Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  It was strange to see my relatives at the Rubins’ house. Matter out of place. Wait a minute. This is my family. My flesh and blood. What? I have relatives? And here they are, saying hello and good-bye at the same time. I’d gotten so used to having no blood relations. Now, many years later, what I think is the weirdest thing of all is that I didn’t bother to ask how they’d gotten there. They had no car, and no money to pay for a taxicab ride to the very edge of the city.

  As usual, Uncle Amado was wearing a suit and tie—the only one he’d been allowed to bring from Cuba—and he seemed stiff and uncomfortable and couldn’t really move the conversation along in his heavily accented English. His wife Alejandra saved the day, though she spoke no English. She had the gift of gab and could put you at ease right away, even through an interpreter. My cousins seemed uneasy and awkward. Tony and I did our best to make this seem like a normal situation, but it was hard going. The whole setup was too weird. I had to do most of the translating, for Tony was still struggling with his English.

  All I can remember is that we went out to the backyard, and little Philip Chait, who was then about twenty months old, walked barefoot on the grass, and this amazed my aunt.

  “Ay, mira eso!” Look, he’s barefoot on the grass!

  Being barefoot in Cuba is dangerous. You can pick up parasites that way. It’s every mother’s worst nightmare, to see a child venture into the outdoors barefoot. Maybe worse than getting an eye poked out. Back then, before Cuba went Neolithic, going barefoot was practically the same thing as going naked. It could only mean two things: You were either destitute or debauched, or both. Letting your children go barefoot in public was akin to hanging a sign around their necks that said “Look, I’m neglected; my parents are the lowest of the low.”

  To this day I avoid going barefoot even inside my own house. Sandals? No me jodas. Only maricones or women wear sandals.

  That was that for their visit, anyway. They came and went. Good-bye. Hasta la vista! Hope to see you again sometime. Good luck.

  Zip, they were gone. We’d see them again, but we had no way of knowing that. More than that, they’d end up rescuing us in the end, after our artificially safe and comfortable life was vaporized, like a test dummy at ground zero in a nuclear blast. And the Becquers would also end up doing a lot for us, acting as family even though we weren’t related to them. So, in the long run, it would be our strange relatives and some strange outsiders who would come to our rescue when we needed rescuing most intensely.

  You never know how things will turn out. Or who your real family might be.

  Flash forward, eighteen years.

  I’m in Spain, in Galicia. Cool, green, craggy Galicia, where the native Celts and their barbarian German overlords, the Sueves, held out against the Muslim invaders from North Africa back in the year 711. It’s the only corner of the Iberian Peninsula that wasn’t conquered by the Moors, the tiny sliver of land from which the Reconquest was launched, under the spiritual leadership of Santiago—St. James the Apostle—who was buried there, at Compostela. These people were too rude and savage to allow anyone to steal their land, and the Moors knew better than to mess with them. They were so tough and hardheaded that they made the Visigoths look like wimps. My corner of the world. My ancestral homeland, on my mother’s side of the family, and also, in part, on my father’s.

  I’d just spent a month traveling in Europe, living on trains and in train stations, with hardly any money to spend. Most of my travel budget had been consumed by airfare and a Eurail pass. Hostels and restaurants were out of the question, most of the time. A successful day was one in which I spent no money at all, surviving on whatever food was left in my backpack from the previous day. The markets were great places to pick up cheap food: mostly cheese, bread, and fruit. My greatest expense sometimes was bottled water. A bad day was one in which I’d have to spring for a shower, somewhere. I’d already dropped about twenty-five pounds and my jeans were falling off. I had no notches left to tighten on my belt, so I poked a few more into it with the only luxury I had allowed myself: a Swiss Army knife, purchased in Geneva.

  I’d never been happier and seriously considered making this lifestyle my profession. Moving from place to place constantly, living by train schedules, figuring out where to wake up the next morning, discovering new places day after day, with only a duffel bag to weigh me down. Living like the birds and the lilies of the field, with no interest in buying, owning, or being number one at anything. My sole interest was to see all the places I’d read about, to touch the distant past, and to dodge the Void.

  This must be the best way to follow The Imitation of Christ, I joked to myself.

