No wonder Mami had ordered a hundred-pound pig… My God! They arrived in platoons… battalions… hordes… whole family trees full. Yeya was standing with Mami here in the little living room. The front door opened right into it. Nestor hung back in the rear of the room… all of twelve or fourteen feet from the front door. This wasn’t going to be fun… every single tribesman clucking and fuming and eating up all the delicious gossip… right in our own family!… I can’t believe it was Dad’s cousin Camilo’s son, Nestor, who did that!… and so forth and so on… and on and on…
The first to arrive was his uncle Pedrito, Mami’s oldest brother, and his family. Family? He arrived with a goddamned population!… There’s Uncle Pepe and his wife, Maria Luisa, and Mami’s mother and father, Carmita and Orlando Posada, who live with them, and Uncle Pepe’s and Maria’s three grown sons, Roberto, Eugenio, and Emilio, and their daughter Angelina, and her second husband, Paco Pimentel, and the five children they have between them, and Eugenio’s, Roberto’s, Emilio’s wives and children and… on and on…
The adults hugged and kissed Yeya and otherwise made a big fuss over her… The children mumbled through it and endured wet smacks from Yeya’s scarlet gash of a mouth… and said to themselves, “Urgggh! I’ll never be a slobbering old mess like her”… but mainly they could smell the pig roasting, and they knew what that was!… and the moment they were set free, they began racing through the casita toward the backyard, where, no doubt, I, Camilo, would say to them, “Little children, come unto me—and see how a real man… roasts a pig.”
One of the little boys, one of Aunt Maria Luisa’s grandsons or stepgrandsons, God knew which, seven or eight years old, was off like a rabbit with the rest of them when he came to a sudden stop in front of Nestor and looked up at him with his mouth open and just stared.
“Hi!” said Nestor, in the voice one uses for children. “You know what’s out back?” He smiled the smile one uses for children. “There’s a whole pig! It’s THIS big!” He held his arms out like wings to show just how colossal it was. “It’s bigger than you are, and you’re a big boy!”
The boy didn’t change his expression in any way. He just kept looking at him, gawking with his mouth open. Then he spoke: “Are you really the one who did it?”
That so unnerved Nestor, he found himself stammering out, “Did what?—who said—no, I’m not the one who did it.”
The boy digested this answer for a minute and then said, “You are too!”—and bolted toward the back of the casita.
In came more clans, tribes, hordes, the battalions. Half of them would come in the front door, seek him with their eyes, spot him, whisper to one another—and avert their eyes and never look at him again. But some of the older men, in typical Cuban fashion, deemed it incumbent upon themselves to stick their big noses in and call a spade a spade.
His uncle Andres’s cousin-in-law, Hernán Lugo, a real blowhard, came over with a very stern look on his face and said, “Nestor, you might think it’s none of my business, but it is my business, because I know people who are still trapped in Cuba—know them personally—and I know what they go through, and I’ve tried to help them, and I have helped them, in many different ways, so I’ve got to ask you something face-to-face: Okay, so technically they had the right to do what they did, but I don’t see how you ever—ever—let them use you as their tool. How could you?”
Nestor said, “Look, Señor Lugo, I was sent up that mast to talk the guy down. The guy was up on top—”
“Jesus Christ, Nestor, you don’t know enough Spanish to talk anybody down from anything.”
Nestor saw red, literally saw a film of red before his eyes. “Then I needed you, didn’t I, Señor Lugo. You would have been a big help! You coulda climbed eighty feet of rope, straight up, without using your legs, to get up there faster, and you coulda gotten as close to him as I did and you coulda seen the panic in his face and heard it in his voice and seen the way he was about to slide off a bosun’s chair about this big and fall eighty feet—and explode on that deck like