Thoughts Without Cigarettes

by Oscar Hijuelos

  Still, whatever ailed me took several months to really manifest itself, and even then, I’m not sure of the day and hour when my mother or any of my other relatives became aware that what I would come to think of as my Cuban disease had taken hold, or even if it was noticeable enough to be truly worrisome to them at first. In any event, by the end of that summer of 1955, I just wasn’t up to snuff, low of energy, and perhaps even more apprehensive and nervous looking than before.

  Maybe I’ve come to read too much into the slightest of my expressions, but the single thing I have to go by comes down to the only photograph taken of me in Cuba. It was posed in the salon of my aunt Cheo’s house in Holguín. Cheo’s daughter, the pretty auburn-haired Miriam, with the serious expression of a young girl who had recently lost her father, and my ethereally pretty cousin Cuza were standing beside my mother and brother, his face unfortunately partly obscured. I’m sitting out front on a little chair, dolled up like a little Lord Fauntleroy, my hair blond and wavy, my cheeks covered with freckles, my pudgy knees dimpled, and on my face, if I’m not mistaken, is a look of not just timidity or shyness but of anxiety, as if I knew what was to come.

  By the time we eventually returned to New York, late that summer, I had become bloated and listless, with a constant fever and an overwhelming desire to sleep, a crisis coming about one evening in our apartment when, in whatever manner such discoveries are made, my mother found a shocking amount of blood in my urine. What ran through her mind in such a moment, I can’t say, but she must have been frightened to death over what my father might do to her if something bad happened to me. Off in his own universe of pots and pans, steaming soups, hamburger platters, and grilled steaks by day, and coming home to manage as best he could through those evenings, clouds of cigarette smoke wafting through the apartment, it’s possible that he hadn’t particularly noticed the way I looked, or my lethargy. With his early morning/afternoon schedule at the hotel and his habit of staying up late with his chums, perhaps he just hadn’t been paying attention. But whatever his state of awareness, when my mother, in shock or denial, without knowing what else to do, finally let him in on my condition—she must have been shaking and worried out of her mind—Pascual, speaking much better English than she, rose to the occasion. Having a good side—a kind of calmness and a reasoning manner about him when he hadn’t been drinking—he quietly tapped on our neighbor’s door to use the telephone. But if the elderly Mrs. Blair didn’t own one yet (though I remember that, in her hallway not far from her door, a heavy black old-fashioned rotary telephone sat on a table), he probably went down to the corner pharmacy to call our doctor, a Sephardic Jew of advanced years named Altchek, who had an office on 110th and Lenox in East Harlem. In that distant age when New York physicians responded quickly to house calls, he arrived at our apartment within the hour, to find me lying on their bed, barely able to move. Always impeccably dressed, Dr. Altchek, whose dark and liquid eyes, I remember, were filled with both sorrow and compassion, quickly went to work. What examinations he administered I do not recall, though I have the distinct memory of his feeling around my swollen abdomen with his fingers and of his thumb opening my right eyelid, that he shined a light into my pupils. It wasn’t long before he, declaring my condition muy grave (grave is the word my mother always used), told my parents that I had to be rushed to the closest hospital, St. Luke’s, fortunately only five blocks away.

  It’s likely that my father carried me there himself, my mother in a frantic state following by his side, or perhaps they had sprung for the luxury of a taxi ride, with Altchek, no doubt, accompanying us. It’s possible that I was so listless as to approach unconsciousness, gone under like my uncle in Cuba after his fall; the truth is I don’t remember much about that evening—I probably don’t want to, or, as is likely, I had lapsed into a coma. I haven’t the slightest idea of the treatments they administered in the emergency room, nor the day of the week, nor at just what hour I had been given a little wristband, admitted officially as a patient, then transferred to an intensive care ward, but that night, as my mother later put it, that carajo—the burden—my illness brought my family began.

