by Carlos Eire
King Louis brought Marie Antoinette to live in that house in Miramar. Brought her there to share the house with his mother, his aunt, and his sister. The neighbors took bets on how long the marriage would last. No one bet on more than one year. And no one won.
12. Sometime in the 1930s, a Jewish refugee fleeing from the Nazis landed in Havana. He had been wise enough to see what was looming on the horizon and had managed to escape with his whole family and several valuable works of art. Strapped for cash in a strange tropical land, this refugee sold off the art piece by piece. Much to his dismay, most of the items sold for a fraction of their real value. Havana during the Depression was not a good place in which to market works of art. Unlucky refugee.
One day, while scouring antique shops in Havana, trying to find more objects with which to fill up that house into which he would bring my mother, Louis XVI found a portrait he immediately recognized. A thrilling find. It was none other than Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. The painting was a bargain. A steal, practically. The shop owner had bought it from another dealer, who had bought it from the Jewish refugee for a pittance and was selling it for not much more than he himself had paid for it. About one hundred pesos. Nobody wanted that portrait. Such a dour-looking woman. Maybe she cussed out all potential buyers, telepathically, scaring them away.
Louis XVI purchased the portrait gleefully and hung it in a place of honor. The portrait of his mother-in law.
Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, you see, was Marie Antoinette’s mother.
Lucky Dad. Unlucky me.
Coño. Qué mierda.
What were the odds of a portrait of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria ending up in the hands of a man who claimed to have been her son-in-law in a former life? What were the odds that this strange man and the portrait would have crossed paths in Havana, of all places?
Only God could calculate those odds. Perhaps. Maybe not even He.
13. Finally, let me tell you more about Abuela Lola, from the luck angle. Houses that burn down, fortunes that are lost, tyrants and revolutions that force you into exile, these are all part of my family’s luck. And so is the lizard-loathing gene. It was my luck to end up with it. She gave me that special gift.
How I wish Lola could tell you about this herself. I may have inherited the loathing from her, but have never fully fathomed it. I know for certain she understood it intimately.
Speak, Grandma. Please . Llegó la hora. The time has come. You, who loved speaking with the dead, speak now. You who were so superstitious, to you I offer the thirteenth place in chapter thirteen.
(…………………………………………………………..)
Oh hell, all I get is silence. History of my relations with the spirit world. But I can guess at some of the things she might have said, for she had a great fear of reptiles. Fear and disgust. And I am a keeper of the fear.
Some things on this earth are truly scary and loathsome. Pond scum. Slime. Eggs. Ooze. Dragons. Salamanders. Newts. Alligators. Iguanas. Lizards. Toads. Frogs. Big-eyed frogs. Croaking frogs. Fly-catching frogs. Pissing frogs. Copulating frogs.
When God got angry at the Egyptians, He sent them a plague of frogs. Disgusting frogs. Frogs without number. Slimy, lusting frogs. And the Egyptians died by the thousands. Died like ugly frogs because of frogs.
And could we forget the snakes, we keepers of the fear? Forget the serpent?
If they can’t poison you, then they crush you. If not in the light of day, then in the dark of night. If not in the tall grass, then in the baby’s crib. They can sneak into your bed, under your pillow, and kill you while you’re dreaming, or making love.
If not by poison, or brute force, then by merely being there, and sharing this world with us, they bring us to the grave. Death itself carries them in his pocket, and loves to brandish them by the handful. The mere sight of their beady eyes and vile, camouflage skin slays as swiftly as any guillotine, even more swiftly sometimes.
Vipers. Boas. Adders. Rattlers. Mambas. Cobras. Pythons.
Snakes writhing over one another. Serpents, copulating, hissing with delight. Writhing over all of creation. Slithering. Since the beginning. Living, writhing guts. Intestines with heads. Sexed intestines. Nothing but ingesting, digesting, expelling, hissing, and mating.
