Waiting for Snow in Havana

by Carlos Eire

  My mind is filled with images of pools that never were, too. I loved thinking of new pools I could invent someday, when I became an architect and engineer, just like my uncle Amado. Someday, I thought, I would build bridges and tunnels and houses and churches and schools and pools. Especially pools.

  Wonders such as the Jell-O pool.

  That was perhaps my most brilliant idea: to build a giant pool, bigger than any in Havana, and fill it with Jell-O rather than plain old water. I don’t mean a pool full of chunks of Jell-O, trucked in, but a pool in which the JellO had set. The world’s largest Jell-O mold. One colossal, shimmering, quivering, shaking pool of Jell-O, its surface smooth as glass, reflecting the blue blue sky and the clouds. It would have to be outdoors, of course, and ringed with diving platforms of tremendous height. The trick would be how to find a way of getting the Jell-O to set in the tropical heat.

  I had big plans. I drew blueprints in my head for the retractable refrigeration dome that would allow the Jell-O to set overnight. I was there, with the retractable roof, before the SkyDome and all those other inferior versions of my invention that dot North America. I’m sure if I’d stayed in Cuba, I could have pulled it off.

  I also had great plans for a bicycle slide pool. This would have been a very long and deep pool with a giant slide about the length of a ski jump, ten stories high, down which you could ride your bike and go careening through the air into the pool. I imagined myself sailing through the air for five minutes before hitting the water, and then sinking slowly, slowly, with the bike, all the way to the bottom of the pool.

  One morning when the dust motes were whirling especially fast, I had the great idea of combining Jell-O pool and bicycle slide pool. I was very pleased with myself that morning.

  Of course, I gave no thought at all to how one might get out from under in a deep Jell-O pool once one had plunged into it. It was the plunging that interested me: the very thought of slamming into Jell-O, especially from a great height. I thought one might bounce a couple of times before sinking in.

  If I had been my uncle Amado, that’s the kind of pool I would have built next to my house. No shady pools under the house for me. But, of course, who am I to talk, or trade places with my uncle? At least he started building a pool. Mine never even made it to paper.

  Amado was a riddle of sorts during my childhood in Cuba. I knew him about as well as I knew his pool. He was our nearly invisible uncle. He was always present by name in our conversations, but seldom there in the flesh. But he was the solid rock of my father’s family. Clearheaded, practical to the core, a tower of strength, a problem solver. And always somewhat distant, even seemingly cold. I came to know later that he loved deeply, maybe more deeply than all the others in his family, but had trouble showing it. He had two daughters almost exactly the same ages as Tony and me, and lived just a few blocks from us, but we hardly ever spent time with him. He and King Louis were not at all close to each other.

  Divine Providence would see to it, though, that Tony and I would end up living with Amado and his family. We were rescued from the orphanage near the Orange Bowl by the one uncle we hardly knew. And, as it turned out, the two years, two months, and two days I lived in his house were among the happiest of my entire life.

  Back in Havana, I can count the times we saw him and his family, it happened so rarely. I remember going to their old house a couple of times. It was somewhere near Tropicream, the ice cream and milk shake place where our dad would often take us. I remember asking my parents why his oldest daughter seemed so weak and unstable as she walked. I remember them telling me that some children are born that way. I remember going to his new house by the sea when they moved there, and marveling at the empty pool in the shade.

  I also remember the day they invited us to swim at their house. It was so near to our vanishing. Tony and I were still waiting for our exit permits, but Amado and his family already had theirs. In just a few weeks they would leave their beautiful seaside house and unfinished pool, and fly off to an uncertain future. Amado had no idea he’d end up working as a simple draftsman in Bloomington, Illinois, for ninety dollars a week.

  Amado’s wife, Alejandra, had asked us to wear sneakers that day, because you couldn’t walk or even swim barefoot on the razor-sharp rocks at the shoreline by their house. They were called dientes de perro, those rocks. Dog’s teeth. So we wore our sneakers to swim in that gorgeous transparent water. Alejandra had told us to bring diving masks, so we wore them too.

