by Carlos Eire
Preparen! Apunten! Fuego!
Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!
Silence.
Laughter. Loud, raucous laughter.
“Look, the bastard crapped in his pants!”
“Bet you thought this would be it, huh?”
“Bet you liked our aim, didn’t you? We’re such bad marksmen. Ha!”
“Just fooling. These weren’t blanks at all. We just aimed above your head. Ha, ha! Fooled you, ha! But this one coming up now is for real!”
“Okay, men: Preparen! Apunten! Fuego!”
Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!
“Ha, ha, ha!”
“Look, he had even more crap left in him, and more piss too!”
“Ha, ha, ha!”
Fidel’s men sometimes shot prisoners with blanks, just for the thrill of it, as a way of driving the prisoners mad and breaking them. And sometimes they shot over their heads once or twice before shooting to kill, or shooting to maim horribly.
You see, one never knew whether the rifles were loaded with real bullets or with blanks, whether they were aiming high or at your body. One could be roused out of bed before dawn, or snatched from the cell at noon, or at three in the afternoon, or eight at night, without any warning or any real death sentence having been passed, and led to the wall, and shot at. Most of the time it was with real bullets, but sometimes it wasn’t.
Prisoners such as Fernando, who refused to talk, or showed no sign of remorse for their counter-Revolutionary sins were shot at more often. It was a kind of perverse Russian roulette.
He won’t talk about that either—about what it feels like to stand in front of a firing squad over and over and over again, not knowing if this time, this time, this time, it’s for real.
You see, prisoners were also often forced to watch one another’s executions. So Fernando knew about the blanks, and about the shooting into the air, and the shooting to kill. He also knew about the real ammunition, and what really happened when someone was riddled with bullets. He knew that much too often the firing squad aimed to maim, not to kill, and that they’d make the condemned suffer as much as possible before blowing out his brains, with the so-called coup de grâce.
Blam!
“Thank you very much, comrade, I must have deserved it.”
Through all of this, and even more, Fernando remained as tight-lipped as a corpse. Never revealed any information about his companions or what they were up to. And he reserved his deepest silence for what could have been his greatest boast.
What would you have said or not said, if you’d almost killed Fidel?
You had it all planned. You’d been so careful. You had it timed down to the minutes and seconds. You’d risked your life to approach a couple of guys you weren’t too sure about. You’d rehearsed it so many times.
But where the hell was that guy with the key to the hangar? He was already seven minutes late. Seven precious minutes.
The guys who were busy distracting the guards, and those other guys who were distracting the controllers at the tower couldn’t keep up their bullshit much longer. No. And that jet in the hangar was so full of the stuff you needed. Loaded. Ready to go. But locked tight. There, behind that hangar door. So close and yet so far.
Eight minutes. Damn it all to hell, where was he?
Nine minutes. Shit. Qué mierda. Where’s that guy?
You need to get into that jet and fly low over the western end of Havana. You need to fly right over the cemetery, right over the family pantheon, and swoop right towards the Castillo del Príncipe, and beyond that, to the Plaza of the Revolution, where Fidel is giving his speech. They won’t expect a plane from that direction.
No doubt, he’ll talk for hours. But here at the airport the time is slipping away. If the guy with the key gets here any later than this, the risks will be enormous, the chance for success minimal. They’ll catch on and shoot you all dead on the spot for trying to take that plane out without authorization.
Ten minutes! Where’s the bastard? And what if a guard shows up now? What will you say? Maybe you should just tell him the truth? Tell him that you intend to fly the jet that’s inside that hangar right over the Plaza of the Revolution and unload all of its bombs and all of its ammunition on the speaker’s platform under the monument to José Martí, right on Fidel and his brother Raúl and Che Guevara and all the other bastards who sit up there with him every single time, licking his butt. And the beauty of it is that Fidel’s pulpit is so far removed from the crowd, so high above them, and so far back. It’s so easy to see and easy to hit, with little chance of civilian casualties.
