Waiting for Snow in Havana (2 page)

I
shouldn't have been surprised that New Year's morning. There had been plenty of signs of trouble brewing, of changes to come. Even a sheltered child should have known something was about to snap. Later in life I would think back to that morning and try to link it to earlier events, just to make sense of what had gone wrong with all our lives.

Quite often, my wondering would come back to the day we almost died.

We were only a few blocks from my grandmother's house when the shooting started. It was near the botanical gardens of the Quinta de los Molinos. At first it sounded like a few firecrackers going off in the distance,
pop, pop, pop
. But within one minute, the pops were joined by
bang
s and
rattat-tat
s, in a mounting crescendo. And the noise kept getting closer and closer. And louder.

My mother began to scream. “A shoot-out, a shoot-out! Oh my God, we're all going to get killed! Stop the car, Antonio, stop the car right here.”

Antonio was my father's name in this life. Antonio Juan Francisco Nieto Cortadellas. This time around, my mother was called Maria Azucena Eiré González. Quite a comedown from Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, but still quite high on the food chain. Marie Antoinette had been stricken by polio just before her first birthday in this lifetime, and her right leg was totally useless. Apparently being imprisoned in the Bastille and losing her head in 1793 had not been enough to settle her Karmic debts.

“If I stop the car now, we'll be killed for sure,” said my father. “Stop shouting, you're frightening the kids.”

It didn't seem to occur to him that the gunfire might be scary enough.

“Stop, stop, I beg you stop…we can get out of the car right here. I know the family that lives in that house right there,” said Marie Antoinette, pointing a little ways down the street. In this neighborhood the buildings were all very close together, flush with the sidewalk. No front or side yards. Jumping out of the car and making a mad dash into a house was not too bad an idea.

“What if your friends aren't home?” Louis XVI asked.
Pop, pop, rat-tat-tat, bang!

“They're not friends; I just know who they are,” Marie Antoinette replied. “They're friends of friends of my sister.”
Bang, pop, bang, rat-tat-tat, bang!
“And where else would they be on a Sunday evening?”
Pop, ka-pop, bang!
“My God, we're all going to die!”
Pop, bang, ka-blam!

My brother Tony and I looked at each other in disbelief. This was just like a war movie! Finally, we were lucky enough to be involved in real gun-play. We had heard it in films, and often far in the distance, especially around bedtime, but never this close. It was so much louder! I thought of Audie Murphy in
To Hell and Back,
shooting dead all those evil Nazis and blowing up their tanks. My brother and I must have seen that movie at least a dozen times. Both of us wanted to be Audie Murphy, the most highly decorated American soldier in World War II. Since our father was a judge, we could go to any movie theater in Havana for free, and we went often.

“There are very good shows on television tonight,” my brother chimed in.
Rat-tat-tat, bang, pop, pop, ka-blam!
“They're probably watching
Rin Tin Tin.
”

KA-BLAM! KA-BLAM! KA-BLAM!

“But grown-ups don't watch
Rin Tin Tin.
Grown-ups don't like shows about dogs,” I said.

KA-BLAM! BOOM! BANG! RAT-TAT-TAT!

“Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh Mary Mother of God in Heaven. Oh Virgin of Charity! Stop the car! Stop the car! STOP!” Mom shouted even louder, over the sound of gunfire.

Maybe it was my overactive imagination, but I could have sworn I also heard a
Ka-ping
. A ricochet. The sound of a bullet bouncing off buildings, just like a war movie. Impressive. Then I heard a dull
thud
. Bullets penetrating buildings. Even more impressive.

Antonio Nieto Cortadellas swung the car over to the curb and stopped abruptly in front of the house my mother had pointed out. My brother and I were thrown forward against the front seat of the car. No one had seatbelts back in those days.

Maria Azucena Eiré González opened her door first.

Then it happened. Before she could swing out her good leg, a man bolted from the shadows. He grabbed my mother by both arms, crouching so low to the ground that his face was lower than hers.

“Save me! Hide me, please! They're after me! They're going to kill me!” The man's voice was shaky.

He started to push Mom back into the car.

“I beg you. For the love of God, hide me. Hide me, please, I beg you!
Por favor, se lo ruego!
”

I popped my head up above the front seat and got a good look at him. He had a round face and dark curly hair, and he was very sweaty. His shirt was open to mid-chest. He must have been in his thirties. I couldn't tell, though. All grown-ups looked the same age until they turned into old people.

