Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PART ONE - The Way Some Things Worked Out
CHAPTER 1 - When I Was Still Cuban
CHAPTER 2 - A Few Notes on My Past
CHAPTER 3 - Some Moments of Freedom
CHAPTER 4 - Childhood Ends
PART TWO - What Happened Afterward
CHAPTER 5 - Getting By
CHAPTER 6 - My Two Selves
CHAPTER 7 - My Life on Madison Avenue
CHAPTER 8 - Our House in the Last World
CHAPTER 9 - Roma
CHAPTER 10 - Another Book
Acknowledgements
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Poem by Magdalena Torrens Hijuelos in the Introduction by Oscar Hijuelos (pp xix-xx), from Burnt Sugar: Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish, edited by Lori Marie Carlson and Oscar Hijuelos and translated by Lori Marie Carlson. Introduction, Copyright 2006 by Oscar Hijuelos. Reprinted with permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon and Schuster.
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To my family and the folks who have always looked out for me.
The year is 1985 and Professor John D Swsinhnder [sic] is getting into his rocket. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, blast off! He was drifting in space at a speed of ten thousand miles an hour. In a short time he was on the moon. He is going there to prove that the moon is made of green cheese. He picked up a rock and bit it.
He said, “If this is cheese than [sic] my teeth are not cracked.” But they were.
In a minute not to lose he got in his rocket and went back to see his dentist. He did not prove that the moon was made of green cheese. But instead he proved never bite rock.
—FROM “A TRIP TO THE MOON,”
OSCAR HIJUELOS, AGE TEN
A Prelude of Sorts
Seems just like yesterday (an illusion) that I was sitting out front on my stoop on 118th Street, on an autumn day, in 1963 or so, feeling rather indignantly disposed and pissed off because my best friend from across the way, with a somewhat smug look in his eyes, kept blowing smoke into my face. He was thirteen, a year older than me, and had already been going through at least a carton of Winstons a week for as long as I could remember—cigarettes that his mother, the venerable Mrs. Muller-Thym, coming back from the A&P, gave, fair-mindedly, to each of her sons on Fridays. (Think he must have started smoking at the age of seven or eight.) We usually got along like pals, running through the backyards and basements together, or else hanging out in the book-laden clutter of his room, playing cards and chess or listening to jazz recordings by Art Blakey and Ahmed Jamal, while occasionally sneaking rum and whiskey from his father’s stash of high-class booze down the hall, which we’d mix into glasses of Coca-Cola, without ice, and drink until the world went spinning and everything became beautiful in an exciting way. The guy was definitely head and shoulders smarter than just about anyone else in that neighborhood, including me, and generous to boot, for he was always giving away his cigarettes and candy and loose change on the street. But on that particular afternoon, he had gotten some kind of hair up his ass. With a smirk on his face, and walking right up to me, he had blown, slowly and with great self-satisfied deliberation, rings of that smoke at my mug. I don’t know why he did this—perhaps because he, like so many of the other kids on that street, sometimes thought me passively disposed on account of the fact that my mother, never forgetting my childhood illness, had always kept a tight leash on me. Or because he just felt naughtily inclined or wanted to express some notion of superiority that day. But whatever he may have been thinking in those moments, I discovered that I had a fairly short fuse. So when I told him, “Come on, man, don’t do that!” in the manner that kids in those days talked, and maybe, “But hey, I’m not messing with ya,” and he kept blowing that smoke at me anyway, I yanked the cigarette out of his hand and put it out on his head.
Thankfully, its burning tip met with the thick matting of his slickened dark hair, but I can still remember the crisp sound it made, like air being quickly released from a bicycle tire, and, of course, that strangely repellent smell of singed organic matter, which foreshadowed, to my young Catholic mind, the possible punishments of hell. Perhaps I ended up chasing him around the block, but he was always too fast for me, or perhaps, I can’t exactly remember, he ran down into a basement or the park, hiding out somewhere in the bushes along one of the terraced walkways that descended from Morningside Drive into East Harlem, on tracks of cracked, glass-strewn pavement. If so, he might have waited until sometime near dark, while I, out of sorts and craving a cigarette of my own, went home to yet another one of those evenings in our Cuban household that tended to leave me feeling restles
s and confused.
