Thoughts Without Cigarettes

  In the hospital, my mother would sit back, across from me, muttering something to herself—no one being around to help her. Maybe in her moments alone, waiting, she prayed—a little black rosary inside her purse—though I bet that just as often as she asked God for guidance or gave thanks, she chastised him for doing such a lousy job. And why wouldn’t she? Somewhere along the line, during this long period of separation from my family, when that partition between my mother and me became the story of our lives, I had absorbed English from the nurses, doctors, and children of my acquaintance with some kind of desperate ease. English in, Spanish out, or at least deeply submerged inside me—from my childhood onward, I have had long complicated dreams in which only Spanish is spoken.

  The kicker was that I’d gotten sick in Cuba, on a trip born, in part, of my mother’s homesickness. Since coming to New York in 1943 as my father Pascual’s young bride from Holguín, she’d returned only once, with my brother some six years before, in 1949 or so, and I suppose that, aside from missing her family, she wanted to show me, her second son, off to them. But it’s also possible that by then, my mother and father needed a break from each other, for at that point, their marriage was already going through its share of tensions having to do with some lingering animosities between them that went back to an earlier time. (You must now see my father as he surely had been in the 1940s: a jaunty lady-killer, about six foot one, with a former campesino’s wide-eyed wonderment over life in the city, a smoothness in his manner, his wavy dark hair brilliant with lotion, and his face redolent of both cologne and cocky self-confidence, all of which amounted to a formula: Pascual + nightlife = my mother’s loneliness and befuddlement.)

  My father had originally come up to join two of his sisters who had left Cuba for New York in the early 1940s. My aunt Borja, five years younger than my father and married to a fellow named Eduardo Basulto, worked as a bilingual travel agent for Pan American airlines. She had studied English in either Holguín or Havana and had started with the airline just after they initiated their popular Cuba-bound routes from New York in 1939. I think she’d been transferred to New York as the result of a promotion, and what her husband did, I do not know—I’ve heard that he was a businessman, in what line of negocios I can’t say—but it was his signature and name, Basulto, that adorned the lease to the first-floor apartment in which my brother and I would be raised. Now, how and why Eduardo Basulto ended up settling on a first-floor tenement flat in such a nondescript university neighborhood, way uptown from the bustle, where mostly working-class Irish and college folks lived, I can’t say. Perhaps he’d gotten tipped off by a Cuban who lived around there, or perhaps, while looking through the want ads in a Spanish-language newspaper, like El Diario, had come upon a listing for a cheap apartment in a “quiet enclave” near a park and just a five-minute walk from the subway station on Broadway. Situated at 419 West 118th Street, in a building that had gone up around 1900, that apartment was a far cry from a typical solar in Cuba. Of a “railroad” configuration, it consisted of a living room that faced the street; an adjoining bedroom with French doors, the room’s window opening to a darkish courtyard; a narrow kitchen, which with its leaking pipes had already seen better days; and a long dimly lit hallway that led to a bathroom and two smaller rooms in the back. Neither fancy nor completely crumbling (yet) and situated directly above a basement with rumbling boilers and noisome plumbing, as a more or less temporary place to live, it would do. Slowly my aunt and her husband filled it with furnishings. Some bric-a-brac and photographs from Cuba soon adorned the walls, and blue linoleum had been put in by the management company to cover the floors. Outside in the entryway foyer, the name Basulto in discreet lettering was printed on a slot over the mailbox and bell for apartment number 2, alongside such others as Blair and Walker and Hall.

  Once they had settled in, my father’s oldest sister, Maya, and her dapper husband, Pedro Tellería, joined them. It must have seemed a logical and familial thing for them to do; Pedro made his living as a musician, playing the double bass with one of Xavier Cugat’s orchestras, and as it happened, during that early heyday of big-band Cuban music, often performed in some of the more fancy venues in the city. As for Maya, she too went to work, in Macy’s as a salesclerk, and along the way, missing my father, with whom she was close, began to write him regularly, her letters encouraging him to come north for a visit—de visita—a notion that he, under his sister’s sway (my mother would always say that she “dominated” him) took to heart.