The gunfire became ever louder. It made my hair stand on end, for the first time in my life. I heard more dull thuds and
ka-ping
s, followed by sirens. Marie Antoinette gave a bloodcurdling shriek, just like the ones in horror films.

In the meantime, Tony had jumped out of the car, without having seen the man. As he rounded the car, the man grabbed him and held him tightly with one arm.

“For the sake of this boy, hide me!” he said through clenched teeth.

Louis XVI shouted: “Get away from us! You're going to get us killed! Can't you see my wife is crippled and that I'm trying to save my kids' lives? Go away! There's nothing we can do for you! Let go of my boy, now! Go! Run!”

The man looked straight at me. I had seen eyes like that before, on paintings and statues of Jesus Christ.

I had also seen them in my dreams. Very often, I used to dream that Jesus would appear at the dining room window, carrying his cross while we were eating dinner. He would just stand there and stare at me, blood trickling down his face. And only I could see him. He didn't have to speak. I knew what he wanted and it frightened me to death. The rest of the family kept eating, oblivious. Then he would simply vanish.

And this man's eyes stared at me exactly the same way.

I ducked back down to avoid the man's gaze.

Then the man took a look at my mother's leg, released my brother, and ran away. As quickly as he had appeared, he disappeared. My brother would say forty-two years later, on the day that I wrote this, that he had never seen anyone run so fast.

We bolted out of the car, not even bothering to close its doors. Tony and I bent close to the ground, just like the soldiers in war movies. All those hours at the movie theater and in front of the television were finally paying off.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!
Ay, Dios mío!
” Marie Antoinette prayed, limping all the way to the door of the house.

KA-BLAM, BANG, BANG, RAT-TAT-TAT!

The noise was deafening. I heard the sound of bullets whizzing past us, too.

SWOOOOOOSH! KA-PIIING!

Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI started banging on the door loudly. King Louis used the door knocker, Queen Marie Antoinette pounded with her cane. The banging seemed to last an eternity, but finally a silver-haired woman opened the door a crack. Without saying a word, Marie Antoinette crashed through the door, and the rest of us followed in her wake.

“I guess she really does know these people,” Tony said.

“Please, please, you've got to let us stay here until the shooting stops,” said Marie Antoinette, as she limped past the living room. Without asking the woman's permission, she herded us to the first bedroom she could find and said: “Get under the bed, quickly.”

Tony and I crawled under the bed and huddled together, shaking. I remember the bedspread was brown, and the marble floor was nice and cool. Our mother sat on the bed above us like a hen over her chicks, saying Our Fathers and Hail Marys under her breath. Our father and the lady who lived in the house came into the room too.

The grown-ups just sat, or stood, in silence. My mother's prayers had become inaudible. Outside, the sound of gunfire diminished gradually, moving farther and farther away. And then it stopped, as suddenly as it had started.

My parents thanked the silver-haired lady profusely and talked for a while in that boring way that grown-ups talk. Tony and I emerged from under the bed, and the lady gave us some candy.

And we went home.

That night I didn't fall asleep in the backseat, as I often did. We got home, our parents tucked us into bed, and sleep crept up on us slowly.

That night I didn't dream about Jesus and his cross.

The next day my parents read in the newspaper about the escaped prisoners who had been shot dead near the Quinta de los Molinos. Our desperate man was only one of several who had escaped from the prison at the El Príncipe fortress, a relic from colonial times.

“You know that man who asked us to save him last night? They shot him dead,” said my father.

“The police killed him,” added my mother.

Louis XVI wouldn't show us the newspaper, but somehow my brother and I managed to get our hands on it later. That's how we got to see the gory photo. He was sprawled on the ground, one arm horribly twisted the wrong way, bloodstains on his shirt, and a pool of blood under his body. A thin stream of blood trickled from his mouth. His eyes were open. But they didn't look the same as when he had looked straight at me. They looked empty.

Cuban newspapers were full of such pictures in the waning days of Batista's regime. Dead rebels. Dead escaped prisoners. Dead innocent bystanders. Blood everywhere. Flies, even.

We were live innocent bystanders. Not a drop of our blood had been shed. What good luck, and at how great a price for that man we turned away in his most desperate hour.

That's what the world was like before it changed. I should have seen it coming.

