Waiting for Snow in Havana (8 page)

Quite a few bombs went off in Havana those last few years of Batista's regime.

To this day, as I am drifting to sleep I often expect to hear a bomb or two going off in the distance. It was an almost comforting sound, a lullaby of sorts. And if it was a bomb followed by a shoot-out, then it was even more oddly soothing.

You knew, at least, that the world hadn't changed.

Sometimes you would learn later where the bomb had gone off, what damage had been done, or whether any people had died. The papers made sure to get photographs of those killed or maimed. Sometimes you never found out anything at all. When so many bombs are going off all the time, it's hard to keep track. Hard to care, too, unless one happens to go off next to you.

Nothing like that ever happened to us, however. Tough to say this, but I was kind of disappointed that I was never near one of these bombs, or that we didn't know anyone who had been blown up by one.

I loved explosions. I loved them in war movies. I loved them off in the distance as I went to sleep. I loved them even more close up when we set off firecrackers.

I loved the sound of the match head on the rough side of the matchbox, the flare: so suddenly there. I loved the sight and the phosphorus smell of the burning match as it approached the fuse on the firecracker, as it transferred that living flame to it. And I loved the sight and smell of the fuse as it came alive and was consumed, eaten by time and fire.

Such a perfect way of thinking about those fuses, and also life. You begin at one end, and as you make your way forward, point by infinitesimal point, you give off sparks. And what you leave behind is charred, consumed, transformed. But that glorious voyage towards the end: poets never grow weary of trying to describe it. The end, or
telos,
as Aristotle or Aquinas would tell you, is the very reason for existence, the purpose of anything that exists. Our
telos
as humans, yours and mine, is to abide with God for eternity. The sparks on our way there, large and small, call them love. The
telos
of a fuse on a firecracker is a nice explosion. The sparks on the way there, call them love too.

On a really good day, I will fight to the death with anyone who tries to tell me that those sparks are not also love, fight with my bare hands or the jawbone of an ass or a broken stump of a sword. Metaphors matter to me, especially perfect ones.

How I loved that instant when the fuse disappeared altogether, when its sparks were swallowed whole by the blood red firecracker. You knew what would happen next, but each and every time it was such a great surprise.

Absolute silence, for the briefest little pinpoint of time.

BANG!

Good ones shake you to the core, sweep over all your senses. Sight, sound, smell, taste, even touch. Yes, touch too: a good blast can be felt all over one's body.

A flash of light, one of those rare moments when raw energy makes itself visible, the very stuff of life, blinding the eyes to all else.

A roar, deafening, that suddenly cancels out all other sound.

Wave upon wave of particles of the exploding object filling the air, fumes that fill your nose and cancel out all other scents, even those of the sweetest flower.

Those same particles invading your tongue, vanquishing all other flavors, melding with your own spit.

And those shock waves, the air itself moving, our invisible ocean of gas ripped from top to bottom, just like the veil of the Temple in Jerusalem when Jesus died on the cross, the air pulsating with energy that seeps into your very skin, your pores, your nerves, and ultimately, your brain, making every other sensation vanish, making you say “Yes, I live.” Sometimes the shock waves bombarding your skin force you to say “God.”

Of course, firecrackers seem a lot less lyrical or cosmic when they blow up in your hand. At least while you're feeling the pain. I should know; it happened to me.

There we were at the park with my dad one day, the whole bunch of us, setting off firecrackers in the
glorieta
. This time, my mom was there too. She was sitting on a park bench under the shade of a giant ficus tree, watching her husband and her boys play with firecrackers.

On this day we had a few duds that wouldn't explode.
Duds
. Now, there's an English word so perfect that it almost makes up for the lameness of
firecracker
.

We'd watch that fuse disappear into the firecracker, and then nothing would happen. The firecracker would just sit there, right where we had put it, totally dead. Talk about frustration!

