You see, back in 1983, the FBI had listed my cousin Miriam’s husband, Eduardo Arocena, who had stayed in our apartment back when, as their number one most wanted fugitive. He was suspected of having been the head (and founder) of an anti-Castro organization, Omega Seven, and of ordering or carrying out the assassination of a Cuban diplomat. Personally, I found it hard to believe that Eddie, un hombre muy callado, a quiet and gentle man, could be behind such a thing, but the truth was that he had been on the lam, as they’d say in gangster movies, for some time (though it had not stopped him from calling me up the previous Christmas to wish me well, while also proclaiming, “Viva Cuba libre!”)
Eventually, the search became so intense that the FBI sent two officers over to 118th Street to interview my mother, and though she had fallen back on the claim that she spoke “too leetle Engeleesh,” one of the officers, a very well dressed American “Negrito,” as she described him, naturally hit the clutch and slipped into a ridiculously fluent Castellano—Castilian Spanish—that dazzled my mother. (That’s what she mainly talked about for weeks—about how that American black man had spoken such a refined Spanish.) In the end, she had nothing to tell them; she certainly did not know of his whereabouts—why would she?
Nor did I, but that did not stop the FBI from messing with my phone. Suddenly, I’d pick it up and hear all these clicks and sonic hums, and switches—even voices in the incredible distance, ever so faint but audible, saying things like “Roger that” and “Roger out”—whistles too, sometimes so loudly that I’d have to pull my head away. (My brother and mother experienced the same disturbances.) This bugging happened to coincide with my Southern California romance. Calling me nightly, she loved to go recount the details of what we had once done, what she would do the next time she saw me, the places where she ached inside, how she was touching herself just thinking about me, and, along the way, moaning as she’d breathlessly bring herself around—in short, a bit of phone sex. What those agents made of it, I can’t say, but on a few occasions, I’d hear a click, and static and screeches, as someone (I think) listened, until the poor guy on the other end couldn’t take it anymore.
As for Eduardo, the poor soul, eventually apprehended and tried, was sent to jail, where he continues, I think unjustifiably, to linger to this day.
All in all, I really didn’t have much to complain about. As a Latino writer—no matter how I looked upon myself, that’s what I happened to be—I had already done quite well. My book had come out with a New York house, a very rare thing; I had been reviewed in the Times, an even rarer occurrence for a Latino writer; and, best of all, along the way, I found a place, however peripherally, with my own special community of writers. Not just the inner-city thing with friends like Julio Marzan and Ed Vega, but in a scene so erudite, yet social, that it was to become known as a hub of Latin American literature in New York City.
Situated in a McKim, Mead & White Georgian brownstone on Sixty-eighth Street and Park Avenue were the offices of the Americas Society, an organization dedicated to the promotion of cultural ties between the United States and our hemispheric partners: Canada, the Caribbean Islands, and Central and South America. Also known as the Center for Inter-American Relations, its ground floor boasted an art gallery, whose shows were mainly dedicated to exhibitions culled from the Latino diaspora to our south. On an upper floor, reached by a winding robber-baron staircase, were several ornately appointed salons in which all manner of programs, from music recitals to business lectures, along with a profusion of poetry and prose readings, literary panels, and such took place nearly every night of the week, each event followed by cocktails.
I’d first caught wind of that place while lugging my corrected manuscript of Our House around a book fair on the East Side. A friend had suggested that I introduce myself to a woman at one of the booths, a director of programs at the Americas Society, Rosario Santos, a transplanted Bolivian who couldn’t have been kinder when I shyly (terrified of the notion of having to speak Spanish with her) introduced myself and, eventually, left her that copy. In turn, she had passed it on to her deputy there, a vivacious, wildly attractive young Hispanist, a certain Lori Carlson. One of those rare creatures unable to resist helping others, she, upon reading Our House, later hosted me as the special guest speaker at a program of her design called Books and Breakfast. On that occasion, just after the novel had been published, I gave a reading from it and answered questions for a small gathering of mainly Latin American businessmen, all before the hour of nine in the morning, after which I went off to work, attending to my subway clocks. She also assigned a cubano, Enrique Fernandez, to write a critical—and as it would turn out, quite positive—piece on Our House for the literary journal she edited, Review, an honor, as far as I was concerned, given the incredible caliber of the authors whose work she championed in its pages.
