Thoughts Without Cigarettes

  On another afternoon, when we were in the kitchen, as I sat by the table across from her, eating something, she started looking at me in an odd way. And just like that, she tilted her head back and, gasping, her eyes rolled up in her head; and she cried, “Help me, hijo, I can’t breathe!”—“No puedo respirar!” Slumping forward, she laid her head in her arms, still as a corpse. What could I do but panic? My stomach went into knots, and I started, without really knowing what was going on, to tug on her dress: I felt so anxious, I thought of running over to Carmen’s for help, but, at the same time, I worried about leaving her alone, and pulling at her arm, I kept repeating, “But, Mamá, Mamá, are you okay?” That’s when I saw the crest of a smile forming on her lips, and her eyes popped open, and sitting up straight, she triumphantly told me, “Ah, but now I know that you care whether I live or die!” She was laughing while I withdrew deeply into myself, wishing I could slip into the walls: I can remember her telling me, “Pero qué te pasa? I was joking. Fue un chiste!” When she saw that I hadn’t lightened up, she waved me off, saying: “You’re too serious for so little a boy.” Then I think she pinched my cheek and, shaking her head, left the kitchen, saying, “But now I know you love me. Yes, I do. Now I know.”

  Okay, so she was a bit unusual and perhaps still as mischievous as she had been as a girl. But the truth is, not having any basis for comparison, nor choice, I got used to her. Still, though she meant well, she obviously (so I now think) couldn’t help but let her resentments affect her judgment. Out of curiosity one day, I happened to ask her where I was born. And without hesitating, she said, “But, Son, don’t you know, I found you in a garbage can, right out in front.” And she took me over to the window, pointing to some cans by the railing. “It was in that one, at the end. I heard you crying and when I saw you, I thought I just had to bring you home.” And she, always inventing stories—what she called “relajos”—laughed and crossed her heart. “I swear to God that’s the truth.”

  I suppose she wanted me to feel a deep gratitude; I suppose it was her way of telling me how lucky I had been to have been rescued from the hospital, but while I didn’t really believe her—for on the other hand, she was always reminding me about how she carried me in her stomach for nine months—a part of me did. Later, looking in the mirror and never really liking what I saw, I truly wondered if the truth had finally come out. Years after, every time I’d hear about that Sesame Street puppet, Oscar the Grouch, who lived in a garbage can, I’d think of that afternoon.

  Not to say that my life in that household with my mother was just a misery—to the contrary, long before I had made any of my own friends, like my pal from across the street, Rich, the ladies who’d come by to see her always treated me nicely. Having a simple liking for my mother’s elemental personality, one of them, Chaclita, came by at least a few times a week. Always smelling nice from some mild eau, she wore pearls and, with her dyed blond hair and flapper wardrobe, seemed the most elegant woman to have ever entered our house. She’d bring along bags of fancy hand-me-down clothes for my mother, and, as well, little packages of the European-style marmalades left over from her trips abroad. A sunny spirit who laced her Spanish with French and always spoke of a love affair she once had with a singer named Nelson Eddy, she, in addition to concertizing, taught violin out of a flower-adorned apartment on Morningside Drive. She never had a bad thing to say about anyone, not even my father, whom she must have occasionally encountered in one of his less robust states.

  In any event, it was Chaclita who made the effort to show me how to write down my own name. This she did one afternoon as we stood in the hallway, her slender (somewhat bony) hand holding my own and guiding my pencil over each letter across a pad. I did so shakily, and afterward, I couldn’t help looking at the name Oscar Hijuelos over and over again. Fascinated, and treasuring it as if it had some great value, I took that slip of paper around the apartment with me proudly, until, after I’d left the little exercise out on the kitchen table and gone away for a few moments, I returned to find that my mother had thrown it out.

