He’d set them down on the table, light a cigarette, and pop open a bottle of sweating Ballantine beer, while my mother, who did most of the cooking, looked over the contents of those packages: On a normal afternoon, they might contain a few pounds of filet mignon or breaded veal cutlets—what she called “empanadas”—or porterhouse steaks or a big plastic bag of Gulf shrimp too, or several whole chickens, or a slab of Swiss cheese, or a few pounds of finely sliced French ham or turkey breast, not to mention a pound or two of ground sirloin beef or a glowing one-pound brick of creamy Hotel Bar butter—items that, on such afternoons, seemed especially tempting since they were strictly forbidden to me.
Such meats jammed the freezer compartment and the shelves of our buzzing Frigidaire. We had so much of that stuff that I can remember my mother lamenting the waste, often throwing out packages of freezer-burned ground beef after they had lingered too long in the dense frost. In a way, when it came to food, my father was a kind of Cuban Santa Claus or Robin Hood, if you like. For whatever he would bring home, he always shared with our neighbors in the building and with his friends.
My mother did as well. For years, Mrs. Walker, “la muda,” could hardly pass by our first-floor apartment on her way home without knocking on the door; often enough, my mother found something from the refrigerator for her to take. I can recall watching Mrs. Walker, who, thin and wan, smoked up a storm herself, always letting her facial expressions stretch like rubber in every direction, her hands wildly working the air while attempting to convey to my mother some simple notion, like coming upstairs for a bite—Mrs. Walker spooning her fingers into her mouth and repeating, “Et, et, et,” while my mother, savoring a dawning moment of understanding, proclaimed in her heavy accent, “Jes, jes—food, food! Comida, ha!” and turned to me, saying, “You see, hijo, I can speaky the English!”
Sometimes, it would work out that we’d head upstairs into Mrs. Walker’s chaotic apartment: Her husband, a bartender working nights, somehow managed to sleep in a room in the back while their kids—Jeannie, Gracie, Carol, Jerry, and Richie—had the run of the house; I mainly remember that piles of clothes were laid out haphazardly all over the place, that she, like my mother, tended to bring in stuff off the street, all kinds of furniture in various states of disrepair lying here and there; and in her kitchen, where we would sit while Mrs. Walker, a nice lady, started to cook some things on the stove—say, some of the steaks my mother had given her—and went on and on about something, which I could barely comprehend, my mother, telling her things in Spanish, with a few words of English thrown in, seemed completely at home with that arrangement. One of those ladies who would smoke while eating, she’d sit down and have a snack, and my mother, sticking to her little finicky rules, refusing anything herself—she’d shake her head, pat her stomach to indicate that she was full—seemed content to bask in their oddly intimate relationship, unrestrained by language. Having a sweet soul, Mrs. Walker, aware that I had been so sick, would just look over at me and smile, blow me a kiss between puffs of smoke, and then, putting down her fork and cigarette, as she did one afternoon, make a rocking motion back and forth before her stomach, mumbling something in her mangled guttural speech, which my mother, tuned in, seemed to pick up on. In one instance, my mother, translating, told me, “Ay, pero, hijo, ella dice que fuiste un bebé muy lindo”—“She says that you were a beautiful baby.” And seeing that my mother had gotten that notion across to me, Mrs. Walker would reach over and pinch my cheek.
We wouldn’t stay long. I used to think that it would have been nice to play with Mrs. Walker’s kids, who had tons of board games on their couch, and the girls skipped rope in the living room, but my mother wouldn’t allow me to join them. Maybe one of them might have a cold without knowing it, and, in any case, there was a mustiness about that apartment, perhaps from all the old stuff that constantly accrued in the place, which must have struck my mother as unsanitary. So we’d head back downstairs, la muda talking up a garbled storm from her door, a nagging sensation bugging me that I had missed out on some fun once again, and the smell of that nicely cooking steak still in my nostrils.