Ms. Carlson, whose Grace Kelly looks and sweet temperament turned more than a few heads, also officiated over a number of literary evenings in which a nobody like me could not only attend charlas—lectures—by some of the most prominent writers of the Latin-American boom, but afterward find himself rubbing shoulders (bumping into literally, the rooms were so crowded) with the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, Luisa Valenzuela, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Poniatowska, Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal, and, among so many others, the towering, Lincolnesque Julio Cortázar. (Which is not to say that there weren’t any non-Latinos around. Two I can recall were the poet/memorist William Jay Smith and the novelist William Kennedy, fresh from winning a Pulitzer for Ironweed. He couldn’t have been more cordial and respectful of me, and took pains to pronounce my last name as accurately as he, married to a Puerto Rican, could. Both he and Smith were real gents.)
I also made the acquaintance of some Cubans there, among them Héberto Padilla the poet, as well as the greatest of Cuban novelists, Guillermo Cabrera Infante (a wonderful man), whom the center had first introduced to an American audience. Other Cubans turned up, sometimes from the island, like Pablo Armando Fernandez, but since one side always boycotted the other, you never saw the pro- and anti-Castro writers in the same room at any given time. (Somehow, after attending a reading by Fernandez, I met his father, who, at hearing my story of my Cuban/American conflicts—which is what I tended to talk about with some folks—he told me, “Well, being half-Cuban is better than not being Cuban at all.”) Another Cuban writer, who would become most famous posthumously in a film, Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas, thin and wan, and wretchedly broke, also frequented the center and had gotten his first job in New York, teaching writing, through its office. I happened to have met Renaldo, whose short and slight body was topped by an implausibly large head, his skin quite pocked, his handsome features ever so tender, in Books & Co. on the East Side one evening. We spoke (in Spanish—how I did it, I do not know) about the fact that he had grown up in Holguín, where my mother came from; I told him I had just published a novel, and he seemed quite touched to meet a kindred soul. (I gave him a copy of Our House, which I got off the shelf and paid for. He accepted it, while confessing he couldn’t read English. “Pero gracias, hombre,” he told me, handing me his card in exchange.)
Most impressively, the center also hosted one of my idols, Jorge Luis Borges, whom I met briefly, and whose hangdog but beatific otherworldly face I have obviously not forgotten. Altogether, those fetes, which welcomed everyone, were of a moment that would never be seen again, a moment when such a place, like the Americas Society, afforded two worlds, that of Latino and non-Latino, the opportunity to come together and celebrate the grandeur of a shared culture. (I am not certain of too many things, but I will venture to say that I doubt the word spic had ever been uttered, or even thought of, in that building.) Compared to any American literary cocktail party I’d ever attend, those evenings seem now like some distant dream.
I may have had an ordinary job, and I may have had a hundred doubts about myself as a Latino, and all kinds of gripes about a million things, but, lordy, when I??
?d leave that center, I’d feel really good about my Latin roots, and in a way I never had before, even if, by the next afternoon, after trudging through one subway station after the other and catching a few stiletto glances stabbing into the back of my head, from Latinos who didn’t like whitey, that glow of belonging—and relating to that literature—might ebb and eventually fade. All I know is this: Since those days, I’ve never again experienced a literary scene so inclusive, nor so nurturing through the sheer heft of intellectual sharing, nor one in which being a Latino writer really counted for something.
