Waiting for Snow in Havana

by Carlos Eire

  I’ve taken great care to report only the mildest of his offending words. But I won’t translate, for fear of landing in hell.

  Aulet’s mynah bird didn’t have to worry about hell, though. Or about much else. He was well fed and sumptuously housed. And he obviously had a voice coach who put great effort into helping him master a highly specialized vocabulary. Back then, I used to suspect the chauffeur. But it could have been my friend Gerardito, or maybe his father. Or everyone in that household, for all I know. The amount of effort that went into creating this screwy masterpiece boggles the mind. The mynah bird, who had no name, knew only one clean phrase: Gerardito, ven a comer. Gerardito, come eat. It was spellbinding to hear “Gerardito, come eat” embedded in the midst of a long string of unconnected swear words and lewd phrases.

  We played with our friend in his private animal garden quite often, and not without risk. Once, as my dad sat at one of the many benches in the garden, he suddenly felt a weight on his shoulders, what seemed to be two large hands pressing down on him. He turned around and he found his nose less than an inch from a lion’s snout. The fact that he decided to say hello to my father might have had something to do with the fact that he was a portly man with lots of meat on his bones. Having faced the guillotine in a former life, my dad remained cool. Or maybe he was petrified. Fortunately, he sat perfectly still until the lion lifted his paws and sauntered off. Then, very cautiously and quietly, he rounded us up, one by one, and brought us into the Aulet house.

  My dad, the hero.

  Years later, but years ago, when my lovely wife was still my girlfriend, and when she was still in graduate school, she tried to argue in class one day that a tiger mentioned in one Latin American short story—a tiger in a house—didn’t need to be interpreted metaphorically. The professor and the other students laughed her off. “Magical realism,” they all said. But she knew so much more about what passes for Latin magical realism than they did, thanks to the stories I had told her. For one thing, she knew about the time Blackie took revenge on me.

  We were playing hide-and-seek. I had found a very nice spot behind the tiger’s cage. The tiger who would later die of indigestion and a failed enema administered with a garden hose. Hiding well was important to me, so important I braved the lizards in the thick foliage. So there I was, hiding successfully, minding my own business, listening for footfalls, as each of my friends were rustled from their hiding spots one by one. And looking out for lizards.

  Then came the hug.

  I felt someone’s arms encircle my legs from behind, just above the knees. Thinking it was my best friend Rafael trying to startle me, even though it would have been immensely weird for him to hug me that way, I whispered: “Rafa, go away, stop it.” Before I could turn around came the pain. Long, sharp teeth piercing through my jeans, sinking into my flesh. And the grip around my legs tightened as the teeth sank farther and farther into me. I’d been bitten by dogs and cats before, but this was a whole new kind of bite. And not just because it was my butt. Those teeth clamped down with resolve, as if they were seeking the seat of my soul.

  I felt a primal terror, produced, probably, by one enzyme passed on to us by our forest-dwelling ancestors. The “you’re-being-eaten” enzyme. Then the “you’re-about-to-die” enzyme kicked in too, along with all those chemical compounds that encode and carry nature’s most special gift to our brain, extreme pain.

  It hurt. I hurt. Badly.

  I knew it had to be Blackie, since lions and tigers can’t hug you. These arms around my legs felt just like human arms, but I knew no human could bite like this. It’s a good thing I didn’t know at that time how awfully strong an adult male chimpanzee can be. I might have actually died from fright.

  Fortunately, once he had dug his teeth into me as deeply as he could, Blackie released me. He was civilized, that chimp. He could have mauled me mercilessly, ripped my flesh from head to toe, punctured my aorta or my femoral artery, or inflicted God knows what other kind of damage. But he extended mercy to me. Grace, even. All he did was bite my rear end, the fleshiest, least crucial, silliest part of my body. Maybe it was the lederhosen and all the other costumes that had tamed him, taught him restraint? Maybe it was the cowboy outfit? The baseball uniform? The white linen suit? Maybe it was just Blackie the primate, my natural cousin, reaching down to his almost human soul, letting this boy go. Punctured, bloodied, but otherwise unharmed.

  Blackie let out a shriek the instant his mouth let go of my butt. A victory howl that scared me almost as much as the bite itself. I’m done for, I thought. Then he shrieked and howled some more and jumped away, his knuckles pushing on the ground.

