Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  But I didn’t kill him. I let him go, and he ran away, leaving the gate to the pool open. I stared at the pool walls, and at those offensive hearts and the names in them, which could be read clearly enough through the ripples. I wanted to shrink and disappear, to be swallowed whole by the earth. It was a very different kind of vertigo from the kind I’d felt on top of the diving platform, but vertigo all the same. Everything pulled away from me at the speed of light, including that wondrous girl, whose face I couldn’t dare to look at.

  She left, quickly, and never spoke to me again, ever.

  I apologized to Mark, assuming responsibility for Freddy’s dumb-ass stunt, simply because if it hadn’t been for me, he wouldn’t have been there in the first place. Mark shrugged it off. The next time I came over, the hearts were gone, totally wiped out, as if they’d never been there. Mark’s parents were nice enough never to say anything about it, and I was far too embarrassed to bring up the subject. At that age, you always hope and pray that bad stuff will go away on its own, thinking that if you don’t acknowledge its existence the nasty stuff will simply vanish, as if it had never taken place. And that’s exactly what had happened here. No way I was going to bring it up.

  God only knows how long they had to scrub the walls in order to get rid of those hearts, or how much they had to pay someone to do it.

  I couldn’t decide what upset me the most: the fact that Freddy had totally ruined my chances with this girl, or the fact that a fellow Cuban had defaced a very generous neighbor’s pool. Charles was befuddled, ashamed of what Federico had done. It had to be Federico, not Freddy. Those dead Cuban boys could sure get you into a heap of trouble, much against your will. And they could also make you feel very ashamed of once having been Cuban.

  That pool never felt the same afterward. I couldn’t swim in it or jump into it without feeling a twinge of guilt and vertigo. Poor Charles was very, very confused by all this unpleasantness, which had been caused by a Cuban. And even if Carlos was buried ten meters deep on the planet Vertigo, Charles knew very well that there was still a link between him and that dead boy, and—through him—to every other Cuban.

  Whatever one lone Cuban might do is a reflection of what any Cuban is capable of doing. One jerk, two jerks, six million jerks. It’s a geometric progression unlike any other on earth: One bad Cuban makes all Cubans look bad, especially on foreign soil.

  “Coño, que mierda,” shouted Carlos from his grave, not even caring that one single utterance of the word coño was enough to transport him from the planet Vertigo to hell, forever and ever.

  When your own people betray you, the only right thing to do is to spew forth the worst words of all, even to shout them as loudly as possible, again and again, until the sound of them fills the whole earth and makes the mountains crumble. When your own body betrays you, it’s one thing. A big nose, or buck teeth, or vertigo are not your fault. You can chalk it up to biology and a crummy set of genes. But when your own people betray you, it’s a whole different ball game, because they make you hate yourself with a passion, simply for being one of them. It’s not a fully rational response, but then again, reason can take you only so far.

  What matters most is always totally unreasonable. Totally.

  Like the shape of a girl’s wrist, or the way her hair brushes against her cheek.

  Seven

  Juan Becquer has come to pick me up. Tony’s already in Juan’s beat-up car. Some sort of Plymouth, but a lot newer than the one my dad owned back in Havana. He’s come to take us to his house so we can spend the weekend with him and his family.

  He thinks we need this.

  Truth be told: Charles doesn’t think he needs any time away from the Chait household, or from the United States of America. Going for a weekend at the Becquers’ will be a lot like leaving the country. Even though I’ve never been to their house, I know it’ll be very Cuban, and I’d rather forget about all that Cuban stuff.

  We drive for a long, long time, and we end up in a neighborhood that doesn’t look at all like Miami. At least not the Miami I’ve come to know. This place is all run-down and full of old ugly houses and lousy old cars, some worse than Juan Becquer’s. The trees are old, and huge, and they smother everything with a very dense choking shade. For the first time since I left Cuba, I’m in a place that might be full of ghosts.

  Is this the same country I’ve been living in?

