Thoughts Without Cigarettes

  In general, however, as much as I might have been a brooding presence, my pop seemed happier than ever in those days. He seemed especially pleased by how my older brother had fared: Since coming back from his stint in the air force, as a Beau Brummel, the sartorial style of Europe having rubbed off on him, he not only made up the credits he needed for his high school diploma but had gotten into Brooklyn College, where he studied art with some fairly well-known painters, who were encouraging of him. Graduating, with that profession in mind, he began teaching art in a Brooklyn high school. Best of all, whatever differences he may have once had with my father seemed to be forgotten.

  He’d turn up with the woman he’d married in a quiet civil ceremony, and she, of mixed Italian and Jewish descent, with her raven hair and dark eyes, hit it off famously with both my mother and my father, though from what I could observe, she had taken a particular liking to my father, who, doting on her, kept bringing up, and quite happily so, the notion that he would love to see them bring a bambino into the world. I can only recall one moment of awkwardness between them. She had just started working for the city of New York and, over dinner perhaps, the subject of her salary had somehow come up: I don’t remember any exact figures—perhaps it was something like seven thousand dollars a year—but that number threw my father for a loop and somewhat saddened him. After twenty-five years at the Biltmore, he had yet to earn as much himself. (His shoulders slumped, he smiled, nodding, but his eyes showed something else.)

  That was the summer, of course, of the moon landing. Nightly, when the progress of that mission was broadcast, my mother and father and I would watch it, like most of the country, on television. As Neil Armstrong first alighted on the lunar terrain, uttering his famous speech, my pop, most comfortably situated on his reclining chair, seemed truly enchanted—to think that someone of his generation, who’d been raised on farms in rural Cuba, could live to witness such a monumental act of daring, must have gone through his mind. His lips, I recall, parted slightly at that moment, the way they would when he’d see a baby.

  I mention this because it’s the only thing I can really remember about the days preceding another journey I’d make. When my aunt Maya in Miami, speaking to my father by telephone, brought up the notion that I go down there for the rest of the summer and work for my uncle Pedro, it seemed a good idea. I would get to spend some time with family and make some money along the way. I certainly didn’t object, and while it wasn’t the sort of adventure I might have been craving, it was something different for me to look forward to, though I can’t imagine that it made my mother happy.

  A month or so short of my eighteenth birthday, I was so selfinvolved that on the day I left for Miami, and my father, sitting on our stoop, wanted to embrace me just before I got a lift down to Penn Station in a neighbor’s car, I sort of flinched and waved him off. Maybe I finally begrudgingly allowed him a kiss on my neck, but what I mainly remember is sitting in that car’s front seat with my little suitcase and a guitar set in back, and feeling slightly put-upon seeing him smiling—perhaps sadly—at me as he settled on that stoop again and reached for a cigarette. I can recall wondering if I’d been a little cold, but before I could change my mind, the car started up the hill and the last I saw of him was this: my Pop in a light blue short-sleeved shirt, a pair of checkered trousers, and sneakers. He had just gotten his dark wavy hair cut short for the summer, and without a doubt he, always liking to smell nice, had dabbed his face with cologne. Some girl was skipping rope a few steps away and as my mother, Magdalena, watched me leaving from our first-floor window, my father turned to say something to her. Then he stood up to say something to me, and waved again: I think the last words he mouthed to me were, “Pórtate bien”—“Behave yourself.” Not that I attached much importance to that, and if I said anything back to him, I don’t recall.

  Of course now I wish I’d been more receptive to him in those moments, but the truth is, I didn’t know it would be the last time I’d see him alive.

  This is what happened: I’d been down in Miami for a few days and put to work by my uncle on one of his sites, mainly hauling bags of cement around. My uncle, incidentally, as a former musician, took an interest in the fact that I’d brought along a guitar and, on my second or third night there, had me follow him into his garage, where he kept his old double bass, the very one he had played for years with the Cugat orchestra. Bringing it out, he spent a few hours trying to teach me some old Latin standards like “Perfidia” and “El Manicero,” my uncle, in Bermuda shorts, attaining such a look of fierce concentration on his face, even if only playing an alternating bass line, while I, trying to fathom the arrangements, did my best to keep up with him. We weren’t bad nor good together, but he was not discouraging of me, even if he had better things to do. Along those garage walls were numerous photographs of my uncle Pedro in his glory days, posed on bandstands with his fellow musicians, all in evening coats and tails, an air of glamour about them: Some found him seated in a posh club with celebrities the likes of Errol Flynn, and, as I recall, Desi Arnaz. What he must have made of me, with my longish hair and blue jeans, I can’t say, but he, who had once been quite dapper in his time, seemed to have decided that he would have to take me downtown at some point to get me better clothes. As things turned out, there wouldn’t be much time for that to happen.

