not at his usual spot. There were no vendors, only police, some of them with their guns drawn.

“The presidential palace has been attacked,” said my father, once we were safely in the car. “We need to get home fast. No one knows what will happen next.” My mother was very quiet. A policeman waved our car on, and we passed through their barricade. It wasn't at all like that other time, when, at exactly the same spot, Louis XVI had picked us up by surprise and there was a puppy waiting for us in the backseat of the car.

The attack on Batista's palace failed. Although the rebels managed to make it all the way to the president's office and bedroom, Batista was not there. They had it wrong. I think he was at one of his
fincas
instead, one of his country estates. Dozens of men died that day, on both sides, providing the papers with a surplus of gory pictures. God knows what might have happened if the rebels had chosen to attack our school too. Batista's kids were there that day, one of them in the classroom right next to mine. If only those rebels had thought the way that
El Colorado
's men had thought when they delivered all their twisted messages to my family. If only they had targeted the children instead of the father, the world might have changed even sooner than it did. Maybe one of the rebels killed that day would have survived, and Fidel Castro would have been eclipsed by him. Or maybe I would have died that day, and you wouldn't be reading this.

Idle speculation. Things happen the way they happen.

Planned they are from the get-go, eternal they are and eternal are we all. One and the same are we and those facts, forever. The way Brother Alejandro's starched clerical collar moved as he spoke. The angle of the sunlight on the boys who knelt on the gravel. The shadows they cast. The taunts, the blow to the head, the tears, the dirty magazines, the bag of popcorn. Each grease spot on the bag of popcorn, and the trajectory of every popcorn kernel as it fell to the floor. The hand extended in goodwill. Each bewildering gift from on high. Every temptation, every glimpse of the plunging crevasse inside our souls. The Judas kiss. The basest humiliation. Everything. All of it seamlessly woven into the story of my fall, our fall, yours and mine, that deep and steep fall. That happy fall, that joyous fall during which we can always, in the wink of an eye, with grace, sprout wings and scrape the gates of Heaven.

T
he pesticide Jeep rounded the corner, spraying death, and we jumped on our bicycles and chased it. It was usually Eugenio, Stinky, who could pedal the fastest, catch up to it, latch on to its rear bumper, and ride behind it for blocks. Eugenio would be lost in the cloud, invisible as the Jeep pulled away. Ten or twenty minutes later, he would return sweating and grinning, as happy as any kid could ever be, and give us a rundown on how far he had been pulled: “Ten blocks this time!” “Twenty blocks!” “Sixteen blocks!”

Few others could match this feat. Not even my brother, who could usually do nearly anything he wanted, such as swim out to the horizon by himself, along with the sharks and barracudas, and peer into the black abyss that opened up beneath him where the sea floor suddenly dropped hundreds of feet beneath the turquoise waves.

When the Jeep passed by, the world was transformed, and everything became invisible. You could barely see your hand in front of your face. The entire street was one giant cloud of pesticide. And it lingered forever. It must have been DDT, that awful poison banned in the United States. Mosquito control. Best way to curb malaria in a tropical paradise. What a beautiful sight, that red Jeep. What an exquisite color, that poison. Kind of blue.

I remember whirling like a dervish in the thick fog, inhaling with abandon, collapsing onto the street nearly delirious. I thought this was what heaven must be like: thick bluish clouds, and that wonderful smell. I have always inhaled with abandon. The world is so full of wonderful smells. Roasted peanuts. Olives. Popcorn. Bus exhaust. Turpentine. Kerosene. Talcum powder. Gasoline. New tires. Glue. Shoe polish. Bubblegum wrappers. Gunpowder. Thinly sliced potatoes and hot dogs frying in olive oil. When I matured, the strangest things began to emit pleasing fumes too. Freshly baked bread. Single-malt Scotch whiskey. Cigars. Roses. Bordeaux wines. New wallets. New cars. The back of a woman's knee after a hot bath. Other substances I dare not mention. Fumes are the fifth dimension, I'm convinced.

But nothing could beat that poison. So pungent, yet so sweet. We loved to fill our lungs with it, loved it so much.

Eugenio, our champion Jeep catcher, was the luckiest and the craziest of all of us. We were a close group of friends, five of us, all from the neighborhood. My brother and I, Manuel and Rafael Aguilera, also brothers, and Eugenio Godoy, who was unlucky enough to have sisters instead of brothers. When we first met him, my brother and Manuel dubbed him
El Apestoso,
or Stinky, because he smelled so bad. But then he started to use deodorant and we had to find another nickname for him. So we began to call him
El Alocado,
the Crazed One. We couldn't call him
El Loco,
the Crazy One, because we had to distinguish him from the homeless alcoholic who lived in the park, who already owned that spectacular name. Big difference between those two. Eugenio's father was a bank president, and his house and gardens took up half a city block.
El Loco
was an older man, scruffy and smelly, who often walked about the neighborhood muttering to himself. Sometimes he would shout, too, flailing his arms, shaking his head. We didn't know for sure where he lived, but we feared
El Loco.
He would show up unexpectedly, just like the DDT Jeep, only more often. And we didn't like that combination of frequency and unpredictability.

