Thoughts Without Cigarettes (44 page)

I continued to think about him, at some point, every day, long after I returned from that conference. Hanging on to his coattails, everything else about my life, from my childhood illness and the sadness I felt growing up, followed behind the images I had of him. In fact, though I was haunted by his memory, it remained something I hadn't been particularly aware of, until, like a thief, at some moment, it would come up behind me. Once while attending the play
Da
, about an Irish man's tribulations with his father's (often humorous) ghost, there came a scene in which the father stands atop the roof of a house, and because it brought back to me that image of my father standing on the rooftop of Butler Hall the night he died, I lost it completely, and would have broken down crying if it were not for the public nature of that place. (My girlfriend, by the way, without knowing it, once took me for a surprise birthday dinner at that restaurant. There I had tried to eat, without letting on that my father had died not ten yards from where we were sitting.) Oddly, for all the times I passed by the Biltmore Hotel, on Forty-third and Park, I never felt tempted to look inside its front lobby, which, I've been told, had remained largely unchanged from earlier years. (I don't know if I was afraid to walk in there or if, in my mind, the old Biltmore of my childhood is the only one I wanted to see.) And at Christmas, despite all the frivolity and parties and drinking and screwing around that came with that season (oh, the things I would see in the office when people were really letting loose), I'd feel a special melancholy. Something about working downtown in what the kids in my neighborhood called the canyon, with the hawk—the wind—at my back, always seemed gratifying to me in a strangely ghostly way, as if, walking in a crowd along the avenue, I could picture my pop, back when he was alive, among them.

I knew he was dead, but memory is a bitch and, with a daydreamer like myself, could make the past seem imminent. And though his presence has faded in its power from my mind by now, back then, I had such a strong recollection of him physically, and of his manner, it wasn't much of a stretch for me to wishfully impose him upon the anonymity of a crowd.

At night, I'd worry about falling asleep and seeing his ghost. Whereas I used to wake up with a jolt, inspired perhaps by the agitated emotions and repressed memories of my childhood, I'd now awaken, my heart beating wildly, from the impression that my pop was just outside in the hall waiting for me, as if he wanted to take me with him. One night I walked into the darkness of the living room, where I saw my father, or the shadow of him: He spoke to me, in Spanish of course, saying: “
Soy ciego
”—“I'm blind.” And then he said: “
Por favor, abra la luz
”—“Please, turn on the light.” When I did, he told me, “Thank you,” and simultaneously vanished. I swear this happened—dream or not, that's what I saw and heard. After a while, it occurred to me that I had some demons to exorcize, but each time I sat down and tried to conjure the world I'd come from, and wrote about my father—honestly—the sensation that I was tampering with the dead left me feeling so anxious that by the time I'd get up from my desk, after scratching at my forearms and wrists while smoking cigarette after cigarette for hours, my skin was a bloody mess. This went on for a long time, each little fragment that I came up with (and threw into a box) bringing with it a price, by way of rashes and sores.

In my self-mortifying Catholicism, I eventually came down with the worst case of eczema, so bad that even folks in my office noticed. My arms, chest, back, and neck were raw and dry; high-strung and feeling guilty, I lived with a
picazón
—an itching—that drove me crazy and intensified every time I'd sit down to write. It got to the point of being so painful that I felt myself on the brink of giving up on that novel, if not on writing entirely. It just wasn't worth it. I was in such a bad way that no hydrocortisone cream made a difference, and I had to sleep with my arms held out over the sheets, anything to keep the fabric from touching me. (I even went to a dermatologist—and that wasn't easy. She told me that she hadn't seen such a bad case before and seemed puzzled that nothing she prescribed seemed to work.)

I was at the height of that discomfort when I had a lovely dream: Walking in a meadow, maybe in a place like Cuba, in the distance I beheld a river, and in the water, there stood a man. As I approached, I could see that it was my pop, Pascual, awaiting me. There, he told me, shaking his head:
“Porque te mortefiques?”
—“Why are you tormenting yourself so?” And with the kindest of expressions on his face, he, reaching into that water, brought up cups of it in the bowl of his hands, which he washed over my arms, my face, my back. I don't recall exactly how it resolved, but I do remember feeling a sense of relief, and, though a dream it may have been, in the morning when I awakened, my skin had cleared of it soreness.

M
y
work on that book, on the weekends and on most nights after work, became a passion which my mother, amused when I'd ask her questions about Cuba or about what she recalled of my childhood, thought of as my nice new hobby, which she went along with. At the office, where I was rarely seen without a library book in hand, I always got through my duties as quickly and efficiently as I could manage, so as to allow myself more time to write, while some of my coworkers, needing the overtime pay, were far less hurried. I didn't like working past five, if it could be helped, and some days I worked so frantically that I sometimes missed lunch, my midday meals coming down to a candy bar eaten out in front of the building, followed by a few cigarettes afterward. (I always waited until past noon to have a smoke: I had watched too many people climbing the subway stairs on Fortieth Street wheezing and often stopping before reaching the top just to catch their breath, only to pause on street level to light up a cigarette.) I had long since begun to dress more casually, abandoning my ties and jackets for blue jeans and a shirt, as if I were the office Bohemian. Still, now and then, I'd get offered a better job with more duties—on one occasion, I was asked to run their office in Seattle, a position that would have paid me more money (though not enough) and came with an impressive-sounding title: VP of operations. (I turned it down.) Other opportunities arose along the way (I will not bore you), which I also turned my back on. After a while, management left me alone.

