Waiting for Snow in Havana (42 page)

Already, I miss Tony terribly.

Already, I've seen my first Cuba cloud.

I've also learned the word
spic
from the freckle-faced girls from the Air Force base who yell it out every time they approach the chain-link fence surrounding the camp.

I've almost eaten shredded metal along with my ravioli in the camp dining hall. It was just there, this big twisted hunk of metal. I bit into it and almost cracked a tooth. Then the guy next to me also bit into one. And the guy next to him cut his tongue on one. Within one minute the whole dining hall was buzzing with alarm and with children crying out in pain. Somehow shreds of metal from the cans of ravioli had made their way into the ravioli. We were told to throw out the ravioli and line up for peanut butter sandwiches instead.

I've also gotten married to a Coca-Cola bottle by accident.

It caught my eye, that rounded glass lip from the top of a Coke bottle, perfectly and cleanly severed, laying on the ground. It looked like a beautiful jade ring. I slipped it on like a ring, but it was too tight and it cut off the blood flow and my finger began to turn purple and swell. The harder I tried to slip it off, the worse it hurt. I felt so stupid. This wasn't at all like the time I'd gotten my head stuck in a church pew. That had been a mystical experience; this was just plain idiocy. I ended up at the camp kitchen and the cook took one look and started to laugh. “Guess I'll have to saw off your finger now,” he said in a totally serious voice. He was Cuban, so I believed him and started to panic, especially when he brought out a huge serrated knife. Then he laughed some more and applied lots of dish soap to my finger and worked the glass ring off. But not without taking off most of my skin along with the ring.

I've also been permanently transformed by a nun, without knowing it.

Nuns ran the camp at Homestead. Don't ask why. It was a camp established by the Central Intelligence Agency and run by Cuban nuns. Anyway, it was Holy Week, and one of the nuns told us, a room full of about eighty boys and girls who had just left all of their family behind in Cuba and were now in a foreign land, that when Jesus willingly embraced the cross on his way to Calvary he saw in it every sin that had ever been committed and would ever be committed in the entire history of the human race, including each and every sin that each one of us in that room would ever commit in our entire lifetime. Somehow she looked us all in the eye at the same time, with a look I'd never seen before, not even in a priest's eye. I knew this nun had been somewhere none of us had never been, and probably would never, ever go, at least before death. Her eyes were living flames, hotter than the Cuban sun, and they sent out rays more concentrated than those that pass through a magnifying glass at high noon at the Tropic of Cancer. She didn't talk to us about our present situation. Though she could have very easily dwelt on very particular, and very immediate problems, like the shrapnel in the ravioli, she talked to us in universal terms about our faults and about redemption from them. She went for the biggest problem of all, and the biggest solution. She told us that Jesus was actually very happy to take up His cross and that He wept with joy upon seeing all of the world's sins embedded in those mean, raw pieces of wood that meant death for Him at the age of thirty-three. She told us Jesus was God made flesh, a God who loved us and had suffered and died so we could choose redemption freely. She spoke of Free Will redeemed by grace and of eternal life.

I walked out of that metal Army surplus prefabricated building in a stupor, wondering what had hit me. What she had said, and the way she had said it pierced me and stuck with me like no other religion lesson I'd had or any Mass I'd ever attended.

So I've been converted without realizing it. And to top it all off, I haven't seen my parents or any other relatives for two long weeks. Meanwhile, my powers of denial are working just fine. This exile thing is a breeze. It's even fun.

In that living room of the small house in Miami, I'm introduced to the family that wants to take me in. They seem like such nice people. They're both younger than my parents, and they also have two little boys they've adopted. One is about a year and a half old, the other is about eight months old. I am delighted to learn that the youngest has the same name as Tony Curtis' character in
The Vikings
. And they also have a huge German shepherd who, for now, barks on the other side of the glass doors, out in the screened-in patio. Such nice people. We talk mostly through my mother's friend, who acts as an interpreter. My English is not quite up to speed, even for the simplest conversations. I can only say rudimentary, yet essential things, such as “I don't eat chicken,” and “I don't eat fish. Too much like lizards.” All this with a very heavy accent.

These nice people ask me very nice questions about my family, my hobbies, and the camp at Homestead. They listen attentively. They seem to like me. They tell me that the house next door has a very nice pool, and that the neighbors have a boy my age, and that they've already offered to let me swim there any time I want.

Tony is there, too. After we're done at this house, we'll go over to another house, to meet the family that wants to take him in. As luck—or Divine Providence—would have it, the folks that want to take in Tony are good friends with the family that wants to take me in. They live about ten blocks away, near Rockway Junior High School, where Tony would be enrolled. They have a teenage son Tony's age and a teenage daughter slightly younger.

My mother's friend's husband, Juan Becquer, has arranged all this under the oddest circumstances. He had been a lawyer in Cuba, where he represented the interests of the Hilton Hotel. Now he is working as a janitor, mopping floors for an interior decorating firm in Miami, the very same firm that had decorated the Havana Hilton. When he landed in Miami, the first thing Juan did was to seek out every American businessman he'd come to know in Cuba. One of them was the interior decorator, who gave him a job as a janitor in his warehouse. It was the interior decorator who wanted to take in Tony, and their friends who wanted to take me in.

Divine Providence. My mom had alerted her friend Marta about our arrival, and her friend had pestered her husband Juan about our plight. I've often tried to put myself in his place. I'm a lawyer mopping floors, I've got two babies, a wife, and both of my in-laws to feed, and now my wife wants me to do something about these two boys I barely know. If I'd been in his place, I think I might have forgotten to ask the boss about the boys. I might have asked for a raise instead.

