Waiting for Snow in Havana (40 page)

I had to hear that demon hound barking every day. I had to see the accursed dog all the time, too. I told my mom about the dog when I told her about the pervert, but when she asked the neighbors about it, they said they didn't know the name or address of the guy who had sold them the dog.

Too late, too bad.

Glorious Revolution. We were all supposed to be transformed overnight, saved from self-love. And were we transfigured yet?

Yeah, sure. We had changed as much as the lizards had.

The lizards stared, as always, indifferent to what humans did, back in the Garden of Eden and back behind that abandoned building.

Lucky bastards.

I
f you've never seen a ripe breadfruit, you haven't really lived.

They are so unbelievably spongy when ripe. Years later, when I saw the film
Mutiny on the Bounty,
I immediately understood why the good ship H.M.S.
Bounty
was so full of breadfruit, and why the British were so determined to spread breadfruit to all tropical corners of their empire, including the Caribbean. Ripe breadfruit explodes so nicely on impact. So thoroughly. So messily. What is an empire without breadfruit? A sham.

The giant breadfruit tree in the yard next to my house stood as tall as the monument to the U.S.S.
Maine
on the Malecón. And it was always loaded with huge green round breadfruits, each about the size of a small melon. So round, so pocked, their surface covered with little square mounds, each blessed in its center with the slightest hint of a nipple. Hundreds of little breasts, arranged in beautiful intricate whorls: little teats, which, when pricked or shot with BBs, would ooze a white milky liquid. Those huge green balls of soft milky pulp with a firm brown stem on their crown, a stem you could grab like the handle and use so well for throwing. They were just like the German grenades the Nazis used in war movies, only round instead of tubular.

We had heard that breadfruit was edible. We knew this because we had often seen the Jamaican man collect the breadfruits and go home with a burlap bag full of them. He told us it was delicious, in a very strange accent. We laughed at him and thought him crazy. Breadfruit was not for eating. It was for shooting at with BB guns or for throwing.

Years later, after Tony and I had left, and after my mother had left, and our uncle Filo had gone
loco,
my father and Ernesto would eat breadfruit. That's what can happen after a Revolution, especially one with a capital
R.

But years before Louis XVI ate breadfruit, during one of our days in Limbo, we suddenly woke up to the fact that the crop next door was bountiful. The huge tree groaned under the weight. The ground was covered with them. The shade under the tree, so dark, so cool, must have preserved the fallen fruit. Our neighbor's gardener had even started to pile up some of the fruit in the corner of the yard nearest the entrance to our house. One hop over the iron fence, taking care not to impale yourself, and you were in breadfruit paradise. We didn't worry about damaging the hibiscus bushes right under the fence. They were expendable.

We had tossed breadfruit before that day. We knew its potential. But we had never before been inspired to throw more than a few. How we got started, I can't remember. All I know is that we threw one or two and then couldn't stop.

These breadfruit were absolutely perfect.

Such beautiful detonations when they hit something, anything. Such a splat, such a reverberating, satisfying concussion. A faint yet true echo that touched each of us deep in our souls. And what a feast for the eyes as well: all that gooey pulp hurtling through space, adhering to whatever stood in its way or falling to the ground in perfect arcs, so obedient to the law of gravity. And that smell, that primal scent, that musk, that fifth dimension. It spoke of swamps, ooze, eggs and sperm, and infinite reproduction. We didn't know about that stuff yet, at least some of us didn't. All we knew was that it was a fine smell, as fine as they come, giddily perched on that elusive boundary that stands between right and wrong.

We hopped over that spear-point fence, raided the pile of breadfruit the neighbor's gardener had left for us, and threw and threw and threw. Most of our shots missed their intended targets, but some were bull's-eyes. The sound of ripe breadfruit exploding on the chest of a ten-year-old boy is like nothing else in the world. Except for maybe the sound of ripe breadfruit exploding on the head of a ten-year-old boy. The sight of it, too. The pulp smeared on the shirt, the forearms, and especially the chin and neck. The strands of pulp falling off someone else's chin, as you laugh so hard that you think you'll lose your mind. The strands on the eyelashes, and those up the nostrils. Even funnier. Especially when the target is your own brother.

