Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  The metal bar had smashed the brains out of the mouse.

  And he was a big sucker, all right.

  Welcome to the house near the Orange Bowl, the house brimming over with calor de familia. The house of family warmth.

  But damn, it’s cold in here. And what’s this wondrous cloud, issuing from my mouth as I speak? I’ve never, ever before seen anything like this. Why does it seem as if I’m smoking? And why is everyone else smoking too?

  The filaments on the tiny space heater are bright, bright orange and they hum, but they don’t seem to be giving off much heat. You have to get real close to it to feel any heat, but if you do that, the other guys start yelling at you.

  “Egoista! Cabrón! Hijo de puta!” Selfish bastard, son of a whore! Bad words are not only all right in this house, but practically the only words spoken.

  The light from the black-and-white television in the corner of the room competes with the orange glow from the heater. Some Western program is on the tube, and these guys have a comment for everything that takes place on-screen, something that always includes some swear word. A real one, not the fake ones I taught all of the American kids at Everglades Elementary School.

  I keep hoping it will snow. It seems cold enough for snow. Damn it, if I’m going to shiver like this, there should be snow falling.

  It’s a few days before Christmas, and a record-breaking cold wave has hit Florida. After the Western show is over, the local news is full of reports about the orange crop. For some strange reason, the oranges are being sprayed with water, which freezes and creates icicles on them. I just don’t get it. Why are they freezing the oranges in order to save them?

  I don’t know what’s more interesting, or wondrous: the oranges covered in icicles, the smoke billowing from my mouth and nostrils, or the sound of the mousetraps.

  Snap! Snap! Snap!

  “Coño, carajo, como hay ratones en esta casa. Me cago en la puta ratona que los parió.” Blankety-blank, there sure are a lot of mice in this house. Blankety-blank.

  I still think that uttering words such as the ones I’m hearing will land a soul in hell for eternity.

  Sometimes during the news show, the older guys get up and empty out all of the mousetraps and set them up again, with nice fat chunks of cheese. Not just any cheese, but that very special kind that is in plentiful supply in this house: government-surplus processed cheese that comes in large bricks, and never spoils, and tastes like rubber.

  “Coño, estos cabrones son grandísimos.” They’re huge, those bastards.

  The older guys report on their catch. And as soon as they’re back in their seats, the traps begin to go off again.

  Snap! Snap! Snap!

  There seems to be no bedtime at this house. We’re up way past eleven already, and no one is getting ready for bed. Tony and I have been assigned to bunk beds in the front room, which is crammed with three other beds.

  Our roommates are aged seventeen, thirteen, and eight. The oldest one is counting the days until he turns eighteen and can leave this rattrap. The thirteen-year-old seems to be a fairly normal guy, and very nice. The eight-year-old seems slow-witted. Or maybe he’s just up way too late for his age.

  There’s one boy who sleeps on a couch on the enclosed porch, one who sleeps in the living room, also on a couch, and three others in the back room, off the kitchen. These guys in the back room are in their mid-teens, and they’re all thugs. No one has to tell me. Any idiot could have figured that out immediately.

  Bad news, those guys in the back room. Their eyes say it all, and so do their bodies. They’re a lot like the caged tigers at the circus, which I’d seen back in Havana, before the end of the world. They’re also poets. They can put bad words to use in ways I never dreamed possible. Not even the portrait of Empress Maria Theresa in my Havana living room—which used to swear most inventively in my dreams—could top these guys.

  They also throw in their versions of English swear words, which are sometimes hard to identify. Asjól. Shí. Fó yú. Modefoco.

  The seventeen-year-old guy digs his fingers into his nose and pulls out long stringy green boogers. “Hey, look at the bears I found hibernating in my cave!” He smears this treasure on the underside of his chair, and laughs.

  Snap! Snap! Snap!

  We all go to bed after the evening news, falling asleep to the sound of the mousetraps snapping away, one by one. And the sound of the guys in the back room shouting, “Coño, otro más! Modefoco!”

  I have no idea what modefoco could be. But I know it can’t be good.

