Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  We get to our final bus stop, which is still many blocks from the Becquers’ house. We walk forever, it seems, under a merciless Florida sun. By now it’s summer. And there’s no shade here on the streets of Hialeah. I think of all of those cartoons I’ve seen with a man walking in the desert, a cow’s skull at his feet, a buzzard circling overhead. This is worse than the Sahara, I tell myself. I’m parched, and the electrical tape that’s holding my shoes together is reaching the limits of its endurance. The fact that I don’t have any underwear on doesn’t help either. My pants are scratchy.

  I no longer have any underwear. Worn out.

  We cross a vacant lot and I’m stunned by what I see. Cactus. The lot is full of little cactus plants, hundreds of them. So, this is a desert after all. If I didn’t know better, I’d think this was a mirage. But I know what real mirages look like. Miami is full of them in the summer. Just look down any long street, and you’ll see some shimmering off in the distance that looks like a glistening lake. The cactus plants are up close, however, and I can touch them. I try to pull one out of the ground, and its thorns fight back, successfully. I leave it alone and suck the blood from my fingertip.

  We finally make it to the Becquers’ house and ring the doorbell. Marta’s mother comes to the door. The look on her face says it all. I don’t need to ask any questions. She’s not only surprised, but horrified to see us standing on the front steps. She also expresses her total surprise and annoyance in no uncertain terms.

  “Pero, qué hacen aquí?” she asks. Why are you here? “Qué se les metió en la cabeza?” What got into your head? “Y ahora, qué?” And what now?

  She’s nice enough to let us in. And when Marta and Juan get home, they allow us to stay. But I can tell that they’re not too happy about it. They’ve just moved in and they’ve got a lot to do. Tony says as little as possible, but looks totally comfortable with the discomfort he’s causing our benefactors. He wanted to get out of the Palace Ricardo, and he did.

  This lie, this trek, can’t ever fit into the Vault of Oblivion. It’s too big. And it feels too much like some sort of omen, or foreshadowing.

  Flash forward, eighteen years. It’s the Fourth of July, 1981, and I’m at Tony’s house in Chicago. It’s as small and as cramped as the Becquers’ duplex. It’s way out in the northwest corner of the city, a Polish neighborhood still unfamiliar to me. Too far from the lake. I’m spending that summer in Chicago after being away for many years, and I am trying to reconnect with my brother, whose force field has been impenetrable for a long time. I’m doing research at the Newberry Library and writing lectures for my fall semester courses. Come September, I’ll have a new teaching job at the University of Virginia, and I’ve got to get my act together. Tony works at O’Hare airport, loading food onto planes.

  “Time for fireworks,” Tony says.

  He goes into his bedroom and I follow. He opens his closet door. There are hardly any clothes in there. No room for them. This is an arsenal. All sorts of weapons: rifles, pistols, machine guns. Boxes and boxes of ammunition. Grenades. A grenade launcher. Not toys. The real thing.

  “Side benefits. It pays to work for the CIA,” he tells me. “The only drawback is getting shot at now and then, or getting screwed by the agency.”

  I identify an AK-47 Kalashnikov assault rifle in the arsenal.

  “Here, take this,” he says, handing me a very nice and heavy .45 caliber pistol.

  He grabs an identical M1911 for himself, and a box of bullets.

  “Let’s go up on the roof,” he says.

  “How about the AK-47?” I ask.

  He laughs.

  We climb up on the roof, using a tall stepladder. It’s a one-story ranch house, and it’s easy enough to get up there. We sit on the gently sloping roof for a while and scan the pinkish sky for fireworks, over the rooftops. Fireworks are illegal in Chicago, but some of Tony’s neighbors know how to get around the law. So it seems. We see a few rockets light up the sky. And we hear explosions all around us. It sounds like a war out there. A familiar sound, a comforting one, in an odd way. Up on that roof, I feel like Tony and I are back in our bedroom in Havana, joking around the way we used to at bedtime, listening to the bombs and the gunfire off in the distance.

  “Party time,” he says.

  He fires first. Pow. I follow his lead. We unload our guns into the pink Chicago night sky. Reload and unload again. The noise we make is heavenly, and so is the smell of gunpowder that envelopes us. I know that what we’re doing is wrong, but I don’t care. I’m with Tony.