We didn't break up into teams as we usually did, the older guys against the younger—always a guaranteed loss for Rafa and me. This was the ultimate free-for-all. Each for himself and God against all. This was our own World War, which we knew so well from movies. It was the fall of Berlin, the fall of Rome, the fall of Havana. It was the beginning and the end rolled into one. The Alpha and Omega. Emanation and Remanation. The Big Bang, coming and going. The Big Whimper, too.

The five of us knew our world had come to an end. The Apocalypse had arrived. We all knew that our parents were making plans to send us to the United States. We knew our days under the breadfruit tree were numbered.

So we threw those smelly, gooey breadfruits, hurled them with absolute abandon, with fury. We tried to inflict as much damage as possible. We laughed our heads off, even when we got hit. Those breadfruit hurt, but we didn't feel pain. We laughed and kept throwing, more and more.

I think it was
El Alocado
Eugenio, as always, who found a way to open the gate that led from the neighbor's yard to the street. It doesn't matter who opened the gate, really. What matters is that the breadfruit war, at first safely contained, spilled out onto the street. This being a free-for-all, each of us had to gather ammunition and throw on our own. Raiding the breadfruit pile, or gathering fruit from the ground once the pile vanished, while keeping an eye on four opponents wasn't easy. Carrying an armload of mushy fruit out onto the street while being pelted from four directions was even harder. But somehow we managed to do this, each of us fighting against the other.

Then the rules of war changed. Many of the houses on my street had masonry or cement walls right up against the sidewalk, most of them about four feet tall, and we quickly figured out that these barriers could serve as fortresses. Someone called a time-out, and we each gathered a pile of ammunition to bring behind our respective ramparts.

I don't know how long the truce lasted. But each of us gathered enough breadfruit to cover one entire suburban street in the tropics with breadfruit slime. And that's what we did. We were five boys throwing breadfruit from one side of the street to the other, with a no-man's land in between, just like soldiers in their trenches at Verdun. Five boys seeking shelter from gooey projectiles behind five walls on opposite sides of the street, lobbing, hurling, tossing, seeking to maim one another, or at least to smother their world with sticky, stinky pulp. We couldn't throw to anyone on our own side of the street due to shrubbery. So it was three on one side of the street, two on the other side, and the breadfruit flying across.

This is what it must be like to have a snowball fight,
I thought.

The breadfruit flew that day as never before or since. Never, ever, anywhere on this earth, I'm sure, will breadfruit be hurled with such rage, delight, and courage. And as happens in any war, or any game, there came one moment of blinding, awe-inspiring bravery, of grace, brilliance, and heroism.

As our ammunition piles dwindled, Manuel made a daring raid on my brother Tony's bunker. Armed with a single breadfruit, Manuel dashed out from behind his wall and entered no-man's land, opening himself up to fire from all sides. Then, summoning all of his strength, Manuel launched his green missile at Tony the instant he saw his crew-cut head peering over the edge of the wall. The trajectory of that breadfruit was a perfectly straight line: good and beautiful, but not exactly true. Instead of hitting my brother's head, the breadfruit hit the wall. And it hit it with such force as to make the entire wall move. I know it moved. I saw it move. The sound made by that impact was by far the most sublime of the day. This was no mere splat, it was a peal of thunder, an earthquake's rumble. I can still hear it and feel it. I think I shall always hear it and feel it shake. Such a beautiful sound, so much like the pounding of a human heart. I shall always see that wall move, too. Such a miracle, a wall shaken by fruit, fruit thrown by a child about to be expelled from paradise.

A child who would end up fighting in a real war in Vietnam a few years later.

Instead of pouncing on Manuel, the four of us simply froze, standing or crouching, transfixed. Then we laughed, and the laughing couldn't stop, wouldn't stop. And we looked around and saw what we had done. Breadfruit pulp everywhere. On walls, on tree trunks, on the sidewalks, on the street, on our neighbors' porches, on their porch furniture and light fixtures. On ourselves. Then we realized we had used up nearly every available missile. And the laughing stopped. We dashed to our respective houses, cleaned ourselves up, and pretended nothing had happened.

