by Carlos Eire
I was ten years old, but I had just learned how to tie my own shoelaces, and I had never cut my own steak or buttered my own toast. I’d never lifted a finger to do anything around the house. No chores. No responsibilities. No clue about what it took to survive.
All of my friends were in the same fix, and all of them were being shipped off too. Niños bitongos, Fidel called us. A bunch of pampered boys. He loved to make fun of us in his speeches. Manuel and Rafael, Eugenio, Gerardito, my new friend Ciro and his sisters, my other new friend Daniel, Jorge, and Julio. Each and every one of us, niños bitongos on our way to the United States, to enroll in the school of hard knocks.
And in the meantime none of us were attending school, despite all the pressure our parents received from the busybodies at the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. Not since the Bay of Pigs, when all private schools were closed down. I didn’t go to school for an entire year.
As we waited for our exit permits, we spent our days playing furiously. We knew the end was around the corner.
But what a year that was! In so many ways it was every child’s dream come true. No school. No tutors. No attempt by any adult to educate us in any way. No books. No lessons of any kind. Not even English language lessons.
Well, I take that back. I should say no formal lessons.
We learned how quickly you can get drunk on Scotch whiskey one day at Eugenio’s house, when Manuel downed a small bottle on a dare. He got so drunk that he couldn’t get up off his chair and babbled nonsense. We thought it was one of the funniest things we’d ever seen. But when he passed out, we began to worry and had to ask for help. His dad had to come get him, and we all got into trouble. Eugenio’s dad wasn’t too mad about the whiskey he lost that afternoon, even though it was now as rare and precious as gold. He knew he’d have to leave it behind anyway. He was mad because we were far too young to be getting drunk.
We learned to thank our parents for keeping us out of school by looking at the books of an unlucky friend who wasn’t in limbo, like us. One math problem will remain forever burned in my memory: “Before our great Revolution Ramiro Gómez used to pay his scumbag capitalist landlord thirty pesos a month for rent. Now that our Maximum Leader Fidel Castro has made the Urban Reform possible, Comrade Gómez only has to pay twenty-five pesos. What percent reduction in rent has the Revolution granted him?”
We also learned how to break windows in all of those houses that had been abandoned, and to cruise through them, looking for treasure. But all we ever found of value was a huge box of fluorescent lightbulbs and a set of old National Geographic magazines (which everyone knew were highly valued by chauffeurs and teenage boys).
The houses were stripped bare, for the most part. Cleaned out. Trucks would pull up and clean house, literally. And there were so many of them in our neighborhood. Everyone was leaving, or so it seemed. The world was being emptied of people and filled up again with replacements. Some of the houses were filled with poor children from the provinces. Most were filled with new families, all members of the Communist Party, who brought along furnishings taken from other houses. Very, very few of these new families were African Cubans. None were Chinese. Very, very few were dark-skinned.
Before anyone left, government officials would come to the house and inventory all of their belongings. This could take days. Then, shortly before leaving, these inventory takers would show up again and make sure that every single item was still there. If anything was missing, the exit permit would be revoked. No one was allowed to take any belongings out of the country, you see, save two changes of clothing, three pairs of underwear, a hat, and one book.
The books were the only hint of mercy. When my turn came, I got to take with me a copy of Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ. Not my choice, of course. What normal boy would choose a devotional manual from the fifteenth century as his only reading material? It made me think of Eye Jesus and Window Jesus. My parents insisted I take it along, and I grumbled. But five years later, it would change my life, perhaps even save it. Wait, I’ll take back the “perhaps.” I know it saved my life. Why deny it?
Anyway, we amused ourselves the way we always had. Those fluorescent lightbulbs, for instance, were wonderful. We took dozens of them to a vacant lot and hurled them like spears or javelins. We watched them fly, fall, and explode with a loud bang—a good substitute for firecrackers, which had become extinct on our island.
The bombs had stopped since the Bay of Pigs. Every now and then something would happen, but there were very few active dissenters who were not already in jail, and those who were still at large had little to work with. A bomb here and there. Some shooting here and there, but not much.
