Waiting for Snow in Havana

by Carlos Eire

  “Ay, Dios mío.” Oh, my God. Always a woman’s voice for this phrase. Only women were supposed to say this. Don’t ask why.

  My dad had to deal with a lot of these accidents in court, so I’ll cut him some slack. In his world, at least half the people were arrollados. The other half were the drivers who ran them over. And I’m sure he had to linger over all the gory details. It was his job.

  But for us, arrollados were only in stories. Except for the afternoon I actually got to see a guy get hit by a car, while out with my dad.

  Well, I really didn’t see it happen. I only heard it—a loud noise off to my left as we were crossing a wide boulevard in Vedado, one of the older suburbs of Havana. It was, I must admit, a most disgusting-sounding thud. It sounded like twenty watermelons dropping onto the ground at once. After the thud came the squealing of brakes.

  Then I remember hearing a woman scream near us, “Ay, Dios mío!” And people running, and more screaming and shouting. And my dad saying, “Mira eso!” Look at that. And my dad turning my head with his hands.

  A very fat man lay sprawled on the street about a hundred yards away. He was wearing a white shirt and green pants. The man lay motionless on the street, flat on his back, about ten yards behind a car with a smashed-up hood and a broken windshield. His limbs looked awfully funny—twisted like a rag doll’s. And he didn’t have any shoes on. Some people knelt around him. Soon a circle of people enveloped him and he disappeared from view.

  “Look at that. He must have gone sailing over the roof of the car,” said the judge.

  “What do you mean, Papa?”

  “I mean that when he got hit, the impact sent him flying over the car, and that’s why he’s lying there so far behind it. I bet he’s dead. No one can survive an impact like that. Look, the car even knocked off his shoes. Whenever that happens, forget it, you’re dead.”

  “How come I don’t see any blood?”

  “Internal injuries. Bad sign.”

  “Can we go take a look close up?”

  “No, no. Better not…ah…here are the police. Good. They’ll handle it. Let’s get going. I’m glad this isn’t my district, and I won’t have to hear the case. I have more of these than I can stomach.”

  And that was it. I had seen proof of the danger of traffic. Cars did hit people. It wasn’t at all like embolias, calambres, and pulmonía.

  But I was still annoyed by the restrictions placed on my bike riding. Strict boundaries. Can’t cross Seventh Avenue. Can’t cross this street, can’t cross that street. Not by yourself. Never. Te puede arrollar un carro. A car could run you over.

  I knew it could never happen to me, but I obeyed all the same.

  My brother Tony never listened to these rules. I think he rode his bike all over Havana, and my parents never knew. He did this with Manuel and Eugenio. But I didn’t, and neither did Rafael, or Jorge, or Julio. We were younger and dumber.

  Now, years later, I pray every night that my children will be even dumber than I was.

  And then there were always bad people who wanted to snatch you away and hurt you terribly. Mala gente. Not just El Colorado and his cronies, but legions of bad people whose sole purpose in life was to inflict pain on others. There were specialists among the mala gente who targeted children. This we heard from very early on. I guess my dad was all too familiar with this kind of danger too, and had trouble handling those cases.

  Like every kid on earth who is warned about mala gente, I didn’t pay much attention to this. I learned not to accept candy from strangers or to climb into cars with people I didn’t know, but I didn’t learn to be as cagey as a fox. Which is what you need to learn about when dealing with bad people. They’re usually much too clever, especially when they are hell-bent on damaging the lives of others.

  How I wish I had listened more carefully to that item on the list of dangers. Right in front of my very own house, one day, after the world changed, not long before I left Cuba, one of those bad people would try to harm me. And if it hadn’t been for our neighborhood wino, El Loco, who rescued me, God knows what might have happened. But that story will have to wait. Not now; I’m not ready. Just let me say that the guy looked perfectly normal, and that a knife was involved.

  For now all I can do is focus on one sweet irony. My family had lots of rules for avoiding peril, and death lurked everywhere for us. Yet we played with firecrackers and went car surfing under killer waves. We also swam in shark-infested waters all the time. Fernando, who understood the rules so well, ended up becoming a jet pilot, and later, a bomber and gunrunner. How could this be?

