Thoughts Without Cigarettes

  As in a fairy tale, Maya simply coveted her nephew with an eye to raising him as her own. But far from adopting a new approach toward my mother—kindness might have gone a long way—she went on disparaging my mother’s maternal abilities to my father any time she could, in fact, making my mother out as a reckless soul. This envidia—or envy—was so pronounced that my aunt Maya had tried to wrest my older brother away from my mother after an incident over which my mother had had no control. My brother had been crawling along the floor when, by some caprice, he had opened the lower door of a kitchen cabinet just beneath the sink, happening upon a can of rat poison—the rats in that apartment, which came up from the basement below us through a garbage chute and the spaces around loosened steam pipes, were abundant—and this poison José managed somehow to eat, perhaps because of its candied smell. Doubled over, he turned blue and, apparently lifeless, had to be rushed to St. Luke’s. (His recovery, after his stomach was pumped, had been, in fact, a close call.) Given her state of mind, Maya, who had come home from her job at Macy’s, blamed my mother’s carelessness for the calamity. According to Maya, she had proved herself unfit to look after her own son, and, dutifully, my aunt volunteered to take my brother off their hands; and while my father resisted her—though with difficulty, for Maya, as the eldest of the sisters, had practically raised him—he ended up holding my mother at fault. Worst of all, my father, to whom his own blood family remained the most important thing in life, wouldn’t tolerate as much as a bad word from my mother about his sister, which is to say that in any such discussions, she never had a chance.

  But Maya’s efforts did not quite work out for her the way she had hoped. Even her influence could not change my father’s mind about my mother, though having an infant in the apartment seemed to make no difference to his nocturnal routines. Now when my father came home, a tie loosened around his neck, at four in the morning, my mother had a crib and a crying infant in the room. Aside from that, it seems that he treated her well enough, even lovingly, but bit by bit, in those years, he slowly began to change. My mother has always blamed it on a combination of that nightlife and his new job at the hotel. He began drinking in the clubs and dance halls, a little at first and then more and more, perhaps to have a good time or to make some liaison easier on his conscience—But why would he feel guilty? He was a Cuban after all—or because he sometimes felt homesick for his family back in Cuba, especially for his beloved brother, Oscar. Still, even my mother would admit that his drinking didn’t really worsen, nor did his melancholy deepen, until 1945, the year the war ended.

  By then, he had started to improve his standing in the kitchens of the hotel; well liked and affable, working around not only other Cubans like himself but immigrants from Italy, Greece, and Poland (whose languages he began to absorb), he found a second home in the Men’s Bar kitchen. And though he would have made far more money as a waiter—a job offered to him—he was, as my mother, sighing, put it one day, too proud to earn his livelihood serving others. (And can you imagine what emotions she, raised in a house with servants, felt when treated like one?) So he remained in that kitchen, learning to prepare chicken and lamb and grill seared steaks, got a raise to about a dollar an hour, and, despite some reservations about New York—for there were always people around to stare resentfully if they overheard someone speaking Spanish on the street—felt optimistic about the future.

  At some point, he began a campaign to bring his older brother, Oscar, to New York, writing him constantly, and, I suppose, while knowing that his brother would never abandon his life in Jiguaní for good, he did his best to persuade him to visit—much in the same spirit his own life in that city had started. In this, he eventually succeeded, though without any expectations that his brother, a campesino to his bones, would ever stay. With four children by two marriages, the eldest aged twelve, and running his own farm, my uncle finally—perhaps reluctantly—consented to make the journey, if only to see his younger brother again.

  That autumn, my uncle Oscar rode south to the provincial capital, Santiago de Cuba, to procure a travel visa for the States and, heading homeward at dusk a few days later, was crossing a meadow on his horse when he found himself in the gathering darkness of a storm: At some point, a lightning bolt flashed around him, and, when his horse reared back, he tumbled off his saddle and flew headlong into the trunk of a tree, breaking his neck. I imagine my father and his sisters got the news by telegram, and who of his sisters rushed to Cuba, if any, I can’t say. But he lingered, it’s been said, in a semiconscious state for twenty-six days—perhaps it was thought he would eventually recover—before he finally succumbed, without so much as ever laying eyes on my father again.

