by Carlos Eire
Fade to black. Pitch black.
Blessed Vault of Oblivion, highest gift from the highest heaven, how lovely you are. Please don’t ever let that day out, or any of the others that immediately followed. I remember nothing past that point, up until the funeral. Whoa. What kind of cruel joke is this? No me jodas. The casket is a gross insult, as is the stupid organ music, and the putrid flowers, and the muffled sobbing, and the insipid words and prayers uttered in that offensive funeral home on Ashland Avenue. And these acrid, insufferable insults wake me up, much like smelling salts.
No! my soul screams upon awakening.
Idiot that I am, I’ll finally see the big picture I couldn’t see while Christine was alive, when her sister tells me, in a hushed tone, there, at that funeral: “You know, she really loved you; she really did.”
Letting go acquires a whole new meaning that day, as do God and the universe itself, and the Void. Major surprise, major adjustment in attitude, but not in daily routine. No way. Mass every morning; unceasing prayer all day and night. Sometimes I fall asleep on my knees and that’s how my mother finds me in the morning, at the foot of my sofa bed. No change in course, either: My path is still as straight and narrow and clearly illuminated as before. It just happens to have this peculiar dip that can’t be fathomed.
I see crucifixes in a whole different light after that day, and I appreciate them all the more, especially the five wounds. And I stick to my quest, the one I vowed to pursue while sitting right next to Christine in history class. Life goes on; the world spins without her in it. I meet a girl who seems to be a soul mate, and we pair up. Love of a different sort takes over me—the kind that requires constant compromises and awkward moments and an untold number of arguments. I go to college, major in history and religion, get married to that girl, and then set out to earn a doctorate in history and religion.
And sometime in 1978, about ten years after Christine’s murder, my path seems to come to an abrupt dead end. Whoa. Nothing but tangled brush and a dark heavy jungle ahead. And this choking nightmare forest envelops me, quickly swallowing up the brightly lit path I followed, which dead-ended as painfully as my time with Christine. All around, everywhere I look, there’s nothing but a stinking, vine-strangled jungle on all sides, and I have no compass to follow or sharp-edged tools with which to clear it. I can’t find a teaching job. My marriage falls apart. I lose interest in everything I’d once loved, including history. I’ve stopped praying. No one to talk to anymore, as I see it. No Presence. Just more sucker punches from the Void, now and then. And when I finally do find a job, it’s at the edge of the world, in Nowhere, Minnesota.
All I have left to like is long-distance running, and I take that up with the same passion I had once reserved for prayer. I run therefore I am.
Flash forward, June 1980. I’m now twice as old as I was when I came home on that Holy Thursday back in 1965. I’ve been teaching in Nowhere and frequenting the Buckhorn Bar far too often. I’ve given up on letting go. Forget it. Evanescent beauty is all I seek, for that’s all that cheers me and all I’m certain of.
Soul mate, schmoul mate. Sure. Dream on. There’s no such thing. A path? Maybe for some, but not for me. God? Yeah, sure. He definitely exists. But only on my terms.
I’m in Paris, traveling alone, living like a bum. I don’t have a hotel at which to stay tonight, but I couldn’t care less. It’s a sunny day in June, and Paris is as heartbreakingly full of itself as when it’s gray and cold and damp. The weather never makes a difference here. Nothing makes a difference. Paris is what it is. Too much.
Way too much.
I’m sitting on the ground, my back against a tree. I’m in the Square du Vert-Galant, a small park at the western tip of the Île de la Cité, which looks and feels just like the prow of a ship. The Seine River flows at my right and my left and meets up to form one stream directly ahead of me as it runs undivided under the Pont des Arts. I’ve been writing letters and postcards for hours, drawing pictures in them and taking in the scenery, reflecting on how strange it is that this place I’ve never visited before should feel so much like home, more so than any other spot on earth. I feel rooted, for the very first time in ages, and more firmly anchored to this tiny island, here, than I ever felt to that large lizard-shaped island where I was born.
