Waiting for Snow in Havana (41 page)

“Hey, you guys got carried away back there, didn't you? What were you thinking? Shooting up people like that. Are you crazy? I didn't make those blowguns so you could do something like that. That lady was ready to call the militiamen on you. You know how serious that is?”

He didn't sound the least bit angry. Instead, he sounded worried and sad.

We stood there as silent as the peas in our pockets.

Ernesto stood off to the side, behind my dad, with a smug look on his face. Near the end he often had that look.

“I got you off the hook, you know, but it wasn't easy,” Louis XVI said.

“You guys put me in a very tight spot. Don't ever do that again, you hear?”

We said okay and got into the Plymouth. We knew there wouldn't be a next time. And I guess he did, too.

I
t was a miracle. It had to be. You can't doubt what you see. If this wasn't a miracle, then nothing else could be.

The color of the sea was changing, as if some giant brush were being applied from beneath. Or was it from above? I stared long and hard at the wild cloud-shaped rainbow in the water. There were splashes of tangerine in there too, little bits of sunset at midday, along with splashes of blood red hibiscus blossoms.

And it
moved
. The colored cloud inside the water kept moving to and fro, twisting and turning with great speed.

It was the most extraordinary thing I had ever seen, and perhaps the most beautiful. I stood there on the dock of a formerly private beach club, under the sun and the clouds, transfixed. I thought surely this was a vision sent directly from heaven—one that spoke to me without scaring me to death. All the visions I'd heard until then had been frightening: Jesus and Mary and the saints appearing to children and giving them messages that none of the adults around them would believe. I'd heard of statues in churches moving, or breathing, or talking. I'd also seen a very scary movie about a boy named Marcelino who struck up a friendship with a crucifix that came alive. The Italian priests across the street had screened that movie outdoors one night, but none of us kids dared to put our hands in front of the camera for that one, much less a middle finger. Talk about scary! The thought of Jesus coming to life on his cross and speaking to me seemed worse than Frankenstein, Wolf Man, Dracula, the Mummy, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon put together.

Twenty years later, in Lugo, not far from where my grandparents had been born, I would almost end up locked into a chapel with a similar crucifix for an entire night. The sacristan didn't see me and locked the gates while I was looking at the altarpiece. The thought of spending the whole night in there with a life-size crucifix, in total darkness, was too much for me to bear. I started yelling for someone to open the gate and get me out. My Spanish cousins laughed for days about that.

I explained to them that I had a fear of bleeding Christ figures, but that only made them laugh harder. They're probably still laughing. “Watch out, don't run into a bleeding Christ on the way,” one of them said to me as I boarded a train bound for Madrid.

But this fast-moving storm of shapes and colors within the turquoise water was a good miracle. It moved and moved without stopping. Sometimes it split into two and the halves circled around to form a whole again. And in the meantime, as the halves danced with each other, the contrast between the cloud and the turquoise sea grew even more intense.

Truth, beauty, goodness, and eternity were out there dancing with the sharks and all the other creatures that feed upon one another—and sometimes upon humans—with sharp teeth or stinging venom. Love was there too, unencumbered by self-centeredness, possessiveness, doubts, or jealousy. Trouble-free love, squirming inside a wondrous sea—a sea already too beautiful to take in.

Was this a farewell vision of everything that was beautiful in my birthplace, all wrapped into one?

This was so much nicer than Window Jesus or Eye Jesus coming to life. This was grace, pure grace, out there, embodied amidst the sharks.

I don't know how long I stood there, or what I said. I had the strangest sensation of not having my feet planted on the ground. Then my brother and my friends Rafael and Manuel showed up. Eugenio was already beyond the horizon, in the United States. We all wondered out loud as to what it could be, and what
El Alocado
might have said.

Tony called out to our dad, and he came over, accompanied by Ernesto. With all of his years of experience in this life and in previous ones, Louis XVI, too, was stumped.

“That is truly amazing.
Que maravilla!
”

The miracle was not just for me, for sure. That made it even nicer.

Our noise attracted several other people.