  Shotgun shack. That’s what they live in. A long narrow house that feels more like a railroad car than a house. But there’s no hallway. To get from the front room to the back, you walk through room after room. Somewhere in there, a few rooms back, there’s a kitchen and a bathroom. If all of the doors were to be opened at the same time, you could blast away with a shotgun from the front room—which is a porch of sorts—and the pellets would come out of the back door.

  This is not how it was for the Becquers in the old country. Far from it. Their house was nicer than ours. Much nicer. In fact, it was nicer than any house I’ve been to in Miami thus far: more like the houses in Coral Gables—that nearly exact replica of my native Miramar—or those houses on those small islands between Miami and Miami Beach. Six people live in this wooden shack: Mr. and Mrs. Becquer, their two small children, and Mrs. Becquer’s parents. The old folks are in double exile: They’re Spaniards who fled to Cuba back when it was part of the civilized world.

  Tony and I are going to sleep in the front room, which is practically all windows. And that’s just fine because this house doesn’t have any air-conditioning or fans.

  It’s good to see the Becquers again, and eat Cuban food. I begin to feel my split personality surface, intensely. I’m no longer just “me,” but Charles and Carlos.

  Charles had forgotten how good Cuban food could be and had steadfastly refused to admit to himself that American food was far inferior. So tasteless, for the most part, and so unimaginative. A piece of animal flesh. A vegetable. A starch of some sort, usually potatoes. Salt and pepper. Some bottled sauce of some sort for the meat. God forbid that any of these basic elements ever be mixed, or spiced up.

  Here, in this shack, it’s impossible to deny the inferiority of American cuisine. The fried plantains, especially, are out of this world. In the western end of Cuba they were called chatinos; in the eastern end they were tostones. Carlos always called them chatinos.

  Charles had forgotten about them. Tony has not. Tony has barely forgotten anything. In fact, Tony refuses to accept his death and stubbornly clings to the illusion that he’s still the same boy who climbed onto the KLM flight back in Havana, with his beautiful dark abyss in tow. Maybe it’s that abyss he carries inside that prevents him from seeing things as they really are. It’s so deep, and so dark, it affects his judgment.

  These are green plantains, nice and green, the very essence of tartness and crunchiness. Charles smothers the chatinos in salt and he relishes that they’re not made from ripe plantains. Chatinos made from ripe plantains come out all mushy and are way too sweet. Carlos hated them, and so does Charles.

  My, how these folks have tumbled from their high perch, Charles observes, relying on Carlos’s memory. Juan Becquer was a successful attorney back in Havana. His wife was also a professional of some sort. Charles doesn’t know and really doesn’t care what she did. All he cares about is how good these chatinos are.

  The food unnerves Charles, little by little. He feels Carlos taking over, being pushy, claiming his entire body. Charles resists, even when he hears the two Spanish oldsters speak in their thick accents from the northern coast of Spain. They remind him so much of his grandparents, back in Havana, whom he does not want to miss. Better not to remember them, those Gallegos, for it’s too painful. God only knows what might happen if that door gets opened, the door to the Vault of Oblivion. It’s the scariest place in the universe, and possibly the lair in which the Void hides out.

  The house is neat and clean inside, but there’s no hiding the squalor: secondhand furniture, all scuffed, stained, and ti
me-worn; bare walls full of cracks, peeling paint.

  Charles gives no thought to the fact that this family is sacrificing a great deal by merely feeding him and his brother, and by spending so much money on gasoline. There’s a lot of Miami to cross in order to get here: They don’t exactly live next door to the Chaits and Rubins.

  It’s a long weekend, very long. That house is nothing but a vortex of pain and sadness, and of constant talk about what’s been lost and how difficult life is in Miami. Even the little kids look depressed. There’s also plenty of storytelling and reminiscing about good times, long ago. Charles begins to feel oddly at peace with Carlos and allows him in. In a weird and unexpected way, this hard-luck family has made both Charles and Carlos feel at home.

  The couch in the front room makes for a nice bed. Cozy and cool, under all those jalousie windows. The huge trees outside make the shotgun shack feel like a cottage in the Black Forest, that fabled place Carlos read about long ago, before he died.

