by Carlos Eire
Truth, beauty, goodness, and eternity were out there dancing with the sharks and all the other creatures that feed upon one another—and sometimes upon humans—with sharp teeth or stinging venom. Love was there too, unencumbered by self-centeredness, possessiveness, doubts, or jealousy. Trouble-free love, squirming inside a wondrous sea—a sea already too beautiful to take in.
Was this a farewell vision of everything that was beautiful in my birthplace, all wrapped into one?
This was so much nicer than Window Jesus or Eye Jesus coming to life. This was grace, pure grace, out there, embodied amidst the sharks.
I don’t know how long I stood there, or what I said. I had the strangest sensation of not having my feet planted on the ground. Then my brother and my friends Rafael and Manuel showed up. Eugenio was already beyond the horizon, in the United States. We all wondered out loud as to what it could be, and what El Alocado might have said.
Tony called out to our dad, and he came over, accompanied by Ernesto. With all of his years of experience in this life and in previous ones, Louis XVI, too, was stumped.
“That is truly amazing. Que maravilla!”
The miracle was not just for me, for sure. That made it even nicer.
Our noise attracted several other people.
“Parrot fish. It’s a whole school of them,” said the man behind me. “Hundreds and hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. I’ve never seen that many all at once.” He explained to us all how parrot fish swam in groups and how they swarmed sometimes.
I thought of the shark pool at the aquarium and the parrot fish we had rescued. We went back about once a week, just to see him. Of course, each time we went we also stared at the shark pool. It kept getting more and more crowded.
And the diving board never shut up about Ernesto. Never. “Do it now. Push him in. Sneak up on him from behind. You’ll feel so much better after you do it. Push him in. Now!”
We all stood there on that dock, watching the miracle unfold for a long, long time. It was as if we were glued to the dock and aloft at the same time. Ernesto stood there too, totally silent.
Eventually, the miracle vanished just as it had arrived. The colors moved farther and farther away, towards the horizon, northwards, riding the Gulf Stream, towards the United States. And then, suddenly, we could no longer see them.
Something else to leave behind, I thought.
No amount of wishing on our part brought them back that day or any other day, and no memory has ever come close to the real thing. After staring at the sea for a while, we went home to await the desengaño that was sure to follow.
36
Treinta Y Seis
It was a grand staircase all right. I’d never seen one so grand or so impressive or so modern. It looked like a giant, graceful corkscrew, or one of the paper streamers Cubans used to throw into the air at Carnival and at birthday parties.
And it seemed to float in the air.
It had a handrail, I think. It must have had one. Cubans were careless about safety—except when it came to swimming after eating or catching pneumonia—but I don’t think they would have been so reckless as to build a freestanding staircase without a handrail.
The staircase was inside a beautiful house not very far from my own in Miramar. The house had a swimming pool outside, free of sharks, and five marble statues around the pool. The five statues represented the five girls in the family, now fully grown.
The family that lived in the house were friends of my mother and her family and had owned a chain of bedding stores. All of the money used to build that house came from something as prosaic as mattresses and beds.
My aunt Lily had been engaged to an uncle of the five girls. But he had died very young, and my aunt never got to marry him. I have his sapphire ring, which my mother snuck out of Cuba inside a sanitary napkin, but I don’t wear it. It’s much too small for me, so my wife wears it. Better that it be on a woman’s finger, anyway. Whenever I think of that family, only women come to mind.
The house was inhabited by women only. The widowed matriarch, Pilar, and four of her five daughters. Three were unmarried, one was divorced. Another one was married and lived nearby.
They were all very beautiful, these five women. Their mother had almost become a nun, and their father had studied for the priesthood. The almost-nun and the almost-priest were appropriately blessed with five enchanting daughters.
One balmy evening, Fidel met one of the daughters at a restaurant. At that time, fairly early in the Revolution, he would show up at restaurants now and then with his retinue of guards. One thing led to another, and Fidel ended up going home with that one daughter, whose nickname was Kika. He got into her car and let her drive. He told her that he was testing the Revolutionary merits of the People’s Car for the first time, and that it was too small for him. He had discovered that the People’s Car, a Volkswagen, was uncomfortable for anyone over six feet tall. That’s what he told her anyway.
