Waiting for Snow in Havana (6 page)

B
lackie the chimp was on the loose again. Running amok in Miramar, swinging from tree to tree, screaming loudly, scaring people.

This time he was dressed in olive green lederhosen. Yes, this fine African chimpanzee was dressed in Bavarian lederhosen, those stupid-looking embroidered leather overalls with short pants, running away from his prison in suburban Havana. Leaping from tree to tree, so far from his real home in the African rain forest, saddled with an English name in a Spanish-speaking country, seeking freedom.

His owner followed him closely on foot, along with a small retinue of servants, watching the chimp's every move, making sure he wouldn't get away for good. I saw Blackie in our ficus tree, out on the sidewalk, and his owner looking up anxiously at the branches, pleading with the chimp to come down, holding Blackie's Alpine hat in his hand. The hat was part of the outfit that must have fallen off, or been tossed away, by the runaway chimp. How vividly I still remember the colored feathers that poked out of the hat band. One red, one gold, one bright green. Blackie screamed loudly from his sanctuary, sounding just like Cheetah in Tarzan movies. Blackie also looked a lot like Cheetah but was a touch neurotic. Even a child could tell this chimp was not quite right in the head.

But you'd be neurotic too if you were as smart as a chimp and you lived in a little house, about ten feet by six feet, perched on a platform slightly larger than your dwelling, about eight feet off the ground, with a six-foot length of chain connecting your ankle to the platform floor. It looked a lot like Tarzan's tree house, come to think of it. The concrete supports that held up the platform had been carefully designed to resemble tree branches. They even had a rough barklike surface etched onto them, and truncated pruned limbs poking out helter-skelter. How I stared at those fake branch stumps when I played in that zoo garden. So much work to make something look natural. All for a chimp and its owner.

And you'd be even more neurotic than Blackie if you also had a bunch of snotty kids taunting you all the time, and throwing hard objects at you and your little house. Among all of those terrible things my friends and I used to do in the neighborhood, I glossed over our treatment of Blackie.

Poor Blackie, chained to his platform. How we loved to anger him. How we loved to yell at him and imitate his cries, or throw stuff at him. We always thought it was so funny when he yanked on his chain violently and threw around his brightly colored aluminum cup. How we loved it when he threw that blue cup at us, his only possession other than the chain. Hard to tell, then or now, whether the chain belonged to him, or he to the chain. The costumes were also his, I suppose. But he wore them only on special occasions.

Sometimes, if we made him really angry, he would defecate in his hand and throw turds at us. You can imagine how much a bunch of boys loved this, how we tried to shove one another in the path of those incoming missiles. Whoa, watch it!
“Oye, Cuidado!” “Prepárate!”
Get ready! We looked forward to the worst: would anyone get smeared with Blackie's stool? No one ever did, much to our collective chagrin.

Blackie belonged to one of our neighbors, the nickel mine magnate, the man with the Cadillac and the chauffeur who drove us to school. Gerardo Aulet, our neighbor, had turned his gardens into a zoo, just around the corner from us. A lion, a tiger, a panther, a chimp, some monkeys, other small mammals, and birds. All sorts of birds. Beautiful, exotic birds, held captive in cages large and small. Some of the cages were so large that later, after the world changed and poor people took over this zoo, some of them turned the cages into their dwellings.

Would that be a sign of progress or one of the saddest things on earth? You tell me. I still don't know.

All I know is that it happened to my birthplace and my people, and that my own memories are clouded by passion. As much as I have tried to escape, to obliterate what I was and ceased to be, I've been as successful at that as I've been at turning myself into a corn-fed, redheaded, freckled, Scotch-Irish farm boy from Indiana. Or Michael Jordan defying gravity. Or Captain James Tiberius Kirk commanding the starship
Enterprise
at warp speed, wooing every good-looking female that crossed his stellar path, human or alien. And speaking of fictional characters, Popeye might have been the wisest of all time, for he knew instinctively what it has taken me a lifetime to realize. “I am what I am,” or as Popeye put it, “I yam what I yam.”

I yam Cuban.

