by Carlos Eire
You know about my dad and heads by now. I wouldn’t put it past him to have said that.
In the meantime, as the crowd grew and my screaming became more frantic, my mother somehow worked her way to the other side of me. By that time, it seemed as if the Mass had stopped. Perhaps it had. I had the distinct impression that everyone in that church had their eyes fixed on me, including the guy in the funny robes, who was no longer whispering “Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi…”
“Here, Antonio, hold his head like this,” said Marie Antoinette, placing her hands over my ears. “Hold his ears down as you pull, and gently twist his head. You do it. I can’t really pull the right way from this angle.”
Louis XVI did as his queen suggested, and in an instant, my head was freed from the paradox, effortlessly.
I rubbed my ears and sobbed for a while, and we all went home after the baptism. I may have looked exactly the same as I did before entering the church, but looks are deceiving. I had been transformed. I had come face to face with God.
So, you ask, what kind of proof is this for the existence of God? If I were a Zen master, I would give you no answer. Instead, I might whack you on the back of the head with a wooden plank, hoping the shock would bring you sudden enlightenment.
But I am far from a Zen master. No Cuban could ever gain the slightest toehold in the way of Zen, even after years and decades of reading up on the subject. Not even by living in a Buddhist monastery for a lifetime could any Cuban actually hear the sound of one hand clapping. We are not mini-malists when it comes to paradox.
No, we like our paradoxes nice and complex. The more labyrinthine, the better. No single hands clapping, no. We don’t like that. It’s too reductionist, too minimalist, too close to a void. It speaks of absence and infinite loss and loneliness. We prefer to seek the coincidence of opposites, the infolding of the flame and the rose, the melding of face and chalice, head and pew, Corpus Domini and YAAAHHH!
And, besides, Cubans like to talk too much, and to explain everything in great detail. None of us could let anyone figure out a proof for God’s existence on his own. Especially a proof that involves church pews.
As the eggplant and the breast speak of resemblances too numerous to be mere coincidence, as the perfect metaphor of near suffocation by an adopted brother sings sweetly of the relation between mind and the world around it, so does the head stuck in the pew announce our primal need to transcend linear logic, a craving as essential to our being as that for air, water, food, and love. So does the head in the pew reveal an intelligence beyond our own, but every bit as real as our own, an intelligence we seek.
Carajo, perdón. Damn it, forgive me, I’ve turned into a pedant from hell. Hoisted by my own petardo! How stupid to use linear logic in an attempt to blow up linear logic, just like that ever-cautious pedant Immanuel Kant and his bloodless, sallow brethren and disciples. I’ve tried to reason through a trinity of metaphors by reducing an infinity of meanings to a mere three. But to rely on reason alone is the surest road to heresy. And to hell, too. A more direct route than foul language.
Better to go for the infolding of Kyoto and Havana than to yearn for the singularity of Königsberg. Better to unthink, after all.
So go figure it out for yourself. Go ahead, after all.
Unthink.
Use your infinite imagination, and allow it to vanish on its own. Stick to the sense of sound alone, novice. I promise: no one will whack you on the back of the head with a wooden plank.
Imagine the sound of
boys thinking inside a giant wave…
Imagine the sound of
a boy screaming whose head is buried in the sand…
Imagine the sound of
a vicious circle…
Imagine the sound of
a philosopher’s shadow moving over cobblestones…
Imagine the sound of
a head trapped in a paradox…
Imagine the sound of
a paradox trapped inside a head…
Imagine the sound of disillusionment and redemption
all at once…
And for Cubans only: imagine the sound of
memories that have nothing to do with Batista or Fidel.
12
Doce
We pulled up to the house slowly, as always. Aunt Carmela’s house was a house you had to approach slowly. It demanded respect.
It was so huge and so far back from the sunlit curb. A couple of mansions down, at the end of her street, there was nothing but blazing turquoise and the rhythmic breathing of the surf. But the house itself was enveloped in gloom, surrounded by a tall imposing wall and gargantuan, prehistoric-looking trees. An eclipse of the sun, contained in a parcel of land in Miramar.