  My family’s logic, like Kantian logic, can only take you so far. Maybe if you think about death all the time and are always trying to communicate with the dead, you’ll eventually find all sorts of odd ways to flirt with danger, even with death itself.

  So, though we sat on the beach for three hours after lunch, waiting for our food to be fully digested, we got to throw rocks at one another. And my dad watched us do it. Sometimes he even helped us find good rocks.

  Those were splendid rock fights we had. I can’t count how many times we did it, because we did it practically all the time. Usually at vacant lots, or on the street, or down at La Puntilla, on the seashore, where we also flew kites. The best rocks were there. They were all pointy and sharp edged. Killer rocks.

  Once, for three or four incredible months, when the gas company dug trenches for a new pipeline in our neighborhood, we not only had an endless supply of the most beautiful chunks of quartz to heave at one another, we actually had trenches, too. And we stocked up on those quartz chunks for future fights. Rocks are recyclable, you know. Even when bloodstained.

  What we usually did was break up into two teams and throw rocks at one another. Was there a point to this? Any rules? Any end to the game? No to all three. Stupid questions. This was sheer, pointless anarchy.

  We all had scars to boast about. Especially the ones that had required stitches. Eugenio’s blond head was full of scars. Manuel had a very nice scar on his head, which always gleamed through his shortly cropped black hair. Tony had one too, though smaller. I had a nice scar above my left eyebrow back then. When my thin blond eyebrows turned into the Black Forest later in life, the scar was swallowed up, and I’ve lost track of it. Maybe it’s still there. I was very proud of it. Especially because it was a scar caused by an almond, rather than a rock.

  Yes, an almond. Almonds can do a lot of damage. Forget the almonds we all buy at the store, which have all been removed from their hard, pointy shells. I’m talking about almonds fresh off the tree. The fresh almonds we had at the play yard at my school, La Salle de Miramar, and which we loved to throw at one another.

  All this under the approving gaze of the Christian Brothers, of course.

  One day we were having a monster almond fight, which was fairly common. We were divided into two camps, facing each other about twenty yards apart, throwing almonds at one another as hard as we could. I was enjoying myself as thoroughly as I always did when throwing hard objects at other children. Then, WHAM! I didn’t see it coming, but I felt it hit for sure, right above my eye, that almond. A bright, bright flash of light and then utter blackness.

  The next thing I know, I’m in the arms of one of the Christian Brothers. It might have been Brother Pedro, since I was in first grade. He was swabbing my forehead with a handkerchief, and it had red stains on it. My forehead hurt a lot. And so did my whole head. And I felt very dizzy.

  The almond fight was over, and a circle of kids hovered over me.

  “Hey, that’s a nice hole.”

  “Yeah, look, it’s so perfectly round.”

  “A hole? I have a hole in my head?”

  “Yes,” said the brother softly, “but don’t worry, it’s not that big.”

  I felt for it with my fingers, and found it. It seemed big enough to me. And deep.

  “I think you’d better go home early today, Nieto. Have your mom take care of you, maybe take you to a
doctor. You might need stitches.”

  Well, as it turned out, I didn’t get any stitches. But I did get to go home early and I spent the rest of the day in bed with a very bad headache.

  Mothers of the world, imagine what might have happened if the almond had hit me directly in the eye, a fraction of an inch lower? That point was sharp. Very sharp. Ay, Dios mío.

  Yes, I was lucky most of the time, and so were all of us, come to think of it. We all took direct hits to the head and face, and no one lost an eye or a tooth. I did get hit in the eye by a rock once. Jorge threw it at me. I think what saved me was the fact that Jorge was only about seven years old at the time and couldn’t pack much of a punch. I had a very nice black eye for a while, but no eye damage.

  I also took direct hits to the ears, twice, and to the mouth, three times. I lost count of how many rocks bounced off the back and top of my head. How about the forehead? Just a few hits, but none as tremendous as that almond.

