Waiting for Snow in Havana (45 page)

And Radio Havana proudly broadcast its programs announcing that Cuba was the only free nation in the Western hemisphere.

The crowd frightened me. It spoke in unison and seemed to think in unison, too. It roared and chanted slogans like
Cuba sí, Yanquis no!
at the appropriate moments. Other slogans too. It was a lot like church, I thought. It was a ritual, a liturgy of correct thinking, punctuated by responses from the congregation.

And the high priest was the Maximum Leader.

I saw him. My grandfather saw him, too. He was a pinpoint, off in the distance. A tiny moving speck. Even from far away we could see his tiny little body bouncing up and down as he spoke. He couldn't talk without moving. He jumped and waved his arms as if he were a basketball player or a demoniac. We could hear him very clearly, of course, thanks to all the loudspeakers that dotted the vast space of the Plaza.

You couldn't get away from his voice. Even if you plugged up your ears with your fingers, the sound of his voice was loud enough to find its way to your brain. You could shut out the words, but you couldn't shut out the noise.

He was bombing us.

He was telling us what was good. Telling us how we should think. He was telling us what to choose and how to choose it. He was telling us we had no choice. And he was telling us we were free. Free at last.

That one tiny, insignificant, erasable smudge under the giant stone exclamation point, that speck of nothingness controlled everyone in that Plaza, and everyone on the island. That one little nothing that my cousin

Fernando had planned to erase at that very same spot, two years earlier. Being at that Plaza, that day, was one of the scariest moments of my life. Scarier than any nightmare I'd ever had.

“Let's go,
abuelo,
can we go now, please?”

“Yes, damn it, let's go.”

We carefully wended our way out of the crowd that had gathered behind us. It wasn't easy. People were still streaming in as we tried to leave. Some of the latecomers were in groups, and were being herded like sheep.

My grandfather spoke over the din: “Hold my hand. I don't want you to get lost.”

I was too old to hold hands, but I did it anyway.

Good thing I did, too, for it would be the last time I'd ever get the chance. I held my grandfather's hand for the last time in my life, there, as Fidel's words fell upon us like hail, or fire and brimstone. We were just two drops in a nearly boundless ocean. But we were two drops who knew what was going on, two drops struggling to free ourselves from the sea around us. An old man torn from his homeland by forbidden love years ago, a boy about to be torn from his by a Revolution.

Two specks moving in the wrong direction.

Two specks about to part from each other forever, thanks to one tiny speck.

One speck bathed in sunlight that day, just like everyone else.

One tiny speck.

Too bad.

G
et Peg-Leg! Get Peg-Leg! Quick, everyone, let's get Peg-Leg!” Marie Antoinette was being pursued by an angry crowd near the Swiss embassy. She'd been camping out on the sidewalk for a couple of days, waiting her turn to apply for a visa to the United States. Suddenly, a mob had gathered across the street, and they'd started shouting insults at all of those who were lined up outside the embassy. Then they started to hurl bottles.

The bottles whizzed past her and smashed on the pavement. She didn't count them, she just fled in utter terror, as fast as she could. She ran on her one good leg, and her friend Angelita, the mother of my fifth-grade friend Ciro, ran along with her, clutching her arm. But my mother was so used to having conquered her handicap that she had no clue at all that they were after her.

“Who's this
Pata palo
they keep shouting about?” asked Marie Antoinette, as the bottles zipped by and smashed at her feet. Between cries of
Ay, Dios mío,
Angelita let her know: “It's you,
boba,
it's you!…and they're coming after us!”

Marie Antoinette stopped dead in her tracks and turned around to face the mob that was pursuing her. They were all on the opposite side of the street and had started to cross it.

“Why are you trying to harm me? What did I ever do to you?”

“You're a worthless worm, that's who you are!” shouted one woman.

“I may be a
gusana,
but I'm a human being, just like you, and a Cuban, too. And I don't know any of you and have never, ever harmed any of you or wished evil on you. So why do you throw bottles at me and call me names?”

“You and all of yours deserve to die, you stinking vermin. We'll kill you all before you have a chance to leave. You don't deserve to live and leave. Death to you and yours!”

“Now you did it,” Angelita sighed. “Now they'll kill us for sure!”

Marie Antoinette continued to reason with the mob: “You have no right to shout insults at us or wish us harm. None at all. I'm just trying to leave this country so I can be with my sons. I haven't ever done anything to harm any of you. Get that through your heads!”

“
Muerte a los gusanos!
Death to the worms! Fatherland or Death! We shall triumph!”

More slogans, chanted in unison, including the Maximum Leader's favorite prayer:
“Cuba sí, Yanquis no! Cuba sí, Yanquis no!”