Yet even these insulting, faithless ones served a purpose. After waiting a minute or so, we would take the duds, slice them open, and light the gunpowder with a match.
Whoosh!
A flash rather than an explosion. Second best, but so nice. And such a great smell too.

It was probably my twentieth firecracker of the day. I lit it inside the
glorieta,
at the base of one of its columns. We watched the fuse burn, as always, with great eagerness. This one seemed to burn more quickly than most, but that might have been an optical illusion, or a trick my memory is playing on me. Dud. The fuse vanished, the last spark flew, and nothing. Zilch. I was mad. It was my third or fourth dud that day. I thought I had waited long enough, but as I reached for the firecracker my dad and my brother and my friends shouted at me in unison.

“No, not yet!”

“Wait! Wait!”

“Hey, no!”

“Don't, don't!”

Stupid dud. I was so angry, I ignored their warnings, grabbed the firecracker with my right hand, and made a fist over it, trying to crush it.

BANG!

It was so pretty. The blast turned my hand into light itself for an instant. It seemed totally aglow, ever so briefly. Bursts of light and showers of sparks shot out from the narrow gaps between my fingers. It looked just like the drawings in Superman comics when the Man of Steel crushed bombs with his bare hands. The thrill hovered ever so delicately and briefly.

Then the pain shoved the thrill aside, rudely, and conquered my brain. My hand was nothing but pain. It was burning, throbbing, seared by a pain beyond all thresholds. I kept my fist closed tightly, and held my right wrist with my left hand, as if trying to choke off the pain. I stood there, frozen, in shock.

A few images managed to embed themselves in my memory, snapshots of sorts.

My dad, brother, and friends rushing towards me.

My dad saying “I told you not to grab it.”

Someone else saying “I told you to drop it.”

My body refusing to sit down next to my mom at her park bench.

My body yielding to her voice.

My mom, sitting next to me, trying to open my fist.

My fist, refusing to open. My mouth letting out a strange sound, some kind of cry I didn't recognize as my own. It was more like a very loud whimper.

My fist letting go, opening, yielding to my mom's voice.

The sight of my hand. It was black and red, all over. Like some odd mixture of coal and raw meat. I remember feeling relieved that I couldn't see any bones. I remember being surprised by the fact that there was no firecracker left in that monstrous hand.

A long car ride to the hospital. Too long. I whimpered all the way there.

A shot in the arm at the emergency room.

A doctor opening my hand, with my mom and dad next to me. That same doctor swabbing my hand and fingers with giant Q-tips dipped in some fluid, for what seemed like an eternity.

My mom and dad telling me not to look.

My mom cradling my head in her hands, holding me tightly against her bosom.

More pain.

A nurse wrapping my hand in what seemed like miles of gauze.

Another shot, this one in my butt.

Calm, peace, relief, sleep. Fade to black.

Did this stop us from fooling around with explosives? Of course not. I gained a special respect for duds, but kept to my old ways, unfazed. Explosions are so hard to give up. Harder even when they seem as natural as sunlight and as common as heartbeats, and you live in a world out of joint—a world that seems to need a few bangs to set it right. If I had stayed in Cuba, the experience might have come in very handy later, for I would surely have tried to blow up much bigger things, just like my relative who ended up shot by a firing squad.

Wait. One more memory has just emerged from its hiding place. One final snapshot.

I'm in my first-grade classroom. It's nearly the end of the school year. I'm looking forward to summer vacation. Brother Pedro is at the blackboard, doing math. An essential prelude to physics. Those sorry-ass Disney characters are still there, all over the walls. Such hypocrites, always happy, except for Donald Duck, who actually showed his darker emotions, the only one who could explode. He was, and still is, the most decent of them all, and the only one I appreciated on the wall. Anyway, after glancing at Donald on the wall, I'm looking out the window at one of Brother Alejandro's malfeasants out on the playground, kneeling on the gravel under the blazing sun, reeling slightly. The sunlight is flooding into the classroom.

