Chapter 23 Summary

Eire talks about the movie The Viking starring Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas, a movie Carlos watches over and over the summer of 1959. In his words, the world has not changed too much in Havana. Men are being killed, of course, shot against the wall, but other than that, life goes on as it always has.

Carlos finds out years later that one of his relatives had been killed against the wall. The lore has it that in the moments before his death, this relative "grabbed his crotch with his right hand, though his arms were bound around his chest, and shouted, 'Shoot me here first maricones! Shoot this!"

Carlos compares this way of facing death to that of the Viking way. While the Vikings invoke their god Odin, the Cuban way would be to say, "Go to hell, you fags, I'm going...