by Carlos Eire
We never heard a word about these animals. Not a single lesson on Cuban wildlife. I think the teacher just wanted to intimidate us. Cross him one time too many, and the next item on the wall might be your carcass.
And it was so easy to make this guy mad. Very irritable, this man with the big black moustache and the thick glasses. Any time something happened that he didn’t like he would punish the whole class. For instance, if he heard a noise he didn’t like but hadn’t seen who’d made it, he’d ask us all to turn in the offender.
“Who did that? Who whistled? Tell me now, or no one gets to go to recess today.”
Most of the time we squealed willingly on one another. Then el profesor Taxidermista would design some punishment for the guilty boy and let us off the hook. One of his favorite penalties was to make the malfeasant stand in the corner of the classroom for the remainder of the day, next to the boa. If the offense was committed just before lunch or late in the afternoon, this wasn’t too bad. But if the punishment was inflicted when the whole morning or the whole afternoon yawned before you, the consequences could be dreadful. You see, so long as this reprobate stood in the corner, he wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom at all. Not even during recess.
I don’t know how many times I watched my classmates holding their crotches, dancing in pain by the boa, and pleading with el profesor to let them go pee. But the more they squirmed or pleaded, the angrier he became, and the more he threatened to extend the torture to the next day, and the day after that, and even for a whole week. Naturally, no seven- or eight-year-old boy will persist in the face of such threats.
I don’t know how many of my classmates I saw pee in their pants, up there by the boa. I lost count. El profesor Taxidermista would then ask one of us to fetch the janitor. The janitor would show up with a bag of sawdust, a push broom, and a large dustpan. After heaping some fragrant sawdust on the yellow puddle, he’d allow it to sit there for a minute or two, and then sweep it all up and take it away. Then he’d come back with a mop and wipe down the floor under the boa. Meanwhile, the boy with wet pants was not allowed to move for the remainder of the morning or afternoon.
They stood up there, all these boys with wet pants, their shame on display. We were too young and untamed to feel sorry for them, or at least to let others know that we did. We laughed, sometimes, and made fun of them afterwards.
Coño, qué mierda.
But it didn’t always work that way.
Sometimes none of us knew the identity of the offender. Then there was hell to pay. No recess, or even worse. Like the time someone left an offensive drawing on el profesor Taxidermista’s desk during lunchtime, while he was out of the room.
“Who left this on my desk? Who drew this? Tell me now, or no one gets recess for the next three days. And no one gets to go to the bathroom either.”
Silence. None of us knew who had drawn whatever had offended el profesor so very much. We didn’t know what had been drawn, either, since he wouldn’t show us.
“One more chance, boys. Tell me immediately, or it’s three days without moving from your desks all day, except to go home for lunch.”
We all looked at one another, hoping the guilty party would confess. Having the burden on your conscience of seeing all of your classmates punished for what you alone had done was often enough to make the offender buckle. It was an old Nazi trick. We knew it from American war movies. Sometimes, in these films, the Nazis would wipe out a whole town full of people as punishment for the wrongdoing of one individual. Maybe el profesor had seen the same films?
But this wayward artist must have had no conscience at all. Or maybe too much fear. Whatever his reasons, the little bastard sealed his lips and allowed us all to be sentenced to hell. For three whole days.
I was one of the first to pay the price. I paid it that very first afternoon. I’d had a lot of lemonade to drink with lunch. Really good lemonade, made with freshly squeezed lemons and tons of sugar that you could see at the bottom of the pitcher, a thick, cloudy sediment even after you stirred it. Someone had brought us a whole basket of lemons that morning.
Afternoon recess came and went and there we were, still in our seats. My bladder had been sending me signals since before the time that would have been our recess. Very soon after our non-recess, the signals began to intensify. Then they turned to pain. Enough pain to make me raise my hand and beg for a chance to go to the bathroom.
“No. No one gets to go anywhere. No exceptions. Maybe you can tell me who drew this awful picture?” He held it up backwards, so none of us could see it.