“Parrot fish. It's a whole school of them,” said the man behind me. “Hundreds and hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. I've never seen that many all at once.” He explained to us all how parrot fish swam in groups and how they swarmed sometimes.

I thought of the shark pool at the aquarium and the parrot fish we had rescued. We went back about once a week, just to see him. Of course, each time we went we also stared at the shark pool. It kept getting more and more crowded.

And the diving board never shut up about Ernesto. Never. “Do it now. Push him in. Sneak up on him from behind. You'll feel so much better after you do it. Push him in. Now!”

We all stood there on that dock, watching the miracle unfold for a long, long time. It was as if we were glued to the dock and aloft at the same time. Ernesto stood there too, totally silent.

Eventually, the miracle vanished just as it had arrived. The colors moved farther and farther away, towards the horizon, northwards, riding the Gulf Stream, towards the United States. And then, suddenly, we could no longer see them.

Something else to leave behind,
I thought.

No amount of wishing on our part brought them back that day or any other day, and no memory has ever come close to the real thing. After staring at the sea for a while, we went home to await the
desengaño
that was sure to follow.

I
t was a grand staircase all right. I'd never seen one so grand or so impressive or so modern. It looked like a giant, graceful corkscrew, or one of the paper streamers Cubans used to throw into the air at Carnival and at birthday parties.

And it seemed to float in the air.

It had a handrail, I think. It must have had one. Cubans were careless about safety—except when it came to swimming after eating or catching pneumonia—but I don't think they would have been so reckless as to build a freestanding staircase without a handrail.

The staircase was inside a beautiful house not very far from my own in Miramar. The house had a swimming pool outside, free of sharks, and five marble statues around the pool. The five statues represented the five girls in the family, now fully grown.

The family that lived in the house were friends of my mother and her family and had owned a chain of bedding stores. All of the money used to build that house came from something as prosaic as mattresses and beds.

My aunt Lily had been engaged to an uncle of the five girls. But he had died very young, and my aunt never got to marry him. I have his sapphire ring, which my mother snuck out of Cuba inside a sanitary napkin, but I don't wear it. It's much too small for me, so my wife wears it. Better that it be on a woman's finger, anyway. Whenever I think of that family, only women come to mind.

The house was inhabited by women only. The widowed matriarch, Pilar, and four of her five daughters. Three were unmarried, one was divorced. Another one was married and lived nearby.

They were all very beautiful, these five women. Their mother had almost become a nun, and their father had studied for the priesthood. The almost-nun and the almost-priest were appropriately blessed with five enchanting daughters.

One balmy evening, Fidel met one of the daughters at a restaurant. At that time, fairly early in the Revolution, he would show up at restaurants now and then with his retinue of guards. One thing led to another, and Fidel ended up going home with that one daughter, whose nickname was Kika. He got into her car and let her drive. He told her that he was testing the Revolutionary merits of the People's Car for the first time, and that it was too small for him. He had discovered that the People's Car, a Volkswagen, was uncomfortable for anyone over six feet tall. That's what he told her anyway.

They drove to Miramar in a caravan, front, rear, and sides protected by other vehicles full of guards.

“You're a very good driver,” Fidel told her.

When they got to her house, the guards surrounded the entire block. Fidel and Kika walked into the house, along with a bunch of other men. Fidel sat by the pool talking to this woman for a while, drinking a whole liter of milk from a bottle. He made a point of asking for a liter that hadn't yet been opened. Back in those days, milk bottles had a seal that was held in place by a thin wire—wires we sometimes used to tie up hibiscus blossoms. Fidel wanted to make sure the milk hadn't been tampered with. The great burden of every despot since ancient times: fear of poisoning. He didn't even pour the milk into a glass; he just drank it straight from the bottle.

And he made small talk with Kika while a retinue of guards surrounded him and the entire house. “Where's the rest of the family?” he asked.

She hemmed and hawed. She said they were all in bed with colds. The truth was that the matriarch and the other three daughters didn't like Fidel at all and had stayed upstairs in their bedrooms.

