Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  We’re all upset that it hasn’t snowed yet. Damn it, where’s the snow? It’s Christmas Eve and we’re up north. If we’re going to be exiled this far from home, we should at least get a white Christmas.

  Crap. It actually starts to rain. What kind of insult is this? God, where are you? The wind begins to pick up, seriously. Ada Serrano jokes about being in the Windy City. We can hear it howling, and we also hear the raindrops being driven into the windowpanes. I get up at dessert time and look out the window. I can’t believe my eyes—the rain is turning to snow. Big fat flakes, falling horizontally.

  “Nieve!” I yell out.

  Everyone comes to the window. We see a man across the street, at the entrance to Swift Elementary School, struggling against the wind. He’s not making much progress. The wind is so fierce that it pushes him back while he holds on to his hat with all of his strength.

  We all have a good laugh at his expense when the wind knocks him down and his hat escapes, flying away from him like a hawk after prey.

  The snowflakes soon outnumber the raindrops, and then quickly replace them. It’s a blizzard out there, an honest-to-goodness blizzard. And we stand at the window, all of us, and take in the miracle. Then we return to the table and enjoy our dessert—flan and the nuts and the turrón—as the snow piles up outside and sticks to everything, like superabundant grace.

  A couple of hours later, the storm is over. Everything is covered in snow. It’s not only on the ground and on all of the parked cars, about four inches deep, but it is also plastered on all vertical surfaces: trees, light posts, street signs, buildings. And it looks like fluffy stucco. Not even Currier & Ives could have come up with a more perfect Christmas landscape, even though Winthrop Avenue is an orderly jumble of densely packed buildings rather than some bucolic village or farm.

  Tony and I walk home with our mother under a starry sky. She can slip in the snow very easily, and none of the sidewalks has been shoveled yet, so we hold on to her tightly. We leave very odd tracks in the freshly fallen snow, like some seven-legged beast with one clubfoot. As soon as I walk down the steps into our living room, I turn on the Christmas tree. It lights up the whole space, including the crèche underneath, on the floor. Little Baby Jesus, his chubby arms upraised, blesses us all, bathed in all colors, all at once. Mary and Joseph, as always, simply look stunned.

  Presents? Who needs them.

  Flash forward, three years. Christmas 1968. Three earthmen are circling the moon, for the first time in the history of the universe. I’ve just had an essay published in the Chicago Tribune about the real meaning of Christmas. It’s been one hell of a year, one damn thing after another, yet the Tribune stoops to publish such a thing in its Voice of Youth column. Never mind Vietnam, which is bad enough. The world is falling apart. Riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Chicago on fire. Curfews. Riots in Paris. Robert Bay of Pigs Kennedy gets shot to death too. Riots at the Democratic Party convention. Blood on the streets of Chicago. Russian tanks on the streets of Prague. My very first transcendent love, Christine, my first true soul mate, murdered, stabbed seventeen times in Madison, Wisconsin. In her absence, I’ve picked up a girlfriend I think might also be a soul mate, broken up once, and gotten back together. Tony has gotten engaged to a girl my age who’s totally wrong for him.

  My Tribune essay ignores all this. It’s all about the way in which the stable in Bethlehem must have stunk to high heaven, and how essential it is to keep that in mind when celebrating Christmas. Forget the decorations on State Street and Michigan Avenue, forget the store windows at Marshall Field’s and Carson Pirie Scott and Company, forget the tinsel, and the gift wrap, and all that stuff. Smell the manger. That’s Christmas.

  Hypocrite. Blind fool. Deep down inside I’m still an idolater and worship all that stuff I deride. Which is why I’m not in a seminary or a monastery. The sad truth is that I can no more let go of what I like in 1968 than I could in 1965, or 1962, or 1956. And I have no burning desire to smell a stinking stable either. No way. I just can’t admit it to myself.

  I’m a success story, damn it, and I’m as deeply entangled in the world and as addicted to praise and recognition as the shallowest, most materialistic, money-grubbing cretin in the world.