  My aunt Maya, by the way, of course, rebooted her efforts to lure me away from home. I won’t go into too many details about that—with Cubans, some things never change, and her old animosities and disparagements of my mother picked up where we had left them some ten years before, but mainly she kept to her old mantra that I would be much better off with them and that it was my mother at the heart of my father’s problems in life. (I suspect that once we had that telephone installed after my pop’s heart attack, she’d had some conversations with him when he could hardly get his words out straight.) But she also had some new tricks up her sleeve: Where before, she’d ply me with ice cream and toys and clothes, Maya, knowing that boys will be boys, did her best to fix me up with a neighborhood girl, a pretty Cuban who, if the truth be told, did not seem particularly thrilled by the notion. Her name I honestly do not recall, though I can tell you that she had longish auburn hair and a figure that in tight jeans was too luscious for me to bear. In any event, come the first Saturday after I’d arrived, we went out to a club near Miami Beach, this loud crazy place jammed to the rafters with young kids, where, at about nine that night as we were dancing—that is to say, while I, considering myself a musician, attempted to dance in that darkened room, its ceiling filled with twirling stars, and the music of Joe Cuba’s Latin boogaloo hit “Bang Bang” raging through enormous speakers—I felt this sudden and strange fluttering going up the right side of my body: It was so pronounced that I began shaking my arm wildly, and I must have had a strange expression on my face, for my date, if that’s what she was, looked at me oddly. Then, as quickly as it came, it went away.

  Sometime later, perhaps an hour had passed, I heard my name announced over the loudspeaker system. It was muffled, the music was so blaring, and at first I ignored it, until, during an interlude between songs, I heard it clearly: It went, at first in English and then in Spanish, “Would Oscar Hijuelos please come to the front office.” When I reached that office, my aunt Borja was sitting inside, a look of utter bewilderment and exhaustion on her face. “Come on,” she told me. “We have to go home.”

  Not once did anyone tell me what had happened, but I somehow knew. Back at my aunt Maya’s so late at night, I had to pack. My aunt Borja had called the airlines, trying to get us a flight to New York, but the best she could do was to book something quite early in the morning, which is why, I suppose, we spent that night not in Maya’s house but in a motel not far from the terminals. I honestly wish I could describe how Maya behaved throughout, except that I couldn’t look at her without seeing tears in her eyes, while Pedro, a stoic sort, shaking his head, had hung around by a kitchen table without saying
a word—what could anyone say? We left well past midnight. At the motel itself, with my aunt Borja, who could have been my father’s female identical twin, in a bed across from me, sighing as she smoked cigarette after cigarette (she lived to be ninety, by the way), I passed the late hours kind of knowing what must have happened but without knowing anything at all—it was as if no one could say more than “Your papá has had an accident.” I watched TV, an old-time movie: Enchantment starring David Niven, one of those classy tearjerkers Hollywood used to make—now and then I’d look over and see Borja wiping a tear from her eyes—and I kept on watching that film until its elegiac conclusion, at which point the station went off the air. Though my journey home early the next morning remains dim, I can remember coming into an apartment crowded with neighbors, and my mother’s unbridled, chest-heaving bereavement; Borja’s kindness and composure throughout; and meeting up with my brother that next Monday. Sometime in the early afternoon, we went downtown to Bellevue Hospital. There, someone at a desk escorted us to a certain room. It was a simple room with curtains drawn closed. At a certain moment, as we stood there, the curtains opened to a large window, and from some floor below, we could hear a lift operating. A platform came up, and on it rested my father, covered in a dark hooded shroud.

  A few days before, he had been working in the kitchen of Butler Hall’s rooftop restaurant as usual, but it seemed to everyone around him that he’d not been feeling well that evening. He had been sweating, his face was flushed, and he had trouble breathing. One of his fellow cooks in that place, a black man who by coincidence was also named Joe—my father sometimes went by that American shorthand—had even urged him to go home, and one of the waitresses there, a lady named Sally, would remember thinking to herself that my father had seemed rather exhausted and slow-moving, but when she’d asked him if everything was all right, he, in his quiet and self-effacing manner, perhaps worrying about holding on to the few extra dollars he’d make that night, just shrugged good-naturedly and told her that nothing was wrong. Perhaps getting a bit of air might help, he must have thought, and so, stepping out onto the terrace, which had a nice view over Morningside Park eastward to Harlem, he had pulled from his shirt pocket a package of Kent cigarettes in the soft wrapping and, lighting one, had taken a few drags, when, so Sally later reported, he had looked around in confusion, his right arm shaking, and the cigarette dropped from his lips, as he himself, his eyes turned to the sky, collapsed onto the roof tarpaulin.

  This happened at nine thirty on July twenty-sixth, about a week after the first moon landing and some twenty-seven years since he’d first arrived in the United States from Cuba. He was fifty-five, and the outpourings of grief at his passing, from his fellow hotel workers and friends from around the city, seemed unending.

