by Carlos Eire
I still don’t understand him.
And he certainly didn’t understand me. Or else he wouldn’t have adopted Ernesto. And he certainly wouldn’t have made me buy a record I didn’t care for at all, which is what he did on one of those days when we walked around Old Havana.
I had about five pesos to spend, and I thought I’d buy myself a record. My first. Louis XVI said he knew of a very good record store that still had lots of records to sell, and we both went there on the bus, somewhere in the oldest part of the city.
It looked ancient and full of ghosts, that part of Havana, even in the daytime. It was gritty and crumbling and beautiful all at once. The record store was one of many in a long arcade, near a place called La Plaza del Vapor. Where the Plaza had once stood there was a giant hole the size of a city block filled with dark green water. It was a Revolutionary urban renewal project gone wrong; too high a water table had surprised the engineers, and they didn’t have the means to fix their mistake. So Old Havana had gained a perfectly square lake.
The same shape as the covers of the long-playing albums in the record store. It was a great place. They had every kind of music: classical, Cuban, jazz, rock and roll, you name it. They also had a listening booth in which you could ask for a record to be played. I must have made about ten trips to that booth, and with each trip my dad grew more impatient and irritated.
He didn’t like the choices I was making.
“That’s jazz, you know. That’s trash. You don’t want to buy that.”
“But I like it.”
“It’s still trash. You don’t really want to buy that.”
“But this guy Miles Davis sounds so good. I like this album a lot.”
“You still don’t know what’s really good. It’s just trash.”
We went on like this for a long time. Finally, he wore me down and convinced me that all my choices had been bad ones. Especially those jazz records. So we ambled over to the classical section, and guided by his expert advice, to which I had now totally surrendered, I ended up buying Arthur Rubinstein Plays President Eisenhower’s Piano Favorites.
Jesus H. Piano-tuning Christ.
I succumbed so totally to my own maximum leader that when I got home I actually played the record many times. I waited for my taste to improve with each revolution of the disc, but instead the opposite happened. As each note receded into the past and another stood poised to take its place, my taste in music declined exponentially. Two days after I’d bought the record, which had a goofy-looking picture of Dwight D. Eisenhower on the cover, I had come to loathe myself for being such a Philistine. I hated the record. I hated every single note and chord. And I hated myself for hating something good and beautiful.
Something was awfully wrong with me.
But that damn record of mine was so dull and dreadful. It even sounded miserable on the old clavichord Louis XVI had rigged up with a couple of stereo speakers on the inside. If it didn’t sound good coming out of the clavichord, then it must have been me who was at fault.
Miles Davis sounded so much better. I had no idea who the guy was, but I could hear the music playing in my brain, and I liked it so much more than the Eisenhower piano pieces.
I stopped listening to the record after a couple of days and left it behind gladly. Louis XVI enjoyed that record a lot. He played it all the time during those last few months I spent in that house with him. Probably played it a lot after I left too, the way I’ve been playing Nirvana these past few months. Full blast.
Havana was far from Nirvana on that day Gagarin came to visit. Every third word that shot out of those infernal loudspeakers was “Revolution” and every other word seemed to be Yanquis. It was pure cosmic dualism, good versus evil, battling it out. Light versus darkness. It was also an apocalypse. The light had not triumphed yet, but was well on its way. The glorious Revolution would wipe the cosmic floor with the heinous Yanqui imperialists very soon.
Not even the Christian Brothers who spoke of Satan and hellfire and the final judgment had painted such a grim view of history.
But who could really think of an apocalypse on a day when the sun could crack the stones, as Cubans liked to say? Forget about a sun hot enough to fry eggs. This wasn’t enough for Cubans, who probably did that all the time without giving it any thought. No, our sun had to be powerful enough to crack stones.
And Yury was surely getting one hell of a sunburn in the back of that convertible. Come to think of it, his face was the same shade of red as that of good old El Colorado of my early childhood dreams. But he was a genuine sport: he waved back at the crowd with a goofy grin on his face. Not quite as goofy as Eisenhower’s on the cover of my new record album, but goofy enough, especially for a hero.