They drove to Miramar in a caravan, front, rear, and sides protected by other vehicles full of guards.
“You’re a very good driver,” Fidel told her.
When they got to her house, the guards surrounded the entire block. Fidel and Kika walked into the house, along with a bunch of other men. Fidel sat by the pool talking to this woman for a while, drinking a whole liter of milk from a bottle. He made a point of asking for a liter that hadn’t yet been opened. Back in those days, milk bottles had a seal that was held in place by a thin wire—wires we sometimes used to tie up hibiscus blossoms. Fidel wanted to make sure the milk hadn’t been tampered with. The great burden of every despot since ancient times: fear of poisoning. He didn’t even pour the milk into a glass; he just drank it straight from the bottle.
And he made small talk with Kika while a retinue of guards surrounded him and the entire house. “Where’s the rest of the family?” he asked.
She hemmed and hawed. She said they were all in bed with colds. The truth was that the matriarch and the other three daughters didn’t like Fidel at all and had stayed upstairs in their bedrooms.
Fidel knew exactly where the rest of the family was, and why. He knew that the matriarch and the other sisters were not good Revolutionaries. Perhaps he knew exactly where their five stores were and what they looked like: they’d been confiscated, along with every other business. And the daughters now had to work as employees of the state at the stores they had once owned. Everyone had to work, you know. El que no trabaja, no come. If you don’t work, you don’t eat. It was one of Fidel’s favorite slogans.
He raised the milk bottle above his head and faced the upper-story windows that looked over the pool.
“Here’s to you, ladies! Hope your health improves. Thanks for the milk! I know it’s hard to come by.”
They tell me he laughed after he said that. He knew, of course, that milk was rationed.
I heard this story from Pilar herself, who said that she’d been standing at her window, behind closed shutters, when Fidel toasted her with a liter of her own rationed milk. Only so many ounces per week.
Pilar also told me that this knocked the wind out of her, literally, and that she couldn’t catch her breath for quite some time afterwards. When Fidel left the house along with his retinue, she said, she was still having trouble breathing.
Fidel never returned. No more dates with Kika. Maybe it was something she said, or something she didn’t say. Or maybe it was all those other women peeking through the shutters. Or maybe it was the poolside statues that turned him off. So bourgeois. Too bourgeois, even for a one-night stand and the chance to sire yet another child.
Anyway, Pilar and her daughters loved to throw movie parties on Saturday nights. They had access to Hollywood films, some now banned from Cuban theaters, and screened them in their palatial living room with the same kind of projector that was used in a movie theater. Most of the time, I watched from the spiral staircase, the stairway to heaven.
Movies in a house! A house large enough
to accommodate an audience of twenty or so. Drinks. Rationed drinks, but still drinks. No popcorn, though. That wasn’t available. But it wasn’t the refreshments that made the evening, it was the event itself. And the fact that I got to stay up until way past midnight.
The grown-ups joked out loud as the movie played on the screen. No middle-finger shadows blacking out the actors, but the gist of the jokes was not much more advanced than that. We children just sat back and watched and listened.
Whenever I think of what my adult life in Cuba might have been, if the world hadn’t changed, it’s those movie parties that come to mind. The lights turned off, the hum and whirr of the projector, the pool glowing outside through the French doors, the jokes.
“Hey, Demetrius, you need a bra!”
We were watching Victor Mature in Demetrius and the Gladiators, the sequel to The Robe. They’d spent so much on the sets for The Robe that the producers had decided to spin off a sequel. It told the story of the Greek slave who had served the Roman centurion who ended up with the robe of Jesus at the crucifixion, and it was pure Hollywood fluff. Since Richard Burton and Jean Simmons had been killed in The Robe, martyred by the mad Emperor Caligula, someone wrote a lame story about what happened to Richard Burton’s slave. And since Victor Mature had played that slave before, he landed the starring role. And we were watching Victor Mature’s very large pectoral muscles convulse.
“Hey, Demetrius, I think you’d take a C cup!”