The year was 1958. Earlier that day, we had held a bon voyage party for my mother's sister, Lily, who was off with a tour group to the United States and Canada. We had gone down to the harbor to see her board the Havana-Miami ferry. It was a lot of fun to watch the cars drive into the huge ship. But it took a long time, and the fun wore off. I had brought only one comic book with me, and it was a bad one. Elastic Man. What a stupid superhero. All he could do was stretch. And he had a very stupid looking red suit without a cape.

As I lay on the cold marble floor under the silver-haired lady's bed, listening to murmured prayers and gunfire, I thought of Elastic Man. How would he have reacted to a shoot-out? By stretching himself completely flat against the ground? Or maybe by stretching himself so thin as to become nearly invisible? He certainly wouldn't have hidden under a bed, not even to avoid being ridiculed for his costume.

I was no superhero, for sure. Nor was anyone else in my family.

The seas were rough that day. So rough that my aunt was seasick all the way to Miami. After she returned to Havana, I was very impressed when she told us about the huge waves and the violent rocking of the ferry, and about how green her cabin mate's face had turned. I imagined my aunt Lily leaning her own green head out of a porthole, puking into the waves. One hundred and twenty miles of vomit. Very impressive. More impressive than her stories about New York City, Niagara Falls, and the Canadian Mounted Police.

Almost as impressive as the sound of bullets whizzing past my head, and the sight of Jesus at my dining room window, cross and all.

H
avana at night. Some nightlife, I'm told. I never got to enjoy it, so I can't tell you about it.

Havana by day. Hot, yes, and radiant. The sunlight seemed at once dense and utterly clear. The shadows were so crisp, so cool. The clouds in the blue sky, each one a poem; some haiku, some epic. The sunsets: forget it, no competition. Nothing could compare to the sight of that glowing red disk being swallowed by the turquoise sea and the tangerine light bathing everything, making all of creation glow as if from within. Even the lizards. The waves, those turquoise waves, splashing against the wall of the Malecón, splashing, leaping over it to flood the road, lapping, lapping, lapping endlessly, eternally. Even in the worst of storms the waves were always a lover's caress, an untiring embrace, an endless shower of kisses.

Of course, I didn't think of it that way back then. Get lost. I was a boy. Images of hugs and kisses were unspeakably repulsive. Waves were fun, not sappy drivel. In the worst of storms my brother and I would ask our father, Louis XVI, to drive our car down the Malecón to be swallowed by the breakers. And King Louis was nice enough to comply.

“You know, kids, the saltwater will wreck the car,” he would remind us. But he would have as much fun as we did, perhaps more, driving through the surf. And he didn't really care that much about rust. We loved it, especially when a surging wall of water would nearly tip us over, and the windshield wipers couldn't race fast enough against the deluge. Sometimes we would pack as many of our friends as we could into the car, and my father would bravely take us all to be swallowed by the waves. Car surfing. Without seatbelts, of course. If Havana had been in the United States, the road would have been closed to traffic, and Dad would have been imprisoned for recklessly endangering the lives of children.

But Havana was not in the United States. That was the beauty of it, and the horror. So much freedom, so little freedom. Freedom to be reckless, but no genuine freedom from woe. Plenty of thrills, and an overabundance of risks, large and small. But so little margin for error, and so few safety nets. For the poor, opportunity knocked loudest in the lottery and the numbers racket. For anyone who wasn't poor, life could be beautiful, even if all was balanced on a razor's edge. As beautiful as a giant turquoise wave poised right over your head.

Havana was the capital of an island nation barely five decades into independence from the Spanish empire. My father's parents had grown up in a Spanish colony, with slaves in their households. Many of the men in his family had trained as army officers in Spain, and their chief purpose in life was to keep Cuba a colony. Many went to their graves denying the fact they were Cuban. My father's generation had been born in Spanish Cuba and had grown up along with the republic; his sister remembered hearing the blast that sank the battleship
Maine
in Havana Harbor. Fifty years is not that much time. How much can one expect of a nation as young as that, and especially of one so physically near to the richest, most powerful country on earth, and so dependent on it for its economic well-being?

Expect trouble.

But those waves, those turquoise waves, along with the sunlight, almost made up for the trouble. Almost. The divine, omniscient sunlight also shone on things warped and evil. Slums full of naked, parasite-infested children. Whorehouses. Bastards. Corpses. Bribes. Beggars. Bright green phlegm on the sidewalk. Bullies at school. And at night, the light was replaced by a menacing gloom, thick with bats, mosquitoes, prostitutes, and flying cockroaches. The turquoise waves turned inky black. Nothing frightened me more than the sight of that black water, except maybe for the sharks swimming silently beneath, and the malevolent magic of the
brujeros,
the voodoo sorcerers, who always did their dirty work at night.