  “I” this and “I” that. Moron. Comemierda. I have a long list of accomplishments that begin with “I.” I’m vice president of student council. I’ve designed the yearbook cover. I’m in about ten clubs and on the honors and advanced placement track in all of my classes. I’ve received a special prize for being engaged in so many social service programs, like playing basketball with handicapped kids every week. I also go to church every single day, pray compulsively, and work at a grocery store about thirty hours a week. Not only that, I’ve managed to find jobs for about twelve other Cubans at my grocery store, where I’m only one of four guys named Carlos.

  Yes, Chuck Neat-o is dead. He died the day I left Bloomington. And he stayed dead too, along with Charles and Charlie.

  Now, at the Jewel food store on Morse Avenue, it’s just Carlos Nieto (Knee-a-toe, not Neat-o), along with Carlos Mendez, Carlos Trelles, and Carlos Montoya.

  Somewhere down the line, in 1978, Carlos Nieto will become Carlos M. N. Eire, and then, later, just plain old Carlos Eire, when I stop writing books with footnotes.

  Flash forward to the present. Right now, as I’m writing.

  This book has come to an end at chapter twenty-five. It’s an arbitrary number. I haven’t aimed for it, or bothered to look up its meaning in the Chinese-inspired Cuban lottery known as la charada, or la bolita, in which every number from one to one hundred is assigned a symbol. Number one, for instance, is caballo, or horse; thirteen is pavo real, or peacock; seventy-eight is sarcófago, or coffin; ninety-six is puta vieja, or old whore; and so on. Ideally, the way this is supposed to work is that if a certain image shows up in your dreams, you can safely bet on its number equivalent and win the lottery. Normally, I pay no attention to this nonsense. But when I wrote my first book without footnotes, a friend passed on the bolita number list, by chance, and I glanced at it. Much to my amazement, I’d stopped at chapter forty-one, the number for lagartija, or lizard, the central metaphor in that book. It was too perfect, too much of a coincidence. So out of sheer curiosity I’ve checked to see what surprise the number twenty-five holds in store for this book.

  And once again, I’m blown away: It’s casa nueva, or new home.

  No me jodas. This is too much. Too much of a coincidence for a book about life in a new country and the journey to one casa nueva after another.

  How awesome, this coincidence, and how annoying. It makes you question everything and ache for certainty, maybe even yearn for the once sacred art of augury to return. But why plumb a number for meaning? Or a name?

  On some days, I wish I could change my name to McKinley Morgan-field, the baptismal and legal name of the chief god of the blues, Muddy Waters. And I often regret not giving that name to my firstborn son, even though that son often thanks me for not having done so.

  Most recently, I’ve pined for the name José Candelario Tres Patines, that of the main character in La Tremenda Corte, the Cuban radio show I used to listen to with Tony every night before going to sleep, back in Plato’s cave. In case you don’t know, by the way, Tres Patines means “Three Skates.” A perfectly nonsensical name, for a perfectly nonsensical world, in which we all commit nonsensical crimes and receive nonsensical punishments.

  “For the crime of nameicide, I fine you fifteen grande-no-fat-triple-shot-no-foam lattes from Starbucks, six unrequited loves, and one day-long oral exam on Immanuel Kant, in German. And may this teach you never, ever to kill your name again.”

  What’s in a name? Who are you, after you die over and over and are gloriously reborn, time and time again, in the same body? What’s a life, anyway? All of the cells you and I were born with are long gone. Our bodies are never the same: We’re in constant flux, physically. So who are we? If all of the cells a
nd atoms in my body and yours are not the same ones we were born with, and if these minute building blocks we have at the moment are constantly replaced, including those that make up our brains, then how can we be the same person, the same self?

  “Software,” the die-hard materialists will say. The hardware changes, but the software and the information it contains remains the same. In other words, all we are is memory.

  Ay. This always gives me trouble. If all we are is memory, and memory contains one death after another, rebirth upon rebirth, how can we ever hope to speak of “I,” “me,” or “myself”? Shouldn’t we speak of “we,” “us,” or “ourselves”?

  This would be so confusing, but so much more accurate.

