Waiting for Snow in Havana (32 page)

Eight minutes. Damn it all to hell, where was he?

Nine minutes. Shit.
Qué mierda.
Where's that guy?

You need to get into that jet and fly low over the western end of Havana. You need to fly right over the cemetery, right over the family pantheon, and swoop right towards the Castillo del Príncipe, and beyond that, to the Plaza of the Revolution, where Fidel is giving his speech. They won't expect a plane from that direction.

No doubt, he'll talk for hours. But here at the airport the time is slipping away. If the guy with the key gets here any later than this, the risks will be enormous, the chance for success minimal. They'll catch on and shoot you all dead on the spot for trying to take that plane out without authorization.

Ten minutes! Where's the bastard? And what if a guard shows up now? What will you say? Maybe you should just tell him the truth? Tell him that you intend to fly the jet that's inside that hangar right over the Plaza of the Revolution and unload all of its bombs and all of its ammunition on the speaker's platform under the monument to José Martí, right on Fidel and his brother Raúl and Che Guevara and all the other bastards who sit up there with him every single time, licking his butt. And the beauty of it is that Fidel's pulpit is so far removed from the crowd, so high above them, and so far back. It's so easy to see and easy to hit, with little chance of civilian casualties.

Drop the bombs, let them fly. Down, down, down, right on Fidel's head. Nice big bombs. What a nice sound they'll make. What a sight, too.

Maybe if you describe how nice the explosions will be, any guard who shows up will join your team?

Twelve minutes! Forget it…so close, so close, and it's slipping away.

Qué mierda. Coño. Carajo.

The guy who was supposed to open the hangar—the only guy who could—never made it to the airport on time. His alternator belt snapped off on his way to the airport, and he had no replacement, and couldn't rig up a substitute fast enough.

Or at least that's what he said. Maybe he had chickened out. Who knows?

When your life's on the line, it's easy to choke. It happens to the best of men. So, even if they make up a story, you take them at their word.

Fernando and the other men waited and waited, ready and willing to take even greater risks if he showed up late. But by the time he showed up, it was way, way too late.

I bet Fidel doesn't know how close he came to dying that day.

Flash forward, five years.

Fernando sits in his cell at the Isle of Pines penitentiary as he always does, day after day. He thinks about the visit he had the day before from his sister Maria Luisa. He shakes his head and wonders how it is that she could fall in love with the guy a few cells down from him. How can a man and a woman fall in love during these brief, closely watched visits? Amazing. He wonders if he'll ever spend time with a woman again, before he's too old to really enjoy it. He cracks jokes that the other prisoners can hear in their cells, and they all laugh.

Flash forward ten years.

Fernando sits in his cell at the Isle of Pines penitentiary as he always does, day after day. On this particular day, he's been offered a chance at freedom. As they've done more times than he cares to remember, the prison authorities have asked him to undergo a “rehabilitation” program in exchange for freedom. If he will only sign an oath of loyalty to the Revolution and allow himself to be properly educated in its glories, then he can walk out a free man. Marked and stained and always closely watched, but free. As he has done more times than he cares to remember, he's told them all to go to hell. He thinks about that cruel ritual he has witnessed so many times, where the guards strip all the prisoners naked and parade the most handsome of them in front of the newly arrived inmates to find out who among them is gay. He thinks about how anyone who gets aroused is taken away for a special mandatory “rehabilitation” program that includes the application of electrical currents to the genitals. He thinks of all the other unmentionable tortures he has witnessed. He thinks about his own pain and the time lost. Fernando cracks jokes that the other prisoners can hear in their cells, and they all laugh, even those who have been through rehabilitational electrocution.

Flash forward, fifteen years.

Fernando sits in his cell at the Isle of Pines penitentiary as he always does, day after day. One of his remaining teeth hurts like hell today, and he feels feverish. His back hurts, too, where he has that large lump over his spine, right there, where the prison guards beat him with their rifle butts years ago. He keeps thinking about the letter he received from Uncle Amado in far-off Bloomington, Illinois, and what he had to say about a Spanish admiral named Nieto who was pressing for his release. Lucky thing Uncle Amado saw the man's name mentioned in the Bloomington
Panta-graph
and had the nerve to write him and ask if he might be related to us. Lucky thing our family has been obsessed with genealogy for so long, and the admiral can easily find out that he
is
related to us. Lucky thing this admiral takes up the cause of pressing for one Spanish citizen's freedom from a Cuban prison. In the long run, the painfully slow process set in motion by the admiral will set him free before his thirty-year sentence is complete. In the meantime, Fernando cracks jokes that the other prisoners can hear, and they all laugh.

Flash forward, twenty years.

