Waiting for Snow in Havana

by Carlos Eire

  I say I’m sorry for not being truly sorry.

  The priest looks me in the eye the same way my mother did forty-three years before and says: “Go in peace, your sins are forgiven.”

  All I can say—all I am supposed to say—is what I say every time: “Thank you, Father.”

  What I should add, but don’t, is: “Hasta luego, Padre.” See you again soon, Father.

  15

  Quince

  Most families give you the keys to the car when you turn sixteen and tell you to go and have fun. In our family, all you get is the key to the family pantheon at the cemetery, and then you’re told how to take care of the dead.”

  This is what my cousin Fernando said to me one day, when I was about seven or eight years old.

  “Prepare yourself for the speech that comes with the key,” he added. But I didn’t need to prepare. I’d already heard all the key phrases many times, even though I was far from sixteen.

  “Here you go, Son, when we’re dead and buried make sure we get flowers on the right feast days. Here’s the list of feasts, take it, and always keep it near the pantheon keys. Also make sure the place is kept clean. Make sure enough masses are said, as required by our last will and testament. Here’s the will, keep it with the keys too. And make sure that our bones are moved to the ossuary after a few years to make room for the newcomers…like you. And after we’re dead, don’t you dare do any of the things we’ve forbidden you to do, like dancing, or wearing loud clothes, or going out with the wrong kind of girls, or—especially—swimming right after a meal. Remember, you must always stay out of the water for three hours after you’ve eaten. If you disobey this rule, you will suffer an embolia and join us in the pantheon prematurely. Here’s the list of forbidden activities. Keep that in your pocket at all times.”

  Still, Fernando was a good teacher. Better than any I had in school. He had good, practical information about our family.

  “Learn this and learn it early, so it doesn’t come as a shock later: our family is interested in three things only: ancestors, death, and good taste. But there’s a family paradox too. Though we are obsessed with death, we avoid many things that could bring it on, such as wearing shirts without undershirts or taking a shower with the windows open.”

  Fernando was a very sensible guy. He flew jet airplanes for the Cuban Air Force, and he drove a purple 1947 Plymouth from which he had intentionally removed the muffler. Within a year of revealing the secret of the pantheon keys to me he would also be smuggling weapons and planting bombs all over Havana.

  He was the only sensible guy in our family.

  How I loved it when he came to visit our house. I never did see enough of him, though, since he was always busy learning to fly jet planes, detonating bombs, or, later, getting sent to prison on a thirty-year sentence.

  Fernando was one of my first cousins, the younger son of my father’s brother Filo, and he was about eighteen years older than me. He was a grown-up, as I saw it, but he wasn’t like any other grown-ups I knew. No one else, for instance, had taken the muffler off his car. No one else would pick me up and throw me in the air, so high that sometimes I almost hit the ceiling. He always caught me too. I never feared being dropped.

  The nicest part of being with Fernando was that he always seemed to be having such a good time. No one else in my family seemed to enjoy themselves so much. Not even his brother Rafael or his sister Maria Luisa, who were also lots of fun to be with. They actually had a sense of humor, those three. But Fernando won the prize, hands down.

  Vroooooooom, vroooooooom, vrooooooom. You could always tell when he was coming. His car was louder than the pesticide Jeep. And when he left our house, my brother and I would go out to the curb to wave him off so that we could stand as close as possible to that wonderful noise. I also liked to inhale the unfiltered exhaust.

  How often I’ve toyed with the idea of removing my muffler. It would make the car sound and smell so much better. But I now live in the United States, where it’s against the law to drive around without mufflers on cars.

  Coño. Qué mierda.

  I shouldn’t dwell too much on Fernando’s car, though, for it ruined his life and brought him within an inch of dying. I’m not talking about a crash or a wreck, not at all. More about this later.

  Back to death and the dead, one of my family’s favorite subjects.

  The dead lived with us. They watched us constantly, always criticizing or spewing out rules. At least that’s how I felt. My mom wasn’t responsible for this. It was my dad and his entire family. Always talking about our family history, always trying to contact the dead, always speaking for the dead.