“But…but…I don’t know who drew it. Could I please step out for a minute? Please? I really need to go. It’s hurting a lot.”
“No. And if you keep asking I’ll extend the penalty for two more days for the rest of the class.”
Dirty looks from everyone.
By that time, the pain had become so unbearable that I lost control completely. And what a sweet feeling it was to let go. I think that might have been my first genuine ecstasy, emptying my bladder, right there at my desk, feeling the warm pee trickle down my legs. Gelassenheit. That’s what it was. I let go, completely, utterly.
But the ecstasy faded fast. I looked down at my feet and noticed, much to my surprise, that a puddle was forming at my feet. The yellow puddle kept growing and spreading to my left and right, across the narrow aisles that separated my desk from those of my immediate neighbors.
I tried to pretend nothing had happened.
The guy to my left, however, noticed soon enough.
“Eeeww, Carlos wet himself. Look at the puddle: it’s huge!”
Everyone craned their necks to look at my feet. And I panicked.
“It’s not me,” I said. “It’s Pepe, there, in front of me. It’s his puddle. Remember, he has trouble holding it. He wet his pants in the corner of the room a couple of weeks ago.”
Pepe, of course, stood up and showed everyone his pants were bone dry. And he asked me to do the same, while he gave me a dirty look. I gave up pretending then. Those seated around me could see my wet pants.
Meanwhile, el profesor Taxidermista sat back and watched my humiliation with detachment. When everyone was done laughing at me, he asked Pepe to fetch the janitor. After the sawdust had been spread and swept and the floor had been mopped, I sat there all afternoon with wet pants and a red face, looking out the window and trying to pretend I wasn’t there.
The classroom had a beautiful view of the Gulf of Mexico and the cloud-dappled tropical sky above it. So did my third-grade classroom. Such beauty, such peace in sea and sky.
Not always, though. One rare stormy day in third grade, a kid said he had spotted a tornado over the water and we all rushed to the windows. Much to our disappointment, no one saw anything that resembled a twister or a water spout. The kid swore up and down that he had seen it, but I didn’t believe him. Neither did most of the class.
False prophet.
But maybe he had seen something else. Maybe, I thought, he had seen Jesus returning to earth, on his way to judge everyone and destroy the world.
El fin del mundo. The end of the world. The words sent shivers up and down my spine, and still do. I’d seen illustrations of it in my religion book, even though we skipped over that lesson, and also in a popular magazine at my grandmother’s house. Long-haired, bearded Jesus seated on a throne up in the clouds, surrounded by armies of angels. Chaos and utter ruin on earth. People frightened out of their wits. The earth opening up, mountains crumbling, the seas full of giant tidal waves. The dead rising from their graves, all bare-ass naked. Very scary stuff. Especially the part about being naked in front of God and everybody.
The article I had seen in that magazine, Bohemia, was entitled “Will the World End in the Year 2000?” And it contained all sorts of information that had been neglected by my teacher, el profesor Infierno. There were umpteen quotations, taken straight from the Bible, that proved without a doubt that the end was very near indeed. I subt
racted 1958 from 2000 and came up with forty-two. Forty-two years!
If I’d been a girl I might have said, “Ay, Dios mío.”
Instead, I sank into a silent panic. I thought about that article for months, all through third grade. And I kept all the fear and worry tightly bottled up. As I saw it, the world was scheduled to end in my lifetime. I would be old, yes, a gray and wizened fifty-year-old geezer, bent over, perhaps confined to a wheelchair, but I’d live to see it.
I began to wonder whether the prophecies were off by a few years. What if the experts had miscalculated by a decade or two? How about three decades? Four? Maybe the end could take place at any moment?
Then one Sunday, in church, the priest read aloud the passage from the Bible in which Jesus says that the end of the world will take place when people least expect it. Yikes! They’d left that one out of the Bohemia article! Maybe the world was about to end in a few days!
I began to scan the blue sky for signs of the end. I tried to peer into the clouds, hoping I might spot Jesus approaching astride one of them before everyone else did. I wanted time to run to the first priest I could find and confess all my sins before the lines at the confessional became too long. I went to bed in a panic many a night in third grade, fearing the end was near. It would be so hard to beat the others to the confessional in the middle of the night.
