The Prince of los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood (6 page)

As I began picking up the rhythm, Abuela dashed into the room twirling a dishcloth above her heard and demanding,
“¡Silencio! ¡Silencio, por favor!”
Papá turned down the music and the crowd froze waiting for her next words. “
Tío
Rigoberto just called—he said he heard from Ramoncito that my sister Ileana got out—with the whole
familia
!” she announced, her voice cracking as she wiped her eyes with the dishcloth and continued: “They’re in España waiting to get
las
visas. In a month
más o menos,
they will be here!
¡Qué emoción!
” She didn’t need to explain much more. It was a journey they all knew—had all taken just a few years before. A journey I didn’t know, having arrived in America when I was only forty-five days old. But over the years I had heard the stories they always told in low voices and with teary eyes, reliving the plane lifting above the streets, the palm trees, the rooftops of their homes and country they might never see again, flying to some part of the world they’d never seen before. One suitcase, packed mostly with photographs and keepsakes; no more than a few dollars in their pocket; and a whole lot of
esperanza
. That’s what the Pilgrims must have felt like, more or less, I imagined. They had left England in search of a new life too, full of hope and courage, a scary journey ahead of them. Maybe my family didn’t know anything about turkey or yams or pumpkin pie, but they were a lot more like the Pilgrims than I had realized.

Abuela disappeared and returned with a handful of black-and-white photos of her sister Ileana with the family back in Cuba.
“Mira.”
She explained in detail as she passed each one around, “Here she is on
tío
Ernesto’s old horse at his farm. Here she is in her wedding dress. Here we are by the old sugar mill . . . look, there is the old schoolhouse . . . look, there’s the old clock in the park . . . Look how young we all were, remember?” Suddenly, no one, including me, was in Güecheste anymore; they weren’t in Miami or Cuba; they weren’t in the present, or the future, but floating somewhere in the formless, timeless space of memory. Though I had never met my
tía
Ileana, it felt as if I too remembered her and the farm, the schoolhouse, the sugar mill. There was more to my past than I had ever realized, a whole other history no book or Mrs. Echevarría ever taught me about: palm trees and mountains; men in straw hats and oxcarts loaded with sugarcane; thatch-roofed homes and red-earth roads in ditto sheets I had never colored.

“
Gracias
to your San Lázaro!” Mamá cried out and rushed to hug Abuela. “I know how much you miss her.
Qué alegría
for you. If only I could get my mother out—soon, soon,” Mamá insisted. “Happy San Giving
a todos
!” she cheered. “One day we will all be together.” “Happy San Giving!” everyone roared, holding their glasses of sparkling
cidra
and rum high up in the air. My frustration and disappointment faded. No matter that they called it San Giving, this
was
my first real Thanksgiving Day. Papá turned the music back on and the celebration continued louder and more exuberant than before. Sprawled on the couch, I fell asleep to the sounds of bongos and
tía
Susana’s cackle; to
tío
Berto playing the cheese grater and the voice of my
tío
Minervino, who believed he could sing as well as (if not better than) Julio Iglesias; to the clang of cowbells and beer bottle taps and the soft scuffle of my mother and father dancing a slow
danzón
.

The next morning Abuela made Pop-Tarts but didn’t eat, complaining she had had stomach cramps all night long. She said Abuelo was still in bed, nauseated. Mamá admitted she threw up before going to sleep, but thought it was too much crème de menthe. I had diarrhea, I confessed, as did Papá. Caco claimed he was fine. None of us knew what to make of our upset stomachs until
tía
Esmeralda called. She told Abuela she had been throwing up all night and was only then beginning to feel like herself again. She blamed it on those strange
yames
. Then
tío
Regino called and said he’d had to take a dose of his mother’s
elixir paregórico,
which cured anything and everything; he blamed it on the flan, thinking he remembered it tasting a little sour. The phone rang all day long with relatives complaining about their ailments and offering explanations. Some, like
tía
Mirta, blamed the cranberry jelly; others blamed the black beans or the yuca that was too garlicky. And some, like me, dared to blame it on the pork. But surprisingly, no one—not even Abuela—blamed the turkey.

