Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  She knows nothing about Zen. Whirr, whirr, whirr . . . Nothing, not even the word. Whirr, whirr, whirr . . . But she’s mastered the Zen of assembling. And no one else in that factory can keep up with her. No Greek, no Pole, no Serb, no Czech, no African-American, no redneck. Whirr, whirr, whirr . . . No Cuban, either, and the factory is full of them.

  Nearly two-thirds of our fellow workers here in this factory came from Cuba too, and most of them, like her, never did this kind of work before. Most of them were lawyers, or shopkeepers, or pharmacists, or teachers, or office clerks, or housewives. All of them had been better off in Cuba, before it became Castrolandia. I’m there for the summer, filling in for those who go on vacation. All the others are here for good. They can’t hope for anything better than this. Unlike my mom, I hate the place and the work. Sheer drudgery for me. But I need the money, and my mom reminds me of that way too often.

  I so envy her constant ecstasy. Whirr, whirr, whirr. . .

  My only raptures in that stifling factory come when I’m opening boxes that contain parts wrapped in newspapers and I spot some interesting article to read, on the sly, when the foreman’s eyes are focused elsewhere.

  After I leave the factory, I go to the Jewel supermarket on Morse Avenue and work some more, as a stockboy. Sum total, I put in somewhere between sixty and seventy hours of work per week. My mom has trouble understanding why I’m not happy with this arrangement, at the age of eighteen, right between high school and college. She also can’t fathom why my girlfriend and bride-to-be is giving me such a hard time about working so much.

  She knows nothing about Calvinism. Whirr, whirr, whirr . . . Not even the name of John Calvin. Whirr, whirr, whirr . . . But, Jesus H. Ever-useful Christ, my mom makes all Calvinists look like slackers and reprobates.

  Whoosh. I hear my mom’s voice. It’s 1974, and she’s speaking to me on the phone. I’m in New Haven, and she’s in Chicago. She’s in a total panic—hysterical—a lack of control I’ve never witnessed before.

  “Your brother has vanished!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s gone. He didn’t come home two days ago and no one has heard from him. He’s disappeared!”

  “He’ll show up. Don’t worry. He’s probably having a good time, somewhere. You know how he used to disappear like this when he was a boy.”

  “No, no! This is different. He’s never vanished for this long. I have a very bad feeling about this. I think he’s dead, somewhere!”

  “Has anyone called the police?”

  “Yes, his wife called, and I had someone call for me, but they won’t do anything. They say he’s a grown man and that he has a right to disappear without telling anyone.”

  “See, I told you, there’s nothing to worry about. He’ll show up.”

  “No, no, no. You don’t understand. Something awful must have happened to him. And I’m not the only one thinking this way: My friend Carmen said that his head is probably floating in the Chicago River!”

  Ay. Leave it to Carmen. Goddamnit. So graphic, so poetic, so overblown, so Cuban.

  Marie Antoinette begins to sob, and then to weep and howl, uncontrollably. All I can do is assure her that everything will be all right, and predict that when Tony finally does show up, he won’t even think that he has anything to apologize for.

  Sure enough, Tony eventually shows up, weeks later, and acts like everyone was a fool for worrying about him. Tony says he went to Florida with a woman he met at the airport, whose charms he couldn’t resist. Mom believes him, of course, and forgives him. God knows why his wife takes him back, but she does.

  Repeat at least a dozen times, only with different details. Tony keeps vanishing, time and time again, and making up ever less credible tales. And our mom worries just as much each and every time, and weeps, and howls, and forgives; and she gives Tony whatever he asks for, along with things he doesn’t even know he should ask for.

  Whoosh. Twin images flash before my mind’s eye: my mom in a coma, dying, tick, tock; my mom hugging Tony when he’s just an empty husk, a faint brainless shadow of himself, trapped in a useless and ridiculously fat body, a changeling if ever there was one on earth.

