by Carlos Eire
Maybe the girls laughed because they too saw their future in the Caballero. Maybe they saw themselves being courted by avatars of the Absurd and loving it without knowing why.
Girls. Too many words for them in Spanish, because the Spanish are infinitely wise about such things. Niñas. Niñitas. Muchachas. Muchachitas. Hembras. Jevas. Their presence made everything so much less hard-edged that it changed the way we boys behaved towards one another. There was less teasing, less wanton cruelty. Far fewer fights, too.
In that school there was a constant buzzing, as though some kind of current flowed through the room, effecting a slow electrocution that made your senses come alive. Even a huge box of a hundred different Prisma-color pencils made sense. Before, I’d considered any box containing more than twenty pencils a useless extravagance, something Sugar Boy would buy just to show off. How many shades of the same color did anyone need, anyway? Now, in fifth grade, one hundred different colors didn’t seem enough. I wanted the biggest box of Prismacolors ever made. Five hundred pencils, a thousand, ten thousand, each a different hue. More pencils than could fit into my entire school.
Not enough.
I was alive for the first time, or so it seemed, because of the girls. We remained two different species from different planets most of the time, but every now and then we’d interact.
It was nice to laugh with girls. Nice to sit near them. Nice to look at them. Nice to listen to them talk. Nice to talk to them on those rare occasions when we crossed the gulf that separated us. Nice to smell them, too.
But it wasn’t the least bit nice to get caught liking one of them. Not at all. No way.
You’d have to go through the mating ritual. It seemed to happen at least once a week. It was horrible, infinitely worse than seeing men get shot on live television.
Whenever the word got out that some boy liked a girl, or vice-versa, their classmates would gang up on them at recess. They’d sneak up on their victims. Usually, it was their closest friends who got close to them, acting innocent, and then jumped on them and hugged them tightly. (Usually, it was this very same Judas who had spilled the beans and let everyone know about the romance.) Then all the others in their class would gang up on the victims, like a phalanx of Spartan warriors, and push them slowly towards the center of the playground. Boys at one end, pushing one of theirs; girls at the other end, pushing one of theirs towards the same point.
Screaming, shouting, taunting, such as you should never wish to hear. And that awful chant from hell, composed by demons, no doubt.
“Ricardo ama a Marta…Ricardo ama a Marta…Ricardo ama a Marta…”
Ricardo loves Marta…Ricardo loves Marta…Ricardo loves Marta…
“Marta ama a Ricardo…Marta ama a Ricardo…Marta ama a Ricardo…”
Usually, Marta and Ricardo, or whoever was being pushed, would squirm and try to drag their feet. But it was as useless as struggling against prison guards leading you to the paredón. The chanting always grew louder as the two groups got closer and closer. And the shouting and laughing from all the other kids assembled in the playground usually turned into a roar.
The teachers did nothing to stop the torture.
Keep in mind that in most cases, only one of the parties being pushed towards the center felt any attraction or “love.” For the other party, it was usually a total surprise.
Imagine revealing your deepest secret to your best friend and having your crush announced to the entire school. And imagine being forced to hug and kiss the object of your affections for the first time in front of the whole school—or worse, imagine being forced to hug and kiss someone you weren’t the least bit interested in, or didn’t like at all.
That’s what happened at the center of the playground, when the two phalanxes finally met: the boy and the girl would be pushed into each other’s arms and taunted until they embraced and kissed. And then the roar from the playground would be deafening. Maybe the Colosseum in Rome sounded like that sometimes.
Little did I know in September, as I laughed at all this, that by February I’d be the one being led to my execution.
It happened so suddenly, and without warning. Funny how it always sneaks up on you, just like Cuba clouds.
One day I was fine. The next day I was in love, transfixed, pierced right through. Ablaze but not consumed, like the burning bush on Mount Sinai. What a shock. I’d been in love before, sure, but it had always been some actress on a movie screen or on television, and the flames had burned low. This time it was a girl my age, someone I could actually have touched, if I’d had the nerve. And the flames were like solar flares.