  But Ernesto was not so lucky. No.

  Ernesto didn’t know what to do in a rock fight. He was so inexperienced. But every now and then, there he’d be, and he’d try to join in. Like that one day at La Puntilla, when my dad brought him along with the rest of us. On that fateful day we had a monster fight. Maybe Ernesto’s presence brought out extra hostility in our rock throwing that day.

  As always, we picked up rocks so fast we hardly had time to look at them. Some were on the large side. We scurried over those sharp-edged rocks like crabs looking for their lunch in the tidal pools, picking up whatever we could find and throwing it. Then we started to throw more furiously than usual. A few hits here and there. The requisite “Ay!,” the occasional, forbidden “Coño!” The laughter. You should have been there. We laughed every time someone got hit. We laughed when we missed. We laughed and laughed. If Adam and Eve hadn’t screwed up so badly, and their children had been able to play in the Garden of Eden, they would have laughed just like we did that day, when we threw rocks at one another on the edge of the turquoise sea.

  But we were in a different garden. And we were picking up larger and larger rocks to throw. Fist-size rocks at first. Then larger and larger and larger. We couldn’t throw these big ones as far or as hard, but it was fun to watch them fly, and to hear them thud when they hit the ground. These big rocks were easy to duck, at least when they came at you one at a time.

  But it was raining big rocks. And it was getting harder and harder to throw and duck at the same time. Experience was the key to survival.

  My dad watched this all with a bemused look on his face. Not a word from the King of France. Maybe he had watched peasants doing this for amusement on Sundays and feast days. He seemed totally unworried.

  Eugenio, el Alocado. Crazed Eugenio. You should have known better, nutty Eugenio. You picked up a jagged rock way too large, about the size of an American football, and you heaved it with both hands. We all saw it fly through the air, twisting and turning as it valiantly tried to defy gravity. All of us saw it except Ernesto, who had bent down to pick up a rock of his own. The rock began its descent just as Ernesto was raising his head. And it became painfully clear to all of us that Ernesto’s face was in the path of the rock, and that it was moving too fast for him to avoid it.

  I know it happened quickly, but it seemed to take forever, that meeting between Ernesto’s face and Eugenio’s rock.

  Few noises in the world compare to that of a large rock breaking someone’s nose. I won’t even try to describe it; really bad things are better left to the imagination. Imagine the sound of a nose being totally flattened all at once. Imagine, too, the sound made by the consciences of seven boys who don’t know if they feel all that sorry to see another boy’s nose crushed.

  Ernesto passed out. He was knocked out cold, just as I had been by the almond. But this was no almond. This was a small boulder. And it put out Ernesto’s lights with fifty times the force of my stupid little almond. King Louis rushed over immediately, moving faster than I had ever seen him move before, and cradled Ernesto’s head in his arms.

  Ernesto was bleeding as none of us had ever seen anyone bleed, not even in a movie. Blood was streaming out of what had been his nose like two small rivers. Not at all like the champagne that had spurted out of Jorge’s nose for a few seconds at that wedding where he and I got drunk. Not at all like the tiny rivulets that dribbled down Kirk Douglas’ face in The Vikings when his eye was mauled by a hawk’s talons. These were two swiftly flowing rivers pouring forth from Ernesto’s nose, two strong red gods. And they had no intention of drying up, or going away anytime soon. But my dad managed to tame them, to slow down the bleeding with his handkerchief.

  I’ve often wondered if cousin Fernando’s nose bled like that when he was tortured by Fidel’s men. Did his nose bleed more or less when he was beaten? About the same? Did anyone laugh while the blood flowed? I’ve also wondered: did Fernando’s gums bleed as much when he pulled out his teeth with his own fingers, one by one, in his dark, dark cell, during those twenty-three years in prison?