  But to be fair to her, my mother also tried to be my teacher, though she could barely read English. What books we had were the kinds that she either found abandoned under the hallway stairs or in boxes left out by the garbage cans in front of our stoop, tomes, for the most part, discarded by the university folks who, at one time or other, had taken temporary apartments in the building. (I recall a few medical students coming and going quickly, and for a while, there was a kindly Lebanese professor, prematurely balding, with two little children, living up on the second floor—I think he was a widower because of the way he doted on the little ones—I can remember him winking at me as I’d watch him speaking with my father from our door.) Among the titles my mother collected for our hallway bookcase: a fancy edition of Oliver Twist with half of its gold-leafed pages missing, a biology textbook, a volume or two of some outdated encyclopedia, a hardcover copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, circa 1930 (which I still have to this day), and other choice sundries like Agricultural Development in the Middle United States, 1954–1955, all of which, I think, she brought home mainly because she thought they might be worth something; but she also treated them, at the very least, like decorations, along the lines of the other bric-a-brac that my mother, who could not pass an item left out on the sidewalk, also brought into the apartment.

  My lessons, if they can be called that, unfolded with the aid not of children’s stories of the Dick and Jane variety, nor any of the classics like The Little Engine That Could or of the Golden series, but rather the comics, which my mother called “funny books.” My brother, working in a local stationer’s, brought some home regularly, as did my father, but we also got some from a teenager named Michael Komisky, later a Catholic missionary priest, who lived in the building next door. A gentle and idealistic soul, his comics were not about crime or adventure but featured animal stars like Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, and Felix the Cat. These my mother found the easiest to understand. In a tender way, as I think about it now, the afternoons we spent sitting by the kitchen table or lying side by side on her bed, with such comics opened before us, were our most peaceful and unhurried, though I’m still not sure what to make of those lessons in which my mother did her best to improve her quite minimal English alongside me. Just the same, she tried.

  “Felis, wh . . . whar . . . whers ar-ray . . . jew . . . jew gaw-gaweeng?” And then, she’d stop and say, “Dejame ver”—“Let’s see now”—and begin the same line again, “Felix, where are you going?” her pronunciation as confounding to me as before. Our movement from caption to balloon, and panel to panel, was always glacially slow, but I didn’t mind those lessons at all: I don’t know what or how much I learned from hearing the words of Felix (“Yes, I will take this rocket ship to the moon!”) as they fell from her lips, but my mother’s attempts to meet me midway, as it were, along with her struggles and out-and-out bursts of laughter—from finally understanding what the heck was being said—constituted the only moments that we were together as mother and son when my supposed frailness, my susceptibility to infections, my illness, and all the anxieties she attached to me were thankfully absent as a subject of our conversation.

  Of course, I had other moments with her, when, forgetting all the crap I’d put her through, she occasionally became almost tender toward me. During a time when she worked cleaning up after a kindergarten school on 116th Street in the evenings, I’d accompany her, passing the hours playing with blocks in a corner, while she, not really knowing how to clean at all, went about singing to herself most happily, dusting the furniture and washing the floors and bathrooms until about ten o’clock, when, her work completed, she’d take a few moments and sit down behind the upright piano to pick out, by ear, some tunes she remembered from Cuba. (They always put her in a good mood; walking home, she always seemed a different kind of lady, lighthearted and laughing.) And in the autumns, during a soporific late afternoon rain, falling asleep by her side, I??
?d feel her pulling me close to her and, sensing her soft breathing, I’d drift off into the most wonderful of dreams. “Qué tranquilo y sabroso, eh?” she’d say. “How tranquil and delicious this is!” Later, in unexpectedly good spirits, she’d take me into our narrow bathroom and, singing gaily, wash my hair over the bathtub, the warm spray pouring down on my head, her fingers massaging my scalp, an unexpected maternal sweetness overwhelming me: Everything about that process, from the smell of her perfume and shampoo and the proximity of her body, in its warmth, as she pressed ever so slightly against me, seemed so pleasurable that whenever she washed my hair, I never wanted it to end—and not just for the little niceties of being pampered but because, during such moments, I’d somehow feel a continuity with her past.

