|
The Hurricane Home Page Essays Memoirs Fiction Plays Poetry References
|
|
HURRICANE by
I didn’t know what it was! Such noise! Such wind! What could it be? My
family moved from Mexico to Havana, Cuba, when I was seven years old. We had
been there only two months when a hurricane hit the island.
It was one of the most devastating in the history of the Caribbean. The
date was October 1926. In
Mexico, we had experienced earthquakes, but never hurricanes.
As newcomers, we had no friends, we didn’t know our neighbors, and did
not read the newspapers. Of course, there was no radio and television.
Papá was a Frenchman who worked as an engineer with the
Compañia Cubana de Electricidad. Despite its name, the Company was an American
enterprise. One day, he came home
early and barged through the house yelling, “Maman,
Maman, pack everything, we have to move in an hour. A hurricane ison its
way.” I
figured it must have been the Americans who told Papá about a hurricane
– a hurricane? – it must be very serious, something evil, someone to avoid
at all costs. Of
course, we didn’t have many possessions. Maman threw all our clothing
into the few boxes we had brought from Tampico when we sailed for Havana. Along
the street, Papá stopped a couple of Cuban men who walked by, talking
and laughing. “Por
favor, would you help us move to another house? The hurricane is coming.” ’Cómo
no, sure . .
. but . . . who’s coming?” “The
hurricane”. They
looked at the shining, burning sun, hesitated and smiled.
From the corner of my eye, I saw one of the men signaling “he’s
nuts”, but they still carried the furniture and didn’t accept any money. My
ten-year-old brother Georges helped Maman take the lighter things.
“Ah, my doll! Where’s my doll?” I wasn’t going to let anybody
carry it, so I sat her gently on my arm. Yes,
we moved, in an hour, from a wooden bungalow to a recently built house.
“It’s stronger,” Papá said.
At dusk the wind blew hard, and continued all night. The whistling came
up and up – then quieted down, only to start again a minute later. The heavy
rain battered the roof, the walls and the solid wooden shutters.
Monstrous sounds shook the basement and rocked the house. “What’s
that, Maman?”
“It’s the hurricane.”
“What’s a hurricane?”
“Hum . . . You can hear it – the strong wind with heavy rain. Don’t
worry. It will pass. Thanks to Papá, we’re safe here”.
I was sure the hurricane was a monster – an angry monster.
Maman reassured me, but she looked white, as she rubbed her hands and
walked from room to room. Papá stuffed rags between the doors and the
floor to prevent rainwater from flooding in. When the rags were soaked, he
squeezed them into buckets, which he then emptied in the toilet.
“We’re lucky the wind is coming from the back. If it were in front,
we’d be flooded. See how the water keeps coming under the doors? Damn it!”
“But Maman, why all that noise? Is the hurricane angry? I’ve
been such a good girl! Please,
Maman, leave the lights on, I can’t sleep.” “It’s
only the wind and rain. You can hear it now.
Try to sleep, Zizi”.
She looked worried and turned toward the shutters, tilting her head as if
to hear better. I had seen the same expression on her when she took my pulse to
check whether I had a fever. “All
right, I’ll put the light on, ma chérie, but don’t worry, nothing
will happen to us.” She
kissed me, reached up above her head to the single hanging bulb, and turned it
on. The bulb swayed from side to
side, making strange dancing shadows across the room.
Awake in my cot, I watched the shadows until they stopped. Few
hours later the water had pierced through the brick walls, staining the
light-green surface, making large, spider looking shapes.
I thought if the water softens the walls, the monster is going to push
its ugly hands through them and reach out to me – what then?
Weary and tense from fear, I forced myself to close my eyes. Curling
under the blanket, I covered my head and finally fell asleep. *
* *
“Come on, Zizi, don’t stay in bed all day!”
Georges called out, “And put something on, it’s cold outside”. Jumping
out of bed, I grabbed the gray blanket, a family relic brought back by my father
from the war in France. It was still warm from my body; I wrapped it around and
went out on to the veranda.
“Dios mío!” I gasped. The street was a river, its brown water
racing out of control. The water burst into waves that collided with one
another, rising in peaks of brown foam at the tops. The deafening roar sounded
like the cries of a thousand frightened animals.
“What now?” I asked Papá with a shaky voice,
“Will the water take us?”
“No, you see, on this side we’re higher than the street, but on the
other side -- that’s the problem. Those poor people, the government does
nothing for them. And they call themselves Christians, bah! The pigs!”
Fortunately, the thunder shut him up. Otherwise, Papá would have
launched into those political speeches that never seemed to end.
“But what now?” I asked
again. He tried to appear calm, but his face was wrinkled into a mask of worry.
He spread his hand over his baldhead and rubbed it slightly, then rested
his chin on the palm of his hand.
“What’ll happen to us, Papá?”
He woke up from his thoughts and was about to speak, but Maman
interrupted,
“We’re lucky, we have enough food, n’est pas, Jules? Isn’t
it?”
“And water -- I brought a lot of liter bottles yesterday. But the storm
will not last long, don’t worry, my baby,” he said to me, extending his hand
to suggest my sitting on his lap. My
heart swelled with tender thoughts. I hugged them both and sat on Papá’s
lap, leaning my head on his shoulder. “You’re
not a baby anymore,” Papá smiled slightly, “How old are you now?” “Seven!
