Thoughts Without Cigarettes (12 page)

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 that 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.

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.”