CHAPTER 9
Roma
In the autumn of 1984, when I had become a member of PEN—a big deal to me—I was recruited to partake in a gala reading with some two dozen other authors, commemorating their first International Writers for Peace day, held downtown in that organization’s West Broadway headquarters. For the program itself, each writer read some statement or poem or bit of prose relating to the notion of peace; and while I had huddled with my friend Richard, from my neighborhood, coming up with a selection of quotes from the ancient world, of the “Thou shall beat thy sword into a ploughshare” variety, and had worked hard to put together what I had hoped would be an interesting presentation, I soon decided that I had perhaps put in too much effort, when walking into that jammed room, I overheard the poet Jane Cooper, gravely intoning, and with a quivering voice, the lyrics to “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
I turned heads there, mainly because, of all the writers on hand that day, I had been the only one to show up wearing a suit and tie. (Norman Mailer, for example, appeared at the podium looking quite hungover and wearing what seemed to be a wine-stained turtleneck sweater.) Sitting down next to Allen Ginsberg, he had nodded, smiling, at me. When his turn came, he got up and read some crazy-sounding poem of easy beatnik rhyme—something that had phrasing along the Nagasaki, Kill the Nazi, Kamikazi line which the audience of diehard lefty aesthetes deeply appreciated, but which I, as usual, didn’t get. (No offense to Allen Ginsberg fans, but I essentially thought the guy had a racket, though I will admit I was about as uptight as any young author could be.) I remember, however, feeling that I had made a connection with Ginsberg, and in what I considered a friendly Cuban manner, I patted him on the shoulder when he came down from the stage and took a seat beside me again.
When my turn came, I threw everyone in that room by reading from my selection of quotes about war and peace from antiquity. And while it was probably not the most exciting thing I could have done, at least it was brief, which, I’ve since learned, crowds really like; Ginsberg himself seemed to appreciate the effort. In fact, if anyone had seemed to have watched me carefully, it was he, with whom I made bespectacled eye contact quite often from the podium, Ginsberg nodding repeatedly at my words. Later, when I returned to my seat, he even tapped me on the knee. Afterward, however, when I got a chance to speak directly to Mr. Ginsberg at the cocktail party, he seemed puzzled that I had even approached him. He asked me two questions: “Which magazine are you with?” To which I answered, “None.” And then, more surprisingly, he asked, “What are you doing here?” which really threw me, since I had been sitting next to him, had been introduced as the Cuban-American author of Our House, and had thought him rather attentive during my little discourse. It was in that moment that I first learned that a lot of pretending went on at such events, and that even writers, not to be confused with anyone else, were required to first and foremost wear the appropriate Bohemian apparel.
And another moment I still cherish today? Through my publisher, I believe, I had been paired to give a reading with Bernard Malamud at a Presbyterian church fund-raiser on the West Side; I am not even sure of the exact occasion, think it might have been for the Columbia Literary Review, but I felt so honored to be sharing the podium with Malamud that it has remained one of my favorite readings to this day. The poor man, I should mention, was then dying from cancer, and so far gone as to be nearly unable to communicate, so deep was his depression. But he was thoroughly professional and, with some difficulty, read from a new work in progress, his age-mottled hands trembling and his voice wavering and low. Somehow he soldiered through. Afterward, when I had the chance to speak with him, he seemed half-dead to the world, until, taken by the devastating smile of a female friend who had come along with me, he found a momentary resurrection. Looking into her eyes, Malamud, buoyed by her presence, seemed to have slipped out from his suffering frame of mind, his posture straightening, his voice, though still delicate, more lively, his eyes for the first time that evening losing their melancholy. I have no idea of what they spoke about, something about old movies perhaps, but once she left him, he underwent a transformation back to the Malamud beside me, the writer who, like his characters, lived in a universe that always spoke to me, of pain and longings and grief. It was probably his last public reading.
