by Carlos Eire
I walked out of that metal Army surplus prefabricated building in a stupor, wondering what had hit me. What she had said, and the way she had said it pierced me and stuck with me like no other religion lesson I’d had or any Mass I’d ever attended.
So I’ve been converted without realizing it. And to top it all off, I haven’t seen my parents or any other relatives for two long weeks. Meanwhile, my powers of denial are working just fine. This exile thing is a breeze. It’s even fun.
In that living room of the small house in Miami, I’m introduced to the family that wants to take me in. They seem like such nice people. They’re both younger than my parents, and they also have two little boys they’ve adopted. One is about a year and a half old, the other is about eight months old. I am delighted to learn that the youngest has the same name as Tony Curtis’ character in The Vikings. And they also have a huge German shepherd who, for now, barks on the other side of the glass doors, out in the screened-in patio. Such nice people. We talk mostly through my mother’s friend, who acts as an interpreter. My English is not quite up to speed, even for the simplest conversations. I can only say rudimentary, yet essential things, such as “I don’t eat chicken,” and “I don’t eat fish. Too much like lizards.” All this with a very heavy accent.
These nice people ask me very nice questions about my family, my hobbies, and the camp at Homestead. They listen attentively. They seem to like me. They tell me that the house next door has a very nice pool, and that the neighbors have a boy my age, and that they’ve already offered to let me swim there any time I want.
Tony is there, too. After we’re done at this house, we’ll go over to another house, to meet the family that wants to take him in. As luck—or Divine Providence—would have it, the folks that want to take in Tony are good friends with the family that wants to take me in. They live about ten blocks away, near Rockway Junior High School, where Tony would be enrolled. They have a teenage son Tony’s age and a teenage daughter slightly younger.
My mother’s friend’s husband, Juan Becquer, has arranged all this under the oddest circumstances. He had been a lawyer in Cuba, where he represented the interests of the Hilton Hotel. Now he is working as a janitor, mopping floors for an interior decorating firm in Miami, the very same firm that had decorated the Havana Hilton. When he landed in Miami, the first thing Juan did was to seek out every American businessman he’d come to know in Cuba. One of them was the interior decorator, who gave him a job as a janitor in his warehouse. It was the interior decorator who wanted to take in Tony, and their friends who wanted to take me in.
Divine Providence. My mom had alerted her friend Marta about our arrival, and her friend had pestered her husband Juan about our plight. I’ve often tried to put myself in his place. I’m a lawyer mopping floors, I’ve got two babies, a wife, and both of my in-laws to feed, and now my wife wants me to do something about these two boys I barely know. If I’d been in his place, I think I might have forgotten to ask the boss about the boys. I might have asked for a raise instead.
Lucky for us, he didn’t forget to ask. That’s the kind of stuff Cubans did for one another in Miami back then. Everyone went the extra one hundred miles. Juan knew we were coming and had spoken to his new employer about Tony and me. He barely knew us, or we him. I think I’d seen him maybe three or four times in Havana, at the most. His boss had replied that maybe he could take one of us, and that he had some friends who might be able to take the other one.
Talk about miracles. This was close to the parrot fish. Very close.
Both families were Jewish. They wanted to take in two Catholic Cuban boys who barely spoke English. They’d have to feed and clothe us, and force us to do homework, and make sure we took showers and brushed our teeth, and stayed out of trouble, and they’d receive no help from any government agency for doing it. They already had kids of their own, and their houses weren’t very large. Yet they wanted to do it. They wanted to do something good, just because it needed to be done.
There were fourteen thousand of us, homeless. Fourteen thousand orphans, waiting for their parents to receive visas and exit permits. All of us had been sent here by parents who thought they’d follow just a few months later, maybe a year at most.
None of us knew we’d be orphans for much longer than that.
And I’m sitting there in that living room, with these nice people, and I look around, and I stare at the Picasso print with the three musicians and at the babies and at the dog out on the patio, and I listen to the English being spoken, and I notice that the sunlight outside is just slightly duller than the light I had grown up with, just a fraction of a fraction less bright.
And I realize that I’m not the same anymore, and that I never ever will be.
I miss my mother. I miss my father, even. I miss everyone so much, except Ernesto.
I miss the sunlight.
I miss my model Viking ship and my comic books.
I’m not the same. I’m not the same. Maybe I’m dead!
All of this sweeps over me like a tidal wave, wordlessly.
What’s this? Why am I sobbing? Uh-oh, now I’ve done it. What’s this nice family going to think? Why? Why? Why am I crying like this? I’ve never cried like this before. Oh God, please, make it stop. Coño, qué mierda!
But I can’t stop. No puedo, no puedo parar…no, no, no.
Juan Becquer, the lawyer-turned-janitor takes me outside, as far from the house as possible, beyond the screened-in patio. He talks to me; he asks me questions. I look at the lizards in the yard. They’re all over the place. Green ones and brown ones, cursing the screen that stands between them and the patio. I see a frog, too, a big brownish one, just sitting there on the thick grass like a stone. All I can do is sob and tell Juan that I don’t know why I’m crying.