But it was the daytime sky I focused on the most, the sky outside my classroom. I saw the most beautiful clouds in all shapes and sizes, and in all shades of white and gray. (No Cuba clouds back then, no.) Hundreds of them, thousands, tens of thousands maybe. I didn’t count them. I looked for Jesus, that’s all I did. Soon my grades began to plummet, and my eyes to fail. I couldn’t read the blackboard or the subtitles on films at the movie theater. Everything looked fuzzy, as if it were turning into a cloud.
It was at the Miramar Theater, as we watched Cantinflas and David Niven in Around the World in 80 Days, that my mother noticed me straining to read the subtitles.
“Here, try my glasses, Carlitos. Tell me if you can see better with them on.”
It was a miracle! I could see again. The fuzziness was gone!
She was nice enough to suggest that I keep her glasses on for the rest of the movie. She was also wise enough to point out that no one would be able to see me wearing women’s glasses in a darkened theater. They were pale green harlequin frames, with curving tail fins at the ends.
A few days later we went to the optometrist and I became a four-eyes. I picked out big square eyeglass frames made out of real tortoise shell. Cuban tortoises, I bet, probably the same species as one of those on my classroom wall. The same kind of frames Fidel wore back then. I’d seen his photo in Bohemia. Come to think of it, I’d seen a picture of Fidel holding a rifle in the very same issue that had the article about the end of the world. I thought his beard was cool. And also his eyeglasses.
I knew Fidel was somewhere in the mountains, fighting against Batista. Anyone who was against Batista must be good, I thought. Batista tortured people and ran a corrupt government. I’d heard about the corruption from my dad, who was no great fan of any politician. He preferred a monarchy, of course, and for him all politicians were bad simply because they weren’t kings. He gave us no details on the corruption, but I believed him. As to the torture, I’d heard about it since first grade, from many sources, but more recently, I’d heard about it from my uncle Mario. His wife’s brother had been arrested and tortured by Batista’s police. He didn’t go into details, but he said his brother-in-law had been subjected to awful cruelty.
That was all I needed to know. Anyone who treated human beings like lizards couldn’t be a good president. He had to go. And the sooner, the better, so we Cubans could at least enjoy a brief spell of decent government before the world ended.
Equipped with my Fidel glasses, I scanned the clouds even more feverishly than before for signs of the end. Such great details I had missed! I could see every leaf on every tree, every billow on every cloud. Now, for sure, I’d be able to spot Jesus riding those clouds, descending into Havana over the turquoise sea, ready to pronounce sentence on us all. I knew that God the Father figured in there somehow, but I wasn’t sure exactly how. It was Jesus who worried me because he was the one pictured in the illustrations I’d seen. He worried me because all judges worried me, as did fathers. I knew what they were like up close. All too well.
Swwissshhhhhhhhhhhhh! Whack! Swishh, Thwack! Swishh, Whack!
Of course, instead of inspecting the clouds, I should have been scanning the hills and mountains of eastern Cuba. Doomsday really did arrive that year, when I was in the third grade. And the judge sported a beard all right, just as in Catholic iconography. But the rest was all wrong. He also dressed in olive-green fatigues, sported cool-looking tortoiseshell eyewear, smoked large Cuban cigars, and rode a Sherman tank.
Surprise!
The entire world shall be judged on one spot, at Doomsday, the Bible says. But it shall not be Jerusalem. It shall not be the Plain of Megiddo, when the Battle of Armageddon is over and done, and the whole world is awash in blood. No. If you read the Bible carefully, with the right inspiration, and your third eye open, you’ll see it for yourself. Most of the world is in for a big surprise.
Prepárate! Get ready.
Swwissshhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Any day can turn into Judgment Day, anywhere, when you least expect it. Don’t look for it up in the clouds. Look way down deep, and all around, at all the hells you’ve helped create in and around yourself.