When we passed through the driveway gate, I always slid off the backseat, dropped to the floor of the car, and closed my eyes.
“Do we have to come here again?” I whined.
“Oh, stop it, you know we have to visit her,” came the predictable response from Louis XVI.
“Aunt Carmela is such a nice lady. And she always has some surprise for you.” Marie Antoinette was always so much more soothing and persuasive.
“Come on, it’s not that bad. She’s not a scary lady at all.” King Louis again.
“Remember, it was at Carmela’s house that Santicló left our Monopoly game last Christmas.” This was my brother speaking.
“I don’t care. This house gives me the creeps.”
“But it’s a beautiful house,” said our mother.
“Take me home, take me home. I want to go home.”
“Stop it. Stop it right now…or…I’ll make you spend the night with Aunt Carmela,” threatened the King of France.
“Oh no. Pleeeaaaaase, no! No! You wouldn’t do that to me, would you?”
“Try me.”
“Stop it, Antonio—”
“Here we are,” interrupted Tony. “Can’t wait to see that butler again. And I can’t wait to see what the surprise is today.”
As always, I got out of the car, obedient but shaking with fear. We climbed the marble steps to the huge bronze double doors, and King Louis used the heavy knocker. BLAM, BLAM, BLAM! We could hear the echo inside.
One of the doors opened slowly. A tall, lanky man dressed in a dark suit appeared. He was thin and bald and had dark circles under his eyes, and he seemed to be hiding something. He looked down his long nose at us, and, as always, said, “Buenos días, Doctor Nieto. Buenos días, Señora.”
Greetings for our parents, but not for us. But, as always, he stared at Tony and me with his dark droopy eyes. He knew we were there. He knew I was trying to hide behind my mom, peering up at him with one squinting eye.
“Come in. I’ll go tell Doña Carmela that you are here. This way, please. Follow me.”
This man didn’t walk like other men. He kept himself straight and stiff as a railroad tie, yet somehow also as loose and fluid as the goop inside a Lava lamp.
The inside of the house was every bit as dark as the driveway and the large front yard. No lights on anywhere, and all the window shutters closed. Room upon room of furniture draped in white shrouds. This house was haunted by sofas, armchairs, and ottomans from bygone days. Each and every piece protected from the ravages of dust by an opaque white veil. Protected too from the insult of novelty, from the attempt to displace memories, from the affront of new human beings trying to supplant those who once sat on them, wrote on them, perhaps even kissed on them. Ghosts they were, really. Furniture that had once been alive. Springs creaking, chair legs scraping, tables receiving sweaty goblets that dripped on them. The occasional stain or gouge. Now they had no purpose to serve save that of filling the rooms, cloaked monuments to happier times, when the windows were open, the lights were on, and the future was not yet the past.
How I hated that journey from the front door to Aunt Carmela’s study. Following that butler through room after dismal room, imagining what might be lurking under those white
shrouds.
The study was different. The window shutters were open and light streamed in. Aunt Carmela had an enormous desk and beautiful glass paperweights and strange paintings on the walls. They were unlike any other pictures I had ever seen. Dalí, Gris, Miró, Picabia, Picasso, maybe?
“I don’t know what she sees in this modern art,” said Louis XVI.
She always came in so slowly, Aunt Carmela. She was nearly blind, and it seemed to take her forever to appear and to make her way to her desk, hobbling on her cane. On this day, as on all others, she was very cheerful. She had the nicest smile I ever saw on an old lady, and eyes that seemed far younger than the rest of her.
On this day, as on all others, we talked for a long time. And when we were done talking came the surprise.
“Here you go, boys, don’t spend it all in one place,” she said, handing us each a five-dollar bill.