When my mother tells me the story, which is at least five or six times a year, it always ends with a bus. Somehow, as the mob continues to harass her and Angelita, a bus magically stops for them. A bus headed for some part of Havana she doesn't even know existed. Marie Antoinette and Angelita jump on the bus and ride it for twenty blocks or so, then get off, panting and wheezing, looking over their shoulders for an approaching mob, and transfer to another bus that will take them back to El Vedado, where Angelita lives.

Marie Antoinette was just doing what the parents of the fourteen thousand airlifted kids were doing all over Cuba: trying to find the quickest way out of the country so they could be reunited with their children. Angelita was doing the same thing. She had three kids in the States: two girls and one boy. The youngest girl had a congenital heart problem and had been through surgery at the age of three.

Angelita and my mom scurried all over Havana, doing what needed to be done, searching for the rarest commodity of all: correct information. Angelita made it to the goal line before my mom, or at least it looked that way. She obtained an exit permit and a visa for herself and her husband. But when they were about to leave for the airport, they received a phone call telling them that their exit permit had been revoked and that they had to reapply. Her husband died of a heart attack right there and then. He was only fifty years old.

Marie Antoinette wouldn't give up, no matter what. She tried and failed so many times. She had no idea it would take her three and a half years to be reunited with us. She didn't know she would get exit permits, only to be turned back at the airport. “Sorry,
señora,
you can't leave today. A diplomat needs your seat.” She didn't know that each time she'd be turned back at the airport, it would take more than a year to get another exit permit. She didn't know she'd end up going to Mexico first, just because a friend of hers there met the right Mexican official at a cocktail party. She didn't know she'd have to spend six months in Mexico, mooching off good friends while she waited for a visa to the States. She didn't know she would hemorrhage in Mexico City and undergo emergency surgery. She didn't know that the blood transfusion she would receive would infect her with hepatitis C. She didn't know that one week after surgery there would be an earthquake. She didn't know that two days after landing in Miami, she'd be caught in a hurricane. She didn't know it would take her another three months in Miami to find a way to join us. She didn't know she'd end up in Chicago. She didn't know Tony and I really wouldn't need her anymore for the rest of our lives, at least not in the ways she thought we would. She didn't know I'd be taller than her when she finally saw me again, wearing size ten shoes that would scare her to death.

And she gave up so much, blindly, just to be with us.

I don't know where Tony and I were at exactly the same time that the mob was pursuing her in Havana. We could have been in any number of places, each of them very far from her.

We were in another world. Tony was probably very unhappy that day. He was always unhappy. I might have been happy. It all depends. I loved the adventure of being on my own, even though on some days the hunger was too hard to take, there, at that orphanage near the Orange Bowl.

Maybe I was swimming in the neighbors' pool at my first house in Miami. Maybe I was reading a library book at the orphanage. Maybe I was delivering newspapers on my bike in Bloomington. Maybe it was at exactly the same moment I accidentally slammed a tightly rolled newspaper into the chest of one of my customers and heard him go
“oooooomph!”
Maybe it was when I broke the glass on a storm door with a newspaper, or that one morning when the angry dog who was usually chained up chased me down the street. Maybe it was when I fell in love with Nancy, a girl with blue eyes like Eye Jesus and a haircut exactly like that of my fifth-grade
noviecita.

All I knew was that since I'd left my home, my nightmares had pretty much vanished and I had learned to bury my love for my parents and family so deeply I barely knew it was there. And one of the ways I did that was to think of how nice it was not to be living with Maria Theresa, Candlestick Lady, Eye Jesus, Window Jesus, and voodoo people anymore.

Of course, every now and then, what I'd buried would bubble up to the surface and scare me half to death. But that didn't happen very often. I was the King of Denial, sitting on the throne at the age of eleven.

I couldn't bury the lizards, though. I'd killed so many I'd never be able to bury them.

All of the stains on my soul are lizard shaped. And some of them are missing their tails. And the severed tails are wriggling madly.

I came after them like a mob, thirsting for blood. I pursued them throughout my entire childhood. I thought they were evil incarnate. But one day topped them all: the day of the Lizard Apocalypse.

“Let's wipe out all of the lizards in the neighborhood,” I said to my friend Jorge.

“You can't do that. There are too many of them.”

“Then how about our block? Just this one square block. We won't cross any streets. We'll just kill all of the lizards on this one block.”

“Okay, that sounds great. Let's go!”

So we each grabbed a broom and went hunting. Brave hunters, seeking to free our neighborhood from fearsome lizards, wielding brooms like baseball bats.

