Thoughts Without Cigarettes

by Oscar Hijuelos

  For their part, those men, who’d grown up as rustics like my father had on a farm, chewing on their cigars and speaking as if their mouths were stuffed with cotton, must have been amused by the sudden appearance of a small blond boy in their midst. “Cheo’s nieto,” it was explained, the one who came down from New York with his mother, you know, that good-looking brunette who left Cuba with that fellow Pascual and who, however often she smiles, must have regretted it, por Dios!—it was written all over her face. They might have rubbed their eyes a few times before getting a second look at me (the story of my life); it took them a while to absorb that such a towheaded boy could have been the offspring of an Hijuelos from Jiguaní. Those campesinos would have probably known my father from the old days before he came to the States, when he used to ride the countryside on a horse himself. They would have recalled his languid demeanor and friendly but sad expression, and would have appreciated and respected me and my brother for the very fact that my father’s family had been in Oriente for over a hundred years. And in those days when every Cuban from Holguín and Jiguaní knew each other, they would have likely remembered my mother from earlier times, from seeing her at Carnival, or from the local dance halls where she, in her late adolescence and young womanhood, had so bloomed as a dancer.

  And yet, however warmly those campesinos might have thought of my mother, they would have still puzzled over the fact that I didn’t look Cuban at all.

  But, even if they may have been at a loss for what to make of me, they were friendly. The owner always prepared the most delicious Cuban fruit shakes for my brother and me, his machete cleaving into the counter with sharp whacks, the juices dripping down, that taste of what I suppose now had to be batidas, which might have been spiked with a little Cuban rum for flavoring, ever so delicious on my tongue. Now and then, one of those fellows would take my brother and me outside and put us on his horse, and back and forth we would go, pulled along the street, jostling by the open-shuttered windows and doorways of the houses and waving at everyone, my head muzzled in its bristly mane, people smiling at us just because we were children.

  Later we’d play hide-and-seek behind the trees and go charging like little bulls through the sheets that had been hung up to dry alongside the houses, or we’d sit by my aunt’s doorway watching the black laundresses—negritas buenas, as my mother called them—go by with their baskets balanced on their heads. About a block or so away, there stood an icehouse—what better thing was there to do than stand by its entrance to cool off or to chew on some of the chips that had dropped from those perspiring blocks of ice into the gutter? I seemed to be always thirsty, so my brother has told me—several times he had to stop me from sipping water from a curbside trough, and it seems that early on, I had already acquired the nervous habit of eating anything offered to me—deep-fried banana fritters, a piece of raw sugarcane, or a strip of bacalao, or salted cod (which I had never really liked but ate anyway). One afternoon, while sitting on the curb, I watched my brother, fooling with a hose in front of Cheo’s house, turn its gushing spout on a very dapperly dressed man, all in white and wearing a lacquered cane boater, as he rode by on a bicycle. With my brother spraying him with abandon, that scene, at least in memory, played out like something from a 1930s Max Roach comedy: He got off that bicycle fuming and, scolding José, began to chase him around in circles, my brother keeping just ahead of his grasp, until my mother, hearing the commotion, stepped from the doorway and, in her loveliness and charm (or outrage that a grown man would harass a boy, however mischievous, of eleven or so) calmed him down, his anger dissipating in a way that seemed to elude her sometimes when it came to our father, Pascual.

  Of course, we’d come to visit my aunts, Cheo, with whom my mother and I stayed, and her oldest sister, María, in whose home my brother usually slept, a few streets away. If there’s any one thing I can tell you about Cheo, it would come down to her kindness and demure, self-effacing manner, though it’s my guess that there was a lot more to her moods than just that. But as a boy, the only things that registered with me were her kisses, her embraces, her generally sweet and maternal ways. I didn’t know that she was a recent widow, nor that she spent her days working in a department store along one of Holguín’s shopping streets, and that her life must have been difficult, what with two daughters to look after and support. She never let on about her grief, however, not to my brother and me, and, in any case, seemed to cope with her circumstance by keeping busy—cooking, sewing, cleaning the house, and praying—yes, she was the most religiously devout of my mother’s sisters. Mainly she oozed affection, being the sort of woman who spoke only endearments, as with “What do you want, my love?” and “Are you hungry, mi vida?” and always with the sweetest smile. I sometimes slept alongside her at night—“Somos familia,” “We’re family,” she’d say quietly, and “Soy tu tía,” “I’m your aunt,” as she’d hold me close, and I’d half strangle her, returning her affections, so precious and warm she seemed.