On some evenings, my father cooked for his pals—steaks with onions and French fries or a simple platter of fried chorizos and eggs—dishes they managed to gobble down even while they continued to smoke (puff of cigarette, bite of food). My father always sent those fellows, wobbly legged and well sated by the time they’d leave, often around midnight—how they managed to get to work the next mornings, I do not know—off with a package or two of chicken or with some cold cuts, his generosity, to his mind, an important part of his very Cuban way of being.
Since we lived near the university, we were sometimes visited by a Cuban professor of the classics, a lonely-seeming baldheaded fellow of middle age, from Cienfuegos, by the name of Alfonso Reina, whom my father had happened to meet one afternoon while walking back from the subway across the campus. The professor always turned up with flowers for my mother and bonbons for her “preciosos” Cuban boys, though I could never have any. His overt gayness, the way his eyes would melt looking at my father and he’d always ask my older brother for a kiss on his mouth, somewhat disturbed my pop, who, in his old Cuban ways, felt somewhat uncomfortable with the fellow’s homosexuality but nevertheless welcomed him into our home for a meal and drinks, as long as there was someone else around, like his friend, the sturdily manly (if occasionally falling apart) Frankie the exterminator, as a buffer. He also welcomed into our kitchen one hell of a blessed fellow, from 119th Street, one Teddy Morgenbesser, formerly of Brooklyn, who worked in the accounts office of the La Prensa newspaper syndicate and had lucked out by falling in love with a bombshell Dominican babe, a certain Belen Ricart, who had two kids and with whom he lived outside of marriage. Jewish, he’d gotten so Hispanicized by her—and from a pretty active nightlife in the dance halls of the 1950s—that he spoke only Spanish in our home. But from what I could tell, he, with his dark hair parted in the middle, dark eyes, and Xavier Cugat mustache, as well as his way of wearing guayaberas whenever possible, seemed quite Cuban, and since I only knew him as Teddy, I assumed that was the case.
My father sometimes took me over to his place. He’d decorated the apartment to resemble, I suppose, an apartment in Havana, with bright fabrics on his art deco furniture, tons of (rubber) palm plants, and hanging beads in the doorways. He had a console on which he played only Latin records, and mostly the big-band mambo music of the 1950s, along with all kinds of folkloric Cuban music, obscure stuff he’d hunted down in Harlem.
On one of those occasions, two things happened that I obviously haven’t forgotten. As I was sitting there one afternoon watching the adults drinking away, my father had Teddy pour me a glass of strong red Spanish wine so that I might try it—why he did so, I don’t know—but it tasted awful to me; I couldn’t imagine why anyone would bother to drink such a bitter thing. (“He’s too young for that,” my father had ruefully concluded.) Later that same afternoon, Teddy, who owned a reel-to-reel tape recorder, conducted, I guess for posterity’s sake, what amounted to an interview entirely in español with my father, during which my father, his face aglow, spoke at length about his early days in Cuba, his life on the farms on which he had been raised, and, in effect, a rather straightforward history of his family and of what must have been much happier times, my father attentively noting the death of one of his younger sisters at the age of two from a fever (his eyes welling up), and on along a meandering road of nostalgia and even more tears, to the sad passing of his older brother, Oscar, which, in such moments, he seemed not to have recovered from.
“He was my life, and my blood, who taught me everything I know,” he said, patting his chest, which had started to heave, at which point, Teddy, having gotten enough down, concluded the session lest my father get more carried away. Now, if it might seem unlikely for me to recall such exact words from so long ago, I won’t dispute that I am perhaps approximating at least the spirit of what he said, but I am
now only mentioning this at all to lament the fact that, all these years later, for the life of me, I can’t remember the tone and timbre of my father’s voice, which remains always soft but indistinct. (As a further aside, about twenty-five years later, long after my father had died, I bumped into Teddy on a bus, and among the things we talked about, I asked him if, by some distant chance, he had any of those old tapes around. The answer, unfortunately, was no, to my deepest disappointment, for I would have given my right arm to have heard my father’s voice again.)