Male and female He made them. First two. Then thousands. Millions. Billions. Trillions. Be fruitful and multiply. Hiss, writhe. Mingle your cold, cold blood. Cold as the absence of light. Cold as the heart of a fallen angel. Colder than the loins of Adam and Eve before It came along.
There was a snake in the garden. A serpent. It talked to the woman with its forked tongue, or maybe not. Spoke without speaking, maybe. Didn’t have to speak at all, maybe. Just showed up and manifested its scaly rainbow skin, which said: “Look at me, woman. I have entrapped all the colors of the rainbow, and you have not. I know things that man over there will never know. Stupid man. What does he know? You know more than he does, but what do you know, really?”
And the rest was nothing but trouble, so the Bible says.
God-damned serpent.
Abuela Lola was among the lucky few. It flowed through her veins, this memory, and she passed it on to me. This is why she stroked my hair all day long, silently, while she lived. While her blood was still hot, before her blood, that final day, became as cold as theirs. Wordless. No words at all can I recall. Not one.
Only a simple, wordless message that said: flee; kill or be killed.
Why speak? We both knew. Loathsome breathing rainbows, all of them. The enemy. Crush their heads. Annihilate them. Erase with abandon the awful mistake. Redemption shall never extend to them. Redemption is their extinction. God the Father Himself hates them. Jesus hates them. Cursed for eternity, they are.
The reason Abuela Lola held me up to the front-door window pane, inside our living room, to watch for my brother’s return from school, rather than out on our ever balmy tropical front porch, was that she never set foot outdoors.
Never.
And the reason she never stepped outside was her fear and hatred of reptiles.
When she and her sister and daughter and son first moved to that house in Miramar, after the tragic death of her husband, it was on the very edge of Havana. Too close to undeveloped land, full of lizards, iguanas, and frogs. Her son, my father, the onetime Louis XVI, had to kill many an iguana. Crushed their heads with a wooden plank.
Eventually the iguanas learned to live elsewhere, as the neighborhood grew, and he and other dutiful sons in other homes crushed their heads with abandon. By the time I came into that house, the iguanas were gone. I never saw one anywhere in that neighborhood. They merely existed in my father’s tales of chivalry, of King Louis the dragon slayer, crusher of iguana heads.
The lizards were far too numerous to disperse. But you know this already. They were always there, and shall remain until the earth melts like wax.
There were frogs in the neighborhood back then, too, back in the beginning, before the City of Man paved its way over their garden. Frogs of all kinds and sizes, I hear. They had gone to the same place as the iguanas by the time I arrived. The only frog I ever saw in that neighborhood was a small one, squashed as flat as a pancake on the street. A foolish frog, no doubt, who tried to return to the garden.
But in the beginning, long before I arrived, the frogs had not yet learned to stay away. And one sunny day, as Lola sat on the porch, a giant loathsome frog jumped on her lap. She was so horrified, so shaken to the core by this surprise encounter with the enemy, that she retreated indoors for the rest of her life. Vowed never, ever to step outdoors again, and she never did.
From the day she made the vow until the day she died, the earth circled the sun about twenty times. For two decades, Lola was a self-made prisoner in her own house. I doubt she viewed herself as a prisoner, though. It was the world full of loathsome reptiles that was a prison. Her house was a sanctuary, a fortress. She was a recluse, a nun. A holy woman, keeping alive the impu
lse to crush the loathsome heads of reptiles, passing it on to some of her progeny.
My father’s mother, my grandmother. Never fully at home in this world. Convinced that reptiles were evil, that, somehow, they were not included among those creatures mentioned in the Bible, in Genesis, about whom God felt good at the dawn of creation.
I don’t know how she felt about envelopes, but I guess she had a fear of them too. Everyone in my family feared envelopes.
What we didn’t fear enough was loss. Exile and loss. So much lost, so much regained, only to be lost all over again.
Always starting all over again. Ignoring the neighbor who is lusting after our stuff. Forgetting the taste of our own urine. Buying lottery tickets. Licking envelopes absentmindedly. Marrying the wrong women. Fumbling miserably with the right women. Tossing away our inheritances for the sake of love or faith. Hating those lizards, crushing their heads. Blowing them up with firecrackers.