Fernando sits in his cell at the Isle of Pines penitentiary as he always does, day after day. Once again, those bastards have urged him to accept “rehabilitation” in exchange for his freedom. Today they rattled off a long list of former inmates who swore loyalty to the Revolution and are now back with their families—many of them in the United States. All of the names belong to men he knows and respects. Once again, Fernando has told them to go to hell. Unknown to Fernando, in far-off Chicago, one of the men whose name was on that list is talking to his cousin Tony at O'Hare Airport. The man has just arrived in the States and taken a job at the airport, where he'll be working for Tony every day. The man tells Tony that Fernando was the funniest inmate at the Isle of Pines, and always kept everyone in stitches. He also tells him that Fernando is holding fast, refusing to undergo “rehabilitation.” Back at the Isle of Pines, Fernando cracks jokes that the other prisoners can hear in their cells, and they all laugh.

Flash forward, twenty-three years.

Fernando is free at last, standing on Spanish soil. His father, my Uncle Filo, lays in a heap at the feet of King Juan Carlos of Spain, and Fernando is right next to him, wondering what to do or say. Filo has tripped and fallen at the feet of the King of Spain, at an airport outside Madrid. He's a much smaller man than he used to be, Filo Nieto, and he looks a lot less distinguished. His suit is as wrinkled as his soul, and his eyes have a peculiar look to them. He has a look in his eye like that of a father who has heard the sound of rifles shooting at his son over and over.

Filo has fallen down and has trouble raising himself off the ground because he is drunk. Dead drunk. He is dead drunk because he did see and hear firing squads shooting at Fernando more times than he wishes to remember, and he is now a crushed, thoroughly wrecked man. You see, Filo would eventually also be arrested and imprisoned, and subjected to watching or listening to the shooting charades staged by Fidel's firing squads.

“Hey, Nieto, wake up.
Buenos días!
We're about to shoot your son in five minutes. When you hear shooting outside, that'll be your son getting shot. Enjoy your breakfast.”

He would also see and hear other things in prison that made him lose his mind completely for a while. But that's another story.

Fernando laughs and laughs, inwardly, at the sight of his father, who has spent most of his life trying to discover some family ties to royalty, lying there drunk at the feet of the King of Spain. He helps his father up, whispers in his ear, and encourages him to muster as much composure as he can.

Fernando searches for words.
Straighten up, Dad. Fix your tie. This is the King of Spain, right here…Oh…so sorry, Your Majesty, excuse us, please…Your Highness, we're all a little worn out. You have my word, next time I'm released from prison, and you help me get out, we'll all try to be more poised and well-mannered.

Flash forward, thirty-one years.

Fernando sneaks up behind me at my cousin Rafael's house in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and taps me on the shoulder. I turn around and see a thin, graying, bald guy with a moustache who is much shorter than me. I don't recognize him at all. He realizes I am clueless.

“Carlos…
soy
Fernando!”

I recognize him, probably with the same look on my face that Jesus' disciples had when they saw him after the Resurrection. I hug this guy who used to toss me into the air.

“Fernando!…
Oye, qué maravilla, esto!
” I say in my rusty Spanish.

“Here, Carlos, I want you to meet my wife and son…. And, by the way, how'd you get so tall so fast? The last time I saw you, you were just a shrimp.”

I laugh, then remain speechless for a while. As silent as a lizard basking in the sun.

S
he was so unbelievably beautiful. It hurt, sometimes, just to look at her. And she was so, so nice. Never ever had I thought it possible for any teacher to be so wonderful.

She was young: still under thirty, I'm sure.

And she liked me so much. It hurt, sometimes, just to feel her affection. I thought the other kids in my fifth-grade class could tell that there was something going on between me and our teacher. Whenever one of my parents would show up, she'd start gushing about how good a student I was, and how courteous, and so on. It was so awkward and embarrassing for me to have to stand there and listen to all this, especially when other kids were within earshot.

She actually told my mom once that I had the nicest skin, and that she loved to feel my arm. And she ran her fingertips back and forth over my forearm right then, slowly, as always, just to show Marie Antoinette how she did it. Good God! I wanted the earth to swallow me whole. But I also felt good about it. It puzzled and sickened and thrilled me, all of this.

Even I, a snot-nosed fifth grader with black dirt under all his fingernails, could tell that her soul sparkled.

She was bright, too. Smarter than any teacher I'd ever had before. And she never made you feel dumb for not knowing as much as she did. Anytime she told you something you didn't know, it was as if she were opening a golden door to a room full of treasure.

It didn't matter which subject she taught: she had a way of making you like them all. In math, you'd actually care about the trains rushing towards each other at different speeds; in English, you'd be eager to learn more about the seemingly insane rules of pronunciation; in poetry, you'd long to write poems yourself, or even to die in a hail of bullets while charging the enemy, just like the Cuban poet José Martí; in history, you'd be transported to the past as if in a time machine.

