Waiting for Snow in Havana

by Carlos Eire

  I was one of the lucky ones. Fidel couldn’t obliterate me as he did all the other children, slicing off their heads ever so slowly, and replacing them with fearful, slavish copies of his own. New heads held in place by two bolts, like Boris Karloff’s in Frankenstein, one bolt forged from fear, the other from illusion. Even those Regla wharf boys lost their heads, they did, in exchange for a ration card and a ban on coin diving. And those that are still there, now grown men, with children and grandchildren of their own, are all walking around with rusty bolts on their necks.

  Thanks to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, I was spared the head transplant. They battled over how best to save me, went to war with each other, pulled out weapons neither one knew they had. Like all real wars—as opposed to the ones staged in films—it wasn’t very pretty or much fun to watch. Working with the skills she had honed so well in the battle over Christmas, my mom eventually prevailed. Louis XVI caved in to her, reluctantly. Caved in and collapsed, unable to resist her persuasive voice. On bad days I see my dad as an inflatable rubber Santa, the air all gone from inside, nothing but a red, wrinkly puddle on the ground. Or I see him as a plastic lawn ornament Santa, turned into shrapnel by a well-placed explosive. Dad-Santa, gone in an instant. Just like our lizard rocket.

  Father, Father, why did you abandon me?

  On good days, I cut my dad some slack. I think that maybe he convinced himself he was reliving what he had experienced in Bethlehem two thousand years ago, and, working with that knowledge, did the best he could. He listened to my mom and her very persuasive voice and chose to spare us the decapitation this time around. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette hid me in the ruins and threw me out the window before Fidel’s militiamen could get to me.

  They threw me as far as they could, and so it was that I was driven into exile, along with my older brother. Threw me across the turquoise sea, all the way to our own Egypt, all the way to the United States, the vault of everlasting illusion.

  11

  Once

  It was a huge wave. The biggest wave of the day. We had no surfboards, boogie boards, or rubber rafts, only our bodies. And we knew how to use them.

  We could see this wave coming, bearing down on us and the beach. It was green. Light green, sort of jade, and foaming way higher than all the other waves in front of it. We fought with all our strength against those smaller waves, which weren’t small at all, dug our feet into the fine white sand and let them pummel us.

  “Wait for the big one!”

  Four or five rows of these waves we wrestled against, knowing that the mother of all waves was not far behind. The closer it got, the bigger it grew. It was turning into a small mountain range.

  We were all about fifty, maybe sixty yards from the edge of the beach, in about four feet of water. It was hard to keep your balance when the waves hit. We turned our backs to them and let them crash over our heads. We yelled at one another over the roar of the surf.

  “Wait for that huge one!”

  “Two more to go, and it’s here.”

  “It’s getting bigger!”

  “Oh, no, it’s getting scary.”

  “It’s a monster, a monster!”

  “Tidal wave!”

  “Mount Everest!”

  “Must have been caused by a whale fart!”

  “No, no, it was one of Ernesto’s farts!”

  “Go to hell, Manuel, it was one of yours!”

  “One more! One more to go!”

  “Get ready, everybody, heeeere it is! Aaaaaquí está!”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa….…….”

  “Aaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy……………”

  It hit us like a freight train. Swallowed us whole, swept us away like straws in a tornado. We rolled in the green water, all of us, submerged, moving towards the shore at what seemed to be the speed of light and no speed at all.

  I remember tumbling under the water, losing all sense of direction. I opened my eyes and saw nothing but green, and lots of bubbles in all sizes. The roar was deafening. Head over heels I spun, saltwater rushing up my nose. Which way is the sky? I asked myself . Which way is the sand? How far left to go?

  I didn’t have to wait very long for an answer. The wave crashed, and I was spit out onto the beach, head first, face down. Hard. With my mouth open.

