Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  I remain unconvinced that these nudist women have the finest bodies on earth, or that they should be proud of displaying them. In fact, the few glimpses I catch of that magazine, the more I think that if anyone on earth should be wearing clothes, these are the most fitting candidates.

  Even though it’s a sin, I take a look. I can’t help it. This guy practically shoves the magazine in my face. But all of the women I see in that magazine are so unattractive. I think that maybe this counts as a venial sin, rather than a mortal one. Or maybe it doesn’t count as a sin at all. If someone is so ugly that you wish they’d cover up, can gawking at their nakedness be a sin at all?

  I’d already seen better-looking naked women in some old National Geographic magazines that I’d found in a recently abandoned house in my neighborhood, back in Havana. Everything else in the house had been seized and taken away by the government, save for those magazines with the yellow border on their covers. A deceptively demure cover that denied the fact that naked women were hidden within.

  The oldest guy in the house, Armando, is the most obsessed with sex. He sleeps in the same room as Tony and me, and he often says the rosary before going to sleep. He’s tried several times to get us all to join in, but he’s given up because the rest of us fall asleep one by one and he ends up reciting the Hail Marys all by himself. Apparently, he’s had a very different sort of religious instruction from the one that Tony and I were cursed with, for he doesn’t think of sex as a sin at all. According to him, you could say the rosary while taking part in an orgy, and then go straight to church and take communion. No sex act of any kind is ever a sin, he tells us, under any circumstances.

  Sometimes he regales us with tales of whorehouses, and what he’d done in them. As was customary in some Cuban families, he’d been taken to a brothel for the first time by an uncle, at the age of fourteen, and he’d gone back many times on his own. Or so he says. He loves dwelling on the details of every visit he ever paid to these bayús, as they were called in Cuba. Unlike the rosary sessions, these late-night stories keep us all wide awake. I don’t know about the others in the room—especially eight-year-old Paquito—but I’m overwhelmed. Later, when I get to driver’s education in high school and see films of real auto accidents, full of mangled corpses, I’ll get a feeling akin to that which Armando’s tales of debauchery evoked.

  One of our transient older guys, whose name I barely get to learn, much less remember, has tales even more lurid than Armando’s. He’s also full of advice.

  “You’ve got to butter people up. Everyone will be much nicer to you if you kiss their behinds and pretend to like them a lot.”

  You have to hand it to the guy: He practices what he preaches. He’s always telling Lucy Ricardo how nice she looks, and how kind she is, and what a great cook she is, and how he wishes that his own mother had been half as nice as she is. And so on. Lucy eats it all up and cuts him all sorts of breaks. More than once, we find the two of them having a pleasant tête-à-tête at the dining room table or in the kitchen, as Chef Lucy burns the rice.

  “You guys are dumb,” he tells us one morning at breakfast, while neither Lucy nor Señor Ricardo are at home. “You react too much to the crap these two scumbags dish out. You need to kiss their butts, the way I do. That’s the only way to get through life: Pretend to love those who can do you favors, and soon enough they’ll think you really do love them, and then you can get whatever you want from them.”

  None of us dares to call him a hypocrite.

  “Do you really think I want to cozy up to this hag and her pimp of a husband? No. But do you see me being pushed around? No. And why is that? Because I’ve fooled her completely. When you’re nice to people, even if you hate their guts, you can always get your way.”

  Some lesson. We all have to admit that his dishonesty has carried him very far indeed.

  “This guy is no genius,” says Miguel the Thug. “Yeah, Lucy may be cutting him a lot of breaks, but having to go to bed with her constantly day and night is more punishment than any of us gets. Hell, it’s worse than anything I had to put up with in jail. I’d even take the electric chair over that.”

  I’m learning a few things at school too, but they all seem less practical, even when they’re very interesting. Except for one unlikely subject.

  Miss Esterman loves to introduce us to Broadway musical shows. I’d heard a lot of opera back home. It blasted out of Louis XVI’s study constantly. I’d even memorized some of the lyrics to “Vesti la Giubba,” not because I wanted to, but simply because my dad played that song so often, again and again. The words just stuck in my brain, and I couldn’t ever find a way of dislodging them.

  Ridi, Pagliaccio, sul tuo amore infranto! Ridi del duol, che t’avvelena il cor! Laugh, clown, at your shattered love! Laugh at the pain that poisons your heart!

