Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  She was already shaken in more ways than she could count, but she wasn’t about to let any of these setbacks stand in her way. As soon as she could, she made her way to the American embassy and applied for a visa. Having two sons in the United States and being a political refugee put her on some sort of fast track.

  Not too fast, though. It wouldn’t be until September that she’d get to leave Mexico City. And during all that time, her friend Carmencita had to cover all of her expenses.

  In the meantime, Tony and I are living life to the fullest in Bloomington. We have great friends and enjoy our lives as much as possible. Tony has a wild set of friends—they cut school often, and know how to have a good time, even out in the cornfields. My friends are far from wild, but we know how to have a good time too. At some point during this time, as my mom is in Mexico, Gary and I hear of a barn near his house that’s supposed to be full of circus gear. We decide to see for ourselves whether this is true or not. Never mind that the barn is on private property. We find a way in by climbing up through a high window. What we find is otherworldly. The whole damn barn is filled with circus stuff all right. Dusty as hell in there, but so eerily beautiful. Wagons. Cages. Signs. A whole circus asleep, or in a coma. All of this equipment, hidden from the world, illuminated by the sharply angled, dust mote–filled shaft of light that streams from the window that we just jimmied open. Things that delight and transport you beyond the mundane, all stacked up, hidden in the dark, like a pharaoh’s mummy within a pyramid, looking ghostly under tarpaulins, like the furniture in my aunt Carmela’s house back in Havana. How much fun is buried in here? Who owns this? How much trouble will we get into if someone finds us in here? We climb back out, and I carry the images with me in a place of honor in the Vault of Remembering, along with the number one song on the charts that week, “Satisfaction,” by the Rolling Stones, which I never tire of hearing, again and again and again, even as an old geezer.

  Hey, hey, hey. That’s what I say.

  Ambivalence about our mom? You bet. Ever more staggering as she gets closer and closer to us.

  Sometime in September, as I’m starting ninth grade and riding on cloud nine, Marie Antoinette flies from Mexico City to Miami. Her plan is to find a job and a place where the three of us can live in Miami. But, as had often been the case in my mom’s life, surprises of all sorts derail her plans.

  Marie Antoinette arrives in Miami penniless, totally dependent on the kindness of friends and the Cuban Refugee Center, a federal welfare agency that hasn’t been too busy lately. It’s been three years, more or less, since Miami has taken in many Cuban refugees. When the doors in Cuba slammed shut in the fall of 1962, the flood had dwindled to a trickle. The only Cubans who made it to Miami during those three years were those who fled in boats and on rafts, or those lucky few who managed to leave via some other country, and somehow made their way there, such as my mom. This means that Miami has adjusted to a fixed number of Cubans, and it’s relatively easy for all new arrivals to find work. Compared to 1961 and 1962, Miami is now a refugee paradise. Gone is the need to send all arriving Cubans as far from Miami as possible, to places such as Bloomington, Illinois.

  As soon as Marie Antoinette sets foot in Miami, however, everything changes. Irony of ironies: The doors are once again opened in Cuba. Much to everyone’s surprise, the United States and Castrolandia reach an agreement that allows for emigration from Cuba. The so-called Freedom Flights begin, which will eventually ferry a quarter of a million Cubans to the United States. And as this begins to unfold, in the euphoria and confusion caused by this sudden unbolting of the prison gates, Cubans in Miami rush to Cuba in boats, pick up their families, and bring them to South Florida.

  Mayhem. Suddenly, the Cuban Refugee Center can’t handle the influx, and Marie Antoinette is lost in the shuffle.

  And that’s not all that stands in her way.

  First, there’s Hurricane Betsy. As soon as she sets foot in Miami, the place is hit hard by a category four hurricane, the worst that Marie Antoinette has seen in her forty-four years in the tropics. Miami shuts down for a while.

  Then, there’s the place where she’s living. She’s with her friends Marta and Juan Becquer, who were so good to Tony and me, especially when we were living at the Palace Ricardo. Marta and Juan are now working on graduate degrees while they carry full-time jobs, and they’re very, very busy. My mom spends a lot of time waiting for them to take her to the places she needs to go to, like El Refugio on Biscayne Bay, the Refugee Center, which was once the customs house and will later be turned into a museum called Freedom Tower. Weeks pass. Nothing. A month. Nothing.