  Surrender. Release. Absolute freedom. Peace.

  I haven’t felt this good in a long time, or as reckless, or as whole.

  A very, very long time.

  Sixteen

  Miss Esterman isn’t here today. Instead we have a substitute teacher: an old lady, very small and thin. She gives you the impression that her bones might break at any moment, for no apparent reason, and that not a single one of those bones is a mean one.

  She looks like a grandmother.

  That suppressed undercurrent of restlessness that had been flowing through our class for the past few months surges to the surface as soon as the Pledge of Allegiance and the Bible reading are over.

  It begins with the roll call. She calls out a name and several kids say “Here” at once. And it happens with every name. One guy, Richard, says “Here” to every name but his own. Richard is one of those Cuban kids who’ve been in Miami so long that they have English first names and can’t speak Spanish correctly. He’s the tallest kid in the class, and he has blond hair and blue eyes. He looks like an English choir boy, but beneath the cherubic exterior, a volcano is waiting to erupt. He’s full of hell, and so far it’s surfaced only on the playground. Miss Esterman has him under some kind of spell in the classroom. The same one she uses on the rest of us.

  No Miss Esterman, no spell.

  Everyone who’d been restraining their worst impulses breaks free, and Richard leads the way. The roll call takes about a half hour, and God only knows what the substitute submits to the principal’s office. There’s no way she can figure out who is really there, or who is who.

  Time for the first lesson of the day. The substitute asks a question, and Richard raises his hand. She calls on him.

  Richard stands up and replies in his rusty Spanish: “Tu eres la vieja más fea y más flaca y mocosa que he visto en toda mi vida.” You’re the ugliest and skinniest sniveling old bag that I’ve ever seen.

  “What? Could you please repeat that? I didn’t get what you said.”

  A few giggles from the few kids who know Spanish. I’m too stunned to giggle. The rest of the class looks puzzled, but highly amused.

  “Te dije que eres feísima, y más flaca que una vaca muerta de hambre, y que tienes la nariz llena de mocos.” I said that you are very ugly and skinnier than a starving cow and that your nose is full of boogers.

  Richard sits down.

  “Oh, I’m sorry . . . I didn’t get that again. Could you repeat it one more time?”

  A girl in the class shouts: “He can’t speak English. He just got here from Cuba.”

  “Oh . . . I see.”

  The legitimate question she asked is answered by some other kid, and the class moves along. Or so it seems for a few minutes. Then Richard begins to interrupt the substitute continually, blurting out more insults in Spanish.

  All it takes is about ten minutes of this, and the class begins to disintegrate into chaos, rapidly. The substitute teacher, who seems unable to realize what’s happening, keeps trying to move the class along whatever lesson plan Miss Esterman had left for her.

  Within an hour, we’re all talking to one another and carrying on as if the substitute were not there at all. After a while, she just gives up and sits at her desk, doing nothing.

  “All right, kids, if this is how you want to behave, so be it,” she says. “It’s your problem if you don’t want to learn what you’re supposed to learn.” Or something
like that.

  By lunchtime, we’re all having a grand old time in there, talking, joking, doing whatever we want. Since Citrus Grove Elementary doesn’t have a lunchroom—only a cafeteria with no seating space—we do lunch in the classroom, as always. I have nothing but my usual Sandwich Spread sandwich—pain américain à la Hellmann’s—but most of the other kids buy real lunches and bring them back to their desks. This means that some of them have several items to play with. I eat my sandwich and drink the eight ounces of milk I get for free, but many of the other kids start playing with their food.

  Food fight!

  Much to my dismay, I see really good food being tossed around the room, stuff I’d love to eat. The brownies, especially, look very good. Even worse, as far as my dismay is concerned, I have nothing to throw, save for what gets thrown at me, most of which I eat.

  At this point, the arrangement of the desks in the room comes into play. Miss Esterman is always changing our desks around. They’re not fixed to the floor, so she’s constantly coming up with new patterns for us, to keep us off guard. On this day, our desks are perfectly arranged for war: We’re in four rows, perpendicular to the teacher’s desk, with two rows at either end of the room and a wide aisle between them. This means that we are evenly divided, with two rows on one side of the room facing two rows on the other, with a trench and no-man’s-land in between.