But Maman, I’m hungry”.
“All right, les enfants, children, let’s have
breakfast. Georges, fan the fire. Zizi, set the table.”
Breakfast never tasted so good. We
cupped our hands around the warm bowls, tore pieces off the baguette and dropped
them into the sweetened café au lait.
With a full belly, catastrophes don’t seem as serious.
One could almost forget the storm. In that bucolic scene, having
breakfast in a warm kitchen, close to a charcoal fire, with a bowl of coffee and
milk, the storm mattered little. The monster was gone.
Georges began to play his favorite game.
He rolled the bread dough between his fingers until they turned into
pea-size pellets, and then he flipped them all over the room.
“Maman, look at Georges. Tell him to go and play outside!”
He smiled a wicked smile, and I said to him,
“You’re always complaining about the showers, now you have a big one
outside, go see!”
“Ha Ha, OK, only if you come with me,” he added with the same naughty
smile. A
thunderous noise brought us back to reality. Georges and I ran to the veranda
where we felt the wind, stronger than ever, and saw the rain fall in torrents.
We had to yell to be heard.
The water was rushing much faster than before and rising by the minute
– at least half a meter higher than before.
Swept by the current, branches of fallen trees swayed up in the air, wood
beams stuck out their heads, dead dogs, and all kinds of debris floated by in
the swift waters. The water was
also darker now, heavier with mud, and more dangerous. At any moment, it might
strike our house. “There
must have been a big avalanche somewhere above,” Georges commented. The
river had already flooded the other side of the street and spread farther away
into the poor people’s district. Suddenly,
right in front of us, a shack collapsed like a house of cards.
In the middle, a woman, standing alone, appeared clutching her baby.
She screamed and yelled, fiercely trying to stand against the current. I
ran to the kitchen, “Papá,
Papá, a baby, a woman!” Tears
flooded my eyes. I twisted forward, one hand on my stomach, with the other
pointing out toward the veranda. I jumped in place, eager for Papá to
find something that we could throw to her. Papá followed, muttering,
“A rope, a cord, a ladder, a . . . something”. We
had nothing. He
went down the front steps and walked into knee-deep water.
“I’ll
try it out. I can swim!” Maman
panicked. “Jules,
Jules, jamais, never! Come back, Tu es fou!
You’re crazy!” Clutching
the rail with both hands, he tried to resist the current, defying its force. But
his grip was slipping on the wet rail, and “Damn this water!” he yelled. Georges
and I grabbed him by the arms, shirt, belt, whatever we could, and finally he
stood safely on the terrace again. Dripping wet, he looked with dismay at what
was left of the shack. The stove, made of an empty oilcan, sat atop of a mound
of stones that the water had not yet knocked down. The bed and the table were
floating, the table showing its legs like a dead animal turned upside down. The
woman had disappeared. I
couldn’t stop crying. “The poor baby, the poor woman!” “Alors,
Zizi,” said Maman, “Come, let me dry your tears. Have some warm milk.
‘Wish we could help her, but . . . there’s nothing we can do”. “But
the baby, the mother -- what’ll happen? They drown, they die?”
“C’est la vie, chérie. That’s life, my darling.
Tomorrow . . . maybe we’ll see her. Papá says the storm won’t last.
Then maybe she’ll come around and we’ll give her shelter, and you can take
care of the baby, OK?” “But
we can’t see her. She drowned
with her baby!” I went away to
cry alone, as I always did, kneeling with my head in my hands at the side of my
cot. My only consolation was to
hold my doll while spasms shook my chest. I felt useless, unable to save them.
There she was, bravely fighting the current.
I imagined the baby opening his mouth, agonizing to breathe, and the
mother falling on her knees, praying for God to save them. Alone,
alone she was. Georges
appeared and patted my head. “Viens,
come, quick, Zizi chérie, don’t cry no more, we saw somebody, and
maybe that’s her.” In
the strong tropical light, I could see a head moving along with the
current, an arm flailing in the air, then sinking into the water and reappearing
again. The body of the woman lurched forward, always forward, in the direction
to a higher point. Georges and I, Maman and Papá, screamed and
yelled for her to make it.
Finally,
she reached the small hill, crawled on it with her knees and arms deep into the
mud, and lay face down, coughing and shaking the water off herself.
We
jumped with joy. I kissed my doll with delight.
Protected by a higher mount to the left, the wooded area where she had
landed was still covered with vegetation. In
the distance, through the heavy rain, we could barely distinguish a female
figure with a long skirt, sitting against the trunk of a palm tree, her feet
anchored in the mud, so as to resist the force of the wind that could take away
her precious bundle. In
front, a bulge -- the baby. *
* * In
the late afternoon, the hurricane stopped as abruptly as it had begun.
Papá,
relieved from all that tension, invited us to walk through downtown Havana to
see the damage. “No,
I want to stay. Maybe she’ll come back, maybe with the baby”. They
never came back. *
* * “Maybe
she went to stay with relatives,” Maman commented, “You see, she
saved herself by following the current. When things don’t go your way, don’t
fight, go along, and later you may change the course of things”. Comments or questions can be addressed to SBOUQUET@prodigy.net
|