Thoughts Without Cigarettes (13 page)

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 Twenty-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.)

I never dallied in front of mirrors for long, and when I did, the face staring back at me through the half-moon wells of distorting glass seemed as if it should belong to someone else, not an Hijuelos. (I hated looking at myself: Once, after I'd somehow gotten hold of a water gun, I went around the apartment shooting out any lightbulbs that happened to be near a mirror—oh, but the beating I got for that.) That feeling used to hit me particularly hard when, during the rare outing with both my mother and father into the outside world—a trip by subway to Queens to see my cousin Jimmy and his beautiful wife, María, or up to the Bronx, where my
papi
liked to hang out with his fun-loving friends on evenings so long they drove my mother into fits of despair—I always felt dismayed and vaguely saddened by seeing our reflections in any sun-drenched window: For while I could “read” my parents' faces easily, their dark features so clearly defined, my own, whitewashed by light, seemed barely discernible. Put that idiosyncrasy together with the fact that I was too aware of my body, that cumbersome thing that had gotten all messed up and needed special care and medicines, I sat in the classrooms of Corpus with such self-consciousness that I hardly ever relaxed or felt at ease like the others.

Along the way, however, I experienced my first publication, the moon ditty that appears earlier here in the epigraph. In its simplicity, it says a lot about me back then, and predicts (I think) my later life view. Just something I had scribbled down during class, it ended up in
Maryknoll
magazine—the sisters had sent it to their missions in Africa, South America, Hawaii, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Formosa, and Japan, as an “example of the originality and imagination of a fifth grader.” (Mainly, I am amazed that it's one of the few things my mother kept of my doings from those years.)

There's not much more about my childhood schooling to tell, except to say that, in some essential sense, I somehow got through it alone. I read all the books we were supposed to read, though I don't remember any now, and magazines like
Highlife
and
Maryknoll
. On certain afternoons, we had readings from the Bible, which I loved. My favorite story was of Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt, but Moses's epic tale, from his abandonment as a baby in the reed marshes of Egypt to his last days on a mountain overlooking Jericho, from whose summit he spied the promised land, before dying, broke my heart—and I took that book's stories as pure history, burning bushes, water struck from a stone, descending angels, and all. (Another favorite involved a tale from the book of Daniel, in which the evil Babylonian king witnesses God's own disembodied hand scrawling out words on the wall, the kind of thing I often waited for to happen at night when, unable to sleep, and hearing voices from down the hall, I'd get spooked by the Rorshachian shapes made by the bad plastering in my bedroom.)

Nothing, however, seemed more straightforward than Father O'Reilly's Baltimore Catechism, which, wrapped in blue covers, contained the simple truths that we children were expected to learn and abide by, lest we one day experience the fires of hell. A simple question (“Why do we pray?”) was followed by a simple answer (“Because God hears us”). In that manner, as I recall, it offered explanations of sin, salvation, and the immortality of the soul and, as if out of a fairy tale, did not skimp on its depictions of the devil, who came across vividly in wonderfully simple but graphic black-and-white ink renderings as a hoofed, betailed, soot-faced creature with pinched backpointed ears, crooked bat wings, and long talons for fingers, holding a pitchfork or else cringing in fear and revulsion when confronted with true sanctity. I believed in the devil as well and, somewhat of a blank slate, took to heart all the other dictums we were taught. (By the time I received my First Communion at the age of ten, I truly thought that my state of grace so guaranteed an entry into heaven that, with a child's optimism, I'd think it wouldn't be so bad if I were to be run over by a truck.)

I'd always absorbed religion. For one of the first things I'd ever heard, predating my illness, came down to this: “
Hay un Dios,
”—“There is a God.” A God to be respected and feared, a God who ruled the universe through the wisdom of His ways. I don't remember hearing that He, the Father, had ever been a kindly God—that was reserved for His son—but, on the other hand, as my mother used to put it, we owed this world—our very existence—to him, “
el Señor.”
Even if He'd kind of fucked me, at least in terms of what I had once been or was on the cusp of becoming, I truly believed that His presence was as certain as the air I breathed. And why wouldn't I, spending so much time as I did with my mother? In some ways she really went for Catholicism: At the beginning of Lent, a cross made by ashes graced her forehead; on Palm Sunday, strands of dried palm reconfigured as a crucifix were put up on the wall as a reminder of what was to come; Good Friday brought the three o'clock gloom, when, I swear, the world seemed to go dark at that exact moment when Jesus was said to have died.

Easter, however, brought the greatest joy, as holy days went. Even to a little kid, it seemed wonderful that the misery of death was transcended by the flower and sunburst triumphs of the resurrection. And it was fun. I recall that even my father attended the Easter services, my brother singing with the choir for the High Mass, the three of us dressed to the nines, going off together to get lost in that rarified atmosphere of incense and flowers, all the while taking in the mysterious and chilling mystical incantations of the Latin (which my mother always appreciated and possibly understood better than the sermons, which were recited in English). Sweetest of all, for a sick kid like myself, I always felt happy—and curious—to see the other children in their Sunday best, their shoes spanking clean, their hair nicely combed, as they sat up in the balcony, facing the altar, in their own separate section. I enjoyed the sense of being around them, of almost seeming to be a part of a group, even if we sat far away: Quite simply, I often felt alone, though it wasn't as bad in church, where, at the very least, I could count on the company of the angels and saints.

I even had a guardian angel, whom I'd always envisioned as a sword-yielding being of indeterminate sex, with flaxen hair and enormous wings, and Jesus himself, whose picture, which I always admired and felt fascinated by, hung in the hall.