And she didn't call any of us by our last names. No. She used our first names or our nicknames. She was intimate with each and every one of us.

This school, El Salvador, was great, and I loved every fraction of a second I spent there. The name was perfect—the Savior—for I had been redeemed, set free from the hell that was La Salle del Vedado. When I was there, it was as if time stood still. Even then, I knew that, somehow, I was already enjoying eternity, in some weird way. Everything was a great surprise and a wondrous homecoming all at once.

Plato would have been so proud of that classroom. The teacher led us to behold the eternal forms, and we uttered sighs of recognition each and every day. Truth, goodness, and beauty were all of one piece, and my teacher was living proof of that. I'm sure if Plato had been there, he would have fallen in love with her. And not in a platonic sort of way. No, I'm willing to wager that he would have wanted more than words to pass between them.

Who knows? Plato might even have boasted to his disciples about the hickeys on his philosopher's neck and the perfume that had rubbed off on him. He might even have sought advice from much younger men about the ways of the world, bought himself some loud shirts, or taken up smoking.

Immanuel Kant, on the other hand, wouldn't have noticed her at all. He would only have worried about whether or not it was time to go for a walk yet, and whether or not the teacher was being thorough enough in finding ways to make the obvious seem complicated and profound. That school, in fact, might actually have unnerved him and led him to use three pairs of garters, or four, in place of the usual two. Kant wouldn't have looked out the window at the beautiful foliage and the sunshine that bathed it. He wouldn't have noticed the clouds either, I'm sure, or the girls in the classroom.

I noticed all these things, of course.

Beautiful plants, sunshine, and clouds were not new to me. But they seemed so different—so much nicer—when viewed from a classroom full of girls.

Even the
Caballero de París
looked good from our classroom window. The
Caballero
—the Gentleman from Paris—was a crazy man who dressed in a tuxedo and wore a flowing black cape and a top hat, even on the hottest days. He had shoulder-length gray hair and a beard as full as that of an Orthodox priest. He walked up and down the streets of Havana, especially Fifth Avenue in Miramar, always looking as if he were making his way to an awesome party. I'm told he was fond of reciting poems to women on the street and that he sometimes gave them flowers.

My brother and I made fun of him whenever we saw him, naturally, and so did our friends. Whenever we saw him while riding in the car, though, our dad would stop us dead in our tracks.

“He's a very wise man. He may be crazy, but he's infinitely wise. Treat him with respect.”

“But he's nuts!”

“Yeah,
Papa,
you're just saying that because he's from Paris.”

“You can be crazy and wise all at once. The two usually go together, because wisdom makes you see things others don't,” said Louis XVI.

In our classroom it was a very different story, however.

“El Caballero!”
someone would shout. “He's here, look! There he goes!”

Everyone would rush to the windows, gawk, and make fun of the guy. Our teacher was unable or unwilling to stop us. That would have never happened at either of my former schools.

The truth was that the
Caballero
looked more dignified when viewed through a window in a classroom with as many girls as boys. He almost made sense, even though we loved to laugh at him. Especially the boys. We laughed, maybe, because we wanted to dress like the
Caballero
and spout poetry. Maybe we knew we'd end up like the
Caballero
someday, looking and acting ridiculously insane for the sake of love, driven by some inner music that would never stop. He was a bearded prophet: our Isaiah, our Jeremiah, heralding our joyous doom in top hat and cape.

Maybe the girls laughed because they too saw their future in the
Caballero
. Maybe they saw themselves being courted by avatars of the Absurd and loving it without knowing why.

Girls. Too many words for them in Spanish, because the Spanish are infinitely wise about such things.
Niñas. Niñitas. Muchachas. Muchachitas. Hembras. Jevas.
Their presence made everything so much less hard-edged that it changed the way we boys behaved towards one another. There was less teasing, less wanton cruelty. Far fewer fights, too.

In that school there was a constant buzzing, as though some kind of current flowed through the room, effecting a slow electrocution that made your senses come alive. Even a huge box of a hundred different Prisma-color pencils made sense. Before, I'd considered any box containing more than twenty pencils a useless extravagance, something Sugar Boy would buy just to show off. How many shades of the same color did anyone need, anyway? Now, in fifth grade, one hundred different colors didn't seem enough. I wanted the biggest box of Prismacolors ever made. Five hundred pencils, a thousand, ten thousand, each a different hue. More pencils than could fit into my entire school.

Not enough.

I was alive for the first time, or so it seemed, because of the girls. We remained two different species from different planets most of the time, but every now and then we'd interact.

It was nice to laugh with girls. Nice to sit near them. Nice to look at them. Nice to listen to them talk. Nice to talk to them on those rare occasions when we crossed the gulf that separated us. Nice to smell them, too.

But it wasn't the least bit nice to get caught liking one of them. Not at all. No way.

