by Carlos Eire
“See, I told you so,” said Louis XVI to the Dauphin, as he wrapped the wound.
Louis XVI also reminded us every single Good Friday that the sun would always disappear at three in the afternoon, the time of Jesus’s death. This didn’t have to involve a solar eclipse, of course, but merely some cloud cover. From a very early age, I’d always waited with great anticipation for three in the afternoon on Good Friday, to see if Louis XVI was right. And every Good Friday some clouds would show up, all right, and darken the sky. As soon as I got to the United States, however, the clouds and the sun refused to engage in such hocus-pocus.
On that first Viernes Santo I spent in the United States, the sun blazed at three in the afternoon, unobstructed, in a joyously clear sky, and its light filled the nave of St. Brendan’s Church.
As the sun played by different rules here on Good Friday, so did everyone else. This was a great revelation to me, an epiphany unlike any I’d had up until then about the Catholic faith in which I’d been reared: Catholicism was not exactly the same everywhere. It took a long time for that to sink in, but once it did, I began to reconsider my loathing for religion.
The Spanish Viernes Santo that Tony and I had grown up with was all doom and gloom, a lethal combination of self-denial, ritual excess, and superstition. It was all about death and suffering, never about the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. Hell, I never knew Easter existed until I came to the United States. I don’t mean the Peter Cottontail Easter, although that, too, was a total surprise. Eggs? Bunnies? Qué coño es esto? I mean the celebration of Christ’s triumph over death, the assertion that he didn’t stay dead, and we won’t stay dead either. As far as I knew, Jesus Christ died every Good Friday and stayed dead all year long, until the next Good Friday came along, and so on. His sole function as redeemer was to die and stay dead, and die again and again, and hang on the cross, bruised and bloodied, until the end of the world, when he’d come back to judge the entire human race and send sinners to hell. It didn’t make sense, but then again, neither did anything else related to religion.
The jazz in that large American car was the first hint I had of Easter, ever. Our driver kept mentioning “Good Friday” too; it was just about the only thing he said that I could understand. He was confusing me. I could have no more called Viernes Santo “good” than I could have called Satan “God.” Polar opposites. My Cuban Good Friday was “Holy Friday,” and there was nothing good about it. But that jazz, whatever tune it was, began to change my viewpoint. It was a crucial first step toward enlightenment, reinforced by all the other American kids in the car, who seemed to be having a perfectly good time on the most depressing day of the year. Even the kids knew that Easter begins on Good Friday.
The second step toward enlightenment followed as soon as we got out of the car and into St. Brendan’s Church. Good God, what was this? St. Brendan’s was light and airy, and totally free of frightening images and bad vibes. We had modern churches in Havana too, mostly in my neighborhood, but they didn’t have this feel to them.
The Good Friday liturgy was just as awful and as long as I expected, but the space in which we were trapped was not at all oppressive. I have no way of explaining it, but the people in that church also gave off very different vibes. No one looked morose, no one beat his or her breast, visibly. I think it might have a lot to do with the simple fact that they were there to celebrate “Good” Friday. Funny thing, the world of difference words can make.
Tony and I survived the liturgy and the ride home with the nice family, and the awkwardness quotient was kept to a minimum. All of us kept our lips sealed, and that seemed to be fine with everyone. We had jazz to listen to, of course. The jazz never stopped on the way back to our Jewish homes.
I wouldn’t admit it to myself, but I was very, very confused. What I’d just seen and heard and felt was all very familiar, but also very strange and new, all at once. Even though I was a total dolt at the time, I began to understand the marvel of that moment on the way home: the sweet, sweet irony that I should have been forced to go to a Good Friday service at St. Brendan’s by a Jewish family.
