Waiting for Snow in Havana (7 page)

Before I knew it we were in the kitchen, safe from further chimp attacks. There, my mom calmed me down, wiped away my tears, and cleaned my wounds. To get to the bite itself, though, she first had to convince me to pull down my pants and my underwear. Since there were a lot of people milling about in that kitchen, who showed no desire to go away and refused to leave when asked, it took some convincing. Everyone wanted to see the bite on my rear end. And everyone saw it, I think.

The hydrogen peroxide and the iodine stung so much that I cried some more. The puncture wounds were deep, but no larger than the size of each of Blackie's teeth. He had only taken one bite, and it seems that my jeans protected me a little, especially since he had bitten right over one of the rear pockets. Thank God my father had received bolts and bolts of denim fabric from one of his many grateful acquaintances and that my mom had turned some of it into jeans for me. Ever since, blue jeans have made me feel safe.

I don't know who caught Blackie and chained him up again that day he bit me. Probably the gardener, or the guy who took care of handling the animals in Aulet's animal garden. But caught he was, and sent back to his little Tarzan-like hut. I went home with a sore butt and an increased appreciation of nature red in tooth and claw, our sweet world where every bough is dipped in blood and every bird's song conceals a dirge. I would like to think that on that day Blackie became aware of that law of the universe I had discovered on the school playground: bullies are the worst sissies in the world when the tables are turned on them.

I never, ever taunted Blackie again. Not even when it made me look bad in front of my friends.

As to the outcome of Blackie's lederhosen escape: of course, as always, he was captured and chained anew. But I don't know how this was accomplished. I only remember Blackie jumping from limb to limb, swinging furiously, making his way down our street on the green canopy provided by the trees. Aulet and his retinue followed close behind, yelling out his name. Aulet looked worried, and silly too, with that Alpine hat in his hand. Blackie looked regal in his lederhosen. He was King of Bavaria that day, and not one whit dumber or less majestic than Mad Ludwig II, builder of Neuschwanstein Castle, patron and friend of Richard Wagner. I rooted for him and urged him to run faster, to swing more furiously from branch to branch, to find freedom.

I wish I knew what happened to Blackie after I left the island on my own dash for freedom. He's always there, lurking in the back of my mind. Maybe he had something to do with the fact that a chimp puppet was the best man at my wedding, and that this puppet held a single blood-red rose during the ceremony. I have photos of that puppet, my best man, holding his red rose. I also have photos of him traveling in Europe with me and my bride, at all these places so far from Miramar. Outside the Jeu de Pomme museum, with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Crossing the English Channel, the white cliffs of Dover a faint haze on the horizon. Marveling at the Alhambra across a deep gorge, perched on the edge of a wall as white as the snow on the Sierra Nevada.

Gerardito ended up leaving by himself, just as I did. The rich boy, my friend, became a poor orphan the minute he set foot in the United States, just like me. I don't really know what he endured, for we never compared stories. Maybe he, too, searched vacant lots in ratty Miami neighborhoods at twilight, looking for discarded soda bottles that could be turned in for two cents apiece, hoping to come up with enough cash to buy a Twinkie or an ice-cream sandwich for dinner. His family followed a few years later, like so many others. His father, the nickel mine magnate, lost his fortune. He was forced to scrounge for lousy jobs in Florida, and to do without wild beasts in his garden, maybe even to mop floors and hear himself called “spic.”

Where Aulet's bestiary ended up, I don't know. After a while you don't give a damn where anything went, not even your own stuff. Burn it, bomb it, send it down the vortex of a black hole. Let it all rot in hell. It was just stuff.

Dross. Sheer dross. Or so you think. Then a chimp puppet shows up at your wedding, years later, and you don't even realize why he's there, or why you are playing a joke on yourself. Then, when you finally get the joke, maybe you begin to reconsider the bulldozer and the dynamite.

Maybe.

Blackie was there in his Tarzan house that final morning I spent in Havana, there in the animal garden. He was there just a few hours before I left for the airport, a few hours before Louis XVI hugged me for the very last time in this life. I went to see Blackie on my roller skates that morning to say good-bye. It was the very last thing I did before leaving. He rattled his chain and made chimp faces at me, as always.

I swear, I think I also heard the mynah bird say,
“Culo, culo, culo feo!”

All right, I'll translate, at the risk of eternal damnation. The bird said: “Ass, ass, ugly ass!”

C
ohetes.
Without a doubt, one of the most beautiful words in the Spanish language.

Firecrackers, in English. A poor word, if you ask me. Impoverished. Lame.

Cohete
is also the Spanish word for “rocket.”
Cohetes
can take you to another world, to many other worlds. Flash Gordon and Dr. Zharkov flew around in
cohetes,
as did Buck Rogers.
Sputnik
had been launched with a
cohete,
and so had Laika. Poor Laika, the dog the Russians sent into orbit with a one-way ticket, propelled by a
cohete
to death by starvation.

Firecrackers?
Not even close. When I first learned of the English word for
cohete,
all I could think of was flaming Saltines.

And I never did find any firecrackers in the United States as large as the
cohetes
I played with in Havana, not even illegal ones.