  After his brother’s death, the sadness of life came to be written all over my father’s face, and he must have lamented the fact that instead of showing that other Oscar Hijuelos the excitements and pleasantries of New York, his invitation had, however indirectly, delivered him to the gates of heaven, or hell, or purgatory, or to wherever such kindhearted campesino souls go when their eyes close for good: For months after, on his nights home from work, he rarely left the apartment, and assumed the posture and habits by which I would most remember him—by the kitchen table, drinking rye whiskey followed by one glass of beer after the other, a cigarette burning down until it singed the cuffs of his shirt. He slumped in misery, lashed out at my mother, swinging his arms out at her, just because he could not allow anyone else to enter into that cage of his pain. He couldn’t hear a thing that anyone said to him, not even his sisters. He’d wince with the realization that certain events cannot be undone, and, blaming himself for that tragedy, embarked upon a sea of regrets.

  When I was born in 1951, at about five thirty on a summer morning, at the St. Luke’s Woman’s Hospital, my father named me after his brother, and I suppose for that reason alone, my father always accorded me a special affection. I’ve been told that as a baby I was good-natured and on the quiet side, that I rarely carried on or cried and had a certain dulzura—a sweetness—about me that, I’ve always believed, must have come from him. By the time I’d entered my infancy, his sisters had finally moved out, relocating to Miami. Borja left when her husband, Eduardo, suffering from a bad heart, became ill, and Maya and her husband soon followed. As for my father? Dividing his days between his job at the Biltmore and home, he still threw the occasional weekend party, as he and his sisters used to, the apartment filling with Cubans and Puerto Rican couples—probably a mix of his friends from the hotel and from the dance halls—as well as a few single strays, male and female alike, from around the neighborhood. On those nights, the drinks and food flowed—my father spending “too much,” as my mother would later complain, on sponging fulanos, most of whom he’d probably never see again and who, in any case, couldn’t give ni un pío—a piss—about him; but because he found it almost unbearable to be alone, those parties took place at least once a month, if not more often. His guests came for their doses of Cuban warmth, the congeniality, the music, blaring on those nights from a living room RCA console, and, aside from the fully stocked bar and the ice-packed bathtub filled with bottles of beer, the immense quantities of food, which lay stacked on platters in the kitchen. It wasn’t long before the crowd, revved up, would get onto the living room floor, dancing away. And there I would be, the little “rubio”—blondie—the cute little americano-looking son of that nice guy Pascual, crawling innocently along our living room floor, bounded by a forest of pleated trousers, shapely nylon-covered legs, and kicking two-toned and high-heeled shoes. My brother swears that, innocent though I may have been, I’d roll onto my back and pass the time doing my best to steal a peek at the mysteries residing inside the plump upper reaches of those swirling ladies’ dresses.

  Sooner or later on those nights, while the music flowed out of the living room record player, which, as with most of our furniture, had been left behind for us by my aunts, with the lights turned low while my mother remained in the kitchen tending to the foo
d or finishing up with the dishes, my father, a sucker for flirtation and a suave rumbero, especially after he’d had a few drinks, took to the dance floor, smitten by some woman’s engaging glance. By the time my mother finally left the kitchen, she hardly cut an exuberant figure like some of the dolled-up femmes fatales in their tight dresses, whom she thought of as lowlifes. She’d sit back on the couch, her arms folded stiffly across her lap, and, neither drinking nor feeling as jubilantly alive as the other women, take in the proceedings rather somberly.

