Waiting for Snow in Havana

by Carlos Eire

  Stupid of me to put up a fight. All along, I should have heeded what the Christian Brothers taught me. I didn’t know it at the time, but those monks explained nearly everything to me. I owe them a lot, including my fear of chauffeurs.

  Lucky me. I attended the finest primary school in Havana. El Colegio La Salle de Miramar. The Christian Brothers ran several schools in Cuba, but their outpost in the plush suburb of Miramar was the flagship, not just for their order, but for all private schools on the island. President Batista must have thought so, for he sent his children there. They were my school-mates, as were the sons of many of Batista’s ministers and generals. The sons of those who owned the sugar mills, tobacco factories, mines, department stores, and nearly everything else of value were my classmates, too, along with the sons of doctors, lawyers, and judges.

  This was a Catholic school for boys, of course. It was run by stern monks, many of them from Spain and France, whose sole purpose in life was to make us aware of our base instincts and turn us into God-fearing Christians. Aside from a handful of Jewish children whose parents had come to Cuba from Europe fleeing Hitler and the Nazis, all of us were Roman Catholics. The Jewish kids would be excused from taking part in religion class, but they still had to sit at their desks while religion was taught. We all thought it was strange, but whenever we dealt with Bible stories from the Old Testament, they would chime in. And they knew all the answers. We couldn’t figure out how they knew so much if they weren’t taking religion class, but somehow they did. It was a mystery the good brothers never bothered to reveal to us.

  You see, they didn’t really explain everything. They only explained nearly everything.

  The principal of this school, Brother Néstor María, was short and stout and spoke Spanish with a very thick French accent. You can imagine how much fun we good Christian boys had with that. French accents are just as funny in Spanish as in English. He would visit our classroom often and stand near the door with his hands behind his back, his huge belly testing the strength of the black buttons on his cassock. He boasted about the school to all the parents, and my mother still talks about it. “You know, that Brother Néstor María would always say that his school was attended by the crème de la crème of Cuban society.”

  The crème de la crème. Sure. We might have been at the top of the heap, but all of us were little thugs, putrid vessels of original sin. Not an hour went by without some kid being bullied or ridiculed. Not a day went by without a fistfight on the playground. Sometimes there would be two or three fights going on simultaneously during recess, each attracting a circle of spectators. The brothers would stand back and watch, intervening only at the first sight of blood. When more than one fight took place at the same time, the spectators would rush from circle to circle, trying to find out who was fighting. Some fights were better than others, depending on the reputation of the participants. What you wanted to see was a fight between two really tough guys. Watching a tough guy beat up on some mariquita was not much fun. The only kids who watched those fights were the maricones.

  I wasn’t counted among the mariquitas or maricones, but I was constantly tested. Abstaining from foul language placed me uncomfortably close to the line between macho and mariquita, and this invited all sorts of challenges to my budding masculinity. In the process, I came to be at the bottom of some pecking order I still don’t understand. And I also took more punches than I care to remember.

  I do remember winning one fight, though, and with merely one blow.

  One fine day in second grade, out in the blazing sunlight, I was approached on the playground by the son of one of Batista’s chief henchmen. Even at that age, I knew that his father was rumored to be in charge of all of the torturing in Cuba. No small task, on an island crawling with rebels. As often happens, the son tried to emulate the father. So this boy whose name I have forgotten was one of the worst bullies in my class.

  Chief Torturer Junior approached me as I stood talking to another kid. He interrupted rudely, as bullies are supposed to do, and asked: “Why do you always stand with your hands on your hips, just like a girl?”

  I looked down at my hands and, much to my horror, I saw that they were indeed resting on my hips. I had to think fast, especially since I had never heard that placing one’s hands on one’s hips was a telltale sign of femininity. But if this guy said so, it must be true. After all, the bullies were the lexicographers of machismo.

  “I don’t always do that,” I replied as I removed my hands from my hips.

  “Yes you do. I see you doing it all the time.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes you do. Ask anyone. You always stand there just like a girl, with your hands on your hips.”