It seemed like sharp humor at the time. No one in my house would ever think to shout out anything like that, especially during a religious movie. I might have been slapped for blasphemy or bad manners or poor taste.
So we watched Demetrius and the Gladiators, and How to Marry a Millionaire, and Three Coins in the Fountain, and a few other movies, over the space of a few months. The last months I would spend in Cuba.
Louis XVI never came with us to these parties. These were my mother’s friends, and he didn’t really like them much. Anyway, King Louis and Marie Antoinette never did anything together anymore.
They weren’t even planning to join us together in the States. Nope. They’d already agreed that Marie Antoinette would be the only one to follow us. She was handicapped, knew no English, and had no job skills of any kind, save sewing. Still, she would be the one to join us and take care of us in the United States until we could return to Cuba. It wouldn’t be that long, two or three years at most. Fidel couldn’t possibly last longer than that. The plan called for King Louis to stay home to guard the precious art collection from the Cuban People. He wouldn’t give that up, not even to be with his real sons. He did keep us in mind, though: he repeatedly said, as the years dragged on and we all got older, and Fidel got more deeply entrenched in power, that he was staying behind so we wouldn’t lose our inheritance.
And one fine day his heart burst, and Ernesto got to keep everything.
We’d be given a ride home from the movie parties by Kika, the daughter who had attracted Fidel’s attention. We’d ride through Miramar at one or two in the morning, in the car that had once given a lift to Fidel, through utter dark and utter silence. La madrugada, that magic time before sunrise when the entire world seems asleep and you think you are the only one who’s truly awake. The best time in the world. The only time that truth appears, uninvited. Still, you have to be careful; you musn’t let truth overtake you. Some truths are best left buried.
If you don’t bury some truths, they’ll have a chance at burying you.
I confess to being an idolater, and to performing sacrifices daily, even hourly, at the altar of the god of denial. I sacrifice painful truths constantly, especially about myself, and bury them without reading their entrails first. It’s a means of survival I learned on the fly, when my world was stripped away, bit by bit. Somehow I learned to cling to one piece of fiction that floated calmly above the wreckage, undisturbed: I am still the same.
I’m still the same even though my friends have all vanished.
I’m still the same even though my favorite school will never exist again.
I’m still the same even though my first childish love vanished overnight.
I’m still the same even though I have no comic books, ice cream, baseball cards, Coca-Cola, chewing gum, toys, good movies, or decent shoes.
I’m still the same even though I don’t have the right to say what’s on my mind inside my own house, let alone in public.
I’m still the same even though my father has adopted a pervert who is now my brother.
I’m still the same even though another pervert has tried to drag me down to hell.
I’m still the same even though I’ve been shot at and bombed.
I’m still the same even though my parents have decided to send me away.
Still the same. I can’t change. I’m like Victor Mature’s pectoral muscles in Demetrius and the Gladiators. He’ll be dead and buried someday, but he’ll always need a bra in that movie. I’m like Kirk Douglas’ dead eye in The Vikings. No matter how old or how dead Kirk and Janet are, that eye will always come to life when Janet Leigh comes into view on the screen, and it will burn, burn, burn.
I’ll always be who I am.
Denial is wonderful. Try it sometime, if you haven’t already. But don’t count on it too much. Sooner or later, denial denies even itself.
Flash forward two months from my last Saturday night movie party at the house of the pool with the five statues, in Miramar.
I’m sitting on a very modern-looking chair in a sparsely furnished and bright living room in a small house in Miami, South West, two blocks north of Coral Way, in the 7900 block. I’m in Paradise, where everything is perfect. There’s no religious art to be seen anywhere, only reproductions of Picasso and Miró. I don’t recognize the art as art, and don’t even know that the artists are Spanish. It’s strange, this house, and wonderful. Nothing original inside a frame. Nothing old, anywhere in this house. The floor is wood, not marble. The living room and dining room are actually one large room, and there’s an air conditioner sticking out of the wall above the living room couch. Beyond the dining room, through clear glass sliding doors, I see a patio like none I’ve ever seen. There’s actually a huge cube of a frame enclosing it all, even on top.
