Here is an excerpt from chapter 1 of Waiting for Snow in Havana:
UnoTuesday night, Eire read from the book at New York's New School University:
The world changed while I slept, and much to my surprise, no one had consulted me. That's how it would lways be from that day forward. Of course, that's the way it had been all along. I just didn't know it until that morning. Surprise upon surprise: some good, some evil, most somewhere in between. And always without my consent.
I was barely eight years old, and I had spent hours dreaming of childish things, as children do. My father, who vividly remembered his prior incarnation as King Louis XVI of France, probably dreamt of costume balls, mobs, and guillotines. My mother, who had no memory of having been Marie Antoinette, couldn't have shared in his dreams. Maybe she dreamt of hibiscus blossoms and fine silk. Maybe she dreamt of angels, as she always encouraged me to do. "Sueña con los angelitos," she would say: Dream of little angels. The fact that they were little meant they were too cute to be fallen angels.
Devils can never be cute.
The tropical sun knifed through the gaps in the wooden shutters, as always, extending in narrow shafts of light above my bed, revealing entire galaxies of swirling dust specks. I stared at the dust, as always, rapt. I don't remember getting out of bed. But I do remember walking into my parents' bedroom. Their shutters were open and the room was flooded with light. As always, my father was putting on his trousers over his shoes. He always put on his socks and shoes first, and then his trousers. For years I tried to duplicate that nearly magical feat, with little success. The cuffs of my pants would always get stuck on my shoes and no amount of tugging could free them. More than once I risked an eternity in hell and spit out swear words. I had no idea that if your pants are baggy enough, you can slide them over anything, even snowshoes. All I knew then was that I couldn't be like my father.
As he slid his baggy trousers over his brown wingtip shoes, effortlessly, Louis XVI broke the news to me: "Batista is gone. He flew out of Havana early this morning. It looks like the rebels have won."
"You lie," I said.
"No, I swear, it's true," he replied.
Marie Antoinette, my mother, assured me it was true as she applied lipstick, seated at her vanity table. It was a beautiful piece of mahogany furniture with three mirrors: one flat against the wall and two on either side of that, hinged so that their angles could be changed at will. I used to turn the side mirrors so they would face each other and create infinite regressions of one another. Sometimes I would peer in and plunge into infinity.
"You'd better stay indoors today," my mother said. "God knows what could happen. Don't even stick your head out the door." Maybe she, too, had dreamt of guillotines after all? Or maybe it was just sensible, motherly advice. Perhaps she knew that the heads of the elites don't usually fare well on the street when revolutions triumph, not even when the heads belong to children.
That day was the first of January 1959.
The night before, we had all gone to a wedding at a church in the heart of old Havana. On the way home, we had the streets to ourselves. Not another moving car in sight. Not a soul on the Malecón, the broad avenue along the waterfront. Not even a lone prostitute. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette kept talking about the eerie emptiness of the city. Havana was much too quiet for a New Year's Eve.
I can't remember what my older brother, Tony, was doing that morning or for the rest of the day. Maybe he was wrapping lizards in thin copper wire and hooking them up to our Lionel train transformer. He liked to electrocute them. He liked it a lot. He was also fond of saying: "Shock therapy, ha! That should cure them of their lizard delusion." I don't want to remember what my adopted brother, Ernesto, was doing. Probably something more monstrous than electrocuting lizards.
My older brother and my adopted brother had both been Bourbon princes in a former life. My adopted brother had been the Dauphin, the heir to the French throne. My father had recognized him on the street one day, selling lottery tickets, and brought him to our house immediately. I was the outsider. I alone was not a former Bourbon. My father wouldn't tell me who I had been. "You're not ready to hear it," he would say. "But you were very special."
My father's sister, Lucía, who lived with us, spent that day being as invisible as she always was. She, too, had once been a Bourbon princess. But now, in this life, she was a spinster: a lady of leisure with plenty of time on her hands and no friends at all. She had been protected so thoroughly from the corrupt culture of Cuba and the advances of the young men who reeked of it as to have been left stranded, high and dry, on the lonely island that was our house. Our island within the island. Our safe haven from poor taste and all unseemly acts, such as dancing to drumbeats. She had lived her entire life as a grown woman in the company of her mother and her maiden aunt, who, like her, had remained a virgin without vows. When her mother and aunt died, she moved to a room at the rear of our house and hardly ever emerged. Whether she had any desires, I'll never know. She seemed not to have any. I don't remember her expressing any opinion that day on the ouster of Batista and the triumph of Fidel Castro and his rebels. But a few days later she did say that those men who came down from the mountains needed haircuts and a shave.
Copyright © 2003 by Carlos Eire. Publisher: Simon & Schuster.
How I wanted to live in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, Siberia, Yukon, Baffin Island, the North Pole. All that white ice, all that snow and cold air. So pure, so good. Snow was grace itself, falling from heaven. It didn't simply hide evil but vanquished it. And I longed for it fervently, there in Havana.Eire dedicated his award to political prisoners in Cuba--writers and people who tried to start libraries in Cuba. Eire ended his talk:
May it not only snow in Havana some time soon, may they be able to speak freely, once and for all.
Here's a little more about Eire and his book, from Caitlyn Hamilton of the American Booksellers Association Bookweb.org:
Though Eire had thought of writing his memoir for years, it was the Elian Gonzalez incident that propelled him to the keyboard at last. He wrote the book in four months, in a process he called an "eruption" and described as "pure joy." For Eire, a professor used to writing formal histories in linear and logical fashion, writing from the heart was illuminating and refreshing. Working without any outline, he "was guided by images."
"[I'd] get an image, or a series of images, and try to make sense of them in narrative form," Eire explained.
Eire said he couldn't have written the book if he hadn't already come to grips with his experience and loss, though he added there is pain one never gets past. Still, he "thinks his parents did the right thing" and even said that he's "eternally grateful for every bad job, every bad place I've ever lived"-- forgiveness that, perhaps, arises from his deep religious convictions. Usually "tight-lipped" about the subject, especially while teaching, Eire openly discusses faith in his book and in interviews. "A series of events made me a very religious person. This [faith] is what saved me. One of the big differences between my brother and me is that my brother lost his faith. I wouldn't have survived without it."
Eire wrote Waiting for Snow in Havana as a novel and wanted the book marketed as such, and under a pseudonym. Advisors felt, though, that if the story was true it ought to be published as such. Being a shy person, Eire balked. He wanted to "hide." He also believed fiction reached more readers.
Here are Eire's other books:
And here is a link to a recent interview in which Eire expresses his views on the pope and the future of the Roman Catholic church.
Don't be hateful to people, just because they are hateful to you. Rather, be good to each other and to everyone else. Always be joyful and never stop praying. Whatever happens, keep thanking God because of Jesus Christ. This is what God wants you to do. --1st Thessalonians 5:15-18 CEV