  Another image suddenly bursts into view: a braided rope with three strands, one is Tony, another is my mom, and the third is my dad. It’s the weirdest braid in the world, for one of the strands—my dad—is totally invisible, but just as evident as the other two, maybe even more so. His absence is his presence, and it defines the twists and turns of the other two. It’s taken my third eye a whole lifetime to see this so clearly. Yes, damn it, my brother’s long sad downward slide and my mom’s response to it are tightly and inextricably intertwined with my father’s gross nonoccurrence. He’s a lot like God, my Louis XVI, insofar as he can’t be seen but can certainly be felt or simply intuited by reason. But he’s totally unlike God, insofar as he never, ever, sends anything good your way. All he can do as a father is haunt our memories and serve as a convenient scapegoat: the efficient cause of everything that’s ever gone wrong in our lives.

  Marie Antoinette is married to a specter, but won’t acknowledge it. Even worse, she’s trapped in a disembodied union and convinced that she must play a dual role to Tony and me, as mother and father, to make up for his ghostliness. Convinced that she’s taking care of us and making our lives better, she’s blind to the fact that Tony and I are so fully Americanized that we treasure our independence from her, and that Tony, especially, resents the way in which she ripped our lives apart by turning us into her caretakers. Tony also hates our dad so much that I fear he might kill him if he ever shows up, and he hates Uncle Amado too, and the Rubins, and the Ricardos, and anyone else—good, bad, or indifferent—who ever assumed the role of parent or guardian in his life. The anger bottled up inside of him is immeasurable.

  I hate no one. I love everybody. Sure. Yeah. And I can stand back and look at this weird braided rope as if I’m not one of its strands. Sure.

  This rope is tied, tightly, around my chest, right over my heart. Sometimes it slips up to my neck.

  Whoosh. Tony plummets downward, at breakneck speed, faster than any Olympic bobsled, taking the tightest, steepest curves at what seems to be the speed of light, defying all the laws of motion, denying, demolishing, pulverizing every fate his mother and father ever hoped would be his. Marie Antoinette watches in horror and does whatever she can to reverse his course, never accepting it as irreversible, not realizing that her love freights him down, often making him plunge all the faster and steeper. Louis XVI, far, far away, clueless, heartbroken, helpless, does nothing but get sicker and sicker as he guards our ephemeral inheritance—that goddamned art collection that’s no longer his, but still fills our former home, which isn’t his either. King Louis, stuck for this lifetime in the tropical communist heat of Castrolandia, a mere custodian of valuable loot that belongs to all of the people of Cuba—not to him or to us—can’t tell shit from Shinola, as his son Tony puts it. Louis XVI can’t understand why Tony stopped writing to him back in Bloomington, can’t cope with the distance and the silence, can’t express a single feeling to any of the three of us, and, least of all, to his wife, Marie Antoinette. The last time he tried, during a three-minute phone call, the Cuban security agent listening on his end laughed when he said to her, “I miss you so much.” Prolonged, outright laughter on the Cuban end.

  Ha, ha, ha. Guffaw. Yes. Viva la Revolución! To me, this cold-blooded belly laugh is the footnote to every Che T-shirt.

  I’m the only one King Louis writes to regularly. He tells me how sick he is, how his heart is failing, and how much stuff he’s crammed into the house, illegally. “It’s worth millions,” he dares to say in one letter. All of his letters are hard to open. Cuban security agents have rifled through them and then resealed them sloppily—intentionally—with thick glue that binds the paper sheets to one another and to the envelope. Whether someone has actually read them is anyone’s guess. Your fellow countrymen in charge of mail su
rveillance just want you to know that every word is potentially subject to inspection, so you’ll keep your most important thoughts safely bottled up in your head. Separating the letters from the envelopes requires patience and the skill of a neurosurgeon.

  And I answer each and every one of his letters. I tell Louis XVI how much I long to be with him again, and how much I love history, and how obsessed I am with the past.