God-damned place where I was born, that God-damned place where everything I knew was destroyed. Wrecked in the name of fairness. In the name of progress. In the name of the oppressed, and of love for the gods Marx and Lenin.

Utterly wrecked.

I have pictures to prove it, from twenty years ago, when my mother went back to visit for one week, packing a Kodak Instamatic camera. Everything was already so thoroughly ruined then as to be barely recognizable. The entire neighborhood went to ruin, just like ancient Rome, only more quickly and without the help of German barbarians. The entire city. The entire country, from end to end. Rumor has it that our house collapsed about two years ago and Ernesto, the adopted one, had to move out. But we have no way of finding out. My mother, brother, and I haven't spoken with Ernesto in more than twenty years. On top of that, Havana might as well be on the other side of the moon, or on Pluto, or the planet Mongo, home of Ming the Merciless, or the outer fringe of the universe, where it's not houses, but time and space that collapse.

Anyway, I really don't give a damn about that house anymore. If it did indeed fall down under its own rotten weight, good riddance. If it didn't, the first thing I'll do when I return to Havana is rent a bulldozer and raze it to the ground all by myself. Or better yet, I'll stuff the house full of dynamite and blow it up. My final firecracker surprise for the old neighborhood, in remembrance of pranks past. I have a neighbor here in town who could teach me how to do it right and without casualties. He blows up things for a living, and his children play with mine. Such a nice guy. So expert with dynamite.

Would this make my current neighbors ordinary or extraordinary in comparison to those I had as a child?

Sorry, I digress. Back to my old neighborhood and Blackie's story: Aulet's son, also named Gerardo, was our friend. He was such a nice guy, Gerardito. If he hadn't suffered from severe asthma, he would have become a member of our gang, the sixth apostle of mischief. Such a funny guy, and always so frail, so sick, so pampered. We could play with him only at his own house, and in his own zoological garden.

Gerardito went to school with Tony and me and shared that perilous Cadillac ride with us every day. He never seemed scared of his chauffeur, though. They seemed to be buddies of sorts, if one could ever conceive of a rich white boy and a poor black man as buddies. They shared dirty jokes, even. And they both freely uttered bad words. But this made sense: bad words and the Aulet house went together.

On one of his rear terraces, Aulet had a mynah bird. A very special creature, this bird, a worthy competitor to the Empress Maria Theresa. He knew every swear word ever uttered in Cuba. And he screamed out these expletives so loudly you could hear him nearly a block away.
“Coño, coño, coño!” “Hijo de puta. Puta. Hijo de puta!” “Puta, puta!” “Carajo, carajo, qué mierda. Qué mierda! Mierda!” “Me cago en tu puta madre. Cago, me cago. Puta madre!” “Culo grande, culo grande y gordo. Culo, culo feo.”

I've taken great care to report only the mildest of his offending words. But I won't translate, for fear of landing in hell.

Aulet's mynah bird didn't have to worry about hell, though. Or about much else. He was well fed and sumptuously housed. And he obviously had a voice coach who put great effort into helping him master a highly specialized vocabulary. Back then, I used to suspect the chauffeur. But it could have been my friend Gerardito, or maybe his father. Or everyone in that household, for all I know. The amount of effort that went into creating this screwy masterpiece boggles the mind. The mynah bird, who had no name, knew only one clean phrase:
Gerardito, ven a comer.
Gerardito, come eat. It was spellbinding to hear “Gerardito, come eat” embedded in the midst of a long string of unconnected swear words and lewd phrases.

We played with our friend in his private animal garden quite often, and not without risk. Once, as my dad sat at one of the many benches in the garden, he suddenly felt a weight on his shoulders, what seemed to be two large hands pressing down on him. He turned around and he found his nose less than an inch from a lion's snout. The fact that he decided to say hello to my father might have had something to do with the fact that he was a portly man with lots of meat on his bones. Having faced the guillotine in a former life, my dad remained cool. Or maybe he was petrified. Fortunately, he sat perfectly still until the lion lifted his paws and sauntered off. Then, very cautiously and quietly, he rounded us up, one by one, and brought us into the Aulet house.