Hoisted on our own petardos, over and over and over.
Lucky as hell, all of us.
14
Catorce
Bless me Father, for I have sinned…”
I was practicing my first confession before my family, who sat in stunned silence. They didn’t want to hear it, but they seemed to me the most appropriate audience. After all, they were the people with whom I screwed up most often. I was seated at the dining room table, with my back to the Jesus window, the same table under which my brother Tony had once, years before, smoked a cigarette stolen from our grandfather Amador and gotten so sick that Dr. Portilla was summoned for a house call.
“Come quickly,” I remember my mom saying on the phone. “I think one of my boys is dying.”
It had all started so suddenly. There we were, watching a Popeye cartoon on television, and my brother started to make groaning noises behind me, from the couch.
“Ooooooh. Ooouuuarrghhh. Ououoooh.”
I turned around to look, from my rocking chair, and was shocked by what I saw. Tony’s face was actually greeen. As green as a dead, rotting chameleon, I swear. And he was holding his stomach.
Maria Theresa saw the whole thing. If you can find the portrait, just ask her. I’m sure she’d give you a very colorful account.
Our next-door neighbor, Chachi’s father, figured out what had happened before Dr. Portilla showed up, black bag in hand. Only someone in the cigar business could have made that instant diagnosis.
My mom had summoned Oscar. Just for company, in an hour of need, because my dad was not at home and there was no man in the house. In Cuba, you see, neighbors always came to your aid. Oscar, “Quinientos Pesos,” did his duty and took his turn at hand-holding. Well, not literally. Cubans don’t like that. If you ask Cubans to actually hold hands, especially Cuban men, you might get punched in the face, or worse.
How I hate being forced to hold hands with people other than my wife and kids at Mass during the Our Father, Sunday after Sunday. It’s not intended as a penitential rite, but it’s one of the harshest punishments ever imposed on me by the Church. Stupid American custom. I’m sure if I checked into it, I’d find out it was started by a heretic.
“I think this kid smoked some tobacco,” Quinientos Pesos said. “Search the house for a cigarette or cigar butt. I bet you’ll find one. Look for a place where he could hide to smoke it. This shade of green comes only from tobacco, I’ll bet five hundred pesos on it.”
We called Chachi’s father Quinientos Pesos because everything he boasted about seemed to be worth exactly that much—five hundred pesos. His air conditioner had cost quinientos pesos, his television, his sofa, his dog, and on and on. Everything, even the most expensive items, such as his Cadillac, had cost exactly five hundred pesos. This was more than some Cubans brought home in a year.
He loved to boast. He built himself a wondrous house right on the seashore, miles west of Havana, way past Sugar Boy’s mansion. The only problem was that construction began about the same time that Fidel rode into Havana on a Sherman tank. By the time this house was finished—and how splendid it was, how modern; it looked like a spaceship, or something from a science-fiction film—he and his family got to live in it for only a year or so. Then they left it behind, and all of its furnishings, and fled to Tampa.
Leaving something like that for the sake of principle must be tough. Especially if you’re over the age of forty and you’ve spent all of your life boasting. Even tougher if all you have to look forward to is a crappy apartment and a menial job in another country where almost everyone thinks that all you’re good for is mopping floors and cleaning out urinals. Not easy, the transformation into a spic. Not at all like a chameleon changing his color.
How well I remember that day in sixth grade, at Everglades Elementary School in Miami, when some freckle-faced kid named Curtis told me to keep my “stinkin’ mitts” off his lunch tray.
“What are mitts?” I asked, in my still-accented English.
“Dumb shit spic, yer all so stinkin’ dumb, why don’t y’all go back to yer stinkin’ country,” was his reply. One of those “stinkin’s” was really another English word that begins with “f.” I had never heard it before.