  No doubt she spent the passing hours nervously, and if my father remained true to form, having already become one of those conscientious fellows—un trabajador through and through—who perpetually worries about his image as a worker, he would have stayed in the hospital until it was time for him to begin his daily morning trek to the 116th Street subway on Broadway in silence, likely consumed with anxiety and bewildered. He probably spent that night smoking one cigarette after the other in the waiting room, all the while perhaps thinking about his older brother, the first Oscar Hijuelos, the parallels between us disturbing him. Later at the hotel, on the same morning after I had entered the hospital, while ensconced in the kitchen of the Biltmore Men’s Bar with his chums, he probably had his first drink earlier in the day than usual—compliments of the bartender, a cubano, who took care of him. At least he must have felt blameless about me, but my mother? Told that I was suffering from a severe infection of the kidneys, she must have despaired at my misfortune and felt mystified by her plain bad luck. Perplexed as she waited in the hospital, her own uncertainties heightened, she must have certainly felt her own twinges of guilt. After all, I had gotten sick in her care and nearly died that very night, and for months afterward, my condition remained, to quote my brother, “touch and go.”

  Years later, when I’d ask her just what had happened, she’d always look down into her hands, as if just mentioning it left her feeling ashamed. She would always have the expression of a woman who, having tried hard to protect me, believed that she had failed. Sitting with her in the kitchen, I’d get the impression that my mother, unapproachable in so many ways, almost felt that she had no right to me as a son, and that deep down, she wanted to wrap her arms around me but couldn’t: It was on such an occasion that she once declared, “But, oh, hijo, it wasn’t anything we wanted for you.”

  For the longest time, all I would know was that I had gotten sick in Cuba, from Cuban microbios, that the illness had blossomed in the land of my forebears, the country where I had once been loved and whose language fell as music on my ears. Of course, diseases happen anywhere, and children get sick under any circumstances, but what I would hear for years afterward from my mother was that something Cuban had nearly killed me and, in the process of my healing, would turn my own “Cubanness” into air.

  The few things I do remember about my initial hospitalization—tubes shoved up me and medicinal smells, and dreary wards, and a terrible loneliness, blood being constantly taken and bitter-tasting pills—seem to have unfolded in the kind of darkness that children experience in bad dreams. Bloated and seeping blood, I must have felt that something had gone wrong, but did I even know? Was I even awake at first? After all, it was common for nephritis to put children under for two and three weeks at a time, sometimes longer, if they awakened at all, and even if I had been aware of it, what on earth could I have been feeling?

  They moved me to the St. Luke’s Convalescent Hospital in Greenwich after a month or so, and from what I can recall, I was constantly given pills. Nurses pushed along carts on which sat quivering little white paper cups of diuretics and antibiotic tablets, though some of the kids, off in the deeper end, would have been treated for a week or so at a time intravenously; bedpans were the rule, and a mixture of food and children’s toilet smells filled the air. Sweets were unknown to us, and what I mainly remember of the food amounted to the blandest of things—like boiled potatoes and carrots, cream of wheat, and possibly skim milk, along with some form of protein, like broiled chicken, but never served with salt, and skinless, a far cry from the euphoria of fat-laced, crispy lechón—ah, Cuba, Cuba. What birds we saw went flying through pictures on the walls, and while I have a vague recollection of playing with a set of Tinkertoys and of seeing a few brightly colored toy trucks rolling across a floor, the wonderful nature of daily childhood discovery seems not to
have been a part of my stay. I doubt that we did much of anything at all except submit to our treatments and sleep and sleep and sleep. I’d sometimes hear the other children crying, and moaning in pain—from what, I don’t know, perhaps from loneliness—but though it’s hard to see their faces now, I would pop up in the middle of the night, feeling overwhelmed by the notion that these kids were only fleeting shadows, slipping away and just out of reach from me, on the other side of the room.