  It’s hard to explain the supernatural things that happened after he was gone. It was hard to forget him, to put from one’s mind that not so long ago, he had, in fact, been sitting by that same table: I couldn’t go into the kitchen without thinking about him, and even when I managed to put him from my mind, some remembrance would hit me, just like that. Holed up in my room with the same pack of cigarettes he’d been smoking that final evening, for his belongings were delivered in a plastic bag, I’d leave them overnight in a drawer, then find them next morning sitting on the radiator or under my bed. I doubt that I sleepwalked and can’t explain how they got there any more than I can find a reason for the way pictures, of my folks in Cuba mainly, fell off the walls at night, or find an explanation for why the front door would abruptly open at around three thirty or four in the afternoon, when he used to come home, even after we’d taken care to shut the lock.

  The apartment, in any case, breathed his memories: In the early mornings, at about five thirty, when he used to get up and head to the hotel, I’d awake swearing that I’d heard his quiet shuffle in the hallway, his keys fiddling with the lock. And sometimes, cigarette smoke, though no one smoked inside the apartment—I never did in front of my mother—seemed to linger particularly in the kitchen. (And it wasn’t just I who noticed: My godmother, Carmen, coming downstairs to check in on my mother, would sometimes shiver, shaking her head, saying: “He’s still here.”) It so spooked me that I almost found it impossible to fall asleep without keeping a light on: I’d lose myself in a few comic books or some science fiction novel, or Mad magazines, though hardly an hour went by on those fitful nights when I wouldn’t think about what had happened. At the same time, if I heard anything, even something as mundane as water humming through the pipes or the rumbling of the boiler beneath, I’d imagine him roaming through the basement, with its twisting passageways, on his way out to visit us. I always expected that, any moment, he’d push open the door to my room, and if I’d happened to finally doze, I would soon enough shoot up in fright. I got to the point that I could not turn off the lamp, nor make my way through the night without listening to a transistor radio: I always dialed past the Latin music stations, preferring the talk shows of Barry Farber, a conservative broadcaster, and Jean Shepherd, whose comical stories, along with Farber’s antihippie harangues, simply kept me company.

  But the persistence of memory killed me: images of him, drifting in from the permanence of the past, much like the smoke one has blown from a cigarette, going off to the heavens.

  The situation wasn’t helped by my mother’s state of mind. She hadn’t been so bad during the weeks that her sister Cheo, coming in from New Jersey, slept by her side, but once my aunt went back home and Borja, another angel, returned to Miami, she really started losing her grip. She went off the deep end—perhaps some old buttons regarding the loss of her father, from a stroke too, when she was a girl, had been pushed—and doubling over with grief, she wandered back and forth in the hallway muttering, despite all the shit they’d put each other through, “Ay pero, mi Pascual.” That was one thing, but at night, resting in bed, at first sighing, then tossing and turning, she tended toward talking to herself and, as it were, hosting both sides of a conversation with my father.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing, woman.”

  “Then why are you looking at me that way?”

  “Because you are so pretty.”

  “Ah, hah, and that’s why you abandoned me!”

  Then she would call the spirits and witches of her childhood into the apartment, praying to Santa Misericordia and, on her knees in the hallway in a cracking voice, offer her spirit up to God so that she might follow him to wherever he had gone.

  I tended to find any excuse to stay out of the apartment, even if I’d just sit out on the stoop at night, where my pop used to, staring out at the lifeless street, where Columbia had put up its new institutional buildings, or I’d go upstairs and knock on Marcial’s door—he might show me a few new things on the guitar, and I’d sit watching his fingers work the fret board, all the while sipping a glass or two of dark Spanish wine. In general, folks were really kind to me, even the neighborhood pricks—at least for a while—but I’d have to come home sooner or later and then my mother, seeing my father in me, would start up with all kinds of crazy shit; she couldn’t resist letting me know that I was just like him—maybe nice in some ways, but only on the surface, and that deep down she knew I was up to no good and that I was a spoiled prince who’d treated her like a slave going back to the times of my illness, though occasionally she’d mess up and address me as Pascual, and what business did I have thinking that life might be easy, when we all should know that for some folks it will always be a hell. She’d go on as well about how I couldn’t have possibly really cared for him and that he knew it—why, I didn’t even let him embrace me on that day when I went to Miami and saw him for the last time; she saw that from the window. And for that matter, since when did I care for anybody else, particularly my own mother, who gave her life up for me, I was so obviously wrapped up in myself. Her tone was always indignant, often hysterical, and sometimes she’d yell out Pascual’s name in the middle of the night, doub
tlessly waking everyone in the building up, but without a single neighbor saying a peep (I’d just hear some windows shutting), and while I couldn’t blame her—what a horrid grief she must have experienced—it seemed to me that we had, as a family, so little to hang on to that I resolved to bring us together, as those phone-in radio shows might put it.