It was our maid, Inocencia, who found the cigarette butt under the dining room table. The table had a very long wine red velvet tablecloth, which reached all the way to the marble floor. Tony had hidden under there to puff on his stolen cigarette, and the smoke had all been trapped under the table. Keep in mind these were Cuban cigarettes. Unfiltered. They made Camels and Lucky Strikes seem like kids’ toys.
Tony stole cigarettes from Abuelo Amador and smoked them in secret at the age of eight. I didn’t ever do that—though I took a few puffs from Tony’s cigarettes now and then—but I was a sinner too, and had amassed all sorts of blotches on my soul. Now, in second grade, it was time to come clean. I had to confess my sins to a priest, I had to lay out my whole sordid seven-year-old past.
“These are my sins, Father…” I began my mock confession.
No one dared play the role of the priest, but they all listened to my sins, wide-eyed, as I read them off one by one. They remained as silent as stones, there, at that table, within sight of the Jesus window, under the eighteenth-century French tapestry that depicted a hunting scene. It was the Bois de something-or-other, my dad said, with authority. After all, he had been there, in that very same forest, chasing the prey, hadn’t he?
“See those hounds? I loved my hounds. They were so sweet, so smart. But the revolutionaries slaughtered them all and ate them. You know what else they did? They broke into the chapel of Saint Denis, the birthplace of Gothic architecture, that jewel built by Abbot Suger in the twelfth century, and they desecrated the tombs of all the French kings. They ripped the heart out of the corpse of my grandfather, Louis XIV, and ate it. They ate his heart. His dead, dead heart.”
What a neat little list of sins I had. But I don’t think pride was anywhere on that list, not even in disguise. Just the opposite, in fact: I was so, so proud of the list.
A list. Things you check off as you read the items, one by one. Groceries, things to do, wishes, blots on your soul.
Taco sauce, milk, sponges, orange juice, razor blades, cat litter.
Fix the faucet, mow the lawn, rake the leaves, adjust the brakes on the bicycle, clean out the gutters, renew the passport, fire all the secretaries.
New cars with ten-year warranties, a toolshed, a rooftop apartment in Paris overlooking the Île de la Cité, bathrooms that never need cleaning, a way to undo the past, an end to death.
Lies, bad words, bad thoughts, disobedience, theft.
I knew theft was just about the worst sin on the list after bad words, and I might have actually felt sorry for it. I say “might” because I’m not sure I felt any genuine remorse. I loved to steal. Busy little kleptomaniac I had been. Toys, mostly. What was this deal where the store made you pay for the stuff on the shelves? If they had the toys out in the open, where anyone could grab them, why make you hand over this stu
ff called money? Especially when they had so many other copies of the same thing you were putting in your pocket. In a bin full of army men or cowboys or cars, what difference does one less make?
“Hey, where did you get that?” The question always seemed to surprise me. How did my mom know I didn’t have this toy already? But every single time she caught me. And every time I was shocked by her omniscience.
“Uh…what do you mean?”
“Where did that toy come from?”
“Uh…I’ve had it for a long time. You just don’t remember it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, of course.”
After the first question-and-answer session, Marie Antoinette would usually walk away. Then she would return a minute or two later.
“I don’t think I ever saw that toy before. Are you stealing again?”
“No. I told you, I’ve had this soldier for a long time.”
Then came the stare. That piercing stare that went straight to the core of the soul. The same gaze you see on some Byzantine icons of Christ. That gaze that says “I know what you’ve done, and you’re a big liar.”
What could I do when pierced by those all-knowing eyes? Confess, of course.
“Well…sí, I took this from the soldier bin at Woolworth’s yesterday.”
“I thought so. How did you do it? I was watching you carefully.”
“I waited until you started talking to that lady with the blue hair. By the way, why do so many old ladies have blue hair? How does it get that way?”
“Don’t change the subject. It’s hair dye. You know stealing is wrong, don’t you? It’s a mortal sin.”
“Yes, I do. I’m sorry.” Sheepish look on my face, with no genuine inner contrition. I knew I’d do it again as soon as I had the chance.