A
t one time, our backyard in Güecheste was shadowed by Australian pines and dahoon hollies. Abuelo cut them down, one by one, to plant fruit trees like those that grew in Cuba—a loquat, some papayas, and an
aguacate
tree—each one yielding a little taste of his lost paradise. But he’d protest every time he bit into any of the fruit—according to him, they were never as large or as succulent or as deeply colored as the fruit in Cuba, which was blessed with soil as rich and fertile as the Garden of Eden. “
En Cuba
you could spit a seed on the ground and it would grow the next day,
como si nada,
” he’d claim, frustrated with how poorly his trees grew in
América
.

He also planted night-blooming jasmine beside the front porch where he sat every summer evening enjoying the last tokes of his six-inch-long
tabaco
for the night. Wearing his trademark Bermuda shorts and black oxfords with dress socks crinkled around his ankles, he’d cross his legs like a woman—one leg draped over the other—and dive into the pages of one of the dime-store Westerns he’d buy at the Farmacia León. Sometimes I’d join Abuelo, fascinated by the dusk settling over the neighborhood as quietly as dust and how his lips moved silently as he read or blew rings of smoke haloing above him. As soon as it grew dark enough to see the green flashes of the
cocuyos,
the jasmine flowers would release their perfume and Abuelo would take a deep breath through his nose. “
Qué rico
. You smell that?” he’d ask me, raising his eyes from the book right on cue. Like the smoke rings from his cigar, he would slowly disappear into the scent of memory: “I had a tree like that in Cuba,
pero
it was three times bigger and a hundred times sweeter.
La gente
could find my house by following the perfume to the beautiful
galán de noche
growing by my front door.”

But flowers and fruit trees weren’t enough for Abuelo to feel at home in Güecheste. He once suggested raising a pig in the backyard. “I’ll feed it
aguacates
from my tree and
sobras
of rice. It’ll taste just like the
carne puerco
we had in Cuba,” he petitioned Mamá. But she forbade it, complaining that she already had enough “pigs” to clean up after and that she would never be able to wash the slaughtered pig’s bloodstains from the concrete terrace. To console himself, he bought a few baby chicks from Ignacio Navarro, an old friend of his from Cuba. Ignacio worked a small farm in Homestead, at the southern end of the county. Abuelo convinced Mamá that chickens would be good for controlling palmetto bugs and roaches—and even mosquitos; one less thing for her to worry about.

The chicks arrived in a brown paper bag stapled shut at the top and pierced with tiny airholes. Their pecking twitched the bag around the back terrace as if it were being skittered around by a ghost. I followed the bag cautiously until Abuelo held it still, undid the staples, and
told me to peek inside. “
No tengas miedo
. They won’t hurt you,” he assured me. It was true; the half dozen
pollitos
like fuzzy pom-poms were too adorable to hurt anything, even me. I picked one up, felt its tiny heart beating against my palms, then flung it into the air, thinking it would fly. It didn’t, of course; it fell right onto the terrace, dazed but unhurt, and began scuttling around, pecking and pecking at nothing. My cat, Misu, looked on, crouched behind the sliding glass door, waiting for an opportunity to spring on the chicks. “You make sure Misu doesn’t get outside,” Abuelo cautioned, “until the chicks are
grande
and can defend themselves.”

I made Abuelo promise to wait to feed the chicks until I came home from school every day so we could do it together. He kept old Bustelo coffee cans filled with leftover rice and beans and other table scraps; we tossed handfuls like confetti on the terrace for the chicks. One time, to Abuelo’s absolute horror, I fed them some M&M’s, thinking they’d love them as much as I did. “
¿Estás loco, niño?
They’ll die eating that
mierda,
” he admonished me, though I didn’t quite believe him. How could anything die from chocolate?

The chicks grew into white hens that reached my shins, and the hens’ droppings splattered the terrace like a Jackson Pollock painting. Mamá hosed it down every weekend, complaining as she whisked her wet broom back and forth across the concrete like a
güiro
: “
¡Qué cagazón!
Is this what I left
mi madre
and sisters in Cuba for—to clean chicken shit?
¡Ay, Dios mío!
” But her attempts at cleaning the droppings were useless; they built up for weeks, baking in the hot Florida sun. Mamá finally broke.
“¡Basta!”
she shouted at Abuelo and me. “I have
muchísimo
to do around here without all this
mierda de gallina
everyplace! Get rid of those chickens—
no me importa
if you have to eat them
uno por uno
.”