  In the meantime, I’m flying high in Bloomington, not thinking of her at all. Same with Tony. I’ve got two successful paper routes, I’m in all honors classes, and I’ve got more good friends than I can count, and more infatuations than I can handle. And I’m even buying my clothes at Montgomery Ward. I’ve got new Levi’s jeans, shirts with button-down collars, crew neck sweaters, and penny loafers; everything I know I should not be attached to or care about, all purchased with my own hard-earned cash. Let go. Yeah. Sure. I know I should let go, but I can’t. Especially when I know that my mom is about to bring my current life to an abrupt and bittersweet end.

  I’m torn and deeply confused, but prefer not to dwell on it. There’s too much to enjoy in the here and now. Too much that will soon evaporate. As Doctor Freud would put it, “Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment.” Yeah, he had a formula for this irksome problem.

  Back in Miami, finally tired of waiting for a ride to El Refugio, Marie Antoinette figures out how to get there on a bus and she borrows the bus fare from Marta’s mom. Once she gets there, she finds out she’s only one of a horde of recent arrivals, even though she landed in Miami before all of them did.

  A kindly social worker with the surname of Sandoval sets up Marie Antoinette with what she needs: a Social Security card and a job search. Staying in Miami is out of the question. Too many Cubans, all at once. Everyone has to be resettled.

  “Do you know anyone outside of Miami?”

  She mentions her cousins in Queens, New York. But that doesn’t work out, for some reason. Dead end.

  “Who else?”

  She mentions her friends, the Puron sisters, who are in someplace called North Adams, Massachusetts. The Puron sisters had a chain of bedding stores in Havana and a beautiful house we used to go to all the time. They had movie parties on Saturdays and showed theater-quality films in their enormous living room. Now they’re in a mill town in the Berkshires, where they think they can get Marie Antoinette a job as a seamstress at a dry cleaning shop.

  So Tony and I prepare for a move to North Adams. We look it up in the encyclopedias at the public library, the same way we had looked up Bloomington at the Miami library. It seems exotic enough. Promising, maybe. Mountains. That would be a change. New England. Sounds less American than the Corn Belt. More European. That could be good, but it could also be bad.

  No matter how certain North Adams looks, Tony and I press ahead with our lives, as if nothing is going to end abruptly. Day to day. Seize the day. Live it to the fullest.

  As divine providence would have it, the seamstress job fails to materialize and North Adams fizzles. Tony and I are not the least bit surprised or fazed. Par for the course. Both of us know that when social workers are involved, things have a tendency to get screwed up. Our rescue from the Palace Ricardo was an exception to the rule, as we see it.

  With North Adams out of the picture, Mr. Sandoval runs out of options. Marie Antoinette doesn’t know anyone else in the United States, save for our uncle Amado. But there are no jobs in Bloomington for someone who doesn’t speak a word of English. That option—the one that would make me happiest—is tossed aside.

  “Are you sure you don’t know anyone else, anywhere?”

  Having a personal connection makes any abrupt transition o
ut of Miami much easier. All of the social workers at El Refugio know this.

  “Well, my friend Carmencita, in Mexico City, has these cousins who’ve gone to Chicago. I don’t know them very well at all, and they just moved there, very recently, but we did spend time together in Mexico.”

  Chicago it is, then. Lots of jobs. Factories on every street, practically, all of them full of workers who speak all sorts of languages except English. And you sort of know someone. That seals it: Chicago, city of the Big Shoulders, Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads. Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth. Carl Sandburg got it right, all right. There are more jobs in Chicago than there are ever people to fill them. Even unskilled cripples who don’t speak English can get a job there.

  When Tony and I find out that we’re going to Chicago, we feel exactly the same way we did when we first toured the Palace Ricardo. Christ, no. Please, no.

  This can’t be happening. Not again. Not another hellhole.

  Everyone in Bloomington thinks of Chicago as an awful place, and that small-town attitude has rubbed off on us. And Tony and I once caught a glimpse of what Chicago looked like, away from the museums. Reverend Nordquist had taken us on a tour of some of the slums on the West Side, along the Eisenhower Expressway. It was a scary place, no doubt about it. We’re not going to live in the museums, after all, or anywhere near them. We know that we’re headed straight for the low-rent districts, with a mom like ours. Maybe even the West Side, or worse.

