The Prince of los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood (32 page)

It occurred to me that none of the men had bothered asking Ariel what
he
missed about Cuba, who
he
had left behind. “I didn’t know you had a brother. Where is he?” I asked him. He picked up Yakson in his arms: “
Sí,
Mayito—he’s older than me. A real
cabrón,
but I love him. He stayed in Cuba because he was draft age. They wouldn’t let him out. I haven’t seen him since we left. I’ll never forget his face that day—he wouldn’t cry, holding my dog Chulo that I had to leave behind too.
Pero bueno,
I send him money all the time—and we write, but not all the letters make it through. I hope I can go see him when my papers come.
Increíble,
all that trouble to get out of Cuba, and now I can’t wait to go back.” He had the same timbre in his voice and faraway look in his eyes as I’d seen in the old men that afternoon when they talked about Cuba. Only Ariel was a boy—a man—my age. Could I have been him, had I been born and raised in Cuba? What if I had to get in a boat and leave everything I knew, not knowing whether I’d see my brother again, or my friends, or this lighthouse, or Ariel? What would I do?

“
¿Y tú?
Don’t you have
familia
in Cuba?” Ariel asked. “No,” I said. “I mean yeah—all my
tías
and
tíos
on my mom’s side—and all their children and grandchildren, I guess.” I explained that I had only seen them in photos and didn’t even know their names. “So what,
primo
? They’re still
familia
. Don’t you want to go see them? Don’t you want to know where you’re from?” Had he asked me that the day before, I would have said no, but since then, I had learned to make
mojo
and roast a pig in a
caja china;
I had congaed and danced salsa with a man; I had held a lighthouse in my arms. “
Sí, claro
. I would like to go someday,” I told him. “
Bueno vamos,
come with me when I go see
mi hermano,
” he said, half in jest. I played along: “
Está bien,
I’ll go, if you take me.” He said he would show me my grandfather’s house, then the sugar mill where my father had worked, and he promised to take me to the best beach in Cienfuegos and to
el farito
where he and his brother played.

“Close your eyes,” I said. When he refused, I insisted, reminding him that I had done the same when he had asked me. He snickered, but yielded and shut his eyes. I locked my arm around his:
“¡Vámonos pa’ Cuba!”
I shouted, tossing us both into the water, joking that we could swim all the way there, right then. “I’ll race you!” he yelled, and started swimming away. “You’re going the wrong way,
come bola,
” I teased him and started after him, calling out, “
¡Tiburón! ¡Tiburón!
Shark!” Trying to catch him, I grabbed his feet, then his legs, his thighs, nearly pulling off his shorts. He struggled and struggled, but finally stopped and turned around. I was ready to meet his sea-green eyes the way I had wanted to all day long, ready to take his face in my hands and bring him to my lips, ready to press my whole body against his.
I like what I like . . . I like what I like
. But instead, his eyes had become delirious, frozen on the sea again as they had earlier that afternoon.
“Tiburón . . . Tiburón . . .”
he muttered to himself, and then swam frantically back toward the lighthouse. In one swift move he pulled himself out of the water and sat on the jetty again, resting his forehead against his knees and covering his ears with his hands as if to keep from hearing something terrible.

I wasn’t sure who Ariel Jimenez was anymore. “
¿Qué te pasa?
What’s the matter, Ariel?” I asked, bewildered. He lifted his face and looked at me blankly, helplessly. “
Nada, primo
,
nada
. I can’t . . . I can’t get it out of my mind,” he whimpered, his eyes now a stormy gray. “Can’t get what out of your mind? What are you talking about?” I asked. “It was the railing,” he began. “My mother says it was the railing. It broke. I don’t remember.” He stared out to sea, and continued, “I don’t remember. The waves were tossing the boat bad and suddenly I was in the water. It was at night. I couldn’t see anything. Just everyone yelling,
swim to the boat . . . over here, Ariel . . . swim to the boat,
but I couldn’t. I knew how to swim,
primo,
I knew how to swim, but I couldn’t. Then someone threw an old tire tube. I clung to it and they pulled me in. It was horrible—horrible.”