  Now I have other lyrics in there, lodged in the same spot, but these have been written more recently, in English, and are much less depressing.

  There were copper bottom tympani in horse platoons, thundering, thundering all along the way. Double bell euphoniums and big bassoons, each bassoon having its big, fat say!

  And many others like that one. Way too many.

  I learn these lyrics because I want to, because they bring me closer to the roots of the new language I’ve fallen in love with. These words set to music make me feel American. Nothing else has the same hypnotic power, the same ability to fool me into thinking that I could shed my former self completely and leave it behind, flapping, like a lizard’s tail when it’s pulled off. Lizard tails eventually stop their spastic dance and rot away. That’s what I want to happen to Carlos.

  Living in the Palacio de las Cucarachas, being surrounded by Cubans at home, and being called Carlos at school only makes me wish more fervently for a total immolation of my former self. If I were able to strangle Carlos in his sleep, I’d do it. What a thrill that would be. Forget about strangling Lucy and Ricky Ricardo or the Three Thugs. The one death I hanker for most intensely is my own.

  Why couldn’t The Music Man belong to me, or I to it? Why couldn’t I have been born in River City, Iowa, or Gary, Indiana; Gary, Indiana; Gary, Indiana? Why couldn’t I be named Harold Hill or Meredith Willson? Why couldn’t I just simply erase my past and start all over again, or just give myself a new name and birthplace? Who’d be able to tell? Do I look any different from any other white American? No. Have I ever been branded on the forehead like a slave? No. But I’m branded on the tongue.

  I still speak with an accent. And Miss Esterman writes in my report card that I should work harder on getting rid of it. This comment makes me furious. Not at her, but at myself. She’s only telling the truth, and I know it. And I also know that she only means to encourage me to try harder because she believes that I’m capable of killing Carlos. But there it is for everyone to see, on my permanent record: Carlos is still alive, embarrassing me, saying easssy instead of eazy, tripping all over trough.

  At least I can write well in English. No accent there, on paper; I own those words completely. Words on paper are a lot like dollar bills or an American passport. Legitimate ones, I mean, not counterfeit. They get me to where I want to go, without anyone asking dumb questions or giving me funny looks. Words on paper make me totally unidentifiable. With them I can kill Carlos for good, make him disappear. A perfect crime, for there will be no body to dispose of, no body to see in the first place.

  So, while I work hard on bending Carlos’s tongue in strange new ways, I work just as hard on amassing an arsenal of words in English, which, if spelled correctly, will allow me to kill the Cuban in me. It’s easy to love English: Some words are poems in and of themselves. You could write them on a page—just one per page—and pass each of them off as a poem. Or you could also pick some at random, like lottery numbers, string them together in alphabetical order, and have a Dadaist poem, which, if conceived in 1919, might have been worthy of publication in one of the Dada journals, maybe Jedermann sein eigner Fussball
(Everyman His Own Football).

  Ankle. Awkward.

  Bark. Beef.

  Clod.

  Dam. Dribble. Drizzle. Drool.

  Eel.

  Fool.

  Gaffe. Geek. Gawk.

  Lawn mower. Love.

  Neck. Nipple.

  Oaf.

  Pitch.

  Shoehorn. Snowflake. Spill. Spool.

  Warm. Whorl. Wrist.

  Yardarm.

  Spelling is no problem at all, even though the language is totally insane when it comes to that. In Spanish every letter is always pronounced exactly the same way. So whenever I learn a new English word, I also instantly memorize its spelling in Spanish. This makes all of the silent vowels visible, and each consonant too. Omelette is pronounced umlet in English but spelled ome-let-té in Spanish. Treasure is pronounced trezur, but spelled tre-a-súr-é. And so on.

  This is why so many foreign kids tend to win the National Spelling Bee in the United States. It’s easier for us aliens, especially when we’re trying to kill the foreigner in us.

  So, when my class is given a certain assignment in history one day, I decide to knock the socks off Miss Esterman with my writing. Our assignment is to compare ancient Greece and ancient Rome. I don’t have to give it much thought. What would an American say? I ask myself. And how would he say it? Commercials, of course. What’s more American than commercials? Having just lived with a family that had two babies, the next piece of the puzzle falls into place all by itself. A commercial about baby products, of course. I’ve seen enough of those already, and I understand the pitch used in most of them.