  Chief Torturer Junior turned to the kid who was with me. “Tell him. You saw it too. Doesn’t he always stand like this?” And the bully struck a very feminine-looking pose, swaying his hips, placing one hand on his right hip and the other on his forehead.

  “I…I…I don’t know,” said the other boy, afraid that he, too, was being challenged.

  “I don’t always stand around like a girl,” I protested once more. “You’re exaggerating.”

  “Are you calling me a liar?” huffed the bully.

  “Uh…no, no.”

  “Yes you are, maricón, you’re calling me a liar. You disgusting fairy.”

  He had done it. He had used the word. And we were only in second grade. This was getting very serious.

  Chief Torturer fils pressed on. “You know, you make me sick. You stand like a girl, and you never say bad words. Here, prove you can say a bad word. Say shit. Say it. Say mierda.”

  “Uh…uh…I can’t. That’s a mortal sin. It’s…it’s against the first commandment.”

  “See. I told you. You can’t even say shit. You know it’s only girls who don’t say bad words. Only girls and maricones.”

  “I can’t say it. It has nothing to do with being a boy or a girl. I don’t want to go to hell.”

  “So you’re calling me a liar again, huh? Well, you can’t do it! Say shit. Say dick. Go ahead, say pinga.”

  The next thing I knew my clenched fist was striking his head, right above his ear. It happened so fast he didn’t have a chance to block the punch. He doubled over and stayed that way for what seemed like an eternity. Then he started to sob. I stood there holding my offending fist, which hurt a little, watching the bully sob. He sobbed and sobbed, and whined, and held his hand against his temple. I thought maybe I had ruptured his brain or something.

  Then he spoke again between sobs: “You know, sob, you can kill someone by hitting them on the temple. Sob. That’s a bad spot. Sob, sob. If you hit someone there, sob, the blow can go right to the brain and kill you.”

  I thought of saying, “Sure, you know this because your father kills so many people. I bet it’s your father who taught you this. I bet he punches a lot of people in the temple. That’s why you’re such an expert.” Instead of saying what I wanted to say, I simply stood there, breathing heavily. And I watched him weep.

  The more he sobbed, the sorrier I felt for him. Waves of pity began to wash over me. But then waves of fear joined them. It dawned on me that I had hurt the meanest little bastard in class, whose father had the power to make people disappear. Now I’d done it. This meant death for me and my family.

  Pity and fear twisted into a knot in my chest and forced me to say “I’m sorry.”

  The bell rang, recess ended, and we went back to class. Though I went home that afternoon and warned my parents about our impending doom, nothing bad ever happened. No police ever came in the middle of the night. No one whisked me away in a big black car during recess. The bully stopped taunting me. He didn’t exactly become my friend, but at least he left me alone from that day forward.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had stumbled onto one of the fundamental rules of the universe. Bullies are the ultimate sissies. Mariquitas at heart, all of them, maybe even maricones. Much later, when I en
ded up at a public high school in a rough neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago, where the tough guys carried knives and used them, memories of that weeping bully saved me from a lot of trouble.

  Of course, the good Christian Brothers had told us repeatedly about the Sermon on the Mount, loving our neighbor, turning the other cheek, and the meek inheriting the earth. But it just didn’t sink in. Original sin had us by the throat. We were all under the same curse, slaves to sin, blind as bats, and as happy as bats in a cave. We fought like God-damned savages, the whole lot of us. We hurled insults with abandon, laughed at the less fortunate, and looked down on nearly everyone else on our benighted island. We were, after all, number one. And everyone else was number two or lower. We knew it. Our parents knew it. The brothers knew it. Pride was our worst sin.

  But all of us thought our worst sin was what the brothers called “dirty thoughts.”

  Ay Dios mío.

  That’s all I can say when I recall my formal introduction to sex in the classroom. I understand the good brothers wanted to warn us about storm clouds on the horizon, but in my case, at least, the warning and the storm clouds became one and the same.