Occasionally, if there had been a banquet at the hotel, he’d come home with a box or two of fancy pastries, two dozen chocolate éclairs, and as many creamy napoleons; these too were forbidden to me. It was worse on holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, when my father would turn up with a twenty-pound turkey and bags of stuffing, which my mother served with sweet potatoes, garlic-drenched yucca, and fried plantains, people coming over to join us, people eating away, while I’d sit off with some carefully prepared chicken and the usual roundup of boiled vegetables. At least my father was sensitive to my gnawing desires, and the way I’d look at him as he’d sit down before a plate of filet mignon smothered in onions. It bothered him enough that, now and then, he’d ask my mother if she was sure I couldn’t at least have a little taste of something different from my usual fare, but she, forced to play the heavy, always reminded him of the fact that, as far as the doctors were concerned, I was still sick, and susceptible to many bad things. He’d nod, smile sadly at me, give a little shrug, and then send me off to bed, where the aroma remained so strong that I could hardly sleep.
So for the longest time, the scent of frying plantains killed me. Not once for several years did I consume anything as lively as a quivery slice of flan, the one dessert my mother cooked, and wonderfully so. And while my parents occasionally sprang for a bar of sugarless chocolate for my delectation, the kind of chalky pasteboard confection intended for old folks and diabetics, every so often a two-pound block of dark German chocolate, over which I would salivate, would turn up in our kitchen. This I’d forlornly watch my brother happily devouring, chunk by chunk. My only consolation came from the fact that my papi, feeling for me, often had some ten-cent comic book that he’d bought for me in Grand Central, usually a Superboy or a Flash, which I think he chose because of their torero-red cape and costume. As soon as I’d hear his keys jingling in the door, I’d run down the hall to greet him, his smell of cologne, cigarettes, and meat intact, and find the comic book rolled up in one of his coat pockets; but before he’d hand it over, he’d lean down and say, “Dame un abrazito”—“Give me a hug” (or “Dame un besito, chiquito”), and once I had, into my room I’d go to follow, as best I could since I could not yet read, the adventures of those heroes by looking carefully at the panels, an act that always remained a high point of my boring days.
In those years, my father seemed not to know what to make of me. I can only recall his kindness, and with the biases I eventually developed toward my mother because of language, I got so attached to him that I came to rewrite my history in the hospital. Little as I remembered about my stay in Connecticut, I just couldn’t imagine that he hadn’t ever come to visit me during that time. Fabricating his presence in memory, I’d remember my pop in a trench coat and hat, with the smell of rain and cigarettes and cologne about him, standing by the visiting room doorway and smiling gently at me. I’d see him nodding at those other parents, their faces grown taut by worries, and then, inside that room, holding out his arms to me.
What drove that version, which I’d cling to years later after he was gone, came down to the fact that, however flawed the man might have been, he possessed an abundance of down-home Cuban warmth.
Altogether, he was a funny cat, un tipo bueno, a tender and affectionate man who had his ways. Once when he had to attend a formal wedding and concluded that his two-tone shoes were too scuffed for the occasion, he covered them over with black enamel paint. And when, in his late forties, he began to get slightly nearsighted and, at first, didn’t want to bother with an optometrist, he made do with a pair of glasses that someone had left behind in the bar. (They seem to have worked for a while.) At the hotel, he played the weekly numbers, never winning but kept paying out a dollar a week every Friday for many years, mainly to help out the black man hawking them, a Korean war veteran who had a hook for a right hand. He collected pennies, keeping them in special blue albums, perhaps thinking that they might one day make him rich. He never read books, having neither the time nor patience for them. What he did read: the Hotel and Club Voice newspaper, the Daily News, and El Diario. Also the occasional brochure that someone at the bar had given him, brochures about “Dream Vacation Homes” in New Jersey and on the value of Korean pearls as an investment opportunity being two that I recall. I can remember him far more for his tenderness toward me, at least when I was a kid, than for anything else, but all the while, he had an air of resignation about him and little patience for waiting things out, even gambling. Once, years later, when he took me over to the bazaar at Corpus Christi School and we played a wheel of luck, instead of putting down a few dimes on two different numbers, he put down dimes on all but a few. Of course, the number that he hadn’t bet on came out; he shrugged and we moved on. When this Puerto Rican kid, Fernando, got stabbed in the gut in a basement a few buildings away during a hassle with an Irish guy over a girl, and came staggering up the stairway, blood trailing behind him (the sidewalk would bear those stains for weeks), it was my father who went down to the corner to call the police. Afterward, he calmly sat out on the stoop, smoking and telling whoever wanted to listen about what had just happened. In other words, he could be quite laid-back, in a Cuban country boy manner.