PART ONE
The Way Some Things Worked Out
CHAPTER 1
When I Was Still Cuban
Pretend it’s sometime in 1955 or 1956 and that you are hanging over the roof’s edge of my building, as I often did as a teenager, looking down at the street some six stories below. You would have seen, on certain mornings, my mother, Magdalena, formerly of Holguín, Cuba, and now a resident of the “United Stays,” pacing back and forth fitfully before our stoop, waiting for a car. She would have been eye-catching, even lovely, with her striking dark features and pretty face, her expression, however, somewhat gaunt. Muttering to herself, she would have had the jitters, not only from her inherently high-strung nature but also because she’d probably spent the night sitting up with my pop worrying about their youngest son—me.
As green and white transit buses came forlornly chugging up the hill along Amsterdam from 125th Street, she would have stood there, perhaps with my older brother, José, by her side, watching the avenue for a car to turn onto the street, all the while dreading what the day might hold for her. Sometimes it would have rained or it would have been brutally cold. Sometimes it would be sunny, or snow would be falling so daintily everywhere around her. She might call out to a friend to come down from one of the buildings nearby, say my godmother, Carmen, mi madrina, a red-haired cubana, with her flamenco dancer’s face and intense dark eyes. Coming down in a bathrobe and slippers to reassure her, she’d tell my mother not to worry so much, it wasn’t good for her after all—the kid would be fine. “Ojalá,” my mother, her stomach in knots, would answer, though always shaking her head.
A car would finally pull over to the curb. The driver, a friend of my father’s, or someone he had paid, would take her either to 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, where she might catch a train, or directly up to Greenwich, Connecticut, where I, her five-year-old son, lay languishing in a hospital. Through the Bronx and over to the highway north to Connecticut they would go and, coming to that placid town, the kind of place she’d never have visited otherwise, enter a different world. In the spring, she’d ride along the loveliest of shadow-dappled streets, the sunlight shimmering through the leafy boughs of elm and oak trees overhead, as if they were passing through a corridor like one of the roads out of Havana; and in the winter, snow, in plump drifts and brilliant, would have been everywhere, so Christmas-y and postcard-pretty. After following her directions, which she would have recited carefully to the driver from a piece of paper—torn out of a composition notebook page or from a brown grocery bag—they would have found the hospital along King Street, off in its own meadow and reached by a winding flagstone driveway, the Byram Woods looming as a lovely view just nearby.
Each time she’d have to bring someone along to help her out with the nurses and staff. My mother had to. For what English she knew, even after some thirteen years in this country, consisted of only a few phrases and words, and even those were pronounced with her strong Cuban accent and the trepidations of a woman who, until then, had rarely ventured out from the insular immigrant’s bubble of our household. It’s possible that one of the Zabalas sisters, three schoolteacherly cubanas living over on 111th Street, who all spoke good English, accompanied her. Or perhaps my brother or my godfather, Horacio, a bank teller, went along. Still, even with that help, just to navigate the hospital’s bureaucracy must have been a misery for her—and not only because she had to depend on someone to translate her exchanges with the ward personnel but because of her fears about what she might be told. In those days, the disease I suffered from, nephritis, or nee-free-tees, as she’d pronounce it, which is now easily treatable with a broad spectrum of drugs, was then often fatal to children. That thought alone must have kept her awake on many nights, and particularly so during the first six months of my stay, when, as a safeguard against my catching other infections, I wasn’t allowed to see anyone at all.
As an aside, I will tell you that for years I didn’t even know the hospital’s name: A kind of chronic disinformation has always been a part of my family’s life, and if I have only recently learned that institution’s name, it’s because, in tandem with this writing, I happened to mention to my brother how strange it was that, for all the times I had asked my mother about just where I had stayed, she never seemed able to come up with a name except to say, “fue allá en Connecticut.” He knew it, however, and it makes sense that this riddle, which would plague me for decades, would have a far less mysterious solution than I could have ever imagined: for that place turned out to be called, quite simply, the St. Luke’s Convalescent Hospital.
A cousin, circa 1928, of its New York City namesake, where I had been taken first, the St. Luke’s Convalescent Hospital consisted of a red-brick three-story structure with a white portico entranceway, and two adjacent, somewhat lower wings at either side. In the quaintness of its architecture, it suggested, from a distance, perhaps a plantation manor house. (This I know less from memory than from a postcard I recently saw of the place.) Somewhere inside the ward in which I stayed, with its locked doors and high windows, its smells of both medicine and Lysol, and its hums of pumping dialysis machines that gave off breathing sounds from down the hall, one found the visitors’ room, whose main feature was a glass partition that had a speaking grille. A nurse would bring me in from the ward, where a dozen other beds both emptied and filled with children monthly, and there behind that visitors’ room partition, eyes blinking, I would sit, while my mother, the nice-looking lady on the other side, no doubt tried to make friendly conversation with the five-year-old boy, her son, the delicate-looking little blond with the bloated limbs, who, as the months passed, seemed to remember her less and less.
