Our apartment, number 2, was the first one to the left once you had climbed a few marble steps inside the mirrored hallway. I don’t know just what I should have felt when my mother pushed open the front door and I saw a framed picture of Jesus with his burning heart in hand, but it was my brother, José, who led me down that hallway to the kitchen, with its buckling linoleum floors, its pipes covered in rust and mold, and walls streaked with amber trails left by the cockroaches at night. Off my parents’ bedroom and directly above our basement boiler, the kitchen’s floors were shaking as I walked in. I’m pretty sure it was a weekend day that I arrived, but I can’t really say—only that my father, Pascual, or papi, was sitting by our Formica-covered table with some of his friends.
“Recuerdas a tu papá?” my mother asked me, just as he looked over at me. “Remember your father?” With his heavyset melancholy Gallego face, he seemed friendly enough, and because I did not know what else to do, I ran into his arms, his huge hands gently caressing my back, his eyes, always sad in memory, almost filling with tears over the fact of my miraculous return. My mother then told me, “Dale un beso”—“Give him a kiss”—and as I did, my face pressing up against his, a strong scent of tobacco and booze mixed with Old Spice cologne rose into my nostrils. Maybe he had asked me, “Cómo andas, hijo?”—“How are you, son?”—or said, “I’m so happy to see you at home,” in English. Perhaps he had an early Christmas gift for me, some toy he would have gotten downtown; perhaps he introduced me to his Mexican buddy, Mr. Daniel Martinez, superintendent from up the street, with his languid jowl-laden face and mariner’s tattoo on his forearm, or maybe his drinking pal supreme, Frankie the Puerto Rican exterminator, was on hand; perhaps a man I knew only as Díaz, one of my father’s fellow cooks from the Biltmore, a dead-on Cuban look-alike for the actor Lon Chaney Jr., also sat by that table—but who knows, it was so long ago. Of one thing I’m fairly certain: My father, in the company of friends and in clouds of cigarette smoke, had exuded, while embracing me, something I hadn’t felt in a long time, a simple kindness, which I hungered for; or perhaps, as I sometimes think now, it was pity.
Then, as I remember, I was taken to my room at the end of the hall, and that too seemed vaguely familiar; one of the few souvenirs I’d brought back with me from my trip to my aunt’s—a smallish conga drum with an animal skin head on which was painted the word Cuba—had been set in the corner; a bag of toys accumulated during my stay in the hospital, filled mostly with rubber soldiers that some kindly neighbors had bought for me, my mother placed down on the bed. She pulled up on its sheets, the mattress below—“This one is new!” she insisted—fitted with a plastic cover, as she’d been told by the nurses that I’d started to wet myself at the hospital. Though the steam pipes sizzled, as if frying up things in their paint-mottling juices, my mother, despite that terrible heat, went over to the window and gave it an extra push shut. Then, almost cheerfully, she told me: “Tienes que descansar”—“You must rest now.” And while I didn’t feel like napping, and even if it was midafternoon, my mother made me get into bed, explaining that I had been very sick. Naturally, I obeyed. I don’t recall that she kissed me, but, in any event, she turned off the lights and closed the door, leaving me, her most frail and delicate child, to stay awake for hours on end, peering out through the window, which only looked onto a desolate back courtyard anyway, wondering what to make of having to lie there in all that darkness.
CHAPTER 2
A Few Notes on My Past
For the next two years, I rarely went out, except to St. Luke’s Hospital for checkups and to a few places in the neighborhood, my mother always by my side. She even felt leery about letting me into the hallway to play with the Walker kids, who daily swarmed up and down the stairs and charged along the marble floors. As for the often rowdy children on the street just outside our front windows, the kind of kids who’d shout, “Hey, Johnny, ya can kiss my ass” and “Fuck yourself, man!” as I watched them playing their running and hitting games and sledding down the hill when it had snowed, I felt nothing less than the purest envy for their freedom. Going out my door, onto the sidewalk, seemed a fantasy.