  What a world inside that water! The fish. The coral. The black, spiny sea urchins. The starfish. The anemones. The colors. And that was just at the coastline. There was a whole sea out there, full of this stuff. The sharks were so lucky.

  Tony sensed it and said, “This is great! I’m going out farther.”

  We were there with Marie Antoinette, who made one of her rare forays into the water. Louis XVI had not joined us, as usual. Uncle Amado was there, and Aunt Alejandra, and their two daughters Marisol and Alejandrita. But neither Amado nor Marie Antoinette tried to stop him. Probably because they had no idea what he meant by “farther.”

  He swam straight out from the shoreline. He swam and swam and swam, until his head was nothing more than a dot between the sea and the blue sky, a period at the end of a sentence written by God.

  He was so fearless, and so full of good ideas.

  He was the one who came up with the idea of pulling the blossoms off the hibiscus hedge next door and tying them shut overnight. He was the one who discovered that cold water could make hot lightbulbs explode. He was the one who invented a new alphabet. We started writing notes to each other in that secret alphabet and within a few weeks we were using it fluently.

  He was one of the funniest people I’ve ever known. When video-cassette recorders were still rare, he once showed me a videotape of Mr. Rogers he had dubbed over with his own voice so that Mr. Rogers, the children’s show host par excellence, spoke like a drunken, raving lunatic. It was a work of genius.

  My fearless brother wouldn’t adjust to exile easily. I don’t think he ever adjusted at all. But I suspect that by the time we left Cuba, he was already seriously damaged. It’s not easy to have an adopted brother foisted upon you, especially when he is a pervert.

  Tony’s life was never stable after we reached the United States. He realized that he could be his own father and mother as soon as he got off the plane, and he ran with that insight, full throttle. And as I have only myself to blame for my many bad choices, so does he. But because he was three years older than me, he was able to make some very bad choices at critical times, and he’s paid for this dearly.

  But back then, on that day at Uncle Amado’s house, he swam out to the very edge of the shallow sea floor that surrounds Cuba. He says he swam past sharks and barracudas and giant stingrays and fish that defied description. And he says he got to the edge of a great abyss, deeper and darker than anything he’d ever seen. It was as if he’d swum out to the very edge of night, he said. He looked down and saw nothing but deep, unfathomable darkness, darker than the night sky, for there were no stars at all. Not one light below. Nothing but black. The blackest black of all.

  He said it was beautiful. And I believe him.

  I’ve seen him do other brave, foolish things. I’ve seen him hold a huge firecracker in his hand until the fuse was no longer visible, and I’ve noticed how his hand didn’t shake at all. I’ve seen him hold a cigarette in his teeth and dare someone to knock it off with a large rawhide bullwhip. I’ve seen him totally scraped up from head to foot after being dragged by a car for a block or so in Miami. He’d accepted a dare to hold on to the car’s bumper while staying on his bicycle, and he’d be damned if he’d let go, even after he’d fallen down. I was there when he rode his bicycle out to the middle of the frozen lake in Miller Park, in Bloomington, Illinois, when we were living with Uncle Amado. It had just frozen over a couple of days before and the ice wasn’t very thick yet. I could hear it cracking and pinging, as if it
were about to give way. I’ve seen him jump off a third-story porch into a snowdrift. I was with him as he drove a Jeep down the runways at O’Hare Airport, right into the path of incoming planes, and he shouted at me, over the roar of the plane’s engines: “I love this! I try to do it once a day!” I’ve seen him come home with a bullet lodged in the palm of his hand, and I’ve heard him say, “Naah, it’s nothing, really.” I’ve seen the machine guns and grenades in his bedroom closet. I’ve heard him boast about the twenty-five hundred parking tickets he collected and threw away without a second glance.

  “Hey, guess what? I’m number two on the list. I’m second! Only one other guy in Chicago owes more in parking tickets than I do! My name was in the paper this morning—front page! I owe the city over seventy thousand bucks! Ha!”

