Waiting for Snow in Havana (20 page)

I often wonder how he ended up in Havana and what he thought about as he silently prepared food for Cubans. I wonder how it felt to be the lone man from China there, at the corner of Ayestarán and Bruzón. After all, we can adapt quickly to the strangest circumstances, sometimes better than animals, but we can't change the color of our skin, or the way our tongue handles unfamiliar sounds.

We can't regrow anything either. Once we lose some appendage, all we are left with are stumps. Like the stump on Louis XVI's neck after his run-in with the guillotine in 1793. Or the stumps on the ever lovely Venus de Milo.

I often wonder where
El Chino
might be now. He was only about fifteen years older than me, which means that there's a good chance he's still alive somewhere. I'm curious about him, personally, but would also like to know if he's still making those killer hot dogs and fries.

Back to Nilda and the black beans and rice, then, as long as I've circled back to the subject of food. Nilda was very kind to me, and always attentive. But she hardly ever spoke to me. As she took me for seemingly endless strolls through the park or watched me play, she said nothing. Except, of course, for her invitation to become an African.

She might have spent more time with me during the day than my own mother, or my grandmother. I had Nilda, and my brother had Hilda. We each had our own nanny, and we had them for a long while.

Rearing three children of my own has made me wonder about my parents and the lives they led. Especially because my wife, Jane, and I have done it without relatives, nannies, or baby-sitters of any kind. My parents had one nanny for each child, a maid to do all the housework, one grandmother, one great-aunt, and one aunt in the house.

No wonder my dad could type labels for each of his objects, make kites, referee rock fights, and take us car surfing. No wonder my mom could make us costumes for parties and spend so much of her day designing and making clothes. There wasn't even a lawn to mow. Plenty of tiles and plenty of
canteros,
or planting beds, full of foliage and flowers, but no lawn. How I've envied them sometimes, my parents, especially after three hours of mowing. All that time they had on their hands.

Whatever work needed to be done in the house was done by African women. And whatever hard work needed to be done in the world, that is, my world, always fell to African Cubans, men and women alike. All the Regla boys who dove for coins were brown or black. And Regla itself was full of brown people. I couldn't help but notice that the neighborhoods and houses of dark-skinned Cubans tended to be downright nasty.

I noticed the absence of dark-skinned Cubans as much as their presence. There were no black or brown kids in any of the schools I attended. Not even light-skinned mulattoes. Not one kid with African features, except, perhaps, for President Batista's kids, who were rumored to have black ancestors. There were no blacks allowed at the beach clubs. No blacks ever attended the same movie theaters we did. No blacks ever went into the same churches that we attended. They just stood outside begging.

Of course, there were no Chinese people at any of these places either.

So when Nilda asked me to join her in being discriminated against, my immediate reaction was to panic. It wasn't exactly a hunger strike. It was more like a boycott—out of fear, not for the sake of some principle. The worst part of it was not being able to eat chocolate. Those Nestlé bars and all the ice cream that suddenly became poison. It was too much to bear. I don't know how many times my mother and others tried to tell me that it was impossible for dark foods to turn you into an African. My entire family repeatedly tried to show me that nothing could happen by eating chocolate or black beans, or by drinking coffee right in front of me and saying: “See? Nothing can happen. You won't turn black.”

I simply didn't believe them. I thought it was some kind of curse placed directly on me, and me alone. I was the only white person who would be turned black by dark foods.

I stayed that way for months and months. Maybe even longer than a year.

Then one day, suddenly, I decided to brave it. When the ice-cream wagon came around, I decided to ask for a chocolate-covered ice-cream bar. It was a beautiful horse-drawn wagon, the same one that came past our house almost every day. The driver, of course, was a black man. My mom was there, as always, money in hand, ready to pay the ice-cream man.

“You're ordering chocolate?”

“Sí.”

Silence.