You'd have to go through the mating ritual. It seemed to happen at least once a week. It was horrible, infinitely worse than seeing men get shot on live television.

Whenever the word got out that some boy liked a girl, or vice-versa, their classmates would gang up on them at recess. They'd sneak up on their victims. Usually, it was their closest friends who got close to them, acting innocent, and then jumped on them and hugged them tightly. (Usually, it was this very same Judas who had spilled the beans and let everyone know about the romance.) Then all the others in their class would gang up on the victims, like a phalanx of Spartan warriors, and push them slowly towards the center of the playground. Boys at one end, pushing one of theirs; girls at the other end, pushing one of theirs towards the same point.

Screaming, shouting, taunting, such as you should never wish to hear. And that awful chant from hell, composed by demons, no doubt.

“Ricardo ama a Marta…Ricardo ama a Marta…Ricardo ama a Marta…”

Ricardo loves Marta…Ricardo loves Marta…Ricardo loves Marta…

“Marta ama a Ricardo…Marta ama a Ricardo…Marta ama a Ricardo…”

Usually, Marta and Ricardo, or whoever was being pushed, would squirm and try to drag their feet. But it was as useless as struggling against prison guards leading you to the
paredón
. The chanting always grew louder as the two groups got closer and closer. And the shouting and laughing from all the other kids assembled in the playground usually turned into a roar.

The teachers did nothing to stop the torture.

Keep in mind that in most cases, only one of the parties being pushed towards the center felt any attraction or “love.” For the other party, it was usually a total surprise.

Imagine revealing your deepest secret to your best friend and having your crush announced to the entire school. And imagine being forced to hug and kiss the object of your affections for the first time in front of the whole school—or worse, imagine being forced to hug and kiss someone you weren't the least bit interested in, or didn't like at all.

That's what happened at the center of the playground, when the two phalanxes finally met: the boy and the girl would be pushed into each other's arms and taunted until they embraced and kissed. And then the roar from the playground would be deafening. Maybe the Colosseum in Rome sounded like that sometimes.

Little did I know in September, as I laughed at all this, that by February I'd be the one being led to my execution.

It happened so suddenly, and without warning. Funny how it always sneaks up on you, just like Cuba clouds.

One day I was fine. The next day I was in love, transfixed, pierced right through. Ablaze but not consumed, like the burning bush on Mount Sinai. What a shock. I'd been in love before, sure, but it had always been some actress on a movie screen or on television, and the flames had burned low. This time it was a girl my age, someone I could actually have touched, if I'd had the nerve. And the flames were like solar flares.

She sat to my right, across a narrow aisle. Forget those blondes, Marilyn and Kim. Forget all blondes. She had brown hair, cropped straight across her wondrous neck. Her eyes were brown, too, and she had very thin, very fine eyebrows.

Jesus H. Soul-searching Christ, how could everything about her be so wonderful? Each and every hair on her head. The bridge of her nose. The bones in her wrist. The feet inside those brown shoes. The fine, fine hairs on her legs, the way she rested her hands on the desk, the way she sharpened a pencil, the way she laughed, the way she ran on the playground, the way she clipped her syllables.

Her voice.

Forget Odysseus tied to the mast, and the song of the Sirens. Rank amateurs, the Sirens. Her sound waves were keyed in to all five senses, not just one. You could have plugged my ears with hot molten lead and the sound would still have invaded the core of my soul. I believe there was also some sixth sense involved, maybe a seventh and eighth, too.

That space between us couldn't have been more than a foot and a half, but it was as vast as the entire universe and as null as zero itself. It was a space I dared not cross, though she already dwelt within me. It was sacred space. Numinous.

I never dared to approach her outside the classroom. And inside the classroom, of course, all of our paltry conversations were hemmed in by our lessons and the everyday events that took place within those four walls.

Of course, I would no more have revealed my feelings to her than I would have stretched my ten-year-old hand across the aisle to touch her. But I do know that I made her laugh a couple of times.

How I wanted her to notice me. So, inspired by the
Caballero de París,
I went on a grooming crusade. There had always been this dark ring around my neck and all this dirt under my fingernails. My teeth were always kind of green. And though my hair was always cropped short, it was always messy. I never bothered to tuck in my shirt, either, when it spilled out of my pants, which was every day. All of these faults I attacked with the zeal only a novice can muster.

I began taking showers at noon, when I went home for lunch break, and even using deodorant. I insisted on more frequent haircuts. And whenever my shirt began to spill out of my pants, I'd ram it down into my waistband, furiously. I let my mom know that my shoes needed to be polished every day. And I brushed my teeth at least twice a day.

I tried to talk to her, but only in class. She'd talk back to me, but that was the full extent of our relationship. Still, I thought everything was moving along very nicely, what with my sprucing up and the joking around. Until the day I spoiled it all.