  “It’s here, the new Roman diaper. We’ve stolen the idea from Greece, but improved on it, as we’ve done with everything else that we’ve stolen from them. Those old Greek diapers are made from leather. They’re great, yes, but they’re so hard to pin tightly or keep clean. And you have to kill a lot of cows and goats, and that makes them very expensive, especially because after only one week, there’s no way to make them smell good, no matter how many times you beat them with a rock in the stream. And they take forever to dry. The new Roman diapers are made of cloth. They’re cheap. They’re durable. They can be washed again and again and every time you wash them, they smell brand new. They dry fast and pin tightly and easily too, and there’s no need to kill your cows and goats, at least not for this. Happy babies! Happy parents! Happy livestock! What else could you ask for? So, get with it, buy Roman now. We know how to improve on everything Greek.”

  Same sort of pitch for nipples and pacifiers. The Greek ones are made of tree bark. They wear out fast and the splinters are one huge drawback, especially if you want the baby to be quiet. Roman ones are made of leather. They’re soft, they last awhile, and they’re splinter-free. The Greeks were geniuses for inventing pacifiers, baby bottles, and nipples in the first place, yes, but they had trouble picking the right materials for things. Leather makes for awful diapers, but it’s wonderful for nipples and pacifiers.

  And so on. I pitch three other products in the same vein: rattles, high chairs, cribs.

  Two days pass. Miss Esterman is at her desk, as usual. But this time she’s speechless. Literally. She’s holding my essay in her right hand and trying to get some words out, but none seem willing to leap from her mouth.

  “Carlos . . . (silence) . . . where . . . how . . . (silence) . . . why . . . did you come up with this?”

  Uh-oh. I’m not sure this is going to be good.

  “This . . . this . . . is . . . like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

  Uh-oh. Not good.

  “This is . . . so . . . so . . . wonderful. How . . . did you come up with this?”

  “I don’t know. Is there any other way to do it?” I reply.

  For a few minutes I savor the blood, exult over the sudden death of Carlos. I killed him, wiped him out. Give me a pen and a piece of paper and I’ll kill him, bury him a little deeper, every time.

  Damn Carlos. He should have said “I dunno,” not “I don’t know.” But that’s all right, I drove a stake through his heart. Next time, it will be a silver bullet. Let’s see how long he can take this kind of abuse. Especially if I keep watching television and mimicking the accents I hear. Those favorite shows of mine should do the trick, especially The Andy Griffith Show and The Beverly Hillbillies. Somehow, the actors on those two shows have accents that are so much easier to copy. They must be the most American, the finest actors, trained at the best enunciation academies.

  So I teach myself to speak Southern, without knowing it.

  Everything changes for me after that essay. I know for sure that I can be an American, that not only can I pass for one, but be one, for real. I don’t have to be a refugee or an exile who happens to speak without an accent. I can own the accent and the language, and let it own me. I can sell my soul to it.

  Quick, English, get me a contract, and I’ll sign it in blood.

  This is such an enjoyable death. Or should I call it murder? Or is it all right to call it both a death and a murder? What English word do you use when you kill yourself and become a new you? Selficide? No, wait, this is one of those annoying cases where Latin surfaces. Sui. Damn. That stands for self in Latin. The right word is suicide, and that word’s no good. When you commit suicide there is no version of you left here on earth. None, save your rotting corpse. It means something else altogether, and it’s way too close to the Spanish suicidio. All of those English words derived from Latin are so easy to learn, but they’re not really English. They’re words to avoid, at all costs. So, what do I call what I just did, in “gen-you-aynne” English, as Andy Griffith would say?

  Cubanicide? Carloscide? No, damn, that won’t work either. The -cide part isn’t real English. That’s Latin too: from caedere, “to cut, kill, hack, strike.” Damn. The -cide in insecticide is the same as the -cidio in insecticidio. One of my favorite radio shows back in Havana made a running joke out of this Latin suffix, which also lives on in Spanish. In La Tremenda Corte, the permanently guilty character of Tres Patines was always brought to trial on charges of some kind of -cidio or -cide. Lechonicidio (porkicide), retraticidio (picturecide), espejicidio (mirrorcide), and so on.

  So, sweet Jesus, what am I supposed to call this sweet death in English?

  Self-squashing?