  I’ve had to deal with my mother’s panic countless times as he’s disappeared off the face of the earth without saying good-bye to anyone, not even his wife. And I’ve had to deal with the aftermath of his returning home with fantastic tales to tell.

  I’ve seen him eat a huge hot fudge sundae after he became a diabetic, on a day when his sugar level was dangerously high.

  He said that abyss was beautiful. And I believe him.

  He calls me once a day now—sometimes more often—and he talks about the weather and his dogs and the deal he’s got going with the mayor of his town, who lives across the street. And he talks to me about his illnesses, and how he has so little time left to live. He also talks a lot about our childhood.

  He likes to tell me about the abyss. It’s one of his favorite topics. He loves to tell the story, with exactly the same details, time after time, as if I’ve never heard it before.

  And in the same way he can’t get the abyss out of his mind, I can’t get that unfinished pool out of mine, the unfinished pool in the unlikely spot, reeking of misbegotten ideas and sour fate. Uncle Amado, the architect at the peak of his career, had built his dream house. But this architect had a daughter who wasn’t as agile as other children. That pool spoke of her needs and his pain. It spoke of the Revolution, which had wrecked or interrupted everything. It spoke of twists of fate and of an infinite number of things.

  In the dark just before dawn, years and miles away, the biggest pool of all merges with Uncle Amado’s in my mind’s eye, and the images intertwine. I see the sea that was a stone’s throw away, that turquoise pool in which floats the island of Cuba. A pool full of sharks and abysses and wonders and darkness.

  I see my brother’s head out by the horizon, a speck bobbing in an ocean of turquoise tears, poised over an invisible chasm. Invisible to me, alluring to him. He made me laugh, but now he makes me cry. He was brave; he was reckless. And his recklessness was often paid for by others. He lived for the moment, and loved it. He searched desperately for substances that would reproduce the abyss, and loved the strongest ones way too much. He was drawn to the dark by the dark itself. In the dark you see no images. None at all. In absolute darkness, there is no remorse, nothing to forget. Nothing at all. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  Nada, nada, nada.

  Which, by the way, also means “swim, swim, swim” in Spanish.

  My seventh proof for the existence of God: a boy swimming out to the abyss from a house with an empty, unfinished pool. Seventh and final proof.

  38

  Treinta Y Ocho

  It was a hot day. An ordinary day in Havana, on the eve of my departure. The sunlight screamed in utter delight, as always, blasting everything in its path.

  Too bad. The loudspeakers ruined it. They were mounted on the utility poles on every street corner, broadcasting from the Plaza of the Revolution. The Maximum Leader was going to give a speech again that day, and the loudspeakers were seeking to do what the sun itself could not: to reach even the darkest, most hidden, innermost rooms in every house in the Ensanche de La Habana, my grandparents’ neighborhood.

  We were all being bombarded. I shielded my brain from the Maximum Leader’s words, and for most of that day I succeeded. The words bounced off my ears and fell to the ground mortally wounded, gasping for meaning. But every now and then I’d let my guard down, and a few words would get through.

  Revolution this, Revolution that. Yanquis are evil. Fidel is great. Hail to our Maximum Leader. He’s given us genuine freedom. All are free now, truly free, under the Maximum Leader’s careful guidance. We shall triumph. We shall build an ideal society. We shall all think alike, think freely, as one with our Leader. Revolution this, Revolution that. Death to Imperialism. Death to Capitalism. Long live Communism and Marxism-Leninism. Death to the Worms.

  It was a special day for the Maximum Leader and his Revolution. The best nation in the whole world had deemed Cuba worthy of a visit by the first human ever to orbit the earth. Yury Gagarin was in Havana that lovely day, and he was going to put in an appearance at the Plaza of the Revolution.

  I had to see him. I didn’t care if he was a Communist and an atheist. I didn’t care one bit that Yury had told Nikita Khrushchev that he’d seen no signs of God in outer space.

  So I’d spent the night at my grandparents’ house, which was near the parade route for Yury. That was the very first night I’d ever spent away from my own house, and it had been hard to go to sleep. It had been even tougher to wake up and find that I wasn’t anywhere near my parents.

