Waiting for Snow in Havana (19 page)

H
ere, have some more, you'll grow up to be just like me.”

Nilda, my nanny, God bless her, was just trying to get me to eat some more rice and black beans. She meant, of course, that I'd grow up to be big and strong, with a back as straight as a royal palm, and a heart that could cheat death a thousand times over.

But that's not what I heard. No.

What I heard Nilda say from my high chair was that if I ate some more rice and beans, my skin would turn black, just like hers. The color of black beans.
Negro.
I would turn into an African.

I knew even then that there was something awful about being black in Cuba. African Cubans weren't too lucky, from what I could see. They seemed to do all the hard work, and to have inferior bathrooms, like the one at the rear of our house, where I saw Inocencia's breasts.

As to the possibility of turning a different color, it seemed very real to me. Didn't some lizards change color all the time? Those green, green chameleons could turn brown in an instant, as you looked at them and they looked right back at you. I'd seen it often enough at that early age. The lizards were everywhere, always flaunting their metamorphic prowess. If lizards changed color so easily, why not humans?

For a very, very long time after that experience with Nilda, I wouldn't eat any food that was black or brown. Nothing dark. Not even chocolate.

I remember my mother, especially, trying to reason with me.

“Please, Carlitos, how about trying this nice Nestlé, this chocolate bar?”

“You know, it won't turn you black. It won't.”

“Believe me. Trust me. Why won't you believe me? Go ahead, try these raisins.”

But the thought of turning into a black boy, an African boy, scared me even more than Candlestick Lady.

In one of his many display cases, Louis XVI had a porcelain candlestick from the eighteenth century with the figure of a woman on it. She was wearing something green, and she was crouching. The hole for the candle was actually behind the woman's back. I think she was a fairy of some kind. Candlestick Lady was the first woman in my dreams, and the first dream bully. She was there long before Maria Theresa, even before Window Jesus, the Jesus of my dreams. In my dreams, she used to come out of the display case and chase me all over the house. And I knew she meant me harm. How, I don't know. I just knew she was up to no good at all.

Fortunately, she never caught me. I always woke up just as she was about to touch me with her evil little hands.

Sometime after I started dreaming of Candlestick Lady, she was joined by an even scarier character, Torso Lady. What a tag team. Candlestick Lady and Torso Lady, chasing me all over that scary house, my house, in my dreams.

Torso Lady was unique. She was just a torso, with tiny little stumps where her arms, legs, and head would have been. She was about the same size as Candlestick Lady, maybe about five inches high at the most. Six, tops. She ran pretty fast for a tiny headless midget without legs. I think she ran faster than Candlestick Lady, as a matter of fact, because she was always in front, and always about to catch up with me.

Where she came from, I don't know. Maybe I had seen too many mutilated carcasses at the meat market. Maybe I drew upon pictures of ancient Greek or Roman sculptures that lacked heads and limbs.

I know it wasn't the Venus de Milo. I know because the very first time I came face to face with her at the Louvre in Paris, at the age of twenty-nine, I broke down and wept. She was so beautiful I couldn't stand it. Even without arms. Her stumps made her seem all the more gorgeous because they made her seem so vulnerable, so much less of a statue, so much more like a living, breathing woman. It was this, I think, that took her straight the core of my soul and ignited it.

What a fool. I've always been such an idiot in this department. Maybe this is why I hate Immanuel Kant so much. Hate and envy are always close to each other. Maybe I envy a guy who can love his garters and his narrow reasoning so much. A guy like that could never fall for a beautiful woman, or even an ugly one. And certainly never for an ancient statue of a woman without arms.

Anyway, back to Torso Lady: she bore no resemblance to Venus de Milo, and this is how I know that the statue at the Louvre was not the inspiration for my infernal dream stalker. Torso Lady was squat and chubby. As far from heavenly as possible, and she ran so awfully fast. Venus de Milo would never run like that, and if she did it wouldn't look as if she were hurrying at all. That's how it is with beautiful women. Nothing they do seems to be a strain for them, even when they outrun you, or pin you to the mat, or outwit you, or tell you to drop dead.

One day I got up the courage to petition Louis XVI.

“
Papa,
please, could you get rid of Candlestick Lady? Could you sell her? She scares me so much. She chases me almost every night in my dreams. She's so mean.”

“Don't be silly. It's just a
candelabro
.”

“Please?”

“No.
De ninguna manera.
No way. You're just being silly.”

“Could you at least hide her so I won't have to see her?”

“No. She's very rare and valuable. She's one of my prize items.”

“Please?”

The answer was always no.

I learned at a very early age what mattered most to King Louis: those objects in the house. They consumed him. Eventually, he would choose to stay with them rather than join us in the States. I know it's infinitely more complex than that, but anyone looking from the outside, or a child looking from the inside, would have to say that the man preferred his art collection to his very own children. So, in a way, Candlestick Lady and her cohorts did end up chasing me out of the house.

Sorry,
Papa,
but that's how I've seen it for a long time. But you've already forgiven me for this in a dream, so you can't hold it against me. And you chose to forgive me in the same dimension as that in which your objects cursed me and pursued me, wishing me harm.

Someone, stop me, please, before I try to turn this into a fifth proof for the existence of God.

No one would be better suited to stop me than the Chinese hot dog man. No metaphysics involved in his trade. His hot dogs and french fries transcended all others on earth without philosophizing. The taste was heavenly, true enough, and I think that hot dog man knew the spiritual secrets behind his cooking, but he was always tight-lipped about it. I don't think he knew much Spanish, as a matter of fact. Only enough to take orders from his customers and repeat the order in a thick accent. I tried talking to him many times, that sage, but he remained silent.