And perhaps you’re wondering whether any Cubans ever showed up to my readings. They sometimes did. Even back then, I had a little Cuban fan base, word getting around, mainly among the females, longtime New Yorkers mostly, who, like my parents and aunts, had come here long before the revolution (they were the Cubans I mainly knew). But every so often, as I’d give a reading, I’d look out and spot someone, arms folded severely across his chest and with a no-nonsense seriousness upon his face, a man affiliated with some anti-Castro organization, on hand to check me out: I could always tell—and for years afterward I’d know them from their severe disappointment that my writing rarely commented on or openly attacked Fidel Castro or his regime; my work just wasn’t that way, and as a consequence, I have sometimes seen these kinds of cubanos get up, disgusted, and leave the room while I happened to be in midsentence.
For all of that, however, once the luster of my debut faded, I fell back into the routine of my days at the agency—living for the weekends, occasionally plodding off to the library at lunchtime (I will forever feel grateful to the nice Puerto Rican librarian who had ordered seven copies of Our House for the Mid-Manhattan branch.) Only occasionally did I feel as if my life had changed, as when some creative chief from another agency, knowing me from around and remembering that Times review, would call me up to offer me a job as a copywriter. In fact, for a brief time, I was tempted to move over to Y&R—which was just across the street—but somehow couldn’t bring myself to do it. By then, I had slipped into what I suppose might be called a postpartum depression, and while I had started to fool around with a new novel, something about a Cuban building superintendent named Cesar Castillo, lingering in the perpetual underworld of a basement (la ánima del Pascual?), I began to feel that my book’s publication had been a fluke, viz., thinking that had I not known the editor from CCNY, nothing would have happened in the first place. And, without realizing it, I still strongly identified with my pop.
Mainly, I’d become melancholic like him, out of the blue. I have the distinct memory of riding the subway home and thinking, as I held on to one of those poles in the center of the car, that I was probably hanging on to the same one that my pop did as he’d ride back, in a forlorn state of his own, with his scent of meat, cigarettes, and booze, from work. (Same line, same cars, the same passing rush of tunnel girders in the darkness; why not?) And it would hit me that perhaps my life would never really be different from his, and all at once, I’d wish to God that I could become someone else.
I had been feeling especially awful one October night in 1984, another of those cold miserable New York evenings, when the black slickened streets, runny with distending lights and misery (now I’m thinking like Ginsberg, carajo!) seemed to define the world. I’d always found blue Mondays hard to take—like just about everyone else who worked downtown—but after I’d turned thirty-three, an age that held a lot of symbolic weight for me as a Catholic, and my life, after the publication of that book, had seemed to flatten out again, I didn’t really know what the hell to do with myself, except to continue on in a job from which I would never be fired—for they knew they had someone smart on
the cheap. With that realization, the prospect of trudging through yet another workweek on automatic pilot, as it were, became more and more of a burden. At thirty-three, I was old enough to feel that I hadn’t a whole lot of time to piss away, and though I thought about quitting nearly every week, the company’s generosity with those transit ads (and well-wishes for my career, such as it was), and the fact that I really didn’t have anything to fall back on, nor the nerve to just say “fuck it,” kept me there, though on some days I’d feel like I was going out of my mind with boredom.
It was one of those evenings when just about everything seemed off, faces elongating in crazy animal ways; the pizzeria guy, stout and sturdy, looking to me like a bull through the glare of his window; the panhandlers coming off like jackals and seeming more devious than usual as I’d just walk on (“Hey, baldy, I’m talking to you!”); the subway stairwells, gutters, and sidewalks smelling pissier (and shittier) than before, and when not even the notion of buying myself a few dollar bottles of wine and smoking half a pack of cigarettes, while watching some bad horror flick on TV, cheered me up. One of those what-on-earth-are-you-doing-with-your-life evenings. I was in the kind of mood where just to hear español spoken on the street irritated me—as in “What the fuck did you all ever do for me?” When I walked into the dollar shop to buy some toilet paper, even the gossiping sweet-natured old Latina ladies by the counter, whom I generally felt charmed by, got on my nerves. (So maybe I was a white motherfucker after all.) Just a lousy night altogether, and on top of it all, I couldn’t believe that I’d have to get up and start all over again the next morning. (I’d leave at eight thirty-five; somehow I’d always get to the office, hustling, by nine.)