  In first grade, Brother Alejandro would come in and warn us not to have “dirty thoughts.” At first, all of us sat there as silent as corpses, not daring to ask what in the world he was talking about. I thought of smelly laundry. But gradually his talks became more explicit. He told us about our shameful parts, and that most shameful of all male traits—erections—the gnawing, inevitable constant that led Saint Augustine to say, “Ecce unde!” (Behold the place!) If you want proof of original sin, said Augustine, just take a look at your penis. It has a life of its own. It can’t really be controlled by reason. Behold the place. But don’t behold it too much, and certainly don’t hold it for too long after you’re done peeing. And don’t hold it at all any other time.

  How Brother Alejandro came to be a sex education teacher for first graders I’ll never know. Maybe because he was one of the few Cuban brothers at that school. He was the toughest of all the monks, the school disciplinarian. You didn’t want to have him riding on your bus, if you rode the bus. And you certainly didn’t want to get sent to Brother Alejandro if you misbehaved. He kept very strict discipline and was feared for his special bare-knuckle blows to the head. He also seemed to spend every single afternoon overseeing detention, making kids write phrases on the board hundreds of times. Some of the statements had a negative spin: “I shall never do X, Y, or Z again.” Some were positive: “I shall always do X, Y, or Z.” If he gave you more phrases to write than could fit on the blackboard, he would count up the lines, write down the number, ask you to erase the board, and keep going. If you complained, he would make you start counting all over again or ask you to return for more the next day. I learned all this from my brother Tony, who was sent to detention often. Sometimes Brother Alejandro would make the worst offenders kneel on gravel outside, in the hot tropical sun. These malfeasants knelt out there for what seemed an eternity. I could see them from my classroom, and I’d look at the clock on the wall. Every time one of those kids ended up out there on his knees, the second hand seemed to slow down. I was lucky, or perhaps even good. I never earned his wrath.

  But I began to fear his visits to our first-grade classroom. There we were, six-year-olds sitting in a room decorated with Disney characters, listening to a monk talk about sex. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in thinking that if we were being warned not to do something, it must have some pleasant side to it, like all of the other fun stuff you weren’t supposed to do. One fine day, Brother Alejandro opened entirely new vistas of perversion and delight to all of us. “Don’t ever look at your chauffeur’s dirty magazines,” he warned us.

  One brave boy dared to ask the fundamental question on my mind: “Brother, what’s a dirty magazine?”

  “It’s a magazine with pictures of naked women.”

  Naked women? Why would anyone want to look at pictures of naked women? This must really be twisted, I thought. All I could think of was old Inocencia and her eggplant breasts. Yuck. Why would chauffeurs keep dirty magazines within the easy reach of children? Maybe all chauffeurs were weird, like dwarves and cripples? Or maybe there was something I didn’t know. Well, I didn’t have to worry; we didn’t have a chauffeur. My father rode the bus to work and drove his own car at other times.

  Then it hit me. Although our family didn’t have a chauffeur, my brother and I were driven to school by one every day. Each and every day we rode to school and back home in a chauffeur-driven, air-conditioned Cadillac, along with the son of the owner of one of the largest nickel mines in Cuba, who lived down the street from us. Four times a day we got into that car: to school, home for lunch, back to school, and then back home again. From that day forward I entered that yellow Cadillac with great trepidation. At any moment, I expected the chauffeur to whip out a dirty magazine and throw it to us in the backseat. This would be worse than a grenade, of course, since it could send you to hell for eternity. Instantly. All you had to do was see a naked woman and die the next moment, without a chance to repent. What if the magazine landed open right next to you, or on your face, and you actually got to see a picture of a naked woman just before the chauffeur, laughing insanely, crashed the car and killed everyone inside? Pretty soon I began to suspect that taxicab drivers also had these dirty magazines, since they, too, were called choferes. And I developed a fear of taxicabs as well.