Well, not much if you’re not one of those involved. If you happen to be there when the shooting starts, then it might seem like too much. Why deny it?
A boy who lived across the street from my grandmother was just standing around outside his house when he was hit by a stray bullet. He almost died. I heard that he didn’t know he’d been hit by a bullet and that he kept asking “Who pushed me?” as they rushed him to the hospital. Some militiamen had been chasing a guy and shooting at him. Too bad for the boy. He lost part of his stomach.
And I almost lost my life. Yes, once again, I came close. Why deny that too? I remember it better than so many other things.
There I am at the park with my friend Jorge. At almost exactly the same spot where we’d tried to launch our lizard satellite years earlier. Both of us are collecting plants and flowers for our moms. There are all these flowers at the park, and since they belong to everyone, we take them with glee. Anyway, there we are, minding our own business, when suddenly a big black car stops at the curb about twenty feet away. I pay no attention. Then another car comes along, moving very slowly. And then a guy in the first car pulls out a machine gun and points it out the window at the oncoming car.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat…
The guys in the second car pull out their guns and start firing back. And another gun comes out of the first car, and more from the second one. And a small war erupts a few feet from us. Jorge and I look at each other with that look I’ve already told you about, the one you’re better off not seeing.
I’ll spare you the sound effects this time.
Bullets are flying all over the park. That whizzing is hard to forget, and I’d heard it before. Jorge and I drop our flowers rudely and start running away from the cars as fast as possible.
In the bright, cell-soaking sunlight I run for my life, bullets whizzing past. With every step I think of the boy who got shot near my grand-mother’s house. I wait for the feeling of being pushed. I cross the street without looking in any direction. Better to be hit by a car than a bullet, no matter how much my family has warned me of the perils of being run over.
I see the garden wall ahead of me. The wall with the hedge behind it, at the house on the corner at the end of my street, the house where the medical student used to keep a real skeleton in his room. I keep my eye on the light green wall. Details jump out at me. The nubs of the stucco on the wall. The ledge on the wall. The hedge behind the wall. The leaves on the hibiscus plants, so dark green. The serrations on the edges of the leaves. The blood red hibiscus blossoms, fully open, partly open, and not yet open. The sound of the gunfire, still going on behind me. The strange sensation of my legs moving so fast. I can’t believe it’s possible to move this quickly.
I’ve taken off. I’m flying, head first, over the green wall and the hibiscus hedge. I’m Superman, at last. I’ve outrun bullets, and I’m staying aloft forever. I clear the wall and the hedge. I’m descending now. I see the lawn approaching my face. I can count every blade of that coarse grass. I see an anthill. Looks like fire ants—better stay away from them. My hands hit the ground and I roll over. Nice somersault. Didn’t know it was in me.
I’m still alive. And I missed the fire ants! I’m Superman! But where’s Jorge? He runs into the garden through the gate, huffing and puffing. I’
m relieved to see him.
Immediately, all sorts of people show up. The people inside the skeleton house come out. Other neighbors. They begin to ask us questions, all of them stupid.
“Are you all right?”
“What happened?”
What’s the matter with them? Can’t they see we’re in one piece and that the shooting is over? We can still hear a few shots in the distance, getting fainter and fainter. I’m not the least bit scared by any of this. No way. I’m a veteran bullet dodger.
I remember thinking that those two cars must have had a lot of ammunition. And that none of the men firing the guns knew how to aim. I also remember wanting to ask if they still had the skeleton in the house, and whether I could go in and see it.
A militiaman shows up about the same time as my father. He begins to ask us questions, less stupid ones, and I do most of the talking. Louis XVI, I notice, has his arm around me and is listening to me very attentively. He’s letting the militiaman ask the questions, which I think is strange. Then Marie Antoinette shows up. Her limp makes it difficult for her to walk very fast, so it’s taken her longer than everyone else to get there. The garden is quite crowded by now.