The irony only increased in sweetness from that day forward, Sunday after Sunday, as Tony and I would ride our bikes from our separate foster homes and meet up at St. Brendan’s for mass. We were both sorely tempted to pocket the money our foster parents had given us to put into the collection basket, but I don’t think we ever did. Well, at least I prefer to remember it that way. We were also sorely tempted to skip mass. But Sunday mass became our lode star, the sole fixed point that linked our present and our past. We’d see each other at other times too, whenever the Chaits and Rubins got together, but not all that often. Mass became our strongest bond, even though we never said much to each other.
And we’d sit and kneel and stand and genuflect and cross ourselves and watch the girly man do his thing in Latin, and never give a second thought to the miracle on the altar or the miracle of our being there, together.
We did stop going to confession and communion, though. And our sins piled up furiously in our hardened souls.
We each had our own life to lead, and we lived in different houses. That’s just the way it was, and that was that. Our parents were back in Havana, doing God knows what, thinking and feeling God knows what. We had no way of knowing. From the instant we left them behind at the Havana airport, we’d had no real, meaningful contact with them. We had the occasional three-minute phone call, but what can anyone say in three minutes, once every two months, with someone listening and laughing at the other end? We had letters, yes, but letters are a very poor substitute for parents when you’re eleven and fourteen. Adults can get by on letters, or even have better relationships with each other through letters than by living together, but children need to press the flesh and to have Mom and Dad there, day in, day out. Without that sort of contact, Mom and Dad become ciphers, mere concepts. And once they become that, you can kiss Mom and Dad good-bye for good. You don’t really need them. And you immediately learn that you don’t need any other blood relations either, especially if they, too, are out of the picture. All you need is whomever is housing and feeding you and looking after your needs, day in, day out, or maybe not even them. Not at all.
That’s just the way it was. And that’s the way it is, period. Sorry. Absence doesn’t necessarily make the heart grow fonder for children who have every reason to think that they’ve been abandoned. At least not consciously. Below the conscious level, all sorts of stuff remains alive, restive, volatile. And you deal with it any way you can, especially by making light of it all, trying to get others to laugh along with you.
Sigmund and Carl, please step back. Don’t even touch this one. On this issue, I’m the expert.
Flash forward, forty-four years. I’m the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Florida Psychoanalytic Society, in Miami. The focus of that year’s conference is childhood trauma and, more specifically, the fourteen thousand airlifted Cuban children. I deliver a tailor-made speech, but it contains bits and pieces from other talks, especially jokes that have brought the house down every time on other occasions. These are sure-fire jokes, tried and true, guaranteed to evoke spontaneous, uncontrolled laughter. I step up to the microphone as confident as ever, knowing I have a quiver full of golden material. Then, one by one, my killer jokes fall flat. No one laughs. No one responds in any way, whatsoever, to anything I say. Dead silence. I keep the jokes coming, as I always do, ramming them in at the most seemingly inappropriate and unexpected moments, to relieve tension. Not one laugh. Not a one.
I realize I’m addressing a group of professionals who specialize in showing no response whatsoever to anything anyone says to them. That’s how they earn their living, by hiding whatever emotional response they might have to anything a patient says. They can’t let their guard down, especially at their annual meeting, with all of their colleagues around them.
I close by saying that it’s been a delight to speak to two hundred and fifty Fr
eudian analysts knowing that I won’t be billed for two hundred and fifty hours of therapy.
Silence. I get the feeling that there’s no one out there in that cavernous banquet hall. Somehow, I’ve managed to warp back in time to some point before the Big Bang, when nothing existed.
The very next day I give a talk at a bookstore in Coral Gables, using many of the same tried-and-true jokes. The audience laughs this time, along with me. Prolonged outright laughter, from start to finish. All of us there have a marvelous time laughing at misfortune.
Go figure.
Or go throw something down the garbage disposal and listen to the sweet, sweet sound of annihilation, which, as I learned at St. Brendan’s on that Good Friday, can always hold the promise of a resurrection.
Hooo Weee.
Five
Oh no. Good God in Heaven. No. Please no.
I can’t believe my eyes.
