Thoughts Without Cigarettes

  I knew he was dead, but memory is a bitch and, with a daydreamer like myself, could make the past seem imminent. And though his presence has faded in its power from my mind by now, back then, I had such a strong recollection of him physically, and of his manner, it wasn’t much of a stretch for me to wishfully impose him upon the anonymity of a crowd.

  At night, I’d worry about falling asleep and seeing his ghost. Whereas I used to wake up with a jolt, inspired perhaps by the agitated emotions and repressed memories of my childhood, I’d now awaken, my heart beating wildly, from the impression that my pop was just outside in the hall waiting for me, as if he wanted to take me with him. One night I walked into the darkness of the living room, where I saw my father, or the shadow of him: He spoke to me, in Spanish of course, saying: “Soy ciego”—“I’m blind.” And then he said: “Por favor, abra la luz”—“Please, turn on the light.” When I did, he told me, “Thank you,” and simultaneously vanished. I swear this happened—dream or not, that’s what I saw and heard. After a while, it occurred to me that I had some demons to exorcize, but each time I sat down and tried to conjure the world I’d come from, and wrote about my father—honestly—the sensation that I was tampering with the dead left me feeling so anxious that by the time I’d get up from my desk, after scratching at my forearms and wrists while smoking cigarette after cigarette for hours, my skin was a bloody mess. This went on for a long time, each little fragment that I came up with (and threw into a box) bringing with it a price, by way of rashes and sores.

  In my self-mortifying Catholicism, I eventually came down with the worst case of eczema, so bad that even folks in my office noticed. My arms, chest, back, and neck were raw and dry; high-strung and feeling guilty, I lived with a picazón—an itching—that drove me crazy and intensified every time I’d sit down to write. It got to the point of being so painful that I felt myself on the brink of giving up on that novel, if not on writing entirely. It just wasn’t worth it. I was in such a bad way that no hydrocortisone cream made a difference, and I had to sleep with my arms held out over the sheets, anything to keep the fabric from touching me. (I even went to a dermatologist—and that wasn’t easy. She told me that she hadn’t seen such a bad case before and seemed puzzled that nothing she prescribed seemed to work.)

  I was at the height of that discomfort when I had a lovely dream: Walking in a meadow, maybe in a place like Cuba, in the distance I beheld a river, and in the water, there stood a man. As I approached, I could see that it was my pop, Pascual, awaiting me. There, he told me, shaking his head: “Porque te mortefiques?”—“Why are you tormenting yourself so?” And with the kindest of expressions on his face, he, reaching into that water, brought up cups of it in the bowl of his hands, which he washed over my arms, my face, my back. I don’t recall exactly how it resolved, but I do remember feeling a sense of relief, and, though a dream it may have been, in the morning when I awakened, my skin had cleared of it soreness.

  CHAPTER 8

  Our House in the Last World

  My work on that book, on the weekends and on most nights after work, became a passion which my mother, amused when I’d ask her questions about Cuba or about what she recalled of my childhood, thought of as my nice new hobby, which she went along with. At the office, where I was rarely seen without a library book in hand, I always got through my duties as quickly and efficiently as I could manage, so as to allow myself more time to write, while some of my coworkers, needing the overtime pay, were far less hurried. I didn’t like working past five, if it could be helped, and some days I worked so frantically that I sometimes missed lunch, my midday meals coming down to a candy bar eaten out in front of the building, followed by a few cigarettes afterward. (I always waited until past noon to have a smoke: I had watched too many people climbing the subway stairs on Fortieth Street wheezing and often stopping before reaching the top just to catch their breath, only to pause on street level to light up a cigarette.) I had long since begun to dress more casually, abandoning my ties and jackets for blue jeans and a shirt, as if I were the office Bohemian. Still, now and then, I’d get offered a better job with more duties—on one occasion, I was asked to run their office in Seattle, a position that would have paid me more money (though not enough) and came with an impressive-sounding title: VP of operations. (I turned it down.) Other opportunities arose along the way (I will not bore you), which I also turned my back on. After a while, management left me alone.

