Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  And the half-built skycraper was abandoned, and eventually it turned to dust, and its location was forgotten, along with that of all of Eve’s poems, buried in haste, which were now incomprehensible to everyone. Gibberish, all of them.

  Beautiful gibberish, but gibberish all the same.

  Now, there’s a beautiful word in English: gibberish. A billion, trillion times better than turkey.

  Adjusting to both curses—those of Eden and Babel—has always been difficult, but never impossible. In fact, for children, that challenge has always been the greatest joy, the greatest gift of all.

  Fershtay? Comprendes, coño?

  Six

  I’ve seen many a pool before, but none like this one. It’s next door, just over the backyard fence. And these wonderful neighbors have told me that I can swim in it anytime.

  If anyone has ever regretted saying anything, it must be this family. And they must rue their generosity deeply. I call nearly every day and ask, “May I come over and swim?”

  At least I call first.

  The beast in me chafes about having to pick up the phone. I just want to go over there anytime I feel like it. Fortunately, I’m sort of entitled to be a pest. I’ve become good friends with Mark, the boy next door, who’s only one year older than me. Mark is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met, and I’m actually surprised that he really exists. He seems more like a character in a novel than a real human being. Or an imaginary friend.

  Mark seems nearly perfect, save for the fact that he’s so much smarter than me and also smarter than anyone I’ve ever known. But you can’t really fault a guy for being brilliant.

  Mark has some sort of heart defect, however, that keeps him from being very active. Swimming is about all he can take, which is why his parents have installed an in-ground pool in their backyard. His curse, my blessing. Whenever I’m swimming with Mark, I fear for him. Norma has assured me that he’s not in any imminent danger of having a heart attack or anything like that, but I can’t help but think that Mark’s always dangerously close to the edge.

  Once, months after I first met him, he’d gotten very excited about the fact that it was raining in his front yard, but not in the backyard. Mark ran around his house, around and around, in and out of the rain, shouting loudly, “I can’t believe this!” He ran out of breath, fell to the ground, and scared the hell out of me. That would be the very first time I’d ever see anyone so enraptured. Too bad that my worries about Mark’s heart would keep me from seeing that mystical ecstasy for what it was.

  I’d never known any other kid who constantly skated on thin ice with the grim reaper nipping at his heels. I tried not to put myself in his place, but I couldn’t stop from thinking about how I would feel if I were him. Coño, que mierda. Mark would die while still a young man, and I’d only find out about it years after it happened.

  I guess I had reason to worry about him, back then.

  His pool becomes the center of my universe, especially after school lets out in early June. It’s small, but its size doesn’t really matter much. My chief interest when it comes to pools is not so much swimming in them as jumping into them. And this one has a diving board. I spend most of my time at that pool diving, finding ways of teasing gravity, and of proving to it that it really has no hold on me.

  I dream of outrageously elaborate diving platforms and chutes, much like the ones now routinely found in water parks. Most of all, I long to free-fall from great heights, and to make the largest splash ever in the history of the human race. But Mark’s diving board is only about four feet high.

  Fortunately, I’m now in the land of infinite potential, where just about anything is possible and you really don’t know from one day to the next how, exactly, opportunity is going to smack you right in the face, just like a giant bug on Alligator Alley as you’re cruising along at sixty miles an hour.

  One fine day, out of the blue, Norma and Lou are invited to some country club that has a giant pool in the shape of a W, and they bring me and Tony along. Of course, that letter figured prominently in the club’s name, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what that name was. The giant W pool is cool enough—it’s four pools in one—but that’s not the best thing about it. Its crowning glory is the tallest multilevel diving tower I’ve ever seen. I take one look and I know that my parents were absolutely right in sending me away.

