by Carlos Eire
This was no war movie. This was real life.
But it was on television. And that gave it an air of make-believe, put it all at a safe distance. The men wielding the rifles were as threatening to me as the torpid guards of Ming the Merciless on Flash Gordon. And my attention that year was really focused on The Vikings, which I must have seen about ten times. That film was so much better than all this shooting on television. It was in color, and it showed you men fighting and dying up close. There was one scene where a guy was crushed to death by a battering ram, and another where a guy got shot through the head by an arrow. And The Vikings had axes, lots of them. Axes flying through the air. Kirk Douglas was so good with those axes. He could even cut off a buxom wench’s blonde braids from across the room and do no harm to her head, neck, or body. All this while dead drunk on mead, or whatever it was that Vikings drank.
Years later, in Chicago, I would meet two girls roughly my age who had seen their own father dragged from their house weeping and screaming, “Please don’t kill me, please don’t!” He had soiled his pants on the way to the paredón, and begged for his life until the split second when the bullets ripped into him. These girls had seen it, lived through it. His crime had been working for the Batista regime. He hadn’t killed or tortured anyone, they said. I think he had been mayor of their town. When they told me the story everything I had seen on television years earlier, under the care of Maria Theresa, seemed so different.
I didn’t know it at the time because my parents shielded me from it, but I had a relative who ended up at the paredón too. And he had been as brave as Ernest Borgnine at the wolf pit, maybe even braver. Instead of invoking the father of all the gods, Odin, he had grabbed his crotch with his right hand, though his arms were bound around his chest, and shouted, “Shoot here first, maricones! Shoot this!”
That would be the Cuban way, so different from the Viking way.
Cojones. Balls. Not Odin, father of the gods, King of Valhalla. Balls. My balls, maricones. Go to hell, you fags, I’m going to die like a man.
Too bad I didn’t find out until I was forty-one years old. Knowing this earlier might have changed my life.
My father, the former Louis XVI, watched all this with a sense of déjà vu, perhaps even with ennui. Here we go again. Mobs, chants, trials, death sentences based on mere suspicion. Executions for all to see. Ho-hum. Interesting, how they use rifles now, and how television makes it possible for so many more to witness the killing. That square in Paris now known as the Place de Concorde never did hold enough people. So few, so relatively few were able to see me lose my head. Ho-hum, I think I’ll go find some more stuff for my art collection.
The judge, my father, watched at home on his television and did nothing. I don’t mean to say that he should have tried to stop the killing, as a judge, as a representative of the law. Only a suicidal maniac would have placed himself between the firing squads and their victims. This wave of executions was a giant tsunami, stirred up in an ocean of hate and pain. There was no stopping it. Everyone knew that. No, what I mean is that he should have thought of fleeing the instant the first bullet tore through the flesh of an esbirro, as Batista’s supporters were known. It still makes me wince. He did nothing but buy more stuff.
He, of all people.
What was going through his head? The head he had supposedly once lost to the guillotine? Why didn’t he pack up his whole damn art collection, find the first ship out of Cuba, and take us to the United States? Or to Spain, where we had family? Or even better, to Norway, where the Vikings lived, and there were no lizards at all? All I remember him saying on the day Fidel Castro rode into Havana astride a Sherman tank, was, “This is no good. Expect trouble. This guy’s no good. Este tipo es malo.”
A few months later, there we were, sitting in the Miramar Theater, watching The Vikings for free, as our world began to crumble. Hadn’t he learned enough from that sorry experience in 1789?
We would keep going to the movies until the day we left. And he kept buying stuff even after we left, until the day he died. Kept adding to his collection until there was no longer any room left in the house for more stuff.
At least the stuff was there to keep him company. And Ernesto. He was there with him as he died. And he remained there as custodian of the collection and occupant of the house. You can’t really “own” anything in Cuba, you see. The state owns everything—excuse me—the people own everything. So you occupy houses and take care of the stuff in them, even though it’s never yours. There is no “yours” or “mine” in a Marxist-Leninist paradise. We hear rumors Ernesto has sold it all, piece by piece, despite the fact that he doesn’t legally own any of it.