I waved at the goofy atheistic Russian space hero and he waved right back.
Contact. I was one with history.
From the parade route, my grandfather Amador and I made our way to the Plaza of the Revolution to get a glimpse of Fidel.
“I need to see that bastard who stole everything from me,” said my grandfather.
You have to understand that my grandfather had worked hard as a truck driver for more than three decades. He wasn’t a rich man. He was an immigrant who’d had too many bad breaks, someone who would have been much better off if he had remained in Spain but was too ashamed to return as a failure. Now Fidel had taken the little that he had saved up. And at just about the same time that all of his money was stolen from him, he crashed his truck and broke his leg in so many places that it couldn’t really be fixed at all. So he walked with a cane now, just like his daughter.
He was the kind of guy that the Revolution was supposed to help.
So we went to see the Maximum Leader. We had to, as long as we were that close.
We walked in the hot sun to the Plaza of the Revolution, along with hundreds of other Cubans. We gathered in the vast space under the monument to the Cuban patriot José Martí, a poet who had died fighting for independence from Spain. The tower at the center of the plaza was about twenty stories high, and directly underneath there was a broad platform with a pulpit from which the Maximum Leader preached to the multitudes. The tower looked like a permanent exclamation point.
It was a sea of people. I’d never seen so many bodies gathered in one spot. Tens of thousands, for sure. Some were curious, like me. Some were there because they were genuine believers in the Revolution. Some were like my father, who was there because it was required of him, in the section assigned to all the judges. There were thousands of Cubans in the same situation, in their own assigned sections. The guardians of the Revolution took attendance. If you didn’t attend, there would be unpleasant repercussions: they reminded you constantly that it was their goal to make it tough for anyone who didn’t show true Revolutionary spirit.
And Radio Havana proudly broadcast its programs announcing that Cuba was the only free nation in the Western hemisphere.
The crowd frightened me. It spoke in unison and seemed to think in unison, too. It roared and chanted slogans like Cuba sí, Yanquis no! at the appropriate moments. Other slogans too. It was a lot like church, I thought. It was a ritual, a liturgy of correct thinking, punctuated by responses from the congregation.
And the high priest was the Maximum Leader.
I saw him. My grandfather saw him, too. He was a pinpoint, off in the distance. A tiny moving speck. Even from far away we could see his tiny little body bouncing up and down as he spoke. He couldn’t talk without moving. He jumped and waved his arms as if he were a basketball player or a demoniac. We could hear him very clearly, of course, thanks to all the loudspeakers that dotted the vast space of the Plaza.
You couldn’t get away from his voice. Even if you plugged up your ears with your fingers, the sound of his voice was loud enough to find its way to your brain. You could shut out the words, but you couldn’t shut out the noise.
He was bombing us.
He was telling us what was good. Telling us how we should
think. He was telling us what to choose and how to choose it. He was telling us we had no choice. And he was telling us we were free. Free at last.
That one tiny, insignificant, erasable smudge under the giant stone exclamation point, that speck of nothingness controlled everyone in that Plaza, and everyone on the island. That one little nothing that my cousin
Fernando had planned to erase at that very same spot, two years earlier. Being at that Plaza, that day, was one of the scariest moments of my life. Scarier than any nightmare I’d ever had.
“Let’s go, abuelo, can we go now, please?”
“Yes, damn it, let’s go.”
We carefully wended our way out of the crowd that had gathered behind us. It wasn’t easy. People were still streaming in as we tried to leave. Some of the latecomers were in groups, and were being herded like sheep.
My grandfather spoke over the din: “Hold my hand. I don’t want you to get lost.”
I was too old to hold hands, but I did it anyway.