  And then, in less than a second or two, someone with a big butt landed right on my head and pushed it deep into the wet sand, burying it completely. Big Butt sat on me for a long time, or so it seemed. Just sat there on my head, his entire weight pinning my head under the sand. I suspected it must be Ernesto. None of us weighed that much. I had sand up my nostrils, sand in my ears, and sand down my throat. I think I screamed, or tried to. No sound would come out, though.

  I thought I was going to die.

  Then, mercifully, the weight lifted from my head, very slowly. I tried to raise my head out of the sand, but couldn’t. I was stuck. Another huge wave crashed over my body, pinning me down. Just as I was beginning to pass out, someone grabbed my arms and pulled hard, freeing my head.

  I blew sand out of my nose, coughed up sand, and gasped for air. I don’t know how long it took me to catch a full, deep breath. All I know is that as I was busy trying to get air into my lungs, I also noticed I had sand in my eyes. And that hurt more than anything else.

  Tony and my friends helped me crawl away from the pounding surf. The sand in my ears muffled the sound of children laughing at me, but I could make out what some of them were saying.

  “That’s the funniest thing I ever saw!”

  “Did you see Ernesto sitting on his head?”

  “They looked like some weird creature with two bodies and only one head.”

  “FrankenErnestostein…Moby Ernesto…Creature from the Fat Lagoon.”

  “Yeah, and did you catch the look on Carlos’ face when we pulled his head out?”

  “Never thought I’d get to see a zombie.”

  “How does that sand taste? Good? Sabrosa?”

  “Here, let me slap your back.”

  Cough, spit, blow, wheeze. More of the same several times over. No words would come out of my mouth. Sand will do that to you. Having two hundred pounds or so land on your head doesn’t help either. I wasn’t just choking, I was stunned. And four boys pounding on your back with clenched fists don’t help much either, especially four boys who think they’ve been given license to hit you as hard as possible.

  Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette eventually showed up and rescued me from all the joking and the inept first aid. King Louis walked me over to one of the outdoor showers and helped me get the sand out of my head. I remember filling my mouth with water, gargling, and spitting out. I remember rinsing my ears, twisting my head sideways and pounding on my temples. Gently. I didn’t want to kill myself. The club nurse helped me too, especially with the sand in my eyes.

  What a great day that was, though. Great storm. Great waves. Great beach. Great parents who let us play in killer surf. Great beach club that let us in for free and allowed us to bring as many guests as we liked. Great management that had no lifeguards and allowed us to tsunami-surf with our bodies. Great coincidence, too, someone landing on my head. As soon as I got over the shock, I started laughing too, and joking. Especially about Ernesto’s big butt.

  Ernesto was not amused. But then again, he was seldom amused.

  I’m not ready to speak about him yet, but I can say this much: he was not our friend. From the very start, from the day he first set foot in our house, none of us kids liked him. And we could tell he didn’t like us very much either. It was one of those vicious circles in human relations that only keep getting worse. If some genius ever figures out how to tap the energy in vicious circles like that one, humankind will have a source of energy more abundant and powerful than cold fusion.

  My mother tells me none of the adults liked him either. My father’s mother was still alive that first day he came to visit. She had fifteen days left to live but didn’t know it. And she pulled my
mom aside and said, “Don’t even allow this boy to use our bathroom.” It’s just about the last thing she ever said, that wise woman who seldom spoke, that gentle woman who ran her fingers through my hair.

  The only one who seemed to like him was my dad.

  Much of Ernesto is locked away in my vault of oblivion. But what’s not in there scares me, and that’s the reason for his shadowy, lurking presence in these pages up to now.

  I have to admit, though, that having him land on my head and nearly suffocate me after we were both swept away by a killer wave is so perfect a metaphor for our relationship as to be my second proof for the existence of God.

  Thomas Aquinas came up with five proofs for the existence of God, all of them based on causality. My proofs are based on similitude and the ways in which all things relate to one another, and to our limited yet eternal minds.

  As long as I am on this topic, let me bring up my third proof for God’s existence. Of course, it involves a head. Mine. And, of course, it’s the kind of proof that no one who takes Immanuel Kant seriously would be eager to accept.