  Ernesto was out for a long time. King Louis tried to revive him, gently, but Ernesto just lay there, as limp as the arrollado I had seen get hit by a car. We all stood there speechless, examining Ernesto’s face and my dad’s. Antonio Nieto, my father, looked so pained, so worried, so angry. I was too green and too thickheaded then to know that love and worry are two faces of the same coin, and that if you flip that coin fast enough, you can also see anger. I just thought he was angry at us.

  When Ernesto finally came to, my dad helped him into the car and rushed him home so he could clean up before going to the hospital. Only a Nieto would do something like that. God forbid you show up at the emergency room with a broken nose, and possibly a concussion, bleeding profusely, with bloodstains on your shirt. Clean shirts were a must. And you had to have that undershirt, too. A clean one.

  It took a very long time for Ernesto’s nose to heal, and it never looked right again, even after surgery. The doctors managed to give him a nose again, but it was all twisted, and he was left with the queerest whistling sound as he breathed. You could always tell when he was near because of that whistle. It was an angry whistle, I swear it was. Every breath Ernesto took from that day forward was filled with resentment, and each of those whistles, each and every breath, was a word of sorts. An angry word, each breath, forming sentences, and paragraphs, and pages, and books. Volumes and volumes of God knows what kind of bitter invective against us, Judge Nieto’s sons, and towards all of our friends.

  We who weren’t Ernesto went on living our lives as always, under the blazing sunlight by day, under our white mosquito tents by night. We woke up almost every single morning to the sunlight streaming in, revealing dust in the air, swirling silently. If we had listened carefully enough, I’m sure we could have heard the dust and also the sunlight falling on each speck of dust. I know we could have, if we’d only tried. I know this as I know other things that are hard to prove.

  Some mornings we woke up to find a lone mosquito trapped in the tent. The buzzing was loud enough to be mistaken for an alarm clock, or a car without a muffler, especially when the mosquito landed on your ear. And sometimes they did just that. Those mosquitoes didn’t know when to quit. Trapped inside the tent all night, a whole human body all to themselves. They would gorge themselves so much they could hardly fly.

  Too happy for their own damn good, those bugs. Too noisy too. Buzzing so happily, so deliriously. So loudly. Vroooooooooommmm.

  Maybe as loudly as the dust and the sunlight. Maybe as loudly as twenty watermelons hitting the ground all at once.

  Those of us who weren’t Ernesto, I repeat, went on living our lives as always, breathing through both nostrils, silently, waking up sometimes to find a lone fat mosquito in our tent. I don’t know about the others in their beds, but I always made sure that the big fat mosquitoes who had spent an entire night drinking my hot red blood paid for their last supper. I squashed them all, flattened them like Ernesto’s
nose. They popped between my fingertips, and I loved to hear that sound.

  And my own blood would go spurting out of their tiny little squished bodies, flying out in tiny droplets that stained my fingers and the mosquito tent in the same pattern as hibiscus blossoms. And I heard that, too.

  I had no fears. Not then. Not yet. Pantheons, embolias, arrollados, bad people, rocks in the eye. Death. Heard about them all, and didn’t really hear at all. All of them for others, not for me. What did I know, really? What did any of us know? We couldn’t hear the dust specks. Couldn’t hear the sound of our own end approaching, second by second.

  Vrooooooooooooooooooommm!

  “Hey, Carlitos, jump in! Let’s go plant some bombs! Jump in, quick!”

  Vrooooooooooooooooooommm!

  How I wish you’d asked me, Fernando. How much, how deeply I wish you had.

  16

  Dieciseis

  They appear suddenly, out of nowhere, when I least expect it. They float into view, and linger there longer than all the others, without changing shape, or changing so slowly as to fool me into thinking they can’t change at all.

  They claim a lot of the sky, always making sure that there is plenty of blue between them and all the others. In all directions. And they’re never upside down. Sideways, sometimes. But upside down, never.

  They come in all sizes. Perspective is their favorite language for kidding around. Some of them are foreshortened. Some are elongated. Some are compact. Some are almost abstract. Some are cubist. The cubist ones are my favorites because they know they are puns.

  What to make of these clouds I see so often? These clouds in the shape of Cuba?