  I suppose that kind of generic Cuban scene of food, drinks, and dancing unfolded in similar apartments across the city circa 1953–54, but in our case, those evenings usually ended on a sour note: For once everybody finally cleared out at some late hour of the morning, leaving behind a disaster of half-finished meals and cigarette-buttfilled glasses everywhere, my mother, unable to forget and forgive my father’s treatment of her, would have it out with him. Down the hall in bed, my brother, José, in the room right next to mine or, if we had boarders, in the same room with me, I’d sometimes hear them tormenting each other at night, and loudly so, as if we, their kids, were deaf. And sometimes, I swear, it seemed that we heard things crashing against the walls, plates breaking, hitting noises, and cries—at which point my brother would get out of bed to see what was going on, only to return in tears, having gotten slapped in the face for his trouble. (Here I have to interject that it was from those days onward that my brother formed a poor opinion of my father, a stance that led some years later to out-and-out fights between them on the street, though I never witnessed such and still find that notion hard to believe.)

  Not to say, however, that my parents were always at each other’s throats; to the contrary, in calmer times, they had their share of laughs and moments of tenderness. He’d sometimes come home with some gift for her, a bottle of perfume or a pair of earrings bought from one of those enterprising vendors who’d go from hotel to hotel, selling goods to the staff at cheap prices. (He must have known every Latino “whole seller” from the Bowery to the Bronx.) Sometimes, I’d see her in the mornings, standing at the end of the hallway by the front door, straightening the knot of his tie and patting down the shoulders of his coat as he’d head out to work. And the fact remains that, however much his attentions may have wandered, they, as a couple, surely fooled around a lot. Once, while crawling across the floor as an infant, I discovered under their bed a white pan of water—a palangana—in which floated a wildly distended and somewhat forlorn-looking used condom, which I hadn’t the slightest idea about. (At the same time, I can’t help thinking of that discovery now without recalling how, on some nights, I’d hear her agitated cries, perhaps of pleasure.) And, as a family, we went places: to Coney Island in the summer, and at Christmas to Macy’s for an annual visit to see Santa Claus, or Santa Clows, as my mother pronounced it.

  As for the static between them, if it affected me badly, I have no recollection of feeling that way—what was I but a little kid anyway?

  Which brings me to that journey I made with my mother and brother to Cuba, in the summer of 1955: It was my father, perhaps in a spirit of largesse or reconciliation, who had paid for our airfares out of his Biltmore wages—$42.50 a week, plus whatever he made in overtime—probably in cash, as he did with all our bills, and since Borja still worked for Pan American airlines, as a bilingual ticket agent in Miami, she had probably gotten him a really good deal for our flight.

  I don’t recall much, if any, fanfare at our departure, or if my father had even been on hand to send us off—my guess is that he’d gone to his job at the Biltmore—but on a certain morning in late June, someone drove us to Idlewild Airport (now JFK), where we eventually boarded a Pan American airlines clipper for Havana. Since I can’t conjure a single moment in later years of my mother ever once relaxing, for even a second, it’s hard to imagine that she behaved any differently that day: too fastidious (and vain) to have chewed on her fingernails, when not chatting wildly away with some newfound Cuban acquaintances across the aisle in her one-thousand-words-a-minute Spanish, she, hating to fly, would have been on the edge of her seat and desperate for distractions. I seem to recall that she’d sit very still, back upright, hardly moving at all, as if to do so would have magically jostled that avion out of the sky. When the stewardess served us wax-paper-wrapped ham-and-cheese sandwiches, my mother could hardly take more than a few bites. She sighed a lot, looking off into the distance. Later, though she was a first cousin to anxiety, but never imbibed as much as a drink, she must have wanted to during the final leg of our vuolo.

  The flight took some three hours and had been routine enough until, while crossing over the Florida straits on our approach to Havana, something ignited inside the airplane’s left wing fuselage, and just like that, flames started shooting out of its engines. Billows of thread-ridden plumes of smoke, like a rocket’s exhaust, spilled into the surrounding clouds, and those silvery gold sheaths of fire seemed to roll back and forth over the wingspan. As the engines sputtered, then fell dead, so exciting to a child but terrifying to adults, the plane breathing ever so heavily, my mother, like so many others around us, made the sign of the cross and began to pray and pray, as if the world were about to end; then she took hold of our hands, squeezing them tightly and only letting go when, after a bumpy descent, we’d miraculously landed safely.

