Waiting for Snow in Havana (44 page)

“Hey, guess what? I'm number two on the list. I'm second! Only one other guy in Chicago owes more in parking tickets than I do! My name was in the paper this morning—front page! I owe the city over seventy thousand bucks! Ha!”

I've had to deal with my mother's panic countless times as he's disappeared off the face of the earth without saying good-bye to anyone, not even his wife. And I've had to deal with the aftermath of his returning home with fantastic tales to tell.

I've seen him eat a huge hot fudge sundae after he became a diabetic, on a day when his sugar level was dangerously high.

He said that abyss was beautiful. And I believe him.

He calls me once a day now—sometimes more often—and he talks about the weather and his dogs and the deal he's got going with the mayor of his town, who lives across the street. And he talks to me about his illnesses, and how he has so little time left to live. He also talks a lot about our childhood.

He likes to tell me about the abyss. It's one of his favorite topics. He loves to tell the story, with exactly the same details, time after time, as if I've never heard it before.

And in the same way he can't get the abyss out of his mind, I can't get that unfinished pool out of mine, the unfinished pool in the unlikely spot, reeking of misbegotten ideas and sour fate. Uncle Amado, the architect at the peak of his career, had built his dream house. But this architect had a daughter who wasn't as agile as other children. That pool spoke of her needs and his pain. It spoke of the Revolution, which had wrecked or interrupted everything. It spoke of twists of fate and of an infinite number of things.

In the dark just before dawn, years and miles away, the biggest pool of all merges with Uncle Amado's in my mind's eye, and the images intertwine. I see the sea that was a stone's throw away, that turquoise pool in which floats the island of Cuba. A pool full of sharks and abysses and wonders and darkness.

I see my brother's head out by the horizon, a speck bobbing in an ocean of turquoise tears, poised over an invisible chasm. Invisible to me, alluring to him. He made me laugh, but now he makes me cry. He was brave; he was reckless. And his recklessness was often paid for by others. He lived for the moment, and loved it. He searched desperately for substances that would reproduce the abyss, and loved the strongest ones way too much. He was drawn to the dark by the dark itself. In the dark you see no images. None at all. In absolute darkness, there is no remorse, nothing to forget. Nothing at all. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Nada, nada, nada.

Which, by the way, also means “swim, swim, swim” in Spanish.

My seventh proof for the existence of God: a boy swimming out to the abyss from a house with an empty, unfinished pool. Seventh and final proof.

I
t was a hot day. An ordinary day in Havana, on the eve of my departure. The sunlight screamed in utter delight, as always, blasting everything in its path.

Too bad. The loudspeakers ruined it. They were mounted on the utility poles on every street corner, broadcasting from the Plaza of the Revolution. The Maximum Leader was going to give a speech again that day, and the loudspeakers were seeking to do what the sun itself could not: to reach even the darkest, most hidden, innermost rooms in every house in the Ensanche de La Habana, my grandparents' neighborhood.

We were all being bombarded. I shielded my brain from the Maximum Leader's words, and for most of that day I succeeded. The words bounced off my ears and fell to the ground mortally wounded, gasping for meaning. But every now and then I'd let my guard down, and a few words would get through.

Revolution this, Revolution that.
Yanquis
are evil. Fidel is great. Hail to our Maximum Leader. He's given us genuine freedom. All are free now, truly free, under the Maximum Leader's careful guidance. We shall triumph. We shall build an ideal society. We shall all think alike, think freely, as one with our Leader. Revolution this, Revolution that. Death to Imperialism. Death to Capitalism. Long live Communism and Marxism-Leninism. Death to the Worms.

It was a special day for the Maximum Leader and his Revolution. The best nation in the whole world had deemed Cuba worthy of a visit by the first human ever to orbit the earth. Yury Gagarin was in Havana that lovely day, and he was going to put in an appearance at the Plaza of the Revolution.

I had to see him. I didn't care if he was a Communist and an atheist. I didn't care one bit that Yury had told Nikita Khrushchev that he'd seen no signs of God in outer space.

So I'd spent the night at my grandparents' house, which was near the parade route for Yury. That was the very first night I'd ever spent away from my own house, and it had been hard to go to sleep. It had been even tougher to wake up and find that I wasn't anywhere near my parents.

This is what it will be like,
I told myself.
This is what awaits me in a month or two.

Like Yury when he prepared for his launch into outer space, I was preparing myself for my launch into an alien world. I think that's one of the reasons I wanted to see him in person. It wasn't just the fact that he was the first human being to fly so high above our atmosphere: I was impressed with his utter calm in a strange environment.

