Thoughts Without Cigarettes (5 page)

He came by that job just in the nick of time, for it wasn't long before my mother had become pregnant with my brother, José. Nevertheless, neither his new position nor my mother's delicate state seemed to slow him down when it came to his passion for New York nightlife, and it seems that while he still had some money, he didn't allow his marital status to get in the way of his primal enjoyments. She found this out when one of his admirers mailed her a barely literate letter. Whoever this lady happened to be, she scribbled down her confessions in pencil and shakily so, her writing and spelling so bad that my mother, waving the letter in my father's face, gloated: “She's not only a whore, but ignorant as well!” Still, her pain at finding out that he had turned into a
parandero
—that is, a roving sort with an eye for the ladies—must have been intense. She'd always say that it wasn't really in his nature, or at least he had never been that way in Cuba (though maybe he was). Left alone in that apartment on those nights, she could have hardly been thrilled when he finally came home at three or four in the morning, reeking of booze, perfume, and who knows what else.

For her part, to add insult to injury, she soon learned, thanks to Maya, about the true nature of her status in that household: as a servant whose job was to cook and clean the apartment and to otherwise tend to everyone's needs. (“I was nothing more than a slave,” she'd one day say.) In that inescapable circumstance, my mother became a virtual captive, and whether she liked it or not, each day Maya, home from her job and expecting to be waited on, found new ways to torment her. The insults were one thing, the ordering her about like a Cuban Cinderella another; but the worst of it was that she threatened to put my mother, pregnant or not, out into the street.

Not that my mother lived in complete despair or had no friends whatsoever. My future godfather, Horacio, tended to keep my mother company on those nights when my father and his sisters went out. (Nothing romantic ever took place between them, by the way—for the perennially unmarried Horacio happened to be the kind of man who, if a shapely woman and a handsome fellow passed by at the same time, chose to check out the latter, with a quick turn of the head, a slight redness rising in his face.) It was during those years that another Cuban family, the Garcías, moved onto the block, and here and there, usually at Sunday Mass, which she was allowed to attend with her sisters-in-law, she'd meet some of the other Latinas in the neighborhood—sending out radar, they just found one another. Somehow a few of her English-speaking neighbors took a liking to her as well. Never having any inclination or opportunity to study English, my mother somehow managed to get by with those neighbors with smiles, nods, and a handful of words and phrases. Along the way, she made a few English-speaking friends, who were patient with her syntax or perhaps found her way of talking amusing—among them, and most wildly so, a certain Mrs. Betty Walker, or “
la muda
,” from up on the fourth floor, a deaf mute with a brood of kids to look after, whose grunts and wild gesticulations were easier for my mother to follow than any English, the two of them often carrying on in the hall about heaven knows what to any passerby's amusement.

None of her new acquaintances, however, were as gracious or attentive or sophisticated as the forty-year-old Argentine beauty Jacqueline Vidal, who, working as a wartime volunteer in the obstetrics ward of the St. Luke's Woman's Hospital on East 110th Street, had been on hand to assist in the delivery of José, in December 1944. That's how they became friends, not only because Jacqueline, or Chaclita, as she would be nicknamed, spoke a soothing Spanish in a ward where none of the other nurses did, but because she, a musical prodigy on the violin who often performed with her sister María-Luisa on the classical circuit of New York, exuded the kind of cultural refinement that simply reminded my mother of the people she had known during her childhood. Which is to say that, bewildered and stranded as my mother may have felt, it was Jacqueline, whose artistic hands were the first to touch my brother's brow, who became her lifelong friend.

Of course it wouldn't be right to say that my father never took my mother anywhere: She visited Central Park and the Bronx Zoo and saw such landmarks as the Empire State Building, which, however, she never ascended. (In one of the photographs of her from that time, she sits, rather well turned out, on a park bench, looking frostily uncomfortable between her female in-laws, though the one I most like from that period is of my father, dapper in a hat and scarf and topcoat, posed in Central Park, holding with pride a chunk of snow in his begloved hands.) In general, aside from being sequestered in the household like a “slave,” my mother, speaking only Spanish, rarely got around on her own. Once my brother was born, however, and she was further housebound save for occasional excursions with a baby carriage out to the park, another complication in her life arose. This had to do with the fact that Maya, having reached her forties, was childless.

As in a fairy tale, Maya simply coveted her nephew with an eye to raising him as her own. But far from adopting a new approach toward my mother—kindness might have gone a long way—she went on disparaging my mother's maternal abilities to my father any time she could, in fact, making my mother out as a reckless soul. This
envidia
—or envy—was so pronounced that my aunt Maya had tried to wrest my older brother away from my mother after an incident over which my mother had had no control. My brother had been crawling along the floor when, by some caprice, he had opened the lower door of a kitchen cabinet just beneath the sink, happening upon a can of rat poison—the rats in that apartment, which came up from the basement below us through a garbage chute and the spaces around loosened steam pipes, were abundant—and this poison José managed somehow to eat, perhaps because of its candied smell. Doubled over, he turned blue and, apparently lifeless, had to be rushed to St. Luke's. (His recovery, after his stomach was pumped, had been, in fact, a close call.) Given her state of mind, Maya, who had come home from her job at Macy's, blamed my mother's carelessness for the calamity. According to Maya, she had proved herself unfit to look after her own son, and, dutifully, my aunt volunteered to take my brother off their hands; and while my father resisted her—though with difficulty, for Maya, as the eldest of the sisters, had practically raised him—he ended up holding my mother at fault. Worst of all, my father, to whom his own blood family remained the most important thing in life, wouldn't tolerate as much as a bad word from my mother about his sister, which is to say that in any such discussions, she never had a chance.