I'm peeling long strips of skin off the palm of my hand and marveling at the transformation. My hand is back. My old hand, not that other one the firecracker left behind, all charred and bloody. The skin I've pulled off my hand is so clean, so beautiful, so transparent. It feels a lot like the wrapper on firecracker packages, except that it's not red. I roll the white skin, knead it with my fingers, ball it up. Brother Pedro calls my name. “Carlos, pay attention!”

I drop my skin on the ground. I shed my skin.

Just like a lizard.

P
arties, parties, birthday parties.

Fiesta!
One of the very few Spanish words every American knows. Along with its narcoleptic cousin,
siesta
. Parties and naps, the only two things spics are good at.

Mel Blanc, voice of Speedy Gonzalez and a thousand other Hollywood cartoons, may you burn in hell forever. As one of your God-damned Hispanic Warner Brothers cartoon characters might have said: “
Sí, señor,
firrst I go to zee
fiesta
and zen I tayk-a
siesta,
beeforrre I go to anozzer
fiesta
again.
Ole! Andale, ándale! Arriba, arriba!
”

I take it back, Mel. Sorry, I got carried away. Hell might be too harsh a punishment for your sins. You must have been clueless, truly. Maybe a better place for you would be heaven, where you might be surrounded by lazy, napping, partying spics who talk funny.

I couldn't make up my mind whether I loved or loathed those birthday parties back then, in sunny, breezy Havana. It has taken me such a long time to realize that few things in life are simple, that so many things are mixed. A bit of this alongside a bit of that. Good and evil dancing with each other so tightly, only one subatomic particle between them, while indifference looks on, as a chaperone, with her two lazy eyes, neither one of them capable of focusing. Here's a brand-new Spanish proverb for you, Mel Blanc:
la indeferencia es bizca.
Indifference is cross-eyed.

Anyway, they dance so fast, good and evil, these two polar opposites. So tightly and furiously. You can't dance with just one of these partners. If you cut into their dance, you end up with both, as a threesome. And if you fear cutting into the dance and taking a spin with good and evil, you end up dancing with the cross-eyed, ugly chaperone.

Even the deepest, most wondrous love can sometimes bring you to that dismal dance, and then every single tune is a tango. A bad tango composed by an angry, drunken Argentine just for you and your loved one. A tango that never ends.

But back to those Cuban parties: no dancing there. None at all. Furious whirling, yes, but no dancing of the literal kind. No Desi Arnaz orchestras banging on conga drums, their ridiculously puffy sleeves quivering to the beat. No rumba, no mambo, no cha-cha-cha. No tangos or string quartets. No waltzes. No Bartók, thank God. Cubans were much too smart back then to allow Bartók to be played anywhere on the island. I think there were laws against it and Bartók police who secretly spied on all the central and eastern Europeans in the country who might dare to pollute the atmosphere with music that not even Satan could dance to. Those who broke the anti-Bartók law were quickly rounded up and smacked on the temple, just above the ear.

The parties I went to just had games, costumes, and presents. No music, aside from the birthday song.

Oh, how the children of the fortunate ones celebrated their good fortune. How great, to be born to one of those families, and to have the children of similar families bring you presents and sing “Happy Birthday” in English as you blew out the candles on your excruciatingly well-decorated cake.

Well, I exaggerate a little. The lyrics were in English, but close to unrecognizable, at least the way we sang them. This is what I thought I was singing:
Japy berrssdéy tú yú, Japy berrssdéy tú yú.
It might as well have been
Abracadabra, hocus pocus,
or
meka-leka-hi, meka-hiney-ho.
It was a magical incantation in the language of the gods, the English tongue. In the language of the people who made movies and had invented every modern convenience.

Cargo cultists, all of us at those parties, and we didn't even know it. Just like South Sea islanders, mumbling their version of English phrases, expecting B-26 bombers to show up loaded with manufactured goods: knives, shoes, hats, screwdrivers, screws, jockstraps, cigarettes, and chewing gum. Phrases as “English” as ours, we fortunate boys and girls.