Lucky for us, he didn't forget to ask. That's the kind of stuff Cubans did for one another in Miami back then. Everyone went the extra one hundred miles. Juan knew we were coming and had spoken to his new employer about Tony and me. He barely knew us, or we him. I think I'd seen him maybe three or four times in Havana, at the most. His boss had replied that maybe he could take one of us, and that he had some friends who might be able to take the other one.

Talk about miracles. This was close to the parrot fish. Very close.

Both families were Jewish. They wanted to take in two Catholic Cuban boys who barely spoke English. They'd have to feed and clothe us, and force us to do homework, and make sure we took showers and brushed our teeth, and stayed out of trouble, and they'd receive no help from any government agency for doing it. They already had kids of their own, and their houses weren't very large. Yet they wanted to do it. They wanted to do something good, just because it needed to be done.

There were fourteen thousand of us, homeless. Fourteen thousand orphans, waiting for their parents to receive visas and exit permits. All of us had been sent here by parents who thought they'd follow just a few months later, maybe a year at most.

None of us knew we'd be orphans for much longer than that.

And I'm sitting there in that living room, with these nice people, and I look around, and I stare at the Picasso print with the three musicians and at the babies and at the dog out on the patio, and I listen to the English being spoken, and I notice that the sunlight outside is just slightly duller than the light I had grown up with, just a fraction of a fraction less bright.

And I realize that I'm not the same anymore, and that I never ever will be.

I miss my mother. I miss my father, even. I miss everyone so much, except Ernesto.

I miss the sunlight.

I miss my model Viking ship and my comic books.

I'm not the same. I'm not the same. Maybe I'm dead!

All of this sweeps over me like a tidal wave, wordlessly.

What's this? Why am I sobbing? Uh-oh, now I've done it. What's this nice family going to think? Why? Why? Why am I crying like this? I've never cried like this before. Oh God, please, make it stop.
Coño, qué mierda!

But I can't stop.
No puedo, no puedo parar…no, no, no.

Juan Becquer, the lawyer-turned-janitor takes me outside, as far from the house as possible, beyond the screened-in patio. He talks to me; he asks me questions. I look at the lizards in the yard. They're all over the place. Green ones and brown ones, cursing the screen that stands between them and the patio. I see a frog, too, a big brownish one, just sitting there on the thick grass like a stone. All I can do is sob and tell Juan that I don't know why I'm crying.

But he keeps telling me that I have to know, that everyone knows why they're crying. He reminds me how important this “interview” is and points out in great detail what I stand to lose if I continue crying. He is firm, precise, and as cold as Kant.

To get him off my back, I say to him: “I'm crying because I'm not worthy of living with this nice family. They're too good for me. They're too nice.”

“Nonsense,” he says.
“No seas tan comemierda.”
Don't be such a fool.

My dad had never spoken to me like this.

Slowly, gradually, he wears me down with a lawyer's resolve. It's not anything he says in particular that calms me down, but simply the fact that he's standing out there with me talking to me and trying to crush the poor logic of my made-up reason for crying. I barely know this guy, and he's treating me as if I were his own kid. Maybe the nice people inside the house will be the same way.

Maybe you don't need your own parents.

Maybe it'll be nice to live without Ernesto.

Maybe life after death can be good.

So I stop sobbing and I go back in, and the nice people offer me something to drink and some cookies, and we talk some more, and we forget all about my crying fit.

Louis and Norma Chait take me in. And their friends Sid and Carol Rubin take in Tony. Two days later, the house with the screened-in patio and the Picasso print becomes my home. And these nice people give me a room of my own and a small transistor radio.

Such brave people. Such nice people. Such fine, fine proofs for the existence of God.

(My sixth proof, by the way, snuck in, as an aside.)

My new parents, Lou and Norma, give me an allowance every week. They let me take out the garbage and teach me to cook my own scrambled eggs. They encourage me to ride my bike to school. They seek out friends for me in the neighborhood. They make me call Tony every other day, and urge me to visit him. They make me write to my family twice a week. They insist that I go to church at Saint Brendan's, and give me money so I can put something in the collection basket, even though they are Jewish. I start to think of them as my mother and father, and I begin to love them. My new dad takes me places. He takes me fishing. He takes me to the beach. He takes me out to restaurants. He takes me to the jazz sessions at which he plays the saxophone. My new mom cares for me with all the attention and tenderness of my old mom. And she is so funny. She makes me laugh. And she teaches me not to plagiarize articles from the encyclopedia for school reports.

“You didn't write this!”

“Yes, I did. It's my handwriting there, you see?” (My English pronunciation is getting better, but I still have a long way to go before I can compete with Desi Arnaz, who seems to speak flawlessly.)

“No, I mean, these aren't your words.
Eschew
?
Altruistic enterprise
?
Flawed, fragile premises
? I don't think you can write like a college professor—”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you took this straight out of the encyclopedia.”

“Yes,
The World Book
is a very nice encyclopedia. It has very good articles. My teacher said I should use it, so I went to the library and used it there today.”

“But you can't just copy the whole article word for word and turn it in as your report. That's too easy. And it's wrong. It's called plagiarism. You should try to find your own words. Always use your own words. Didn't you have to write reports in Cuba?”

“No. We had essays and exams, but no reports like this one.”

“Well, you should always use your own words in a report. You can research the facts in encyclopedias or books, but you should always use your own words when you put it all together. You can always find your own way of saying things.”