  And although I am perhaps sounding rather blasé about my situation there, the fact remained that for every good day when I felt that I was doing the right thing by remaining a willing more or less middle-rung lackey, as long as I could pursue my “art”—the way I’d think about it during my more pretentious moments—there followed two or three days, sometimes a week, when I would take a good look in the mirror and realize that, approaching thirty, for all the wonderful gifts I supposedly possessed (music, drawing, writing), I was, in fact, a hack, a poseur, and, worst of all, a classic underachiever. Like my friend Tommy, I talked a good line, with the difference, however, that I believed it was he who had the real talent. (Another truth is that I considered my older brother, José, more deserving of achieving, so to speak, our family’s first artistic success. Having said this, I am not even sure now if, on some unconscious level, I held myself back as some kind of crazy nod to Cuban familial order.)

  Despite the tedium of my daily routines—or perhaps because of them—I began to slowly accumulate a lot of pages, of scenes and dialogue, all the while searching for a voice that somehow sounded like “me”—this fellow, a New Yoikah, with Spanish words, drawn from memory, zipping through his mind like so many pajaritos volando, as my mother might have put it. At a certain point, when I’d decided that I needed a formal opening, my superstitious side got the best of me. Taking a pad along, I left my apartment one Saturday morning and headed over to St. John the Divine cathedral, where I spent some five hours sitting in the knave pews, taking in the organ practice, the piped-in choral music, the ambience of that Episcopalian altar (almost as soul-reaching as a good Catholic altar) while scribbling out, in a most elemental manner, what would become the first chapter of my novel. I went back there on occasion, or, if the weather was fine, I’d sit in the cathedral’s herb garden, fooling with scenes, all the while trying to fight off the nagging depression that would suddenly come over me in waves, shooting up from my knees. (The thing about being inside a church: I just didn’t feel alone—even if I didn’t see a single soul; just the notion that someone might be there peering at me from some timeless, perhaps beautiful place, bolstered my spirits enough to make it all just a bit easier.)

  Of course, it was all autobiographical—the first chapters (getting a lot of it wrong) trying to reimagine my father’s courtship and marriage to my mother: To help me along, I’d pore over any maps of Cuba I could find, usually in an antiquated atlas, the sort I’d come across down in Fourth Avenue’s Biblo and Tannen bookstore; just perusing the cartography of Cuba, with its profusion of mysterious names, like the parts of a body, and those etched and writhing lines, sinewy as vinery, that constituted its rivers and roads and borders—all of that fed my imagination. Even if it had been years since I last stepped on that soil as a child, I’d find my pop’s hometown of Jiguaní and trace its route to Holguín, and though I would just be looking over a piece of wafer-thin paper, it was as if I could go back there again. I’d remember that he had once worked as a mail carrier and imagine him riding over the countryside on a horse from farm to farm, cocoa and coffee plantations and dairy centrals abounding, a satchel of letters in his charge. I’d hear the birdsong ringing out from the forests, blue sky and verdant hills surrounding him, and the rain coming down like a waterfall at four in the afternoon, and smell the clay earth giving off a cooling perfumed exhalation, then the heat and humidity rising from the ground. Best of all, I would imagine him as a young man, tall and thin in his saddle, and astride his chestnut mare, as he’d make his leisurely way do
wn toward the Sierra foothills: Simply put, in those bits of research, he’d come back to life!

  They, of course, journeyed to America and had two sons, the older named Horacio (after my godfather) and the younger—my stand-in, or doppelganger, as the educated folks say—Hector, I took from a Puerto Rican guy about my age, who worked behind the counter of a liquor store on 105th Street. While I’m at it, I called my pop Alejo—liking its similarity to the Spanish word lejano, “faraway” (but also in homage to Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban writer)—and my mother, or someone much like her at any rate, Mercedes, which was my aunt Cheo’s name. As for mi tía Maya, whom I could only see at that point through my mother’s eyes, I made up the name Buita—which, I suppose, had something to do with buitre, “vulture.”

