Thoughts Without Cigarettes (53 page)

She was really a cheerful and good-natured woman, bright and outgoing: The gardeners and crew at the academy and all the gatekeepers liked her—every week, someone or other would ask me if we were going to get married. (A funny thing: Even Francine du Plessix Gray, a beautiful woman herself, visiting the academy with her husband, the artist Clive Gray, always seemed unable to take her eyes off of Sojin when she happened to be around.) The only people there, in fact, who seemed to resent her were certain of the female academicians. Though Sojin spoke Japanese, Chinese, Russian, German, Italian, French, and English, one such academician always referred to her as the “bimbo.” I'd look the other way—what did I care? We were having a nice time together, no matter what we happened to be doing. After all, it was all part of the dream I seemed to be living in Italy, whose lovely and quite passionate energies slipped bit by bit into my writing, while my own affections for that woman, later to be displaced and abused, seemed so real and something that I then believed would never be forgotten.

I stayed on in Rome for almost another year after my fellowship ran out, and because I had some money saved and no particular place to go, I rented a largish apartment some ten blocks from the academy, by a marketplace, its back windows looking out over a series of descending terraces and gardens. There we lived as tranquilly and, I think, as happily as possible, though I did have an upstairs neighbor, a red-haired Sicilian actress, who might have wanted to have something with me (or perhaps with Sojin). In another flat in the same building, a kept woman, also of dazzling good looks, who, bored to death with her arrangement with a rather solemn fellow from Milano, would sometimes take me with her to see the opera. (Sojin, I am certain, thought we might have had something between us but didn't seem to care.)

In that residence, while left alone, I worked on my novel, but it was something that slipped in and out of my life; weeks would go by when I wouldn't write a word—namely because, quite frankly, I didn't think anyone would care about such a book—and thusly bored, I'd look around for something to do with myself. That came down to music. Walking along the street, if I heard someone with any kind of chops playing an electric instrument, I somehow mustered the nerve to ring the bell. Eventually, I had my first real success with a bass player, Stefano, who not only invited me up to jam but produced a huge chunk of hashish—or
cioccolato
(which the Spaniards were also crazy about)—to enhance our performing pleasure. In turn, he knew of a few other musicians, among them a guitarist (with a ton of equipment), a keyboard player, and a drummer, and getting together every weekend in the basement room of a warehouse-sized bakery out by the Via Appia, we started to put together a repertoire of mainly reggae and Eric Clapton covers, which these Italians, hash- and potheads to the core, particularly cherished. But once again, I had a capricious musical career: We played a few gigs in the homes of friends, a blues bar in Trastevere (to a house that would have been empty were it not for our friends), and, that next Christmas, a dance party at the academy, for which we received permission to rehearse on the academy grounds (unheard of, I believe) and whose high point, at least from my group's perspective, came when they were all invited into the academy dining hall for dinner, a great honor, no matter how spotty the food was in those days. (And our performance? Not too bad, as I recall, and quite nicely dressed up by Sojin swaying to the music.)

I really enjoyed their friendship—but once they found out that I had my own place, with two bedrooms, my apartment became their lovers' retreat; these Romans, cool as they could be, lived at home with their families, which would pretty much be their story until they'd get married, and even then, having one's own domicile wasn't a certainty; housing was so tight in that city, unless you were a foreigner renting, that young couples would go anywhere they could to make it: At night the road behind the academy, a street on which stood religious institutes and priestly housing, was often lined with rocking, bobbing automobiles whose windows always seemed to be steamed up in the winter, and in Trastevere, there was a Thai bar and restaurant right off the Via dei Panieri, a massive joint with bamboo décor, that rented curtained booths to young couples for the evening so that they would have some privacy in which to pass their amorous time—a venue, by the way, that most academy folk did not have a clue about.

My musician pals were no different, and after holding a party in my place, where we just hung out smoking this and that, with lots of wine flowing, most took turns with their girlfriends in the spare bedroom. Having a soft heart, I'd lent my favorite in the band, a great guitar player named Sandro, an extra key, but once that got out—and it did, as he couldn't help bragging about his special in with me—I'd find myself in the situation of having to use a coded door ring when I'd come home, for copies of the key had been made. But, even then, that didn't always work: Poor Sojin once came in to find my bassist friend in bed with his girlfriend. After a while, with someone wanting to come over nearly every day, it became an impossible situation, especially in terms of my writing, and I found myself in the unfortunate position of having to dislodge my Italian friends from that apartment—at first they cooperated, though rather sullenly, a moratorium finally agreed upon—then that would fall apart, someone ringing my bell, which could be heard all through the building, at two in the morning. What else could I do but let him and his girlfriend in?

Oh, they were grateful all right, but between that and my discovery that after almost two years in Rome, I had run out of money, a check cashed at a local Banco Nazionale having bounced, it started occurring to me that sometime soon, I would have to leave that city and the wonderful, occasionally cantankerous people who inhabited it.

N
ot that I wanted to leave, however. That notion not only left me despairing, but my girlfriend, taking my sudden decision the wrong way, thought that I had made up my poor financial situation. After treating her so well, and playing the sport with just about everybody I had met in Rome, I'd gone through a good amount of money, and far more quickly than I ever thought possible. (Every so often I'd take the Sicilian and the beauty from upstairs in my apartment house to the toniest restaurant in the neighborhood for lunch, a joint called Il Cortile, where I once spied Marcello Mastroianni holding forth at a table.) Not that I even began wanting to abandon her—far from it—but the scene that took place when I told her about leaving ended rather badly. With tears in her eyes she claimed that if I really wanted to stay,
we
could find a way to scrape a living together, or, if I cared for her, I would bring her back to the States, a notion that scared me. Really, there wasn't anything to be done. Stupidly, I had put a wall between myself and our future, shutting her out and never really giving any other possibilities much thought at all.