  I’d already covered every country in Western Europe, save for the British Isles, and had finally made it to Spain, where I knew I could mooch off my relatives. After all, I had more family there than anywhere else on earth.

  So, I’ve made it up to Galicia, and I’m staying with family, in the house where my grandmother was born, and her grandmother, and her grandmother, and her grandmother, and so on, God only knows how far back. The place looks and feels older than the Colosseum. It’s a house made of stone, and it’s cold inside, even in June. It’s a farm, and there are livestock in the room directly below mine. This part of the house is really the top floor of a barn. Back in the old days, that’s how most farmhouses were built in Europe. The body heat from the livestock helped to warm up the living quarters above for the humans.

  I open what I think is a closet, looking for a place to hang my shirts, and I’m surprised by three hams, hanging from hooks. It’s the whole leg, really, not just that squat, round piece of meat that we call ham in America. These are pig legs I’m looking at, from the hip down, hoof and all: smoked hams, cured by my family. It’s jamón serrano, the staple of every bar in Spain. The rafters in the kitchen are full of them too. They just hang there, these hams. One of them is always smaller than the others. When you want some, you just pull that one down and slice yourself off a piece. Then you hang it back up.

  I’ve come to Spain in search of my roots. I need to find out who I really am. I need to come home, I tell myself. Cuba is not my real home, and never was. It’s a hopeless mess, that odious island, beyond fixing. I’d spent years poring over maps, looking for this spot, longing for it. Not just when I was a small child, but for years and years, even as I was writing my doctoral dissertation, reading German texts all day long.

  I’m not the only Cuban there. Sort of. My grandmother’s youngest brother, Ramiro, now in his late seventies, had once lived in Cuba. Like many other Gallegos, he returned home after a while, with lots of money in his pockets, and bought up acres and acres of land. Incredible as it may seem, Cuba was once a prosperous place where Europeans went to get rich. Although Uncle Ramiro was born to a family of tenant farmers, he now owns land as far as the eye can see. He opens a window and says to me: “Everything you see here, all the way to the horizon, is mine.” Ramiro chops firewood as if he were my age and mows the hay vigorously, with a sickle identical to that of the Grim Reaper. He’s one tough guy. Ice-blue eyes bluer than the sky, cheeks so red that they look as if they’re on fire. His son Arturo and his grandson Alberto, my cousins, look just like him.

  I feel so much at home, and so much like an alien, all at once. This place is in my blood, and it feels right, but in a strange way. It also feels like another planet. For one thing, I’ve never spent time at a farm before, or pressed my nose against the food chain so intensely. I’ve just had to select the rabbit we slaughtered for dinner. This is more than a farm: It’s more like a survivalist camp, or a hippie compound gone insane for organic food and total sustainability. My family grows and prepares absolutely everything they consume, and they use only natural fertilizers. The only store they visit, I think, is the one that sells parts for their farm equipment. They buy gasoline too, of course, but if they could drill for oil and tap petroleum, I’m sure they’d refine their own fuel too.

  Even the grasshoppe
rs are put to use. Cousin Arturo shows me how he catches them and uses them for bait. There are some nice, clear streams flowing nearby, full of fish.

  Cousin Arturo takes me into a barn, jug in hand. Inside the barn there’s an oak barrel, about six feet in diameter. He turns the spigot and fills the jug with red wine. “We make this ourselves, from our grapes,” he says. “Taste it.” Pruébalo. Oh, man, this is good wine, I say. Buenísimo. It’s one of the finest wines I’ve ever tasted, way up there with any great Beaujolais Nouveau.

  Any time they want some wine, my relatives just go into that barn and fill up a jug. They bake their own bread too, which is made from the wheat they grow and mill. It’s round, dark, and grainy, and it tastes great. They take slices from it with the same big knife that they use on the hams. “Why eat that crap they sell at the store? It’s not really bread,” says Arturo.

  The amount of work they do in order to live like this is incredible. They’re up before dawn and they keep going until ten at night, when they finally sit down for dinner, which, when you come right down to it, seems to be the sole purpose for their existence on earth.

  So, I tell myself, this is who I really am. This is who I am supposed to be; this is what my blood should compel me to do. I should stop reading. I should give up on being a vagrant for the rest of my life, or a college professor.

