house, hoping my father would be home and thinking about ways I might be able to get in if he was not. It had been east of the city, but when I got there it was not there. There were no houses at all, just fields of corn and sugarcane. I was sure I had gone wrong, so I went north as far as the beach, and south quite a way, and so on. You can imagine.
And it was not there. I decided then that there were two Havanas, or maybe the city had changed its name and this little town had taken it over.
By then I was about starved. I went back to the market and stopped at every stand, saying I would be glad to do some work if the man or woman who ran it would give me something to eat. It was no at every stand.
Finally I stole some food. It was a little loaf of Cuban bread, still warm from the oven. I grabbed it and ran as fast as I could, which was pretty fast even back then. When I got into an alley that had a good hiding place, I ate it. I have never eaten anything better in my whole life than that little loaf of Cuban bread. Cuban bread is about like our Italian bread but sweeter, and for me it was like I was in Hell and a fresh loaf from Heaven had fallen and I had caught it. Right then I should have thought seriously about the Eucharist, but I did not.
What I thought about instead was sin. I knew that it was wrong to steal and that I had stolen the bread, but I had learned enough moral theology to know that when a hungry person steals food it is only a venial sin. I had committed quite a few venial sins already, like lying to the abbot, and I figured God was not going to send me off to Hell for venial sins anyway. That night I slept in my hiding place in the alley, and I did not like it.
The next day was not much different, except that I stole a chicken. There was a woman in the market who roasted them to order on a spit, little skinny chickens that would have made my English teacher make jokes about friars. Without letting on that I was paying attention, I watched her pretty carefully while she was roasting one. When it was done, the customer who wanted it spread a rag on the table, and the chicken-stand woman laid the hot chicken on that. There was a little time-a few seconds-when nobody was holding it. Then the customer wrapped it up in her rag and put it in her basket and paid.
So I waited for the next customer, figuring I would grab the chicken out of her basket while she was paying. Only the next customer had a basket with a lid, and I saw that my idea was not going to work. She would put it in there and close the lid, and start screaming while I was getting her basket open. What I would have to do instead was grab the chicken as soon as it was put down on the rag.
I tried to, but all I got was a whack from the chicken woman's stick, a stick I had not even noticed she had. It hurt like the devil and I was afraid I was going to get caught, so I ran.
It made me mad, too. Mad at her for whacking me, and mad at myself for not grabbing the chicken. I knew it was going to be a lot tougher when I tried it again, so I waited until the sun was nearly down and some of the stands were closing. That made it easier for me to see from a distance when she had a customer, because there were not as many people. For a while I was afraid she would not have any more.
Finally somebody came, a man. I think he meant to eat his chicken as soon as he got it, because he did not have a basket or anything to carry it in. She got a chicken for him from the wooden cage and showed it to him. He nodded, and she twisted its neck, and plucked and gutted it faster than you would have thought possible.
While it was cooking, I worked in a little closer. And as soon as she had it off her spit, I had it out of her hand. She got me again with her stick and it hurt pretty bad, but I grabbed her stick with my free hand before she could get it back up and got it away from her.
She thought I was going to hit her with it then, but I did not. I just dropped it and ran off with her chicken.
Maybe it tasted as good as the bread. I do not know. All that I remember is how scared I was that I was going to get caught before I finished it. How scared she was too-that short fat woman cowering with her arms up, afraid I was going to brain her with her own stick. When I thought of her just now, that is how I remembered her.
When I had eaten everything and sucked the bones-it did not seem like much-I found another sleeping place, not so near the market and the docks. And when I was lying there thinking about the chicken and getting hit twice with her stick, it came to me that if the lanky man buying the chicken had grabbed me from behind, it would have been all over. I would be in jail, was what I thought. Now I think they would probably have tied me to a post and beaten the merda out of me, then kicked me out. That is how they usually punished people when I was then.
After that, I started thinking about the monastery. Really thinking about it, maybe for the first time ever. How peaceful it had been, and how just about everybody there tried to look out for everybody else. I missed my cell, the chapel, and the refectory. I missed some of my teachers, too, and Brother Ignacio. It was funny, but the thing I missed most of all was the work he and I had done outside-helping milk sometimes, herding the pigs, and weeding. Collecting eggs in a basket like the ones I had hoped to steal out of, and carrying them in to Brother Cook. (His name was Jose, but everybody called him Brother Cook anyway.)
Then I got to thinking again about the rules, and what they had meant. You could not go into anybody else's cell, not ever, and the cells had no doors on them. You got told when to take a bath, three novices at a time, and there would be a monk there watching the whole time, generally Brother Fulgencio. He was older even than the abbot.
Those were rules I had not thought about at all when I was little. I took them in stride, like I had taken the rules at our school in the States. But when I got older and we learned about being gay and all that, I understood. They had thought we were, and they had not cared as long as we did not actually do anything with another kid. Once I had realized what was going on, it bugged me a lot. I did not want to spend the rest of my life thinking about girls and knowing that the people around me were thinking about boys, and thinking I was, too.
It was that last part that really got to me. If it had not been for that, if there had been a way I could have proved once and for all that I was no leccacazzi, I think I might have stayed.
That got me to thinking about how it was outside. It seemed to me Our Lady of Bethlehem had been a good thing, a good idea Saint Dominic had a thousand years ago: a place where people who did not ever want to fall in love or get married-or felt like they could not-could go and live really good lives.
But it seemed to me, too, that the world outside the monastery ought to be about the same, only with falling in love and maybe having kids, a place where people liked each other and helped each other, and everybody got to do what he was good at.
That has never changed for me. When you read the rest of this you're not going to believe me, but I am writing the truth. We have to make it like that, and the only way we can do it is for each person to choose it and change. I chose it that night, and if I have slipped up pretty often God knows I am truly sorry about every slip.
Sometimes I have had to slip. I ought to say that, too.
2
The Santa Charita
I am not going to tell you much about the next few days. They are not important and run together anyway. I asked various people about another Havana, and they all said there was not one. I asked about my father and his casino, but nobody had heard of it. I walked down every last street in town, and I talked to priests at two churches. They both told me to go back to Our Lady of Bethlehem. I did not want to do that, and I did not think I could even if I tried. Now I hope things are different, but then I was sure I could not. I tried to find work, and sometimes I did get a few hours' work for a little money. Mostly it was around the docks.
Then Senor heard me asking about work. He said, 'Pay attention, muchacho. You got a place to sleep?'
I said no.
'Bueno. You need someplace to sleep and meals. You come with me. You got to work and work hard, but we'll feed you and give you a hammock and a place to sling it, and when we get home you'll get some money.'
That is how I got to be on the Santa Charita. English sailors talk about signing articles and all that, but I did not really sign anything. The mate I had talked to just talked to the captain, and the captain wrote my name in his book. Then the mate told me to make my mark beside it, so I initialed it and that was all there was to it. I think the mate's name was Gomez, but I have known a lot of people with that name and I may be wrong. We said Senor. He was a little man with big shoulders, and smallpox had given him a really tough time when he was younger. It took me two or three days to get used to the way he looked.