Yury had balls.
Cojones.
The size of coconuts, and probably just as hard. The kind of balls I'd need in exile. You just can't get into a tiny metal capsule and sit atop the largest
cohete
ever made without balls like coconuts. He was a messenger from the world of the brave, and from the future too. Someday, I'd be going into outer space also. Surely, by the time I'd reach fifty, we'd all be vacationing on the moon. I'd be taking my kids to the moon in July 2000, and I'd be able to tell them on the way there, as the earth got smaller and smaller behind us, that I'd seen the very first cosmonaut in the flesh.

Havana was full of billboards welcoming Yury.
BIENVENIDO GAGARIN
. The billboards also had the same message in Russian. It looked like such an interesting language. Almost as good an alphabet as Tony had invented, except it had too many letters.

Yury had a very red face. That's what struck me when I laid eyes on him, his face was about the same shade of red as hibiscus blossoms. He rode through Havana in a motorcade on his way to the Plaza of the Revolution, sitting in the backseat of a convertible with the top down. Well, not exactly in the backseat, but rather above it, with his rear end on the body of the car and his legs on the backseat.

He was getting one hell of a sunburn. Cuba was more perilous than outer space for a pale Russian. That sunlight howled with delight as it slammed onto the cosmonaut's red face.

A Russian on parade in Havana. What a sight. I didn't know at the time that the Soviet Union also contained Uzbeks, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Tatars, Armenians, and dozens of other subject nations. I thought everyone in the Soviet Union was Russian, like Yury. I had no idea it had been an empire for so long, and that Cuba was not its first colony. But I did know one thing: everything they made was a piece of crap. Russian cars were junk. Russian appliances were junk. Russian bicycles were junk. Russian toys were junk. Russian oil and gasoline were worse than junk. The streets of Havana had become rivers of sludge. Louis XVI explained it had something to do with the Russian oil, which was either too thin or too thick for the American cars most Cubans still drove, and which leaked from the cars onto the asphalt. And the sludge was getting thicker and thicker.

Once, trying to cross a wide boulevard in a hurry, I lost my shoe to the sludge, and Louis XVI laughed out loud at the sight of my shoe glued to the median strip.

King Louis and I were doing a lot of walking then, in early 1962. During that one year when I didn't go to school, as I awaited my departure, Louis XVI took me on a few of his errands into the heart of Havana. It was the best time I ever had with him. What I remember best of all is simply walking by his side, hearing him talk. He had a memory for every place we visited, a history. I knew by then that my dad's history was not necessarily an account of the real past. But I loved to hear him bring the past alive, even a false one.

His past was so much more interesting than his present.

I often wonder what it must have been like for him to take me along and talk to me, knowing that he'd lose me soon. What did it feel like for him to know that Tony and I were leaving, with no assurance that he'd ever see us again? What did it feel like to know that he had chosen to stay with his art collection and Ernesto rather than to join us in the States?

He never talked about it. All I know is what he said in a letter shortly before he died, years later. It was an odd letter, full of emotion. Perhaps he knew he was close to death, for he seldom revealed his feelings. He told me that he had known all his life that he would have children and lose them. He said that he knew when Marie Antoinette first proposed sending us to the States by ourselves that this was our fate and his. That it was meant to be. He'd resisted the idea, he said, but not strongly and not for very long, because he knew that God had already planned it this way.

He also told me that when our airplane had taken off he had felt as if his heart were being ripped out of his chest. He said nothing had ever hurt so much in his entire life. He added that it was a pain that had stayed with him constantly, every single day.

I still don't understand him.

And he certainly didn't understand me. Or else he wouldn't have adopted Ernesto. And he certainly wouldn't have made me buy a record I didn't care for at all, which is what he did on one of those days when we walked around Old Havana.

I had about five pesos to spend, and I thought I'd buy myself a record. My first. Louis XVI said he knew of a very good record store that still had lots of records to sell, and we both went there on the bus, somewhere in the oldest part of the city.

It looked ancient and full of ghosts, that part of Havana, even in the daytime. It was gritty and crumbling and beautiful all at once. The record store was one of many in a long arcade, near a place called La Plaza del Vapor. Where the Plaza had once stood there was a giant hole the size of a city block filled with dark green water. It was a Revolutionary urban renewal project gone wrong; too high a water table had surprised the engineers, and they didn't have the means to fix their mistake. So Old Havana had gained a perfectly square lake.

The same shape as the covers of the long-playing albums in the record store. It was a great place. They had every kind of music: classical, Cuban, jazz, rock and roll, you name it. They also had a listening booth in which you could ask for a record to be played. I must have made about ten trips to that booth, and with each trip my dad grew more impatient and irritated.