  Gradually, I began to fill those pages with the spine of what I perceived as my life, up until the time of my father’s death. Yet, while I felt that I was probably making some progress toward becoming a writer, if that’s what I really wanted to do, in that process of digging up the dead (and resurrecting them, as it were), I began to experience some very bad nights of restless sleep and disorienting dreams again. (As it would turn out, I’d go through that same upheaval with later books, but this was the worst.) My nightmares got so bad that my girlfriend at the time, a sharp lady on her way to a Ph.D. in statistical analysis at Teachers College, often thought aloud that a little psychological counseling might help me achieve a creative breakthrough and recommended that I see a therapist. But coming from a culture (cubano) and neighborhood (mainly working-class) where, quite frankly, something as bourgeois as therapy was not only unheard of but spurned as a rich man’s indulgence, I couldn’t even begin to take such a suggestion seriously. “Oh, really?” I’d say, feeling somewhat offended. And yet, often hitting a wall (sometimes literally), I eventually did.

  The fellow I hooked up with happened to be a cubano who, as he would tell me, had left the island disguised as a priest and, coming to the States from Spain, to which he had escaped with a Vatican delegation, worked for IBM for a decade before commencing his studies for a Ph.D. in psychology, his specialty dream analysis. (He was also something of a humanist, having been mentored by Rollo May.) When I met him for the first time, probably around 1980 (I do not exactly recall), he seemed everything that I was not: tall, dark featured, somewhat macho, soulful, pensive, with a strong but charmingly Cuban accent, and he had the handsome if slightly serious face of a Asturiano matador. Above all, he was a Cuban from Havana, which, it surprised me to learn, actually meant a great deal to me. (Even so, I had my doubts at first, enough that once when I visited Donald Barthelme, I couldn’t help but ask him if he had ever seen a shrink. His answer: “I have found them, upon occasion, useful.” Drag of cigarette, gulp of drink.)

  Still, it took me a long time to trust his judgment enough to allow him inside, as it were. But eventually, he became of use to me, at least in the way a priest can be when you go to confession. During those sessions, I learned a few things. It was the first time anyone had ever told me that the kind of year I spent away from my family as a four- and five-year-old would have produced an acute sense of anxiety and depression, insecurity, nightmares, mood swings, and melancholy in anyone (oh, thank you!). But it was all the more traumatic in my case, he reasoned, not only because of the nature of my illness but because of the way my circumstances had, in effect, severed me from my roots (no big news). My darkness had been further aggravated by my sense of guilt related to watching my father, or “tu papá,” descending into a purgatory of self-injury and, the big payoff, his death—something that I, experiencing a survivor’s sense of helplessness, had obviously not yet come to accept. (The flip side came when this psychoanalyst, being a cubano and naturally superstitious, and as someone who had, in reality, almost become a priest, cast doubts on whether anyone could be truly dead. He—the antiscientist and a hater of ese comermierda Fidel, who had outlawed the open practice of Christianity on the island—simply believed in God, and in ghosts, and in spirit transmissions. In other words, bless his soul, he was not your typical psychoanalyst.)

  Though I left many of those sessions feeling better, I also wondered if I had turned into some kind of faggot. (Go to my old neighborhood bar and tell one of those wasted guys that you felt depressed and he’d look you over and say: “What you need is a drink and a fine piece of ass.”) Sometimes, I felt so stupid about that therapy that I’d stop for months at a time, only to go back. Most sessions I treaded water, though; once, in what must have been a case of transference (or time travel), the interior of his office somehow became that of a rustic house in Cuba, down to its deeply green smell of palm leaves and dampened earth (swear to God). Somehow, he came to represent for me some paternal Cuban archetype, as if my father and the abuelos I had never known had been magically combined in him. For a few minutes, I had a sense of belonging. On the heels of that experience, which was like a waking dream, he told me, in a voice that sounded just then so much like my father’s, “But don’t you know, eres cubano. You are Cuban, after all.”

  While I am a little embarrassed to have disclosed such a thing, those sessions, despite the formality of the circumstance, offered me the kind of internal encouragement that I could never get anywhere else, not from my family nor any of my friends. And the process of talking about my dreams, which, in any case, always had either a terrifying or mystical aspect to them, really got the gears in my subconscious working, and even helped me come by the title of my novel one night. It was on the spine of a book, along one of the shelves, the H’s, in the used bookstore around the corner from my mother’s apartment, where I had gone walking in a dream. Noticing my name on the spine of a book, I pulled it out and saw my novel’s title for the first time: Our House in the Last World.