  Fortunately, no one throws anything at the substitute teacher, who continues to sit at her desk through all of this, as if nothing unusual is taking place. Sparing her makes it possible for us to carry on.

  The bell rings. Lunch is over. The kids who had trays and plates return them to the cafeteria and come back. There’s been a lull in the fighting, a momentary truce. Just like the one that took place between the Germans and the Franco-British forces along the western front on Christmas 1914, which didn’t last long.

  With no food to throw, we dig into our desks and look for suitable projectiles. At first it’s wads of paper and paper airplanes. But the mere act of having to dip into our flip-top desks for ammunition accidentally reveals to all of us a crude defense strategy. If you keep your desk top flipped up, you have a nice big shield to hide behind.

  Hiding behind our shields, we reach for the one item that is crying out to be used, precisely because it’s shaped like a bullet: our coloring crayons. We let them fly. And when I say “we,” I mean all of us. Not one kid in that class is a conscientious objector or a pacifist. Each and every one of us is launching colored projectiles across the room.

  The crayons smash into the desktops and break into smaller pieces. They smash into the walls too, for not everyone has good aim or a good throwing arm. As we run out of whole crayons to throw, we begin to pick up their remnants from the floor. Throwing crayons across the room and ducking behind the shield of your raised desktop is hard enough. Throwing them while you try to pick up pieces from the floor is even harder. So, this is when the casualties begin to mount. I get hit several times. Good thing I’m wearing glasses, for someone lands a shot right over my eye, and it’s thrown hard. It leaves a purple blotch on my lens. I score a few hits myself, including one that lands squarely in someone else’s eye. It’s one of the nicest guys in the class, someone who is as close to a friend as I can hope for. He winces and puts his hand over his eye. My conscience bites hard, and I do some wincing of my own, inside. But that doesn’t slow me down or stop me. It’s kill-or-be-killed in there, everyone for himself and God against all.

  Crayons give way to pencils and pens, and the chalk from the blackboard, and even to ink cartridges—those little plastic tubes full of ink that you could insert into fountain pens back then in the early 1960s. Some of the ink cartridges burst. On the desktops, on the walls, on the floor, on the warriors.

  It seems to go on forever. Then the bell rings. School’s out. I don’t know about the others, but I don’t even see the substitute as I file out the door. I go home a bit ruffled and stained up, just like everyone else. And we leave behind a classroom that looks as if it has been hit by a tornado.

  I know we’re all in trouble, and that there will be hell to pay. Big-time. But that’s not going to happen today, I tell myself. That’s tomorrow’s problem. I live for the present, the eternal now moment. All I can think about is how much fun I had, and how I wish I hadn’t hit that one guy in the eye.

  The rest of that day is like every other one at the Palace Ricardo. A bad dinner at five o’clock, kitchen duty, a walk to the library, a walk back during which we look for empty soda-pop bottles that we can redeem for two cents apiece, an hour or two of television, and off to bed.

  Morning breaks, and I get out of bed feeling shaky. Suddenly, now has turned into a day of reckoning. In the kitchen, it’s the usual rush and the usual pecking order. Like the lowest monkeys in a monkey tribe, some of us have to wait until the alpha monkeys are done eating before we can even begin to think about our turn. Tony and I eat our margarine toast and drink our instant café con leche, and we head for school. As soon as I walk through the classroom door, I know that judgment day has arrived.

  The principal is in our room, and he’s just standing there, tight-lipped, up in front, next to Miss Esterman, who looks thoroughly mortified. He says nothing, and neither does she. There are also a couple of janitors in the room, cleaning up the mess we made. One of them is scraping crayons off the wall. The other is collecting debris from the floor. We go through the usual sacred morning ritual: Pledge of Allegiance, Bible reading via the school’s sound system. The janitors stop their cleaning while this takes place. We students eye one another and make subtle facial gestures, all of which indicate apprehension of the highest order. I catch a glimpse of Richard. His gaze is fixed on my end of the room, like a needle on a compass pointing to true north. But I catch him glancing at Miss Esterman and the principal out of the corner of his eye, furtively.

  Much to my relief, no one has shown up wearing an eye patch.

  Miss Esterman is the first to break the silence.