  By then, my father, raised on farms near Jiguaní in eastern Cuba, and a campesino to his bones, had begun his courtship of my mother in earnest; he’d met her in 1939, when she was working as a ticket girl in a movie house in Holguín. Perhaps he’d gone there to look for women or to take in a movie or two, though Jiguaní, a largish town in its own right, must have surely had its share of cinemas. Whatever the circumstances, an afternoon arrived when he found himself waiting in a line by the ticket seller’s window of the Neptuno movie theater along one of the main drags of that city. Behind a glass or wire-meshed booth sat my mother, then twenty-six years of age and in her prime—with a good figure and of a fair height, about five foot five in low-heeled shoes, her hair dark, curled, and falling to her shoulders, her face so intelligent, whimsical, and filled with life, her lips pursed in a smile.

  She must have given him a mirthful up-and-down—because he was already some kind of man, exuding a perfume-drenched sweat and virility that she would one day describe to me, laughing, as “muy muy fuerte” (“Oh so very powerful”). She must have liked something about him, perhaps the hopefulness that she saw in his eyes. Doubtless he was cordial and gentlemanly around her, didn’t drink or smoke, though he would have shown the hard edges of a fellow brought up on a farm. Since she always took in the movies after her shift ended, she probably joined him inside the theater, and as he slipped in a few words during those stretches when that interior, filled with cigarette smoke and the cries of infants, grew cacophonous with conversation, he probably tried to talk her into going out somewhere, to a dance hall or for a stroll in one of Holguín’s small parks or to dally in a café. Eventually there came the moment when she first heard him say his name: “Soy José-Pascual Hijuelos de Jiguaní,” and she told him her own, “Magdalena de la Luz.”

  Possibly, as she sat across from him during a meal in one of the town’s placitas, she noticed the way he chewed his food loudly, smacking his lips; and while this may have offended her always snooty sensibilities, for she had come from a good family that had fallen on hard times, there would have been something so engaging about his smile and the way he looked at her, as if she were the only one in the world, that she would have forgiven that crudeness. Somewhere along the line, after they’d been seeing each other for a while, they would have started fooling around in some manner and laughed at the stars the way young people, feeling immortal, do while strolling through the night, the velvet sky hanging over them. They would have made a hell of an impression in the local dance halls, and the more they saw each other, the more she would have felt confused by her growing feelings for this plainspoken fellow from Jiguaní. At the time, there was someone else hovering about the periphery of her life, a well-off lawyer who’d been after her lately. But perhaps he was dull as a button, a very proper sort, a gentleman, ever so obedient and respectful around women, the sort to insist upon a chaperone—in other words, a bore—while she, a live wire in those days, wanted someone a little more exciting even if he might be a little blunt in his manner, but not overly so, like the tall campesino who’d smelled of both the farm and cologne, and seemed, from the way he stared at her, to know something about women.

  After a while, they began spending time in each other’s family homes, so they might find out what they were getting into. Now, while my father grew up mainly in the countryside of Oriente province, with a bloodline going back to who knows when in Cuba—the 1820s, if not earlier, I’ve heard—my mother came from a family whose begin
nings in Cuba were of far more recent vintage, the early 1890s. That’s when my maternal grandfather, one Gerónimo Torrens, from whom I derived my middle name (yes, Jerome), first arrived in eastern Cuba from Barcelona as an officer with the Spanish army. In those contentious times—the Cubans had been struggling to gain independence from Spain on and off since the first wars of the 1830s—my grandfather oversaw the collecting of road and bridge tariffs from the local Cuban populace in and around the districts of Holguín. Though a photograph of him, taken in his later middle age, circa 1920 or so, conveys the image of a bald and prosperous, somewhat portly gentleman with a quite serious no-nonsense countenance, he had carried out his duties as a young officer rather casually, often looking the other way when it came to the Cubans, whose affable manner and patriotic fervor had won his sympathies. (My mother would always talk about the way he, a Catalan and therefore a separatist by inclination, never charged the Cubans for their passage through his toll roads and how he was well liked because of it.) He was certainly taken by the forested beauty of the region and by the friendly nature of its people, for by the time the Cuban republic finally came into being in 1902, he, like so many other Spaniards before him, decided to put down roots there.

