Waiting for Snow in Havana

by Carlos Eire

  A child who would end up fighting in a real war in Vietnam a few years later.

  Instead of pouncing on Manuel, the four of us simply froze, standing or crouching, transfixed. Then we laughed, and the laughing couldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop. And we looked around and saw what we had done. Breadfruit pulp everywhere. On walls, on tree trunks, on the sidewalks, on the street, on our neighbors’ porches, on their porch furniture and light fixtures. On ourselves. Then we realized we had used up nearly every available missile. And the laughing stopped. We dashed to our respective houses, cleaned ourselves up, and pretended nothing had happened.

  Then the phone calls began to come in from neighbors. Complaints. It seemed the phone would never stop ringing. Since it was our street, it was my brother and I, and our parents, who shouldered the responsibility for our Apocalypse. My father went out the door, took a look at the street, and made two phone calls of his own, one to the parents of Manuel and Rafael, the other to Eugenio’s parents. Within a half hour or so, there we were, the five of us, cleaning up the mess with hoses, brooms, mops, and shovels. It took the rest of that afternoon to remove every trace of our glorious breadfruit war.

  We worked harder than we ever had. We toiled even harder than the school janitor who cleaned up pee puddles. We had been undone by our own war, our version of a counter-revolution. Transformed from worms into worker bees by glorious stinking breadfruit. Funny, I don’t remember complaining about working really hard for the first time in my life. I only remember inhaling deeply and laughing.

  And now, whenever I feel the rage rising within me, I force myself to smile and breathe deeply. Nine times out of ten I smell breadfruit. Nice and ripe.

  34

  Treinta Y Cuatro

  I was the first to lay eyes on the woman with the big butt. Her rear end was monumental, large enough to contain all of the world, and all of human experience.

  Thinly, very thinly veiled by red fabric, it spoke of many things without speaking. Fertile fields, sunlight, water, earthworms, hard labor, sweat, roots, greens, fruit, udders, milk, flies, muddy hooves, feathers, trucks full of produce, market stalls, blood, meat, money, canvas shopping bags bursting at the seams, kitchens with banged-up pots, crusty kerosene stoves, lard wrapped in wax paper, dripping tins of olive oil from Spain, diced onions hissing in black pans, garlic fumes, knives that gave off sparks when sharpened on pedal-driven wheels lined with flint, sparks that flew like planets being born, Band-Aids, iodine, aprons stained with memories, ladles, spatulas, spoons, forks, dishes, glasses stained with lipstick, cups, napkins, tablecloths folded by grandmothers, dishes steaming on the table, thinly sliced avocados, fried plantains, malanga, yucca , carne asada, arroz con pollo, picadillo, ropa vieja, tasajo, papas rellenas, tons of rice, black beans, garbanzos, red beans, paella, beer, wine, rum, coffee, flan made in old chorizo tins, custard with vanilla wafers stuck inside, guava paste and cream cheese on crackers, lots of sugar, sunsets, endless talk, whispers, shouts, gossip, songs, music on the radio, dancing in place, hands around the waist, hands on the back, familiar bones felt under the flesh, new ones discovered, heat within, heat in the air, kisses, joy, disappointment, betrayal, sorrow, arguments, prayer, sex, birth, ration cards, firing squads, illness, and death.

  And eggplants, of course.

  And oh, yeah, love, too. I’m sure love had a lot to do with making that butt so big.

  Anyway, the woman with the world’s largest rear end was standing under a palm tree, near a drinking fountain, talking to some friends. I fingered the peas in my pocket and tapped Rafael on the shoulder.

  “Look, over there, the perfect target.”

  “Good one!”

  “Let’s find the others. We have to tell them!”

  We were roaming the new park on the banks of the Almendares River, attacking people with our blowguns. It was none other than Louis XVI who had made the peashooters for us by cutting up an old television antenna. A simple enough weapon to make and use. Thin, hollow metal cylinders, about ten or twelve inches long. All you needed was something hard to shoot out with your tongue and air from your lungs. Aiming was a snap, especially at close range, and with a projectile as hard as a dried pea.