What genius stole that idea from me? I’d longed for such an enclosure and planned it down to the smallest details while lying in bed under my mosquito tent in Havana. The idea came to me in a flash one morning as I studied the dust motes swirling inside the mosquito tent. Why not enclose the outdoors, blocking out the lizards and the bugs?
Now, in the United States, I find that someone has beaten me to the punch. But I’m glad to see my idea brought to life, even if it steals my thunder. I’m so glad this house has a totally screened-in patio. I’m glad to be in the United States, where everything is reasonable and new and perfect. I’m so glad to be in Paradise, among friendly strangers.
I’ve been driven miles and miles to this house to meet the family that wants to take me in. I’ve been driven here by the husband of a friend of my mother who has somehow arranged for this family to rescue me from the refugee camp at Homestead. He’s using up his only day off that week to take care of this.
I’ve been living in the camp for two weeks now, ever since I was separated from Tony at the airport. As soon as we cleared Immigration, we were loaded into different vans and taken to different camps. Tony went to a camp for teens in Kendall, I went to a camp for preteens in Homestead.
Already, I miss Tony terribly.
Already, I’ve seen my first Cuba cloud.
I’ve also learned the word spic from the freckle-faced girls from the Air Force base who yell it out every time they approach the chain-link fence surrounding the camp.
I’ve almost eaten shredded metal along with my ravioli in the camp dining hall. It was just there, this big twisted hunk of metal. I bit into it and almost cracked a tooth. Then the guy next to me also bit into one. And the guy next to him cut his tongue o
n one. Within one minute the whole dining hall was buzzing with alarm and with children crying out in pain. Somehow shreds of metal from the cans of ravioli had made their way into the ravioli. We were told to throw out the ravioli and line up for peanut butter sandwiches instead.
I’ve also gotten married to a Coca-Cola bottle by accident.
It caught my eye, that rounded glass lip from the top of a Coke bottle, perfectly and cleanly severed, laying on the ground. It looked like a beautiful jade ring. I slipped it on like a ring, but it was too tight and it cut off the blood flow and my finger began to turn purple and swell. The harder I tried to slip it off, the worse it hurt. I felt so stupid. This wasn’t at all like the time I’d gotten my head stuck in a church pew. That had been a mystical experience; this was just plain idiocy. I ended up at the camp kitchen and the cook took one look and started to laugh. “Guess I’ll have to saw off your finger now,” he said in a totally serious voice. He was Cuban, so I believed him and started to panic, especially when he brought out a huge serrated knife. Then he laughed some more and applied lots of dish soap to my finger and worked the glass ring off. But not without taking off most of my skin along with the ring.
I’ve also been permanently transformed by a nun, without knowing it.
Nuns ran the camp at Homestead. Don’t ask why. It was a camp established by the Central Intelligence Agency and run by Cuban nuns. Anyway, it was Holy Week, and one of the nuns told us, a room full of about eighty boys and girls who had just left all of their family behind in Cuba and were now in a foreign land, that when Jesus willingly embraced the cross on his way to Calvary he saw in it every sin that had ever been committed and would ever be committed in the entire history of the human race, including each and every sin that each one of us in that room would ever commit in our entire lifetime. Somehow she looked us all in the eye at the same time, with a look I’d never seen before, not even in a priest’s eye. I knew this nun had been somewhere none of us had never been, and probably would never, ever go, at least before death. Her eyes were living flames, hotter than the Cuban sun, and they sent out rays more concentrated than those that pass through a magnifying glass at high noon at the Tropic of Cancer. She didn’t talk to us about our present situation. Though she could have very easily dwelt on very particular, and very immediate problems, like the shrapnel in the ravioli, she talked to us in universal terms about our faults and about redemption from them. She went for the biggest problem of all, and the biggest solution. She told us that Jesus was actually very happy to take up His cross and that He wept with joy upon seeing all of the world’s sins embedded in those mean, raw pieces of wood that meant death for Him at the age of thirty-three. She told us Jesus was God made flesh, a God who loved us and had suffered and died so we could choose redemption freely. She spoke of Free Will redeemed by grace and of eternal life.