I suspect my late father, Louis XVI, has something to do with this.
I feel tendrils extending from the core of my soul, growing, burrowing into the soil beneath me, swiftly and doggedly branching out in all directions, reaching down, down, to the core of the earth itself. I don’t ever want to leave, and I vow to stay put. To hell with that teaching job in Minnesota. I’ll work as a street sweeper here, if I have to.
Yet, I don’t know a soul in this city, and the locals stubbornly refuse to understand the way I speak their language. If the Void really wanted to do me in, it could do it right here, in this strange place where I’m more alone than I’ve ever been. It could drive me mad with Absence, push me into the Seine and drown me, as it’s done with many a forlorn lover.
“Come and get me,” I whisper, in English. “I dare you.”
Nothing.
The air is perfectly still. The harmonious din of Paris reverberates down here, so near the water. It’s as if all of the sound waves tumble down to this spot because they feel as much at home here as I do. I try to detect the presence of my dead father, the onetime decapitated King of France, who may or may not have enjoyed being in Paris again. He’s not here. Absent, as always, despite his profound influence.
“Dukes up, bitch,” I whisper again. “I double dare you.”
Nothing.
Instead, the Presence that first banished the Void from my life years ago quietly begins to snip away all the tendrils that had just sprung from the core of my soul. Silently, wordlessly, It severs each and every one of these fast-growing roots and forces me to stand up and walk away.
Snip, snip, snip. I hear no voices, I see no apparitions, but I know that It is everywhere and has always been and will always be, especially in that spot deep within me that had tried to root itself in this one place. How I know this, I don’t know. But I’m as certain of this Presence and Its boundlessness and Its nearness as I am of the fact that I’m right smack in the middle of Paris, walking up the steps to the Pont Neuf, headed for the locker at the train station where I’ve crammed my duffel bag.
It doesn’t need to speak at all. It doesn’t have to say let go. I already know this, just as I know that the Void will stalk me for life, but never prevail. I reach for a passage I first read a long time ago in a certain book, which is etched somewhere in my memory.
With my third eye I search for that text in my Vault of Remembering. I see Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. They hand me a small brown book engulfed in flames, then hurl me across a turquoise sea to a strange and wondrous land, as they cry a river of tears wider and deeper and murkier than the Seine. I open the burning book at random and read the text in question, which, curiously, is no longer in Spanish:
“He who knows best how to let go will enjoy the greater peace, because he is the conqueror of himself, the master of the world, and an heir of heaven.”
The flames from this passage leap up and scorch all the stubble left behind by the severed tendrils. The light is blinding. The fumes are sublime. And the pain is absolutely exquisite.
Heavenly.
Twenty-three
My mother, Marie Antoinette, is in Rome, at the Vatican. It’s 1984, and she’s traveling with a large group of her Cuban friends from Chicago. The end point of her tour will be Madrid, where I’ve been living for the past eight months with my lovely wife, Jane. She’s going to spend several weeks with us, once she’s done with this European tour, which she’s managed to finagle from a travel agency free of charge to herself because of the high number of other travelers she roped into joining her.
His Holiness John Paul II is out and about, on foot, in some corner of the Vatican, despite the attempt on h
is life by some Turk that the Kremlin hired to kill him.
As divine providence would have it, my mother and her tour group cross paths with His Holiness.
“Papito, Papito,” she yells, at the top of her lungs, which is about three times louder than the average human being can manage to scream.
Hard to translate. “Little pope, little pope” comes close, but doesn’t really do it justice. It’s at once a term of endearment, in a spiritual sense, but also highly irreverent, as far as papal protocol is concerned. English has no such suffix for a term of endearment. Stiff upper lip and all that. You know.
“Papito, Papito, por favor reza por Cuba,” she shouts, again and again. Please, dear little Pope, pray for Cuba.