  I’ll take exile any day and lose my family gladly for this thrill. That’s my tower, the one I’ve been waiting for all my life. The top platform seems at least as tall as a five-story building, I guess, incorrectly. It’s a ten-meter Olympic competition platform only about three stories above the surface of the water. I walk around it. I look up at it, and I resist the temptation to pray to it. This may be the closest I’ve come to something divine, I think. I peer into the water directly beneath it. It’s beautifully deep, at least another five stories down to the bottom, I guess. It’s not really that deep, but it sure looks like it. The color and transparency of the water remind me of the seashore at my Havana beach club. But this is better: There are no sea urchins, moray eels, or crabs at the bottom.

  It’s spiffy clean.

  The only problem is that there’s an enormously long line of kids waiting for their turn on this tower. From far away, the kids in line look like ants waiting their turn at a picnic basket. Up close, they’re noisy, excited, and edgy. Most of them have trouble standing still. One by one they jump off at different levels. The line that moves the fastest is the one for the bottom springboard. The line for the top platform would probably be illegal nowadays. It’s a continuous line from the pool deck all the way to the very top, and this means that there are dozens of kids clinging to a ladder that goes straight up about thirty feet. No safety rails or anything of the sort. It’s a metal ladder and everyone has wet feet, and there’s a lot of jostling and horsing around.

  Tony and I split up immediately. He goes straight to the top platform and spends all of our time diving from there. Given the long lines, we don’t cross paths at all. We’re used to leading separate lives by now. So I nearly forget that he’s there at all.

  I take the lower springboard first, after a long wait in line. Hoo Weee. That was great. I do it a couple more times. Then I move to the middle level, the greatest height from which I’ve ever taken a leap. Hoo Weee. I do notice as I approach the edge and get ready to dive that an unexpected optical illusion makes the bottom of the pool seem very, very far down. It’s a slight shock, but I don’t let it disturb me.

  I know I’m ready for the top platform.

  I begin the long, slow climb. As I’m waiting in line, the kid behind me pokes fun at the religious medals hanging around my neck. They are my talismans, given to me by my parents. I never take them off. Ever. One of them—a medal of the Virgin Mary—has been in the family since the 1830s, and Louis XVI made a big deal of removing it from its display case and hanging it around my neck. In my mind, its sentimental value competes with its spiritual power.

  Eventually, I’ll end up losing this treasure at the Indiana Dunes, while swimming in Lake Michigan, seven years after King Louis gave it to me. I won’t discover that it’s fallen off its chain until I’m already back in Chicago, late at night. Of course, when something of that magnitude happens, God’s not going to allow it to simply vanish from your conscience too easily. No way.

  The very last time I spoke with my father on the phone, just a couple of months before he died, he had to ask, “Do you still have the medal?”

  And I just had to lie to him: “Yes.”

  “Great, I’m so glad. Take good care of it.”

  Those were the last words he ever spoke to me. Sorry. Very sorry, Dad. Lo siento muchísimo. I wish I still had it with me.

  “Hey, what are those dog tags?” asks the punk who’s in line behind me.

  “Holy medals. I’m Catholic.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad. So sorry to hear that,” he snorts.

  I climb up the tall ladder, slowly. It�
��s more like simply hanging on to the ladder than climbing it, the line moves so slowly. I pass the middle platform. The goal is near, finally, and now there’s no turning back. With a long line behind you, there’s no way to change your mind and go back down. And with each rung I climb I notice that the ground below me seems to be getting farther and farther away in a disproportionate measure.

  How weird. This has never happened before. Of course, I’ve never been up this high before either, except inside a building.

  The higher I climb, the stronger the vertigo gets. It’s as if the earth is receding from me, sinking lower and lower, even when I’m not climbing. My head reels. I start to get woozy, and I feel as if my entrails are being sucked out of me by gravity. I look over my shoulder, to the line below, and I feel as if I’ve just been launched from Cape Canaveral. Hooooo. I’m in outer space, the ground seems so far down.

  I think of Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, one of my favorite movies. I curse Hitchcock for not doing enough to convey a better sense of what it feels like to have the earth recede from you at the speed of light. All this time, I’d thought that Jimmy was just a little dizzy, and maybe something of a wimp.