Drop the bombs, let them fly. Down, down, down, right on Fidel’s head. Nice big bombs. What a nice sound they’ll make. What a sight, too.
Maybe if you describe how nice the explosions will be, any guard who shows up will join your team?
Twelve minutes! Forget it…so close, so close, and it’s slipping away.
Qué mierda. Coño. Carajo.
The guy who was supposed to open the hangar—the only guy who could—never made it to the airport on time. His alternator belt snapped off on his way to the airport, and he had no replacement, and couldn’t rig up a substitute fast enough.
Or at least that’s what he said. Maybe he had chickened out. Who knows?
When your life’s on the line, it’s easy to choke. It happens to the best of men. So, even if they make up a story, you take them at their word.
Fernando and the other men waited and waited, ready and willing to take even greater risks if he showed up late. But by the time he showed up, it was way, way too late.
I bet Fidel doesn’t know how close he came to dying that day.
Flash forward, five years.
Fernando sits in his cell at the Isle of Pines penitentiary as he always does, day after day. He thinks about the visit he had the day before from his sister Maria Luisa. He shakes his head and wonders how it is that she could fall in love with the guy a few cells down from him. How can a man and a woman fall in love during these brief, closely watched visits? Amazing. He wonders if he’ll ever spend time with a woman again, before he’s too old to really enjoy it. He cracks jokes that the other prisoners can hear in their cells, and they all laugh.
Flash forward ten years.
Fernando sits in his cell at the Isle of Pines penitentiary as he always does, day after day. On this particular day, he’s been offered a chance at freedom. As they’ve done more times than he cares to remember, the prison authorities have asked him to undergo a “rehabilitation” program in exchange for freedom. If he will only sign an oath of loyalty to the Revolution and allow himself to be properly educated in its glories, then he can walk out a free man. Marked and stained and always closely watched, but free. As he has done more times than he cares to remember, he’s told them all to go to hell. He thinks about that cruel ritual he has witnessed so many times, where the guards strip all the prisoners naked and parade the most handsome of them in front of the newly arrived inmates to find out who among them is gay. He thinks about how anyone who gets aroused is taken away for a special mandatory “rehabilitation” program that includes the application of electrical currents to the genitals. He thinks of all the other unmentionable tortures he has witnessed. He thinks about his own pain and the time lost. Fernando cracks jokes that the other prisoners can hear in their cells, and they all laugh, even those who have been through rehabilitational electrocution.
Flash forward, fifteen years.
Fernando sits in his cell at the Isle of Pines penitentiary as he always does, day after day. One of his remaining teeth hurts like hell today, and he feels feverish. His back hurts, too, where he has that large lump over his spine, right there, where the prison guards beat him with their rifle butts years ago. He keeps thinking about the letter he received from Uncle Amado in far-off Bloomington, Illinois, and what he had to say about a Spanish admiral named Nieto who was pressing for his release. Lucky thing Uncle Amado saw the man’s n
ame mentioned in the Bloomington Panta-graph and had the nerve to write him and ask if he might be related to us. Lucky thing our family has been obsessed with genealogy for so long, and the admiral can easily find out that he is related to us. Lucky thing this admiral takes up the cause of pressing for one Spanish citizen’s freedom from a Cuban prison. In the long run, the painfully slow process set in motion by the admiral will set him free before his thirty-year sentence is complete. In the meantime, Fernando cracks jokes that the other prisoners can hear, and they all laugh.
Flash forward, twenty years.
Fernando sits in his cell at the Isle of Pines penitentiary as he always does, day after day. Once again, those bastards have urged him to accept “rehabilitation” in exchange for his freedom. Today they rattled off a long list of former inmates who swore loyalty to the Revolution and are now back with their families—many of them in the United States. All of the names belong to men he knows and respects. Once again, Fernando has told them to go to hell. Unknown to Fernando, in far-off Chicago, one of the men whose name was on that list is talking to his cousin Tony at O’Hare Airport. The man has just arrived in the States and taken a job at the airport, where he’ll be working for Tony every day. The man tells Tony that Fernando was the funniest inmate at the Isle of Pines, and always kept everyone in stitches. He also tells him that Fernando is holding fast, refusing to undergo “rehabilitation.” Back at the Isle of Pines, Fernando cracks jokes that the other prisoners can hear in their cells, and they all laugh.
