Waiting for Snow in Havana (43 page)

Too bad they couldn't keep me for longer than nine months. They just couldn't. Marie Antoinette never showed up as she was supposed to. No one was allowed to leave Cuba after the Missile Crisis of October 1962. My mom and the parents of about twelve thousand other children were all trapped on the island, and no one knew when they would be allowed to leave. So the Chaits had to let me go and their friends the Rubins had to let Tony go.

And on the day I left that house I died again. And I buried the pain a little deeper this time around.

They loved me while they could, Norma and Lou, and did more than they should have. I was such a bad liar, and they knew it and put up with it. They gave me many gifts that have lasted a lifetime. And I loved them, and still do, and am ever mindful of the fact I'll always fall short in the good deeds department when compared to them.

They put me on the right path, in my new land. The land of eventuality.

Eventually, I found out I could be my own father and mother, and for a while I convinced myself that I was doing a much better job than Marie Antoinette and King Louis.

Eventually, I found a life that didn't include movie parties in palatial homes with statue-ringed swimming pools, but did have all sorts of other wonders to offer. Like videotapes of
Demetrius and the Gladiators,
and one
Seinfeld
episode that featured the male bra that Victor Mature could have used: the “Bro.” (I'm ready to wager that there was at least one Cuban on
Seinfeld
's writing staff.)

Eventually, I acquired English. It's mine. All mine. I bought it word by word, on credit, the American way. And English owns me, too. I think in English; I even dream in English, except when Louis XVI shows up. Spanish stopped growing and is now a homely, misshapen dwarf. An all-wise and almost mystical dwarf, keeper of the keys to my soul, but a dwarf nonetheless.

Eventually, I lost my accent. Well, almost. I prefer to think that I can pass for Jimmy Stewart, or Captain James Tiberius Kirk, but if you listen carefully, you can tell there's something funny about the cadence of my speech, and the way I pronounce some words, like
eschew.
And don't ever talk to me when I'm angry or tired; you might mistake me for Desi Arnaz.

Eventually, I even earned the right to plagiarize myself, using material from one encyclopedia article in another. I did, I swear.
Lo juro. Mal rayo me parta.
It was marvelous. I did it last week. And I got paid for doing it, too. Don't ask me to be specific, though. One can get in trouble for plagiarizing even oneself, if one gets caught.

Especially if one uses the word
eschew
too often.

T
he tourists' Havana was dotted with nightclubs, bars, casinos, and whorehouses; my Havana was dotted with pools. And I gave all of them names: shark pool, five-statue pool, Popeye's pool, screwdriver pool, never-full pool, tire pool, eye-killer pool, invisible pool, blue lava pool, giant toilet pool, pool of my dreams.

So it's not surprising that when I think of my final days in Cuba the first image that leaps to my mind is that of my uncle's pool.

Some pool it was. Right next to the turquoise sea, and bone dry. No trees within a hundred-yard radius, and in the deepest shade. Nothing but rough, dusty, gray cement. It smelled of concrete, even four years after the cement had been poured. It was an enigma.

My uncle Amado, an architect, had built himself a pool
under
his house. This wasn't an indoor pool I'm talking about. No, it was an outdoor pool, under the house. From the street the house looked like a nice normal building with a three-story façade. But it really had no ground floor beyond a foyer. What would have been the first floor, behind the foyer wall, was the open space for the pool, and the house itself stood above the pool. When you looked at the house from the rear, you saw it all clearly.

Uncle Amado had all sorts of reasons for leaving the job unfinished. Knowing his reasons didn't make it any less enigmatic. It was a cement hole: no tiles, no smooth surfaces, no water, in the deepest, deepest shade.

I had always been drawn to pools. In water you are weightless, and weightlessness frees your mind. But as the Revolution progressed, the number of pools began to shrink. Gone were the private clubs we had frequented. Some were trashed in an orgy of retribution against privilege, others were summarily closed, and those that survived were opened to the public, free of charge. But the funds for maintaining so many clubs soon ran dry and so did the pools. So towards the end I spent a lot more time reminiscing about pools than enjoying them.

I was especially fond of remembering Popeye's pool, probably because it was the one in which I had learned to swim.

Popeye's pool had gotten its name from the man who took care of it, who hated us. It was at Manuel's and Rafael's beach club, and it was tended by a man who was simply known as
El Marinero
—the sailor. Of course, he instantly became Popeye to us. He looked a little like Popeye, too, except he had no pipe. He even wore a cap like Popeye's. He hated us because we often rolled around in the sand with our wet bodies, and then jumped into the pool and watched the sand vanish into the water. It made such a nice cloud when we jumped in. We did this repeatedly, even though he always yelled at us, “Hey, you're going to clog up the filter with all that sand again.” He always gave us the evil eye, and with good reason.