  Those evenings slipped one into another, without a lot of variation: Once night fell, the unused rooms were kept dark, to save money, I suppose; after dinner, which Cheo improvised over a hot plate or small stove, my cousins serving, we’d listen to the radio. That was a big deal in those days, and very exciting, for most programs, featuring popular music, were beamed in from Havana—acts like El Trio Matamoros (the “moor killers”) and singers like Olga Guillot and Beny Moré, among so many others, as well as soap operas and comedies. (And to impose my future knowledge about something I would have hardly been aware of back then, the news bulletins would have occasionally been about the rebel forces of Fidel Castro, then encamped in the Sierra Maestra some fifty miles or so to the south.) Sometimes, we’d join our other cousins, Cuza, Beboy Macho, y Gladys, María’s offspring, and go strolling along those streets, to congregate, as so many other Holguíneros did, in the nearest plaza, where a municipal band might be playing and where a stand sold freshly made papaya and coconut-flavored ice cream. (“How you loved your sweets!” my mother would tell me.)

  I do recall playing in a small park nearby, El Parque Infantil, where there were swings, and that I’d go there with my cousin Miriam, who, as she has told me a thousand times since, treated me like her little muñeca, her blond-haired doll; we also slept side by side sometimes, but the only telling anecdote I know of our time together comes down to something she recently told me: Along that street stood a pepper tree, which I always picked at as if the hanging brilliantly red peppers were lollipops, and that I constantly ate them even when I was told not to, to the point that my lips burned so much that my cousin had to coat them over with honey—I was just that way, and if I take satisfaction in saying so, it’s because such a detail reminds me of the fact that, once upon a time, I was a Cuban.

  Altogether, life in Cheo’s household unfolded peacefully and without much happening at all, though one evening, I must have been dozing in my aunt’s front room, which was her sala, whose door opened to the street, and as I happened to look over, I saw my mother and Aunt Cheo holding each other. Perhaps it is a caprice of memory, but one of them was crying on the other’s lap—perhaps my mother, lamenting her life in New York, or, remembering his good traits, simply missing my father and wondering what might have gone wrong between them, or if she’d done the right thing marrying him. Or perhaps it was Cheo—with her bottled-up widow’s grief and feeling the burdens of her responsibilities and of her own kind of Catholic loneliness, for she would wait her entire life to be reunited in eternity with her husband—who needed her sister’s comforting. To be honest, I can’t recall just which of those Torrens women felt like falling to pieces that night—or perhaps they both were—but that blurred memory, from so long ago, has stayed with me just the same.

  Now, Holguín, unlike the far more raucous city of Havana, shut down completely at about ten at night, with such stillness that a raised voice from some dwelling a block away could be heard, and, after a while, the cicadas took over. In my bed
, which I shared with my mother and sometimes my aunt, I waited for the dense midnight humidity and heat to lift—it was a Cuban summer after all—and yet, finally closing my eyes, after tossing in sweat, I’d just as soon awaken to the somewhat cooler morning and rooster calls, and carts and hawkers passing by on the street, cans and bells clanging, ever so happy to do what I, as a young boy, was prone to do, which was to eat and eat things like sugar-covered pieces of bread fried in lard and to sip from my own cup of heavily sweetened café con leche. Occasionally, as a special treat, my aunt boiled up a pot of condensed milk, to which she’d add an exotic and deliciously nutty flavoring, so deep and dark that for years, well into my twenties, I wondered just what that magical “Cuban” drink had been. It was one of the tastes I most vividly—and fondly—remembered from my stay in Holguín, and I truly became convinced that its Cuban origins were what made that drink so special, as if its uniqueness had been distilled from some obscure roots in the deepest jungle; this was an illusion I held on to until the day came when my mother, breaking that spell of decades-old nostalgia, advised me that my magical Cuban elixir, something I believed had come from heaven and considered better than honey and cinnamon and all the sugars in the world combined, was nothing more than Borden’s milk mixed with a few tablespoons of Hershey’s syrup.

