“Thank you, sir,” I told him.
After some further niceties, Mr. Straus, explaining that there would be a great number of people waiting to speak to me, said good-bye. As he predicted, one reporter after the other, scheduled through my agent, called me from all over the country. Though I had a few breathers, I spent most of that afternoon and the next day talking about that which I had already been sick and tired of talking about—what else?—The Mambo Kings and myself, my destiny for the coming months, the coming years. In every conversation, these questions: Given my humble roots, how did I, as the son of Cuban immigrants, feel to be awarded a Pulitzer? And: Now that I had somehow scaled the Olympian heights of literature, how did I feel about becoming the first Hispanic to Win a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction?
The latter made me feel both proud and, at the same time, oddly singled out for the wrong reasons. Remember that back in 1990, my award had come on the heels of a period in America when the virtues of affirmative action were being debated: I couldn’t help but feel, as I know others did, as if my prize had something to do with the afterglow of that benevolence. Later, I’d encounter a lot of folks who would all but voice the opinion that it was time for some Hispanic to finally win a prize like that, as if I happened to be the lucky one.
Indeed I was fortunate to have been in the right place, with the right house, at the right time, with the right book, and though Mambo Kings, under whatever circumstances, remains a unique creation, it could have easily slipped through the cracks. Just look at the record: Aside from myself and, nearly twenty years later, Junot Díaz, no other Latino has been given a Pulitzer in fiction. As for the National Book Award? Despite its fifty-plus-year history, a Latino novel has yet to win a single one. (And, if I may, more sadly, remark: Though an array of wonderful books by gifted authors like Sandra Cisneros, Cristina Garcia, Rosario Ferre, Virgil Suarez, Elena Castedo, and Patricia Engle, among others, has since been published, with a fair amount of attention paid to them, the balance in more recent years has tipped back to where it had once been, wherein the works of Latino authors are, so I have recently heard, considered old hat and of a category hardly deserving critical attention, as if Latino writing, once again, has fallen to the wayside in terms of critical appreciation as a form of authentically American literature.
In the weeks to follow, relatives I never even knew about suddenly came out of the woodwork, though, oddly enough, I never heard a word from my aunts Maya and Borja in Florida. (But at least I came into contact with my cousin Dalgis, my tio Oscar’s daughter, whom I would later meet in California.) Mas Canosa’s Cuban-American Freedom Foundation in Miami offered me a large sum of money to write an anti-Castro pamphlet on their behalf. (I refused, though not particularly for ideological reasons: I just didn’t want to be selling myself to anyone, on the left or right.) I met people like Sting and Lou Reed and David Byrne, and many Latin musicians and personalities like Tito Puente and Celia Cruz and Graciela from the epoch I had written about. (My greatest honor? Playing the chords to “Guantanamera” on the piano, while backing up Graciela as she sang at a party.) For at least a few years, I became one of the darlings of New York high society—at one dinner, I sat between Barbara Walters and Bill Blass, at another with Lauren Hutton. At Bill Clinton’s first formal dinner at the White House, shortly after he had come into office, I spent the night hanging out with the playwright August Wilson, an unrepentant chain-smoker, who remained my good friend until his recent death. A few years later, at a second White House dinner, a state affair in honor of the Colombian president Andrés Pastrana, I had the incredible thrill of meeting Gabriel García Márquez, who, finding out that I was the author of Mambo Kings, told me, “That’s a book I wish I had written.” (God bless you, maestro.) Around that time, I received an honorary doctorate from my alma mater, City College, a Literary Lion medal from the New York Public Library, and other awards that, quite frankly, I can’t now recall, or that don’t seem to have really mattered to the world in the long run, but that made me feel somewhat proud back when, as if I had done something good for my community—los latinos—by opening some doors, at least in terms of publishing, for suddenly, New York houses were actively seeking out such authors, a feeling that would most strongly come to me when I would meet a young aspiring Latino writer who, looking to me as, yes, a role model, wanted to one day duplicate my success, though I would hope without having to smoke all those cigarettes.
My mother, for what it’s worth, would live off my Pulitzer distinction for years. Walking around the neighborhood like a grand dame, she took to wearing oversize sun hats with florid bands so that no one could miss her, and, as with my first book, carried the New York Times announcement of my prize tucked in a transparent plastic sleeve inside her purse, anxious to show it to anyone who expressed even the slightest interest. Calling out to shop-owner friends along Broadway, as we’d walk along, she’d say, “This is my boy, el escritor!” Then ask, laughing: “Have you something you’d like him to write for you?” (After all, I was her suddenly famous son, and as a result, we got along better after that, but the flip side? She could not look at me without suggesting that I buy myself a wig, the kind that true artists wear, like Liberace did.)
But to go back to the day when I first received the news, it wasn’t until the later afternoon, with the gloom of that day finally lifting, that did I experience, while traipsing out into the emerging sunlight, a moment of true elation. I was in the front yard, relieved to be off the telephone, when I sensed in the shifting of light across the lawn my pop’s presence. I will swear that as the light swelled, blinking, around me, he was there, standing just behind me and, I like to think, smiling, his spirit aglow with pride over my sudden accomplishment—not just because I would have my name and picture in the newspapers (though I would be proud of the fact that millions of people would see the rare surname Hijuelos in print) or because Tom Brokaw would nearly mispronounce my apellido over the air that next evening, but perhaps because I had taken so many disparate energies and hard emotions from our lives and turned them into something that so many people, across these United States and, as well, the world (I wonder what my pop would have made of seeing a Spanish-language edition of my book published in Madrid, in the windows of shops near the Prado, or in Japanese, sold off a Tokyo kiosk), might well enjoy and appreciate. I remember feeling that although he had not lived long enough for me to really know him, my novel, The Mambo Kings, was my way of doing just that, of holding a conversation with him, though he had long since been dead. His spirit, for better and for worse, in its kindness and gentleness, in its melancholy and, alternately, exuberance, his love of life, fear of death, his passions and vices—down to the thousands of drinks he had consumed and cigarettes he smoked—were all there, transformed, in that book. Or to put it differently, he was alive again, if only as a momentary illusion—and that, ladies and gents, felt absolutely superb.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my brother, José-Pascual, for his input about the chronology regarding my mother and father’s lives in the 1940s, as well as for the rooftop photograph that graces the cover of this book. And to my cousin Natasha Bermudez, upon whose research I have largely based my references to the Hijuelos family line.
Thanks should also go to Lori Marie Carlson, for her translation of my mother’s poem featured in this book, as well to the Free Press, in whose publication, Burnt Sugar, an anthology of Cuban poetry, “This Is My Book” first appeared. Further thanks go to the teachers who influenced my development as a writer: the late Susan Sontag and Donald Barthelme, and Frederic Tuten, who is, I am happy to say, still writing away. At Gotham, my thanks go out to William Shinker, who first encouraged this work, and to Lauren Marino and Cara Bedick. My gratitude also goes out to Jennifer Lyons, Karen Levinson, Lorna Owen and José Miguel Oviedo, whose inputs were invaluable. As for the others, from Richard Muller-Thym, a lifelong friend, to those who have always mattered to me, I also give thanks.
Finally, I thank all the wonderful Latinos—misunderstood as we may sometimes be—who have supported and shown me affection in the past.
Oscar Hijuelos, Thoughts Without Cigarettes
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