  For what it’s worth, I simply don’t know where else that title could have come from, except my subconscious. It was just there. Having said that, I can’t help but point out that were it not for two missing letters—c and j—one could spell my name, Oscar Hijuelos, from it. I know it’s not much, but at the time that little coincidence, even if it is a bit forced, imbued the book with a magical glow.

  Good things happened: Sending off the first chapter to a foundation, I received a grant. It paid three thousand dollars, before taxes, a fortune to me at the time, not enough to live on but an encouragement. (I do not remember what I did with that money.) The best part of receiving such a grant, the CAPS, came down to some of the folks I met through it. One of the judges, a Puerto Rican living on 115th Street in East Harlem, Edwin Vega Yunque, or Ed Vega, called me up. He was a novelist, and a fine one at that, who, however, in that climate when no major New York houses published Latinos, had gone critically unnoticed in his own city. (Or to put it differently, completely ignored by the major newspapers.) He treated me well, however, invited me over to his apartment, where, as it happened, I got to know his daughter, Suzanne, an aspiring guitar-strumming singer back then, who, I recall, often performed downtown at a place called Folk City. Ed was a Buddhist, married to an American wife, and as a writer knew just about every Latino author in the city, among them a Puerto Rican poet, Julio Marzan, and the Guatemalan David Unger, both of whom became my friends.

  It was just a happy time: Through Vega, I made my debut as a writer, reading from my own work before a Latino audience at a poet’s hutch up in the South Bronx—just a storefront with some folding chairs and a podium on Jerome Avenue. That initiation took place before the kind of down-home crowd you only find in the ghetto, with kids, mothers, pregnant women, old abuelitas, teenagers, and your rank-and-file local poets and teachers responding to your work with both seriousness and enthusiasm. (Afterward, tons of food was served from tinfoil-covered plates, along with beer.)

  I also did a reading back then in an East Harlem apartment—think it was at Quincy Troupe’s home: I don’t recall just how long I read from my work—mostly black folks were in attendance, and while I stuck out (as always) and met one hell of a grouc
hy poet in Amiri Baraka, I felt really good to be hanging out with that crowd. (In a way, outside the office, I had started to lead a secret life.) And yet the reading that made the most difference, with Wesley Brown, took place up at City, where I filled in as a last-second replacement.

  It turned out that the audience included one of my former classmates at City, Karen Braziller, who had published my short story in her review, and her husband: They ran a small downtown press—Persea Books, whose offices were on Delancey Street in the same building that once housed Mad magazine (I remember those kinds of things). Having read from a portion of my manuscript, I think it was the husband who inquired whether I had anything else along those lines. Not long afterward, I turned up at their door in their building off Gramercy Park East with a couple of shopping bags filled with the fragments and longer narratives I’d been fooling around with over the past few years: These represented what would become, after intense amounts of work on both our parts, my first novel.

  Taking a few years, the actual process went more or less smoothly, and at a far less hectic pace than what publishers would demand today. About the writing itself: typewriters, ribbons, pen and pencil, notepads, white-out, scissors, erasers, Scotch tape, and rubber cement were the tools I used to produce the final manuscript.

  As for the editing, I benefited from the expertise acquired by my former colleague at CCNY, Karen Braziller, then a senior editor at E. P. Dutton but assuming those same duties for their press. Spanish proofreading was done by my friend Ed Vega, with whose corrections the novel passed muster. Finally, when it came to a cover, we settled on a painting, found in a book in the New York public library (I think), an early work, circa 1945, by Philip Guston entitled If this be not I? It included so many elements that figured in my novel—columns, a stoop, a figure in what looked like a chef’s toque, and distant tenements—that it seemed the only choice. Over the title, a generous quote from Barthelme, while on the back one found a fairly stern picture of me, going through what I guess was a “Russian author” phase, in a beard.