There we were in Chinatown, my dad, my brother, and I, buying firecrackers.

“I want some of these big ones!”

“How about one of those long strings? Two? Three? Ten? Please,
Papi? Por favor?
”

“We've got to have some of those round ones too!”

“Okay, Felipe, let's have ten boxes of these. And twenty of those.”

Yes, Havana had a Chinatown, and a Chinese cemetery too. Lots of Chinese had somehow ended up in Havana, and some were named Felipe. You could buy any explosive you wanted on
Calle Zanja
—Ditch Street in English.
Zanja
sounds a lot like
Shanghai.
Is that why the Chinese ended up in that neighborhood? Or does it have anything to do with the fact that Chinese coolies dug a lot of ditches in Cuba?

Anyway, the Chinese had the best firecrackers in town, and we were amassing quite an arsenal.

How I stared at the merchandise in that store. Long, long strings of firecrackers in all sizes. From tiny ones as thin as rose stems, tied together in perfectly symmetrical rows of two, about the length of Pancho Villa's bullet belt, to huge ones as round as hot dogs, strung together in bundles the width of the average tomb. Small individual firecrackers as round as a pencil, two inches long. Medium-size explosives as round as a man's index finger. Large
petardos
about half the size of a dynamite stick. Jumbo
petardos
that could have passed for dynamite sticks, the only ones that King Louis wouldn't buy for us.

The most amazing thing was that this was not the only firecracker store in Chinatown. There was another one next door, and across the street, and next door to that, all over the street, and down some of the side streets, a nearly infinite supply of firecrackers.

We went to Felipe Wang's store because my dad knew him and always got a special deal. Favors. All those favors. The most gorgeous boomerangs in the world.

They were all red, those firecrackers. Blood red. Even the thin transparent wrapping paper around them. Chinese paper, the same stuff my dad used for kites, only slightly thinner. How I loved to handle that paper, to feel it with my fingers, to rub it, to inhale the scent of gunpowder, to hold it over my eyes and see the entire world turn blood red. All those dragons on the labels, they were so awesome, despite the fact that they were related to lizards. These were firecracker dragons, small gods of pure joy. And all those Chinese characters on the labels, too. Mystical words, secrets from another dimension. I was certain that somewhere in China there were these extremely wise men, a caste of priests who had discovered gunpowder, along with a whole other way of writing.

I saved the wrappers. I saved them in my sock drawer, and had to leave them all behind, along with Mom and Dad and almost the entire family, and all the stuff we owned. When I saw
Citizen Kane
for the first time, and got clobbered over the head by the great surprise of “Rosebud” at the end, my hair stood on end. If I were still a genuine Cuban, I might say that I fainted, or suffered a heart attack, or was felled by an
embolia
. But my powers of exaggeration have greatly diminished in exile. I have to admit that it was just a chill that went through my body. I knew what my Rosebud had been, and that was my chill of recognition. My love for those wrappers ran deep. I fear that when I die, my final words will be
“los papelitos rojos”
—the red wrappers—instead of something pious.

These treasures came from so far away, from the other side of the globe. My dad had told me that if I could dig a hole deep enough, right through the earth's core, I would end up in China. For a while I believed him, even though his geology didn't take into account purgatory and hell. The good Christian Brothers had told me about those two places, also under my feet. But I preferred to think my dad was right.

Chinatown was full of scary things too. Images of large dragons, in all shapes and sizes. Images of heathen deities, some looking like Christian demons. Statues of the Buddha. Very few statues of the Enlightened One totally at peace, though. Most of these Buddhas seemed lacking in insight, blind in the third eye. They reminded me of some of the Catholic images that also scared me: Saint Lazarus on his crutches, his legs being licked by dogs; Saint Barbara, holding a cup in one hand and a sword in the other. Images used by
brujeros
and by those who practiced
santería,
that quintessentially Cuban religion that masks African beliefs, symbols, and rituals with a thin veneer of Catholicism. I was especially scared by these very weird Buddha statues that I've never seen anywhere else since then, also available in all sizes: a very fat Buddha with tiny children crawling all over him, his pudgy arms held aloft, a goofy, almost sinister grin on his face. It looked as if the children were devouring him little by little. In some of the poorer neighborhoods, like Regla, or Marianao, or Old Havana, you could see these proudly displayed in front windows. My dad told me that people thought these statues brought good luck. They scared the bejeezus out of me.

Louis XVI liked the Enlightened Buddha, of course, because of his belief in reincarnation. That gave me the creeps too, the way he told me the story of Siddhartha so often. I was waiting for him to tell me that the story was wrong, that Siddhartha had not been the final incarnation of the Buddha, that he had been the Buddha too. He used to tell me about Christian saints, canonized by the Church, who came back. If heaven was not the final destination of the holiest men and women, why assume Nirvana was the Buddha's last stop? Fortunately, he never went that far.