  Though I spent a year in that place, I haven’t a single name of any of the home’s doctors or nurses in my head or, for that matter, any sense of what the hospital’s staff members looked like, though my guess is that in the Connecticut of 1955–56, they were most likely decent, locally recruited New England folks, and since it seems to have had a somewhat religious atmosphere—here and there crucifixes hung on the walls—I would imagine that a chapel could be found somewhere inside and a chaplain, perhaps an Episcopalian priest, who would officiate over the services, say prayers over the young patients’ beds, and console parents when things did not quite work out.

  You see, there were others in my ward, some whose renal functions worsened and never quite recovered. It’s a fact that not all the kids who were sent there to convalesce got better, some beds emptying mysteriously overnight. Those who were healthy enough were allowed into a playroom. That’s where I got to know Theresa, a pigtailed, sweet-natured girl who, also suffering from nephritis, exhibited the same listlessness and bloated limbs as I: We were cooped up in the same rooms; our arms ached in the same way from where blood had been taken; our urine swished, pinkish, in vials; and, in that isolation, there was always someone around to examine for blood what we’d left in the bedpan or potty. Breathing haltingly, we shared the same shocked expression and, like all the kids in that place, went for months without seeing the light of day, for we were never allowed outside to romp in the surrounding greens, whose sunny glare we spied flowing through the windows far above us. If I have mentioned her, it’s because Theresa is the only name I came away with from that hospital and because, as it would happen, aside from recalling that we were always playing with alphabet blocks on the floor and that I’d sometimes see her curled up in a corner, drowsily trying to stay awake—whatever medicines they gave us knocked us out—she would be the only fellow patient I’d run into years later, during my feeble-brained and quite timid adolescence.

  Ah, but the anxieties we shared, the treatments I received, and the isolation I felt during that period would later come back to me in recurring dreams, the chronic nightmares I’d suffer from well into my thirties. In one of them I’d feel a rod—possibly a catheter—being inserted into my urethra, and a flinching over that pain, some nasty burning in my center; the sensation, as well, of choking on the dryness of pills, of swallowing metallic powders, would come to me, along with this odd fearful logic that accompanied those rituals: If I swallowed one of those pills, I’d die, while on the other hand, if I didn’t, I’d still die. Razors with pinheads pricked at my fingertips, drawing blood, and with so many things entering me, up my rectum sometimes, injections in the hard tissues of the buttocks, no wonder so many of my dreams turned into nightmares. In the silence of that ward at night, with only the humming of machines softly breathing like the children themselves, down the halls, a haunting darkness with almost a smothering human nature, like floating shrouds or shadows, which made one cry out, and some other lingering sensations that involved electricity, which would rise as a great shock from inside the body, that plump swollen bag filled with microbios, with sludge and Cuban shit, and probably with sins—why else would you be there in the first place? And while all that was going on, I’d begun to forget myself.

  I do remember a closet. Since so many infant patients came and went from that place, the children of the ward were dressed in the cast-offs of the children who had preceded them; this apparel was stored in an immense-seeming walk-in wardrobe, smelling of lacquered pine, with shelves that were piled high with trousers and shirts and other items. One day, as a nurse fitted me into a pair of corduroys with a snap-button fly and pull-up straps and a striped shirt, she started barking at me in English to step forward, to lift my arms—commands that I apparently did not respond to quickly enough, for, as I remember, she pushed me inside that closet and slammed the door behind her, leaving me in the dark for what might have been only a few minutes but seemed to me an interminably long time: In the darkness, I worried that those clothes would come to life and, lifting off the shelves like spirits, come tumbling down to smother me. As for being locked inside? It surely reminded me that I was not at home in Manhattan, nor in my auntie Cheo’s house in Holguín, nor by the beautiful Cuban sea, nor out in Oriente, dazzled by the evening sky, nor, for that matter, out on our front stoop, sitting beside my father as he smoked cigarettes, watching kids play on the street, or walking somewhere with my mother, whose faces, by then, I could barely recall.