  I often wondered what kind of special treatment President Batista’s children got at my school. Were they ever picked on by other boys? Were they subjected to the same sex talks? Did they ever have to write anything on the blackboard a hundred times? “I shall never forget my homework again,” or maybe, “I shall ask my father not to torture anyone again.” Did Brother Alejandro ever smack one of them on the back of the head?

  I don’t know. All I know is that the school was full of their bodyguards, outside and inside. Men who stood around all day, pacing back and forth, wearing suits or sport coats, even on the hottest afternoons. We knew they carried guns, and that they kept them concealed under their jackets. One day, on the way to recess, a boy in my class had the nerve to sneak up on one of the bodyguards and lift up his jacket, to see the gun. The bodyguard just smiled, and buttoned his jacket. I was lucky enough to see the gun in its holster and it looked huge.

  I don’t know about the other kids, but I thought that the bodyguards were there to protect the president’s children from bullies. To protect them from me, maybe. And one afternoon in second grade I came face to face with the chance to be shot by a bodyguard. It happened suddenly. I was running down the hallway towards the grassy yard at the back of the school. Vendors of all sorts hung around back there all day, waiting for the kids to come out. Ice cream, candy, baseball cards, switchblades. These guys sold just about everything. Yes, switchblades. I told you Havana was not in the United States. If you had money, the brothers would let you buy any kind of snack that these men sold, or any size switchblade. One of these guys made the best popcorn I had ever tasted. He sold it in pastel-colored paper bags that would very quickly soak up the oil. They were a beautiful sight, those greasy bags. Anyway, I was running to buy something and—boom!—I ran into a first grader! Knocked him down. His popcorn went flying all over the place. I fell to the floor too, stunned by the collision.

  When I saw whom I had knocked down, I froze. It was Batista’s youngest son, the first grader. He looked a lot like his father. Uh, oh, I thought. Now I did it. The bodyguards will surely come and shoot me. Or maybe take me to jail, rip out my fingernails, and smack me on the temple. But before I had a chance to get really scared, Batista’s son looked at me, and holding out his half-empty bag of popcorn, asked, “Would you like some?” He had the look of an angel on his face, the look of grace. I expected death or torture, or at least imprisonment, and instead I was offered the very same popcorn I had spilled.

  The bodyguards never used their guns on me or on any bully,
but they did need them after all. I found that out one sunny afternoon in second grade, when the school was suddenly surrounded by dozens of police cars. Brother Alejandro entered our classroom and handed a note to my teacher, who asked us to remain calm and wait for our parents to come pick us up. School was canceled for the rest of the day; we had to go home immediately. One by one, our parents showed up, looking troubled. One by one, we were plucked from our classrooms. My mother, Marie Antoinette, had the same look on her face that day as on the night of the shoot-out near the Quinta de los Molinos. As we were getting into the car, I noticed the switchblade salesman was not at his usual spot. There were no vendors, only police, some of them with their guns drawn.

  “The presidential palace has been attacked,” said my father, once we were safely in the car. “We need to get home fast. No one knows what will happen next.” My mother was very quiet. A policeman waved our car on, and we passed through their barricade. It wasn’t at all like that other time, when, at exactly the same spot, Louis XVI had picked us up by surprise and there was a puppy waiting for us in the backseat of the car.

  The attack on Batista’s palace failed. Although the rebels managed to make it all the way to the president’s office and bedroom, Batista was not there. They had it wrong. I think he was at one of his fincas instead, one of his country estates. Dozens of men died that day, on both sides, providing the papers with a surplus of gory pictures. God knows what might have happened if the rebels had chosen to attack our school too. Batista’s kids were there that day, one of them in the classroom right next to mine. If only those rebels had thought the way that El Colorado’s men had thought when they delivered all their twisted messages to my family. If only they had targeted the children instead of the father, the world might have changed even sooner than it did. Maybe one of the rebels killed that day would have survived, and Fidel Castro would have been eclipsed by him. Or maybe I would have died that day, and you wouldn’t be reading this.