Good thing I did, too, for it would be the last time I’d ever get the chance. I held my grandfather’s hand for the last time in my life, there, as Fidel’s words fell upon us like hail, or fire and brimstone. We were just two drops in a nearly boundless ocean. But we were two drops who knew what was going on, two drops struggling to free ourselves from the sea around us. An old man torn from his homeland by forbidden love years ago, a boy about to be torn from his by a Revolution.
Two specks moving in the wrong direction.
Two specks about to part from each other forever, thanks to one tiny speck.
One speck bathed in sunlight that day, just like everyone else.
One tiny speck.
Too bad.
39
Treinta Y Nueve
Get Peg-Leg! Get Peg-Leg! Quick, everyone, let’s get Peg-Leg!” Marie Antoinette was being pursued by an angry crowd near the Swiss embassy. She’d been camping out on the sidewalk for a couple of days, waiting her turn to apply for a visa to the United States. Suddenly, a mob had gathered across the street, and they’d started shouting insults at all of those who were lined up outside the embassy. Then they started to hurl bottles.
The bottles whizzed past her and smashed on the pavement. She didn’t count them, she just fled in utter terror, as fast as she could. She ran on her one good leg, and her friend Angelita, the mother of my fifth-grade friend Ciro, ran along with her, clutching her arm. But my mother was so used to having conquered her handicap that she had no clue at all that they were after her.
“Who’s this Pata palo they keep shouting about?” asked Marie Antoinette, as the bottles zipped by and smashed at her feet. Between cries of Ay, Dios mío, Angelita let her know: “It’s you, boba, it’s you!…and they’re coming after us!”
Marie Antoinette stopped dead in her tracks and turned around to face the mob that was pursuing her. They were all on the opposite side of the street and had started to cross it.
“Why are you trying to harm me? What did I ever do to you?”
“You’re a worthless worm, that’s who you are!” shouted one woman.
“I may be a gusana, but I’m a human being, just like you, and a Cuban, too. And I don’t know any of you and have never, ever harmed any of you or wished evil on you. So why do you throw bottles at me and call me names?”
“You and all of yours deserve to die, you stinking vermin. We’ll kill you all before you have a chance to leave. You don’t deserve to live and leave. Death to you and yours!”
“Now you did it,” Angelita sighed. “Now they’ll kill us for sure!”
Marie Antoinette continued to reason with the mob: “You have no right to shout insults at us or wish us harm. None at all. I’m just trying to leave this country so I can be with my sons. I haven’t ever done anything to harm any of you. Get that through your heads!”
“Muerte a los gusanos! Death to the worms! Fatherland or Death! We shall triumph!”
More slogans, chanted in unison, including the Maximum Leader’s favorite prayer: “Cuba sí, Yanquis no! Cuba sí, Yanquis no!”
When my mother tells me the story, which is at least five or six times a year, it always ends with a bus. Somehow, as the mob continues to harass her and Angelita, a bus magically stops for them. A bus headed for some part of Havana she doesn’t even know existed. Marie Antoinette and Angelita jump on the bus and ride it for twenty blocks or so, then get off, panting and wheezing, looking over their shoulders for an approaching mob, and transfer to another bus that will take them back to El Vedado, where Angelita lives.
Marie Antoinette was just doing what the parents of the fourteen thousand airlifted kids were doing all over Cuba: trying to find the quickest way out of the country so they could be reunited with their children. Angelita was doing the same thing. She had three kids in the States: two girls and one boy. The youngest girl had a congenital heart problem and had been through surgery at the age of three.
Angelita and my mom scurried all over Havana, doing what needed to be done, searching for the rarest commodity of all: correct information. Angelita made it to the goal line before my mom, or at least it looked that way. She obtained an exit permit and a visa for herself and her husband. But when they were about to leave for the airport, they received a phone call telling them that their exit permit had been revoked and that they had to reapply. Her husband died of a heart attack right there and then. He was only fifty years old.