  Then I let out a howl of my own, far from triumphant. I howled in pain.

  “He bit me, he bit me! Whaaahh! Blackie bit me! Whaaahh!”

  “Hey, you just gave away your hiding place,” said Manuel from a few feet away, with compassion.

  “I’m not joking. He bit me, he really did! Ay, this hurts! Waaahh!” And I cried like the little boy I was.

  One by one my playmates came to my hiding place. And they all seemed to talk at the same time.

  “I’ve got to see this!”

  “What? You mean Blackie is loose?”

  “Yaaaayy!”

  “Hey, we’d better get in the house. We might be next!”

  “You’re lying. Let me see. I don’t believe you.”

  From the upstairs terrace, the mynah bird chimed in: “Coño. Carajo. Puta. Puta. Gerardito. Gerardito, ven a comer. Coño.”

  My mother, who was inside the house talking to Gerardito’s older sister, heard all the screaming and hurried out as fast as she could. Meanwhile my playmates gathered around me and saw I was telling the truth. Though I was wearing blue jeans, the bloodstain was easy enough to see. Then we all began to walk towards the house, keeping an eye out for Blackie. My brother tried to comfort me.

  Before I knew it we were in the kitchen, safe from further chimp attacks. There, my mom calmed me down, wiped away my tears, and cleaned my wounds. To get to the bite itself, though, she first had to convince me to pull down my pants and my underwear. Since there were a lot of people milling about in that kitchen, who showed no desire to go away and refused to leave when asked, it took some convincing. Everyone wanted to see the bite on my rear end. And everyone saw it, I think.

  The hydrogen peroxide and the iodine stung so much that I cried some more. The puncture wounds were deep, but no larger than the size of each of Blackie’s teeth. He had only taken one bite, and it seems that my jeans protected me a little, especially since he had bitten right over one of the rear pockets. Thank God my father had received bolts and bolts of denim fabric from one of his many grateful acquaintances and that my mom had turned some of it into jeans for me. Ever since, blue jeans have made me feel safe.

  I don’t know who caught Blackie and chained him up again that day he bit me. Probably the gardener, or the guy who took care of handling the animals in Aulet’s animal garden. But caught he was, and sent back to his little Tarzan-like hut. I went home with a sore butt and an increased appreciation of nature red in tooth and claw, our sweet world where every bough is dipped in blood and every bird’s song conceals a dirge. I would like to think that on that day Blackie became aware of that law of the universe I had discovered on the school playground: bullies are the worst sissies in the world when the tables are turned on them.

  I never, ever taunted Blackie again. Not even when it made me look bad in front of my friends.

  As to the outcome of Blackie’s lederhosen escape: of course, as always, he was captured and chained anew. But I don’t know how this was accomplished. I only remember Blackie jumping from limb to limb, swinging furiously, making his way down our street on the green canopy provided by the trees. Aulet and his retinue followed close behind, yelling out his name. Aulet looked worried, and silly too, with that Alpine hat in his hand. Blackie looked regal in his lederhosen. He was King of Bavaria that day, and not one whit dumber or
less majestic than Mad Ludwig II, builder of Neuschwanstein Castle, patron and friend of Richard Wagner. I rooted for him and urged him to run faster, to swing more furiously from branch to branch, to find freedom.

  I wish I knew what happened to Blackie after I left the island on my own dash for freedom. He’s always there, lurking in the back of my mind. Maybe he had something to do with the fact that a chimp puppet was the best man at my wedding, and that this puppet held a single blood-red rose during the ceremony. I have photos of that puppet, my best man, holding his red rose. I also have photos of him traveling in Europe with me and my bride, at all these places so far from Miramar. Outside the Jeu de Pomme museum, with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Crossing the English Channel, the white cliffs of Dover a faint haze on the horizon. Marveling at the Alhambra across a deep gorge, perched on the edge of a wall as white as the snow on the Sierra Nevada.