  I have nothing but the utmost contempt for Kant, and so should you. He was foolish enough to trust entirely in one kind of reasoning alone, and verbose enough to convince many other smart people that he was right. Benighted fool, that lousy philosopher Kant, curse of the thinking class.

  May you burn in hell forever, Immanuel, you obsessive-compulsive pedant, or find yourself in heaven, right next to Mel Blanc and the airport guy who laughed when he peered inside my underwear. And may you be eternally rid of the double set of garters that you wore on your precisely timed walks around Königsberg every afternoon, those jaunts that were a more accurate reckoning of the hour and minute than that of any clock in your gray Hanseatic town. You need not fear that your hose will slither down around your ankles in the afterlife, dear Immanuel, as you discuss the Categorical Imperative with Mel and Airport Guy. Or as you ponder the ding-an-sich and dissect Vernunft in a million useless ways with your two eternally doltish pupils. Socks and philosophy are even more useless in heaven than in the tropics.

  I found that out early in life, along with my third proof for the existence of God, in a church. Let me get to the point with Prussian alacrity and precision.

  It was years before the wave, years before Ernesto. I wasn’t in school yet, not even preschool. We had gone to a baptism somewhere in the older section of Havana, in a very old church. There we were, sitting in a pew towards the rear of the nave, my parents, my brother, and I. It was a creepy church, just like all the others in that part of town. Pathologically Baroque. Dark and gloomy, with scary images everywhere. Gory crucifixes. The awful smell of incense and candles. The Mass that preceded the baptism had just started, and I was rolling around on the hard wooden pew, trying desperately to find some way of amusing myself while this guy dressed in a ridiculous robe mumbled words in a language that seemed oddly familiar but also very strange.

  Dominus vobiscum. Dominoes vo-what? Why is he talking about dominoes, that game my grandfather loves to play with his white-haired friends?

  Et cum spíritu tuo, came the mumbled response from the congregation. What was that? Eco d’espíritu tuyo? An echo of your spirit? Was he talking about ghosts’ voices?

  Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had positioned themselves between me and Tony, as always. They never let us have fun in church. Always placing their index fingers up to their lips and saying “shush, be quiet,” or simply hissing “shhhhhhhhhhh.” Sometimes King Louis would smack us. I never had anything to do. Couldn’t bring toys to church. Couldn’t talk. Nothing at all, except to try to make sense of Latin and feel the burden of my own existence.

  Ah, but suddenly I noticed this church was different. The pews didn’t have solid backs. No, these were interesting pews. Their backs were carved in an intricate pattern. Row upon row of wooden slats in undulating shapes. Lots of rounded openings. What intriguing holes these were!

  I tried to make sense out of the pattern, which looked a lot like that optical illusion you find in every basic psychology textbook, the picture that looks like the silhouette of a cup or an urn if you look at it one way, or the silhouette of two faces looking directly at each other, nose to nose. My very first paradox. This being a church, I guess the cup in the pattern must have been a chalice. But that’s neither here nor there.

  What matters is that I wanted to merge with the optical illusion, to live inside the paradox.

  I got down on the hard wooden kneeler and ran my hands along the undulating shapes for a while. Then I stared at the rounded openings, puzzling over their affinity to the shape of my head. Round head. Round opening. Wow!

  So I decided to put my head through one of these openings. I tested its breadth with the crown of my head. Amazing! The round hole was just wide enough to fit my head through by the smallest of margins. I had a bit of trouble inserting my head, but not much. A little twist of the neck here, another twist there, and bingo! Breakthrough! Durchbruch, as my dear friend the mystic Meister Eckhart would say. I had pierced right through the illusory plane, crossed from one dimension to another.

  I stared in wonder from the other side of the pew at the pattern, looking sideways down the back of the pew at row upon row of cups-and-faces. It was the same from the other side! Incredible. And I had pierced right through, become one with the pattern, one with the paradox.