  Ramiro tells me one night, “You know, when I was a little boy, living in this house, the animals had a nicer life than we did.” I begin to understand the whole migration deal, the search for greener and warmer pastures in the Caribbean.

  In my first three days there, I spend all of my time with Ramiro and his family: my grandmother’s side of the family. I have yet to meet my grandfather’s side. Arturo tells me that I’ll meet them soon enough.

  As I’m walking down the road with Arturo on day four, a tractor passes us. The guy behind the wheel is about my age, and he looks awfully familiar. He’s a younger version of my grandfather. The resemblance is shocking. I notice that the tractor has my surname, Eire, inscribed on its side. Arturo says to my grandfather’s replica: “Hey, look, I’ve got one of your relatives.” We have a brief conversation, and he takes off with his tractor. Just like my abuelo: a man of few words.

  That night, as I’m sitting at the kitchen table with Ramiro and family, slicing up a ham and drinking wine, two young women show up, suddenly.

  “We hear that you’ve kidnapped one of our cousins,” they say.

  The next thing I know, I’m being driven somewhere by these women. They drive fast, very fast, and the driver takes her eyes off the road constantly, to engage in conversation the only way that the Spanish find acceptable: by looking at you. The women, Teresa and Dolores, are about my age, and I can’t quite figure out what sort of cousins they are. All I know is that they’re from my grandfather’s side of the family. They’d been alerted to my presence by the guy on the tractor.

  Five years later, one of these lovely women will die in a head-on collision with a truck while passing another car on a sharp curve.

  We end up at a huge wall with a large gateway and drive into a courtyard. It’s a moonless, pitch-black night, but I can tell that we’ve arrived at a substantial house with a chapel beside it. An older woman hugs me the instant I emerge from the car. She was waiting there to pounce on me.

  “Let me look at you,” she says. Her name is Carmen, and she looks a lot like my mother. She runs her hands along my face. “Oh, it’s so good to have you here.” I walk into the house and am taken to a huge kitchen with a gargantuan fireplace, next to which is a long table. I feel as if I’ve entered a medieval banquet hall, and, in fact, I have. This is one of the estates owned by my grandfather’s side of the family, who, I find out that night, were once the feudal lords of this area. Like many such baronial houses, it was built piecemeal. This kitchen seems to be the oldest room in the house. The rest of it—the “new” part—dates from the early eighteenth century.

  One by one the members of this household show up. I can’t keep their names straight. But I recognize each and every one of them as someone I’ve seen before. They all look like one another, and like me. Much more so than Ramiro and his clan. My grandmother’s relatives are all of slight build. These cousins are all tall, except for one named Paco. And there’s a remarkable consistency to the faces, both male and female. If you stood all of us together in a police line-up after a crime, people would have trouble telling us apart.

  “Now, tell us, which one of these snatched your purse?”

  “It’s all of them,” the victim would have to say.

  In walks Julio, whose name I’ll have no trouble remembering. He’s a poet, and he has no legs. Like my own mother, he was stricken with polio as an infant, back in the 1920s. His parents did all they could to straighten out his useless twisted legs, but as soon as he was old enough to get his way, he simply said, “Hack them off; they’re a nuisance.” He cracks joke after joke, and all of them are funny. Spontaneous humor, not prepackaged jokes. He seems to have a way of finding humor in everything, and especially in his own condition. “I proved to be too much of a challenge to Our Lady at Lourdes,” he says about a pilgrimage he was forced to undertake years ago. “I asked her not just for new legs, but for very pretty ones.”

  The last relative to walk in is Alec Guinness. Or so I think. I’m dumbstruck. What’s Alec Guinness doing here? Obi-Wan Kenobi?

  “Meet Camilo, your grandfather’s youngest brother.”

  Camilo is in his late seventies. It was his birth that killed my great-grandmother. He was her tenth child, and the last. I can only imagine what medical care must have been like back then, at the turn of the century, in this part of Galicia. I’d been hearing about Camilo all my life, but all I knew about him was this one horrible thing: He’d killed my grand-father’s mother, and after that the family fell apart.

  “Are you married?” he asks me.

  “Not at the moment,” I say.

  “Neither am I. So I guess this makes us the two most eligible bachelors in the world,” he says, deadpan.