  Gerardito ended up leaving by himself, just as I did. The rich boy, my friend, became a poor orphan the minute he set foot in the United States, just like me. I don’t really know what he endured, for we never compared stories. Maybe he, too, searched vacant lots in ratty Miami neighborhoods at twilight, looking for discarded soda bottles that could be turned in for two cents apiece, hoping to come up with enough cash to buy a Twinkie or an ice-cream sandwich for dinner. His family followed a few years later, like so many others. His father, the nickel mine magnate, lost his fortune. He was forced to scrounge for lousy jobs in Florida, and to do without wild beasts in his garden, maybe even to mop floors and hear himself called “spic.”

  Where Aulet’s bestiary ended up, I don’t know. After a while you don’t give a damn where anything went, not even your own stuff. Burn it, bomb it, send it down the vortex of a black hole. Let it all rot in hell. It was just stuff.

  Dross. Sheer dross. Or so you think. Then a chimp puppet shows up at your wedding, years later, and you don’t even realize why he’s there, or why you are playing a joke on yourself. Then, when you finally get the joke, maybe you begin to reconsider the bulldozer and the dynamite.

  Maybe.

  Blackie was there in his Tarzan house that final morning I spent in Havana, there in the animal garden. He was there just a few hours before I left for the airport, a few hours before Louis XVI hugged me for the very last time in this life. I went to see Blackie on my roller skates that morning to say good-bye. It was the very last thing I did before leaving. He rattled his chain and made chimp faces at me, as always.

  I swear, I think I also heard the mynah bird say, “Culo, culo, culo feo!”

  All right, I’ll translate, at the risk of eternal damnation. The bird said: “Ass, ass, ugly ass!”

  8

  Ocho

  Cohetes. Without a doubt, one of the most beautiful words in the Spanish language.

  Firecrackers, in English. A poor word, if you ask me. Impoverished. Lame.

  Cohete is also the Spanish word for “rocket.” Cohetes can take you to another world, to many other worlds. Flash Gordon and Dr. Zharkov flew around in cohetes, as did Buck Rogers. Sputnik had been launched with a cohete, and so had Laika. Poor Laika, the dog the Russians sent into orbit with a one-way ticket, propelled by a cohete to death by starvation.

  Firecrackers? Not even close. When I first learned of the English word for cohete, all I could think of was flaming Saltines.

  And I never did find any firecrackers in the United States as large as the cohetes I played with in Havana, not even illegal ones.

  There we were in Chinatown, my dad, my brother, and I, buying firecrackers.

  “I want some of these big ones!”

  “How about one of those long strings? Two? Three? Ten? Please, Papi? Por favor?”

  “We’ve got to have some of those round ones too!”

  “Okay, Felipe, let’s have ten boxes of these. And twenty of those.”

  Yes, Havana had a Chinatown, and a Chinese cemetery too. Lots of Chinese had somehow ended up in Havana, and some were named Felipe. You could buy any explosive you wanted on Calle Zanja—Ditch Street in English. Zanja sounds a lot like Shanghai. Is that why the Chinese ended up in that neighborhood? Or does it have anything to do with the fact that Chinese coolies dug a lot of ditches in Cuba?

  Anyway, the Chinese had the best firecrackers in town, and we were amassing quite an arsenal.

  How I stared at the merchandise in that store. Long, long strings of firecrackers in all sizes. From tiny ones as thin as rose stems, tied together in perfectly symmetrical rows of two, about the length of Pancho Villa’s bullet belt, to huge ones as round as hot dogs, strung together in bundles the width of the average tomb. Small individual firecrackers as round as a pencil, two inches long. Medium-size explosives as round as a man’s index finger. Large petardos about half the size of a dynamite stick. Jumbo petardos that could have passed for dynamite sticks, the only ones that King Louis wouldn’t buy for us.

  The most amazing thing was that this was not the only firecracker store in Chinatown. There was another one next door, and across the street, and next door to that, all over the street, and down some of the side streets, a nearly infinite supply of firecrackers.

  We went to Felipe Wang’s store because my dad knew him and always got a special deal. Favors. All those favors. The most gorgeous boomerangs in the world.