“Hot dogs. Fried potatoes. Very good.” That was the sum of his philosophy.

Those hot dogs and fries were out of this world. I've spent the rest of my life searching for something to equal them. They were tiny little fries. Shoestring fries. He cooked them on the spot for you, in an oil-filled wok. He had them all cut up already, and he would take a handful or two and throw them into the hot oil. They would hiss and sputter and make the nicest little bubbles as they cooked. And the smell. Inhaling fifty thousand dollars worth of cocaine would never get you as high as you could get beside his wok, at the corner of Ayestarán and Bruzón, right around the corner from my grandparents' house.

My grandmother was annoyed that my brother and I preferred the Chinese guy's hot dogs to her Spanish cuisine, but she grudgingly put up with it. Hard to beat the Chinaman, after all. He was as wise and expert as those priests who made firecrackers back in China.

We went to my grandparents' house every single Sunday, without exception. It was great to spend Sunday at another house so far from our own, in such a different neighborhood. The buildings there were all so close together. No front or side yards at all. And most buildings were occupied by two families, one on the bottom floor and another on the top. The street-level apartments had porches, the second-story ones had balconies.

My brother and I loved the balcony. It was such a good spot from which to launch paper airplanes, or from which to spit.

How we loved the spitting. Gathering up enough saliva in your mouth to launch a great big liquid bomb was a challenge in and of itself. But we would do it, time and time again.

“Big one!”

“Bigger than yours! Look at that splat on the sidewalk!”

Sometimes we'd try to get as close as possible to the pedestrians underneath without actually hitting them. Sometimes we failed, and the huge drops of spit would land on them. Then it was time to hide in my grandfather's room or on the staircase, and pretend nothing had happened.

One time my brother threw lighted matches over the balcony, and one landed on a man and burned his shirt. The man knocked on the door, furious, and came up and made quite a scene. My brother, master of lies, denied he'd done anything. The man kept pointing to the burn hole on his shirt and demanding that we buy him a new one. The more he ranted and raved, the calmer Tony's lies became and the more hurt he acted. Finally, my grandfather gave the guy five pesos, and he went away, cursing. But on the way home, Tony pulled the matches out of his pocket and showed them to me.

There was also a lizard's tail in his pocket. He loved to pull them off. Sometimes he caught lizards just so he could rid them of their tails, and watch the tails wag, all on their own, apart from the lizard. They had a life of their own, and it was amazing to see them move. On most lizards, I think, the tail grew back. But on some, it didn't. We had one lizard in the backyard we always recognized because of its stump of a tail. It looked almost human, with its tiny stub at the rear.

I loved going to my grandmother and grandfather's house. The sunlight on their porch was so bright, and they got the Sunday newspaper. We never got the Sunday paper at home, so theirs was the only place where I could enter the worlds of
The Katzenjammer Kids, Alley Oop, Prince Valiant, Terry and the Pirates,
and other American comic strips, all translated into Spanish, with titles that didn't always resemble the English originals.
Alley Oop
was
Trucutú
. Good thing, too, for Cubans would have pronounced that as
Ahyey-Óh
and turned the caveman into a disguised African deity, like Saint Lazarus and Saint Barbara.

Before the world changed I didn't spend much time talking to my grandparents, or to my mother's sister and brother. That would come later. I was way too young to care about talking to grown-ups, before Fidel came along. And by the time I began to talk to them, it was time to leave.

But I always felt so calm around them. Their presence was so soothing.
Abuelo
was a mountain of sorts, with snow-white hair, so solid, so silent, so unmovable, so sure of himself.
Abuela
was so sweet and so solid. Years later, when I made the trip to her ancestral home, I would come to understand how much she resembled the stone houses of Galicia, with their walls about two feet thick.

And I loved the way they spoke Spanish. Both of them had very thick accents and lisped their
c
's and
z
's with utter abandon. Sometimes they made fun of the way we mangled the language of their homeland.

“Listen to these little Cubans: they speak Castilian so poorly. How cute they are.”

My grandparents always called Spanish “Castellano” because their native tongue was Gallego, the dialect spoken in Galicia. Some Gallegos take their own language very seriously. When I finally got to meet my grandfather's only surviving brother in Galicia, who looked just like Alec Guinness, he refused to speak Castilian Spanish.

My mother's sister Lily was so affectionate and sweet that my brother and I could only respond by being mean to her. How we loved rifling through her jewelry box, which looked to us like a pirate's treasure chest. Tony and I would take pieces of her jewelry and hide them all over the house. For the remainder of the week, Aunt Lily would have to spend time looking for her jewelry as she dressed for work each morning. Sometimes she would phone our house and ask if we could please tell her where we had hidden her necklace, or her pin, or her earrings.

And she never seemed to get angry about this, or yell at us. On the contrary, every Sunday she greeted us with the biggest hugs and told us how much she loved us, her very own Katzenjammer Kids. And every Sunday we would find better places in which to hide her jewelry.

She is the closest I think I have ever come to unconditional love.

My mother's brother Mario was even more of a mountain than our grandfather. He was about six feet three inches tall, a tightly wound bundle of energy, self-confidence, and good humor. He always called me Cabo, which means “corporal” in army ranks. And he loved to smack me and Tony on the head with his knuckles while he told us jokes. Forty years later, he is still one of the funniest people I know, and one of the most optimistic.

I've forgotten when and why Uncle Mario began to call me Cabo, but I shall never forget the nameless hot dog man from China,
El Chino de los perros.
Those fries, I tell you, were a work of genius. The onions too. I don't know how he managed to dice onions into such small chunks. Any smaller, and they would have been microscopic. And the smell of the stuff frying in oil was nice enough to make me ignore the exhaust from the buses that passed by just a few feet away.