Five dollars was a lot of money back in 1957, especially for children. Despite her advice, I blew it all on an entire box of Davy Crockett trading cards, which were all the rage at my school. One of those vendors outside the schoolyard sold them by the packet. But I came armed with five dollars one fine Monday and bought an entire box containing about thirty packets.
Desengaño. Packet after packet contained the same sets of cards. Out of two hundred or so cards, I think I only managed to get a sum total of half a dozen new ones. Five American bucks for cards I already owned, and all the other kids already had, too. I couldn’t even trade them, so I threw most of them down a sewer outside the school.
I should have listened to Carmela. She was very wise. Perhaps the wisest of all of my relatives.
Tía Carmela was the only Nieto who seemed to have lived life to the fullest. Back when it wasn’t the least bit fashionable, in the late nineteenth century, she had insisted on doing things her own way. She was a rebel and a liberal through and through.
I don’t know the full story, but this is what I’ve been able to reconstruct. Carmela was Abuelo Amado’s first cousin. Her father was my great-grandfather’s brother. She had been brought up in the strict, stultifying tradition of the Nieto family. This meant denying that you lived in Cuba. It also meant, if you were a woman, that you devoted your entire existence to your husband and children.
Not Carmela. She took up every cause she believed in, especially democracy, independence from Spain, and equal rights for women and the recently freed African slaves. She was vocal about it, ruffling every feather there was to ruffle. She loved socializing and parties, and fervently believed in having a good time while taking care of the needy.
Then, to top it off, she took up writing. She wrote fiction and newspaper columns in which she gave advice and championed her liberal causes. And if this were not odd enough, she married an American man. From Kansas, of all places. How he ended up in Havana, I don’t really know, but they had three children: Daisy, Archibald, and Addison.
I’m sure those names went over very well with the Nieto family.
Then she did the unthinkable. She fell in love with another man, a Cuban. A hero of the War of Independence against Spain. A man who was married to another woman. She and the war hero allowed nature to take its course, and before long, trouble came their way. Carmela, you see, was no longer on very friendly terms with her American husband. So much so, in fact, that when she became pregnant, the man from Kansas knew with absolute certainty that she wasn’t carrying his child.
He packed his bags, said good-bye to his children in English, and returned to Tornado Alley without ever looking back. He divorced Carmela and disowned his children. He never wrote a letter or ever inquired about Daisy, Archie, and Addison. Never answered their letters either. He abandoned them totally.
Years later, when Addison was in his twenties, he would seek out his father in the United States, but Kansas man refused to see him. He wouldn’t even open the door for Addison. Through a closed door he told him to go away. “You’re not my son,” he told him. “Go find your Cuban father. Go back to stinking hot Cuba, where you belong.”
Carmela and her war hero married eventually and had two children of their own, but their union came at a very high price. The entire Nieto family refused to have anything to do with Carmela after her scandalous divorce and remarriage. In the same way that Kansas man refused to acknowledge the existence of his children, the Nietos refused to admit that Carmela existed.
My father was the only relative who kept in touch with her through all of this, furtively. He dared not court the disfavor of the family openly. Decades passed and no one else in the family talked to the woman. When her war hero husband died, my dad was the only relative at the funeral.
While every Nieto was stone silent and invisible, Carmela continued to write, promote her causes, and enjoy life. She also became fabulously wealthy. How this happened, exactly, I don’t know. But it did. Her house was ample proof. So was the hospital that she established in El Rincón, outside of Havana, to shelter lepers.
And no one said a word to her, until I came along.
I have no memory whatsoever of my role in breaking the ice. I only know what my mother has told me, which can always be trusted. According to her, I overheard some grown-ups talking about Aunt Carmela one day and asked why I’d never met her. When it was explained to me that she was an outcast, I couldn’t understand how someone could be shunned for divorcing one man and marrying another. And I began to ask, with uncharacteristic persistence, that I be taken to meet Aunt Carmela. I became such a pest about it that Marie Antoinette finally convinced King Louis to break the ice. He called her and arranged for an open reconciliation. No more secret visits and phone calls. After a well-announced visit from us, the rest of the family also caved in, asked her forgiveness, and went back to loving the woman no one had really wanted to shun in the first place.