And, as I have mentioned, he’d speak to me in English, not always, but when he did, it was with a quiet authority and without my mother’s befuddlement and confusion. Whereas my mother remained, for all her life, an ebullient woman, incapable of holding back, her nervous energies flowing all over the place, he comported himself with his younger son with a minimum of words: “Come here,” “Go on,” “What do you want?” “Ask your mother.” And, at least until things got too hard for him, he rarely showed any anger toward me or the world. I just found something comforting about him, even if I would never get to know what he was really about.
Yet, while he offered me affection, that cubano, a union man and hotel cook of simple tastes and longings, he never really taught me anything at all, not how to dress (though he could be quite dapper), nor how to dance the mambo or rumba (at which he, like my mother, had excelled), nor, among so many other things, even how to drive a car (he, raised on farms with horses, never would learn). And when it came to something as important as restoring that which had been taken from me, a sense of just who I was, I doubt that, as with my mother, it occurred to him that something inside of me was missing, an element of personality in need of repair. Earthly in his needs and desires, he just didn’t think that way. Though he never once accompanied me to a doctor and really didn’t take much care of himself, he simply must have seen me as the son he had almost lost, and, at first, for the longest time, always deferred to my mother when it came to matters of my health.
After a while, my father began to feel sorry for me. One night, I remember, when my mother was out with some friends, he could not take the wan expression that had come over my face as he stood over the stove, cooking up a steak in butter with onions, along with fried potatoes, in a skillet. Turning to me, he asked in his quiet way, “Quieres un poquito?”—“Do you want some?” And though I felt reluctant to answer him, as if to say yes would be wrong, he filled my plate anyway. Unfortunately, my stomach had grown so unaccustomed to such rich foods that not an hour later, I got deathly ill and, coming down with the shivers, had to throw everything up, and took to my bed, worried that my mother would find out; and yet, with my father telling me, “Not a word to your mother, huh?” I passed the night, reeling with the memory, however fleeting, of tha
t delicious meal.
Naturally, I came to prefer his company, which is not to say I didn’t care for or love my mother in the same way as my father. If I felt a different kind of affection for her, it had more to do with the way she’d sometimes look at me when I’d speak to her in English, as if I were doing something wrong, or worse, as if I were some stranger’s kid trying to give her a hard time. I was too hyper to always notice, too insensitive to become morose, but I can remember occasionally wondering if I were nothing more to her than a burden that she had no choice but to contend with.
Though strict about my diet, she had her inconsistencies. Once she handed me a glass of orange juice in which I saw floating the cellophane body of a dead cockroach, its antennae curling along the surface. When I refused to drink it, she made a face, and, in one motion, picked the insect out with her fingers and threw it in the garbage. “Está bien, ahora”—“It’s fine now,” she told me. And when I still refused to as much as take a sip, she grabbed the glass off the table and emptied it into our sink, all the while muttering, “It’s like pouring money down the drain.” Turning, she scolded me, “I can’t believe how spoiled you are! We’re not like los ricos—la gente rica, after all!” Then she sat down, oblivious to just how startled and bad I felt.