  “Te gusta?” she’d ask me. “Good! At least your mamá is doing one thing right!”

  And she’d laugh and dream aloud: “I’m doing it for you the same way my mamá did it for me, in Cuba.” Then: “If it feels so good, it’s because your abuelita taught me, hijo.” Afterward, she’d towel my head off, stand me in front of a mirror, and comb my hair. Looking me over, she’d rap my back and say: “Ya está!”—“Just fine!”

  One afternoon—I was seven—a letter arrived from Cuba, in a nearly weightless envelope. She opened it by the window, at a time of the day when the sun had risen over the tenement buildings across the street, and light came flooding into the living room. Kids were on the street; I could hear them shouting, a ball hit during a stickball game, a car honking, someone calling out, “Run, Tommy, run, ya dumb fuck!” when all at once, as she read down the page, she stopped and looked up, and said, “Ay pero mi mamá, mi mamá.” She shrank within herself just then—I’d never seen her looking so petite; she wasn’t—and began to softly cry, shaking her head, murmuring to herself. Not knowing what to do, I went over to her, asking, “What is it?” But, as she stood in that shaft of light, she kept on weeping until, just as suddenly, she gathered herself and, touching my face, told me: “Mi mamá se murío.” Then, in her English, “Jour abuelita, she is now in heaven.”

  As for my homeschooling, I think that period of studying with my mother lasted for perhaps a year and a half or so, until there came the point when—my father had probably pushed for it—my mother, reluctantly believing that keeping me at home wouldn’t do me much good, finally enrolled me in a first-grade class at the local Catholic school, Corpus Christi, run by wimpled Sinsinawa Dominican nuns. The school itself was situated on the Broadway side of 121st Street, just across the way from the Teachers College complex of old turn-of-the-century buildings, its classrooms taking up three floors above the church where I had been baptized, with a rectory where the nuns lived way above.

  This happened late into the year so that I had only a few months of schooling at that level. It was just as well—I’d felt terrified and not at all used to being around other children, let alone such an ethnic mix, for the kids in that school, just as in the neighborhood, included blacks and Puerto Ricans and Cubans, as well as Irish and Italians, among others. I felt, from the start, with my mother by my side, tremendously self-conscious and uncomfortable, not just because I’d been apart from normal kids for so long, but because of the way I’d come to believe that there was something wrong with me, for not a day had gone by when my mother hadn’t reminded me that my body, like the world, was filled with poisons.

  Just being out of the apartment on a regular basis threw me, and in my social awkwardness, I must have struck most of those kids as something of a lost soul. Though I had enjoyed the odd outing with my family into someone’s home, going to school scared me, and my face must have shown it. I can recall always feeling out of sorts. In my quietude, I just seemed different from the other kids, down to my unusual last name, Hijuelos, and the face and complexion that didn’t seem to go with it. Neither the Irish nor the Spanish-speaking kids knew what to make of me. Given my timidity, as if I’d have preferred to disappear into the walls like a ghost, and, as well, the fact that I didn’t have any real inkling how to read, my situation wasn’t helped by my mother, who made sure that everyone knew about my condition. While the other kids were dropped off by the entryway doors below, she not only walked me up to my classroom each morning, on those days when the weather permitted me to go to school at all, but, in her broken English, told my first teacher—I believe her name was Sister Mary Pierce—that I was still a very sick child and that I had to be watched over carefully. My fellow students would have probably noticed this without the two cents she’d deliver by the doorway: “My son, he is not so good in the kidneys.” And when I had gotten upset one day because the sister asked that we come to class with a ten-cent box of Crayolas, which my mother claimed she could not afford because we were “poor,” as I sat forlornly in the classroom, later that morning, my mother, having changed her mind, turned up with a box of those crayons in hand. These she delivered at the door, but not without cheerfully announcing to everyone, “Mi niño, Oscarito, he was crying and crying for them.” (I remember feeling stunned with embarrassment and wishing that I could turn into a bird and fly from that room.)