  Tony tells me he wants the bottom bunk. “You climb up; I’m getting the easy one.” We cover ourselves up with our thin blankets and soon enough shiver ourselves to sleep.

  In the morning, the body count is tallied. Twenty-two mice. Twenty-two in just one night. The guys in the back room are ecstatic. “Veintidos, veintidos ratones. Coño, y quedan tantos más.” Twenty-two mice, and so many more left to go.

  “Too bad we can’t kill all the cockroaches the same way,” says some other kid.

  I’m impressed, and even take a look at the small pile of corpses in the kitchen garbage can. Not a pretty sight, but a cool one nonetheless. I’ve never seen so many dead mice, and neither has Tony, the great hunter of all creatures great and small.

  I’ve never been so cold either. It’s incredible. We’re all wearing several layers, including our jackets. And we’re all on fire inside, apparently, belching out smoke from our mouths and nostrils.

  Breakfast consists of toast smeared with margarine and café con leche. It’s not real coffee with milk, but instant coffee dissolved in water with powdered milk.

  Tony and I march off to our new schools, accompanied by some of the other kids. Our schools are just around the corner, right across the street from each other: Citrus Grove Elementary and Citrus Grove Junior High.

  As soon as we step outside, I notice something odd. The cars and the grass are all covered with something vaguely white.

  Snow? Could it be? No, it just doesn’t match the images on Christmas cards. But it sure does look white. I run to a car and scrape off the white stuff with my fingers. It’s just like the stuff inside the freezer. The same stuff I used to scrape off the inside of my freezer back in Havana.

  Back there, in that other world, I used to empty out the freezer, pile all the frozen food in the kitchen sink, and stick my head inside. I’d stare at that miraculous stuff, scrape it, dab it on my tongue with much more reverence than I’d ever shown for a consecrated host, and let it melt. I’d turn my head in there as much as I could to look at all sides of that small freezer and marvel at the fuzzy stuff that was totally unlike anything else on earth, and so imprisoned in there, so caged up.

  I’d do this until the inside of the freezer started to drip or my mom or our maid would yell at me and chase me away. And whenever I could, I’d take one of the ice cube trays with me as I made my escape, so I could meditate on those miracles too, and pop them into my mouth, one by one, as they rapidly died in the tropical heat, giving up their souls and leaving nothing but water behind.

  Heaven, I was sure, must be full of this stuff. Heaven must be piled high with this; it must be made of this, and this only. It was the stuff God sent to the Jews in the desert, which kept them alive for forty years. And it must be the stuff that the Christian Brothers used to talk to us about all the time, this stuff called grace, which came down from heaven and mingled with your free will and made you a better person. I ached to live where water could freeze outdoors, with frost and snow all around me.

  And now I was scraping the stuff off a car. And it was all around me, on every car and on the grass.

  Ecstasy.

  I’ve made it. I may be living in a hellhole, but I’ve been blessed with some kind of ice and the kind of cold that makes people better. I’m out of the tropics for sure, out of that part of the world where the absence of cold and ice makes people inferior.

  On the way to school, as I round
a corner, I nearly bump into a burly garbage man hefting a large trash can. Two perfect columns of steam shoot out from his nostrils. Absolutely perfect. I stare at him, and he stares right back.

  “Crazy kid,” he mutters.

  Citrus Grove Elementary School looks a lot like the school I’d just left behind, on the outskirts of Miami. It’s not really a single building, but a collection of buildings, linked by covered walkways. There are no interior hallways of any sort. To get from room to room, you have to go outdoors.

  On a frosty morning like this one, there’s no escaping the cold.

  Citrus Grove Junior High School, across the street, reminds me of my fourth-grade school in Havana. It’s an older building, in Spanish colonial style, with an inner courtyard in the middle.

  I say good-bye to Tony on the street that separates our two schools. He enters his old building and I go into my much newer nonbuilding. I walk into my school with the eight-year-old boy; Tony walks into his with most of the other kids from the house.

  After a brief meeting with the principal and his assistant, I’m sent to a classroom.