Blessed are the peacemakers, said Jesus. My blessing was to get to know that very nice woman and to visit the house from hell. The butler and the veiled furniture, you see, were the least of my problems. Beyond the study, at the end of the wide main hallway, there was a grand staircase. On the first landing of that staircase there was a giant fish tank, which I loved, flanked by two modern abstract sculptures that scared me to death. They were far scarier than Maria Theresa. They looked like something by Modigliani or Henry Moore, but they were black and odd looking, and reminded me of voodoo masks and costumes I had once seen at a museum at the University of Havana.
“Want to go see some little devils?” King Louis had said one day.
“Diablitos? Sure, let’s go. Sounds great.”
“Okay, I’ll call this guy I know and he’ll let us in. This is a special museum, you know. It’s not always open.”
So, as always, a bunch of kids piled into the car, and off we went, to the university. We might have done some car surfing on the way, who knows? It was a cool winter day, and cloudy. On days like that, the surf was usually whipped up by the northern winds that swept down all the way from the polar ice cap. It was a perfect day for car surfing, anyway, whether we did it or not.
What a rude surprise, those little devils at the university. We walked into the exhibit hall and I froze with panic. What I saw were life-size figures dressed in colorful grass costumes, most of them wearing pointy-headed masks. These African costumes displayed on life-size mannequins inside those glass cases terrified me as nothing else had ever done before. Maria Theresa and Eye Jesus and the Candlestick Lady (about whom I have not yet spoken) seemed like angels next to these devils.
“Get me out of here!” I screamed.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Get me out of here, now, please.”
I felt as if I were in the presence of a malevolent force that wanted to annihilate me.
I would feel exactly the same terror, magnified ten thousand times, many years later when confronted with the Evil One himself in a dream. Don’t think for a minute that just because it was a dream it was an illusion. The force behind those dia
blitos manifested itself to me, in a very real way, and let me know it was pissed at me. Pissed as hell, as only the Prince of Darkness can be. Yes, I did finally get to meet him face to face, the ill-tempered King of Assholes. He’s very large, let me tell you. Huge. And he’s a cranky bastard, the Father of Lies, and an ugly son of a bitch too.
Maybe someday I’ll be able to tell that story. But not now.
I ran out of that exhibit as fast as I could, found my way to the car, and stood out there in the small parking lot at the rear of the university for a long while, waiting for everyone else to come out.
“You’re such a coward,” said my brother Tony when everyone finally emerged.
“Those devils were so nice,” chimed in Rafael. “You should have stayed and taken a better look.”
“You know,” said Louis XVI, reassuringly, “out in the countryside some black people still wear those costumes. They dance around a fire at night and put curses on their enemies. And sometimes they’re possessed by spirits and fly around.”
Just what I wanted to hear. Muchas gracias, Papa. Of course, I didn’t say that. I just said I wanted to go home.
The image of those diablitos dancing around bonfires out in the sugarcane fields would haunt me for years. Until the day I left Cuba, to be precise.
Anyway, the sculptures on the landing of Aunt Carmela’s grand staircase gave off the same vibes to me. And so did the giant Saint Lazarus statue in a small shrine behind the kitchen. The leper hospital she had founded was named after Saint Lazarus, the patron saint of lepers, and that’s why she had this giant statue in her house. There he was, life-size, just like the diablito mannequins, Saint Lazarus, hobbling on crutches, disfigured by leprosy, the sores on his legs being licked by dogs. Mean-looking mangy dogs.
Somehow, devotees of Saint Lazarus found out about the image at Carmela’s house and came all the way to Miramar to venerate it. Most of them were ragged, humble people. Several times while I was visiting, I saw them knocking on the rear door, begging for admission to the shrine.
Lazarus had plenty of candles and votive offerings. Fruit. Coins. Trinkets. Cigars.