Quite often, we awoke to find hexes on our front porch. All sorts of voodoo curses, none of which required written notes. Foul-smelling trinkets and coins. Rotting fruit wrapped in red ribbons. Bloody feathers. An occasional chicken head. Makeshift altars on which stuff had been burnt. These were all gifts left behind by the relatives of those men and women my father, the judge, sent to jail every weekday.

My father was a kind man, mild mannered and soft spoken. He had a very hard edge, but everything about him seemed soft and vulnerable, maybe because he was so fat. He was about five feet six or seven and weighed well over two hundred pounds. Thin, gray hair. He already looked liked an old man when he married my mother, at the age of thirty-seven. He collected fine porcelain and paintings, and all sorts of art. We owned a rare Palissy dish from the sixteenth century, one of the very first pieces of colored European porcelain. When my father lent it to the National Museum for an exhibit, it was assigned its own full-time guard. Years later, I would see an almost identical Palissy at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. I wept like a baby right there, that sunny weekend morning in 1976, even though I was a grown man.

We had other valuable stuff, too. We had a Murillo painting of the boy Jesus hanging in the living room, along with a portrait of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. Under their watchful gazes I watched television. American culture flooded our living room with a constant torrent of images, right under their noses: Felix the Cat, the Three Stooges, Woody Woodpecker, Laurel and Hardy, Mickey Mouse, Mighty Mouse, Betty Boop, Buck Rogers, the Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Donald Duck,
Gunsmoke, Bat Masterson,
Fred Astaire, Pluto, Jimmy Cagney, Rin Tin Tin, Flash Gordon, Tarzan,
Sea Hunt,
Superman,
Perry Mason,
Zorro. But never ever
I Love Lucy
. Good thing, too. I think any American television show with a Cuban in it would have confused the hell out of us.

The child Jesus by Murillo, tending his sheep on a canvas blackened by centuries of candle smoke, always looked kind yet forlorn. He was obviously scanning the hills of Galilee for lost sheep. But that stern Maria Theresa. She scared me. In my dreams, she would often begin swearing at me like a sailor on shore leave, uttering the vilest language known to man. When I told my father about these dreams and pleaded with him to banish the swearing Empress from our house, he had a very simple, historically accurate reply:

“Don't be silly. She was such a refined lady she could never swear like that.”

Of course, I couldn't repeat the bad words to offer proof of Maria Theresa's expertise at swearing. If I had, he would have slapped me across the mouth. Foul language was not allowed in our household. Bad words—
malas palabras
—if uttered, were swiftly punished. Somehow, in my own numbering of the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not utter bad words” had come to rank first.

In my father's study, we had a silver reliquary containing bone fragments from seven different saints and two slivers from the True Cross. Imagine that:
the
True Cross! As if this were not enough, we also had a seventeenth-century painting of Jesus carrying his cross and bleeding profusely—the stuff of my dreams—and an Italian porcelain plate with the face of Jesus embossed in such a way that wherever you went, the eyes followed you. Blue eyes. My father loved to show that one off, and to taunt his visitors:

“I dare you: see if you can get away from His gaze.”

Directly across the room from the staring Jesus hung a portrait of an English lady in her riding clothes, holding the reins of her steed. She only swore at me once. In a dream, of course, and in Spanish, just like Maria Theresa.

I only dream in Spanish now when I am visited by my father's ghost.

My father, Louis XVI, the Cuban judge, the art collector, the reckless wave rider, made the most beautiful dioramas out of seashells and coral. So inventive and so delicate. The shells became butterflies, the coral served as vegetation for the butterflies to alight upon. And no two pieces were alike. Louis XVI made the wooden glass-covered boxes by hand too, and they were crafted with the ultimate care, lined in velvet. Some of these hung on our walls, but most were given away as gifts. The shells and the coral came from a place that scooped up sand from the sea and sold it to construction firms.
La Arenera:
that's what we called it. The sand place. It was on the banks of the Almendares River, near a peanut oil factory that smothered the air with the scent of roasting peanuts.