We were spoiled brats,
niños bitongos,
who thought we'd never have to worry about cleaning out pool filters. Served us right, it did, to be hurled down to the bottom of the heap when we reached the States. I once spent an entire summer, between high school and college, working sixty hours a week at my mother's factory, inserting thousands of screws in the morning and taking out the very same screws in the afternoon, day after day. They were temporary screws, put in place to speed up the bonding power of a special glue between two parts. The holes into which my screws fit would later be filled by different screws, driven in by somebody else down the assembly line.

I thought I was in hell.

Marie Antoinette was one of the star assemblers at the factory, which made photocopy machines. There wasn't a single job she couldn't do better than anyone else, bum leg and all. Rutger, the ex-Nazi German manager, loved her. She'd sometimes show him how there would be a better way to assemble the pieces, or how to improve their design. Rutger would then call over the engineers and they'd shake their heads, and agree, and walk away looking puzzled.

Cubans weren't supposed to be smart. And most of the workers at that factory were Cubans. Some had been professionals or businessmen before they fled. One of the janitors had been a lawyer in Havana.

I, too, ended up as a janitor, but not in a factory. It was at a housing project in a very poor neighborhood, in a very poor New England town, while I was in graduate school. My worst task at that job was peeling off old wallpaper, under which cockroaches had built their nests. Dodging the rats near the trash dumpsters was not much fun either, but it was still much better than having to read Kant.

But I digress. The point is this: those pools spoke to me of the privileged life that I knew was mine. I knew that I had pools to choose from and that the boys in Regla only had their stinking wharf. I knew it, and I loved knowing it. I loved it up to the last fraction of a second that I stood on Cuban soil, even though by then I'd lost my pools.

God bless the roaches behind the wallpaper, and the screws at the factory, and the broken dishes at the Conrad Hilton Hotel. God bless especially the freckle-faced girls who leaned on the chain-link fence and shouted
“spic!”
my first day at the refugee camp in Homestead. Thanks to them I became a Regla boy, and that pride turned quickly into a burning shame—a shame that still hangs around my neck like a festering dead iguana. So those Regla boys are in there, in my mind, swimming away, diving for coins in their underwear. They swim infinitely, eternally.

My mind is filled with images of pools that never were, too. I loved thinking of new pools I could invent someday, when I became an architect and engineer, just like my uncle Amado. Someday, I thought, I would build bridges and tunnels and houses and churches and schools and pools. Especially pools.

Wonders such as the Jell-O pool.

That was perhaps my most brilliant idea: to build a giant pool, bigger than any in Havana, and fill it with Jell-O rather than plain old water. I don't mean a pool full of chunks of Jell-O, trucked in, but a pool in which the JellO had set. The world's largest Jell-O mold. One colossal, shimmering, quivering, shaking pool of Jell-O, its surface smooth as glass, reflecting the blue blue sky and the clouds. It would have to be outdoors, of course, and ringed with diving platforms of tremendous height. The trick would be how to find a way of getting the Jell-O to set in the tropical heat.

I had big plans. I drew blueprints in my head for the retractable refrigeration dome that would allow the Jell-O to set overnight. I was there, with the retractable roof, before the SkyDome and all those other inferior versions of my invention that dot North America. I'm sure if I'd stayed in Cuba, I could have pulled it off.

I also had great plans for a bicycle slide pool. This would have been a very long and deep pool with a giant slide about the length of a ski jump, ten stories high, down which you could ride your bike and go careening through the air into the pool. I imagined myself sailing through the air for five minutes before hitting the water, and then sinking slowly, slowly, with the bike, all the way to the bottom of the pool.

One morning when the dust motes were whirling especially fast, I had the great idea of combining Jell-O pool and bicycle slide pool. I was very pleased with myself that morning.

Of course, I gave no thought at all to how one might get out from under in a deep Jell-O pool once one had plunged into it. It was the plunging that interested me: the very thought of slamming into Jell-O, especially from a great height. I thought one might bounce a couple of times before sinking in.

If I had been my uncle Amado, that's the kind of pool I would have built next to my house. No shady pools under the house for me. But, of course, who am I to talk, or trade places with my uncle? At least he started building a pool. Mine never even made it to paper.

Amado was a riddle of sorts during my childhood in Cuba. I knew him about as well as I knew his pool. He was our nearly invisible uncle. He was always present by name in our conversations, but seldom there in the flesh. But he was the solid rock of my father's family. Clearheaded, practical to the core, a tower of strength, a problem solver. And always somewhat distant, even seemingly cold. I came to know later that he loved deeply, maybe more deeply than all the others in his family, but had trouble showing it. He had two daughters almost exactly the same ages as Tony and me, and lived just a few blocks from us, but we hardly ever spent time with him. He and King Louis were not at all close to each other.