  Holy crap. This is not how it should turn out, not after all the gains we’ve made. We’re devastated. I can’t let go. Not this much. No.

  But Marie Antoinette can’t wait to see us again. Our absence has been eating away at her, gnawing at the core of her soul. She’s waited so long, endured so much. She didn’t dig a tunnel under the Florida Straits with her bare hands, as she vowed to do, but she’s come damn close to the equivalent. Two departures denied at the last minute. Waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Being attacked by a mob. Visiting embassies all the time. Pestering everyone. Leaving all by herself, abandoning all her other loved ones, including her husband. Emergency surgery. Earthquake. Hurricane. El Refugio. Resettlement. She really would prefer to stay in Miami, so much, but it turns out that she can’t because of all the newcomers who got out the easy way.

  She’ll make our lives so much better, finally.

  Yeah. Sure.

  Flash forward, forty years. Marie Antoinette is near the end of her life, and she knows it. Pope John Paul II has just died. He and she were born in the same year, and both have declined in tandem. In three weeks she’ll be dead.

  “I think my time is up,” she says, as I’m driving her around Chicago in a rental car, on the way to see Tony in his nursing home way up near Wisconsin, in Waukegan. “Papito is showing me the way.”

  All I can say is, “No, not yet.”

  “Are you glad I sent you away?” she asks for the one millionth time. She’s been asking me this question constantly ever since she showed up in 1965, and more and more frequently in the past few years as her health steeply declined, along with Tony’s.

  “Yes,” I say for the millionth time. “I thank you and God for this gift every single day, often more than once a day. No gift can compare with it, ever.”

  “Tony doesn’t think so,” she says. This, too, is something I’ve heard way too often.

  I say nothing.

  She asks: “Are you glad I joined you here in Los Estados Unidos?” That’s a new question. Totally new.

  I feel a buzz saw slicing through my brain and a blowtorch scorching the core of my soul.

  “Yes, sure, of course. Are you crazy?” I say. “Yes, yes. Thank you for that too.” In Spanish, of course.

  And, damn it, she knows she just made me lie.

  Twenty-four

  Union Station, Chicago. It’s the third of November, 1965, around seven in the evening. Tony and I meet up with our mom after one thousand three hundred and seven days apart from her. She looks so much older, and smaller; her presence, here, in this enormous train station lends the world itself an unfamiliar feel, a lack of definition.

  She exudes pure love, but enwraps space and time in a thick, menacing haze.

  All I know is that whatever lies ahead is going to be unlike anything I’ve known up until now. So I thirst for some certainty other than that. This is a whole new Void, unexpectedly generated by the one soul on earth who loves me the most. I can’t yet recognize it, but I know I don’t like it. I want to imagine a better future so I can enjoy this long-delayed reunion, but my apprehension snuffs out whatever flame could be kindled by the sight of my beaming gray-haired mom and her cane. If only we could see into the future, I say to myself.

  Better not to know what awaits us, of course.

  Better for us, in late 1965, yes. But certainly not for you, now. You need to see what lay ahead then, and what came to pass.

  So, fasten your seat belt.

  Whoosh. Flash forward again, forty years. It’s the merry month of May, in the year 2005. I’ve just given a talk on the Pedro Pan Airlift at a public library, and the place is full.

  “I’m sick of you people,” shouts the old man in the third row.

  He speaks with an Eastern European accent, and he reminds me of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.

  “You people are ruining this country,” he yells, his voice trembling. “It’s because of you people that we have Bush as president. It’s because of you people that we’re stuck in this war in Iraq. It’s because of you people that this country is being ruined in every way and the world hates us. Why don’t you people shut up, go back to where you came from, and leave us alone?”

  Whoa, dude.

  I’m in Westport, Connecticut, on the east bank of the Saugatuck River, within sight of Long Island Sound. It doesn’t get more genteel around here than this town, save for Greenwich, perhaps. Furs in every closet, jumbo gems in every safe. More money in trust funds than one can find in most tropical nations. Outbursts like this are as rare around here as plastic pink flamingoes on a front lawn.

