Waiting for Snow in Havana Read Online Free PDF Page A

billion-to-one ratio, roughly. This was another quirk of his. He never spoke of sex and he loathed dirty jokes. This made him a rare bird among Cuban males. From first grade on, every boy’s reputation as a genuine male was constantly tested through sexual humor and the free exchange of “bad” words. Anyone uncomfortable with that in first grade was taunted as a mariquita, or sissy. By third grade the insult was upgraded to maricón, or queer. And it couldn’t ever get any worse than maricón . Even suffocation and entombment in a giant sandpile was better than that.
    Anyway, back to the ride to Regla and my father’s courthouse. Once off the bus, we would catch a small launch, jam-packed with people, and cross the harbor. At dockside, on either end, poor boys dove for coins thrown into the water. Most were my age, some even younger. The water was way past murky. Once the coins hit the water, they would quickly disappear from view. No turquoise here. This water was a deep, dark green, smudged with rainbow-hued oil slicks, and it smelled worse than it looked. My father’s musings as we crossed the harbor made the boat ride scary.
    â€œJust think of all the sharks swimming under us right now.”
    â€œYou know, I once saw an old black woman fall off the side of the boat and drown, right here. And the guy who dove in after her was eaten by a shark. It was horrible.”
    â€œYou know, one of these boats capsized once during a rainstorm, and everyone drowned. No, no, I take that back. Some drowned. The rest were eaten by sharks. It was horrible. What a tragedy.”
    â€œYou know, some crazy man once drilled a hole into the hull of one of these water taxis and when it was about halfway to the other side it sank. It was horrible: those who didn’t drown were eaten by the sharks.”
    Those poor boys diving for coins in water so dark that one couldn’t see a shark coming seemed to me the bravest humans on earth. Or the most desperate. At the time I didn’t know that desperation and bravery are usually one and the same thing. My dad would always give me a coin to throw in, usually a nickel. Sometimes it was a Cuban nickel, sometimes an American nickel. (Back then the currency was interchangeable, for the peso and the dollar were often nearly on a par with each other.) And the boys would scramble and fight one another to get to my nickel. The look of glee on the face of the boy who burst forth from the filthy water holding my nickel was priceless.
    From the dock we would walk to the courthouse, a few blocks away. These were grimy streets, I thought, full of disgusting old buildings and poor people. The only color I remember seeing in that neighborhood was brown. The buildings were brown, the streets were brown, the people were brown. Even the statue of the Virgin Mary enshrined in the chapel of Our Lady of Regla was brown. The blazing sun remained far above, in its pure realm, unable to pass through the narrow streets. Not one tree in sight, at least on the way to the courtroom.
    The courthouse seemed indistinguishable from the other buildings on that narrow street, probably because there was hardly enough room to step back and take a good look. The door seemed ancient and weathered. It was brown. The policeman guarding it was also usually brown. Once you made it past the door, you knew this was no ordinary building. It had jail cells, the only real ones I have ever seen. And there were people in the cells. Mostly brown people. We had to walk past them to get to Dad’s chambers. They looked sad and angry and dirty, and they eyed me with malice, or so I thought. I was very glad to see policemen in that jailhouse corridor on the way to Dad’s chambers. These were obviously bad people who had done something wrong. Who knew what they could do to me if my father hadn’t locked them up? The jail cells reminded me of the lions’ cages at the zoo, and the people inside