And although I am perhaps sounding rather blasé about my situation there, the fact remained that for every good day when I felt that I was doing the right thing by remaining a willing more or less middle-rung lackey, as long as I could pursue my “art”—the way I'd think about it during my more pretentious moments—there followed two or three days, sometimes a week, when I would take a good look in the mirror and realize that, approaching thirty, for all the wonderful gifts I supposedly possessed (music, drawing, writing), I was, in fact, a hack, a poseur, and, worst of all, a classic underachiever. Like my friend Tommy, I talked a good line, with the difference, however, that I believed it was he who had the real talent. (Another truth is that I considered my older brother, José, more deserving of achieving, so to speak, our family's first artistic success. Having said this, I am not even sure now if, on some unconscious level, I held myself back as some kind of crazy nod to Cuban familial order.)

Despite the tedium of my daily routines—or perhaps because of them—I began to slowly accumulate a lot of pages, of scenes and dialogue, all the while searching for a voice that somehow sounded like “me”—this fellow, a New Yoikah, with Spanish words, drawn from memory, zipping through his mind like so many
pajaritos volando
, as my mother might have put it. At a certain point, when I'd decided that I needed a formal opening, my superstitious side got the best of me. Taking a pad along, I left my apartment one Saturday morning and headed over to St. John the Divine cathedral, where I spent some five hours sitting in the knave pews, taking in the organ practice, the piped-in choral music, the ambience of that Episcopalian altar (almost as soul-reaching as a good Catholic altar) while scribbling out, in a most elemental manner, what would become the first chapter of my novel. I went back there on occasion, or, if the weather was fine, I'd sit in the cathedral's herb garden, fooling with scenes, all the while trying to fight off the nagging depression that would suddenly come over me in waves, shooting up from my knees. (The thing about being inside a church: I just didn't feel alone—even if I didn't see a single soul; just the notion that someone
might
be there peering at me from some timeless, perhaps beautiful place, bolstered my spirits enough to make it all just a bit easier.)

Of course, it was all autobiographical—the first chapters (getting a lot of it wrong) trying to reimagine my father's courtship and marriage to my mother: To help me along, I'd pore over any maps of Cuba I could find, usually in an antiquated atlas, the sort I'd come across down in Fourth Avenue's Biblo and Tannen bookstore; just perusing the cartography of Cuba, with its profusion of mysterious names, like the parts of a body, and those etched and writhing lines, sinewy as vinery, that constituted its rivers and roads and borders—all of that fed my imagination. Even if it had been years since I last stepped on that soil as a child, I'd find my pop's hometown of Jiguaní and trace its route to Holguín, and though I would just be looking over a piece of wafer-thin paper, it was as if I could go back there again. I'd remember that he had once worked as a mail carrier and imagine him riding over the countryside on a horse from farm to farm, cocoa and coffee plantations and dairy centrals abounding, a satchel of letters in his charge. I'd hear the birdsong ringing out from the forests, blue sky and verdant hills surrounding him, and the rain coming down like a waterfall at four in the afternoon, and smell the clay earth giving off a cooling perfumed exhalation, then the heat and humidity rising from the ground. Best of all, I would imagine him as a young man, tall and thin in his saddle, and astride his chestnut mare, as he'd make his leisurely way down toward the Sierra foothills: Simply put, in those bits of research, he'd come back to life!

They, of course, journeyed to America and had two sons, the older named Horacio (after my godfather) and the younger—my stand-in, or doppelganger, as the educated folks say—Hector, I took from a Puerto Rican guy about my age, who worked behind the counter of a liquor store on 105th Street. While I'm at it, I called my pop Alejo—liking its similarity to the Spanish word
lejano
, “faraway” (but also in homage to Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban writer)—and my mother, or someone much like her at any rate, Mercedes, which was my aunt Cheo's name. As for
mi tía
Maya, whom I could only see at that point through my mother's eyes, I made up the name Buita—which, I suppose, had something to do with
buitre
, “vulture.”

Gradually, I began to fill those pages with the spine of what I perceived as my life, up until the time of my father's death. Yet, while I felt that I was probably making some progress toward becoming a writer,
if that's what I really wanted to do
, in that process of digging up the dead (and resurrecting them, as it were), I began to experience some very bad nights of restless sleep and disorienting dreams again. (As it would turn out, I'd go through that same upheaval with later books, but this was the worst.) My nightmares got so bad that my girlfriend at the time, a sharp lady on her way to a Ph.D. in statistical analysis at Teachers College, often thought aloud that a little psychological counseling might help me achieve a creative breakthrough and recommended that I see a therapist. But coming from a culture (
cubano
) and neighborhood (mainly working-class) where, quite frankly, something as bourgeois as therapy was not only unheard of but spurned as a rich man's indulgence, I couldn't even begin to take such a suggestion seriously. “Oh, really?” I'd say, feeling somewhat offended. And yet, often hitting a wall (sometimes literally), I eventually did.

The fellow I hooked up with happened to be a
cubano
who, as he would tell me, had left the island disguised as a priest and, coming to the States from Spain, to which he had escaped with a Vatican delegation, worked for IBM for a decade before commencing his studies for a Ph.D. in psychology, his specialty dream analysis. (He was also something of a humanist, having been mentored by Rollo May.) When I met him for the first time, probably around 1980 (I do not exactly recall), he seemed everything that I was not: tall, dark featured, somewhat macho, soulful, pensive, with a strong but charmingly Cuban accent, and he had the handsome if slightly serious face of a
Asturiano
matador. Above all, he was a Cuban from Havana, which, it surprised me to learn, actually meant a great deal to me. (Even so, I had my doubts at first, enough that once when I visited Donald Barthelme, I couldn't help but ask him if he had ever seen a shrink. His answer: “I have found them, upon occasion, useful.” Drag of cigarette, gulp of drink.)