The following few days, I fed the hens as if it were their last meal and they were our next, not knowing what would happen to them. Then the following Saturday morning I woke up to the shadow of Abuelo walking past my bedroom window. He carried several long boards on his shoulders and wore the
guajiro
straw hat he always put on to do yard work. His shadow was soon followed by the sound of a handsaw and then a hammer, the blows vibrating my windowpane.
Could he finally be building a tree house for me?
For months I had pleaded with him, but he had never heard of or seen a tree house. “¿
Qué es eso?
That must be a silly
americano
thing,” he told me.

But that’s why I wanted one as perfect as the tree house on
The Brady Bunch
. Mine would be made of lacquered pine with a Dutch door, cradled in the wye of our
aguacate
tree, with a rope ladder and a secret escape hatch in the floor. I’d dress the windows in red-and-white checkerboard curtains, bring up my set of Lego blocks and books. I would spend all day out of sight of the mean looks Abuela cast my way whenever she caught me coloring, drawing, writing, or playing house with Misu. My own little paradise, perched so high above the world I’d see clear to Miami Beach, I thought.

“¡Levántate!”
Mamá startled me out of my daydream, knocking my bedroom door open. “Get up and go help your Abuelo—
está completamente loco
.” “Why?” I asked, hoping for the answer I wanted to hear, but there would be no tree house. “He’s building
un gallinero
—can you believe that?
¡Un gallinero!
What did I leave Cuba for?” she said. I thought hard:
A chicken coop? A chicken coop?
Until it made sense: the coop would keep the chickens off the terrace and silence Mamá’s complaints. Abuelo had figured out a way to save the chickens from slaughter, for the time being at least. I got dressed, put on year-old work sneakers, and scarfed down my
café con leche
and bowl of Froot Loops before dashing outside to see what was going on.

Abuelo had already dug four holes for the coop’s posts in a back corner of the yard, which was
littered with two-by-fours, rolls of chicken wire, and boxes of nails. “Riqui,
al fin,
” Abuelo greeted me. “It’s about time.
Ven acá,
hold this for me.” As instructed, I gripped one of the posts with both hands. Abuelo drove it into the ground with a rock the size of my head. Trying not to blink or recoil each time the rock hit, I kept my eyes on the ground and my feet spaced apart. Our next-door neighbor, Pedrito, came over to help; he was in charge of mixing the concrete that would anchor the posts. “Is that one ready?” he asked.
“Listo,”
Abuelo answered, and Pedrito began plopping the concrete, like gray cake batter, into the hole around the post.
“¡Excelente! Eres un bárbaro,”
Abuelo commended him, patting him on the back and shaking his hand ceremoniously. “Pedrito is a real
hombre del campo,
like me,” he explained.

They did look like brothers, almost, wearing similar straw hats that seemed too big for their short, stocky bodies. They both had thick eyebrows fuzzy as caterpillars; ears as big as bananas; and wide, muscular fingers from years of working with their hands. Pedrito was the only neighbor I ever saw Abuelo pal around with; they helped each other with yard work, traded and smoked
tabacos
together, and exchanged loquats and
aguacates
from each other’s trees, bantering over who had managed to grow the biggest or the best-tasting one.

After the four posts were set in place, Abuelo asked if I wanted to keep helping; I would have preferred to go inside and watch cartoons or play with my Legos all Saturday morning, but I said yes. We had to save the poor chickens. Next, Abuelo had me sit on one end of the two-by-fours set on the work bench so I could keep them steady as he hand-sawed each one, his flexed forearm swelling up thick as a loaf of Cuban bread, rings of sweat appearing under his arms. Jiggling the box of nails like a maraca, I handed them one at a time to Abuelo, who hammered the beams to the posts, framing the coop while Pedrito unrolled the chicken wire. The three of us bent, trimmed, and stapled the wire to the frame as if we were wrapping paper around a giant gift box. When we finished, Abuelo stood back to admire the masterpiece. “It’s done.
Bárbaro
. Beautiful,” he announced, resting his hand on the top of my head. “Now let’s bring
las gallinas
.”