El Loco
was crazy. We knew that and our parents knew it. They called him
El Loco
too. He was one of the very few people in my neighborhood—perhaps the only one—at the bottom of the heap. At least the maids and nannies got paid and slept indoors.
El Loco
had nothing but the filthy clothes he wore and a wide-brimmed peasant straw hat. He was a force of nature, wild and dangerous, capable of just about anything.

We, of course, were perfectly sane, and so were our parents. Unlike
El Loco,
who avoided the DDT Jeep like the plague, we had the good sense to discern the true, good, and the beautiful, and to chase down pesticide clouds. Our parents were enlightened enough to urge us on.

One of my father's brothers, Rafael, was the only adult who ever scolded us for calling this man
El Loco
. He had the odd nickname of Filo—which means “edge” or “sharpness”—and he was the only one in my father's family who touched alcohol. Maybe that had something to do with that peculiar burst of compassion on his part, for he was not exactly a compassionate man. Or maybe it was a premonition on his part, for Filo would one day be imprisoned and tortured, and lose his own mind. So it goes with revolutions. Anyway, Filo pricked our consciences just a little, but not enough to make us stop. We had no consciences, really. And
El Loco
was crazy, really.

Since we were all so sane, we thought it our right and privilege to taunt
El Loco
from a safe distance. “You're nuts!” “You're insane!” “Hey, what was it like at Mazorra?” (That was the name of Havana's largest insane asylum.) “Hey, how long before you go back?” Sometimes he would start shouting and chase us. Eugenio told us that
El Loco
had once pulled out a huge knife and chased him for two blocks.

We were fine specimens, the five of us. We also tormented a slightly retarded man who lived next door to Manuel and Rafael. Sometimes we would shout at him, and, since he moved slowly, challenge him to come chase us. “Mongo!” (Short for
mongoloid
). “Hey, how much is two plus two?” “Hey, what color was Napoleon's white horse?” “Hey, Mongo, why don't you show us how fast you can run!” And so on.

Back in the fifth century Saint Augustine bemoaned the fact that as a child he and his friends had stolen pears from a neighbor's tree just for the thrill of it. What an underachiever, that Augustine. When it came to committing mindless sins and manifesting unmistakable signs of total depravity, the five of us were gold medalists.

We rang doorbells and ran away. We called for taxicabs on the phone and sent them to the other end of the city. Using our deepest voices, we ordered groceries and hardware on the phone and had them delivered to our neighbors' houses. We uprooted plants from our neighbors' yards and from nearby parks. We picked fruit from neighbors' trees, not knowing that we were imitating a great saint. We took milk bottles from front porches and used them for target practice. We scattered thumbtacks and smashed bottles on the street and waited for cars to run over them. We blasted huge firecrackers—some of which were about the size of half a stick of dynamite—all over the neighborhood, wrecking shrubs, blackening porches, and scaring to death God knows how many old ladies. We crashed our toy cars into one another with the greatest force possible, smashed them with hammers, or blew them up with those huge firecrackers. We jammed wads of bubblegum into neighbors' front-door locks. We stole toy soldiers from Woolworth's. Sometimes we set those stolen plastic warriors on fire, just to watch them burn. We shot at streetlights at night with our water pistols, shattering the hot lightbulbs. When we didn't have water pistols on hand, we also threw rocks at the streetlights. We threw rocks at cats and dogs. We threw rocks at birds. We threw rocks at one another.

When we ran out of rocks and hard objects, we took to guns. We shot at birds with our BB guns and our pellet guns. Sometimes we even shot at people. Twice, the ever-feuding Aguilera brothers shot BBs at each other. I will never forget the sight of Rafa chasing his older brother Manuel on his bicycle, BB gun in hand, swearing, steering, and shooting at the same time. We laughed about that for weeks. Once my cohorts actually shot at passing buses with their BB guns from the roof of Eugenio's house. Somehow I missed that one. I think I was sick that day. But oh how I wished I could have been on that roof with my friends and brother. The four of them described in great detail how the passengers on the bus recoiled when the BBs hit near their windows. Eugenio even claimed he had shattered one window.