Expect more than one Doomsday, and one judge, and one end of the world. Expect the unexpected. Expect unjust verdicts and crushing punishments, along with just ones and others that are way too merciful. Expect some sentences to be both fair and unfair at the same time. Expect mercies that are punishingly beautiful and beautifully punishing. And at the very end, the end of all ends, so goes the rumor, all things shall be well.
And who knows? Maybe what we mistook for the most unfair verdict of all will turn out to have been the most merciful.
20
Veinte
The light outside was a faint, dim blue, and we were unwrapping our presents. We had been waiting for this moment all year long.
Christmas morning, 1958.
We always got up before dawn on Christmas. It was my brother who couldn’t wait and always woke me up so early. Some years he barely slept at all, I think. We’d get to the tree in a hurry and paw through the presents like starving kids looking for edible scraps at the garbage dump. Some presents were too big to wrap. Once, years before, we’d woken up to find a Lionel train set under the tree. Another year, it had been Ivanhoe’s castle, full of knights in armor. And one memorable year it was Fort Apache, complete with U.S. cavalry, a tribe of Indians, and all the characters from our favorite television show, Rin Tin Tin.
That morning it was bicycles. A brand new bike for my brother and one that looked strangely familiar for me.
“How do you like your new bikes, boys?”
Our noise had woken up Mom and Dad, and they’d come out to the living room.
“I love it!” My brother was very happy.
“Is this Tony’s old bike?” I was confused.
Although it was green, with hand-painted yellow stripes, a new seat, spiffy new whitewall tires, and multicolored plastic streamers coming out of the yellow handlebar grips, I could have sworn it was Tony’s old red bike.
“Why would you ask that?” Louis XVI seemed surprised by my question. “Look, it’s green, not red, and it’s totally different.” My father, like his father before him, and his grandfather, had been educated by Jesuits. He was an expert at the art of casuistry.
“Yeah, I see the color, and the streamers, and the seat, and the light on the handlebars, but it looks a lot like Tony’s bike.”
“Look, that’s Tony’s bike right there.” Marie Antoinette pointed to the shiny twenty-six-inch blue bike with the streamlined light on the front fender. My mother hadn’t been
educated by Jesuits but instinctively thought like one.
“Yeah, that’s Tony’s new bike. Where’s the old one? This one looks a lot like it.”
I ran down the hallway to the side door where we kept our bikes stored. No one tried to stop me. One look was all I needed. My old bike was still there, as beaten up as ever, but Tony’s was gone. I shouted at my parents from the side door, down the long hallway where the shoe had once hit my toe, “Hey, Tony’s bike isn’t here! Where is it?”
Silence.
I felt an odd mixture of enlightenment, anger, and disappointment that my ancestors had recognized as disillusionment, or desengaño.
“Hey, you gave me an old bike for Christmas. You gave me Tony’s bike—all you did is get it painted and put some new stuff on it.”
“It looks brand-new,” said Marie Antoinette.
“But it’s not. It’s not. It’s Tony’s bike and it’s no good. It’s not fair.”
“Come look at your other presents. You have so many of them,” Marie Antoinette said, using the most powerful weapon in any mother’s arsenal: distraction.
“Oh, look at this giant box,” she continued. “I wonder what could be inside?”
She triumphed. After two or three more transparently diversionary suggestions, I gave up complaining about the bike.
The big box contained an Erector set. What a marvel, those things. You had to put everything together using real tools. Screwdrivers. Wrenches. Pliers. Some genius in New Haven, Connecticut, had come up with the basic idea, and his company kept manufacturing and marketing endless variations of it. Little steel rods with holes in them. Screws and bolts. There were even little electric motors, gears, and winches on the better sets, like the one we got that Christmas. Thick instruction booklets—junior blueprints—guided you through the assembly process and suggested all the different machines and structures you could make. Eugenio’s set had a real steam engine.
It made you feel like a man, an Erector set.
We were taking out the first few pieces when we suddenly heard loud, persistent knocking on our door. There, peering through that same glass pane through which my Abuela Lola and I used to look out onto our street, stood a nervous-looking man.