At some point, probably the summer after I’d finally come home, we went down to Coney Island by subway—a long trip in those hot electric-smelling cane-seated cars into Brooklyn, in case you hadn’t the occasion to try that delightful ride out for yourself—on one of the few journeys we made as a family, small as ours happened to be. A photograph: I posed on the boardwalk with my dapper, self-possessed older brother, my father in his looming campesino majesty, and my mother, her usual guarded or skeptical expression on her face. I had on a pair of baggy white shorts and a straw hat, and, unless I’m mistaken, I looked plump and soft, perhaps not at all alert, as if I had no idea what I was doing there, not just at Coney—though I recall enjoying the sweetness of its confection-stand air—but with those people, who happened to be my Cuban family.
In those days, with José in school or else working at some part-time job and doing his thing here and there around the neighborhood, and with my pop often at the hotel, getting in as much overtime as he could manage, my mother became the center of my world, often my only companion—and a rather overly vigilant one at that. She constantly washed my hands (and only with Phisohex, the sole antibacterial soap that doctors considered safe for the infectiously prone) or else told me not to put things I found on the floor in my mouth and kept after my every move; it seems that I became her full-time job. Sweeping the floors or wiping down the walls, swatting at skittering roaches, she was always quejando—mainly about the fact that we were too poor for me to get sick again and about “los gastos,” the costs of my medicines and doctors and the hospital visits, some of which my father’s union did not cover, my mother reminding me, “In this country, nobody gives nothing away.” All the while she’d conjure, again and again, those microbes, which seemed to be everywhere, like the very air we breathed, the dust-mote-ridden light through the window, like God.
She’d go on as well about another realm of which I could have only been vaguely aware: her life in Cuba, and the goodness of the people she had known back in Holguín before coming to America—“Este purgatorio”—and about how wonderful a man my father had been to her in the days when they met—“Cuando él me quería, mucho.” “If only I’d known what I was getting into,” she’d say, without ever missing the chance of attacking Maya. “Borja, yes, she was good to me, she even felt sorry for the way I was treated, but that other one?” She’d shake her head. “That witch . . .” And she’d launch into diatribes against my aunt and into the history of their differences, with stories that inevitably began with “One night that woman” or “That one, the evil sister, la mala, thought she could get away with anything, but . . .” Byzantine tales of torment and abuse—my fairy tales—flew from her mouth to my ears, and without her once considering just whom she was talking to, or my age and innocence, as if indeed it didn’t matter if I really understood her at all.
Sometimes, she’d take me down the hill along Amsterdam to the ladies’ pelluquería, or hairdressers, on 122nd Street, which my godmother, Carmen, ran with her younger sister, Olga; in that salon, these Cuban beauties and their female clientele formed the hub of local Latina society, just as Freddie’s Bodega and the liquor store next door to it, farther down the block, formed a hub for the Latino men scattered here and there in that ethnically mixed neighborhood. (There was a Japanese restaurant on 119th, a Japanese grocery on 123rd; Irish bars up on Broadway; and, as a matter of course, we’d occasionally see some mysterious-looking Hasidim, with their wild locks of hair, affiliated with the Jewish Theological Seminary, walking on the street. And the center of Harlem itself, on 125th Street, our Times Square, was a tempest of black and Latino and, in those days, Italian folks.) In Carmen’s, I just enjoyed hanging around and overhearing the ladies discuss some rather touchy subjects, like male infidelity, crushes, sex, heartthrobs—the sort of things I assume they assumed I couldn
’t understand, even when Carmen tended to speak to her godson, while smiling and pinching my chin, in both English and Spanish. My mother, in such circumstances, tended to tell Carmen not to bother, with the Spanish at least, but she, my godmother, perhaps flabbergasted at the notion, always went on in that way, saying things like “Magda, you have to give him some encouragements. No seas tan dura”—“Don’t be so hard on him.” She and her sister, Olga, were delicious women, in any case, and quite nice to me. Besides, I just liked the laboratory atmosphere of their salon, with all its space-age-looking hair dryers, ladies in curlers, Spanish in the air, music on the radio, and clients chatting away endlessly in voices that, for the most part, with sunlight pouring down through the window, seemed happy.