I unwrapped the ice-cream bar and hesitated. It was so brown. As brown as the ice-cream man. As brown as Nilda. As brown as the woman with no legs who begged outside several churches in Miramar. You couldn't avoid her. Even if we went to a different church, she always seemed to be there, wherever we went. It was almost as if she were following us, Sunday after Sunday. She had no legs, only stumps. And she used to pull her skirt up so we could see her stubby, mutilated legs, which were horribly scarred at their rounded ends, above where her knees would have been.

I closed my eyes and took a bite from the chocolate-covered ice-cream bar, thinking this might be my last moment on earth as a white boy. I savored the ice cream in my mouth, allowing the chocolate crust to slide off the vanilla ice-cream core and melt on my tongue. Such a wonderful, familiar taste, just as good as I remembered it to be. I had trouble opening my eyes after that first bite. But when I finally opened them, I immediately glanced at my hand.

I was white. White, as I'd always been. Whew!

The ice-cream man caught me looking at my hand and grinning, and gave me one of the strangest looks I ever saw as a child. Then he tugged on the reins, made a clucking sound at the horse, and rolled away to sell more ice cream to white kids.

They'd been right after all, those who told me that dark food couldn't turn you into an African. What they didn't know was that it would take only one brief plane ride to turn me from a white boy into a spic. And I'm reminded of it every time I have to fill out a form that lists “Hispanic” as a race, distinct from “white” or “Caucasian.”

It wasn't any food that stripped me of my whiteness. No. Just one forty-five-minute plane ride over the turquoise sea. Well, let me correct myself. Since I flew out of Cuba a few minutes after sunset, the water wasn't turquoise at all. It was starting to turn dark blue, and the farther north we flew, the darker the water became.

By the time we had reached the lights of Key West, the sea was black. Pitch black.

And behind me, in the inky darkness, my tail was flapping like mad in Fidel's pocket.

S
he bought us comic books every Wednesday, the woman without desires, my father's sister. Tony and I would wait eagerly for her to get off the bus and walk home from the corner.

“Did you get me a
Batman
this week?”

“How about me, did you get me a
Donald Duck
with Scrooge in it?”

I was the
Batman
fan. Tony liked Scrooge McDuck because he had a vault full of money and a diving board from which to jump into it. That was always his aim, my dear brother, to be as rich as Scrooge McDuck and to be able to dive into a vault full of money.

He never made it. He told me today, again, during one of his daily phone calls, that he loved me and that he had no money at all. He also tells me he's close to death all the time, and I believe him. He can barely walk twelve feet without feeling short of breath. He has no teeth, no job, and no hope. Maybe this is why he won't stop eating hot fudge sundaes, even when dangerously close to a diabetic coma.

He's a mere shadow now, a specter trapped inside a failing body. But back then, in Havana, he was a spirited boy with braces on his teeth and dreams of becoming a multimillionaire.

My ambition was to fight evil in a great costume like Batman. Of course, I would have liked having awesome preternatural powers like Superman, but fighting evildoers on a purely human scale, like Batman, seemed more heroic to me. After all, I knew I'd never develop X-ray vision or the power of flight, but I hoped that someday I'd be able to jump from rooftop to rooftop.

I still have no idea what my father's sister, Lucía, dreamed of doing, or whether she ached for anything at all. She was such a shadow of a woman. Very nice, and loving, in her own cool distant way, but not quite there most of the time. Her room was at the rear of the house, right next to the dining room. She kept the doors closed most of the time and hardly ever emerged.

She read a lot. Sometimes she would watch television with us. But aside from that, I don't think she did much else. She never attended the university. Never worked either, not until she was already fifty-nine years old and her mother died. Then, freed from her mother's supervision, she took a part-time job at one of the finest jewelry stores in Havana, selling expensive stuff to rich ladies.

It was a great store to visit, full of display cases that were lit from within. The smaller counters were full of all sorts of jewelry. The larger display cases, which stretched a long way to the back of the store, were full of bulky silver objects: teapots, pitchers, platters, candelabras, picture frames. I think most of Brother Néstor María's favorite crème de la crème mothers and grandmothers shopped at that store. I know President Batista's wife did. She was one of their best customers.