Pago-Pagoans we were, and we didn't know it. Tongans. Papuans. BoraBorans. Nanumangans. Manihikians. Nukulaelaelans. Head-hunting cannibals, no better than grass-skirted, bone-in-nose savages, we were. And we thought we were Cubans. Urbane Cubans, mind you.

But there we were at party after party, singing
Japy berrssdéy tú yú
just before the painstakingly well-wrapped presents showed up. Mel Blanc would have loved to hear us. Good thing he never did.

Of course, we knew that we had brought the presents. And, of course, all of us were studying English at school and knew at a very basic level what we were singing. But it
was
a magical song. Sacramental, too. It was so much like the Latin used in church, which we both understood and didn't, and which brought about such major changes in the fabric of reality.
Hoc est corpus meum
. This is my body.
Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei
. This is indeed the cup of my blood.
Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world have mercy on us.
Per omnia saecula saeculorum.
For ever and ever, world without end. Or even the Greek that we mistook for Latin:
Kyrie eleison.
Lord have mercy.

Somewhere between South Sea savages and ancient Romans. Somewhere between London and Madrid. Somewhere between heaven and earth. But, oh, so close to heaven compared to so many other Cubans.

All the cakes had themes. American themes. Cowboys and Indians. Popeye. Hopalong Cassidy. You name it, if it was part of the American entertainment empire, we had it on a cake.
Keik.
Or more properly, in that relaxed, African Spanish of Cuba,
kei.
That's what we called them,
keikes,
or
keiis,
in the plural. Not
tortas
or
pasteles,
the proper Spanish names. Never, ever, ever did we call a cake a
bollo,
as in other Spanish-speaking countries. In Cuba
bollo
had somehow evolved into the swear word for a woman's private parts. Maybe this is why the English
cake
had taken over all the Spanish words? Or did
bollo
evolve into a bad word as a revenge for
keik
?

Anyway, those cakes were amazing. Some were mountains of multicolored meringue and icing. Others were dioramas worthy of display in a museum. Under the decorations there were surprises. Some of the meringue flowers and plastic figurines had jawbreakers attached to them, buried inside the cake. A treat within a treat. I didn't really like the jawbreakers, but I loved getting them. They made me feel lucky, even as I tossed them away into the shrubbery, passing on the treat to the lizards and fire ants.

And virtually every party involved costumes. Especially the parties for very young children. No special theme, just random costumes, like at carnival time. Clowns, cowboys, Indians, policemen, Cossacks, pirates, yachtsmen, baseball players, bullfighters, Dutchmen in wooden clogs, Bavarians in lederhosen, doctors in lab coats. But never ever monks, priests, or Cuban peasants. And never ever ever boys in their underwear diving for pennies and nickels at the Regla wharf.

Sometimes monkeys would show up in costumes, too, just like Blackie. I have pictures to prove it. There seemed to be a lot of pet monkeys in Havana, and affluent Cubans had a penchant for dressing them up, even though Cuba had no native primates. No monkeys or apes of any kind. No native humans either: all of the Arawaks, Tainos, and Caribs who lived there before the Spanish arrived had been wiped out by the end of the seventeenth century, their genes sent to oblivion.

None of the Indian costumes I ever saw at those parties were those of Cuban Indians, who tended to wear loincloths or nothing at all. No good Cuban mother would allow her child to go to a birthday party naked or almost naked. Someone might mistake your offspring for a boy from Regla, or think you were too lazy to make a costume—or even worse, too broke to pay someone to make it for you. They were all North American Plains Indians, those Cuban kids, most of them chiefs, too, with large feathered headdresses, war paint on the cheeks, fringed vests, beads, and moccasins. Some of them brought peace pipes along, or even said “How,” the palms of their hands upraised in greeting. Well, really
Jao,
in Spanish.