Then the phone calls began to come in from neighbors. Complaints. It seemed the phone would never stop ringing. Since it was our street, it was my brother and I, and our parents, who shouldered the responsibility for our Apocalypse. My father went out the door, took a look at the street, and made two phone calls of his own, one to the parents of Manuel and Rafael, the other to Eugenio's parents. Within a half hour or so, there we were, the five of us, cleaning up the mess with hoses, brooms, mops, and shovels. It took the rest of that afternoon to remove every trace of our glorious breadfruit war.

We worked harder than we ever had. We toiled even harder than the school janitor who cleaned up pee puddles. We had been undone by our own war, our version of a counter-revolution. Transformed from worms into worker bees by glorious stinking breadfruit. Funny, I don't remember complaining about working really hard for the first time in my life. I only remember inhaling deeply and laughing.

And now, whenever I feel the rage rising within me, I force myself to smile and breathe deeply. Nine times out of ten I smell breadfruit. Nice and ripe.

I
was the first to lay eyes on the woman with the big butt. Her rear end was monumental, large enough to contain all of the world, and all of human experience.

Thinly, very thinly veiled by red fabric, it spoke of many things without speaking. Fertile fields, sunlight, water, earthworms, hard labor, sweat, roots, greens, fruit, udders, milk, flies, muddy hooves, feathers, trucks full of produce, market stalls, blood, meat, money, canvas shopping bags bursting at the seams, kitchens with banged-up pots, crusty kerosene stoves, lard wrapped in wax paper, dripping tins of olive oil from Spain, diced onions hissing in black pans, garlic fumes, knives that gave off sparks when sharpened on pedal-driven wheels lined with flint, sparks that flew like planets being born, Band-Aids, iodine, aprons stained with memories, ladles, spatulas, spoons, forks, dishes, glasses stained with lipstick, cups, napkins, tablecloths folded by grandmothers, dishes steaming on the table, thinly sliced avocados, fried plantains,
malanga,
yucca
, carne asada, arroz con pollo, picadillo, ropa vieja, tasajo, papas rellenas,
tons of rice, black beans, garbanzos, red beans, paella, beer, wine, rum, coffee, flan made in old chorizo tins, custard with vanilla wafers stuck inside, guava paste and cream cheese on crackers, lots of sugar, sunsets, endless talk, whispers, shouts, gossip, songs, music on the radio, dancing in place, hands around the waist, hands on the back, familiar bones felt under the flesh, new ones discovered, heat within, heat in the air, kisses, joy, disappointment, betrayal, sorrow, arguments, prayer, sex, birth, ration cards, firing squads, illness, and death.

And eggplants, of course.

And oh, yeah, love, too. I'm sure love had a lot to do with making that butt so big.

Anyway, the woman with the world's largest rear end was standing under a palm tree, near a drinking fountain, talking to some friends. I fingered the peas in my pocket and tapped Rafael on the shoulder.

“Look, over there, the perfect target.”

“Good one!”

“Let's find the others. We have to tell them!”

We were roaming the new park on the banks of the Almendares River, attacking people with our blowguns. It was none other than Louis XVI who had made the peashooters for us by cutting up an old television antenna. A simple enough weapon to make and use. Thin, hollow metal cylinders, about ten or twelve inches long. All you needed was something hard to shoot out with your tongue and air from your lungs. Aiming was a snap, especially at close range, and with a projectile as hard as a dried pea.

We had just seen a documentary on the Indian tribes of the Amazon River basin, which must have been deemed acceptable by the Revolutionary authorities, and we had fallen in love with their blowguns. And King Louis, ever eager to amuse us and our friends, had said: “I can make even better blowguns for you out of metal.” So he took out his hacksaw and cut into pieces the rods of an old antenna he just happened to have on hand. Then he carefully sanded and polished both ends of each of the resulting cylinders and gave all of us sturdy, nearly indestructible blowguns.

