There was silence as we pondered this weighty information.
“So we’ll have to move fast,” said Tito.
“We? What is this ‘we’?” said Luis, alarmed.
“Well, if Calcines is going, I’m going,” said Tito, “and if I’m going, my brother is going, and if we’re going, you’re going, Luis.”
“I see,” said Luis. “In that case, I’m going home now to say my prayers, because tonight is the night we die.”
That evening, the four of us watched from behind the fence around my yard as La Natividad came out her front door, then went down the steps and through the gate. As usual, she was wearing all black, and she was clutching a large, shapeless black bag. Even stranger, on this night she held an umbrella over her head—even though it was dark out, and not a drop of rain had fallen in days! It was such an odd sight that fingers of fear began to tickle my spine.
“Man, she really is nuts!” Luis whispered.
“Shh! Quiet!” said Tito. “She can hear a frog croak a mile away.”
“She can see the freckles on a frog’s ass a mile away, too,” Rolando said. “Keep it down until she’s gone.”
La Natividad looked around. She was always suspicious of everyone and everything, but she seemed especially on guard tonight. I wondered if she’d sensed us. Then she moved on, disappearing around the corner.
The four of us swung into action. We ran down the street and flattened ourselves against the wall until we were sure no one was watching . Then I pulled on the rusty old gate. As I’d expected, it was locked.
“Great,” I said. “We have to go over the wall!”
La Natividad’s property was surrounded by a concrete wall about six feet high. Once there had been iron stakes stuck in the top of it, but a lot of them had rusted and fallen out over the years, leaving gaps that a boy could wiggle through.
“What about her dogs?” whispered Luis.
“Oh, yeah!” said Tito. “The dogs!”
“How could we have forgotten about the dogs?” Rolando said, slapping his forehead. “What are we, idiots?”
La Natividad’s dogs were two large, vicious black mutts, with yellowed, dripping fangs and beady, malevolent eyes. They were one of the many reasons we usually didn’t walk near La Natividad’s house. If we did, they would come charging up to the gate and bark madly until we were gone. But she must have left them in the house, because there was no sign of them in the yard.
“Well, over we go,” said Tito.
The four of us hoisted ourselves over the wall and dropped to the ground on the other side. There, in front of us, were the mangos, some of them rotten, others as fresh as if they had just fallen that day.
“Look at them all!” said Luis. “Wow, do they look good!”
“I wonder if they’re cursed,” Tito mused.
“Well, I’m starving,” said Rolando. He was about to bite into one, but I stopped him.
“Listen, man, every fairy tale I’ve ever heard about witches starts just like this,” I said. “Some kids are about to steal the gold, but they see some food, and they stop and eat until they’re as fat as pigs. Then the witch comes back and cooks them!”
“You’re right,” said Rolando. “I’ve heard those stories, too.”
“Good thinking,” said Tito.
“We’ll get the mangos on the way back. Let’s go up and try the door.”
“Oh, man, Calcines, I don’t know.” Rolando groaned. “Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea.”
“You were the one who dared me!” I said. “You can’t back out now. If you do, you have to wear a dress to school every day for a week.” That was the punishment we had devised for anyone who backed out of a dare. So far, it had never been enforced, but we took it very seriously.
“I’m not wearing any dress!”
“Then let’s go,” I said.
We slunk like ninjas up the crumbling concrete steps, until we were at La Natividad’s front door. I could smell some strange odor, no doubt the smoke lingering from one of her magic ceremonies. It was an exotic, intoxicating scent.
“Wow,” I whispered, turning to face the boys. “Whatever this lady is up to, it’s something really—”
“Yaaaaaaaaagh!” screamed Luis, falling backward down the stairs.
I whipped around to see what had frightened him so. The front door had opened, and there stood La Natividad, leering horribly down at us. Behind her, I could see two slavering sets of jaws, and I heard the sound of guttural growling.
“It’s her! She flew back on her umbrella!” Tito yelped.