When we weren't at parties we sometimes played cowboys and Indians. Never
conquistadores
and Indians. After all, we had no movies about our own history.

But that's what a colony is all about, isn't it?

I finally realized I had grown up in a colony years later, on a London bus, thanks to a Jamaican. So wise, that man, that Caribbean neighbor, reading his tabloid newspaper. I asked why the bus had stopped and its driver had disappeared, for no apparent reason. “Tea time,” he said, in his blessed Jamaican accent. “The bus driver has to stop for tea,” he said, turning the page, not even looking up. “And if you complain,
they
say
you're
not civilized.” Then he laughed. A deep laugh that came from the very bottom of his soul, each “ha” so carefully enunciated, as perfectly spaced as beads on a rosary. “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!” And he turned another page.

Sometime between first and second grade, there were no more costumes at birthday parties. Just games, cake, and presents. I was so glad when the changeover took place. I hated most of my costumes.

We played a lot of American games, of course. Pin the Tail on the Donkey. Bobbing for apples. Hopsack races. Tug-of-war. Blind Man's Bluff. We could have been in Ohio. But we also had
piñatas,
a small nod to our own culture. Cuban
piñatas
were just like the Mexican ones now sold in the United States, made of cardboard and brightly colored tissue paper, with room inside for candy and party favors. But there was one difference. Cuban
piñatas
were not destroyed by blows, much to our chagrin. Instead, they had long ribbons attached to panels at the bottom. Every kid at the party would grab a ribbon and at the count of three, or seven, or ten, all would tug, the bottom of the
piñata
would rip open, and goodies would rain down upon us.

The day I found out that Mexicans got to beat the crap out of their
piñatas
with sticks, I was so jealous.
That must be a far superior culture,
I thought.

Ripping open the
piñata
was one of the high points of every party. The instant those goodies hit the floor, all of us would lose control and jump on one another like American football players scrambling for a fumble. Or kids in Regla diving for pennies. Sheer pandemonium. Arms and legs flying all over the place. Pushing. Grabbing. Screaming. Punching. Kicking. No holds barred. Every now and then a kid would emerge from the huddle with a black eye or a bloodied lip.

I always made off with at least some candy. But never with one of those tokens for a really nifty party favor. My brother Tony always got those.

The mothers seemed to enjoy the melee. They shouted loudly and laughed their heads off.

These parties were full of mothers, you see. That was another very Cuban deal. Mothers stayed around for the party. None of this drop-off-the-kid-thank-God-see-you-two-hours-later American kind of stuff. No. These mothers stayed for the whole party, keeping an eye on things and talking to one another. How well I remember those phalanxes of moms, and my own mother among them.

When I was very young, I think the costumes used to scare me. So many familiar faces, so much else out of place. And I was dressed just as ridiculously as everyone else, perhaps even more so. I would orbit fairly close to Mom, and return to her repeatedly, as if she were some kind of safe haven.

Eventually I would leave her alone and go off on my own, to seek out what the party had to offer. Just as I would do on a much larger scale at the age of eleven, when she and my dad put me on a plane and sent me to Miami, with a suitcase containing two pairs of socks, two undershirts, two briefs, two shirts, two pairs of pants, one handkerchief, one sweater, and one jacket. No costumes allowed. No toys, mementos, money, or jewelry either. My brother Tony and I had to strip down to our briefs at the airport, just like the boys from Regla, so a government official could ensure that we weren't smuggling any of our property out of Cuba. Like my number two
Batman
comic book, or my firecracker wrappers, or family pictures.

The worst part was when they tugged on the elastic band of your underpants and peered down at your butt and your genitals to make sure you hadn't hidden anything there.

Wait, I take that back. I think it was even worse when they laughed at you.

I didn't think about parties that day I left, but it might have helped. I should have tried to recall the party to end all parties. Sugar Boy's party. The party that made it inevitable that I should end up in a small, stuffy room at José Martí Airport, a stranger peering down at my bare ass and laughing.