But why stop at buses and BB guns? Why not aim higher? At Eugenio's house there were a lot of real guns, with real ammunition. Rifles, pistols, shotguns. None of them were locked up, and his father never seemed to be around to stop us from using them. One day my four cohorts climbed to Eugenio's roof with a .22-caliber rifle and took turns shooting at passing aircraft. Yes, they tried to shoot down airplanes. I wasn't there, though. Once again, I had missed out on great fun. What if they had actually succeeded? I tried to imagine the fireball and the explosion as the plane landed on someone's house.

We were capable of anything.

We also killed lizards whenever we saw them. In all sorts of horrible ways I can't yet reveal. All I will say now is that we sometimes tried to send them into outer space like the Russian dog Laika.

Poor lizards.

You see, it wasn't just my adopted brother Ernesto who was rotten. We were all rotten. The difference between him and us was that he did even nastier things and never got caught. Compared to him, the five of us were amateurs, and bad ones at that. We got caught every now and then and had to pay.

Like the day when the older boys ganged up on Rafa and me and put us through their version of Indian torture.

We had all recently seen a movie in which the ever-evil Hollywood Indians had buried some unfortunate ever-wholesome Cowboy up to his neck in the sand and smeared his face with something sweet. When the ants came out and ate his face we all squirmed and squinted, turning away from the screen and peeking through our fingers. But look we did. And the image took hold of us. This was one evil deed that cried out for imitation.

Rafa and Manuel's yard had several fire ant nests. One of them was huge. We knew they were
hormigas bravas
because we had all been stung now and then. We knew to stay away from them, and especially from that one big nest, which looked like a small volcano. Often, while playing in that yard, one of us would have a run-in with them and cry out in pain and run around like some demoniac. All of us learned to recognize the scream that came with their bite. It would take some time for the bite to swell, but the pain was there from the instant they bit you.

Those ants made the lizards look good.

But they weren't the only constant reminder of nature's treachery in that yard. The Aguilera yard was also blessed with a hot pepper bush. These weren't jalapeño peppers, with which just about every North American is familiar. No, they made jalapeños seem mild mannered. They were beautiful, tiny red peppers, and they could kill. They were truly exquisite to behold: such a bright shining red. Same color as a sports car, or the brightest red lipstick, and so smooth to the touch. They cried out, “Touch me, kiss me, eat me!” The ultimate deception. All of us had been tempted to sample them—cautiously, just on the tip of the tongue—and we rued having done it. One brush with their evil juice and you could brag about knowing what hell was like. They burned hotter than lava and made your flesh swell to the point of bursting.

I'm not exaggerating.

And one day, shortly after having seen the movie with the guy whose face got eaten by ants, the older boys decided to act out the fateful scene. Naturally, they used the two of us who were youngest and weakest to play the role of the hapless Cowboy. And they hit upon the very Cuban idea of combining the killer peppers and the fire ants.

The three of them—Manuel, Eugenio, and Tony—ganged up on Rafa and me, smeared our faces with the red peppers, threw us onto the fire ant nest, and held us there for a while. I had never thought it possible to hurt so much. And I didn't know which was worse, the sting of the ants or the burn from the peppers. But I still remember very clearly how I could feel my eyelids and lips swelling.

Rafa and I cried out, begging for mercy from our Indian torturers and for help from our moms. But our mothers were too used to our war games and our constant cries of distress and agony. (“Help, help, don't scalp me, no! Aaaaaaaay!” “Help, help, this grenade blew my legs off! AAAaaaaaay.” “Oh no, my guts are spilling out. Ooooooh no!”) No one came out of the house to rescue us, though we were shouting at the top of our lungs.

As soon as the Indians released us, Rafa and I ran into the house, wailing. Everything was blurry due to the hot pepper juice in our eyes and the swelling of our eyelids, but we found our way to our mothers in the kitchen, where they were chatting. I was crying my heart out, thinking that I was maimed for life, or on the threshold of dying. In between our sobs Rafa and I explained to our mothers what had happened, as they pelted us with questions and cries of alarm. Neither Rafa nor I had any idea how badly disfigured we were already, and how much that upset our moms. They rushed us into the bathroom, tossed us into the shower fully dressed, and soaked us thoroughly. I remember the two of them making more of a din than we two kids.

If you ever need to awaken quickly from a deep, deep sleep arrange to have two Cuban mothers shout at your bedside as if their children have been hurt. If you need to awaken from a coma, have them shout as if their older children have hurt the younger ones.

Rafa and I had our eyes soaked in something that made us cry even more and were slathered with ointment where the fire ants had left their marks. I don't know about Rafa, but I cried more on that day than I had ever cried before.