My foster parents have arranged for a festive meal with the Rubins, to celebrate the arrival of Tony and Charles into their households. It’s a Norman Rockwell painting, save for the palms and the mango tree in the yard. The table is beautifully set. It’s a bit crowded, but cozy and cool. In Florida you seldom want it to be cozy and warm. Cool is better, much better.
And the main course is trotted out, as per Norman Rockwell’s instructions.
It’s the biggest goddamned chicken I’ve ever seen. I didn’t know it was possible for chickens to get so huge. It’s the whole deal: the animal itself, in its entirety, save for the head and feet. It’s golden brown, and glistening.
Norman Rockwell would have been thrilled if he’d been invited. Every detail seems to have been copied perfectly from that painting of his, which I will see three years later, reproduced in a Saturday Evening Post retrospective on his work for that magazine.
Because of that painting, I refuse to go to the Norman Rockwell museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, even though I drive past it very often, on the way to my daughter’s college. I don’t ever want to see that abomination up close.
You know what I’m talking about. Everyone has seen that image of the all-American Thanksgiving dinner with the matriarch bringing out the big bird, the patriarch at her side, perhaps joined to her at the hip, and a table full of grinning, happy faces.
A picture of hell to me.
“I don’t eeat cheeken,” I announce, loudly, as everyone is busy beaming.
Norma looks crushed and puzzled at the same time. Everyone turns and looks at me with expressions that are just the opposite of those of the diners in Rockwell’s painting.
“It’s not a chicken. It’s a turkey,” says Norma.
“Is a cheeken . . . a beeg one,” I protest.
“No, it’s a turkey. You know, a turkey?”
“Turkey, turkey, turkey,” others chime in.
“No . . . eh . . . arr . . . I don’ eeat birds,” I try to explain.
And everything goes downhill, swiftly. The details are now lost, trapped in my lovely, blessed Vault of Oblivion.
Hell of a way to start a relationship with two generous, loving families who’ve never run into a gnostic heretic before, or a firm conscientious objector to the consumption of avian flesh. It’s the first real test of everyone’s mettle: of their resolve to help us, and of our resolve to be helped only as we see fit.
I’m not alone in this, after all. There are two spoiled brats at the table.
Tony has the same problem with birds that I do. In fact, he’s been my mentor in this area. Right after the incident at the meat market, which opened my third eye, Tony has been my guru, revealing the deepest darkest secrets about the stygian sources from which spring each and every piece of meat served up to us. He, too, had his third eye opened at that same meat market, three years before me. And in the time between his awakening and my mine, he had learned many other valuable secrets.
His lessons on inner organs will prove unforgettable, especially those on brains, kidneys, and livers.
“Do you know what you’re eating?” he asks me, as I sit in my high chair, back in our museum of a house, in Havana.
“Mom calls them frituritas.”
“No, no, not fritters; do you know what they really are?”
“Muy buenas,” I say. Very good. “Deliciosas.” Yummy.
“No, idiot. They’re frituritas de seso. You’re eating a calf’s brain, all cut up and deep-fried. A calf is a baby cow, and you’re eating the squishy organ that’s inside its skull. Do you know what a brain is?”
“No.”
“The brain is what we think with and feel with. It’s where all memories are stored too.”
“Oh.”
“Before it gets cooked, it’s all pink and slimy, and wrinkled. It looks like a huge ball of worms. Or little snakes.”
“Oh . . . ughh . . . oh . . . vrrroughshhhh.”
How well I remember that sudden rush of nausea, and the vomit that spewed out. Tony remembers it too.
Tony is the chief gnostic, the high priest of discernment when it comes to carne of any kind, the master of all flesh-related knowledge, the fleischmeister. But right now, at this table in Norma and Lou’s house, Tony’s main problem is that he can’t speak a word of English, and that he has to leave all of the confessing and protesting to his lone disciple, who lacks the requisite eloquence.