“I can't make you any poisoned darts, though,” he said as he handed us our weapons. “I might be able to make the darts, but I don't think I could come up with the poison.” He looked sort of crestfallen as he said it.

“But you can use peas,” he said, his face brightening. “They're not being rationed right now. I can get you each your own bag of peas.”

We piled into the '51 blue-and-cream Plymouth and headed for the nearest food store. On the way there we practiced shooting spitballs out of the car's windows or at each other, at close range. Those spitballs stung. And they stuck to anything we hit with them. Parked cars, telephone poles, street signs, pedestrians, and what not. We made the spitballs from the pages we'd ripped out of an old
Bohemia
magazine.

The peas were so much better than the spitballs, though. No comparison. They'd come barreling out of our blowguns like torpedoes from a submarine. And they made such a nice noise as you fired them, snapping back your tongue from your lips. But that soft
thhhhpp
was nothing compared to the loud
thhhwack
you'd hear when you hit your target. Such a sublime sound.

We had practiced with our peas for a day or two before going to the new park and were actually working on our second bags of ammunition, grateful that they weren't being rationed.

The new park was one of the first urban projects completed by the Revolution. The Almendares River flowed between Vedado and Miramar, forming a natural boundary between the two suburbs. It also flowed past one of the last remaining slivers of forest in Havana,
El Bosque de la Habana,
which was high above it on a bluff. The woods there had previously been accessible only to those who wanted to brave the wilds. Now the wilderness was open to the People.

We'd braved the wilds in the Bosque many times before the park was built. Louis XVI loved taking us there. We'd hike the rough trails and marvel at the trees and the bluffs. One cliff in particular was very scary. You had to inch your way along a very narrow ledge, clinging with your hands to the chalky stone face. It must have been at least a two-hundred-foot drop. One false step and you'd be dead.

We walked that ledge so many times I lost count.

I can still close my eyes and see the green water far below and my over-weight father struggling to flatten his stomach against the cliff face as he inched along the ledge. I can also see my own feet creeping along the ledge and hear my dad urging me on.

“Keep moving, keep moving. If you stop moving and look down, you'll get vertigo. So move, move, move.”

“What's vertigo?”

“What you're feeling right now.”

Louis XVI must have been one of the least safety-conscious men in Cuba. Or the world, I think. I still remember the sound the pebbles made on that thin ledge as we dislodged them with our feet and they tumbled down the cliff face. The ledge wasn't exactly firm. And my dad's two-hundred-plus pounds made the pebbles rain down.

“Listen to those pebbles,” my dad would say as he clung precariously to the chalky rock face, “and try to imagine what sound a body might make if it were to fall down the cliff. Imagine how the screams would get fainter on the way down, and how they might echo. Imagine how the splash would sound as the body hit the water.”

Louis XVI was right about that. There was a wonderful echo in the Bosque. Even the falling pebbles produced an echo. And there was one great spot where we could really play with the echo, shouting and waiting for our voices to return. When all of us shouted within split seconds of one another, the barrage of voices that would return was spectacular. Every voice obeyed its appointed time delay.

Louis XVI was probably wrong about something else, though. “You know, those ruins are just waiting to be discovered,” he'd say, pointing to a spot across the river. “They're older than the sunken continent of Atlantis. It was a civilization much more advanced than our own. But only the right person will be able to really see them, and read their documents, and pass on their great secrets to the world. They await a Messiah of the Ruins. Do you see them? Right over there? Maybe one of you will discover them. Maybe one of you is their Messiah.”

We thought we saw them. And we begged him to take us there, to the other side of the river.

“No, you have to get there all on your own. Maybe when you're older.”

I think I began to take an interest in the past right there, looking across the river to those mysterious shapes on the opposite bluff.

But all those trips to the Bosque had been long ago, in the past, before the world changed, or shortly thereafter. The Bosque was being civilized now, opened up to the Cuban People. It was a very pretty park they'd made, you had to admit it. Nice walkways, benches, kiosks, and lights. Beautiful views. And it was all so safe, so close to the river. The trails we had walked so many times before were still above us, untouched by the park.