“It’s okay. Take it easy,” I said, trying to comfort him as I realized he was reliving the trauma of falling off the boat on his way from Cuba and nearly drowning. I didn’t know what else to say or do except drape my arm loosely around his shoulder. We listened to the screech of the seagulls. For a moment, we were the only two people on earth. He turned his eyes back to me: “I’m sorry,
primo
. I get like that sometimes. It’s like I’m there again, drowning. I don’t understand,” he said. “That’s all right.
No te preocupes
—you’re here now.
Tranquilo, tranquilo,
” I told him. “I’m sorry I pushed you in. I can’t imagine going through that shit. It must’ve been terrible. I think I’d rather stay in Cuba,” I said, trying to lighten up the mood. “Yeah, right.” He chuckled and picked up Yakson, who started licking the salt off his earlobes. Ariel’s eyes returned to their usual sea green. “We should get back,” I suggested, and he nodded.

When we stood up, he fell against me, his body trembling a little. All six-plus feet of him, tall and vulnerable as the lighthouse in my arms, our wet and cool bodies casting a single shadow.
Ariel Blanco, Ricardo Jimenez—
we were one: one boy who had almost drowned, one man lost at sea without another man.
José Baggs. Bill Martí
: we were
cubanaso
and gringo, one and the same, with one nameless country for a moment, until we slowly loosened our embrace.

Composing himself, he turned around and rested his gaze on the lighthouse: “Do you think someday we’ll get to go inside—climb all the way to the top?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe—hope so.” We made our way back through the sand dunes and headed down the trail again. Neither of us knew what to say, or understood what had happened, exactly, and we were too young to make sense of it. We let the whispers of the pine trees speak for us as we watched the play of sunlight and shadow flickering on the ground like a silent movie over our feet. Back at the camp, most of the men were knocked out, cocooned in hammocks or draped over lawn chairs, while the women bustled around cleaning up. “
Míralos,
” Mamá complained to us, “useless. I
know
you two don’t grow up to be like
that
.” She guilted us into emptying the coolers and backfilling the hole we had dug for the
caja china
. We carved up the rest of the pig—loose meat and leftover bones that Mamá insisted Ariel take home for his family and Yakson. All packed up, she went around whacking the men on their arms and butts with a spatula: “
¡Levántense, dormilones!
It’s time to go! Wake up!”

We trekked back to our cars, the haul a bit lighter than when we had arrived that morning. Mamá untied the yellow markers as we went and stuffed them back into her tote. As usual, the family lingered in the parking lot debating next week’s feast, until it was agreed that
tía
Mirta would make her famous oxtail stew, despite her recent bunion surgery. “You’re coming next week,
verdad
?” Mamá asked Ariel. “
Sí, sí
. Of course,” he said. The crowd began to disperse, leaving me and Ariel standing by his half-gold, half-gray Honda. We hugged and I spoke into his ear, “
Nos vemos
next Sunday.” He got into his car and rolled down the window to ask me: “
Oye, primo,
who is this
Bil-Bá
guy anyway?” “Bill Baggs,” I corrected him, “I don’t know—some
americano,
I guess. With so many Cubans here now, they should just call this place Cubanaso Park,” I joked. “
Coño,
gringo, you don’t know anything.” Ariel laughed, winked, and drove away.

I didn’t know yet that Sunday after Sunday would come and go with feast after feast, but Ariel would never return with us to El Farito—the summer would end without his sea-green eyes, his voice, his shadow, or Yakson at his side, and we’d never wrap our arms around the lighthouse or each other again. I didn’t know yet that we’d never go to Cuba or to a concert, never ride in his Cuban Cadillac with the windows down, blaring “Forever Young,” and never dance together again. I didn’t know yet that I’d miss Ariel Jimenez, the boy—
the man
—like someone I had known all my life, left behind in a country far, far away. As I watched his car disappear down the colonnade of pine trees, all I knew was that I wanted to see him again and again and again. Maybe I could admit to him what I couldn’t admit to Victor. Maybe Ariel was the same as him, and the same as me. Maybe he would be the one.