Flash forward, twenty-three years.
Fernando is free at last, standing on Spanish soil. His father, my Uncle Filo, lays in a heap at the feet of King Juan Carlos of Spain, and Fernando is right next to him, wondering what to do or say. Filo has tripped and fallen at the feet of the King of Spain, at an airport outside Madrid. He’s a much smaller man than he used to be, Filo Nieto, and he looks a lot less distinguished. His suit is as wrinkled as his soul, and his eyes have a peculiar look to them. He has a look in his eye like that of a father who has heard the sound of rifles shooting at his son over and over.
Filo has fallen down and has trouble raising himself off the ground because he is drunk. Dead drunk. He is dead drunk because he did see and hear firing squads shooting at Fernando more times than he wishes to remember, and he is now a crushed, thoroughly wrecked man. You see, Filo would eventually also be arrested and imprisoned, and subjected to watching or listening to the shooting charades staged by Fidel’s firing squads.
“Hey, Nieto, wake up. Buenos días! We’re about to shoot your son in five minutes. When you hear shooting outside, that’ll be your son getting shot. Enjoy your breakfast.”
He would also see and hear other things in prison that made him lose his mind completely for a while. But that’s another story.
Fernando laughs and laughs, inwardly, at the sight of his father, who has spent most of his life trying to discover some family ties to royalty, lying there drunk at the feet of the King of Spain. He helps his father up, whispers in his ear, and encourages him to muster as much composure as he can.
Fernando searches for words. Straighten up, Dad. Fix your tie. This is the King of Spain, right here…Oh…so sorry, Your Majesty, excuse us, please…Your Highness, we’re all a little worn out. You have my word, next time I’m released from prison, and you help me get out, we’ll all try to be more poised and well-mannered.
Flash forward, thirty-one years.
Fernando sneaks up behind me at my cousin Rafael’s house in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and taps me on the shoulder. I turn around and see a thin, graying, bald guy with a moustache who is much shorter than me. I don’t recognize him at all. He realizes I am clueless.
“Carlos…soy Fernando!”
I recognize him, probably with the same look on my face that Jesus’ disciples had when they saw him after the Resurrection. I hug this guy who used to toss me into the air.
“Fernando!…Oye, qué maravilla, esto!” I say in my rusty Spanish.
“Here, Carlos, I want you to meet my wife and son…. And, by the way, how’d you get so tall so fast? The last time I saw you, you were just a shrimp.”
I laugh, then remain speechless for a while. As silent as a lizard basking in the sun.
27
Veintisiete
She was so unbelievably beautiful. It hurt, sometimes, just to look at her. And she was so, so nice. Never ever had I thought it possible for any teacher to be so wonderful.
She was young: still under thirty, I’m sure.
And she liked me so much. It hurt, sometimes, just to feel her affection. I thought the other kids in my fifth-grade class could tell that there was something going on between me and our teacher. Whenever one of my parents would show up, she’d start gushing about how good a student I was, and how courteous, and so on. It was so awkward and embarrassing for me to have to stand there and listen to all this, especially when other kids were within earshot.
She actually told my mom once that I had the nicest skin, and that she loved to feel my arm. And she ran her fingertips back and forth over my forearm right then, slowly, as always, just to show Marie Antoinette how she did it. Good God! I wanted the earth to swallow me whole. But I also felt good about it. It puzzled and sickened and thrilled me, all of this.
Even I, a snot-nosed fifth grader with black dirt under all his fingernails, could tell that her soul sparkled.