She sat to my right, across a narrow aisle. Forget those blondes, Marilyn and Kim. Forget all blondes. She had brown hair, cropped straight across her wondrous neck. Her eyes were brown, too, and she had very thin, very fine eyebrows.
Jesus H. Soul-searching Christ, how could everything about her be so wonderful? Each and every hair on her head. The bridge of her nose. The bones in her wrist. The feet inside those brown shoes. The fine, fine hairs on her legs, the way she rested her hands on the desk, the way she sharpened a pencil, the way she laughed, the way she ran on the playground, the way she clipped her syllables.
Her voice.
Forget Odysseus tied to the mast, and the song of the Sirens. Rank amateurs, the Sirens. Her sound waves were keyed in to all five senses, not just one. You could have plugged my ears with hot molten lead and the sound would still have invaded the core of my soul. I believe there was also some sixth sense involved, maybe a seventh and eighth, too.
That space between us couldn’t have been more than a foot and a half, but it was as vast as the entire universe and as null as zero itself. It was a space I dared not cross, though she already dwelt within me. It was sacred space. Numinous.
I never dared to approach her outside the classroom. And inside the classroom, of course, all of our paltry conversations were hemmed in by our lessons and the everyday events that took place within those four walls.
Of course, I would no more have revealed my feelings to her than I would have stretched my ten-year-old hand across the aisle to touch her. But I do know that I made her laugh a couple of times.
How I wanted her to notice me. So, inspired by the Caballero de París, I went on a grooming crusade. There had always been this dark ring around my neck and all this dirt under my fingernails. My teeth were always kind of green. And though my hair was always cropped short, it was always messy. I never bothered to tuck in my shirt, either, when it spilled out of my pants, which was every day. All of these faults I attacked with the zeal only a novice can muster.
I began taking showers at noon, when I went home for lunch break, and even using deodorant. I insisted on more frequent haircuts. And whenever my shirt began to spill out of my pants, I’d ram it down into my waistband, furiously. I let my mom know that my shoes needed to be polished every day. And I brushed my teeth at least twice a day.
I tried to talk to her, but only in class. She’d talk back to me, but that was the full extent of our relationship. Still, I thought everything was moving along very nicely, what with my sprucing up and the joking around. Until the day I spoiled it all.
One day, at recess, I couldn’t hold it in any longer. It just sort of jumped out of my mouth, like a toad.
“You know, Ciro, I think I’m in love with my right-hand neighbor. You know who.”
“Yeah, I can see why,” he nodded. Ciro was my best friend.
He could see all right. He could see himself playing Judas.
A couple of days later at recess, it happened. Ciro got close to me and gave me a bear hug, and all the other boys in the class descended on me. I was besieged, captured, and pushed towards the center of the playground. I resisted as much as possible, keeping my eyes closed. I didn’t want to know how close we were getting to the awful moment.
Finally, I peeked through half-closed eyelids at the approaching doom. She looked so terrified on the other side. So utte
rly scared.
We were pulled and pushed to the center of the playground, my first love and I, and God knows what happened there at the center. I can’t recall the full horror.
All I can remember is that within four weeks she was gone. Gone forever, just like all the other kids. One by one they disappeared.
It was early 1961. March, to be exact. About one half of my classmates had vanished without saying a word. One day they’d be there, and the next day they’d be gone. Teachers vanished too. Off to the United States or some other country. The rest of us knew why they were vanishing and why they couldn’t say good-bye, but it hurt all the same to see the empty desks.
By April the school had to close because there were too few students and teachers, and because so much had changed for the worse.
We children of the Revolution had much to learn when I was in fifth grade. Everything changed. I will tell you all about that soon enough. And as bombs fell from the sky, and bullets flew, and money evaporated, and Fidel laid claim to our souls, and everyone I knew and cared about vanished quietly, and I began to face the prospect of my own vanishing, what do I remember most vividly?