Anyway, the firecrackers more than made up for everything unpleasant in Chinatown. We set off our little bombs all over the neighborhood. On the inner branches of flowering shrubs. On trees. On walls and fences. On neighbors' porches. On toys. On anthills. On lizards. Inside empty soda bottles. Inside storm drains. Some of these targets required lighting the firecracker in your hand and throwing it before it exploded. My brother and Manuel were experts at that. Daredevils, too. They took to playing a game that was a combination of Russian roulette and Chicken in which they would both light firecrackers in their hands at the same time and wait to see who would be the first to throw his. I did it a few times and always threw first.

Then there was the time when we tried to set up the first, last, and only Cuban space program. Inspired by Laika's flight into space, we decided to launch a living being into outer space. And what creature better than a lizard? So we captured a large green chameleon, taped it to the top of a large tin can, set our largest firecracker under it, and placed it on the sidewalk in the park at the end of my street. Having decided that one firecracker wasn't large enough to propel the can into outer space, we substituted several medium-size
petardos,
but then decided that there was no way that several fuses would burn in perfect sync and that what we really needed was a single huge explosive. So Eugenio came to the rescue. He ran home to get one of those huge
petardos
my dad wouldn't buy, the ones that resembled sticks of dynamite. His dad wasn't as much of a weenie as mine.

We couldn't hide our excitement from one another when Eugenio showed up on his bike, sweating and grinning, and pulled the giant
petardo
out of his pocket. We carefully arranged the explosive device under the can so that only the wick was sticking out. Calling it a mere “firecracker” would be an insult. It could have been a stick of dynamite, for all I know.

“I bet this can will go into outer space.”

“Yeah, the thrust from the explosion should send that can past the clouds.”

“What if the lizard actually goes into orbit?”

“That would be so great.”

“How long do you think he'll last in space?”

Our reluctant astronaut squirmed under the white surgical tape we had used to bind him to his capsule. So green, so very green, that beautiful Cuban chameleon. The kind of green you see on tropical plants, and on new spring foliage in northern latitudes, but not on wildlife.

Since it was his explosive, Eugenio lit the fuse. Then we all backed up about six feet and waited for liftoff.

It was a long fuse. We stood there for what seemed an eternity, watching the sparks wend their way down the fuse towards the bottom of the can and the explosive under it.

BANG!

A blinding flash, a cloud of smoke.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh, whoosh!

“What happened?”

“Hey, where's the can?”

“It blew up, stupid.”

“What do you mean?”

“It blew up. Completely destroyed. Didn't you feel and hear those pieces flying by?”

“I saw it explode into a million pieces, I really did,” said my brother Tony. “And one of those pieces of metal nicked my ear. Here, look: blood!” Sure enough, there was a little bit of blood trickling down the edge of Tony's left ear. We all inspected ourselves for damage. Everyone was intact. Except the lizard of course.

“Hey, do you think we might be able to find pieces of the lizard?” I asked.

“No, stupid, it's gone, all gone. Too soft to survive.”

“Let's see if we can find pieces of the can,” said Manuel.

“Yeah, maybe we'll find lizard guts on one of them,” added Rafael.

We fanned out over a fifty-yard radius, leaving the charred epicenter behind. We did manage to find a few pieces of shrapnel, but none was very large. No trace of the lizard, or the tape. Our spaceship and astronaut had gone out of this world, yes, but not the way we expected.

We laughed and laughed like the idiots we were. Thinking back, I now realize it was a miracle that we weren't hurt by the flying shrapnel. Every mother's worst fear, metal embedded in her boy's eye.
Whoosh!
That's as close as we came to harm, an odd flurry of whispers following the explosion.

We were graced that day.

Fools. None of us did well in physics later. I thought then, and I still think now, that all so-called laws of physics are random acts, directly willed by God. The so-called laws could change any instant, as they did when that can blew up in our faces.

That's what could happen when we were unsupervised, which was most of the time. But every now and then my dad would want to join in the fun, and when he did we were more cautious. Often, when he joined us we would go to a park about two blocks from our house, on Fifth Avenue—
Quinta Avenida
—the nicest street in Miramar.

It was a grand old park that stretched across both sides of the avenue and it was full of ancient ficus trees that had trunks as big as houses. Ficus trees have these tendrils that grow from their branches, and when they reach the ground, they take root and swell, ever so slowly, and another trunk begins to form. Trunk upon trunk, ficus trees build themselves out. Sometimes a single tree is a forest of trunks, some bundled together, others standing at various distances from the center. They were so much fun to climb and to fill with firecrackers. So many nooks and crannies. So many lizards to blow up.

This park also had some sort of enormous marble gazebo, or band shell, held up by thick Corinthian columns. We loved to explode firecrackers in the
glorieta,
as we called the giant gazebo. The acoustics of the dome made it sound as if we'd set off an atomic bomb, or so we thought. It thundered and reverberated, and filled us with undiluted joy.

Then there was the smell of the gunpowder. The
petardos
gave off the most intoxicating fumes. But even the smallest firecrackers were worth smelling. We would all run over to the spot where our firecrackers had exploded and inhale deeply.

How I wished I could smell the gunpowder when real bombs went off at night. Imagine what a punch a bundle of dynamite can pack! More often than not, they were far off in the distance, but every now and then we got lucky and one would be close enough to rattle our window shutters.