  From a prosperous family in Barcelona, owners of one of the most successful shoe factories in Cataluña, he established a thriving shoe business of his own in Holguín. Along the way, he brought my maternal grandmother, María, over from Mallorca to join him. Whether they had married in Spain or tied the bonds in Holguín, I can’t say, but as an immigrant vested in that young nation’s future, Gerónimo, a Cuban by choice, brought into the world three holguinera daughters—María (1910), Magdalena (1913), and Margarita, or Cheo (1915), whom he, prospering from a postwar boom, raised in a fine house by a park not far from Holguín’s highest hill, Loma de la Cruz.

  Which is to say that my mother, the same lady I’d sometimes see quietly muttering heaven knows what to herself as she went about washing the dishes, had grown up in the genteel and fairly comfortable existence of the Cuban upper middle class, with servants, cooks, and laundresses helping to run the household. They were well-off enough that she had journeyed as a young girl with her family to Spain, spending some months shuttling between Barcelona and Majorca, where on nearly every evening, they went to an opera or a ballet or a zarzuela; and when she and her family weren’t out enjoying that cultured life, my mother spent time with her abuelos, whom she, with wonderment in her eyes, always remembered as kindly and refined—“gente refinada,” as she’d put it—their life, as she had experienced it, but a glimpse of a world she would never see again. What she must have dreamed about on those transatlantic voyages to and from Spain as she’d stand by the railings of one of those ships, looking over the pitching grayness of the ocean, I can’t say. But as an elegant little girl in a sunbonnet and prim blue dress, with a slightly petulant look on her face, she had an imagination that would have populated those bell-waves with sirens and mermaids—no wonder, then, that she’d speak in later years of once having sailed across the Atlantic during the times of Columbus, via the enchantments of past reincarnations.

  But it was not as if she returned home to a house that was lacking in the arts. My abuelo, a member of the Masonic Society, who sang opera and wrote poetry that he’d publish in Spain and in local Cuban newspapers, did everything he could to re-create the same kind of salon society in his home. Inviting many local artists into his house for weekly gatherings, he, without an iota of the campesino in him and a most formal man, became locally famous for such cultural fetes, which my mother, as a girl, had been encouraged to perform in. Though she never elaborated on just how those afternoons unfolded, beyond saying that their visitors sang, acted, played instruments, and recited famous poems and speeches, she’d come away from that time with an aristocratic and somewhat artistic air, even a haughtiness that would develop all the more as she grew older—and, in fact, poorer, for in the midst of those glories came her family’s decline, thanks to her father’s ambitions and, perhaps, his overly patriotic soul.

  He’d been a moderately wealthy and rather levelheaded businessman who in a moment of lapsed judgment placed both his trust and financial resources in the hands of one Gerardo Machado, a Liberal Party candidate for the presidency of Cuba, into whose coffers my grandfather’s money, by way of a large loan, had flowed. He must have been elated over Machado’s victory in 1925 and proud of the services he had rendered to his adopted country, until, having gotten into debt, he found it necessary to journey to Havana to address Machado about the urgently pressing matter of repayment, a notion to which Machado, in the tradition of a good man changed to the bad by power—as president he was to be known in Cuba as a “second Nero”—did not warm. Traveling frequently to Havana, my grandfather always came back to Holguín empty-handed, and his grief over that betrayal, as well as the financial ruin that accompanied it, accounted, in my mother’s opinion—“Ay pero, hijo, fue algo muy triste”—for the stroke that took his life one evening. He was taking a shower and singing the bolero “Dónde Estás Corazón,” when in mid-verse his voice, a fine baritone, simply stopped. My mother, opal eyed and lovely, had just turned fourteen.