Funny, how I ended up with a half brother of sorts, just like Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas in The Vikings. The difference in my case being that I never had even a little stump of a sword to wield against him. Good thing, too, I think. Fratricide has a strong gravitational pull, let me tell you. That’s why a fragment of a sword will sometimes suffice.
My father didn’t have a Viking funeral after his heart burst. He was buried quickly at the family pantheon, and by the time I learned of his death, his corpse was already ten feet under ground in our marble vault, two thousand miles away from me, and his immortal soul was on its way to a new body somewhere else, perhaps already in some woman’s womb. Maybe in Norway, somewhere near a fjord.
How I wish I could let go of the images I have of the death I never witnessed and the funeral I never got to attend, let go of what doesn’t belong in the core of my soul, let go of all the passions that rule me. Letting go is a worthy goal, perhaps the worthiest of all.
Saintly Johannes Eckhart, Meister Eckhart, who was nearly declared a heretic in the fourteenth century for all the wrong reasons, had it all figured out. The only reason we suffer, he said, is that we are attached to stuff and to people. What you have to do is to stop loving. No attachment, no pain. So simple. So thoroughly German. Gelassenheit. What a concept. The Meister came up with it. It’s what we should all aim for, he taught. The state of letting go. Letting-go-ness. You even have to let go of God, he warned. “I pray God may rid me of God,” he said.
Maybe a German can let go, in the thick autumn fog of Cologne, in the dead of a dim northern winter, when the sun barely shines for six hours a day, if it shines at all. But can a Cuban ever let go? Sorry, Meister Eckhart, it must be that sunlight. I love you, dear Meister, love you dearly, but that damn sunlight stays with you forever. It’s burned into your cells. God is light, is he not, liebe Meister? What do you do if your very self is already suffused with the essence of God? If your memories themselves are rays of light from heaven? How can you let go?
Poor Saint John of the Cross, the Spanish Carmelite monk. Born Juan de Yepes, descended from Jews, transformed into Juan de la Cruz when he took the cowl. He enjoyed less sunshine than Cubans, but more than Germans. He tried to be German, like you, dear Meister. He tried so hard to be like you that his Spanish Carmelite brethren had to lock him up and physically abuse him on a daily basis back in the sixteenth century. He read what your Dutch and German disciples wrote. And look what happened to him. He wrote the greatest love poems of all time. And what did he say in these poems?
Love hurts. It never stops hurting. God is love, God is pain. Pain and joy are one and the same. Life is longing. Pure longing. Nothing but unrequited love.
Blame it on the sun, and the sunlight. It makes as much sense as anything. With all that light, Cubans have a hard time letting go. Even if they only lived in the place for one day before being whisked away, the sunlight is forever trapped in their blood. We love much too deeply. I see this trait in my half-Cuban children, full-blown at times, and they haven’t even been to Miami yet.
Time to think Nordic once again. Which is what I tried to do as a child, mindful of the effect that sunlight was having on me.
I would look at maps of the world and long for northern latitudes. I actually used to think that the farther north you wen
t on the globe, the purer things became. I remember stretching out on the cold, white marble floor of my house, the closest I could get to ice, and staring at maps for hours and hours, wondering what it would be like anywhere north of Cuba, and especially above latitude forty-five degrees North. Or even better, fifty degrees North, no, eighty degrees North. How I wanted to live in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, Siberia, Yukon, Baffin Island. The North Pole. All that white ice, all that snow and cold air. So pure, so good. Snow was grace itself, falling from heaven; it didn’t simply hide evil, but vanquished it. And I longed for it, fervently, there in Havana.
The very thought of darkness for twenty-three hours a day also seemed so inviting. Wasn’t the Miramar Theater always dark and cold? How nice it was, so different from the blinding sunlight outside and the heat that came with it.