The store, Petriccione's, was next door to a restaurant called El Carmelo, and next to the restaurant was a newsstand that sold comic books. Every Wednesday, when the comics came in, our aunt bought us each a new one.

Sometimes, on those rare occasions when King Louis and Marie Antoinette went out together, Aunt Lucía would be left in charge of us. Tony and I hated those nights because she made us go to bed at seven. Her own bedtime was around eight o'clock.

Tony and I would resist, but we always caved in after some mischief, such as jumping back and forth between our beds. Once, on one of those nights when she was in charge, we jumped on the beds so wildly that Tony broke one of them.
My
bed, of course.

After a couple of years we figured out that if we were quiet enough to fool her into thinking that we'd gone to sleep, she'd go to sleep herself and we'd be able to stay up until our parents came home, listening to the radio in our room, playing games, or breaking each other's furniture. Once she went in there and shut the door, that was it for the night. Even if all hell broke loose.

Years later, with Ernesto in the house, this would prove to be a very bad thing.

But while we were little and Ernesto wasn't there, it was harmless enough. We always hated the way she said
pyjamas
(peeyahmas) instead of
pajamas
(pahyahmas), but once we learned to take advantage of her lax supervision, we didn't mind her baby-sitting at all.

Years later, when I was a college student, she would end up living with my mother and me in our basement apartment in Chicago. I discovered that she had once played the piano very well and that she was fluent in English. She knew a lot about history and art and music, but she seldom shared her knowledge with any of us or tried to put it to use. She was an immensely proud woman who seemed to know a lot about who were the “right people” and which were the “good families.” But she was proudest of all about her self-confinement and self-restraint, a demeanor that she expected from all of us.

She scolded me in Chicago for listening to the wrong music, dancing, drinking beer, keeping my hair long, and growing a beard. As always, what she said had little effect on me.

I couldn't understand her. Even then, knowing her better, I couldn't detect any kind of burning desire in her. She read a lot and watched television. She was more of a shadow than a woman, and it seemed she had always been like that.

My mother tells me that Lucía never had any friends and that she never even had suitors when she was young. Her whole life before the Revolution was spent at home with her family. No parties, no chaperoned dates. No lovers. No dancing, none at all. No nights out on the town. No days at the beach. In Havana, of all places!

Which goes to show you that just about anything is possible.

But is it really possible to have a life without desire? I still refuse to believe it. Not even Meister Eckhart, wrapped invisibly in the cold fog in fourteenth-century Cologne, achieved a life without desire. Forget selflessness. Forget
gelassenheit:
forget forgetting the world and what the “I” lacks. We all hunger for so much that we imagine even the dead still need us. So we frequent cemeteries and place flowers on graves.

Saint John of the Cross, who fervently desired not to desire anything but God, also failed. Poor Saint John, fellow spic, at least he was honest. He admitted his failure. He knew that the shortest distance between two beings is always a labyrinth, and that its very design is desire. He also knew that his passion for God was not different in kind from any other love and that desire itself was the ultimate proof for the existence of God. Who on earth could fail to recognize his plea, save those with hearts of granite?

Forget the five proofs offered by Saint Thomas Aquinas, forget the ontological proof of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, forget Blaise Pascal's wager, forget the four contemptible proofs I have offered here. Saint John made them all superfluous. Desire proves itself most eloquently and painfully. Desire is God, and God is desire.

In the dark of night, the frogs piercing the gloom with their ceaseless croaking, my loved ones asleep, both far and near, my own wound festering, I refuse to believe that Lucía had no desires.

I simply refuse.

And so does Saint John in heaven. It doesn't take a mystic or a poet to know this. Any moron listening to the radio should know, instinctively. Desire oozes from every piece of music. Twenty years ago, the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante sat in my sky blue Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, about ten inches away from me, and told me:

“Las canciones populares han reemplazado la poesía en este siglo.”
Popular songs have taken the place of poetry in this century. He was dead serious.

I agree. And this is why I play my stereo as loudly as possible.

My aunt must have had unrevealed desires, at least a labyrinth or two into which she tumbled. In that world, before the Revolution, the world of Lucía Nieto and many other Cuban souls, male and female, the world of those who could afford to be stiffly proper and hold their emotions in check, much could be hidden.