And I’m talking a mile a minute, showering the militiaman with all the details I can remember. The color of the cars. The number of people inside. The guns. What the men looked like. What the guns looked like. Even what we were doing at the park.
The militiaman takes down my name, address, and phone number. I also point down the street and say I live just a half a block away.
I go home with my parents. Jorge walks along with us. I get home, drink a glass of iced water, and start to cry.
I don’t know why I’m crying. I can’t explain it. But the tears and the sobbing bubble up like some unstoppable geyser. My dad hugs me tightly. I feel the stubble on his face, and I remember how he used to rub my face into it when I was smaller, and that makes me cry even harder.
“It’s okay now. You’re okay.”
“But I’m afraid of the militiaman…”
“Why?”
“What if he comes back and asks more questions and arrests me for stealing flowers?”
“No, no, don’t worry, that won’t happen.”
But I am worried, and in shock, and nothing he says can keep me from crying. I am scared about having confessed my crime to a militiaman. Maybe I’ll end up like Uncle Filo or Cousin Fernando. I was, after all, taking the people’s flowers. Foliage of the Revolution, which belonged to all and could never be owned by any one person or family. I had stolen from the Cuban People. It doesn’t cross my mind at the time that the bullets had anything to do with my crying.
Denial has always been one of my greatest talents. But there are some things that just can’t be denied. For instance, I can’t deny Cousin Addison’s iguanas. He has so many of them in the backyard of Aunt Carmela’s house, and they are all so huge. It would be impossible to deny the existence of those monsters, or of Addison’s bizarre garden.
Dozens upon dozens of banana trees, evenly spaced. Ponds in all shapes and sizes, stocked with exotic Cuban fish. Cages and cages full of iguanas. Addison catches them with his bare hands on the seashore east of Havana and brings them home to the cages that wait for them, cages he has built himself. Every now and then one escapes, as iguanas are wont to do when they’re in small hand-built cages, and Addison has to go looking for it. Sometimes they show up on someone’s porch, or kitchen, or living room, and Addison has to answer to his angry neighbors.
There, in the back of this gracious mansion, just a few feet from the giant Saint Lazarus statue near the kitchen, in one of the most elegant houses in Miramar, Addison, the half-Cuban, half-American former denizen of Hollywood, has built himself a banana plantation. He always acts as if it makes perfect sense. He sits back there in his comfortable wicker chair, sipping frosty drinks under the shade of the banana trees, looking very satisfied and immensely proud.
His iguanas are brown, not green. He says they are that color because they’re seashore iguanas, from a rocky place. They are camouflaged to blend in with the rocks, not with foliage.
Lizards are bad enough, but these monstrosities are beyond belief. They are so unbelievably large. And so ugly. So hideous, in fact, that I soon realize they could be an argument against the existence of God. And that frightens me more than the iguanas themselves, though I, of course, deny it.
The scales, the folds on the skin, the mouth, the tongue, the claws, the spikes, the tail. And those eyes, those horrible eyes from hell. Everything about them is pure evil. I imagine that Ernesto’s soul must look like that.
I have some trouble sitting in Addison’s banana plantation because of the iguanas, but he has a way of making you trust him, and he has convinced me that in his Eden the reptiles are trapped in the prisons they deserve. He doesn’t exactly trust those lizards, so I have to trust the guy.
Or maybe it’s his weirdness that makes me trust him. Maybe it’s because he is only half Cuban. Not many Cuban men are only half Cuban. Maybe it’s because he looks a lot like Jimmy Stewart. Not too many Cuban men resemble an actor who has kissed Kim Novak and Grace Kelly. Maybe it’s because he can talk about early Christian martyrs whose severed heads were used as balls in games at the Colosseum. No other Cuban man tells stories like that. Maybe it’s because he once lived in Hollywood and went to parties with Charlie Chaplin. Very few Cuban men have done that. Maybe it’s because he rides a bicycle everywhere. Cuban men don’t do that, for sure. Maybe it’s because he goes scuba diving and swims with sharks on purpose. Most Cuban men don’t trust sharks. Maybe it’s because he lives at his mother’s house and shares it with a very young, funny guy who is an acrobat. He might be the only man in Cuba who does that.