  We had just seen a documentary on the Indian tribes of the Amazon River basin, which must have been deemed acceptable by the Revolutionary authorities, and we had fallen in love with their blowguns. And King Louis, ever eager to amuse us and our friends, had said: “I can make even better blowguns for you out of metal.” So he took out his hacksaw and cut into pieces the rods of an old antenna he just happened to have on hand. Then he carefully sanded and polished both ends of each of the resulting cylinders and gave all of us sturdy, nearly indestructible blowguns.

  “I can’t make you any poisoned darts, though,” he said as he handed us our weapons. “I might be able to make the darts, but I don’t think I could come up with the poison.” He looked sort of crestfallen as he said it.

  “But you can use peas,” he said, his face brightening. “They’re not being rationed right now. I can get you each your own bag of peas.”

  We piled into the ’51 blue-and-cream Plymouth and headed for the nearest food store. On the way there we practiced shooting spitballs out of the car’s windows or at each other, at close range. Those spitballs stung. And they stuck to anything we hit with them. Parked cars, telephone poles, street signs, pedestrians, and what not. We made the spitballs from the pages we’d ripped out of an old Bohemia magazine.

  The peas were so much better than the spitballs, though. No comparison. They’d come barreling out of our blowguns like torpedoes from a submarine. And they made such a nice noise as you fired them, snapping back your tongue from your lips. But that soft thhhhpp was nothing compared to the loud thhhwack you’d hear when you hit your target. Such a sublime sound.

  We had practiced with our peas for a day or two before going to the new park and were actually working on our second bags of ammunition, grateful that they weren’t being rationed.

  The new park was one of the first urban projects completed by the Revolution. The Almendares River flowed between Vedado and Miramar, forming a natural boundary between the two suburbs. It also flowed past one of the last remaining slivers of forest in Havana, El Bosque de la Habana, which was high above it on a bluff. The woods there had previously been accessible only to those who wanted to brave the wilds. Now the wilderness was open to the People.

  We’d braved the wilds in the Bosque many times before the park was built. Louis XVI loved taking us there. We’d hike the rough trails and marvel at the trees and the bluffs. One cliff in particular was very scary. You had to inch your way along a very narrow ledge, clinging with your hands to the chalky stone face. It must have been at least a two-hundred-foot drop. One false step and you’d be dead.

  We walked that ledge so many times I lost count.

  I can still close my eyes and see the green water far below and my over-weight father struggling to flatten his stomach against the cliff face as he inched along the ledge. I can also see my own feet creeping along the ledge and hear my dad urging me on.

  “Keep moving, keep moving. If you stop moving and look down, you’ll get vertigo. So move, move, move.”

  “What’s vertigo?”

  “What you’re feeling right now.”

  Louis XVI must have been one of the least safety-conscious men in Cuba. Or the world, I think. I still remember the sound the pebbles made on that thin ledge as we dislodged them with our feet and they tumbled down the cliff face. The ledge wasn’t exactly firm. And my dad’s two-hundred-plus pounds made the pebbles rain down.

  “Listen to those pebbles,” my dad would say as he clung precariously to the chalky rock face, “and try to imagine what sound a body might make if it were to fall down the cliff. Imagine how the screams would get fainter on the way down, and how they might echo. Imagine how the splash would sound as the body hit the water.”

  Louis XVI was right about that. There was a
wonderful echo in the Bosque. Even the falling pebbles produced an echo. And there was one great spot where we could really play with the echo, shouting and waiting for our voices to return. When all of us shouted within split seconds of one another, the barrage of voices that would return was spectacular. Every voice obeyed its appointed time delay.

  Louis XVI was probably wrong about something else, though. “You know, those ruins are just waiting to be discovered,” he’d say, pointing to a spot across the river. “They’re older than the sunken continent of Atlantis. It was a civilization much more advanced than our own. But only the right person will be able to really see them, and read their documents, and pass on their great secrets to the world. They await a Messiah of the Ruins. Do you see them? Right over there? Maybe one of you will discover them. Maybe one of you is their Messiah.”