  So, this is it. This is vertigo. Hooooo.

  When I finally reach the top platform, I get my bearings again. The ground stops pulling away from me, my guts rebound, and I’m able to look at the amazingly flat landscape around me without feeling woozy. Standing at the back of the platform is just like being inside a building: It gives you the sense of being enveloped by a structure. That awful feeling I had back there, on the ladder, ebbs. I take in the clouds, which look like a mountain range. I take in the sight of the people below, who look very small. I admire the big W of the pool, so turquoise, so perfectly carved into the landscape.

  And everyone behind me starts yelling at me. “Huurry uuup!” “Juuump, already!”

  I step up to the edge, out in the open. Nothing above but blue sky and ridiculously puffy clouds in all shades of white and gray, with hints of yellow; nothing below but the big turquoise W and the pool deck. Hooooo. What’s this? The pool below recedes, nearly vanishes. Suddenly I’m a mile high, not ten meters. The bottom of the pool is so far down that I know I will surely die if I jump off. No one can survive this.

  Yelling behind me. Lots of yelling. I’ve stalled the line. For all I know Tony is one of those yelling the loudest.

  I know I can’t go back down the ladder, and I know that if I jump, I’ll die. This is it, I think: This is my last moment on earth.

  I stare at the pool’s bottom, a mile down. All of the open space around me and the vast abyss beneath close in on me. What a tight spot. I can’t inconvenience those on the ladder, especially because they’re all yelling at me. The politeness drummed into me since birth makes it necessary for me to jump. And I know if I just stand there, my wooziness will make me fall off. So I have no choice. I cross myself and leap into the crushing void. I fall and tumble, unable to steady my body as I plummet. I wanted to taunt gravity, and here I am, being sucked in like a bug on a lizard’s tongue. The fall ends very quickly, and painfully. I hit the water hard, at an awkward angle.

  Splat! Yeow! I’ve made the biggest splash ever, but, good God almighty, I feel as if I’ve hit the pool deck instead of the pool. The pain I feel and the water rushing up my nostrils are the only proof I have that I haven’t died, because my eyes simply won’t open. I let gravity have its say, and sink as far as it will take me. Then, slowly, I drift up, patting my chest with my hands to make sure I haven’t lost my Mary medal; I break the surface, and swim to the pool’s edge, my body throbbing from head to foot.

  Many years later, while reading about Olympic divers, I’ll discover that hitting the water flat from ten meters up can cause severe internal and external bruising, strains to the tissues that hold internal organs in place, and minor hemorrhaging in the lungs. Splat! Yeow!

  No more diving for me that day, at the big W pool. No more dreams about colossal diving structures, either. None, ever again. My admiration for Jimmy Stewart—which was already very intense because of his access to Kim Novak’s lips—increases tenfold, and now, more than ever, I set my sights on becoming Jimmy someday, or at least as close to Jimmy Stewart as any Cuban can hope to be.

  I’m still unable to fully separate actors from the characters they play. But I’ve become an expert at separating my present life from my previous one. Charles has banished Carlos to the grave in which he belongs, a grave that is at least ten meters deep, on the planet Vertigo.

  Yet, Carlos is summoned from the afterlife, much in the same way that spirits were summoned to the Ouija board by Louis XVI. Twice a week Norma and Lou summon Carlos’s spirit to possess Charles, who then has no choice but to call Tony and talk to him. Once a week Carlos is also asked to move Charles’s hand, as if it were a planchette on a Ouija board, and to pen letters to his parents, back in Plato’s cave. On Sundays, no one has to summon Carlos. He simply shows up, takes over Charles, and makes him pedal all the way to St. Brendan’s Church, where he suffers through the mass and exchanges a few words with his brother Tony.

  That Sunday deal is weird, yes, but it feels all right.