  I take a closer look at the old coot who seems to hate me, simply for being Cuban. I notice something odd on his bare forearm. Is that a tattoo? What gives? This is Westport. Only teens and twenty-somethings have tattoos in this town, and then only in hidden places. Wait. Are those numbers? Yes, damn it.

  Someone, please, kill me now, before my head explodes.

  I’ve seen those numbers before on the parents of some of my Chicago schoolmates, and they can mean only one thing: This guy is a Holocaust survivor. He’s wrestled with the devil and pinned him to the mat. If anyone on earth should understand bigotry and its place in the master plans of the Prince of Darkness, it should be this guy.

  So I ask him point-blank about the tattoo, after the question-and-answer period is over, as he gets up from his chair. And he confirms my hunch.

  “So what?” huffs the geezer. “What do you care if I’m a Holocaust survivor? That has nothing to do with you people and what you’ve done to this country. You people voted for this Bush, and the other one, and Reagan, and Nixon, and you’re all stupid, and always vote for the wrong side. I’m sick of all of you.”

  The old man turns his back to me, shrugs his shoulders, and walks away, and maybe that’s a good thing. Nothing I can say will change his mind. Bigots have no way of processing any information that contradicts their thinking, even bigots who’ve been abused by other bigots.

  Bastard. Cabrón. Imbécil. I have to forgive him.

  As this is taking place, my mother is dying in Chicago. Tick tock, every second is part of a countdown, much as in a rocket launch. She’s been in a coma for several days, and the doctors have told me that she won’t be coming out of it this time, as she’s done before. “She’s got about another week to go, that’s it; maybe two,” a young Pakistani doctor said to me, without flinching.

  After spending nearly a week in Chicago, I
’ve rushed back home to Connecticut so I could fulfill this speaking engagement and spend a couple of days with Jane and the kids. My Calvinist impulses are too strong. And this has been a tough call to make: Do I stay in Chicago and watch my unconscious mother breathe in and out, day after day, tick tock, or do I come home to my conscious loved ones and my professional obligations, and make myself useful for a couple of days?

  Being useful is such a great virtue. The greatest perhaps, especially for a spic. We have such a bad reputation to overcome. God forbid we miss an appointment. Tick tock. Someone might say, “I should have known better than to invite one of you people to speak to us.”

  The venom spewed by the Holocaust survivor is worming its way through me. Pretty soon, it will make me feel physically ill. I know it, expect it. When things like this happen, it always gets to me, eventually.

  But images of my dying mother block out the poison this time. She’s the only thing on my mind—other than the traffic—as I drive home on Interstate 95. The venom will hit much later, after she’s dead and buried.

  The boundary between past and present burns away, like morning fog.

  Whoosh. It’s summer 1969, and the Chicago Cubs seem headed for the World Series, for sure. Marie Antoinette is working at her factory, screwing machine parts together. Whirr, whirr, whirr . . . She’s an artist with that pneumatic screwdriver, just as with her sewing machine at home. Her dexterity is a lot like an athlete’s, or a musician’s, or a ballerina’s. She moves so fast, so fluidly, so perfectly in harmony with the pieces of metal that she’s handling. She’s one with those parts, and with her tool. There’s no screwdriver and there are no screws or parts to bind; there’s also no Maria Azucena Eiré de Nieto. Whirr, whirr, whirr . . . There’s no stool under her, no workbench, no assembly line; no cavernous, stifling hot factory humming and ringing and clanging and thumping with the rhythmic noise of hundreds of workers piecing together photocopy machines; no foremen giving orders, no inspectors with clipboards, no clock on the wall, tick tock; no shafts of sunlight streaming in from the windows high above; no coworkers, no husband back in Cuba, no mother, father, sister, brother; no beautiful house left behind; no recently married Tony working at a print shop twenty miles to the south, on Lake Street; no Carlos looking at her from just a short distance away, here in Evanston. The salt pill she took a few minutes ago to prevent dehydration in this colossal oven never existed to begin with. Nothing exists but her motion, and the feeling of it, and the sheer elation it brings, which is eternal and beyond description.