But as indifferently as I behaved (I had to be out of my mind), I also didn't have a dime to my name, and I learned quickly enough that I didn't have anyone in my life in the States (New York, at any rate) with the means or disposition to send me as much as the cost of my airfare back: In fact, I only managed to get home because of a deal I quickly made with a Hispanist professor at Swarthmore, who had written me in Rome earlier that spring requesting that I give a lecture to his students there—about what, I didn't know—in exchange for my airline ticket and three hundred dollars, just enough to get me back on my feet when I'd arrive.

Still, aside from tearing myself away from Roma and the easy lifestyle there (except for rush hour, when every Italian raced home at two hundred miles an hour just so they could do nothing), I had hardly thought about New York or the people I'd left behind, and when I did, opening the door to my own memories, I'd sink into a profound
You came from shit and to shit thou shalt return
depression. Bingeing to get over it, I'd smoke and drink cheap, not bad, wine to the point that, yes, my kidneys would ache so deeply that I'd feel
almost
tempted to see a doctor; and then, feeling better, after a day of misery, the thought that I really had nothing to return to, after all, would lay me low again.

Sojin, at least, remained gracious to the end. The day I left, in early May, she drove me to the airport and we said our good-byes, promising, of course, to see each other again as soon as possible. As I crossed over into the passengers-only lounge, I could see her mascara running down her lovely face as if she already knew that getting back together, given my departure and mercurial temperament, was unlikely, if not impossible.

After I landed midafternoon in JFK and worked through the traveler's usual rigmarole, I took a bus back into the city and nearly passed out from how gray and run-down Harlem looked: The same avenue that had so thrilled me as a child upon my release from the hospital, and where I had spent countless afternoons as a teenager shopping or hanging out here or there with my friends, seemed so hopelessly ugly that I quickly started to sink; I'd gotten so used to Roman aesthetics and the tropical colors of that city, the sun-baked crumbling walls and balcony gardens, as well as the Californian/ Mediterranean blueness of its sky, that for the first time in my life, I had some insight into the visual despair that Cubans of my parents' generation—and for that matter, my exiled cousins—must have experienced as newcomers here. Whatever charms the city had always held for me—and however much I may have fed off the energies and variety of our citizens—would take me months to appreciate again. In the meantime, I felt so glumly disposed that I could hardly believe that not twenty-four hours before, I had been in bed with a remarkably beautiful woman whose spectacular looks, I quickly decided, not a single woman in New York could begin to touch.

It wasn't just a matter of physicality but of spirit: So many of the faces I glimpsed that day seemed hardened and angry and so generally pissed off at life as to distort even the finest of their features grotesquely. Of course, I was under a spell, unexpectedly missing not just the woman I'd left behind but Italy itself: New York women seemed plain and mean in a way that I had never realized before, an impression that lasted for months, until, of course, I got used to the city again and, making my own inner adjustments, became more and more the dumb shit I had always been. I'd also arrived looking sharper and better-dressed than ever before—a fashion designer, Sojin had done everything in her power to break me of my badly wanting sartorial tastes (okay, if I told you how many people have since looked at me and declared: “But I thought Cubans were supposed to be sharp dressers,” you wouldn't believe it), though the air of upgrade and refinement I now exuded—and my sudden discomfort over my old surroundings—left me, always the loner, feeling even more estranged, and probably too delicate for that world, as if, in a carryover from my childhood, I had reentered into my Lord Fauntleroy mode, albeit as an adult version.

In my absence, I had rented my apartment to a friend of mine from CCNY. I'd already hooked up with some yuppie willing to fork over almost twice my monthly payments to live there, but when my friend called me up, newly moved out from another place that he shared with a woman and his adopted son, with my own good fortune, I felt so bad for him that I bagged my agreement with the first fellow, throwing some ten or so thousand dollars away in the process. The problem, however, was this: Though I'd written him from Rome that I would be needing my place come the end of April, a date I had arbitrarily chosen and kept pushing forward, and he'd had plenty of notice to leave, when I finally got home, expecting to find my place vacated, I discovered that my friend had hardly packed a toothbrush. In fact, the apartment seemed in a state of chaos, with clothing, boxes, and books and magazines and newspapers strewn about everywhere, but among the things I hadn't expected to come across were the Black Power and Elijah Muhammad posters he'd plastered on the walls. Additionally, his adopted son, then about six years old and a rather troubled kid, had done a fair job of increasing the local cockroach population by stuffing cookies and other foodstuffs he presumably had never wanted to eat inside my couch, which is to say that my apartment had become infested with them.

But somehow I wasn't angry or particularly disturbed: My friend, a quite laid-back fellow, seemed hardly bothered by those conditions, and while I felt less than happy to be back in New York, just stepping into my apartment, with its sweeping views of Harlem, seemed to make it easier. Besides, I'd almost learned to relax in Rome—why become an uptight, anxiety- and complaint-ridden New Yorker again, when I had a newly found sense of gusto and (so I thought) savoir faire? Once he'd explained that he had made plans to get everything out that next weekend, I somewhat settled down. He'd already found another place in the neighborhood and just hadn't gotten his act together: So, everything was cool, right?