  “Class, you know why Principal So-and-So is here. He has something to say to you.”

  He rips into us, not by screaming and yelling, but by subtly needling our consciences with red-hot reminders of everything we’ve ever been taught by our parents and our teachers—the very same principles that all of us had been trying not to think of ever since yesterday. I can’t speak for the others, but my conscience has been released from the cage into which I put it yesterday, and now it’s like a wounded rampaging bear, in there, wherever it is that it dwells and does its work.

  Ay. It hurts. I’m getting mauled. And the guilt is flowing like red-hot blood from gaping wounds. But I have to admit to myself, as my own conscience is ripping me to shreds, that what I’m looking at is kind of funny, maybe even hilarious.

  As Principal So-and-So talks, the janitors are hard at work, scraping crayons off the walls and floor, wiping stains, sweeping, mopping. Somehow, something deep inside of me tells me that I should laugh at this, that it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. It’s a lot like the aftermath of a pie-throwing scene in a silent movie, except that in this rendering, we have a principal scolding us, the pie throwers. And I’m waiting for a pie to hit the principal squarely in the face.

  I half expect the overture from Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie to start playing over the loudspeaker that has just delivered the Word of God to all of us reprobates.

  But this is no silent film. It’s real life, and Principal So-and-So gives us a tough assignment. We’re asked to write an essay in which we explain our behavior: “Why did I do what I did, even though I knew it was wrong?” This is a low blow. The lowest of the low. What does he expect us to say?

  But wait, maybe it’s not such a low blow. Is that it? Is this the extent of our punishment? No suspension? No detention? Nothing else?

  Damn. Yes, there’s something else. He’s going to write a letter to all of our parents and guardians detailing the nature of our appalling behavior, and
they’ll have to sign it and return it to him. He’s also going to turn our essays over to our elders, and they’ll have to sign and return those to him too.

  I breathe a huge sigh of relief and laugh, inside. In my case, this turn of the screw will be painless. Lucy and Ricky won’t give a damn about this at all. They might not even read what I give them to sign. That’s what they always do. “Qué es esto?” Lucy will ask. What’s this? She’s the only one who signs our stuff. She always asks about what’s on the pieces of paper we give her to sign, and she never reads it herself, to check and see if we’ve told her the truth. When it comes to things of this sort, she trusts us completely because her English is so poor, and also because she couldn’t care less about any of us.

  I luck out. For once, being an orphan works in my favor.

  Writing the essay is every bit as hard as I expected, even though we’re given the rest of the day to do it. This is no homework assignment, but our sole activity for the day. I approach my conscience with caution, since it’s on the rampage. It roars, and mauls me. I back off. If I rely on this beast, I’ll have to write my essay in blood. Hell, no. No way. So I do the only thing I can: I turn to the other beast in me, the one that’s always nice and sweet and wicked to the core, the one that thinks highly of me and all of my worst impulses.

  Doctors Freud and Jung and all of your disciples—wayward or not—please feel free to laugh. No need to hide your feelings. This is the kind of stuff that keeps you gainfully employed.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” I say in my essay. “I had to defend myself.” Yeah. I didn’t start this, I say, but once it got going and stuff started flying around the room, it became a question of honor and self-defense. What was I supposed to do? Let others pelt me with crayons and chalk and ink cartridges willy-nilly? Hide behind my desktop like some sissy girlyboy? Even the girls were throwing things. What kind of boy would that make me, if I were to just sit there, passively? And where was the substitute teacher during all of this? Why didn’t she do anything? Why didn’t she protect me from all of those projectiles? Yes, I know it’s wrong to trash a classroom and to disrespect a teacher, but I got hit hard by some of those crayons. They hurt. And my clothes got all stained up, maybe permanently. I live in an orphanage, you know. I have to wash my own clothes, and I don’t have much in the way of a wardrobe. If something is damaged, that’s it: I don’t get to replace it. So, where was this teacher? It was her job to keep the natives from getting out of control. I’m not one of them, the real troublemakers. I just had to defend myself from them, under the most pressing of circumstances. I’m really a good boy. A very good boy, living in hell. Yeah. I have a lot to put up with once I leave the classroom, so the least that the school could do for me is to provide me with a safe and nurturing environment.