  Along the way, I spent time with my Majorcan-born abuelita, who, with sunken but sweet eyes and skin nearly translucent from age, wore her gray hair tied back tautly over her head, in the formal Spanish style. She lived with her oldest daughter, my aunt María, and if there was anyone from whom Cheo derived her gentle and saintly character, it was surely her mother. The sort to sit in a corner and take in things quietly around her, as if contented with a kind of invisibility, she’d suddenly reach her hands out to grab me if I were passing by, just to request a kiss—“Dame un besito!”—my abuela’s face, so solemn before, softening with happiness. It was in her company that my mother seemed most tranquil; they sometimes shared a bench by the window in the front parlor—I can remember my abuela, bathed in sunlight, always sewing some garment—and while they would speak softly about missing each other (perhaps) or of matters concerning my abuela’s frailness, for she was not in the best of health (perhaps) or of plans to visit my grandfather’s grave together (definitely, for, indeed, they went to the cemetery one day), what I can mainly recall is how my abuela treated her second-eldest daughter with utter tenderness, sometimes reaching over to gently touch her face and say, “Oh, but my darling Magdalencita.” What my mother felt just then, I can’t say, but she always behaved around her with reverence and humility and gratitude, as if to show Abuela María that she, indeed, had outgrown the spoiled ways of her youth. She, in fact, never seemed as much at home as she did in those days with her mother in Holguín. (But that’s all I can recall about her, my mother’s “santa Buena” and how they were with one another.)

  Now, her namesake, my aunt María, aside from the fact that she bore a strong resemblance to my mother in a way that the gentle Cheo, with her teaspoon-shaped face and sweet smile, did not, I can’t remember at all, though her husband, Pepito, remains vividly with me. And not because he was much beloved in the family and known as a good provider and a patriarch, but because he carried me about his country place, a farm, and just about everywhere else we went, on his shoulders. A bookkeeper in Holguín, he had a longish face, intensely intelligent eyes, and a manner that was both serious and warm. He wore wire-rim eyeglasses. (Years later, a balding priest I once saw meditating in a garden in Rome reminded me of him, as if Pepito had returned as a ghost.) One of those Cubans who, never caring for baby talk, always spoke to children as if they were adults, it’s to Pepito that I owe one of the few statements that I can actually remember word for word: “Sabes que eres cubano? No te olvides eso,” he told me one day when he had taken us up to a beach near Gibara, along the Atlantic coast. “You know that you’re Cuban? Don’t forget that.” That afternoon at the beach, when he had taken off his guayabera, the flowing crests of white hair gushing from his chest astonished me. Later, as he carried me into the ocean, I may as well have been riding upon the shoulders of a silver-haired faun, his fur matting in the foam. Laughing and grabbing hold of my arms as I desperately tried to hang on to his neck, Pepito, waist-high in the Cuban sea, began to swing me around in circles, the horizons of both ocean and land spinning around me. I was reeling dizzily when he set me down into the water just in time for a high wave to come crashing over us: another taste, of burning salt water, like brine, in my throat, my thin arms grasping his legs (bony and hairy as well) for dear life, until he hoisted me up once again into the safety of his embrace, Pepito patting my back as I trembled with relief.

  Later, I fell asleep under a tree, and I felt drowsy still as my uncle carried me back through the narrow streets of that little sun-parched town, folks standing by the doorways of their palm-thatched houses along the way, calling out and waving at us. At any rate, I guess I can say that on that day, I had been baptized in the Cuban sea.

  Now, while staying on Pepito’s farm in the countryside outside Holguín, I became deeply fond of nature, or so I’ve been told. In that campo persisted a strong, almost overwhelming scent, not of animal dung or of burning tobacco but of an aroma I still recall from that visit—the air always smelling like the raw inner marrow of a freshly cut or snapped-open sapling branch, redolent of the juices of its white and yellow fringed fibers, of the earth and water, and of greenness itself. There were insects everywhere, and blossoms peeking out from the dense bush and forests around us, and at night, when mosquito netting draped the windows, beetles the size and weight of walnuts pelted the walls, with no end to the tarantulas, lizards, and vermin inhabiting the raised-on-pylons under-portion of the house, where the smaller livestock sometimes slept. The crystal night sky over rural Oriente, with a dense sprinkling of stars as seen from Pepito and María’s porch, still remains clear to me, but it was the farm’s animals that I grew most attached to. I seem to have felt a special fondness for the pigs, into whose pens, to my mother’s consternation, I often wandered. Or else I kept chasing after those plump and squealing creatures in the front yard, spending so much time with them that it was easy for me to imitate their guttural swallowing, as if I were a bristly snouted animal myself instead of a spindly boy whom my cousins had already nicknamed “el alemán,” or “the German,” for his looks. Apparently, I pecked at the ground like the hens and cawcawed like the roosters, doubtlessly running barefoot in their leavings. I played with chameleons and bush lizards as if they were my friends.