And my mother would take me to church occasionally, while my father always stayed home. I enjoyed seeing so many folks dressed up in their Sunday best, the men all wearing hats and ties, and my mother’s friends in their veils and florid hats, smelling nice and looking pretty standing on the steps. While the Mass, in solemn Latin, never failed to put me half to sleep, my mother, nodding at the altar and making the sign of the cross, seemed to take it all to heart, even when she couldn’t always understand the sermons that the Irish priests—Fathers Ford, Dwyer, and Byrne—delivered weekly to a congregation that, bit by bit, was becoming less Irish and more Spanish. We’d sometimes attend High Mass at eleven, to hear my brother, one of the pipsqueaks in the choir, sing, but even then, if a few people started coughing around us, she get me out of there immediately. (And speaking of religion, at home, my mother often punctuated her observations about life with “Ay, Ave María” and “Por Dios!” for no particular reason at all; I’d sometimes see her sitting by our kitchen table whispering to herself as she read some letters, presumably from Cuba, and then, having prayed, make the sign of the cross. If it was a letter from her mother, María, in Cuba, she’d kiss the wafer-thin paper it had been written on.)
Now, you’d think that a child in such close proximity to so loquacious and opinionated a woman would have picked up the pieces of that lost “mother” tongue again, just through constant exposure. But, although that’s just what should have happened, the simple truth is that she never really spoke to me but directed her tirades, her aphorisms, her orders, her stories, at me. If she’d been a different sort—say, like my loving aunt Cheo—my mother might have gently prodded/eased the Spanish language out of me or, at the very least, gone over the sorts of exercises that most Cuban mothers might with their children, like the rolling of the rrrrrs through the repetition of tongue twisters like “Tres tigres tristes,” or, starting from scratch, taught me just what things were called, or how the Spanish alphabet worked and about los vocales, or else, in any case, gently cajoling me to speak more Spanish, day by day. Who knows how my feelings about “refusing” to speak it might have changed. But, for whatever reasons, that sort of patience, organization, and attentiveness were just not part of her nature.
Perhaps she thought my Spanish would naturally come back to me or that, quite simply, it seemed too great a bother, given her more immediate concerns. (Years later, she’d say, shrugging, “I don’t know why you didn’t want to learn,” as if that were something that had been offered. And while I now wish she had been more demanding when it came to my speaking Spanish, my guess is that I would have still found ways of pushing that language away.)
Regardless, by then, I remained indifferent, blocked, and somewhat of a spoiled princeling: She may have filled my ears with her thousand-words-a-minute Spanish, but like a good defender, as vigilant about avoiding the absorption of those words as if they were poison, akin to the Cuban microbes my mother always talked about, I hardly ever let those words in through the walls I’d put up. And so, early on, we adopted our own way of communicating with each other: She’d speak to me in Spanish, which I comprehended but resisted speaking, and I’d answer her in English, a language she barely understood and, in any case, never really cared for.
Standing by my window, I loved it when the scissors man, with a grindstone on his cart, came up the hill ringing a bell and, getting a taker, stopped to sharpen those knives and cutlery, the sparks flying off his wheel; or I’d see a ragman going into certain doors where bags of cast-offs awaited him; and, I swear to God, that neighborhood had its share of midgets—maybe they were hooked up with the Ringling Brothers circus and stayed somewhere on 125th Street—but they’d sometimes come waddling by on the street in pairs. Then there were the Italians in their Alpine hats, three men strumming guitars and mandolins, along with a woman, her ears bejangled like a Gypsy’s, banging a tambourine, who seemed to appear from out of nowhere—from East Harlem perhaps, or Little Italy—and marched up the hill, serenading the tenements with bel canto and Neapolitan songs. (People would lean out their windows and toss down dimes and quarters wrapped in tissue paper.)
And I’d feel a definite excitement when the coal truck pulled up—yes, that was a different era in New York—and practically backed into our living room, or so it seemed: From its rear dropped a metal chute down into a basement window, where there was a storage bin, and for half an hour or so, the coal, released from the truck, would come rushing below into that darkness, like so much river water (a sound I still find soothing). From the window, I’d watch as well, with some enchantment, what the local Irish cops on the beat called “shenanigans.” Our black streetlamps, from the turn of the century, had ornate astragal moldings and roundish ridges that made it easy enough for kids to climb, some three stories high, to their finial tops, usually to place or recover what the local mischief makers had left hanging there—trousers and sneakers, and sometimes even underwear, during that unceremoniously humbling process known as “depantsing.” They also played three-sewer stickball in the spring and summer, and games like Chinese and American against the walls, and now and then, as I’d wait for my father to come home, fistfights broke out, usually over some girl, someone calling the cops, a squad car or an officer on his beat arriving to break things up—it all seemed so thrilling to me. (Crazily enough, also on that street at night, some fellow, in celebration of his Celtic roots, think his name was Myles, would dress up in a tartan skirt and tam-o’-shanter and, as if part of an invisible procession, move up and down the block, playing wistful airs on the bagpipes.)