I won't tell you what we did, exactly, because it was so unholy. Suffice it to say that we were immensely successful. So successful, in fact, that I'm still haunted by their tiny ghosts, thirty-eight years later.

The skin, that magic skin still makes me so envious. As wondrous as the changing colors of parrot fish in the turquoise sea. Those tails. Why can't I have one? Every now and then I'd like to leave my tail wriggling in danger's jaws. Those eyes. Eyes that can rotate like the earth itself; eyes that follow you wherever you go, like Eye Jesus.

They were so beautiful. Especially the green chameleons with the
pañuelo
on their throats, that little red kerchief of skin that they furled and unfurled. They were the most beautiful. And they were the ones I hated and feared the most.

Jorge and I killed them all. We started at my house and made a circuit around the entire block. I was most successful at one spot: behind the abandoned building where the pervert had held a knife to my face. There were a lot of lizards back there. I knew this because they had stared at me indifferently on that awful day. In the bright, blinding sunlight and in the darkest shade we killed them. We were as thorough as good historians chasing down every footnote. We climbed trees like mad that day, and jumped fences, and trampled shrubs all around our block.

Of course, almost all of the people who lived in those houses were new to the neighborhood. I didn't know most of them, and I certainly didn't care about jumping their fences or trampling their shrubbery. They were no better than thieves themselves, living in houses others had left behind.

I was on my way out. We'd received our exit permit. I knew the day and time of my departure. April the sixth, at six o'clock in the afternoon.

No more Jorge, no more Louis XVI, no more Marie Antoinette or grandparents or uncles or aunts or cousins. No more toys. No more comic books. No more baseball cards. No more lizards.

But I could take something with me that no inspector at the airport could ever find, no matter what. I could take with me the exact number of lizards I had killed on that one single day.

Forty-one.

I forget how many Jorge killed. All I know is that his number was smaller than mine, and that he will therefore spend less time in purgatory than me for that sin. Maybe forty-one thousand years less.

Forgive me, hateful, dreadful, ugly, joyous, wondrous creatures. I took it all out on you, and for all the wrong reasons.

Forgive me, Jesus. Didn't you once say: blessed are the lizards, for they shall inherit the earth? I'm sure you did. It's just that those lackluster apostles of yours forgot to write that one down in the final version of the Sermon on the Mount. Isn't that it? I'm sure you said a million things that they neglected to write down. I'm sure you saw a lot of lizards there in Palestine. In the temple courtyard, on the grapevines, and the silent stones, and the fig trees, and the nets hung to dry by the Sea of Galilee, sunning themselves. Maybe they even flocked to you.

I'm sure there were even lizards at the foot of the cross, keeping you company, and that artists have left out that detail for nearly two thousand years, too. If I ever take up painting, I'll include them in a crucifixion scene, Jesus. I'll make sure they have drops of Your blood spattered all over their bodies. And if I ever paint an image of Your Sacred Heart, I'll make sure there is a lizard perched on the thorns that encircle it.

You must have said plenty about them. All those people out there, in Your day, believing that this earth and everything upon it were created by an evil deity; all those people out there, in Your day, who saw lizards, snakes, and crocodiles as the ultimate proof of the existence of an evil creator.

People just like me.

You must have set them straight. It was the biggest mistake of all, wasn't it: thinking that some creatures prove that the Father is evil? The most awful mistake of all, mistaking the serpent for the Creator?

Didn't You also have a lot of lizard parables? Like the parable of the silent tail-less lizard? The parable of the lizard who waited patiently for little boys with brooms? The parable of the escaping iguanas? The parable of the lizard that almost flew into orbit? How about the parable of the lizard-shaped clouds? And the parable of the sinner who had an iguana's soul?

I know I said there was no way You could have kissed them. But I've changed my mind. After years of reflection, I'm sure You kissed them. And they kissed You back. Not like Judas, though. They were incapable of betrayal.

No one forced You to kiss the lizard, Jesus. I, however, can't say the same. I've made my peace with lizards, but I still can't bring myself to kiss a real one. I've only kissed metaphorical lizards, and I can't say that I've done that willingly, much less with affection. It always leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

At least now I admire their beauty. I recognize that they're beautiful in their own lizard way. But I can't say that I find them kissable. Not yet.

The only lizard I can kiss joyfully is a toy lizard. My youngest son has a beautiful iguana puppet that looks better than a real iguana. I've kissed that. I've also kissed rubber and plastic lizards, and beanbag lizards. When I was a child, I didn't have a single toy that even came close to resembling a lizard. But my children have lots of them. And when we go to Florida and see lizards, they are delighted and don't even think of causing them pain.