  Proving the existence of God is fairly easy. Any idiot can take a stab at that. As one might say in Chicagoese: What, you think all of this made itself up? Yeah. Sure. Proving the existence of the soul and its immortality is much harder. After all, we perish and vanish from view just like all of the plants and animals on earth. Poof. Dust we are and unto dust we return, just like the pets we love, and the chickens we eat, and the cockroaches we squash, and last summer’s heirloom tomato plants. The universe insults us by carrying on and on, as if we had never existed. How galling: Many astrophysicists now say that its eternity is undeniable, as undeniable as God’s used to be.

  Ay. Tremendo insulto. What an affront.

  In another book, which I wrote two deaths ago, I came up with several contemptible proofs for the existence of God. But in this book, I’ve wrestled with the harder challenge posed by the human soul, that most painfully evanescent entity. And here, at the end, I have only one proof to offer concerning the soul and its immortality: this whole book, from cover to cover, and its readers, including you.

  Go ahead, call this proof ridiculous. I double dare you.

  Dukes up.

  Having just died an utterly exquisite and surprising death a few days before I began to write these pages, while biking through the Tiergarten in Berlin—a park with a name that comes too damn close to sounding like Tear Garden in English—I can’t help but see it this way: If one can recall how one learned to die, and remember dying again and again, then death has no right to be absolute. None at all. It would be the ultimate poetic injustice.

  And the stupidest, cruelest, grossest joke ever, totally out of sync with the order we can perceive in the universe.

  Learning to die is as necessary as learning to breathe, but a lot harder. It’s not just because of the pain involved, but also because death calls for opposite reactions all at once, something none of us is well equipped to handle. Death gives you no choice but to embrace it and hate it and thank it all at once. Letting go is the key to dying well, and so is never letting go. Never is the only door to forever. Never surrendering and always surrendering. Dying is the only option and not an option at all. Something to be fervently desired and something totally unacceptable. Dying is constant. But it is summed up only once, at physical death, when the body begins to dissolve. Then, and only then, will we know if we’ve learned our lessons well, when our vulnerable bodies are also transformed by another sort of sweet flame. Then, and only then, can all our dying lead to deathlessness and an enduring life in which there is no Absence whatsoever. None. Forever.

  Presence. Sheer presence. Light. Love eternal.

  Flash back, forward, sideways, up, down, inward, outward, any way you want. Forget directions, time, and space.

  I’m at a Christmas tree farm with the four sweetest souls in the world: my lovely wife Jane, my son John-Carlos, my daughter Grace, and my son Bruno. The trees are all planted in perfectly straight lines that extend in all directions—horizontally, vertically, diagonally, infinitely—over gently undulating ground, on an earth without circumference, the center of which is everywhere. There’s snow underfoot, lots of it, and the bright, sublime light that envelops us doesn’t melt it. Not even in the least. Every snowflake remains intact. Every tree is perfect. Each and every tree, each and every branch and needle, perfectly shaped, and gleaming, as if from within. We have trouble deciding which tree to cut. We argue, as we always do. “No, not this one, that one. No, not that one, this one.” We trudge through the snow up and down the endless rows of pines. And everyone we know and love shows up and tries to help, as each and every tree shouts, “Pick me!” And, simultaneously, we five try to help everyone we know and love to pick out their prize tree, as the angels laugh and all the perfect evergreens cry out, “Pick me!” and our saws sing, in perfect harmony, “Use us, now!”

  This goes on forever.

  Por siempre jamás.

  Without end.

  Without end, when all is said and done.

  You know.

  Acknowledgments

  Ever since the publication of Waiting for Snow in Havana, I’ve been asked countless times, “When will you continue the story?” or “When will you write another book without footnotes?” My response has always been the same: “Maybe tomorrow; maybe never. I have to wait for the inspiration.”

  Out of the blue, the inspiration finally came at an unlikely time, in a most unlikely place: Berlin, in early June 2009, after a two-week journey on the Elbe River, up from Prague. I must thank my travel companions on this tour—in which I was a lecturer—for helping me realize that all genuine pilgrimages ultimately lead to the core of the soul through a linking of heaven and earth; past, present, and future; self and other; dreaming and waking; and the here-and-now with the then-and-there.