  Before I was born, I’m told, seances were held regularly at my house. Grandma Lola, Aunt Uma, my dad, his sister, and others would sit around the dining room table and try to contact the dead. The same table at which I ate all my meals, the table of my dreams, too, from which I would see Jesus standing at the window. My cousin Rafael told me about this when I was forty-one years old.

  How much fun it might have been to see this happen. Imagine hearing the voices of the dead coming through your grandmother or some other living relative. My cousins Rafael and Fernando had a lot of fun, or so they tell me. They used to live in the house, you see. Their father was a diplomat, and while he served in faraway places like Seville, Washington, and Mexico City, they were left in the care of Abuela Lola, Tía Uma, and my dad. Louis XVI had been a surrogate father to them during much of their childhood. And they loved him.

  Fernando and Rafael would always be chased out of the house when the seances took place, but they didn’t let that stop them from enjoying themselves. Often, they would eavesdrop just outside the dining room window. They could hear everything clearly through the closed shutters.

  Once, they brought a friend along to listen, however, and all hell broke loose. It started as all seances did, with an invocation of the spirits of the dead.

  “Oh, spirits, speak to us from beyond the grave…”

  “Oh, spirits of the dear departed, come join us anew…”

  “Wait a minute, guys, I’ve got a great idea,” whispered my cousins’ friend.

  “What?” whispered back Rafael and Fernando.

  “Wait and see.” Whispered, of course.

  “Oh, dear spirits, please, harken unto us…”

  “Dear souls, we approach you, we implore you, speak…”

  Silence. Dead silence.

  My cousins’ friend rose and pulled himself up the dining room window’s iron grate—pulled himself up in such a way that he was literally standing along the full length of the window. No one inside could see him, of course, since the shutters were closed. Then, as the silence was at its deepest, this kid let out a very, very loud burp. According to Rafael it was a long, monster burp.

  “BRRROOOOOUUUUGHAAAAAAOOOOOOOUUURRRRPPP!”

  Panic inside. Chairs moving quickly. Gasps. A scream, probably from my father’s sister, the woman without desires.

  The dead had spoken in a foreign language.

  “Oh, my God, what was that?”

  “Ay, qué susto!” Oh, what a scare!

  My cousins and their friend ran away from that window as fast as they could. According to Rafael, no one inside that dining room ever found out who had burped. He’s still convinced that some of them might have actually taken it for a genuine burp from beyond the grave.

  But it wasn’t just talking with the dead that was routine in my family. My dad claimed he saw the dead, too. Said he saw them all the time, and heard their voices.

  One dark moonless night, walking back home from the Roxy theater with my dad and brother and friends after a stupid Mexican cowboy movie, we passed a house with a large yard and a barking dog, and Louis XVI said to us, “Listen, that dog can feel the presence of ghosts. Dogs see them all the time. And they understand what the dead say, too. They see things and hear things most humans can’t see or hear.”

  “Can you see ghosts?” Manuel
asked my dad.

  “All the time,” responded Louis XVI. “There are several here in this yard, right now, and they’re trying to tell us about their tragic deaths.”

  Dead silence, for a while, until King Louis started to tell us about the buried pirate’s treasure that some Chinese ditchdigger had found not far from the Roxy Theater years and years ago. That got the conversation moving again.

  Ghost stories were as much a part of my childhood as toys, pranks, firecrackers, and rock fights. Ghost stories told by someone who believed in them and often narrated them as first-person accounts. They must have really scared me, for almost all of them are locked away in my vault of oblivion. All I’m left with is some vague memory of a house where the walls dripped blood, which my dad claimed to have seen with his own eyes.

  No wonder when it came time for me to face the dangerous world of romance, years later, I was so ill equipped and messed up so horribly. Boys should learn more than ghost stories from their dads. They shouldn’t be taken on too many trips to the cemetery either.