  I find out that Camilo doesn’t live there, but on the other large family estate, which has fallen to ruin. The one I was supposed to inherit part of, but never did and never will.

  They bring out the aguardiente, the firewater, which is about eighty percent pure alcohol. They make a queimada by pouring the firewater into a large shallow silver tray and setting it on fire, after all of the lights in the room have been extinguished. The flames light up the room, and we drink up what the fire leaves behind, along with what is still in the bottle. We all have a wonderful time getting to know one another.

  As the home-brewed firewater starts to work its magic, and as I look around the table, I begin to feel happier than I’ve been in a long time. Then I’m not just happy. I’m more than that. I am who I am, finally.

  Bonk. I’m out of my body. I’m one with all of my relatives at that table. I have no body of my own. I’m part of a much larger package deal. All of us at that table aren’t simply linked, we’re one. I look at my hands and all the other hands around the table. It’s the same hand. I look at the eyebrows. It’s the same ridiculously large pair of eyebrows, unfortunately. I look at Julio’s legs, which are just two stumps. I look at his beaming, smiling face, which looks so much like my grandfather’s and mine, but has an almost beatific glow to it. I see, somehow, that Julio is not a broken man, but just the opposite: Of all of us sitting around that table, he’s the one who’s lacking nothing, the only one who seems to be living in a resurrected body. A perfect body.

  Bonk. The veil begins to part between this world and that other one—the eternal one. I catch a fleeting glimpse of the divine spark in each of our souls, and of the way in which our bodies in that room are but an extension of that spark, every bit as eternal, as totally indestructible. I intuit, for the first time in my life, how much of what we call “real” is but one tiny sliver of an immensely complex whole that our brains have trouble proces
sing, a dimension beyond paradoxes in which amputated legs are at once horrible little stumps and gloriously beautiful, eternally intact limbs; and in which we are each at once unique and mere extensions of those to whom we are bound by blood.

  Damn. Just as it all starts to make sense, the veil descends again, gradually, and I return to my body, and, eventually, to Ramiro’s stone house, and back to the United States and desolate Minnesota, where the Void stalks me relentlessly.

  But I’ll never be the same again. Ever.

  I’ll never again have any trouble holding contradictory thoughts in my mind, especially about my own identity, and that of those I could call family. I’ll also have no further trouble understanding how it was that those teachings in The Imitation of Christ that once scared me half to death eventually saved me from the pain that Charles refused to recognize and Carlos had to bear.

  The blessed pain of learning how to die.

  Eight

  If bowling can’t turn you into an American, then nothing can. Or so I thought. Is there anything on earth more perfect than a bowling alley, or more American?

  I’d seen a small bowling alley at a beach club in Havana once, but it was nothing like this one.

  This bowling alley was like the vestibule to heaven. It was huge, subtly lit, and cooler than any movie theater. Lane after lane after lane. It seemed to go on forever. The pins at the end of every alley, all perfectly lined up, and all lit up, like idols in their own niches, taunting you, just begging to be mowed down, toppled. The balls, such perfect projectiles. Cannonballs for you to launch, with holes drilled into them, into which you stuck your fingers. The mechanical equipment couldn’t have been more amazing, or a better summation of American ingenuity. Surely a Nobel Prize must have gone to the genius who designed the contraption that picked up the pins that you left standing and swept away the ones that were still loitering about on their sides, sprawled on the floor, defeated. It not only laid the upright ones back in their places, but also knew how to distinguish between your first and second frames. After your second try, it would sweep everything away, like the Grim Reaper, and then install a pristine set of tenpins, all resurrected. The ball return was as much a marvel as any Mercury spacecraft. You’d see your ball for an instant as it sped out of the back of the alley into that long chute that fed the ball return, and seconds later it would emerge at that console, just like the cannonball it was, super-fast, and then it would be slowed down by a reverse-spinning wheel, and gently roll onto a trough, harmlessly, and make the nicest clunk as it hit the other balls in the return tray. And that dull clunk was just a teaser. The sound of the alley was sublime. It was just about the sweetest I’d ever heard indoors, anywhere. The thudding, sliding, and rolling of the balls. So hushed, so muffled. Controlled thunder on a human scale. The crashing. Ka-blam. Crash after crash, each and every pin letting out its own sweet scream, all achieving the most perfect harmony.