His Holiness stops dead in his tracks, turns around, and finds the crazed woman who keeps calling him Papito.
He speaks to her in perfect Spanish. “Are you Cuban? What are you doing here? How did you get out?”
She tells him that she left Cuba a long time ago and is now living in the United States, and that her homeland needs his prayers.
In perfect Spanish, as he holds her hands, he tells her he prays for Cuba every day.
She plants several kisses on his cheek, leaving it smeared in bright red lipstick. None of her friends snaps a photo of this earth-shaking event.
Too bad. This moment sums up her life.
Marie Antoinette, my mom. Maria Azucena Eiré Gonzalez. Conceived somewhere between La Coruña, Spain, and Havana, Cuba, on a transatlantic ship. Her parents eloped because they came from different social classes and no one in the Old World would allow them to get married. Her very existence was always an affront to propriety and the status quo, to everyone else’s notion of what was supposed to happen.
Told she would never be able to walk after being stricken with polio, she proved everyone wrong. Told she would have to wear metal braces after she dared to prove everyone wrong, she shirked the braces and made do with a simple cane instead. It wouldn’t be until she was in her sixties that she had to resort to two canes. Told she would never wed because of her crippled leg, she found herself an eccentric judge to marry. And she carried two pregnancies to full term despite her frequent falls, some of which were pretty serious.
God only knows how many times I banged my head against the ground, really hard, before I was born, or what I might have made of my life without those prenatal bruises.
Her resolve and self-confidence knew no bounds, and neither did her desire to prove everyone wrong, even when it came to learning English. She never, ever learned more than a few words and phrases, all horribly mangled in the thickest Spanish accent ever heard in any English-speaking land. Why should she learn it? She wasn’t going to stay in the United States. No way. She was no immigrant, but a refugee, waiting for Castrolandia to become Cuba again. Besides, why shouldn’t all Americans learn her language?
Marie Antoinette never took no for an answer. She never accepted anything she thought was wrong or stupid either, such as learning English. So, when the exit door to Cuba was slammed shut in the fall of 1962, just a few days before she was about to leave, she never stopped trying to find another way out.
And she managed to do it, not once, but twice, only to be thwarted at the last minute. Sometime in 1963 she somehow gained an exit through Spain and actually got to the airport, thinking she had succeeded, only to find that the all-wise and compassionate Revolution had already given her seat to someone “more important.” Months and months of scraping and bowing and going here and there, all reduced to a brusque rebuff, and a simple confirmation of her insignificance. “Try again,” said the jerk at the airport, smirking, knowing that this was tantamount to saying “grow a new leg.” Then sometime in 1964 she wrangled another bona-fide exit through Venezuela, only to have exactly the very same thing happen again at the airport. “Try again,” said the compassionate Revolutionaries, smirking, as always.
Somewhere in there, between the first and second—and third—attempts she was attacked by a mob while waiting in line outside the Swiss embassy. Such harassment was routine. Those who wanted to leave were reviled as gusanos, or worms, and were fair game for the so-called Cuban people, el pueblo cubano. Reporting these mob attacks to the authorities was futile, even when you were injured. In fact, if you reported any such attack, you were just digging a deeper hole for yourself, for the mobs were directed by the authorities.
As Marie Antoinette struggled to leave, Louis XVI did nothing. Leaving was never part of his plan. His only plan was to stay put and guard our valuable inheritance.
“This can’t last much longer,” he said, year after year.
Anyone who applied for a visa or permission to leave the country had to surrender his job and all of his property. Men, especially, had a high price to pay, for they were forced to pay their “debt” to the Revolution by performing slave labor in the countryside for anywhere from three to six years before being allowed to leave.
For many, many years, no family could ever leave Cuba intact.
This makes it hard for me to judge my father harshly for betting on the collapse of the Revolution, rather than on an exit visa.