  Why not? Squash is one of those sublime English words, a poem unto itself, whether used as a noun or a verb. It matters little that the noun and verb point to very different things. The word itself has been plucked from heaven, from the tongue in which our mother Eve wrote her poems, the one cursed by God at Babel. In the case of the noun, the vegetable in question is often odd enough in shape and color to deserve an odd and seemingly mismatched word. And the beauty of the noun is increased by the fact that squash is often associated with the fall season and the most beautifully named holiday in the English language, Halloween, and the second most beautiful, Thanksgiving. Or there’s also that game reserved for the very privileged few, squash, played in suffocating enclosed spaces with skinny little rackets and a ball that can squash your eye and knock it out of its socket if you’re not careful. In the case of the verb, to squash, the word conveys the sound made by a violent action. Squash a cockroach and you’ll hear skwash. Smash a land crab or a scorpion and you’ll hear the same lovely sound, only louder.

  Yes, Carlos got self-squashed by that essay, all right. Squashed flat, like a cockroach in the kitchen sink. He couldn’t move fast enough, like a real roach —whoosh—and his exoskeleton wasn’t tough enough to take the blow dealt to him by those words on paper.

  Skwash, you’re history, Carlitos.

  I’m through being nice to you. Being nice doesn’t get you anywhere, no matter what that transient housemate at the Palace Ricardo says. Hypocrisy is never a good policy, especially with someone whose culture encourages uncles to take their fourteen-year-old nephews to whorehouses, or to say the rosary and talk about orgies simultaneously.

  Any country with whorehouse
s deserves to be abandoned and forgotten. That’s the lowest of the low, that cultural trait, more shameful than an ugly old nudist on display or any mispronounced word. More disgusting than a cockroach on your lips, or an accent on your tongue.

  Time for Charles to take your place, Car-lee-toes. High time.

  Fifteen

  We’re out in the Everglades, somewhere, and it’s broiling hot. I’ve felt fired-up kilns and ovens cooler than this. And we’re watching a bunch of men in camouflage gear prepare for the next invasion of Cuba.

  These guys are serious. And those are real bullets they’re firing. I miss the sound of gunfire so much. My nightly lullaby back in Havana. It’s great to hear it again.

  All day long they drill, and sit for lessons on tactics and hand-to-hand combat, and crawl through ditches and under barbed wire while someone fires live ammo over their heads. The guys in charge all behave like professional soldiers, or at least give the impression that they know what they’re doing. Those doing the drilling and crawling are giving it their all.

  Tony and I just watch. We want to take part, but are told we’re way too young. It’s thrilling, all right, but also extremely frustrating. I want to feel bullets flying over my head. And I wouldn’t mind landing in Cuba with these guys a few months from now, or next year, or the year after that. Sometime. Anytime.

  I’d like to do my share, even though deep inside I know it’ll be a futile gesture.

  At the end of the day, the top man in charge gives a rousing speech in which he thanks the men for their dedication and courage and assures them that their efforts will not go to waste this time. No mention is made of the Bay of Pigs. Bringing up that subject is as unnecessary as pointing out where the sun is, or how much we’re all sweating.

  We’re all here because that invasion failed. And it failed because President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert and their advisors decided to dump the exile invasion force in the worst possible spot—a swamp—and then to abandon them totally, after having promised military support. These men here in the Everglades have taken it upon themselves to try again, with no help from anyone. What they’re doing out here in the bush is illegal, but they don’t care. So what if John Kennedy promised Nikita Khrushchev that he’d keep the Cuban exiles on a short leash? Who cares? It’s our island to reclaim, not his, or Nikita’s. And Cubans have been invading their island from bases in Florida for a century and a half. It’s such an essential part of Cuban history, an inescapable recurring pattern: A repressive regime on the island drives out those who dare to challenge the status quo; they go to the United States, gather funds, buy weapons, invade the island, and try to topple the oppressors; time and time again. Our greatest national hero, José Martí, spent a lot of time in exile in the United States in the late nineteenth century, mostly in New York, and also in Tampa. He landed with an invading force and was shot dead by the Spanish in a skirmish. Our first president, Tomás Estrada Palma, spent years fighting for independence from Spain, got tossed out, and then spent lots of time in upstate New York, teaching at a private school in a dinky little town. While stuck up there, in the middle of nowhere, he worked tirelessly to ensure the island would be invaded again. Most of our great heroes were exiles at one time or another, and all of them fought against oppression from bases in the United States.