I said nothing. I was too busy running. I leapt down the stairs four at a time and headed straight for the wall, but I wasn’t moving fast enough to escape the dogs, one of which was right behind me. I could feel its hot breath on my calves as I dived for the wall and pulled myself up. A pair of fangs grabbed my shorts and refused to let go. I kicked madly behind me until I heard a yelp and a thud, and then I was over.
Catching my breath, I looked up to see Luis sitting beside me.
“How did you get here so fast?” I asked, astonished.
“Fear,” he answered.
Tito and Rolando were not as lucky. Luis and I could hear their pathetic screams blending with La Natividad’s screeching as she urged the dogs on. Suddenly their heads appeared above the wall, and they, too, dropped onto the sidewalk. Tito was bleeding from a gash on his leg. Rolando had lost his pants.
“Run!” Luis yelled.
We needed no further urging. New speed records were set as we disappeared down San Carlos Street. We didn’t even bother saying goodbye as we escaped into our houses.
Somehow, I was able to make it through the front door and into bed without Mama hearing me. But as I lay there pretending to sleep, I could hear La Natividad’s dogs barking, furious at having lost their chance to sink their teeth into our bottoms. After an hour, they settled down, but I knew that I could never go within a hundred yards of that house again.
How had La Natividad gotten back into her house without our noticing? She must have used witchcraft; there was no other explanation. It occurred to me that she might have a back door, but I dismissed that as too commonplace. I could more easily believe that she’d flown through the air than that she’d gotten the drop on us by sneaking around the block.
If I was going to escape Fidel, I thought in frustration, then it would have to be without the help of La Natividad’s magic charms.
As the barking faded, there came another, even more ominous sound. From the vacant field nearby, I could hear a drum start up, followed by chanting and the beating of a tambourine. The santeros were at it again. I was sure that La Natividad had summoned them to cast a magic spell on us. I waited all night for some demon to come slinking through the window and steal my soul. But I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, it was morning, and I was still the same old troubled boy, waiting for his telegram to come.
Nguyen Van Troy
One day I looked at the calendar, and I realized we’d been waiting for our telegram for nearly a year. The suspense was starting to feel like a wasting disease. I could feel it taking another little bite out of me each day. The worst part was that I couldn’t even talk about it with anyone. Mama and Esther felt the same way, so there was no point in complaining to them.
“Complaining only makes things worse!” Mama would say, and Esther would get upset if she saw that I was upset. I couldn’t talk to the boys about it, either. They talked about nothing but my impending escape to freedom. I was sick of their wild speculations about blond girls, hot dogs, and apple pie. So I kept my agony to myself.
Papa continued to slave away at the work camp, month after month. He was one person I didn’t want to complain to. Compared to what he was going through, my life was like an amusement park. He said the guards were always threatening to take away his furloughs, but so far that hadn’t happened. We looked forward to those weekends with tremendous yearning, for we missed P
apa fiercely. Each time we saw him, he looked thinner and more exhausted. But Papa had not earned his reputation as one of the strongest men on the docks of Cienfuegos for nothing. He had the endurance of a draft horse, and he swore that he would not let the Communists beat him down.
“Look at it this way, hijo,” he said during one of his visits. “We may not know what day that telegram will arrive, but God knows. And every day that passes brings us one day closer to that moment.”
“But I want to know when it’s coming!” I said. “And what if they don’t send it at all? What if they forget or they just decide not to let us go?”
Papa drew me close and gave me a bone-crushing hug.
“Sometimes the hardest thing about life is not knowing,” he said. “Not just about this, but about everything. It’s not an easy lesson, but you’ll have to learn it, son. M’entiendes?”
“Yes, Papa, I understand.”
Just before school started, the Caballero brothers and I decided to make a trial run to Nguyen Van Troy Middle School, which was much farther than Mariana Grajales—at least a mile and a half. To get there, we had to cross through the territories of three or four gangs. We wanted to find a safe route. Luis would have been with us, but he’d had a bad asthma attack and was stuck in bed.
Rolando was very quiet and I thought it was probably because he hadn’t been promoted. Rolando was an even worse student than I was. The thought that he was going to have to spend another year in sixth grade was eating him alive.