But he keeps telling me that I have to know, that everyone knows why they’re crying. He reminds me how important this “interview” is and points out in great detail what I stand to lose if I continue crying. He is firm, precise, and as cold as Kant.
To get him off my back, I say to him: “I’m crying because I’m not worthy of living with this nice family. They’re too good for me. They’re too nice.”
“Nonsense,” he says. “No seas tan comemierda.” Don’t be such a fool.
My dad had never spoken to me like this.
Slowly, gradually, he wears me down with a lawyer’s resolve. It’s not anything he says in particular that calms me down, but simply the fact that he’s standing out there with me talking to me and trying to crush the poor logic of my made-up reason for crying. I barely know this guy, and he’s treating me as if I were his own kid. Maybe the nice people inside the house will be the same way.
Maybe you don’t need your own parents.
Maybe it’ll be nice to live without Ernesto.
Maybe life after death can be good.
So I stop sobbing and I go back in, and the nice people offer me something to drink and some cookies, and we talk some more, and we forget all about my crying fit.
Louis and Norma Chait take me in. And their friends Sid and Carol Rubin take in Tony. Two days later, the house with the screened-in patio and the Picasso print becomes my home. And these nice people give me a room of my own and a small transistor radio.
Such brave people. Such nice people. Such fine, fine proofs for the existence of God.
(My sixth proof, by the way, snuck in, as an aside.)
My new parents, Lou and Norma, give me an allowance every week. They let me take out the garbage and teach me to cook my own scrambled eggs. They encourage me to ride my bike to school. They seek out friends for me in the neighborhood. They make me call Tony every other day, and urge me to visit him. They make me write to my family twice a week. They insist that I go to church at Saint Brendan’s, and give me money so I can put something in the collection basket, even though they are Jewish. I start to think of them as my mother and father, and I begin to love them. My new dad takes me places. He takes me f
ishing. He takes me to the beach. He takes me out to restaurants. He takes me to the jazz sessions at which he plays the saxophone. My new mom cares for me with all the attention and tenderness of my old mom. And she is so funny. She makes me laugh. And she teaches me not to plagiarize articles from the encyclopedia for school reports.
“You didn’t write this!”
“Yes, I did. It’s my handwriting there, you see?” (My English pronunciation is getting better, but I still have a long way to go before I can compete with Desi Arnaz, who seems to speak flawlessly.)
“No, I mean, these aren’t your words. Eschew? Altruistic enterprise? Flawed, fragile premises? I don’t think you can write like a college professor—”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you took this straight out of the encyclopedia.”
“Yes, The World Book is a very nice encyclopedia. It has very good articles. My teacher said I should use it, so I went to the library and used it there today.”
“But you can’t just copy the whole article word for word and turn it in as your report. That’s too easy. And it’s wrong. It’s called plagiarism. You should try to find your own words. Always use your own words. Didn’t you have to write reports in Cuba?”
“No. We had essays and exams, but no reports like this one.”
“Well, you should always use your own words in a report. You can research the facts in encyclopedias or books, but you should always use your own words when you put it all together. You can always find your own way of saying things.”
Too bad they couldn’t keep me for longer than nine months. They just couldn’t. Marie Antoinette never showed up as she was supposed to. No one was allowed to leave Cuba after the Missile Crisis of October 1962. My mom and the parents of about twelve thousand other children were all trapped on the island, and no one knew when they would be allowed to leave. So the Chaits had to let me go and their friends the Rubins had to let Tony go.
And on the day I left that house I died again. And I buried the pain a little deeper this time around.
They loved me while they could, Norma and Lou, and did more than they should have. I was such a bad liar, and they knew it and put up with it. They gave me many gifts that have lasted a lifetime. And I loved them, and still do, and am ever mindful of the fact I’ll always fall short in the good deeds department when compared to them.
They put me on the right path, in my new land. The land of eventuality.
Eventually, I found out I could be my own father and mother, and for a while I convinced myself that I was doing a much better job than Marie Antoinette and King Louis.
Eventually, I found a life that didn’t include movie parties in palatial homes with statue-ringed swimming pools, but did have all sorts of other wonders to offer. Like videotapes of Demetrius and the Gladiators, and one Seinfeld episode that featured the male bra that Victor Mature could have used: the “Bro.” (I’m ready to wager that there was at least one Cuban on Seinfeld’s writing staff.)
Eventually, I acquired English. It’s mine. All mine. I bought it word by word, on credit, the American way. And English owns me, too. I think in English; I even dream in English, except when Louis XVI shows up. Spanish stopped growing and is now a homely, misshapen dwarf. An all-wise and almost mystical dwarf, keeper of the keys to my soul, but a dwarf nonetheless.
Eventually, I lost my accent. Well, almost. I prefer to think that I can pass for Jimmy Stewart, or Captain James Tiberius Kirk, but if you listen carefully, you can tell there’s something funny about the cadence of my speech, and the way I pronounce some words, like eschew. And don’t ever talk to me when I’m angry or tired; you might mistake me for Desi Arnaz.