And there’s no equivalent of the Holy Spirit in our strange food cult, no Paraclete who can help us speak in tongues, or make us understood in languages other than our own.
The dinner disintegrates into a sad occasion, marred by our refusal to eat the main course and our inability to explain our revulsion.
Eating a bird sandwich is one thing; seeing the bird carved up and served to you is a whole other step, much steeper, which I can’t take. And watching others gnaw on drumsticks is more than Tony and I can take. We try to shield our eyes as we eat the potatoes and the other stuff that’s harmless.
Welcome to the adjustment period. Ay.
Being such good people, the Chaits and Rubins are not about to give up on us. So they make accommodations, and try again to have a nice group dinner, very soon after this fiasco. By that time, somehow, I’ve managed to draw up a list for Norma with the help of a dictionary. It’s a list of the foods I can’t eat, which include all birds, all water-dwelling creatures, and every inner organ I can think of. It’s a good and thorough list, I think. And even though I’m a snot-faced brat, I have enough sense to be grateful for Norma’s openness to my very peculiar food phobias. I know I must seem like a Martian to her.
So, a second gathering is arranged. This time, I say to myself, I have nothing to fear. My list is so clear, so complete, there can be no repeat of the last fiasco.
Same setting. Same inner beauty to the gathering, and to the people around the table. Everything feels so right, and looks so swell. So Norman Rockwell perfect.
Out comes the strangest and ugliest piece of meat I’ve ever seen. It’s huge and purple and kind of tubular, and it has a very lumpy and fatty appendage at one end.
“Qué coño es esto?” Tony and I both ask ourselves, silently. The coño is a mortal sin, but it slips out, much like an ouch. What the hell is this?
“Eh . . . wat eez deez?” I ask, nervously.
“Tongue,” says Norma. “Boiled tongue.”
Qué coño es tong? I ask myself, risking hell again. I’m sure Tony is asking himself the same question.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out what this piece of meat could be. It looks like a gargantuan slug, with a yellowish tumor on its rear end.
“Eh . . . wat eez tong?” I dare to ask.
Norma sticks out her tongue and points to it.
“Lengua! Dios mio! Lengua. Quién come eso?” I didn’t know it was possible to eat tongue, or that the thought of doing so would cross anyone’s mind.
Whirrrrr! Lou fires up the electric carving knife and begins to attack that huge cow tongue as if it were a nice piece of rump roast. Slice, slice, slice.
/> “Here, try it.”
I can’t really refuse it, since it’s not on the list, my equivalent of the Geneva Conventions. A deal is a deal, and these people are so nice, I can’t dig in my heels on this one, even though I’ve been blindsided by my own ignorance of the depths to which humans will sink when it comes to turning animals into food.
So I try it. And Tony tries it too.
I’ve never tasted anything so foul, so vomit-inducing, in all of my brief time on earth. It’s not just the taste, but the texture. It’s like rubber, coated with toxic slime. There’s no way of chewing it up quickly and just swallowing it. The flavor is strong, aggressive, impossible to ignore. Every bite makes it gush out, and there are so many bites to take.
Mary, Mother of God, help me.
I chew and chew and so does Tony. We’re watching each other, carefully. “If he can take it,” I tell myself, “so can I.” Tony’s thinking exactly the same thing.
Then I look at the carved-up tongue on its platter, and I begin to lose my resolve. The sight of it is worse than the chamber of horrors inside my mouth.
I try to pretend I’m hiccuping, as I did with the nuns on my first night at the camp, but the gagging that takes over me is much too powerful to disguise.
I spit the rubbery chewed-up tongue into my napkin, as I pretend to wipe my mouth, and I slip this disgusting mess to my good friend Victor, under the table. I pray that no one sees this maneuver, as Victor chews up what I’ve just given him.
Fade to black. Total blackout. Past this point, I can access nothing that happened, save for feelings of shame and revulsion, and regret. This one is at the very bottom of my Vault of Oblivion.