We were there on the day it first opened to the public. And Inaugural Day for the Park of the Revolution had brought out a huge crowd. The place was teeming with people, as packed as the shark pool at the Aquarium of the Revolution. Which is why we could shoot our peas with impunity.
Thhhhp!…thhhwack!

It was so easy to hide behind other people or behind trees. We had shot dozens of people and slipped away without any trouble. It was so much fun to see their reactions. I aimed for their heads. My brother aimed for their backs and butts. The others aimed at different parts of their victims' bodies.

Every now and then, when the other guy least expected it, we'd shoot at each other, too.

It was the most fun I'd had since our breadfruit war. It was almost as if nothing had changed and we were back in our old world. But there was a certain kind of ferocity to our play that evening, in that new park by the river. We knew our days were numbered. And in so many different ways we were all pissed as hell.

What we didn't know was that it would be our last adventure together. If we had known that, we might have actually shoved people into the river, I think.

Louis XVI had brought Ernesto along, but Ernesto said he was too grown-up for such hijinks. King Louis himself made no effort to supervise the small guerilla squad he'd brought to the park. He seemed to derive great pleasure from knowing that we were all out there, shooting peas with abandon. So King Louis and Ernesto walked along the paved paths that we stalked, paying little attention to what the rest of us were doing.

Eugenio, Manuel, and Tony, all of them thirteen or fourteen years old, were far ahead of me and Rafael in terms of their aggressiveness and risk taking. Rafa and I were only eleven, and still more cautious.

Before long,
El Alocado,
Eugenio, began to get careless. He'd shoot people and barely make an effort to hide. He'd just put the blowgun behind his back, stare directly at his victims, and laugh. We all warned him to be more careful, but he wouldn't listen. Then Manuel and Tony dropped their warnings, and joined him.

Thhhhp!…thhhwack!
Ha, ha, ha!

You can understand why I had to tell them about the lady with The Butt. We were one soul with five bodies. Something like that had to be shared. All for one, and one for all. For the last time.

So we decided to shoot The Butt in unison. What else would anyone in their right mind do?

It was an act of pure love, what we did.

“Caritas,”
Saint Augustine would have said, pure love directed towards God and others, rather than towards the self.

We lined up like a firing squad about ten feet from The Butt. She had her back turned to us, and the people with her were so busy talking that they didn't notice us either. We couldn't say “ready, aim, fire” because we needed our mouths and tongues to fire the peas, so we cued one another with our eyes and other subtle signals and aimed our blowguns in unison.

Thhhhp!…thhhwack!
Multiplied by five!

Every one of us, I'm proud to say, hit the target. It would have been a disgrace to miss. It was like hitting the side of a barn, as they say in the Midwest.

“Aaaaaaay! Qué fue eso?”
What was that? She wheeled around faster than we thought she would, and, of course, she saw us. “
Aaaaaaay!
What are you doing? Degenerates. They've shot me up! Militiamen! Militiamen! Please help, do something.”

She lunged at us. Well, sort of. When you're that large it's hard to lunge. She came towards us, yelling at the top of her lungs. People stopped dead in their tracks and stared. We, of course, ran away as fast as we could.

Louis XVI was nearby, and we ran through the crowd to him.

“What's all the noise, kids?”

“I don't know, some lady just went nuts over there.”

“Really? Maybe I'll go take a look.”

“No, don't…let's get out of here.”

In the meantime, Butt Lady had worked her way through the crowd and found us talking to the King. She started shouting at my dad, very loudly, waving her arms wildly. The fat under her upper arms swayed like walrus blubber as she shook her index finger near his face.

“Hey, you,
señor,
what are your boys up to? This is a total disgrace! They shot me! What kind of kids are you raising? I should report you and those kids. Criminals! That's what they are: criminals! They belong in jail, or a work camp.”

“I'm so sorry,
señora,
but I don't know what you're talking about.”

We left the judge in charge and snuck away silently, on cats' feet. I didn't want to know how he would handle this, and neither did any of the rest of us. We exited the park and waited for him at the car. Of course, we assumed he'd survive the fat lady's attack. And he did. A few minutes later, he found us standing around the Plymouth.