  Appropriately, his funeral was grand, a procession replete with a horse-drawn hearse, gloomy priests, men in dark tri-cornered hats beating drums solemnly, and hundreds of prayerful mourners winding from the street outside their house, where his body had lain in state overnight, to the church and then the campo santo. Lingering by his grave that day, my mother surely had her regrets, for, with the onset of adolescence, she had apparently become fond of tormenting him and, for that matter, quite a number of people with her untoward behaviors.

  At school, despite winning prizes for writing essays and poetry and for singing the Cuban anthem, “La Bayamesa,” better than anyone else, she often got in trouble with her teachers for a generally insolent attitude. She had been the plague of a hapless local haberdasher whose female manikins, in the fine array of their 1920s flapper dresses, displayed in a row outside his arcade shop, my mother regularly knocked over at dusk just because she felt like it (this, in the dreams of her later life, she’d always remember as if it had just happened, with fondness and in detail, down to the mole just below the shopkeeper’s quivering, mustachioed lips.) She loved to repeat aloud to anyone who’d listen the randy verses she’d overhear on the streets; and when it rained, the sky bursting open, no matter the time of night, she couldn’t help but run outside and spin in circles in the torrential downpours, ruining her clothes and getting drenched to the bone. Why she did so she never knew. She’d consort with local brujas—or witches—whose homes she treated like second schools, made friends with the lowliest children from the streets, and expressed, fitfully, a longing to hang around the local dance halls. Unlike her sisters, she had gotten some cucarachas in her head, and her papá, a strict Spaniard at heart, responded as he only could. Her mother, María, never laid a hand on her, but her father did, over and over again—“Me pegaba, mucho, mucho,” she’d later tell me—often with a strap or a belt, and most violently so during periods of his greatest distress.

  But no matter how much he beat her, it only provoked her further. Though she loved her papi more than any man in the world, she, sticking her tongue out at him, often spoke to her father in a manner that no daughter ever should. Even after he’d fallen on hard times, and there came the point when he no longer had the spirit or will to punish her, she still couldn’t help herself. My mother, a creature of habit, had become so accustomed to his beatings that when they stopped, her world turned upside down, and, seeing him brought so low, she’d practically beg her papi to beat her again, as if that would somehow bring back the better days of old.

  Probably neighbors or some of her papá’s former employees helped them to vacate their fine house for a more humble dwelling, but that move, by horse-drawn carts, or camión, with most of their furnishings having been sold off, must have been a disheartening and frighteni
ng experience for them, if not a pure misery. Far from Spain, with no other family in Cuba to call upon for reassurance, they surely must have felt so alone—and scattered; no wonder her nerves took a turn for the worse. I don’t know what skills Abuela María had, if any, or how she might have supported her young daughters, though I believe she may have become a seamstress. I do know that she was a woman of great piety, “una santa,” of a sweet and quiet disposition, and the sort who, never hurting a soul, didn’t know quite what to do with her spirited daughter. Spicing up any gathering with her vivacious manner, my mother seems to have become in her own way something of a minor celebrity in the dance halls of Holguín, where, she’d one day tell me, she became known as a “queen of the rumba.”

  At carnival time, as throngs of partiers and musicians snaked through the streets, a battery of drummers beating out “La Chambelona” on their congas, she especially shined as a dancer, and among her nicknames, there was one, having to do with the movies, that apparently came about because of her high cheekbones and nearly luminescent eyes: the “Katie Hepburn” of Holguín. (While there are a few similarities between them, I have seen her in an early photograph, in which she, with a pageboy hairdo, slightly plumpish face, and a question-mark curl licking her ear, more easily resembled a silent film vamp like Theda Bara or Clara Bow, stars of her teenage years.) By the 1930s, as a pretty, light-skinned cubanita of a fierce intelligence and vivacious temperament, exuding an aristocratic air but also seeming accessible—“Yo gozaba!”—“I had my fun!”—she had no problem attracting the attentions of men, among them that boring but sturdy lawyer whom she’d turn away and of course, my father.