  “Boys and girls,” says Miss Esterman, “we have a new student in our class. Let’s welcome him, please. His name is Carlos.”

  Miss Esterman has no way of knowing that she just killed and buried Charles.

  Everyone in that classroom looks at me. I don’t know what to make of them, for they don’t look very much like the American kids I’d just left behind at Everglades Elementary. For one thing, they are all a lot shabbier, and less American looking, save for two or three of them.

  One guy is huge.

  I know what will follow. I’m used to it by now. The Pledge of Allegiance. A Bible reading over the loudspeaker. Announcements.

  Yes, we read the Bible every morning in Florida public schools. It’s 1962, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has yet to be killed by a court ruling.

  Nothing remarkable happens in school that first day, except that I immediately take to Miss Esterman. She’s so much nicer than the teacher I’ve just left behind, so much friendlier, so much more motherly, even though she’s just a “Miss” and therefore not a mother. And everyone in class seems to like her too.

  I can also detect an undercurrent of tension in the classroom, unlike any I’ve felt before. Some of the kids in this class seem uneasy, restless, on edge, despite their obvious esteem for Miss Esterman.

  Oddly enough, there are hardly any Cuban kids in my class. Because I am living in a house full of Cubans, I expected to see many more of us in school, but, as it turns out, there are only two other Cubans in my class, and both of them have been in the United States for so long that they speak Spanish with an American accent. Both of them came to Miami long before Fidel took over Cuba and turned it into Castrolandia.

  Lunch is a new experience, for I had made it myself, following the instructions of my new foster mother. It was so easy to make, and it takes no time to eat it. It barely passes for a sandwich: two pieces of tasteless American bread smeared with Hellmann’s Sandwich Spread. I’d had the stuff before, but with some meat and cheese thrown in for good measure. This so-called sandwich spread is nothing more than mayonnaise with some bits of pickle mixed in. It tastes good. So good, it leaves me craving a few more sandwiches.

  This new foster mother is not at all like Norma, or Miss Esterman. There’s nothing motherly about her. She seems more like a burned-out, rule-obsessed teacher, which is what she had been back in Cuba. She and her invisible husband had run their own small school, somewhere in Havana, a school I’d never heard of, which they’d named after themselves. Common sense and common decency dictate that I refrain from giving you their real names, for one or both of them might still be alive as I write this, and they’ve probably been hoping and praying for all of these years that none of us who were placed under their care at that house near the Orange Bowl would ever let the world know what that house was like. Who knows? Maybe they’ve repented and are now redeemed.

  So let’s call them Lucy and Ricky Ricardo.

  Lucy was a short and wiry woman, about five foot two, maybe shorter. She was an old lady to me—probably in her late forties or early fifties—with jet-black hair, poorly dyed. She radiated apathy, laced with bursts of anger and resentment. Her sole job was to manage our foster home and to cook one meal a day. We kids did all the cleaning and our own laundry. And none of us could figure out how she spent most of her time, for whenever she wasn’t scolding us or giving us instructions on what to clean, she was locked up in the air-conditioned room she shared with Ricky, the Invisible Man. Every now and then she’d come out to watch a television program with us, but her English was so poor she would end up asking a lot of questions and ruining the show for us.

  Ricky was older by a few years. He had a debauched and menacing air that reminded me of Jack Palance, the Hollywood actor who always played villains. Years later, when I’d first see the 1962 version of Cape Fear, I’d instantly recognize this onetime foster father of mine in the sleazeball character played by Robert Mitchum. There he is! Ricky insisted that we always call him Señor Ricardo, and on those rare occasions when he was around, he always reminded us that he’d been the principal of his own school back in Havana, El Colegio Ricardo. He worked the night shift at The Miami Herald, doing some job that was never disclosed to us, and for this reason he was invisible most of the time. When we woke up in the morning, he was on his way home from work. Then he slept all day, while we were at school. And by the time we came home he was gone, off to work again. He worked a long shift, apparently. Or simply didn’t like to come home. He also barely had any days off at all, and he wasn’t around much on weekends.