“Ah, don’t worry about it, Rolo,” I said. “Who cares anyway? At least you don’t have to walk so far.”
Rolando snorted. “Who the hell is Nguyen Van Troy, anyway?” he said. “What kind of dumb name is that?”
“He’s Chinese,” said Tito.
“No, he’s Russian,” I said.
“That’s not a Russian name,” said Tito.
“Well, one thing’s for sure. He’s a Communist. Probably some kind of hero or something,” said Rolando.
“There are no Communist heroes!” I said.
The brothers instinctively looked around to see if anyone was listening. Then Tito turned to me. “Calcines, if you want to get your butt thrown in jail, that’s your problem. But leave us out of it.”
“Sorry. But it’s true. They renamed all these schools after people we’ve never heard of, and they expect us to care? What’s wrong with our own Cuban heroes? We have plenty of them!”
From Papa’s stories of Ritica la Cubanita, I knew an assortment of tales dating from the war against the Spanish colonialists. For the rest of our walk, I regaled the boys with anecdotes about José Martí, Antonio Maceo, and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, men of dignity and courage who had sacrificed everything to free us from Spanish control.
“How do you know all this stuff?” Rolando asked. “You can barely read!”
Far from insulting me, Rolando’s comment jolted me into a realization: I was capable of learning—as long as it was something I was interested in.
“I just don’t care about learning the crap those Commies are always trying to shove down our throats,” I said. “I know the real history of Cuba. All they teach us in school is lies and more lies.”
We arrived at Nguyen Van Troy without getting into any fights. I stared solemnly at the crumbling brick edifice that would be my new home for the next three years . . . or until the telegram came. There was no way it could take that long. With a shudder, I realized that if it hadn’t come by the time I finished ninth grade, I’d be too old to leave the island. The army would have its claws in me then. My old, familiar fear began uncoiling from my belly like a snake and crawling up through my chest. With an effort, I pushed it down again, willing myself to be a man and not a boy.
That school year dragged on just like the year before it. In early 1968, Abuelo Julian went to the sugar mill and came home near the beginning of the summer, and we rejoiced that he was safely with us once more. School ended. I had learned that Nguyen Van Troy was a Vietcong soldier who died fighting against the “evil Yankee empire.” Now every morning I met up with Tito, Rolando, and Luis on the front steps of the Jagua Movie House. We sat around and tried to think of stuff to do that would be fun but wouldn’t get us into trouble. It was a short list. We went to the port, we spied on La Natividad, and went on long countryside walks to the cemetery. Because there was so little we could do, summer, which I yearned for throughout the school year, seemed like a different kind of prison sentence.
Then one day, as the boys and I were sitting around in the stultifying heat, a soldier in a jeep appeared out of nowhere, pulled up in front of our house, and handed Mama a piece of paper.
The boys and I looked at one another, then shot to our feet. The instant the soldier drove off, all the neighbors flooded our front yard.
“The telegram!” someone shouted.
My heart stopped. Was this it? Would we be leaving one week from today?
But Mama opened the envelope, then shook her head. “It’s not the telegram!” she said to the crowd. They dispersed, disappointed.
“What is it, Mama?” I asked, out of breath.
“It’s Papa,” she said.
My heart sank like a stone. Esther came up behind Mama, clinging to her skirt. “Is he—is he okay?”
“It’s his hernia,” she said. “It’s gotten worse, and he will have to have an operation.”
“What? It’s that bad?”
“Well . . . it’s not great, but at least he’ll get to come home for the surgery. And afterward, he’ll have some time off to recuperate.”
“You mean Papa will be able to stay with us for a while?”
“Yes,” said Mama. “Papa is coming home.”
“Yay!” Esther and I jumped for joy.
But then I stopped. “Mama, if the Communists think Papa is such a bad man, then why are they doing this for him?”
The look on her face told me she was thinking the same thing. I waited to hear what kind of glass-half-full reason she would come up with this time.