  We thought we saw them. And we begged him to take us there, to the other side of the river.

  “No, you have to get there all on your own. Maybe when you’re older.”

  I think I began to take an interest in the past right there, looking across the river to those mysterious shapes on the opposite bluff.

  But all those trips to the Bosque had been long ago, in the past, before the world changed, or shortly thereafter. The Bosque was being civilized now, opened up to the Cuban People. It was a very pretty park they’d made, you had to admit it. Nice walkways, benches, kiosks, and lights. Beautiful views. And it was all so safe, so close to the river. The trails we had walked so many times before were still above us, untouched by the park.

  We were there on the day it first opened to the public. And Inaugural Day for the Park of the Revolution had brought out a huge crowd. The place was teeming with people, as packed as the shark pool at the Aquarium of the Revolution. Which is why we could shoot our peas with impunity. Thhhhp!…thhhwack!

  It was so easy to hide behind other people or behind trees. We had shot dozens of people and slipped away without any trouble. It was so much fun to see their reactions. I aimed for their heads. My brother aimed for their backs and butts. The others aimed at different parts of their victims’ bodies.

  Every now and then, when the other guy least expected it, we’d shoot at each other, too.

  It was the most fun I’d had since our breadfruit war. It was almost as if nothing had changed and we were back in our old world. But there was a certain kind of ferocity to our play that evening, in that new park by the river. We knew our days were numbered. And in so many different ways we were all pissed as hell.

  What we didn’t know was that it would be our last adventure together. If we had known that, we might have actually shoved people into the river, I think.

  Louis XVI had brought Ernesto along, but Ernesto said he was too grown-up for such hijinks. King Louis himself made no effort to supervise the small guerilla squad he’d brought to the park. He seemed to derive great pleasure from knowing that we were all out there, shooting peas with abandon. So King Louis and Ernesto walked along the paved paths that we stalked, paying little attention to what the rest of us were doing.

  Eugenio, Manuel, and Tony, all of them thirteen or fourteen years old, were far ahead of me and Rafael in terms of their aggressiveness and risk taking. Rafa and I were only eleven, and still more cautious.

  Before long, El Alocado, Eugenio, began to get careless. He’d shoot people and barely make an effort to hide. He’d just put the blowgun behind his back, stare directly at his victims, and laugh. We all warned him to be more careful, but he wouldn’t listen. Then Manuel and Tony dropped their warnings, and joined him.

  Thhhhp!…thhhwack! Ha, ha, ha!

  You can understand why I had to tell them about the lady with The Butt. We were one soul with five bodies. Something like that had to be shared. All for one, and one for all. For the last time.

  So we decided to shoot The Butt in unison. What else would anyone in their right mind do?

  It was an act of pure love, what we did.

  “Caritas,” Saint Augustine would have said, pure love directed towards God and others, rather than towards the self.

  We lined up like a firing squad about ten feet from The Butt. She had her back turned to us, and the people with her were so busy talking that they didn’t notice us either. We couldn’t say “ready, aim, fire” because we needed our mouths and tongues to fire the peas, so we cued one another with our eyes and other subtle signals and aimed our blowguns in unison.

  Thhhhp!…thhhwack! Multiplied by five!

  Every one of us, I’m proud to say, hit the target. It would have been a disgrace to miss. It was like hitting the side of a barn, as they say in the Midwest.

  “Aaaaaaay! Qué fue eso?” What was that? She wheeled around faster than we thought she would, and, of course, she saw us. “Aaaaaaay! What are you doing? Degenerates. They’ve shot me up! Militiamen! Militiamen! Please help, do something.”

  She lunged at us. Well, sort of. When you’re that large it’s hard to lunge. She came towards us, yelling at the top of her lungs. People stopped dead in their tracks and stared. We, of course, ran away as fast as we could.