  They were all red, those firecrackers. Blood red. Even the thin transparent wrapping paper around them. Chinese paper, the same stuff my dad used for kites, only slightly thinner. How I loved to handle that paper, to feel it with my fingers, to rub it, to inhale the scent of gunpowder, to hold it over my eyes and see the entire world turn blood red. All those dragons on the labels, they were so awesome, despite the fact that they were related to lizards. These were firecracker dragons, small gods of pure joy. And all those Chinese characters on the labels, too. Mystical words, secrets from another dimension. I was certain that somewhere in China there were these extremely wise men, a caste of priests who had discovered gunpowder, along with a whole other way of writing.

  I saved the wrappers. I saved them in my sock drawer, and had to leave them all behind, along with Mom and Dad and almost the entire family, and all the stuff we owned. When I saw Citizen Kane for the first time, and got clobbered over the head by the great surprise of “Rosebud” at the end, my hair stood on end. If I were still a genuine Cuban, I might say that I fainted, or suffered a heart attack, or was felled by an embolia. But my powers of exaggeration have greatly diminished in exile. I have to admit that it was just a chill that went through my body. I knew what my Rosebud had been, and that was my chill of recognition. My love for those wrappers ran deep. I fear that when I die, my final words will be “los papelitos rojos”—the red wrappers—instead of something pious.

  These treasures came from so far away, from the other side of the globe. My dad had told me that if I could dig a hole deep enough, right through the earth’s core, I would end up in China. For a while I believed him, even though his geology didn’t take into account purgatory and hell. The good Christian Brothers had told me about those two places, also under my feet. But I preferred to think my dad was right.

  Chinatown was full of scary things too. Images of large dragons, in all shapes and sizes. Images of heathen deities, some looking like Christian demons. Statues of the Buddha. Very few statues of the Enlightened One totally at peace, though. Most of these Buddhas seemed lacking in insight, blind in the third eye. They reminded me of some of the Catholic images that also scared me: Saint Lazarus on his crutches, his legs being licked by dogs; Saint Barbara, holding a cup in one hand and a sword in the other. Images used by brujeros and by those who practiced santería, that quintessentially Cuban religion that masks African beliefs, symbols, and rituals with a thin veneer of Catholicism. I was especially scared by these very weird Buddha statues that I’ve never seen anywhere else since then, also available in all sizes: a very fat Buddha with tiny children crawling all over him, his pudgy arms held aloft, a goofy, almost siniste
r grin on his face. It looked as if the children were devouring him little by little. In some of the poorer neighborhoods, like Regla, or Marianao, or Old Havana, you could see these proudly displayed in front windows. My dad told me that people thought these statues brought good luck. They scared the bejeezus out of me.

  Louis XVI liked the Enlightened Buddha, of course, because of his belief in reincarnation. That gave me the creeps too, the way he told me the story of Siddhartha so often. I was waiting for him to tell me that the story was wrong, that Siddhartha had not been the final incarnation of the Buddha, that he had been the Buddha too. He used to tell me about Christian saints, canonized by the Church, who came back. If heaven was not the final destination of the holiest men and women, why assume Nirvana was the Buddha’s last stop? Fortunately, he never went that far.

  Anyway, the firecrackers more than made up for everything unpleasant in Chinatown. We set off our little bombs all over the neighborhood. On the inner branches of flowering shrubs. On trees. On walls and fences. On neighbors’ porches. On toys. On anthills. On lizards. Inside empty soda bottles. Inside storm drains. Some of these targets required lighting the firecracker in your hand and throwing it before it exploded. My brother and Manuel were experts at that. Daredevils, too. They took to playing a game that was a combination of Russian roulette and Chicken in which they would both light firecrackers in their hands at the same time and wait to see who would be the first to throw his. I did it a few times and always threw first.

  Then there was the time when we tried to set up the first, last, and only Cuban space program. Inspired by Laika’s flight into space, we decided to launch a living being into outer space. And what creature better than a lizard? So we captured a large green chameleon, taped it to the top of a large tin can, set our largest firecracker under it, and placed it on the sidewalk in the park at the end of my street. Having decided that one firecracker wasn’t large enough to propel the can into outer space, we substituted several medium-size petardos, but then decided that there was no way that several fuses would burn in perfect sync and that what we really needed was a single huge explosive. So Eugenio came to the rescue. He ran home to get one of those huge petardos my dad wouldn’t buy, the ones that resembled sticks of dynamite. His dad wasn’t as much of a weenie as mine.