  As a refugee from the former Soviet Empire I was overwhelmed by what I found in its former colonies. Knowing that my Cuban brethren are still trapped inside a grotesque relic of that totalitarian nightmare, and knowing that my parents had sent me to the United States so I wouldn’t end up in these places through which I was traveling, I couldn’t help but feel a constant twinge of something I couldn’t identify: a strangely mixed emotion—part sorrow, part envy, part gratitude, and part rage—that drew me inward and made me feel more like an exile than ever.

  I must therefore thank you Czechs and Germans who were bold enough to rid yourselves of your oppressors twenty years ago: The legacy of your accomplishment brought me in touch with my own past in a very immediate way, and it gave me hope for the future of the ruined land I was forced to leave behind and from which I’ve been barred, along with my books.

  I’m especially grateful to the Museum of Communism in Prague, in which I never set foot. I only saw posters advertising its existence, but that was enough for me. It knocked me off balance just to know that such a museum exists, in which I and every Czech over the age of twenty-one could be at once a visitor and an exhibit. You realigned my thinking and my center of gravity, Museum of Communism, as all great paradoxes tend to do. So thanks to whoever created you, a place at once so ludicrous and meaningful, and so perfectly designed to awaken my full identity. I must thank the Berlin Wall too, or what’s left of it. Its sorry remains—including the small chunks I purchased at souvenir shops and brought home with me—were a constant source of inspiration.

  Infant of Prague—miracle-working icon of the Christ child brought to Bohemia from Spain by Carmelite nuns in the seventeenth century, exile reified, tucked away in such a peculiar spot, which I had such a hard time finding—I thank you too, much more than the Museum of Communism or the Berlin Wall. If I hadn’t stumbled into your shrine on that Pentecost Eve, this book wouldn’t have been written. Mil gracias. You know why. Tú sabes.

  Others have done more than inspire me: They’ve actually helped shape this book and enabled its creation.

  First, I’d like to thank Alice Martell, my agent. Thanks, Alice, for your advice and all of your efforts on my behalf. And once again; I can’t thank you enough.

  I’d also like to thank my editor, Martin Beiser, for his support, and guidance, and unerring advice. I can’t thank you enough either.

  Deeply heartfelt thanks also go to my colleagues in the Virginia Seminar in Lived Theology, funded by the L
illy Foundation: Charles Marsh, Mark Gornik, Patricia Hampl, Susan Holman, Alan Jacobs, Chuck Mathewes. Our spirited conversations during the past four years have guided the writing of this book, and your response to just one small part of it has improved the whole considerably. Thanks, friends.

  Thanks also to Father Robert Pelton, of Madonna House. You’ve helped in so many ways, so constantly, from far away.

  Here, in my own house, I found the greatest help and inspiration of all.

  As happened before, with Waiting for Snow, my children, John-Carlos, Grace, and Bruno, played a key role. I couldn’t read this book to you as I did with the other one nine years ago, when you were so much younger, but your eagerness to read the emerging text, day by day, and your honest responses meant more to me than you can imagine. You guided me and kept me fired up, you three. This is your story too: Thanks for helping me tell it.

  Finally, I owe the greatest debt of all to my wife Jane, whose love and encouragement and advice helped me find the right words in their hiding places and allowed me to corral them and string them together in the best possible order, under the best possible circumstances, during a wonderful summer that slipped away much too quickly but will forever be with us, no matter what.

  As always, thanks doesn’t even begin to cover it, lovely Jane, my Jane. The right words with which to end this sentence aren’t hiding; they simply can’t be found on earth.

  About the Author

  BORN IN HAVANA in 1950, Carlos Eire left his homeland in 1962, one of fourteen thousand unaccompanied children airlifted out of Cuba by Operation Pedro Pan. After living in a series of foster homes in Florida and Illinois, he was reunited with his mother in Chicago in 1965. His father, who died in 1976, never left Cuba. After earning his PhD at Yale University in 1979, Carlos Eire taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota for two years and at the University of Virginia for fifteen. He is now the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. He lives in Guilford, Connecticut, with his wife, Jane, and their three children.