  Louis XVI was nearby, and we ran through the crowd to him.

  “What’s all the noise, kids?”

  “I don’t know, some lady just went nuts over there.”

  “Really? Maybe I’ll go take a look.”

  “No, don’t…let’s get out of here.”

  In the meantime, Butt Lady had worked her way through the crowd and found us talking to the King. She started shouting at my dad, very loudly, waving her arms wildly. The fat under her upper arms swayed like walrus blubber as she shook her index finger near his face.

  “Hey, you, señor, what are your boys up to? This is a total disgrace! They shot me! What kind of kids are you raising? I should report you and those kids. Criminals! That’s what they are: criminals! They belong in jail, or a work camp.”

  “I’m so sorry, señora, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  We left the judge in charge and snuck away silently, on cats’ feet. I didn’t want to know how he would handle this, and neither did any of the rest of us. We exited the park and waited for him at the car. Of course, we assumed he’d survive the fat lady’s attack. And he did. A few minutes later, he found us standing around the Plymouth.

  “Hey, you guys got carried away back there, didn’t you? What were you thinking? Shooting up people like that. Are you crazy? I didn’t make those blowguns so you could do something like that. That lady was ready to call the militiamen on you. You know how serious that is?”

  He didn’t sound the least bit angry. Instead, he sounded worried and sad.

  We stood there as silent as the peas in our pockets.

  Ernesto stood off to the side, behind my dad, with a smug look on his face. Near the end he often had that look.

  “I got you off the hook, you know, but it wasn’t easy,” Louis XVI said.

  “You guys put me in a very tight spot. Don’t ever do that again, you hear?”

  We said okay and got into the Plymouth. We knew there wouldn’t be a next time. And I guess he did, too.

  35

  Treinta Y Cinco

  It was a miracle. It had to be. You can’t doubt what you see. If this wasn’t a miracle, then nothing else could be.

  The color of the sea was changing, as if some giant brush were being applied from beneath. Or was it from above? I stared long and hard at the wild cloud-shaped rainbow in the water. There were splashes of tangerine in there too, little bits of sunset at midday, along with splashes of blood red hibiscus blossoms.

  And it moved. The colored cloud inside the water kept moving to and fro, twisting and turning with great speed.

  It was the most extraordinary thing I had ever seen, and perhaps the most beautiful. I stood there on the dock of a formerly private beach club, under the sun and the clouds, transfixed. I thought surely this was a vision sent directly from heaven—one that spoke to me without scaring me to de
ath. All the visions I’d heard until then had been frightening: Jesus and Mary and the saints appearing to children and giving them messages that none of the adults around them would believe. I’d heard of statues in churches moving, or breathing, or talking. I’d also seen a very scary movie about a boy named Marcelino who struck up a friendship with a crucifix that came alive. The Italian priests across the street had screened that movie outdoors one night, but none of us kids dared to put our hands in front of the camera for that one, much less a middle finger. Talk about scary! The thought of Jesus coming to life on his cross and speaking to me seemed worse than Frankenstein, Wolf Man, Dracula, the Mummy, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon put together.

  Twenty years later, in Lugo, not far from where my grandparents had been born, I would almost end up locked into a chapel with a similar crucifix for an entire night. The sacristan didn’t see me and locked the gates while I was looking at the altarpiece. The thought of spending the whole night in there with a life-size crucifix, in total darkness, was too much for me to bear. I started yelling for someone to open the gate and get me out. My Spanish cousins laughed for days about that.

  I explained to them that I had a fear of bleeding Christ figures, but that only made them laugh harder. They’re probably still laughing. “Watch out, don’t run into a bleeding Christ on the way,” one of them said to me as I boarded a train bound for Madrid.

  But this fast-moving storm of shapes and colors within the turquoise water was a good miracle. It moved and moved without stopping. Sometimes it split into two and the halves circled around to form a whole again. And in the meantime, as the halves danced with each other, the contrast between the cloud and the turquoise sea grew even more intense.