Of course, she was my mother, I knew that—she kept telling me so—“Soy tu mamá!” But she also seemed a stranger, and all the more so whenever she started to speak Spanish, a language which, as time went by, sounded both familiar and oddly strange to me. I surely understood what she was saying (I always would); her words seemed to have something to do with our apartment on West 118th Street, con tu papá y tu hermano, and, yes, Cuba, that beautiful wonderland, so far away, of love and magic, which I had visited not so long before. Facing me, she’d raise the pitch of her voice, arch her eyebrows as if I would hear her better. She’d wipe a smear of lipstick onto a Kleenex from her black purse, muttering under her breath. I remember nodding at her words; I remember understanding my mother when she said, “Mira aquí!” (“Look what I have!”) as she reached into her bag for a little ten-cent toy; and “Sabes que eres mi hijo?” (“Do you know that you’re my son?”) and things like “Pero, por qué estás tan callado?” (“Why are you so quiet?”) and “Y que té pasa?” (“What’s wrong with you?”)
What happened to be wrong with me came down to the fact that I never answered my mother in the language she most wanted to hear, el español. I just couldn’t remember the words, and this must have truly perplexed her, for I’ve been told that, before I went into the hospital, I spoke Spanish as cheerfully and capaciously as any four-year-old Cuban boy. I certainly didn’t know much English before then. Maybe I’d picked up some from the neighbors in our building or from my brother, José, who, seven years older than I, attended the local Catholic grammar school and, like any kid, hung out on the streets; but, in our household, Spanish, as far as I can remember, was the rule.
On the weekends, before my life had changed, whenever our apartment filled with visitors, and my father’s friends from all over the city came by to visit, it was Spanish they spoke. Oh, some like my sharp cousin Jimmy Halley, formerly of Holguín, Cuba, and a building manager in Queens, and mi padrino, Horacio, who worked for a Chase branch in Chinatown, knew English, as did my father from his job as a cook in the Men’s Bar of the Biltmore Hotel. But I have no memories of hearing them speak it. I must have exchanged some words with our elderly, genteel across-the-hall neighbor, Mrs. Blair, or with our German superintendent, the jolly Mr. Hess, rotund and red cheeked, always sweeping
with a broom in the halls. But since I spent most of my days as an infant with my mother, going just about everywhere with her—to the nearby Columbia University campus, by whose fountains we would sit, or down the hill to Morningside Drive and the circle that looked eastward over Harlem, where the other young mothers from that block sometimes gathered with their strollers and baby carriages—that language, Spanish, must have permeated me like honey, or wrapped around my soul like a blanket or, if you like, a mantilla, or, as my mother, of a poetic bent, might say, like the sunlight of a Cuban spring.
It was on Morningside Drive, incidentally, where the first pictures of me as an infant were taken: They show this thin and rather delicately featured child, with curling blond hair, in white booties and a dainty outfit, standing by a bench, a passably cute toddler, but not the sort one would have associated, at first glance, with the usual expectations of what the offspring of a Cuban couple should look like, which is to say, anything but a little towhead americano.
Now, if I turned out that way, it’s because I owed my looks to a great-great-grandfather on my father’s side who had been Irish; white as white could be, I had hazel eyes, and altogether an appearance that, given my parents’ more “Spanish” looks, set me apart from them. My mother’s antecedents, the Torrens y Barrancas and Olivers y Guap families, were light-skinned Catalans, and my papi, Pascual Hijuelos, a Gallego by ancestry, and blond as a child himself, tended toward a Spaniard’s ruddiness that, in fact, was probably Celtic as well. But both of my parents had dark hair and dark eyes and were unmistakably Cuban in their manner, their speech, and, yes, in that great definer of identity, their body language and souls. My brother, José, fell somewhere in between: He was also fair skinned, his eyes were dark and intense, and his hair, of a brownish-red coloration, bespoke somewhat more Latino origins, though, while growing up and as a ringer in his late teens for that old-time actor John Garfield, he too would hear that he didn’t particularly look or seem Cuban, at least not until he had occasion to speak Spanish. And while I’ve long since discovered that a few of my relatives attracted the same mistaken notion from strangers—“Are ya really Cuban?”—but were hardly bothered by it, for they knew just who they were, I’d find out that vaguely consoling fact years later, after it no longer seemed to matter and the damage to my ego had already been done.
Thoughts Without Cigarettes Page 1