Fidel knew exactly where the rest of the family was, and why. He knew that the matriarch and the other sisters were not good Revolutionaries. Perhaps he knew exactly where their five stores were and what they looked like: they'd been confiscated, along with every other business. And the daughters now had to work as employees of the state at the stores they had once owned. Everyone had to work, you know.
El que no trabaja, no come.
If you don't work, you don't eat. It was one of Fidel's favorite slogans.

He raised the milk bottle above his head and faced the upper-story windows that looked over the pool.

“Here's to you, ladies! Hope your health improves. Thanks for the milk! I know it's hard to come by.”

They tell me he laughed after he said that. He knew, of course, that milk was rationed.

I heard this story from Pilar herself, who said that she'd been standing at her window, behind closed shutters, when Fidel toasted her with a liter of her own rationed milk. Only so many ounces per week.

Pilar also told me that this knocked the wind out of her, literally, and that she couldn't catch her breath for quite some time afterwards. When Fidel left the house along with his retinue, she said, she was still having trouble breathing.

Fidel never returned. No more dates with Kika. Maybe it was something she said, or something she didn't say. Or maybe it was all those other women peeking through the shutters. Or maybe it was the poolside statues that turned him off. So bourgeois. Too bourgeois, even for a one-night stand and the chance to sire yet another child.

Anyway, Pilar and her daughters loved to throw movie parties on Saturday nights. They had access to Hollywood films, some now banned from Cuban theaters, and screened them in their palatial living room with the same kind of projector that was used in a movie theater. Most of the time, I watched from the spiral staircase, the stairway to heaven.

Movies in a house! A house large enough to accommodate an audience of twenty or so. Drinks. Rationed drinks, but still drinks. No popcorn, though. That wasn't available. But it wasn't the refreshments that made the evening, it was the event itself. And the fact that I got to stay up until way past midnight.

The grown-ups joked out loud as the movie played on the screen. No middle-finger shadows blacking out the actors, but the gist of the jokes was not much more advanced than that. We children just sat back and watched and listened.

Whenever I think of what my adult life in Cuba might have been, if the world hadn't changed, it's those movie parties that come to mind. The lights turned off, the hum and whirr of the projector, the pool glowing outside through the French doors, the jokes.

“Hey, Demetrius, you need a bra!”

We were watching Victor Mature in
Demetrius and the Gladiators,
the sequel to
The Robe.
They'd spent so much on the sets for
The Robe
that the producers had decided to spin off a sequel. It told the story of the Greek slave who had served the Roman centurion who ended up with the robe of Jesus at the crucifixion, and it was pure Hollywood fluff. Since Richard Burton and Jean Simmons had been killed in
The Robe,
martyred by the mad Emperor Caligula, someone wrote a lame story about what happened to Richard Burton's slave. And since Victor Mature had played that slave before, he landed the starring role. And we were watching Victor Mature's very large pectoral muscles convulse.

“Hey, Demetrius, I think you'd take a C cup!”

It seemed like sharp humor at the time. No one in my house would ever think to shout out anything like that, especially during a religious movie. I might have been slapped for blasphemy or bad manners or poor taste.

So we watched
Demetrius and the Gladiators,
and
How to Marry a Millionaire,
and
Three Coins in the Fountain,
and a few other movies, over the space of a few months. The last months I would spend in Cuba.

Louis XVI never came with us to these parties. These were my mother's friends, and he didn't really like them much. Anyway, King Louis and Marie Antoinette never did anything together anymore.

They weren't even planning to join us together in the States. Nope. They'd already agreed that Marie Antoinette would be the only one to follow us. She was handicapped, knew no English, and had no job skills of any kind, save sewing. Still, she would be the one to join us and take care of us in the United States until we could return to Cuba. It wouldn't be that long, two or three years at most. Fidel couldn't possibly last longer than that. The plan called for King Louis to stay home to guard the precious art collection from the Cuban People. He wouldn't give that up, not even to be with his real sons. He did keep us in mind, though: he repeatedly said, as the years dragged on and we all got older, and Fidel got more deeply entrenched in power, that he was staying behind so we wouldn't lose our inheritance.