  Whoosh. It’s nineteen seventy-something and Tony is drinking heavily. O’Hare airport is one hell of a nonstop party. According to him, booze and drugs flow more abundantly than tap water. During these golden years of his, he gets to fly everywhere for free, as long as there’s an empty seat not taken by a paying customer. And often, it’s a first-class seat, with unlimited drinks and easy access to attractive flight attendants who are very eager to party, not just during the flight but also at whatever the destination happens to be. I’d only find this out later. While this is happening, he’s not talking to me. Tony, my brother, flight attendant magnet, has vanished from my life, completely, and I from his. The force field he began to wrap himself in back in Miami has grown ever more impenetrable, and the difference between his life and mine has created a vast gulf between us, as colossal as that between one end of the universe and the other. While he’s flying around the world carousing with flight attendants, I’m slaving away at my doctorate, reading everything ever written by and about John Calvin and the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The most fun I have is returning books to the library after I’ve drained all of their blood out of them. The contrast between the two of us stuns me, each and every day, and the more stunned I become, the further Tony and I grow apart.

  The braided rope in my mind’s eye begins to fray.

  Marie Antoinette fills her basement apartment with broken, wounded souls who need company. First it’s my brother’s friend John, fresh from war and mayhem in Vietnam. He joined the Marines and volunteered for duty in Southeast Asia so he could shoot at communists. He got to fire at them, all right, and to kill a few, but they also got to shoot back, lob mortars, blow up his jeep, and fill his body up with shrapnel, and all of this has left him off-kilter. He’ll recover just fine, living in that basement. I was still there, then, but his path and mine seldom crossed. He was finishing his degree at the Art Institute of Chicago and I was majoring in theology and history at Loyola, just seven blocks up Winthrop Avenue. I worked at the Jewel supermarket every night and came home late. He drove a taxicab at night and came home even later. After John went off on his own, all healed, and after I got married and left the basement apartment, Marie Antoinette took in a long string of wounded souls: a girl from Colombia; a Peruvian priest who was questioning his vocation; her brother’s sister Lucía—my aunt—who left Cuba at the age of seventy-five and couldn’t stand living in Bloomington with her brother Amado; this friend, that friend, and perfect strangers foisted on her by friends. I’d lose track of who was living with her, there were so many of them. And she’d also make hundreds of friends, mostly Cuban, who became like family to her. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that they became a better family than any she could hope to have with Tony and me.

  At her funeral, at St. Ita’s Church—where I once prayed for hours on end every day and where Tony and I had our first weddings—nearly every pew will be full. It’ll be a sight to behold, as impressive a testimony to the love she doled out, naturally, unconditionally, as might make most of us feel grossly inadequate.

  Whoosh. Tony turns dissoluteness into an art. He lies and cheats, and drinks and parties, gambles himself broke time and time again, and collects guns as if they were baseball cards. He also collects parking tickets with a nearly apocalyptic sense of urgency, and his name ends up in the news as one of Chicago’s most wanted parking criminals. Seventy thousand dollars in unpaid fines land him in jail. Marie Antoinette can’t stop crying about that and helps him pay the much smaller sum that he negotiated with some lenient judge. It’s the first of many stints in the hoosegow for Tony. Most of the others will be for drunk driving and domestic violence. He and his second wife have a very rough-and-tumble life together, but, somehow, for some reason unfathomable to me and Marie Antoinette, and anyone who knows the full story, the two of them remain as inseparable as Romeo and Juliet.

  Whoosh. It’s 1975, and Louis XVI retires from his judgeship, due to his ever-worsening heart condition. God only knows what compromises he’s had to make in order to work as a judge in Castrolandia, or what his life must have been like, stripped of his wife and children. Years and years later, I’ll get a furtive glimpse of him from a woman who writes to me out of the blue and tells me that my father once rescued her from a ten-year prison sentence. Her crime? Selling her weekly meat ration to a neighbor. This woman will also tell me that she went to my house, to thank my father in person, face-to-face, and that he never once mentioned that his wife and children were in the United States.

  In the final year of his life, Louis XVI will write to me about his plans to leave Cuba and his efforts to find a perfect home for his art collection. “Would you object if I just accept the inevitable and let go of your inheritance?” he’ll ask me. “Go ahead and let the bastards set up a nice museum,” I’ll respond. He’ll tell me about his dealings with the Ministry of Culture, and his search for an abandoned mansion large enough to house my noninheritance. I’ll tell him how much I long to see him again, and how glad I am that he’s decided to leave Castrolandia. What I don’t tell him is how I fear he’ll get screwed by the Ministry of Culture. What he doesn’t tell me is how sick he is.