The acrobat is about eight years older than me, the same age as Ernesto. He has lived at Aunt Carmela’s house with Addison for a while and goes everywhere with him. He helps him catch iguanas and tends his banana garden. He brings us drinks from the kitchen when we sit out in the garden and shows me how to do all sorts of somersaults and cartwheels. Once I saw him leap over a very wide pit about thirty feet deep. I thought he would fall into the abyss, but he managed it with all the finesse of a jaguar.
I think that he and Addison are just good friends. Or maybe I deny some other thoughts.
Addison and my aunt Lucía have been spending a lot of time together at his house, along with the acrobat. Recently, Lucía, the woman without desires, has visited him almost every day. I think that maybe they are getting romantically involved. Maybe my aunt is harboring some faint, smoldering desire. Sometimes she brings me along to see Addison. By now I’ve lost my fear of Carmela’s driveway. But I still haven’t lost my fear of the inside of her house. Even a banana garden full of iguanas is preferable.
I’ve gotten to know Addison pretty well this year, not just because he comes to visit Lucía at our house often, but also because he and Lucía have invited me to join them on some of their outings. I’ve seen movies I’d never seen before, most of them from the silent era. Addison knew some of the people who made them. I’ve also seen my very first live staged play with them: El robo del cochino. The Theft of the Pig. It was a brand-new play written by a Cuban, and it was set in the countryside. I’d never seen live actors before, or seen a story written by a Cuban, and I sat there, stunned, wondering how it was that they had memorized all that dialogue. Or maybe they were making it up? Every bad word in the book was uttered in that theater that evening, and some I’d never heard before. No one ever used bad words in movies. How could they get away with this on stage? No one would dare write a script like this, not even a Cuban.
It was a boring story, but an ear-opening and eye-opening experience. The whole play was about the exploitation of laborers, and the evil lives of the landowners, and the injustice of claiming ownership over anything. At the end of the play, of course, the pig got slaughtered. But since it was an invisible pig, there was no blood shed on the stage, and no squ
ealing.
I may be missing a lot of school this year, but the play alone is worth about two months of formal education. The banana plantation, the ponds, the iguanas, and the circus acrobat are worth about another month. Addison’s stories about Hollywood are also worth another month or so. That’s about half a school year right there.
The shoot-out at the park is worth the other half, all by itself.
The fights between my mother and father aren’t worth anything. Every now and then they scream at each other. Half of the time I don’t know why, exactly. But the other half of the time I know exactly what they are arguing about: what to do with Tony and me.
Somehow Marie Antoinette has managed to wear down Louis XVI. She’s gotten him to agree to send us to the United States. The catch seems to be that she is handling the whole thing by herself. He wants no part of it, and carries on with his life as if none of this were happening, collecting art and antiques by the truckload as other collectors flee the country.
So Marie Antoinette has set herself to the task of shipping Tony and me to the States. And somehow she is managing to do it, all by herself. She has stood in line for our visa waivers at the Swiss embassy. She has stood in line for our passports. She has stood in line to request our exit permits. She has hired a lawyer to draw up all the necessary papers, even though her own husband is a judge and attorney. She has talked to a thousand and one people on the phone and in person. She has taken buses and taxicabs everywhere.
One day she calls my father’s friend Puentes Pi, the crime scene photographer, and arranges for our passport pictures to be taken. Puentes Pi shows up after dinner one evening with that old camera of his, the same one he uses to photograph corpses. His camera has captured a thousand images of people who’ve been murdered or run over by cars. It has also captured hundreds of images of Tony and me growing up. He is always there, it seems, taking pictures. Not just on birthdays, but throughout the entire year. He has the nicest old camera, with flashbulbs that explode like small firecrackers. He is a determined enemy of the candid photo, too. He makes us pose and pose and pose, as if he were painting a portrait. Maybe it’s because he is so used to photographing corpses, which are always in their ultimate pose.
