No Way Home: A Cuban Dancer’s Story. Carlos Acosta

the air. The loser had to put a mud ball in his mouth and bite it in two. It was my favourite game, even though I quite often had to bite a mud ball and inevitably I would end up swallowing some of it. It was a miracle I never got worms.

      That evening, we were halfway through a match that was very important for both our reputations as mud-eaters when I caught Pedro Julio trying to cheat.

      ‘Stuck!’

      ‘It’s not stuck!’

      ‘It is so, Yuli, look, it’s standing up.’

      ‘I know your tricks, bro’, that stick’s lyin’ down in the mud. Look, look!’

      ‘Shit, bro’, that’s cheating, nooo!’

      I grabbed the mud-stick, and balancing it on the end of each finger in turn, threw it at the mud. Pedro Julio turned green because the stick landed upright each time. I kept on throwing it from my knee, my elbow, my head and every time the stick fell right down and stuck perfectly. It seemed it was my lucky day.

      ‘Now you’re really gonna see how it’s done. Get ready to bite!’ I crowed.

      Preparing my final throw, I took hold of the mud-stick by the nail and walked back a few paces. Pedro Julio was sweating. One, two, three and splat! Stuck!

      ‘That doesn’t count, you cheated. I’m not playing any more!’

      ‘Look who’s talking, stop being a wimp and eat the mud ball!’

      ‘I’m not going to fucking eat it!’

      ‘Bite it, bite it, you lost!’

      ‘I’m not biting nothing.’

      ‘Take that then!’

      I rubbed the mud ball in his face. He got another even bigger one and pressed it against my forehead. I jumped on top of him and we fell into the mud. I had him pinned down good and proper by the neck when a black car drew up beside us.

      I felt someone tugging at my arm.

      ‘Let him go, let him go, Junior, let him go …!’

      Everybody called me Yuli around the neighbourhood, a few people called me El Moro, but nobody ever called me Junior.

      I turned and in one quick movement an extremely strong man had thrown me into the car.

      ‘Quick, quick, quick!’

      Shit, no! It was my teacher, Silvia, and a driver.

      ‘Hurry up, hurry up, or we’ll be late!’ she ordered the driver and then she turned to me.

      ‘How is it possible, Carlos Junior, that you have failed to turn up for a performance that is so important for your school?’

      I only managed to say: ‘Oh my God, I forgot! Miss, it’s just …’

      ‘The show has been suspended for the past half hour because the mazurka is incomplete. Do you think that’s right? Look at the state of you. You look like a vagrant.’

      I was completely covered in mud.

      The driver put his foot down on the accelerator. He went over every pothole, rattling around as though it were cattle he was transporting not people. In the back seat, I was pinned between Silvia and another teacher, who stared at me and smoked as Silvia fired out questions.

      ‘Why were you fighting with that boy?’

      ‘Because he didn’t want to eat mud …’ I replied, all innocence.

      ‘That’s no reason to fight … of course he didn’t want to eat mud. Whoever would have thought of such a thing?’

      I kept quiet. Obviously I had thought of such a thing, as had all my friends who loved to play ‘Eat Mud’ and enjoyed it when their opponents lost.

      When I arrived at the stage door there were several teachers waiting to whisk me rapidly inside.

      ‘For God’s sake, he’s completely covered in mud … Where’s he been, a pigsty? What are we going to do with you? You’re a disaster!’

      They all spoke at once as they scrubbed the mud off my face and legs. One applied a bit of make-up to me while another whipped off my clothes and shoved me into a dance-belt and leotard. They moved fast, shaking me and manipulating me as though I were a puppet.

      ‘Up, put your hand in … Stand …’

      I did what they said. They finished putting my jacket on then bustled me out of the changing room. There were a lot of people in the corridor, most of them students who looked me up and down as though I were a Martian. I was just about to go onstage, when I heard the music for the mazurka and, behind me, someone shouting: ‘Your shoes, your shoes, you’ve forgotten your shoes!’

      My heartbeat accelerated. The music was getting to the part when we had to enter.

      ‘Get a move on, get a move on, or we’ll go on late!’ cried Grettel in a panic.

      I fell to the floor, put on my shoes and ran like lightning.

      Aaaand … a-one, two, three, one, two, three.

      Phew! I had made it. I faked a smile and executed the geometrical formations all around the stage, while Grettel shot me furious glances.

      Afterwards, I lurked in a corner at the back of the theatre wearing only my muddy, torn shorts, skulking along the wall like a rat. The phrases I had so often heard echoed in my ears: ‘You’re dirty, you stink, you’re a disaster.’

      They were right. I was a disaster. My life, my world, was a disaster. Perhaps it was fate. Perhaps the saints knew that on 2 June 1973, a disaster of a boy would be born in Los Pinos, a muddle-headed, mud-eating, break-dancing fool with a sick mother and a jailbird father determined against all odds that he should study ballet. Perhaps that was my destiny.

      I was replaced by Ulises in the Camagüey Festival because of my continued absences. The school won nearly all the medals that year and our teacher Lupe’s ballet, Dreams of Sailors, in which I should have been dancing, won most of the prizes. Lupe had done everything she could not to lose me from the cast, but I kept skipping about a week’s worth of classes each month and everyone was frightened that I would fail to turn up for performances during the festival.

      At home we made a pact not to say anything to my father. We did not want to upset him now that he had been transferred from the Combinado to a cadet school. He was working there, earning seventy pesos a month. The salary was not enough for us to live on, so we had to try to cut back on household expenses. We stopped going to the cinema and we went to school with the exact money for the bus journey and nothing more. I had to keep wearing the same pair of trousers even though they were already too small for me. My sisters sold our coffee and soap rations to get money for food and my mother resumed her fortnightly trips to the countryside to exchange our rations with the farmers.

      At the beginning of September 1984, I enrolled for what should have been my third year of ballet. In fact, I had to repeat my second year because, having started at the age of nine instead of ten, I was a year younger than my classmates. Repeating the year meant that I would be in the correct group for my age: eleven years old, in my sixth grade of schooling and my second year of ballet.