  Whoosh. It’s 1976, mid-September. As Tony continues his steep descent and Marie Antoinette ministers to wounded souls in her basement apartment and I bury myself in sixteenth-century Latin, French, and German texts, a large truck pulls up to my house in Havana one day. It parks directly in front, where the ficus tree used to be that Tony and I climbed just about every day. Without a tree to block it, the scorching sun blasts the front porch and the door to the house, howling in self-satisfaction, aggressively. Men emerge from the truck and knock on the door, with the door-knocker I used to play with as a child. Tick tock. My father, who’s in the living room talking to a diplomat from the Peruvian embassy, gets up, opens the door, and sees the large truck parked at the curb. The men tell him that they’ve come for his art collection. Louis XVI tells them that there must be some mistake, for no place has yet been found in which to house all of this art he’s been collecting since he was a teenager. The men say that there’s no mistake at all, that they’ve been charged with emptying the house of its treasures and taking them to a warehouse. As the Peruvian diplomat listens to this exchange—which he can’t make much sense out of—Louis XVI crumples and dies on the spot, right there, by the front door, on our black-and-white marble floor, just beyond reach of the scorching sunlight. All attempts to revive him fail.

  Louis XVI laughs and laughs as he leaves this body, in which he hasn’t ever been very happy, and spits, spiritually, on the truck parked at the curb.

  The truck drivers flee the scene immediately and abandon their mission. Somehow, in that mysterious way in which corrupt workers’ paradises work, the bureaucrat who ordered the looting of my house gives up, and no one ever returns to take my dead father’s art collection anywhere. The museum never comes to be; Ernesto, my adopted brother, gets to stay in the house with all the stuff; and he earns the unfair, un-communist right to sell it all on the black market, piece for piece.

  Three cheers for the so-called Revolution and its Ministry of Culture!

  Whoosh. It’s 1980. Marie Antoinette’s factory goes bankrupt and closes down, and she loses her pension. All of her contributions to the factory’s retirement plan had been invested in company stock, and she and everyone else are left with nothing. Nada, nada, nada. She can’t find another job, but lucks out, big-time. She ends up in a brand-new apartment, in the near North Side of Chicago, in a plush building run by the Little Sisters of the Poor. The monthl
y rent is a negligible slice of her ridiculously low Social Security income. And all of the views from that building are priceless. The red, orange, and purple sunsets from my mom’s fifth-floor picture window are beyond sublime, as are all of the smokestacks and church steeples that punctuate the cityscape to the west, in what was once the heart of industrial Chicago but is now the exclusive domain of yuppies and their offspring.

  I get a job in Minnesota, a short ten-hour drive from Chicago, and begin to reconnect with Tony and Marie Antoinette.

  Tony’s force field begins to burn away, much like a meteor hitting the atmosphere, as he plunges deeper into his abyss. One image bolts out of my memory: Tony and I take the elevated train to the Art Institute of Chicago, along with Kenny, one of his friends from the airport. Tony jokes around, and sometimes he’s funnier than the comedians at Second City, but he’s wearing slippers on his feet. Goddamned slippers. And he’s got pajama pants under his slacks. He pauses for a long time when we come to Grant Wood’s American Gothic painting, and says, after minutes of silence: “Hey, look, it’s Uncle Amado.”

  Whoosh. Tony begins to tell me about his work for the Central Intelligence Agency, and about his covert work as a spook in Central America. “That’s where I went when I disappeared,” he confesses. “I was an operative, working off the record. I’m one of those expendables that the Agency will deny is working for them if caught or killed in action.” I refuse to believe him. He also tells me about all of the music he’s composed for Pink Floyd, and how they’ve never paid him for it. I have trouble believing that too, even though he seems to know an awful lot about Roger Waters, Syd Barrett, and David Gilmour, whom he claims to have befriended at O’Hare airport, along with Ronald Reagan, Frank Sinatra, and Don Rickles.