  The sole uncomfortable glitch in this new life is Freddy, the Cuban neighbor. Charles is forced to speak Spanish to Freddy, because Freddy is foolish enough to think that he’s still the same person he was back in Cuba. Freddy refuses to accept the fact that Federico died, probably because his aunt and uncle keep invoking the dead boy’s name, summoning him from the spirit world. Freddy is constantly possessed, and even more so in his house. Sometimes he manages to shake off Federico’s spirit outdoors, or at my house, but the instant he gets within ten feet of his house, Federico rudely pushes Freddy out of his body and takes over.

  This might be the chief reason behind our strained relationship. Federico is always looking for Carlos, and can’t find him. Instead, he has to deal with Charles, who can sometimes be insufferably obtuse.

  Mark is so much easier to get along with, not just because he’s an easygoing guy and so smart, but also because Mark doesn’t know that Carlos ever existed. Norma notices this, and observes this one day: “You and Mark get along so well, but you and Freddy are always fighting.”

  Sometimes we’d come to blows. But we’d always patch things up. We needed each other as much as we disliked each other. One time, however, Freddy tested our friendship to the utmost. Or maybe it was Federico. Or both of them together.

  I’d developed a monster crush on a certain girl and was dumb enough to tell Freddy about it. I should have known better. Carlos was dead, but Charles still had all of his memories, intact. Back in the cave, in the old country, Carlos had been betrayed by a friend who’d been entrusted with the secret of Carlos’s infatuation with a beautiful brown-haired girl. This Judas had told everyone else and arranged for a humiliating mating ritual in the school yard. So Carlos knew that Cubans shouldn’t be trusted with love secrets and that Cubans also had a tendency to mock that most sacred of feelings and to embarrass the hell out of both parties in any love affair, whenever possible.

  Charles owned that memory, but he made the mistake of ignoring it. Besides, this girl he’d fallen in love with was American. This was a totally different situation. New world, new life, new rules. Charles assumed that Freddy was on the same wavelength.

  Jesus H. Judas-kissing Christ.

  Freddy swam in Mark’s pool very often because my free pass was extended to him too, and he hung out with me all the time. Normally, no females came anywhere near the pool, and the idea that some girl might end up swimming with us was simply inconceivable. Then, somehow, one magical day, unexpectedly, the object of my affections ended up at Mark’s pool too. It was a miracle. I was so, so happy, and so fired up. If I’d been able to, I’d have jumped from a diving tower ten times higher than the one at the W pool, and not felt even a twinge of vertigo. Hell, I’d have jumped from the Telstar satellite, orbiting above the earth, into a wading pool.
I’d have done anything to impress her. But the last thing I’d have done was to let her know how much I loved her.

  For many, many years this totally moronic approach to romance governed my relationships with all of the females who beckoned me from eternity, not with words, but by simply being who they were. I’d never disclose my feelings, no matter how perfect they were, no matter how sublime their wrists or voices were, no matter how divine their presence. No way. It seemed like an imposition, some sort of rudeness, to let any female know how crazy I was for her. Or simply how crazy I was, period.

  What I always wanted to say sounded odd to me, even though it made perfect sense.

  “Hey, I’ve known you forever. Where have you been? I’ve missed you, so much.”

  Doctors Freud and Jung, please chime in at this point, if you feel like it. Too late now to help me with this problem, but I’d love to hear your take on it. My guess is that you won’t attribute it all to brain chemistry, thanks be to God. But while you’re at it, please also try to explain Freddy’s behavior at the pool that day. I go nuts every time I think about it.

  Freddy got his hands on a big black crayon, dove into the pool, and began to inscribe the walls of the pool—underwater—with very large hearts that contained my name and that of my soul mate. Heart after heartbreaking heart, all along the wall, round the entire perimeter, each about the size of a toilet seat.

  Given that my attention was wholly focused on the girl in our midst, I didn’t catch on to what Freddy was doing until it was far too late.

  What’s he doing? No. No. Coño. Dear God, no.

  Unfortunately, by that point I couldn’t do anything except to jump into the pool, grab him by the neck, and say through clenched teeth: “Te voy a matar.” I’m going to kill you.