Plus, didn’t Santa Claus live at the North Pole? He must know what he is doing. He is, after all, the nicest guy on earth. Wouldn’t the nicest guy live in the nicest place?
I had it all figured out, and The Vikings helped me put it all into place in air-conditioned darkness. Northern was better. Definitely. Greater tolerance for pain, greater valor, and no lizards on top of it. Axes. Big axes flying through the air. Arrows and battering rams. Swords. Sword stumps, even. No firing squads, no cowardly shooting at men in soiled pants who were tied up and couldn’t defend themselves. If you had a score to settle, you fought hand-to-hand and you gave your opponent a chance. You didn’t just round up those who didn’t like you and shoot them dead by the thousands.
And you could still love up North. Burn like a bleedin’ volcano, you could, like one-eyed Kirk. But you could also achieve gelassenheit, if you so wished.
That’s what happened to one-eyed Kirk at the end of the movie, you know. Just as he gained the upper hand against his own half brother, just as he was about to win the object of his affections, he decided to let go. He stood there, dumbstruck and scared at the prospect of winning, of being attached. He thought of Janet Leigh’s blue eyes, thought of the deep blue northern sea, and he let go. I bet he prayed to Odin: “Help me let go, Odin, grant me gelassenheit. Rid me of desire, rid me of passion.”
How I envy Kirk. Odin heard him, in Valhalla, and Kirk was saved from himself. Rescued from burning passion. No such luck for me.
I yam what I yam. Soy Cubano. Cubanus sum.
And even in New England I wait for snow.
24
Veinticuatro
The fireflies were out that night. Cocuyos. They came out of the shrubs, and the trees, and the lawns, and they blinked with abandon, flashing green when you least expected it. They zigged and zagged, hovered and rose and descended, and made your heart skip a beat. Kids all over the island chased them down and trapped them in jars with metal lids that had holes punched into them with a hammer and a nail.
Never mind the new world in the making. On hot tropical nights like that there were too many parties to count. Rum, limes, beer, loud music that unmasked veiled mysteries, and far too many cigarettes. Shouting, sweating, dancing, whispering, and far too many hands, hips, and lips on forbidden places.
And prayers, too. Always. Some blasphemous, some devout.
We walked down Fifth Avenue with large candles in our hands, our lights shining like giant fireflies in the night. Hundreds of human fireflies: insects challenging the gloom of night on the feast of Saint Anne, which also happened to be the sacred anniversary of the Revolution. Well-to-do insects, for the most part, out for a transcendent stroll on a hot night in late July, just a hair or two south of the Tropic of Cancer.
It was a grand procession, on the grandest of avenues. We had filed out of the Church of Jesús de Miramar, that temple to wealth and privilege, and made a circle up one side of the elegant boulevard for a few blocks and back down the other side to the church. Quinta Avenida had such a beautiful park right in the middle, all along its median strip. It stretched for miles.
What a church that was, so full of murals depicting the passion of Jesus of Nazareth. Huge, colorful murals, most of them densely packed with crowds and people. The oddest thing was that many of those who had paid for the murals had been included in these crowd scenes. Louis XVI loved pointing out to me people that he knew, and, even more, fingering people who were there in church, a few pews away.
“Look, there’s Saint Peter, and there’s Saint John. Look, there’s Mary Magdalen. Look, there’s Joseph of Arimathea, and Veronica. Look, there’s Longinus, the Roman centurion.”
And, sure enough, there they were. They looked a little older, all of them, but the artist was so good, he had captured their likenesses perfectly, almost as well as in a photograph.
What a great deal. Your face preserved on a church wall, for all to see, until Doomsday, portraying a character from the Bible. Imagine that.
“Hey, why aren’t any of us up there?”
“It costs too much money.” A simple and honest reply from the former King of France. He preferred to spend his money collecting art: better to own a painting than to be in a painting.
“Is Judas here today?”
“No. Think about it. Would anyone pay to be Judas?”
“What about that guy with the funny hat?”