Still, if my mother saw me standing by an open window, she’d pull me away and slam it shut. And then, without much of an explanation, she’d threaten me with the notion that I might not ever get the chance to go out; and so I’d sit down, benumbed and cautious, wondering what the hell was going on.
Several times a day, I had to take a regimen of pills, which I got used to, and occasionally some vile-tasting liquids, possibly mild laxatives, but when it came to food, I had to live off my memories of better times. As such, I felt deeply affected whenever an ice cream truck drove up the street with its tingling bells, or when I saw kids coming up the block carrying a white-boxed cheese pizza from the old hole-in-the-wall V&T’s on 122nd Street, which they’d eat right there on the sidewalk. (In such a state of vigilance, or food envy, you become aware of every box of Cracker Jacks, every Hershey bar, every thirty-five-cent roast beef sandwich on rye bread with mayonnaise and salt and pepper from Adolf’s corner delicatessen that you’ve seen someone eating.) I could not eat anything with salt, most meats, butter, nor the merest bit of sugar, as my nephritis had apparently left me in a prediabetic state. (By then, my eyes had started failing badly—I had no idea of just why things looked blurry a few yards away and thought that normal; but the deterioration of my eyesight was distinctly related to what had happened to my kidneys, a doctor later told me; neither of my parents, nor my brother, had problems with their vision.) Which is to say they’d put me on a diet that no child of six or seven could ever possibly care for: Whatever foods I did eat—potatoes, carrots, and some meat or chicken—were boiled to death, and never anything as delicious as one of my papi’s typical weekend breakfasts of fried eggs with steak or chori
zos, onions, and potatoes cooked in delicious Hotel Bar butter and smothered in salt, the aromas of which I had to endure while eating bowls of sugarless cream of wheat farina with skim milk. Whatever the doctors at the hospital instructed my mother, invariably through someone translating, she adhered to their dictums religiously, as if she were frightened to death about what my pop would do to her if I had a relapse.
Nevertheless, that regimen was no easy thing for a kid to put up with, especially given that the one luxury we had in our lives involved food. We may have been “poor”—“Somos pobres,” my mother declared for years afterward—but by the end of each week, our refrigerator practically spilled over with delectable cuts of meat and other victuals that most families in my father’s income bracket—“upper-class poor” is how my brother and I came to think of ourselves—would have never been able to afford.
You see, as a short order cook at the Biltmore Men’s Bar, my father had worked a special deal with the pantry supervisor at the hotel, an Italiano who, for five dollars a week, allowed him to bring home whatever cuts of meat and other delicacies he wanted. He was not alone in this. Earning little despite their membership in the Restaurant and Cabaret Workers Union, local number 6, all the kitchen staff availed themselves of such perks, while management, being vaguely aware of this—and doing the same themselves—looked the other way. (As they did about other things: I grew up eating with monogram-embossed Biltmore utensils and on slightly chipped plates from their different restaurants, and, at one point, an art deco armoire, a cast-off from when the hotel had started refurnishing the rooms, took up a corner of my parents’ bedroom.) Daily, those secreted packets of meat came home with my father without fail. Ambling toward Amsterdam, across the Columbia University campus, from the 116th Street subway, with his slightly limping gait—even in those years when he was in his early forties, he’d balloon up and down in weight—he’d walk in through the door at around three thirty or four in the afternoon, a strong scent of meat and blood preceding him, and particularly so if he’d come uptown in an overheated train or in one that had stalled in a tunnel. Tucked inside his shirt and wrapped in muted-orange butcher’s paper, those bundles of meat and chicken almost always bled through the fabric.