  But we went to the cemetery all the time. El Cementerio de Colón. Columbus Cemetery. Since Columbus is buried in Seville, Spain, the name was purely honorific. What a place! A true city of the dead, with real streets and marble pantheons that looked like houses. It looked as if it had always been there and would always be there. When we passed under the huge front gates I always felt that we were entering eternity itself.

  On most days it was fairly empty of live people, and extremely quiet. Eternity has no noise. Except on certain holidays. On Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, the place was mobbed, and very noisy. Cubans talk loudly, even in cemeteries. Put together dozens and dozens of families talking loudly on any street of a densely packed cemetery and what you have is a mildly delirious sort of din. We always had to line up in the car just to get in, and then we’d have to fight traffic inside the cemetery itself. Family upon family, all delivering flowers, cleaning the marble grave sites, greeting the dead, grooming their future burial places.

  Most of the families we knew had a pantheon—some enclosed, some not—in which preceding generations were buried, and in which succeeding generations would be buried. A few years after each burial, the tombs would be opened and the remains of the dead removed from the burial crypt. Out with the old, in with the new. In most cases, the tropical climate worked wonders with decomposition. A few years, and all you had were clean bones. Most pantheons had smaller niches called ossuaries, where the bones taken from the graves would be collected. Then the crypt would be ready for the next dead relative.

  Every now and then, a family would be surprised by a relative who hadn’t decomposed. Louis XVI knew about all these problem cases, of course, and told us about them in great detail.

  This recycling arrangement meant that every time you went to visit the dead, you were visiting your own future grave. Our father, of course, loved pointing this out to me and Tony.

  “You know, this is where I’ll be buried. And you’ll be buried here, too. And so will your children and grandchildren. That is, unless you build a bigger and better pantheon and move us all. You know, I’d love for us to have a better pantheon. Maybe someday you boys will build us one. Maybe one like Aunt Carmela’s?”

  Aunt Carmela had a pantheon that resembled its original namesake in Rome. We went there once, and it was cavernous. The marble walls were a golden yellowish hue and very shiny, as though polished with a vengeance. I stared at the wall in front of me for an eternity, or so it seemed, spooked by the sight of Carmela’s name etched deeply into the marble above a huge sarcophagus.

  “Why is Carmela’s name on there if she’s not dead yet?” I asked Louis XVI.

  “Because it’s good to be prepared.”

  “But death is always so far off,” I said, foolishly.

  Louis XVI laughed. “Who told you that?”

  “Mama.”

  “Well, don’t listen to her. Death is always just around the corner, always ready to surprise you.”

  Good God Almighty, what a thunderbolt that was. To this day, whenever I see marble, I think of death. Maybe this is why some overdecorated Italian restaurants unnerve me.

  And whenever I think of the beach I also think of death. Sudden death. Embolias and calambres. Strokes and cramps. Somehow I put together my dad’s warning in the cemetery with another warning I constantly received at the beach, and the result was an odd association as lasting and peculiar as the one between chauffeurs and dirty magazines.

  “You can’t go in the water yet. Not for another hour.”

  This was my mother speaking. She irritated me to no end, and I played the role of a logician, right there, in that fine white sand, with the turquoise sea as a backdrop. And those clouds, those never-finished, ever-changing poems; and the blazing sunshine, that transfiguring, everlasting kiss; and those waves, those endless caresses—all of them bore witness to the dialogue between a son and his mother. Ask them if you can track them down and find them. Not even Fidel could make that beach vanish. And I’ve long been convinced that every word ever uttered anywhere is somehow preserved at that spot.

  “Do I have to wait that long? Why? Maybe you shouldn’t have given me lunch, then?”

  “You know that if you go into the water before your food is fully digested, you’ll suffer an embolia and drown.”

  “What’s an embolia?”

  “It’s bad. It can kill you.”

  “But what is it? What does it do to you?”

  “It’s something that happens in your brain. It paralyzes you, and if you’re in the water, you’ll sink to the bottom immediately and drown.”

  “How does it happen? What does food have to do with it?”