  There, in Havana, along the periphery of the airport, royal palms rose in the distance, the sky ever so blue, and as the cabin hatches sprang open and the dense tropic humidity warmed the compartment, we waited while a ground crew wheeled a mobile stairway up to the doors. Shortly, along with a retinue of Cubans and any number of festive, perhaps blasé tourists and commuting businessmen, we disembarked from that clipper and stepped onto the tarmac, where I first breathed the Cuban air.

  Later, we caught a bus for Holguín, and during that twelve-to-eighteen-hour journey (I’ve heard both numbers) as we crossed Cuba, mainly in the dead of night, going from little pueblo to pueblo along the northern coast toward the east, I apparently did not turn out to be a very good traveler. Could have been the intense humidity, or some on-the-run snack we’d picked up from one of the vendors swarming the dusty station stops, but the more deeply we entered Cuba, the more I trembled from chills, squirming about on my mother’s lap. Soon enough, whatever I had come down with spread into my guts, so each time we stopped, I’d get off the bus, my mother holding my hand, to vomit into the darkness. (My brother, José, has told me that I did so over and over again.) At some point, my face drained of color, I fell limply asleep on her lap, my mother peering down at me. I have a memory of the bus pulling into another stop, my mother fanning herself with a newspaper, Cuban voices murmuring from the road, where the male passengers, taking a break, stood about outside puffing madly, and inseparably so, on their cigars, columns of bluish smoke curling around them like incense, an almost impossibly loud chorus of cicadas—night bells—sounding from the brush, moths crawling about in agitated circles on the windows, clouds of gnats swirling around the lantern lights. En route again, as I looked out the bus windows, I doubtlessly saw wonderful things: the ocean horizon, like a rising plain reaching up to all the stars, then endless fields of sugar and pineapple, and forests passing, their silhouettes so reminiscent not of vegetation but of contorted shadows standing at attention in row after row, like the dead (my mother along the way touching my sweating brow). Cuba itself seemed enormous to me, and as that night wore on, I probably saw a ghost or two roaming through its darkness—Cuba was full of spirits, I remember my mother telling me—and that sky, I swear, occasionally wept shooting stars.

  Then morning came, and a few farmers, black cigarillos in their lips, boarded the bus with caged hens, and as roosters crowed, vendors selling little paper cups of coffee came down the aisle, and the music of a radio—a woman’s mellifluous voice, perhaps someone like Celia Cruz or Elena Burke—sounded from the doorways of the houses: I can remember thinking, sick as I felt, that I had been travel
ing through an immensely interesting tunnel, like that of an arcade attraction in an amusement park, but one that went on and on, seemingly forever.

  Once we arrived in Holguín, however, I got better, attended to by my affectionate aunt Cheo and her adolescent daughters, Miriam and Mercita. Our days together went happily enough. Always treating me kindly, they did their best to keep their youngest cousin, a few months short of turning four, well-fed and entertained—oh, but we played in the back, where a mango tree stood, lizards crawling about and a smell of jasmine and wildflowers so strong they left one yawning and sleepy. And while their modest house was just a one-story solar and nothing special on a nondescript side street in Holguín, I’ve always considered it my own little piece of Cuba.

  Though I can’t describe how the rooms were laid out, in which part of the house I slept, or even where the baño with its toilet—what my mother always called the “inodoro”—had been situated (think it was in its own shed, just off the back patio, where there was possibly a shower as well), I do know that the mornings smelled wonderfully from the fragrant and dense blessings of a nearby soda cracker factory, and that down the way, along a descending cobblestone street, on a shady corner, stood a bodega where the local campesinos, coming into town on donkeys and horses, would stop to have a few drinks, its wooden floor reeking of pungent beer. A mulatto in a straw hat passed his days there, in a narrow space behind a juice-dripping counter, chopping up pineapples, splitting coconuts, and occasionally brandishing on the tip of a machete some chunk of mango or papaya for me to eat. I’d go there with my brother in the afternoons and marvel at the thin and bony hunched-over farmers, whose faces seemed half-hidden under their hats, and at the way sunlight poured in from the back through an open door, casting their shadows into infinity.