  This was a great church. We should come here more often, I thought.

  Oremus, I heard from my trans-dimensional vantage point. I remember mulling it over in my head, the head that was protruding out of the back of a pew like that of a malfeasant in stocks in some Puritan New England town back in 1689, maybe the very town in which I now live.

  Oremus. There he goes again. Why is that guy with the funny robe always talking about oars? I thought he was saying los remos—“the oars.” Oars made me think of the beach and the brightly painted rowboats they had at our club. I thought of cups-and-faces, pews, rowboats, and the beach. I thought of the turquoise sea, which called to me even at that early age.

  Throughout this first rapture of mine, King Louis and Marie Antoinette remained absorbed in the Mass. Or maybe they were so relieved by my silence and lack of movement that they entered the fragile retreat of their own minds. Either way, they failed to take notice of me and my wonderful discovery.

  Then came time for communion.

  This meant that some people would have to get up and walk up to the communion rail to have that little white thing placed on their tongues. Then they would come back to their pews looking very, very serious. Not that many people went to communion back then, when all it took was one venial sin to make you unworthy of the body of Christ, but there were always enough holy people in any pew to make you move slightly as they made their way past you on the way up and the way back. More often than not it was women, with those dumb-looking veils on their heads, those folding fans in their hands, and those noisy high-heeled shoes on their feet. Why didn’t men go up for communion? Why didn’t they wear veils? Why did women wear such crazy shoes? Why did they snap their fans open so loudly, and fan themselves so furiously? Why did they shut those fans with an even louder noise? Snap, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, SNAP! Why weren’t men allowed to use fans?

  More things to ponder from my trans-dimensional perch. More mind-bending questions to fuel my ecstasy from within the paradox.

  Then came the rude awakening. A woman sitting in our pew had to go to communion. Which meant I had to move. But there was one problem, as I quickly discovered.

  My head was stuck in the pew.

  I tried and tried, but no amount of neck twisting or shifting into reverse could get my head out of that hole in the pew. Stuck in the paradox, I was. Somehow, either my head had swelled, or the opening in the pew had shrunk. My ears, especially, proved an insurmountable obstacle. So I did what any kid my age would have done. I yelled, at the top of my lungs: “Mami, Papi, se me trabó la cabeza!” Mom, Dad, my head is stuck
!

  The pall of silence that descended upon that church was thick indeed. It was as if I had made everyone stand perfectly still. As if I had made everyone hold their breath. As if everyone were suffocating.

  Everyone except the man in the funny robe.

  “Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam. Amen.” I could hear the priest whispering at the communion rail, as he dispensed the body of Christ, Our Lord, to kneeling women, and a man or two.

  “Mom, Dad, my head is stuck!” I yelled again. “My heeaaad is stuuuuck!”

  “Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi…” (Whispered.)

  Dad came over and started to pull on my shoulders. But every tug caused my ears to collide with the immovable wooden barrier of the hole’s edge. And each attempt brought with it more pain.

  “YAAAaaaaah! You’re hurting me! You’re hurting me! My ears! YAAAaaaaah!”

  “Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi…” (Whispered.) Those dominoes again.

  By now a small crowd had gathered around us.

  “If this kid got his head in here, there must be some way to get it out,” my father whispered through clenched teeth. These are the very first words of my father’s that I remember with precision. So he tugged and tugged some more, and my ears felt as if they were being ripped right off my head.

  My response was to yell even louder.

  The crowd around us grew. People started whispering advice to my dad. “Turn his head this way.” “No, no, don’t turn his head at all.” “Get some oil and rub it on his ears.” “Put your hand on the top of his head and push hard.”

  “Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi…” (Whispered.)

  My brother Tony came up with what seemed the best idea to me. “Dad, why don’t you get one of your saws and cut the pew?”

  I’m not sure, but I think I remember my dad muttering something under his breath that sounded an awful lot like, “Maybe what I should do is cut off his head.”