  “Your body just can’t handle digestion and swimming at the same time. It’s some sort of overload. Too much for your body to bear.”

  “Then why are there so many people in the water? I saw some of them eating a little while ago. Look, they’re all fine.”

  “They’re all in grave danger, risking too much. If they don’t get an embolia, then they may get a calambre.”

  “What’s a calambre?”

  “It’s when your muscles get all cramped up and you can’t move them. They’re also very painful. If you get a calambre in the water, you’ll drown.”

  “Even in shallow water?”

  “Yes, you might fall down so quickly no one will notice, and you’ll be unable to get your head out of the water. Especially if you get an embolia on top of the calambre.”

  I didn’t find any of this scary, just irritating as hell.

  Mom continued: “I’ve known of many people who have gone into the water too soon after eating and drowned, or nearly drowned. Most of them got embolias.”

  “Who? Anyone I know?”

  “My uncle Emilio, who had just arrived from Spain. He didn’t know about the three hours, since they never went to the beach in Galicia. They found him all twisted up in the water. Todo jorobado. All twisted up, but he was lucky enough to survive drowning. But one of my childhood friends drowned from an embolia. And a lot of other people you don’t know.”

  “But why don’t we ever see anyone drowning at this beach?”

  Silence. I continued pursuing my line of logic: “I see people eating and swimming, and I never see anyone getting emboliado.”

  She set me straight: “You don’t get emboliado, you suffer an embolia. And the answer is still no, you can’t go in for another hour. Your body is still digesting its food. If you go in now, you could die.”

  “So why did you give me lunch, then? If I have to wait three hours before swimming every time I eat at the beach, it’s not worth coming. If I have to wait another hour, it will almost be time to go home when I finally get in the water. Why did you give me lunch? Why?”

  “Because if you don’t eat, you’ll be too weak to swim. And you could drown.”

  I gave up and went back to digging my trench in the sand.

  Maybe if I dig deep
enough, I thought, I could get to China. I thought that in China, maybe, they jumped into the water right after eating or even ate in the water. Anyone who made firecrackers, I thought, had to be smart enough not to have such stupid rules.

  So I dug furiously, dug and dug, until I hit water. “Carlos, be careful. If you hit water in that hole you’re digging, don’t put your feet into it. You could get an embolia that way, too.”

  No way to win. None.

  Embolias and calambres at the beach were just the tip of the iceberg. The world was an infinitely dangerous place for my family, full of risks at every turn. Pulmonía was always a possibility. Pneumonia. And it was always fatal.

  Here are some of the ways in which my family thought you could catch pneumonia and die: standing in front of an open window with wet hair. Going outdoors without a shirt on, except at the beach. Going outdoors in the daytime wearing just a T-shirt, except at the beach. Wearing a shirt without an undershirt. Wearing shorts between November and February. Going outdoors without a jacket between November and February, no matter what the temperature. Taking a shower with water that wasn’t warm enough, no matter what time of the year, even on the hottest days. Wearing shoes without socks.

  Catching a chill, under any circumstances, was a death sentence. And you could catch a chill in a million and one ways. Being out in the rain for too long, even with an umbrella. Running too quickly from an air-conditioned room into the tropical heat, or vice-versa. Eating ice cream between November and February. Standing in front of an open refrigerator too long. Scraping frost from the freezer and eating it.

  God forbid you should ever bathe or take a shower while running a fever. Sudden death would surely follow after that first contact with the water.

  These were not superstitions, mind you, but quasi-scientific theories, based on centuries of cumulative experience and thousands of reports of pulmonía felling someone you never knew directly.

  Then there was traffic. Tales of people who had been run over by cars were a constant source of conversation, especially for my father. Arrollado. Run over. Sí, pobre tipo. Yes, poor guy. Arrollado. He didn’t see the car coming. Wham! Gone. Pobre mujer. Poor woman. She didn’t look both ways before crossing the street and a bus hit her. Knocked her to the ground, ran over her with its wheels, and then dragged her for a block. And she was pregnant too.