  This is what it will be like, I told myself. This is what awaits me in a month or two.

  Like Yury when he prepared for his launch into outer space, I was preparing myself for my launch into an alien world. I think that’s one of the reasons I wanted to see him in person. It wasn’t just the fact that he was the first human being to fly so high above our atmosphere: I was impressed with his utter calm in a strange environment.

  Yury had balls. Cojones. The size of coconuts, and probably just as hard. The kind of balls I’d need in exile. You just can’t get into a tiny metal capsule and sit atop the largest cohete ever made without balls like coconuts. He was a messenger from the world of the brave, and from the future too. Someday, I’d be going into outer space also. Surely, by the time I’d reach fifty, we’d all be vacationing on the moon. I’d be taking my kids to the moon in July 2000, and I’d be able to tell them on the way there, as the earth got smaller and smaller behind us, that I’d seen the very first cosmonaut in the flesh.

  Havana was full of billboards welcoming Yury. BIENVENIDO GAGARIN. The billboards also had the same message in Russian. It looked like such an interesting language. Almost as good an alphabet as Tony had invented, except it had too many letters.

  Yury had a very red face. That’s what struck me when I laid eyes on him, his face was about the same shade of red as hibiscus blossoms. He rode through Havana in a motorcade on his way to the Plaza of the Revolution, sitting in the backseat of a convertible with the top down. Well, not exactly in the backseat, but rather above it, with his rear end on the body of the car and his legs on the backseat.

  He was getting one hell of a sunburn. Cuba was more perilous than outer space for a pale Russian. That sunlight howled with delight as it slammed onto the cosmonaut’s red face.

  A Russian on parade in Havana. What a sight. I didn’t know at the time that the Soviet Union also contained Uzbeks, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Tatars, Armenians, and dozens of other subject nations. I thought everyone in the Soviet Union was Russian, like Yury. I had no idea it had been an empire for so long, and that Cuba was not its first colony. But I did know one thing: everything they made was a piece of crap. Russian cars were junk. Russian appliances were junk. Russian bicycles were junk. Russian toys were junk. Russian oil and gasoline were worse than junk. The streets of Havana had become rivers of sludge. Louis XVI explained it had something to do with the Russian oil, which was either too thin or too thick for the American cars most Cubans still drove, and which leaked from the cars onto the asphalt. And the sludge was getting thicker and thicker.

  Once, trying to cross a wide boulevard in a hurry, I lost my shoe to the slu
dge, and Louis XVI laughed out loud at the sight of my shoe glued to the median strip.

  King Louis and I were doing a lot of walking then, in early 1962. During that one year when I didn’t go to school, as I awaited my departure, Louis XVI took me on a few of his errands into the heart of Havana. It was the best time I ever had with him. What I remember best of all is simply walking by his side, hearing him talk. He had a memory for every place we visited, a history. I knew by then that my dad’s history was not necessarily an account of the real past. But I loved to hear him bring the past alive, even a false one.

  His past was so much more interesting than his present.

  I often wonder what it must have been like for him to take me along and talk to me, knowing that he’d lose me soon. What did it feel like for him to know that Tony and I were leaving, with no assurance that he’d ever see us again? What did it feel like to know that he had chosen to stay with his art collection and Ernesto rather than to join us in the States?

  He never talked about it. All I know is what he said in a letter shortly before he died, years later. It was an odd letter, full of emotion. Perhaps he knew he was close to death, for he seldom revealed his feelings. He told me that he had known all his life that he would have children and lose them. He said that he knew when Marie Antoinette first proposed sending us to the States by ourselves that this was our fate and his. That it was meant to be. He’d resisted the idea, he said, but not strongly and not for very long, because he knew that God had already planned it this way.

  He also told me that when our airplane had taken off he had felt as if his heart were being ripped out of his chest. He said nothing had ever hurt so much in his entire life. He added that it was a pain that had stayed with him constantly, every single day.