And one fine day his heart burst, and Ernesto got to keep everything.

We'd be given a ride home from the movie parties by Kika, the daughter who had attracted Fidel's attention. We'd ride through Miramar at one or two in the morning, in the car that had once given a lift to Fidel, through utter dark and utter silence.
La madrugada,
that magic time before sunrise when the entire world seems asleep and you think you are the only one who's truly awake. The best time in the world. The only time that truth appears, uninvited. Still, you have to be careful; you musn't let truth overtake you. Some truths are best left buried.

If you don't bury some truths, they'll have a chance at burying you.

I confess to being an idolater, and to performing sacrifices daily, even hourly, at the altar of the god of denial. I sacrifice painful truths constantly, especially about myself, and bury them without reading their entrails first. It's a means of survival I learned on the fly, when my world was stripped away, bit by bit. Somehow I learned to cling to one piece of fiction that floated calmly above the wreckage, undisturbed: I am still the same.

I'm still the same even though my friends have all vanished.

I'm still the same even though my favorite school will never exist again.

I'm still the same even though my first childish love vanished overnight.

I'm still the same even though I have no comic books, ice cream, baseball cards, Coca-Cola, chewing gum, toys, good movies, or decent shoes.

I'm still the same even though I don't have the right to say what's on my mind inside my own house, let alone in public.

I'm still the same even though my father has adopted a pervert who is now my brother.

I'm still the same even though another pervert has tried to drag me down to hell.

I'm still the same even though I've been shot at and bombed.

I'm still the same even though my parents have decided to send me away.

Still the same. I can't change. I'm like Victor Mature's pectoral muscles in
Demetrius and the Gladiators
. He'll be dead and buried someday, but he'll always need a bra in that movie. I'm like Kirk Douglas' dead eye in
The Vikings
. No matter how old or how dead Kirk and Janet are, that eye will always come to life when Janet Leigh comes into view on the screen, and it will burn, burn, burn.

I'll always be who I am.

Denial is wonderful. Try it sometime, if you haven't already. But don't count on it too much. Sooner or later, denial denies even itself.

Flash forward two months from my last Saturday night movie party at the house of the pool with the five statues, in Miramar.

I'm sitting on a very modern-looking chair in a sparsely furnished and bright living room in a small house in Miami, South West, two blocks north of Coral Way, in the 7900 block. I'm in Paradise, where everything is perfect. There's no religious art to be seen anywhere, only reproductions of Picasso and Miró. I don't recognize the art as art, and don't even know that the artists are Spanish. It's strange, this house, and wonderful. Nothing original inside a frame. Nothing old, anywhere in this house. The floor is wood, not marble. The living room and dining room are actually one large room, and there's an air conditioner sticking out of the wall above the living room couch. Beyond the dining room, through clear glass sliding doors, I see a patio like none I've ever seen. There's actually a huge cube of a frame enclosing it all, even on top.

What genius stole that idea from me? I'd longed for such an enclosure and planned it down to the smallest details while lying in bed under my mosquito tent in Havana. The idea came to me in a flash one morning as I studied the dust motes swirling inside the mosquito tent. Why not enclose the outdoors, blocking out the lizards and the bugs?

Now, in the United States, I find that someone has beaten me to the punch. But I'm glad to see my idea brought to life, even if it steals my thunder. I'm so glad this house has a totally screened-in patio. I'm glad to be in the United States, where everything is reasonable and new and perfect. I'm so glad to be in Paradise, among friendly strangers.

I've been driven miles and miles to this house to meet the family that wants to take me in. I've been driven here by the husband of a friend of my mother who has somehow arranged for this family to rescue me from the refugee camp at Homestead. He's using up his only day off that week to take care of this.

I've been living in the camp for two weeks now, ever since I was separated from Tony at the airport. As soon as we cleared Immigration, we were loaded into different vans and taken to different camps. Tony went to a camp for teens in Kendall, I went to a camp for preteens in Homestead.