Her beautiful brown hair brushing against her neck. It was cut in such a straight, straight line.
28
Veintiocho
They say when you die your entire life passes before your eyes in a split second. But even if it’s more like an ocean of time than a split second, I’m willing to bet that when my turn comes, I’ll see one whole section that is nothing but fragmentary images.
Sometimes, when I least expect it, they’ll pop out, these fragments of a world turned upside down. Like flashbacks from a bad trip.
Bummer, man.
Here we go. Hold on…Aguántate…I feel one coming….
There are Pioneers marching down our street. Kids our age, all dressed alike, wearing red berets and red neckerchiefs, marching like little soldiers.
“Uno, dos, tres, cuatro…”
Soldiers in the making. Militiamen and women of the future. Spies. Informers. Obedient servants of the Revolution.
The marching is relentless. Every single day, and always at the same time.
Little copies of Immanuel Kant, taking his stupid walk at the same time every day. Dozens and dozens of them, marching down our street. Always in the same direction, too.
How I long for the pesticide Jeep to show up and spray them all. Maybe they’ll all get tripped up in the fog and march into one another. A heap of Pioneers left behind, all coughing. We all know they probably couldn’t take the poison the way we can.
Stupid red berets and red neckerchiefs. Stupid marching slogans.
“Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, Cuba sí, Yanquis no, Cuba sí, Yanquis no…”
“Fidel, seguro, a los Yanquis dale duro…” Fidel, undaunted, hit those Yankees hard…
But there’s no more pesticide Jeep. No pesticide to spray. Like everything else, none to be had.
Tony and I had been Cub Scouts for a while, a couple of years earlier, but had given up in disgust. Too many petty rules masquerading as important stuff. Stupid merit badges. Stupid salutes. Stupid uniforms. I don’t think we lasted more than three months. Our troop leader, Fred, was French and had served in the Foreign Legion. What the hell was he doing in Havana, running a Cub Scout troop, and trying to turn us all into little Legionnaires?
We didn’t stay with the Scouts long enough to find out.
And now those creeps next door want us to be Pioneers. They badger our parents about it, those creeps who run the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. They want us to be just like all those kids marching in lockstep down our street, and all around the neighborhood.
They moved into Chachi’s house, these neighborhood spies and busybodies. Chachi’s family had moved to that gorgeous house by the seaside, only to leave it behind a few months later. Off to the United States, their new house left for someone else. Their old house left behind for spies and meddlers.
Every block in Havana has one of these houses. They’re everywhere. Watching. Listening. Prodding. Intruding. Threatening. Controlling. We’re unlucky enough to have them next door, and to live in a climate that forces us to keep the windows open all the time.
Manuel comes up with the perfect counter-slogan for the pioneers:
“Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, comiendo mierda y gastando zapatos…” One, two, three, four, eating shit and wasting shoes…
I must explain: for Cubans, anything that’s dumb or a waste of time can be called “eating shit.” A chump or a fool is a comemierda, or shit eater.
Anyway, after our resident genius Manuel comes up with his counterslogan, we can’t refrain from using it. We hide on the porches, or up in the trees, or behind the shrubs, and shout out as they walk by:
“Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, comiendo mierda y gastando zapatos…”
They’re all so busy marching in lockstep and shouting out their stupid slogans that they don’t hear us.
Or can they hear us? Maybe they can. Every now and then we see a head or two turn and look around, at their own peril. Looking in any direction but forward is wrong. For a Pioneer, that is. Che Guevara has a slogan they also chant, ad nauseam:
“Marcha atrás nunca, ni para coger impulso.” Not one step back, not even to gain momentum.
It’s dangerous for us to call the Pioneers shit eaters and to accuse them of wasting shoes, especially since shoes are scarce and rationed nowadays. About three or four months ago shoe repair shops started using old tire treads as heels and soles. I see them every day on my dad’s wingtip shoes.