He didn't like the choices I was making.

“That's jazz, you know. That's trash. You don't want to buy that.”

“But I like it.”

“It's still trash. You don't really want to buy that.”

“But this guy Miles Davis sounds so good. I like this album a lot.”

“You still don't know what's really good. It's just trash.”

We went on like this for a long time. Finally, he wore me down and convinced me that all my choices had been bad ones. Especially those jazz records. So we ambled over to the classical section, and guided by his expert advice, to which I had now totally surrendered, I ended up buying
Arthur Rubinstein Plays President Eisenhower's Piano Favorites.

Jesus H. Piano-tuning Christ.

I succumbed so totally to my own maximum leader that when I got home I actually played the record many times. I waited for my taste to improve with each revolution of the disc, but instead the opposite happened. As each note receded into the past and another stood poised to take its place, my taste in music declined exponentially. Two days after I'd bought the record, which had a goofy-looking picture of Dwight D. Eisenhower on the cover, I had come to loathe myself for being such a Philistine. I hated the record. I hated every single note and chord. And I hated myself for hating something good and beautiful.

Something was awfully wrong with me.

But that damn record of mine was so dull and dreadful. It even sounded miserable on the old clavichord Louis XVI had rigged up with a couple of stereo speakers on the inside. If it didn't sound good coming out of the clavichord, then it must have been me who was at fault.

Miles Davis sounded so much better. I had no idea who the guy was, but I could hear the music playing in my brain, and I liked it so much more than the Eisenhower piano pieces.

I stopped listening to the record after a couple of days and left it behind gladly. Louis XVI enjoyed that record a lot. He played it all the time during those last few months I spent in that house with him. Probably played it a lot after I left too, the way I've been playing Nirvana these past few months. Full blast.

Havana was far from Nirvana on that day Gagarin came to visit. Every third word that shot out of those infernal loudspeakers was “Revolution” and every other word seemed to be
Yanquis
. It was pure cosmic dualism, good versus evil, battling it out. Light versus darkness. It was also an apocalypse. The light had not triumphed yet, but was well on its way. The glorious Revolution would wipe the cosmic floor with the heinous
Yanqui
imperialists very soon.

Not even the Christian Brothers who spoke of Satan and hellfire and the final judgment had painted such a grim view of history.

But who could really think of an apocalypse on a day when the sun could crack the stones, as Cubans liked to say? Forget about a sun hot enough to fry eggs. This wasn't enough for Cubans, who probably did that all the time without giving it any thought. No, our sun had to be powerful enough to crack stones.

And Yury was surely getting one hell of a sunburn in the back of that convertible. Come to think of it, his face was the same shade of red as that of good old
El Colorado
of my early childhood dreams. But he was a genuine sport: he waved back at the crowd with a goofy grin on his face. Not quite as goofy as Eisenhower's on the cover of my new record album, but goofy enough, especially for a hero.

I waved at the goofy atheistic Russian space hero and he waved right back.

Contact. I was one with history.

From the parade route, my grandfather Amador and I made our way to the Plaza of the Revolution to get a glimpse of Fidel.

“I need to see that bastard who stole everything from me,” said my grandfather.

You have to understand that my grandfather had worked hard as a truck driver for more than three decades. He wasn't a rich man. He was an immigrant who'd had too many bad breaks, someone who would have been much better off if he had remained in Spain but was too ashamed to return as a failure. Now Fidel had taken the little that he had saved up. And at just about the same time that all of his money was stolen from him, he crashed his truck and broke his leg in so many places that it couldn't really be fixed at all. So he walked with a cane now, just like his daughter.

He was the kind of guy that the Revolution was supposed to help.

So we went to see the Maximum Leader. We had to, as long as we were that close.

We walked in the hot sun to the Plaza of the Revolution, along with hundreds of other Cubans. We gathered in the vast space under the monument to the Cuban patriot José Martí, a poet who had died fighting for independence from Spain. The tower at the center of the plaza was about twenty stories high, and directly underneath there was a broad platform with a pulpit from which the Maximum Leader preached to the multitudes. The tower looked like a permanent exclamation point.

It was a sea of people. I'd never seen so many bodies gathered in one spot. Tens of thousands, for sure. Some were curious, like me. Some were there because they were genuine believers in the Revolution. Some were like my father, who was there because it was required of him, in the section assigned to all the judges. There were thousands of Cubans in the same situation, in their own assigned sections. The guardians of the Revolution took attendance. If you didn't attend, there would be unpleasant repercussions: they reminded you constantly that it was their goal to make it tough for anyone who didn't show true Revolutionary spirit.