Sometime in early 1965, Marie Antoinette runs into someone who knows someone at the Mexican embassy, and she pounces on her, asking for that ultimate favor: an introduction. Once again, for the third time, it pans out. She obtains a visa and an exit permit. Fearing a repeat of the previous attempts, trying to buffer herself from disappointment, she approaches the airport with a healthy measure of skepticism. This time, the authorities allow her to take her seat. No one “more important” had to travel that day, apparently. She bids farewell to her husband of twenty years, her parents, her brother and sister, her husband’s sister, boards the plane and actually manages to take off, at just about the same time that her youngest son’s life is being radically changed by a certain book.
As has been the case since the early days of the Revolution, those who leave Cuba aren’t allowed to take anything out of the country, save for a few changes of clothing. Marie Antoinette has a tiny suitcase, no money, and no clue how she’s going to get to the United States once she reaches Mexico. Fortunately, she has a good childhood friend in Mexico City, Carmencita, who has agreed to house and feed her while she searches for a visa to the United States.
Lucky Marie Antoinette. She owes this good twist of fate to none other than Che Guevara. Back in 1959, in the earliest days of the Revolution, Carmencita’s husband, a businessman, went to visit Che, the new treasury minister, full of fervor for the new changes that were taking place, like so many other Cubans.
“I want to invest in Cuba,” he told Che. “I want to build up our industrial base, and make us less dependent on foreign investments. What are your plans? What new industries would you like to see developed?”
“Carajo, you can invest in anything you want,” said Che. “But whatever you create will be taken from you. We’re not going to allow any private enterprise.”
So, while he still had a chance, Carmencita’s husband took all of his money—with only a few weeks to spare—and fled to Mexico, where he invested it wisely and grew fabulously rich.
At the very same time Che spoke to him this way, Fidel Castro was strenuously denying that he or his so-called Revolution were communist. And the world believed him because the world’s press was so easily and willingly duped. Who can resist the charm of cigar-chomping bearded revolutionaries who never shed their green fatigues, even after their Revolution has toppled the universally hated dictator and wiped out anyone who challenges them, including other bearded colleagues in green fatigues?
Good thing that my mom’s friend’s husband didn’t have to rely on press reports.
Carmencita welcomes my mom to Mexico City, generously lodges her with some of her relatives in a fancy high-rise building near the Bosque de Chapultepec, and offers to help her get a visa to the United States.
In Bloomington, Tony and I get the news in a tersely worded telegram
. We don’t dare talk about this to each other. It’s been three years since we left Cuba and neither one of us is sure that this is good news, though deep down we know that it is, sort of. Do we really need her? What about our life here in Bloomington? Better not to talk about it.
Our ambivalence is colossal.
Within days of her arrival in Mexico, Marie Antoinette begins to hemorrhage. At first it’s blamed on the altitude, since Mexico City is one of the highest cities on earth, but as the bleeding intensifies there’s no choice but to take her to a hospital emergency room. A hysterectomy seems to be the only solution. So she goes under the knife. And Carmencita pays for the surgery.
The loss of blood has been substantial, so transfusions are called for. Several pints of anonymously donated blood are pumped into Marie Antoinette’s veins. What no one can see or even suspect—given that this is 1965—is that some of the blood is infected with hepatitis C. There aren’t any tests for this virus, which will slowly destroy her liver and kill her forty years later.
As soon as she recovers from surgery, Marie Antoinette returns to the apartment she shares with Carmencita’s relatives. It takes her a while to get back on her feet, physically and emotionally. Having to undergo an emergency hysterectomy is tough enough under the best of circumstances. When you’ve just landed penniless and alone in a foreign country it’s a bit tougher. And when you’re immediately hit by an earthquake, it’s even harder.
It was the toilet that offered Marie Antoinette some clue as to why she was feeling so dizzy. Water was sloshing out of the toilet. Until she saw that, she thought the swaying and the noise were all in her head, yet another post-surgical dizzy spell.