  Juan Becquer works hard during the week, at Sid Rubin’s warehouse. He’s a tough character: medium in height, well muscled, something of a bulldog in human form. Nothing seems to get him down. And he’s got a tender, fatherly air to him. He tells Charles and Tony that everything will be all right, that the losses will be recovered, somehow, and advises them never, ever to despair. Tony knows what he’s talking about, but Charles doesn’t have much of a clue. Despair? Come again? Why? Life in the United States of America is just peachy keen.

  Juan Becquer and his wife Marta will eventually reinvent themselves, earn PhD’s, and become college professors in Michigan. Charles has no way of intuiting at that moment, in that shotgun shack, that the good folks who are trying so hard to comfort him, at great expense, have also died. Grown-ups, he thinks, come over here in one piece, unchanged. They’re grown-ups, after all. Nothing affects them. He also has no clue that there are hundreds of thousands of Cuban families like the Becquers in the United States, and especially in Miami, who have willingly embraced poverty for the sake of freedom and consider it a blessing of sorts to find themselves at the bottom of the heap, and an even greater blessing to know that they will climb their way back to the top, no matter what.

  Whatever losses Charles has experienced are all emotional, not material. Yes, he misses his family whenever he dares to think about them, and he misses his childhood friends too, but he’s gained more than he’s lost when it comes to creature comforts. He has his own room, a transistor radio, a baseball glove, a bicycle, plenty of food, a pool next door, a weekly allowance, and loving foster parents. Norma is so wise and funny. Lou is a funny guy too, and cool. He plays the saxophone, for heaven’s sake, and sometimes takes Charles to jam sessions, or out on boats to fish in Biscayne Bay. So Charles is very, very happy in his fool’s paradise, his comfortable cocoon, out there in Westchester, where there’s no squalor whatsoever, and no one ever talks about Cuba.

  Idiot. Imbécil.

  I should have been reading the only book the Cuban authorities had allowed me to bring along on my journey, the awful book chosen by my parents: The Imitation of Christ, written by Thomas à Kempis in the fifteenth century and translated into Spanish by Juan Eusebio Nieremberg in the seventeenth. But I couldn’t read that depressing book any more than I could have pounded nails into my own hands and feet or rammed a crown of thorns onto my head.

  Good God. Jesus H. Inimitable Christ.

  My parents had told me that the book would always answer whatever questions I had, especially those that had to deal with which path to take. It was an old Spanish superstition, similar to the English Protestant one about the Bible. Ask your question, open the book at random, and there you’ll find your answer, somewhere on those two pages. Search through them; the Spirit will lead you to the right passage.

  I’d already tried that several times, but the book never spoke to me in a good way. Instead, it scared me half to death. Every page was filled with instructions on how to empty yourself and gain detachment from the world. Set your sights on heaven, not earth. Forsake the world. The light is above, always above, not down here. True love is selflessness, endless giving of yourself to others, endless suffering that will be amazingly transformed into the ultimate joy. Avoid loving this world with your heart of clay, forget about girls’ ankles, fast cars, baseball games, even your transistor radio; forget anything and everyone in this world, including your entire family.

  Forget it all. Let go. This is all like a bad dream that seems real. The real life is elsewhere. What you’re really pining for with every fiber of your being is not here.

  Not exactly what an eleven-year-old boy wants to hear. Or anyone else of any age, for that matter. It’s the most depressing book ever written by any human being, in all of human history.

  Oddly enough, I was as attached to that accursed book as I was to the Mary medal that Louis XVI had given me, and which I’d eventually lose. It was my only physical contact with my loved ones, those whom I didn’t want to admit that I missed. I kept it close at hand, as a talisman or a holy relic, even though I couldn’t abide what it had to say. I wasn’t ready for it. No way, no how. So I clung to the book that told me not to cling to anything on earth.

  If my life was a dream, it was a good one, I told myself. Damn good. Little did I know how quickly I’d wake up, and how much I would need that book’s advice. Eventually, it would save me from myself.