Divine Providence would see to it, though, that Tony and I would end up living with Amado and his family. We were rescued from the orphanage near the Orange Bowl by the one uncle we hardly knew. And, as it turned out, the two years, two months, and two days I lived in his house were among the happiest of my entire life.

Back in Havana, I can count the times we saw him and his family, it happened so rarely. I remember going to their old house a couple of times. It was somewhere near Tropicream, the ice cream and milk shake place where our dad would often take us. I remember asking my parents why his oldest daughter seemed so weak and unstable as she walked. I remember them telling me that some children are born that way. I remember going to his new house by the sea when they moved there, and marveling at the empty pool in the shade.

I also remember the day they invited us to swim at their house. It was so near to our vanishing. Tony and I were still waiting for our exit permits, but Amado and his family already had theirs. In just a few weeks they would leave their beautiful seaside house and unfinished pool, and fly off to an uncertain future. Amado had no idea he'd end up working as a simple draftsman in Bloomington, Illinois, for ninety dollars a week.

Amado's wife, Alejandra, had asked us to wear sneakers that day, because you couldn't walk or even swim barefoot on the razor-sharp rocks at the shoreline by their house. They were called
dientes de perro,
those rocks. Dog's teeth. So we wore our sneakers to swim in that gorgeous transparent water. Alejandra had told us to bring diving masks, so we wore them too.

What a world inside that water! The fish. The coral. The black, spiny sea urchins. The starfish. The anemones. The colors. And that was just at the coastline. There was a whole sea out there, full of this stuff. The sharks were so lucky.

Tony sensed it and said, “This is great! I'm going out farther.”

We were there with Marie Antoinette, who made one of her rare forays into the water. Louis XVI had not joined us, as usual. Uncle Amado was there, and Aunt Alejandra, and their two daughters Marisol and Alejandrita. But neither Amado nor Marie Antoinette tried to stop him. Probably because they had no idea what he meant by “farther.”

He swam straight out from the shoreline. He swam and swam and swam, until his head was nothing more than a dot between the sea and the blue sky, a period at the end of a sentence written by God.

He was so fearless, and so full of good ideas.

He was the one who came up with the idea of pulling the blossoms off the hibiscus hedge next door and tying them shut overnight. He was the one who discovered that cold water could make hot lightbulbs explode. He was the one who invented a new alphabet. We started writing notes to each other in that secret alphabet and within a few weeks we were using it fluently.

He was one of the funniest people I've ever known. When video-cassette recorders were still rare, he once showed me a videotape of
Mr. Rogers
he had dubbed over with his own voice so that Mr. Rogers, the children's show host
par excellence,
spoke like a drunken, raving lunatic. It was a work of genius.

My fearless brother wouldn't adjust to exile easily. I don't think he ever adjusted at all. But I suspect that by the time we left Cuba, he was already seriously damaged. It's not easy to have an adopted brother foisted upon you, especially when he is a pervert.

Tony's life was never stable after we reached the United States. He realized that he could be his own father and mother as soon as he got off the plane, and he ran with that insight, full throttle. And as I have only myself to blame for my many bad choices, so does he. But because he was three years older than me, he was able to make some very bad choices at critical times, and he's paid for this dearly.

But back then, on that day at Uncle Amado's house, he swam out to the very edge of the shallow sea floor that surrounds Cuba. He says he swam past sharks and barracudas and giant stingrays and fish that defied description. And he says he got to the edge of a great abyss, deeper and darker than anything he'd ever seen. It was as if he'd swum out to the very edge of night, he said. He looked down and saw nothing but deep, unfathomable darkness, darker than the night sky, for there were no stars at all. Not one light below. Nothing but black. The blackest black of all.

He said it was beautiful. And I believe him.

I've seen him do other brave, foolish things. I've seen him hold a huge firecracker in his hand until the fuse was no longer visible, and I've noticed how his hand didn't shake at all. I've seen him hold a cigarette in his teeth and dare someone to knock it off with a large rawhide bullwhip. I've seen him totally scraped up from head to foot after being dragged by a car for a block or so in Miami. He'd accepted a dare to hold on to the car's bumper while staying on his bicycle, and he'd be damned if he'd let go, even after he'd fallen down. I was there when he rode his bicycle out to the middle of the frozen lake in Miller Park, in Bloomington, Illinois, when we were living with Uncle Amado. It had just frozen over a couple of days before and the ice wasn't very thick yet. I could hear it cracking and pinging, as if it were about to give way. I've seen him jump off a third-story porch into a snowdrift. I was with him as he drove a Jeep down the runways at O'Hare Airport, right into the path of incoming planes, and he shouted at me, over the roar of the plane's engines: “I love this! I try to do it once a day!” I've seen him come home with a bullet lodged in the palm of his hand, and I've heard him say, “Naah, it's nothing, really.” I've seen the machine guns and grenades in his bedroom closet. I've heard him boast about the twenty-five hundred parking tickets he collected and threw away without a second glance.