She was bright, too. Smarter than any teacher I’d ever had before. And she never made you feel dumb for not knowing as much as she did. Anytime she told you something you didn’t know, it was as if she were opening a golden door to a room full of treasure.
It didn’t matter which subject she taught: she had a way of making you like them all. In math, you’d actually care about the trains rushing towards each other at different speeds; in English, you’d be eager to learn more about the seemingly insane rules of pronunciation; in poetry, you’d long to write poems yourself, or even to die in a hail of bullets while charging the enemy, just like the Cuban poet José Martí; in history, you’d be transported to the past as if in a time machine.
And she didn’t call any of us by our last names. No. She used our first names or our nicknames. She was intimate with each and every one of us.
This school, El Salvador, was great, and I loved every fraction of a second I spent there. The name was perfect—the Savior—for I had been redeemed, set free from the hell that was La Salle del Vedado. When I was there, it was as if time stood still. Even then, I knew that, somehow, I was already enjoying eternity, in some weird way. Everything was a great surprise and a wondrous homecoming all at once.
Plato would have been so proud of that classroom. The teacher led us to behold the eternal forms, and we uttered sighs of recognition each and every day. Truth, goodness, and beauty were all of one piece, and my teacher was living proof of that. I’m sure if Plato had been there, he would have fallen in love with her. And not in a platonic sort of way. No, I’m willing to wager that he would have wanted more than words to pass between them.
Who knows? Plato might even have boasted to his disciples about the hickeys on his philosopher’s neck and the perfume that had rubbed off on him. He might even have sought advice from much younger men about the ways of the world, bought himself some loud shirts, or taken up smoking.
Immanuel Kant, on the other hand, wouldn’t have noticed her at all. He would only have worried about whether or not it was time to go for a walk yet, and whether or not the teacher was being thorough enough in finding ways to make the obvious seem complicated and profound. That school, in fact, might actually have unnerved him and led him to use three pairs of garters, or four, in place of the usual two. Kant wouldn’t have looked out the window at the beautiful foliage and the sunshine that bathed it. He wouldn’t have noticed the clouds either, I’m sure, or the girls in the classroom.
I noticed all these things, of course.
Beautiful plants, sunshine, and clouds were not new to me. Bu
t they seemed so different—so much nicer—when viewed from a classroom full of girls.
Even the Caballero de París looked good from our classroom window. The Caballero—the Gentleman from Paris—was a crazy man who dressed in a tuxedo and wore a flowing black cape and a top hat, even on the hottest days. He had shoulder-length gray hair and a beard as full as that of an Orthodox priest. He walked up and down the streets of Havana, especially Fifth Avenue in Miramar, always looking as if he were making his way to an awesome party. I’m told he was fond of reciting poems to women on the street and that he sometimes gave them flowers.
My brother and I made fun of him whenever we saw him, naturally, and so did our friends. Whenever we saw him while riding in the car, though, our dad would stop us dead in our tracks.
“He’s a very wise man. He may be crazy, but he’s infinitely wise. Treat him with respect.”
“But he’s nuts!”
“Yeah, Papa, you’re just saying that because he’s from Paris.”
“You can be crazy and wise all at once. The two usually go together, because wisdom makes you see things others don’t,” said Louis XVI.
In our classroom it was a very different story, however.
“El Caballero!” someone would shout. “He’s here, look! There he goes!”
Everyone would rush to the windows, gawk, and make fun of the guy. Our teacher was unable or unwilling to stop us. That would have never happened at either of my former schools.
The truth was that the Caballero looked more dignified when viewed through a window in a classroom with as many girls as boys. He almost made sense, even though we loved to laugh at him. Especially the boys. We laughed, maybe, because we wanted to dress like the Caballero and spout poetry. Maybe we knew we’d end up like the Caballero someday, looking and acting ridiculously insane for the sake of love, driven by some inner music that would never stop. He was a bearded prophet: our Isaiah, our Jeremiah, heralding our joyous doom in top hat and cape.