  I still missed days, especially if it rained or snowed or if I showed the slightest signs of any fatigue. That my mother refused to let me out of the apartment in the bad weather must have seemed pathetic to some of the kids, but the sisters were more forgiving. (Maybe they thought she was a little troubled and felt sorry for me.) As I got around to becoming, more or less, a full-time student, my mind always wandering, I would feel confused about whatever the nuns were teaching us, as if some part of me deep inside couldn’t help but cling to a notion that I was stupid, mainly because I couldn’t get my mother’s voice out of my head. It took me a while to fall into stride there, having already turned into an overly cautious and suspicious child, somewhat rigid in my ways. For the first few years, I preferred to be quiet during our classes, which began after we’d recited our morning prayers (an “Our Father,” a “Hail Mary,” and the Credo) and the pledge of allegiance, whose words I could never quite get straight. Having started out later than most kids, I lived in dread of being called on, and lacking self-confidence, I always felt that I had to play catch-up when it came to reading and writing, over which I agonized, all the while thinking that I wasn’t very smart. And not just because I was often too distracted by my own anxieties to concentrate well, but out of some sense that my mother and father’s limitations, when it came to English, had become my own: Just attempting to read—anything really—I’d feel as if I had to swim a long distance through murky water to fathom the meaning, and, at the same time, though I eventually improved, shell-shocked though I was, I always had the sense that the language was verboten to me, as if I needed special permission from someone to take it seriously. No matter how hard I tried, or how well I did on the tests, I secretly believed that my mind was essentially second-rate—all the other kids just seemed brighter than me.

  Told to paint a picture of a house in a field during the sessions that passed as art class, I tended toward using a single color, like green, as if to venture into a variety of colors, like the other kids, remained somehow beyond me. My brushstrokes were clumsy, too wide and sloppy, which was particularly vexing to me, since my brother, José, had not only always possessed an artistic temperament but had already, as a somewhat worldly streetwise teen, begun drawing quite well—for he was already getting locally known as an artist. I also lacked his fine singing voice, having failed to please our well-known choirmaster, a certain Mr. MacDonald, who during an afternoon audition turned me away with disappointment. And as I mentioned in passing before, I couldn’t see very well, already squinting and barely making out what the nuns wrote in chalk on the board. It took a while for anyone to notice my nearsightedness, and once my mother began to suspect that something was wrong with my vision, she, holistically minded, or believing in the old wives’ tale, resorted to feeding me a bag of carrots a day for months, before finally taking me down to a union optometrist on Tw
enty-seventh Street, who, for five dollars (upon presentation of a union card), fitted me with my first pair of awfully thick-lensed eyeglasses, my vision so far gone by then that just seeing things as they really were seemed a revelation.

  Nevertheless, those eyeglasses, however helpful, added another unwelcome dimension to my self-image: four-eyes. I already had to live with kids calling me an Oscar Mayer Wiener, and though my name would later invite more pleasant permutations among my friends, like Oscar Wilde, Oscar Petersen, and Oscar Robinson, among others, I could never stand it: The name that now seems far more elegant because of my uncle’s importance to my family in Cuba, which I wasn’t even really aware of back then, became something I never felt proud about as a kid. In fact, I can recall feeling envious over a cowboy’s name on Rawhide, a show my father liked to watch at night on one of the second- or third-hand television sets he’d buy from a used appliance shop in Harlem. The show’s main character was called Sugarfoot, and I suffered greatly that my parents hadn’t named me something that wonderful. (Years later, when I first thought I might publish somewhere, I seriously considered adopting the nom du plume Oliver Wells, and to jump even farther ahead, during the kind of journey I could never have imagined making as a child, I signed my name on the guest registry of the archeological museum in Ankara, Turkey, as Alexander Nevsky, the kind of thing I’d do from time to time.)