Marie Antoinette wouldn’t give up, no matter what. She tried and failed so many times. She had no idea it would take her three and a half years to be reunited with us. She didn’t know she would get exit permits, only to be turned back at the airport. “Sorry, señora, you can’t leave today. A diplomat needs your seat.” She didn’t know that each time she’d be turned back at the airport, it would take more than a year to get another exit permit. She didn’t know she’d end up going to Mexico first, just because a friend of hers there met the right Mexican official at a cocktail party. She didn’t know she’d have to spend six months in Mexico, mooching off good friends while she waited for a visa to the States. She didn’t know she would hemorrhage in Mexico City and undergo emergency surgery. She didn’t know that the blood transfusion she would receive would infect her with hepatitis C. She didn’t know that one week after surgery there would be an earthquake. She didn’t know that two days after landing in Miami, she’d be caught in a hurricane. She didn’t know it would take her another three months in Miami to find a way to join us. She didn’t know she’d end up in Chicago. She didn’t know Tony and I really wouldn’t need her anymore for the rest of our lives, at least not in the ways she thought we would. She didn’t know I’d be taller than her when she finally saw me again, wearing size ten shoes that would scare her to death.
And she gave up so much, blindly, just to be with us.
I don’t know where Tony and I were at exactly the same time that the mob was pursuing her in Havana. We could have been in any number of places, each of them very far from her.
We were in another world. Tony was probably very unhappy that day. He was always unhappy. I might have been happy. It all depends. I loved the adventure of being on my own, even though on some days the hunger was too hard to take, there, at that orphanage near the Orange Bowl.
Maybe I was swimming in the neighbors’ pool at my first house in Miami. Maybe I was reading a library book at the orphanage. Maybe I was delivering newspapers on my bike in Bloomington. Maybe it was at exactly the same moment I accidentally slammed a tightly rolled newspaper into the chest of one of my customers and heard him go “oooooomph!” Maybe it was when I broke the glass on a storm door with a newspaper, or that one morning when the angry dog who was usually chained up chased me down the street. Maybe it was when I fell in love with Nancy, a girl with blue eyes like Eye Jesus and a haircut exactly like that of my fifth-grade noviecita.
All I knew was that since I’d left my home, my nightmares had pretty much vanished and I had learned to bur
y my love for my parents and family so deeply I barely knew it was there. And one of the ways I did that was to think of how nice it was not to be living with Maria Theresa, Candlestick Lady, Eye Jesus, Window Jesus, and voodoo people anymore.
Of course, every now and then, what I’d buried would bubble up to the surface and scare me half to death. But that didn’t happen very often. I was the King of Denial, sitting on the throne at the age of eleven.
I couldn’t bury the lizards, though. I’d killed so many I’d never be able to bury them.
All of the stains on my soul are lizard shaped. And some of them are missing their tails. And the severed tails are wriggling madly.
I came after them like a mob, thirsting for blood. I pursued them throughout my entire childhood. I thought they were evil incarnate. But one day topped them all: the day of the Lizard Apocalypse.
“Let’s wipe out all of the lizards in the neighborhood,” I said to my friend Jorge.
“You can’t do that. There are too many of them.”
“Then how about our block? Just this one square block. We won’t cross any streets. We’ll just kill all of the lizards on this one block.”
“Okay, that sounds great. Let’s go!”
So we each grabbed a broom and went hunting. Brave hunters, seeking to free our neighborhood from fearsome lizards, wielding brooms like baseball bats.
I won’t tell you what we did, exactly, because it was so unholy. Suffice it to say that we were immensely successful. So successful, in fact, that I’m still haunted by their tiny ghosts, thirty-eight years later.
The skin, that magic skin still makes me so envious. As wondrous as the changing colors of parrot fish in the turquoise sea. Those tails. Why can’t I have one? Every now and then I’d like to leave my tail wriggling in danger’s jaws. Those eyes. Eyes that can rotate like the earth itself; eyes that follow you wherever you go, like Eye Jesus.
They were so beautiful. Especially the green chameleons with the pañuelo on their throats, that little red kerchief of skin that they furled and unfurled. They were the most beautiful. And they were the ones I hated and feared the most.