I loved passing that spot on the way to my grandmother's house. “Here come the peanuts, here come the peanuts! Get ready to inhale!” I would cry out from the backseat. The aroma would rush into the car suddenly, as if we had hit a wall of peanuts, and linger inside for blocks and blocks, almost all the way to Grandma's house. “You know, that counts as your snack for the afternoon,” Marie Antoinette would often say.

Every now and then we would make runs to
La Arenera
to sift for shells and coral. My father knew the owner. He seemed to know everyone. There were mountains of sand all over the place. White sand, gray sand, pink sand, brown sand, yellow sand. I mean mountains, literally, about five or six stories high. We could only sift at the bottom, though we itched to climb to the top of each and every mountain of sand. “Too dangerous, kids. Too dangerous,” the owner would warn us as he handed us sifting trays. “I don't want you climbing on the sand, you hear?” Dad made sure we got the message. “You know,” he would say as we were pulling up to
La Arenera,
“a lot of men have been lost in these sandpiles. Poor workers. They started to climb and sank into the sand. They disappeared, sucked in, drowned in the sand. Those sandpiles are full of dead men, you know. Once the sand sucks you in, that's it. No one can pull you out. Look at those sandpiles: they're just like the pyramids of Egypt. Tombs. Very large tombs.”

It worked. We were rowdy kids, but we never took to climbing up the sand. As we sifted for treasures at the very bottom of the sandpiles, I thought of the skeletons that lay buried beneath the sand.
Maybe one day we'll be lucky enough to find bones,
I thought. But we never hit bones. Just beautiful objects, handcrafted by God Himself, about to be turned into art by my own father.

My father also made the niftiest kites out of brightly colored tissue paper.
Papel de China,
it was called. And balsa wood frames. My dad would slice the balsa wood with a special knife he saved in a special box, cut the paper into all sorts of shapes, arrange the colors in wild patterns, apply glue, tie some string, and, presto, a kite would appear. A tail made of thin strips of cloth, tied together in a chain of knots, was the finishing touch. Sometimes he would make a dozen or two at a time, give them to all our friends, pile us into the car, and take us to the seashore to fly them at the mouth of the Almendares River, not far from the sandplace.

I especially liked the fighting kites, which had double-edged razor blades embedded in their tails. We would hoist our kites high, far from one another, and then bring them closer and closer and try to cut each others' strings with the razor blades. Sometimes it worked, but most of the time the kites simply got tangled up and plummeted to the ground. But when a kite actually had its string cut, it was beautiful. It would sort of hang there in the air for an instant, confused by its freedom, and then fly off wherever the wind wanted to take it. Sometimes they landed on the roofs of houses. Sometimes they landed blocks away, or plunged into the turquoise sea. We would cheer and shout, unless of course the damaged kite happened to be our own. I hated to have mine cut, and the sad truth is that I never got to cut anyone else's. My father, Louis XVI, didn't seem to mind this wreckage of his handiwork at all. He seemed to enjoy it.

My father also sent people to jail every day, or fined them.

And sometimes these people would strike back the only way they could. They would curse us. Summon devils to rain misery upon us all.

Along with the devils came the presents too. Being a judge was not all that bad. Favors rendered, favors acknowledged. Once, a crate full of live chickens was brought to our door by a black man who simply said: “For Doctor Nieto. He'll understand.” My brother and I set the chickens loose in the rear patio and shot at them with our water pistols. Still, we were kinder to the chickens than our maid Caridad; she wrung their necks and cooked them all. Another time a blue Cadillac pulled up to the house, and a uniformed chauffeur delivered a case of wine to the front door. The wine was immediately given away to a neighbor. Alcohol was not allowed in our household.

“Let someone else get drunk,” said Louis XVI.

Along with the curses and presents, sometimes there were physical threats. When I was very little, my father took on the case of a notorious outlaw revolutionary known as
El Colorado,
or Red. Many other judges had turned down the chance to try this man in their courtrooms. It didn't matter much whether this was due to fear or bribery. What it meant was that my father stood all alone against this man and his supporters, and that our family became the target of intimidation. Notes were slipped into our mailbox. Phone calls from strangers came in the middle of the night. The messages were nearly as inventive as Dad's shell-and-coral dioramas, but in a perverse way.

“We know when your lovely wife takes the children to the park, along with your colored nannies. Her blue polka-dot dress is so pretty, and she fills it out so nicely, especially on top. Too bad one of her legs is so shriveled up. Maybe we should chop it off for her.”