But Maya's efforts did not quite work out for her the way she had hoped. Even her influence could not change my father's mind about my mother, though having an infant in the apartment seemed to make no difference to his nocturnal routines. Now when my father came home, a tie loosened around his neck, at four in the morning, my mother had a crib and a crying infant in the room. Aside from that, it seems that he treated her well enough, even lovingly, but bit by bit, in those years, he slowly began to change. My mother has always blamed it on a combination of that nightlife and his new job at the hotel. He began drinking in the clubs and dance halls, a little at first and then more and more, perhaps to have a good time or to make some liaison easier on his conscience—
But why would he feel guilty? He was a Cuban after all
—or because he sometimes felt homesick for his family back in Cuba, especially for his beloved brother, Oscar. Still, even my mother would admit that his drinking didn't really worsen, nor did his melancholy deepen, until 1945, the year the war ended.

By then, he had started to improve his standing in the kitchens of the hotel; well liked and affable, working around not only other Cubans like himself but immigrants from Italy, Greece, and Poland (whose languages he began to absorb), he found a second home in the Men's Bar kitchen. And though he would have made far more money as a waiter—a job offered to him—he was, as my mother, sighing, put it one day, too proud to earn his livelihood serving others. (And can you imagine what emotions she, raised in a house with servants, felt when treated like one?) So he remained in that kitchen, learning to prepare chicken and lamb and grill seared steaks, got a raise to about a dollar an hour, and, despite some reservations about New York—for there were always people around to stare resentfully if they overheard someone speaking Spanish on the street—felt optimistic about the future.

At some point, he began a campaign to bring his older brother, Oscar, to New York, writing him constantly, and, I suppose, while knowing that his brother would never abandon his life in Jiguaní for good, he did his best to persuade him to visit—much in the same spirit his own life in that city had started. In this, he eventually succeeded, though without any expectations that his brother, a
campesino
to his bones, would ever stay. With four children by two marriages, the eldest aged twelve, and running his own farm, my uncle finally—perhaps reluctantly—consented to make the journey, if only to see his younger brother again.

That autumn, my uncle Oscar rode south to the provincial capital, Santiago de Cuba, to procure a travel visa for the States and, heading homeward at dusk a few days later, was crossing a meadow on his horse when he found himself in the gathering darkness of a storm: At some point, a lightning bolt flashed around him, and, when his horse reared back, he tumbled off his saddle and flew headlong into the trunk of a tree, breaking his neck. I imagine my father and his sisters got the news by telegram, and who of his sisters rushed to Cuba, if any, I can't say. But he lingered, it's been said, in a semiconscious state for twenty-six days—perhaps it was thought he would eventually recover—before he finally succumbed, without so much as ever laying eyes on my father again.

After his brother's death, the sadness of life came to be written all over my father's face, and he must have lamented the fact that instead of showing that other Oscar Hijuelos the excitements and pleasantries of New York, his invitation had, however indirectly, delivered him to the gates of heaven, or hell, or purgatory, or to wherever such kindhearted
campesino
souls go when their eyes close for good: For months after, on his nights home from work, he rarely left the apartment, and assumed the posture and habits by which I would most remember him—by the kitchen table, drinking rye whiskey followed by one glass of beer after the other, a cigarette burning down until it singed the cuffs of his shirt. He slumped in misery, lashed out at my mother, swinging his arms out at her, just because he could not allow anyone else to enter into that cage of his pain. He couldn't hear a thing that anyone said to him, not even his sisters. He'd wince with the realization that certain events cannot be undone, and, blaming himself for that tragedy, embarked upon a sea of regrets.

When I was born in 1951, at about five thirty on a summer morning, at the St. Luke's Woman's Hospital, my father named me after his brother, and I suppose for that reason alone, my father always accorded me a special affection. I've been told that as a baby I was good-natured and on the quiet side, that I rarely carried on or cried and had a certain
dulzura
—a sweetness—about me that, I've always believed, must have come from him. By the time I'd entered my infancy, his sisters had finally moved out, relocating to Miami. Borja left when her husband, Eduardo, suffering from a bad heart, became ill, and Maya and her husband soon followed. As for my father? Dividing his days between his job at the Biltmore and home, he still threw the occasional weekend party, as he and his sisters used to, the apartment filling with Cubans and Puerto Rican couples—probably a mix of his friends from the hotel and from the dance halls—as well as a few single strays, male and female alike, from around the neighborhood. On those nights, the drinks and food flowed—my father spending “too much,” as my mother would later complain, on sponging
fulanos
, most of whom he'd probably never see again and who, in any case, couldn't give
ni un pío
—a piss—about him; but because he found it almost unbearable to be alone, those parties took place at least once a month, if not more often. His guests came for their doses of Cuban warmth, the congeniality, the music, blaring on those nights from a living room RCA console, and, aside from the fully stocked bar and the ice-packed bathtub filled with bottles of beer, the immense quantities of food, which lay stacked on platters in the kitchen. It wasn't long before the crowd, revved up, would get onto the living room floor, dancing away. And there I would be, the little “
rubio
”—blondie—the cute little
americano
-looking son of that nice guy Pascual, crawling innocently along our living room floor, bounded by a forest of pleated trousers, shapely nylon-covered legs, and kicking two-toned and high-heeled shoes. My brother swears that, innocent though I may have been, I'd roll onto my back and pass the time doing my best to steal a peek at the mysteries residing inside the plump upper reaches of those swirling ladies' dresses.