  One morning, when the family had decided to throw a party for their neighbors, Pepito, ordering some hands to dig out a pit in the yard under a tamarind tree, called my brother and me to his side so that, I suppose, we could witness the slaughtering of a pig. The poor thing must have known what was going to happen, for my cousins Bebo and Macho, in their sturdy teens, struggled while dragging it out from its wire pen, and it put up a terrible fight, trying to run away, until with a quick thrust of a blade against its neck, Pepito ended its struggles. (It squealed in terror, snorted, collapsed, and then, trembling slightly, eyes expanded, gave out a final cry before dying.) Soon, they’d dragged it into another shed, where it was cleaved in half, its guts pulled out, and then each side, tied by the hooves, was hung off a hook, buckets left underneath to catch the dripping blood. The penetrating smell of that pork flesh and its blood made me step away; it was probably a pal of mine, but I remained on hand when those sides were hauled out into the yard to cook over a smoldering pit. It would take hours to roast the lechón to “crackling perfection,” as the cookbooks might say, but in the meantime, something awry happened—an iguana, crawling over, embedded itself inside one of the flanks. The easiest solution, it seemed, came down to smoking it out, and so they hung that side up under a tamarind tree and built a fire underneath it. However, the wood was too green, or the flame too high, because shortly a column of thick, black smoke went billowing upward
into that tree and, at a certain moment, a commotion arose in the branches; soon the tarantulas that had been nesting there panicked, for from its lowest branches, a rainfall of those creatures came dropping down by the dozens, like black flowers, and began scattering wildly in all directions in the yard. There were so many that even the women were recruited to hunt them down, the family rushing after the creatures with brooms and shovels and pans lest they get underneath the floorboards and take over the house for good. Indeed, I remember that.

  Somewhere along the line, however, there came the moment when I didn’t seem well. My mother’s always claimed that I had the worst habit of drinking from puddles in the countryside, especially after a rainfall, and while you’d think that such water—Cuban water—falling from God’s skies would be pure as any could be, I came down with something anyway, my face and limbs blowing up, and my manner becoming so listless that I was confined to a bed for days, my uncle and aunts convinced that I had perhaps suffered from an allergic reaction to an insect bite. I don’t recall at which point this happened. But those first signs of my illness could have taken place after we’d made a trip to see my father’s family in Jiguaní, which was about fifteen miles away, though, if so, I would have been too late to meet my great-grandmother, Concepcíon, who’d died the year before, at one hundred and thirteen, from diabetes. (Her mind was intact and spirits good, even if both her legs had been amputated; among her last words, I’ve been told, were: “I may have been ugly, but I was lucky in life.”) Or perhaps I’d gotten sick, so my mother has also claimed, from something I’d eaten, perhaps a piece of delicious pork, an undercooked morsel, or one I’d picked up off the ground the day when those tarantulas fell from the tree. Or at the beach near Gibara, a prickly mollusk had jammed something vile into my foot, and it had gotten infected without anyone knowing. Or, perhaps, in the midst of some Cuban miasma, for in the woods there were an abundance of stagnant mosquito-ridden ponds, I had sucked into my lungs some germs, or what my mother called “microbios.” Still, I can’t say just when the symptoms of my illness first came over me, and what recollections I have of that little piece of Cuba hardly summon up any moments of particular discomfort. But during that summer when I turned four, from some mysterious source, those microbios, which my mother, with an almost medieval panache, would describe as “animalitos”—or little animals—slipped inside my body, those parasites (or whatever they were) filling my system with their venom.