“Because,” she said finally, “your papa is such a hard worker they think he’s worth repairing. Even the Communists can see what a good man he is.”
I had to hand it to Mama. Sometimes she actually convinced me that everything was all right.
When Papa got off the bus a few days later, the three of us were waiting for him. I was shocked at how sick he looked. His skin hung on his bones like a badly made suit. He walked bent over, because of his constant pain. We brought him into the house, laid him in bed, and gathered around him.
“Oh, they’re trying to work you to death!” exclaimed Mama. “Those animals! They’re no better than Nazis!”
“It’s okay,” Papa said. “The important thing is, I’m home.”
“Papa, are you really having an operation?” I asked. “Are they going to slice you open and look at your guts?”
“Niño!” said Mama.
“Eww!” said Esther.
“Yes, they are,” Papa said. “And they’re going to sew up my hernia so it doesn’t hurt anymore.”
“Is it going to make you all better?” Esther asked.
“It’s supposed to,” Mama said. “Now, you two scoot so your father can get some rest. He needs it.”
Later that night, as I lay in bed, I could hear their anguished voices. Mama had the same fear I did: that the Communists were going to use this operation as an excuse to kill Papa on the operating table. It would be a quick and convenient way for them to dispose of a troublesome worm. All it would take was a few too many drops of anesthetic.
“We can’t worry about every little thing that pops into our heads, Concha,” Papa told her. “What will be, will be. Right now, the important thing is I’m home with my family again, and this operation means I will have a nice long break from that horrible place.”
“If you survive it,” Mama said bitterly.
I was surprised—she never let herself voice such dark thoughts in front of us kids
. She was so good at hiding them that I’d almost come to believe she didn’t have any.
“Enough of that kind of talk,” Papa said. “You don’t know how good it feels to lie down in my own bed with you again, and to know my little ones are safe and sound in the next room. If you did, you wouldn’t be carrying on about what might happen. You have no idea of the things I’ve seen, Concha. I’ve told you only a tenth of what really goes on. I am never going to tell you about the rest, ever. They’re too sad and horrible. But I’ll tell you one thing right now—I’m either going to get my family to America, or I’m going to die trying. And whether I die on the operating table or in front of a firing squad, it’s all the same. This Revolution is going to fail, Concha. It might take a long time, but someday Fidel Castro will be dead, and the truth about what has happened here will come out. And then the world can hang its head in shame for not having tried hard enough to stop it.”
The day before his operation, Papa bade us goodbye, as nonchalant as if he were going to the store. Mama went with him, leaving Esther and me with Abuela Ana and Abuelo Julian. Esther wailed as the taxi pulled away.
“Shh,” said Abuela, “don’t cry. Your parents will be back soon, and your papa will be as good as new.”
“Yeah, Esther,” I said—though I didn’t believe it. “Everything will be fine.”
“I’m hungry,” Esther whined.
“Me, too,” I said.
“How about some chicken soup?” Abuela said. “I’m sure Eduar would love to help me make it.”
“No way, Abuela!” I said. “Forget it!”
Abuela started laughing and I knew she was thinking about the last time she had made chicken soup for us. Abuela had decided that at the age of twelve, I was old enough to learn how to kill a chicken. She handed me a broom and told me to use it to corner a chicken, then grab it and wring its neck. I must have chased that chicken around the yard for an hour, until it finally gave up, out of a combination of exhaustion and terror. I grabbed it by the neck, but the thought of killing the poor bird was just too much. I gave it to Abuela and she handed it back, telling me to twist its neck three times until I felt it break. I lost courage before I could make the third twist, and I let the chicken go. It fell to the ground and began to flop around, as chickens do when they are dying. Then, suddenly, it got to its feet and took off again. I begged Abuela to let that be the end of it, but she handed me the broom again without a word, and I knew what I had to do. After another endless chase around the yard, I captured it again. Under her firm gaze, I finally managed to do the chicken in. I could not eat a bite of the soup she made from it, and I never wanted to kill another chicken again.
Leaving Glorytown Page 11