  Instead, in its pitch-blackness, it seemed a deep and endless space through which one might fall, or from whose depths might emerge monsters. Shell-shocked, and wishing that someone—my mother, my father, anyone—would come to my rescue, I knocked on the door until that nurse finally opened it, then scolded me about behaving better, to pay attention to her when she was telling me something, and, for crying out loud, to stop being so dense and learn to answer her in English. I don’t know how many times this kind of scene played itself out over those long months, but I have a general recollection of feeling a sense of dread (as if the walls would fall on me), harangued (as if I had to watch my every word), and maligned for my ignorance of English.

  And my mother? Once I started getting better, it was she, but never my brother, who would be allowed into an inner playroom to spend time with me. While she sat on a bench along a wall, I’d play with some toys by her feet. She always seemed to be talking about something, and frantically—I wish I knew now just what she’d said; occasionally, she’d lean forward to move some blocks around, but I hardly seemed aware of her. She must have at least smiled at me now and then and perhaps affectionately so, but though she may have wanted to hold me, it wasn’t allowed—touching was forbidden. Other parents too, I recall, gathered in that room. I’ve since often wondered what she made of them or might have said to them if she could have managed more than a few phrases in English and shared her worries.

  Visiting me and finding that I seemed to have withdrawn into myself, what else could she do but stare at me with dismay, shaking her head at this puzzling sea change, or else sit back in her chair in frustration? What else could she do but sigh, her striking dark eyes widening, as she muttered something under her breath? That same puzzlement would always enter her voice when she’d address me in the future, “Me entiendes?”—“Do you understand me?”—becoming one of the stock phrases she’d use to punctuate our every conversation, as if her own son had become a stranger who’d suddenly dropped into her life, an americano whose timidity and fears she needlessly (and perhaps selfishly) confused with laziness (“You didn’t want to speak Spanish after all!”) or with aloofness (“Por qué me miras así?”—“Why do you look at me that way?”).

  I’d often turn away from her, or shrug, or pretend that she wasn’t there. It must have killed her.

  On one of those afternoons, however, deep into my stay at the hospital, I was allowed to leave the ward and go outside for a while. I know this because of a photograph, the only one I’ve ever had to commemorate my stay at that convalescent home. I’m in a heavy coat, bloated and lost and seemingly staggered by the brilliance of spring, my distinctly rounded, very pale face partially washed out by the sun, nothing less than a child’s apprehension and bewilderment contorting my mouth. Someone, perhaps a family friend like mi padrino Horacio, had snapped it, since my father, in all that time, never once came to see me, and my mother didn’t know how to—for I had never seen her take, in all my life, a single photograph (she was not that way). But thank God someone did, for after so many years, eve
n that memory, of me standing in a field, would, like so many other things about that time, have likely been forgotten.

  Eventually, there came the day I left Connecticut and found myself in a taxi with my mother crossing 125th Street over to the West Side from Lenox Avenue, where we’d gotten off a New York Central Railroad train. It must have been close to Christmas, for the store windows blinked with colored lights, and pine trees for sale lined the streets. Across the intersections hung banners and enormous glass and wire snowflakes, and here and there along the Harlem sidewalks, vendors were out hawking dolls and toys and all kinds of household goods, crowds of people bumping into each other, enchanting me. I know I wore a heavy wool coat with a hood because my mother kept tightening the cords each time I squirmed about while trying to loosen them from around my jacket collar, and, as would happen a thousand times in the future, she told me, pulling my hands away, “Stop that! Or you’ll get sick again!” Then, just like that, we were on our way up that long hill on Amsterdam and making a left onto 118th, our six-story tenement building being the fourth one along that block on the uptown side. As we stopped in front of its gray Doric-columned stoop, screaming kids were inside playing running games like tag and hide in the front hall, among them little Jeanie Walker, the deaf lady’s daughter, a little slow in the head but her pretty and expressive face breaking out into a huge grin of happiness at the sight of me: First thing she did was to wrap her arms around me in a hug, but just the same, I had trouble placing her.