  While I wasn’t looking, and while no one else in the world was looking, the Soviet Union was filling up Cuba with nuclear missiles. Some Cubans knew about it, of course, and many of them tried to tell the world. Some went straight to those very, very intelligent folks in Washington, D.C., who worked for President Kennedy, but their reports were dismissed as fables, or mere rumors. “Crazy Cuban exiles,” they said in Washington. And as Cuba filled up with enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the entire East Coast of the United States and most of the Midwest, my clock began to tick loudly, even though I couldn’t hear it at all.

  Soon enough, I’d lose everything, again, in an instant. Those missiles would never be fired, but they’d kill me nonetheless, and also every other airlift kid whose parents were still stuck in Cuba.

  I went back to the Chaits’ after that weekend at the Becquers’ shack feeling odd, less sure of who I really was. Carlos had taken over Charles a bit too intensely. Charles had also realized that maybe there’s a level of comfort among your own that can’t be duplicated among foreigners, no matter how nice they are to you. Squalor has its charms, under the right circumstances, with the right folks.

  While I was with the Becquers, I couldn’t help but wonder where my uncle Amado was, and why Tony and I never heard from him. Being with Cubans who weren’t related to me made me think of Amado. I had family here, after all. But where was he?

  Uncle Amado was my father’s older brother. He’d left Cuba just a few months before Tony and me, and he lived in Miami. But it was as if he’d disappeared into thin air. At the time I had no way of understanding why.

  Now I do, of course.

  The man was sixty-two years old, and he had a wife and two daughters to take care of. And one of his daughters had special needs, as we say nowadays. She’d always been a bit slow and physically challenged. Amado had been a successful architect back in Havana, head of his own firm. And here he was in a new country, penniless. At an age when most men began to prepare for retirement, he had to start all over again. As if this weren’t bad enough, there was no work for him in Miami. The city was flooded with Cuban refugees, many of them professionals of all sorts, and there weren’t enough jobs to go around, not even menial ones. Juan Becquer was one of the lucky ones, having landed a job as a janitor.

  God knows what Amado, his wife, and two daughters were doing, or where they were living. But you can bet that they weren’t too happy or comfortable. And you can bet that Amado had more on his hands than he could handle. Hell, I’m surprised that he didn’t simply melt away. If I had to toss my profession aside, give up e
verything I owned, and move to a foreign land right now with a handicapped child in tow—at the age of fifty-nine—I’d probably dissolve into a puddle. The last thing I’d want to do is to add two snot-faced boys to my household, or even to check up on them.

  I have to be honest with myself, and with you.

  One fine day, however, Amado finally showed up. The whole gang came to visit us, at the Rubins’ house: Uncle Amado, Aunt Alejandra, and cousins Marisol and Alejandrita. They came to say good-bye, even though they hadn’t yet come to say hello. Amado was being relocated to a small town in Illinois, one of those northern states. Like thousands of other Cubans in Miami, and like all of the airlift kids, he was being booted from Miami, where there was no place for him.

  They knew nothing about their destination or what might be waiting for them, other than the fact that Amado had been hired by an architectural firm as a draftsman, for a whopping ninety dollars a week, before taxes. This was an offer he couldn’t refuse. It was all part of a federal program that relocated Cubans all over the United States. Scatter them all, get them out of Miami, as quickly as possible, and as far away as possible. Give employers a bonus for hiring a Cuban, tell the Cubans that if they don’t take the job they’ll be completely on their own in Miami. No welfare checks, no food stamps, no medical care. Nothing. Nada. Take the job, or else.

  So Amado had taken the job in Bloomington, Illinois, hometown of former presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, and also home to State Farm Insurance, Eureka vacuum cleaners, and Beer Nuts, the preferred snack at many an American bar. Also where Abraham Lincoln had once given a remarkable speech that no one wrote down, a soul-stirring oration, the words of which no one could remember. It’s simply known as his “Lost Speech.” Of course, Amado and his family knew nothing of this. All they knew was that this was the only choice they had, which is the same thing as having no choice at all. The architect was now going to work as a draftsman. It was better than working as a janitor.