“Riqui,
dale mi’jo,
finish loading up the car. We need to leave soon,” Mamá said, nudging me from my daydream. Indeed, time to leave, time to jump into
el Malibú
or Julio’s Corvette, or my
abuelo’s
baby-blue Comet, or a Space Mountain rocket ship, or onto my bike, and ride for years down the road toward all my somedays. Someday to my first love, Carlos, as sexy as Ariel, as wild as Julio, as talented as Victor. His skin will smell of oil paints and seashells. He will draw the ghosts of Cuba haunting us both, and I will give voice to them through the poems he will urge me to write. I’ll caress him lying in our bed without shame, feeling as alive as the sun bursting out of the sea in our window every morning. Someday to my
abuela
lying in a hospital bed, her eyes gesturing at the apologies that the tubes down her throat won’t allow her to speak. She will squeeze my hand—hard—then slip away softly without a word, and I will let her go. Someday to Misu’s last meow and the last story of Cuba my
abuelo
will tell me on the porch the day his heart gives up—the last survivors of the farm I’d longed to re-create in every backyard of my life. Someday to the afternoon Caco will call me about his divorce:
I’ve never been this alone—never
.
When are you coming home to Miami?
he’ll say, his voice withering over the line. And I will understand what has always made us brothers is not blood, but our love.

“
Vámonos
—everything’s ready to go,” Papá said. Yes, ready to go and keep going until the night I’d see him alive for the last time, in his bed, a book by Nietzsche in Spanish on the night table, my mother and I holding him as he stared blankly at the ceiling, both of us waiting for him to die, waiting for him to say I love you. I love you. Going until the day I’d return to El Cocuyito twenty years a man, the aisles echoing with Victor’s arias and the chorus of the village that made me their prince and loved me before I knew how to love anyone, or myself. Going until the April morning on a plane descending into Havana: the flutter of palm trees miming stories, the turquoise sea lacing the island just as I had imagined it, the red clay of the earth begging my hands to dig into it. I will begin to sob. My mother will give me a tissue and ask me what’s wrong. I will tell her,
I am all this—I am all that you are
. Going until I’d climb all the way up inside Cinderella’s castle, or reach the top of the lighthouse and see forever, or tip it into the sea and dare to disturb the universe. Going until I’d find an answer for the square root of negative nine—an answer as real as the creases in my palm. Going until I‘d hear the mermaids not only sing to me, but carry me away with them to the place where my poems would whisper from.

“
Por favor, Riqui,
hurry up. Here,” Mamá said, handing me her
por si las moscas
tote. I stuffed it into the trunk. “It’s getting dark,” she continued, “
los cocuyos
are coming out already. We can’t stay here forever, you know.” “I know, Mamá,” I said, “I know.” Time to go, indeed, time to go.

RICHARD BLANCO
was born in Madrid in 1968 and immigrated as an infant with his Cuban-exile family to Miami, where he was raised and educated, earning a BS in civil engineering and an MFA in creative writing. An accomplished author, engineer, and educator, Blanco is a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow and has received honorary doctorates from Macalester College, Colby College, and the University of Rhode Island. Following in the footsteps of such great writers as Robert Frost and Maya Angelou, in 2013 Blanco was chosen as the fifth inaugural poet of the United States, becoming the youngest, first Latino, first immigrant, and first gay writer to hold the honor. His prizewinning books include
City of a Hundred Fires, Directions to the Beach of the Dead, Looking for The Gulf Motel,
and
For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey
. For more, visit richard-blanco.com.

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NONFICTION

For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural

Poet’s Journey

POETRY

City of a Hundred Fires

Directions to the Beach of the Dead

Looking for The Gulf Motel

One Today: A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration

Boston Strong: The Poem to Benefit the One Fund Boston

COVER DESIGN BY ALLISON SALTZMAN

BACKGROUND GRAPHICS COURTESY OF PAUL MALON

AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © BY TIMOTHY GREENFIELD - SANDERS

THE PRINCE OF LOS COCUYOS
. Copyright © 2014 by Richard Blanco. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.