Eventually, I even earned the right to plagiarize myself, using material from one encyclopedia article in another. I did, I swear. Lo juro. Mal rayo me parta. It was marvelous. I did it last week. And I got paid for doing it, too. Don’t ask me to be specific, though. One can get in trouble for plagiarizing even oneself, if one gets caught.
Especially if one uses the word eschew too often.
37
Treinta Y Siete
The tourists’ Havana was dotted with nightclubs, bars, casinos, and whorehouses; my Havana was dotted with pools. And I gave all of them names: shark pool, five-statue pool, Popeye’s pool, screwdriver pool, never-full pool, tire pool, eye-killer pool, invisible pool, blue lava pool, giant toilet pool, pool of my dreams.
So it’s not surprising that when I think of my final days in Cuba the first image that leaps to my mind is that of my uncle’s pool.
Some pool it was. Right next to the turquoise sea, and bone dry. No trees within a hundred-yard radius, and in the deepest shade. Nothing but rough, dusty, gray cement. It smelled of concrete, even four years after the cement had been poured. It was an enigma.
My uncle Amado, an architect, had built himself a pool under his house. This wasn’t an indoor pool I’m talking about. No, it was an outdoor pool, under the house. From the street the house looked like a nice normal building with a three-story façade. But it really had no ground floor beyond a foyer. What would have been the first floor, behind the foyer wall, was the open space for the pool, and the house itself stood above the pool. When you looked at the house from the rear, you saw it all clearly.
Uncle Amado had all sorts of reasons for leaving the job unfinished. Knowing his reasons didn’t make it any less enigmatic. It was a cement hole: no tiles, no smooth surfaces, no water, in the deepest, deepest shade.
I had always been drawn to pools. In water you are weightless, and weightlessness frees your mind. But as the Revolution progressed, the number of pools began to shrink. Gone were the private clubs we had frequented. Some were trashed in an orgy of retribution against privilege, others were summarily closed, and those that survived were opened to the public, free of charge. But the funds for maintaining so many clubs soon ran dry and so did the pools. So towards the end I spent a lot more time reminiscing about pools than enjoying them.
I was especially fond of remembering Popeye’s pool, probably because it was the one in which I had learned to swim.
Popeye’s pool had gotten its name from the man who took care of it, who hated us. It was at Manuel’s and Rafael’s beach club, and it was tended by a man who was simply known as El Marinero—the sailor. Of course, he instantly became Popeye to us. He looked a little like Popeye, too, except he had no pipe. He even wore a cap like Popeye’s. He hated us because we often rolled around in the sand with our wet bodies, and then jumped into the pool and watched the sand vanish into the water. It made such a nice cloud when we jumped in. We did this repeatedly, even though he always yelled at us, “Hey, you’re going to clog up the filter with all that sand again.” He always gave us the evil eye, and with good reason.
We were spoiled brats, niños bitongos, who thought we’d never have to worry about cleaning out pool filters. Served us right, it did, to be hurled down to the bottom of the heap when we reached the States. I once spent an entire summer, between high school and college, working sixty hours a week at my mother’s factory, inserting thousands of screws in the morning and taking out the very same screws in the afternoon, day after day. They were temporary screws, put in place to speed up the bonding power of a special glue between two parts. The holes into which my screws fit would later be filled by different screws, driven in by somebody else down the assembly line.
I thought I was in hell.
Marie Antoinette was one of the star assemblers at the factory, which made photocopy machines. There wasn’t a single job she couldn’t do better than anyone else, bum leg and all. Rutger, the ex-Nazi German manager, loved her. She’d sometimes show him how there would be a better way to assemble the pieces, or how to improve their design. Rutger would then call over the engineers and they’d shake their heads, and agree, and walk away looking puzzled.
Cubans weren’t supposed to be smart. And most of the workers at that factory were Cubans. Some had been professionals or b
usinessmen before they fled. One of the janitors had been a lawyer in Havana.
I, too, ended up as a janitor, but not in a factory. It was at a housing project in a very poor neighborhood, in a very poor New England town, while I was in graduate school. My worst task at that job was peeling off old wallpaper, under which cockroaches had built their nests. Dodging the rats near the trash dumpsters was not much fun either, but it was still much better than having to read Kant.
But I digress. The point is this: those pools spoke to me of the privileged life that I knew was mine. I knew that I had pools to choose from and that the boys in Regla only had their stinking wharf. I knew it, and I loved knowing it. I loved it up to the last fraction of a second that I stood on Cuban soil, even though by then I’d lost my pools.
God bless the roaches behind the wallpaper, and the screws at the factory, and the broken dishes at the Conrad Hilton Hotel. God bless especially the freckle-faced girls who leaned on the chain-link fence and shouted “spic!” my first day at the refugee camp in Homestead. Thanks to them I became a Regla boy, and that pride turned quickly into a burning shame—a shame that still hangs around my neck like a festering dead iguana. So those Regla boys are in there, in my mind, swimming away, diving for coins in their underwear. They swim infinitely, eternally.