And I yell at Pioneers from my hiding place and call them shoe wasters. I wonder how different my life would have been if my mother hadn’t caught us doing it.
It frightens her to the core. She has visions, the kind mothers get. Flash-forwards rather than flashbacks. Ugly, tormenting visions of my brother and me being hauled away by militiamen, never to be seen again. Visions of our Defense Committee neighbors overhearing us. Visions of us in some juvenile prison camp way out in the provinces, where all we’d do for the rest of our lives is cut sugarcane. Or even worse, visions of us being packed off to Russia or East Germany or Czechoslovakia, of us disappearing to some foreign land and never returning.
Someday I’ll lose count of how many times she’s told me about how much we frightened her that day she caught us yelling at the Pioneers, and how much that awful moment weighed in her decision to get us out of the country as soon as possible, in any way possible.
She sees us as little Fernandos, I guess. Next thing you know, we’ll be planting bombs and hauling weapons. She knows about our love of firecrackers, so I guess she’s not entirely wrong to worry.
And the rumor begins to circulate. The rumor of all rumors.
The Revolution is going to take all the children away from their parents, and soon. Something in the new Cuban constitution allows for it: Patria Potestad. My mother is now convinced that the state is going to herd us into trucks and ship us off to parts unknown. Maybe even to Russia. After all, it happened during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, in some areas controlled by the Communists, and everyone knew someone who had known someone who had known someone whose kid had been sent to Russia, never to be seen again.
There are so many Spaniards in Havana, and so many children of Spaniards. The memories are fresh. My mom and many others know it’s possible.
Communists? I am hearing the word for the first time. Batista is still president. I am about five years old, and I’m in our car on the way to my grandparents’ house, just as we pass what will become the Plaza of the Revolution. It’s still under construction. Tony and I are in the backseat, as always, and I hear my parents talking about Communists in the front seat.
“Hey, those Communists must be good guys,” I chime in.
“Why do you say that?” asks Louis XVI, with a tone that can only mean I’ve made a mistake.
“Because they must help people communicate…”
Prolonged laughter from the front seat. “How cute,” says my mom.
“What’s so funny?”
“Oh, never mind, you’re too young to understand. But Communists aren’t good. Not at all. They’re very bad.”
Now I am a few years older, passing the same spot, staring at a hammer and sickle on a billboard from the backseat of the car, and we’re all supposed to become Communists.
Fidel has declared himself a Marxist-Leninist and proclaimed the Revolution and the country Communist. No more private property. No more mine and thine. No more exploitation of the masses by capitalists. Share and share equally. And if anyone fails to work, then he or she will have nothing to eat. And you can’t work just for yourself or for your family. Everyone has to work for everyone else. And everyone owns everything, all together.
So he says.
The Chinese hot dog man has lost his hot dog stand. The Revolution won’t tolerate anyone claiming a business for himself. Not even a hot dog stand. The hot dogs have vanished along with a lot of other stuff. Like Coke and Pepsi.
My uncle Mario has lost his two businesses to the Revolution. The last thing he did at his furniture store was to burn all the accounting records so that those who still owed money on their furniture wouldn’t have to pay the state. The Revolution wanted to keep collecting the money they owed. The money they owed to themselves, I guess, according to the logic of the Revolution.
My uncle is almost sent to prison for that subversive act.
Fernando Chan has lost his store, too. He can still work there if he wants, but he won’t be the owner any longer. He can’t give kids raisins and olives, either, since they’re not his to give away anymore.
Everyone has lost whatever real estate they owned.
The state has compensated them, but with such paltry sums as to make the whole deal stink.
Besides, one fine morning, recently, Che came up with the great idea of doing away with money altogether. I’ve had it a few times myself, especially when short on cash. No money at all. Let everyone share and share alike. To each according to his or her needs. So all the banks have been closed, and all accounts have been seized. This is the first step. Everyone who had a bank account can keep some arbitrary low sum—a few hundred pesos, I think. All else is gone, obliterated.