My dad, the hero.

Years later, but years ago, when my lovely wife was still my girlfriend, and when she was still in graduate school, she tried to argue in class one day that a tiger mentioned in one Latin American short story—a tiger in a house—didn't need to be interpreted metaphorically. The professor and the other students laughed her off. “Magical realism,” they all said. But she knew so much more about what passes for Latin magical realism than they did, thanks to the stories I had told her. For one thing, she knew about the time Blackie took revenge on me.

We were playing hide-and-seek. I had found a very nice spot behind the tiger's cage. The tiger who would later die of indigestion and a failed enema administered with a garden hose. Hiding well was important to me, so important I braved the lizards in the thick foliage. So there I was, hiding successfully, minding my own business, listening for footfalls, as each of my friends were rustled from their hiding spots one by one. And looking out for lizards.

Then came the hug.

I felt someone's arms encircle my legs from behind, just above the knees. Thinking it was my best friend Rafael trying to startle me, even though it would have been immensely weird for him to hug me that way, I whispered: “Rafa, go away, stop it.” Before I could turn around came the pain. Long, sharp teeth piercing through my jeans, sinking into my flesh. And the grip around my legs tightened as the teeth sank farther and farther into me. I'd been bitten by dogs and cats before, but this was a whole new kind of bite. And not just because it was my butt. Those teeth clamped down with resolve, as if they were seeking the seat of my soul.

I felt a primal terror, produced, probably, by one enzyme passed on to us by our forest-dwelling ancestors. The “you're-being-eaten” enzyme. Then the “you're-about-to-die” enzyme kicked in too, along with all those chemical compounds that encode and carry nature's most special gift to our brain, extreme pain.

It hurt. I hurt. Badly.

I knew it had to be Blackie, since lions and tigers can't hug you. These arms around my legs felt just like human arms, but I knew no human could bite like this. It's a good thing I didn't know at that time how awfully strong an adult male chimpanzee can be. I might have actually died from fright.

Fortunately, once he had dug his teeth into me as deeply as he could, Blackie released me. He was civilized, that chimp. He could have mauled me mercilessly, ripped my flesh from head to toe, punctured my aorta or my femoral artery, or inflicted God knows what other kind of damage. But he extended mercy to me. Grace, even. All he did was bite my rear end, the fleshiest, least crucial, silliest part of my body. Maybe it was the lederhosen and all the other costumes that had tamed him, taught him restraint? Maybe it was the cowboy outfit? The baseball uniform? The white linen suit? Maybe it was just Blackie the primate, my natural cousin, reaching down to his almost human soul, letting this boy go. Punctured, bloodied, but otherwise unharmed.

Blackie let out a shriek the instant his mouth let go of my butt. A victory howl that scared me almost as much as the bite itself.
I'm done for,
I thought. Then he shrieked and howled some more and jumped away, his knuckles pushing on the ground.

Then I let out a howl of my own, far from triumphant. I howled in pain.

“He bit me, he bit me! Whaaahh! Blackie bit me! Whaaahh!”

“Hey, you just gave away your hiding place,” said Manuel from a few feet away, with compassion.

“I'm not joking. He bit me, he really did!
Ay,
this hurts! Waaahh!” And I cried like the little boy I was.

One by one my playmates came to my hiding place. And they all seemed to talk at the same time.

“I've got to see this!”

“What? You mean Blackie is loose?”

“Yaaaayy!”

“Hey, we'd better get in the house. We might be next!”

“You're lying. Let me see. I don't believe you.”

From the upstairs terrace, the mynah bird chimed in:
“Coño. Carajo. Puta. Puta. Gerardito. Gerardito, ven a comer. Coño.”

My mother, who was inside the house talking to Gerardito's older sister, heard all the screaming and hurried out as fast as she could. Meanwhile my playmates gathered around me and saw I was telling the truth. Though I was wearing blue jeans, the bloodstain was easy enough to see. Then we all began to walk towards the house, keeping an eye out for Blackie. My brother tried to comfort me.