I got a glimpse of Lucía's desires after the world changed. Two glimpses, actually. First, I saw her strike up a friendship with her cousin Addison after he returned from the States for good. They became very good friends and often went out together. I asked my mom once if he and Lucía would ever get married. “What a silly question,” she said, laughing.

I didn't think it was silly. But of course, at that time I didn't know there was something odd about Addison sharing his home with a sixteen-year-old boy who was a circus acrobat.

I wonder whether my aunt ever suspected Addison of being gay. Did it matter? She seemed to enjoy Addison's company, and at the very least she desired his being there, as Saint John might have said.

He was the only friend she ever had.

I got another glimpse years and years later, when she was close to death, living in a nursing home in Uptown, one of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago. She was about ninety years old, so frail that she was unable even to watch television or eat solid food. So I began to bring her milk shakes from McDonald's. Vanilla shakes, in paper cups, with a plastic straw.

She lived for those shakes. She told me she did. But she didn't have to tell me. Her guard was down, obliterated by age and by exile. There she was, living in a place she hated, surrounded by strangers and all sorts of the “wrong people,” betrayed by her own aging body, so far from home, so far from sunshine.

Her eyes lit up like klieg lights at a Hollywood premiere whenever I walked in with that shake in my hand.

She had lost so much. A whole lifetime lost. Property lost, too. I didn't know it when I was a kid, but Lucía owned our house in Havana. Not King Louis, as anyone would have assumed. We all lived in
her
house. And she lived in the rear of her own house, nearly invisible. The house had belonged to her mother and she had inherited it.

“Go get your own house and stop turning mine into a museum,” Lucía could easily have said to my father. But she never did.

She was supposed to die in that house, her own house, in her own room, as her mother and aunt had died, nursed and ushered into the afterlife by her family rather than by orderlies in a noisy, busy, over-lit Chicago nursing home that reeked of disinfectants.

Instead, she left the house behind, and her one friend, her cousin Addison, at the age of seventy-six, because she couldn't stand what Cuba had become. She left her brother King Louis and Ernesto in charge of the house that now belonged to all the people of Cuba. She knew life would be tough in the States, but she never could have imagined how tough it would really be.

“Ay, Carlitos, gracias por el batido.”
Thanks for the shake.

“De nada, tía.”
You're welcome, aunt.

She grabs my hand and squeezes it, feebly.

Flashback.

I'm running on the sidewalk that is shaded by the breadfruit tree, running to greet my aunt, who has just stepped off the bus. It's a Wednesday, and the weather is perfect, as always. The edge of the shadows on the cement are razor sharp. The cigar-shaped, blood red hibiscus blossoms are opening wider with each passing second. As I run by them, they sigh with relief. I'm too busy now to rip them from the bushes and dissect them, or to tie them up so I can see whether the force that opens them is strong enough to pop the string, so I can find out how strong their desire really is. Tony is right behind me. A tail-less lizard is hiding nearby, hiding so well we don't see it, the very same tail-less lizard that Lucía will mention immediately upon getting off an airplane in Chicago years later, on a cold, cold, gray day, the tail-less lizard who, as she put it, asked her to tell Tony and me not to hurry back to Havana, please. Aunt Lucía is wearing one of her dark old-lady dresses with polka dots. Her gray hair glistens in the sun like one of the silver teapots at her jewelry store. She walks slowly, as always. Tony and I reach her as she steps over the curb, at the corner. She's walked about twenty feet from where the bus dropped her off. My brother and I have run about half a city block in the same amount of time. We ask for the comic books, and she pulls them out of her large purse. She gives each of us our Wednesday present, slowly. Our hands don't touch at all. There's a hint of a smile on Lucía's face, but I'm too busy to notice. I take what is rightfully mine, what I desire and deserve each and every Wednesday, and purely out of habit, the habit she expects me to have, I say the proper words.

“Ay, tía, gracias por el Batman.”

“De nada, Carlitos.”