“The High Priest Caiphas? No, he’s as bad as Judas.”
“What about Pilate?”
“Yes, he’s here today. Look, over there, in the third pew.”
And there was Pilate. Wow.
I still see that man’s face every time Pilate’s name comes up in the Creed, or the gospel readings during Holy Week. It’s the only face Pilate will ever have, or could ever have.
“He’s a judge, you know. We went to law school together. He’s just like me, except he’s a magistrate and earns a lot more.”
“But wasn’t Pilate a bad guy, like Judas? Didn’t he condemn Jesus to death?”
“No, he wasn’t bad, really. He was just doing his job…and he washed his hands…and he repented later and became a Christian before he died. I think he might even be a saint. It’s not easy to be a judge, you know. It’s a great honor to be Pilate in these murals. I wish I could have afforded it.”
Pilate, like all the other males in that church, had to take the heat like a man. Out came the white handkerchief now and then to wipe the brow and dab the upper lip and chin and neck. But no fanning. Real machos knew how to take the heat without removing their jackets.
Women got to cool themselves off and, sometimes, their little children. Mary Magdalen really knew how to whip out that fan. She was the best of them all, the one who set the rhythm for all the other women, and determined the appropriate number of fannings between the opening and closing of those instruments of femininity.
The delicate, lacy veils the women had to wear over their heads would dance a little, fluttering in the self-made breeze.
Oremus.
“Hey, mami, could you fan me a little? It’s so hot in here.”
Swishhh, snap, fan, fan, fan, fan, fan, fan, fan, swishh, SNAP!
“Is that it? Keep going, please…It’s so hot in here.”
“Shhh, pay attention to the Mass. Offer the heat up as a sacrifice. It’s a good penance.”
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
How I hated that word sacrificio. How I hate it still.
It’s the same with “patience.” What a hateful word. It may earn you salvation to be self-sacrificing and patient, but there’s no denying the fact that it’s a pain in the here and now to put up with unpleasant things. Like the heat in church. Or like waiting for your mother to buy fabric in one of those infinitely boring stores on Calle Muralla, owned by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who prefer to call themselves Poles, rather than Jews.
Rumor had it that the artist who painted the passion murals had used a young Polaco from Calle Muralla as his model for Jesus. But it was just a rumor, fueled by the fact that no one at that church came close to looking like the Jesus in the murals.
My dad didn’t know for sure. But he did know he had seen a few Jewish guys who looked just like Jesus.
Of course, he remembered what Jesus looked like from one of his previous lives.
Anyway, I couldn’t decide what I hated more, a hot church or a fabric store. Both required patience and self-sacrifice. Could there be anything more boring than Mass or a store full of nothing but bolts of cloth?
“Are you done yet? When will Mass end? How much longer?”
“Be patient.”
“And why can’t you fan me some more?”
“Offer it up as a sacrifice.”
The legless black woman who was always outside, sitting on the steps that led to the parking lot, certainly had a lot of patience. She just sat there Sunday after Sunday, her stumps on display, her little drooling boy stretched across her lap, her hand outstretched for alms. Oh, I think I forgot to tell you about the drooling boy before, when I mentioned this woman.
Yes, she had a little boy about my age who could do nothing but drool and stare into space with empty eyes. He was so thin he looked more like a skeleton than a living, breathing boy.
I don’t know how she managed to get herself to church every Sunday, along with her boy, without legs and without a car. But there she was, every Sunday, on the church steps, following us, it seemed. If not at Jesús de Miramar, then at Santa Rita, near that park where the firecracker blew up in my hand, or at San Antonio, where I took my first communion.
And she smelled so bad, this beggar who sat in the bright sun every Sunday morning. It was a stench like no other. Very different from the awful smell of butcher shops, but definitely in the same league. She made me close my eyes and hold my breath as I walked out of church every Sunday morning. But sometimes she caught my eye. And that was such an awful thing, when she stared right at me and held her hand out close to my face. I had no tolerance for her pain, or her neediness, or her drooling boy.