  This was all right, as far as all of us were concerned, for whenever he showed his ugly mug there was always some sort of unpleasantness.

  The world-weary thugs in the back room and the seventeen-year-old guy in my room all say the same thing about him: “Le está pegando los tarros a su mujer.” He cheats on his wife. Since these guys do nothing but talk about sex constantly, day and night, I figure that they must know something. They’re self-proclaimed experts who’ve already had all sorts of sex, or at least think they have.

  From the very start, Lucy and Ricky make it clear to Tony and me that they don’t like us. Both of them tell us, to our faces, that we are demasiado finos—too refined—and too spoiled, and that we need to be brought down a few notches. In many ways, Lucy and Ricky remind me of Fidel, for they find it impossible to hide their contempt for anyone who at any time might have had a life even slightly better or happier than theirs. It doesn’t matter much to Ricky and Lucy that Tony and I no longer have any privileges to boast of, or even any clothing from our former life. Our chief unforgivable sin is our past, and what they’ll seek to beat out of us is anything that reminds them of that past: our softer tone of voice, our mannerisms, our politeness, our cluelessness, and our refusal to use bad words.

  After that first day of school, as soon as we get home, Lucy Ricardo outlines the rules of the house for us, some of which we’ve already learned from the other kids in our brief time there.

  We’re to make our own beds, breakfasts, and lunches. Breakfast will consist of nothing other than toast, margarine, and café con leche. And with ten guys fighting over a two-slot toaster, breakfast is always guaranteed to be slow, and highly amusing. Lunch will be nothing other than two slices of bread with Hellmann’s Sandwich Spread. The school will provide us with one small carton of milk, free.

  Dinner will be served at five in the afternoon. Afterward, we’ll all take turns washing the dishes and cleaning the entire kitchen. We’re all assigned specific days, in teams of three, in rotation.

  Snacks are your problem.

  Saturday is holy house-cleaning day. No one is to go anywhere on Saturday morning, under any circumstances. All of us are expected to clean the entire house, from top to bottom, and we’ll rotate our jobs according to a schedule kept by Lucy. After cleaning there will
be an inspection, and anyone who hasn’t done a good enough job will be grounded for the rest of the weekend.

  Washing Ricky and Lucy’s Ford Falcon and cleaning their room are two of the duties assigned to us.

  Sunday is laundry day. We all have to walk to a Laundromat, where we’ll wash, dry, and fold our own clothes and linens. Lucy will give us the quarters for the machines, and laundry soap. We’re each assigned one drawer in some dresser for all of our clothes, and we are expected to put them all away neatly. The drawers are to be inspected randomly, so you can always be caught off guard. Messy drawers are punished by grounding, or other disciplinary measures, at the discretion of Lucy and Ricky.

  Clothing is your problem. If you wear it out, damage it, or outgrow anything, tough luck. In dire cases, Lucy might take you to the social worker, who might come up with some funds for an item or two. Mending clothes is not part of Lucy’s job, and pestering social workers is a great inconvenience, which she greatly resents.

  We’re to receive an allowance of seventy-five cents a week, every Friday.

  If you don’t want to use your allowance to pay for haircuts, you can go to the Miami barber college downtown, where some apprentice will cut it for free. Getting downtown, about thirty-five city blocks away, is your problem.

  If you want to go to church and there’s room in the car, Lucy might take you, if she feels like going. Or you can walk to church, if you feel like it.

  School is your problem, if you care to consider it a problem at all. Getting help with homework is your problem too, if you think that something like that matters.

  Staying in touch with your parents or anyone else is your problem.

  Your health is your problem too, and so are your teeth and eyes. Doctors of any kind, or dentists, are for other people, not for you. Illnesses, cavities, and injuries are all frowned upon, and discouraged. Broken teeth or eyeglasses can’t be mended, much less replaced.

  If you have any disputes or difficulties of any kind with any other boy at the house, that’s your problem too. Men are supposed to settle their differences like men, not by running to mommy or daddy or anyone else who might be taking their place.