When I flew into Miami, all I seemed to see from the air was water. It was everywhere, the encroaching sea at the coast, and inland shining ribbons that sliced the landscape to pieces. Much of downtown Miami was protected, of course, but outlying districts, even just blocks away, were flooded. I was mildly shocked.
But the place still worked. Impressive causeways linked up the new islands, and I saw pod buses in chains like shining beads, navigating around the new archipelago much as in my childhood you could drive down the Keys from Largo to West.
A dutiful if reluctant son, I was returning to Florida. I hadn’t been back here for, shame to say it, over ten years. That’s a long time these days. It’s a changing world, and over such an interval change heaps up like a head of water behind a sandbank, and then bursts all over you.
Out of the airport, I took a pod bus down to Calle Ocho, 8th Street, and then a ferry. It was a smart, agile airboat, not much more than a sheet of plastic driven by an immense fan. My pilot was a girl, maybe twenty, with not a word of English. She made that little boat skim like a skateboard; it was a fun ride.
We headed into Little Havana. We squirmed through swarms of boats and yachts. There were people on Jet Skis and old Everglades swamp buggies and even battered tourist pedalos, many of them laden with stuff. Along Calle Ocho the boats and junks had been ganged together to make huge, ragtag floating markets: there were cafйs and tabaqueros, and floating stores selling cheap clothes, even bridal wear. Bugs and flies rose everywhere, great clouds of them, far more than I remembered from my childhood. But there were still old men playing dominoes in the Maximo Gomez Park, and in Memorial Boulevard, heavily sandbagged, the Eternal Torch still burned in honor of the Bay of Pigs counter-revolutionaries. All this took place at the feet of the old buildings, many of which were still occupied, in their higher floors anyhow. The aging building stock gleamed silver, coated in smart Paint, as if they had been wrapped in foil. Beneath the tide marks you could see how the water was working away at the stone and the concrete. Barnacles on skyscrapers, for God’s sake.
In places there were cleared-out swathes, great lanes of rubble over which kids and scavengers swarmed. The tracks of hurricanes, probably, gaps in the urban landscape that would never be filled in. A coast is a place of erosion, uncle George used to say to me, a place where two inimical elements, the land and the sea, war it out relentlessly, and in the end the sea is always going to win. One day all these grand old buildings were going to just subside into the ocean, their contents spilling into great mounds of garbage in the patient water.
In the meantime, life went on. My pilot waved at rivals or friends, cheerfully yelling what sounded like obscenities. Everybody had some place to go, just like always. Despite all the dirty water everywhere it was still the Little Havana I remembered, a place I had always found exciting.
When we reached the coast I had the boat drop me at a small ferry stop a couple of kilometers from my mother’s house. I had decided to walk the rest of the way, my pack on my back.
It was the middle of the afternoon. The road, a northwest drag following the line of the coast, was good enough and had been resurfaced recently with a bright central stripe of self-maintaining silvertop. But you could see that the sea sometimes came up this far: there were bits of dried-up seaweed in the gutters, tide marks around the bases of the telegraph poles. There wasn’t a single car to be seen, not one, and the silence in which I walked was dense. That was a jarring discontinuity with my memories of childhood: on a comparable Tuesday afternoon in 2005, say, the cars would have been purring past, an endless flow. The housing stock had changed, too. The timber-frame houses I remembered, each nestling in its half-acre of lawn, were mostly abandoned, boarded up and in various states of decay, or they had gone altogether, leaving vacant lots behind, as if they had been spirited up into the sky. A few had been replaced by squat poured-concrete blocks with narrow windows: the modern style, fortresses against hurricanes, each an integral block, seamless from its roof to its deep foundations.
The air was bright and hazy, and the wet heat settled on me like a blanket. I was soon sweating, and regretting my decision to walk. There was an unpleasant smell in the air, too, a stink of salty decay, as if some immense sea animal was rotting on the beach. But it couldn’t be that, of course; there were no animals in the sea.
At last I bore down on my mother’s house, my childhood home. It was one of the few of the old stock still standing. But it was surrounded by heaps of sandbags, all slowly decaying. Big electric screens shimmered around the yard, designed to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and on the roof a wagon-wheel home turbine languidly turned, barely stirred by the breeze.
And here came my big brother, around the corner of the house, large as life, paintbrush in hand. “Michael! So you showed your face.” Instant criticism, but what could you expect? John wiped his palm ostentatiously on his coveralls, leaving a silvery streak, and held his big hand out to shake mine.
I shook back, cautiously. John was a big man, built like a football player. He always towered over me. A couple of years older than me, he’s balding, and his brown eyes are hard, set in a broad face. My features come from my mother’s side, but where she was always tall, pretty, with gray eyes like smoke, I’m small, round-shouldered, dark. Intense, people sometimes say. I’m more like my uncle George, in fact. My mother always said I reminded her of England. I got her gray eyes, though, which looked good in the fleeting years when I was almost handsome.
John takes after our father. As always, he intimidated me.
“I flew in,” I said lamely. “Quite a journey these days.”
“Isn’t it just? Kind of hot, too. Not good weather to work in.” He clapped me on the back, spreading more Paint and sweat over my shirt, thus messing up my laundry and my conscience. He led me around to the back of the house. “Mom’s indoors. Making lemonade, I think. Though it’s sometimes hard to tell exactly what she’s doing,” he said with conspiratorial gloom. “Say hello to the kids. Sven? Claudia?”
They came running from around the side of the house. They’d been playing soccer in the yard; their ball rolled plaintively along the ground, chiming softly for attention. They faced me and smiled, their eyes blank. “Uncle Michael, hi.” “Hello.”
Sven and Claudia, in their early teens, were tall, handsome, well-fed kids with matching shocks of blond hair. They were the products of John’s second marriage, to a German called Inge, now vanished after a divorce; they had their mother’s coloring, though both had something of their father’s heavyset massiveness. I always thought they looked like Cro-Magnon hunters.
For a couple of minutes I tried to make small talk with the kids about soccer. It turned out Claudia was the keenest, and even had a trial lined up for her local pro club. But as usual the talk was strained, polite,
a formality, as if I were a school inspector.
We were all wary. I’d committed a faux pas a couple of Christmases back when I’d sent them packages addressed to Sven and Claudia Poole. After the divorce my mother had taken to using her maiden name, as had I. But when he left home John switched back to my father’s name, Bazalget — I’d never known why, some row with my mother — and so these two were officially Bazalgets. John had a way of blowing up at me about such things at family occasions, spoiling the day and upsetting everybody.
I’d learned to tread carefully. We are an unusual family. Then again, maybe not.