I never dallied in front of mirrors for long, and when I did, the face staring back at me through the half-moon wells of distorting glass seemed as if it should belong to someone else, not an Hijuelos. (I hated looking at myself: Once, after I’d somehow gotten hold of a water gun, I went around the apartment shooting out any lightbulbs that happened to be near a mirror—oh, but the beating I got for that.) That feeling used to hit me particularly hard when, during the rare outing with both my mother and father into the outside world—a trip by subway to Queens to see my cousin Jimmy and his beautiful wife, María, or up to the Bronx, where my papi liked to hang out with his fun-loving friends on evenings so long they drove my mother into fits of despair—I always felt dismayed and vaguely saddened by seeing our reflections in any sun-drenched window: For while I could “read” my parents’ faces easily, their dark features so clearly defined, my own, whitewashed by light, seemed barely discernible. Put that idiosyncrasy together with the fact that I was too aware of my body, that cumbersome thing that had gotten all messed up and needed special care and medicines, I sat in the classrooms of Corpus with such self-consciousness that I hardly ever relaxed or felt at ease like the others.
Along the way, however, I experienced my first publication, the moon ditty that appears earlier here in the epigraph. In its simplicity, it says a lot about me back then, and predicts (I think) my later life view. Just something I had scribbled down during class, it ended up in Maryknoll magazine—the sisters had sent it to their missions in Africa, South America, Hawaii, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Formosa, and Japan, as an “example of the originality and imagination of a fifth grader.” (Mainly, I am amazed that it’s one of the few things my mother kept of my doings from those years.)
There’s not much more about my childhood schooling to tell, except to say that, in some essential sense, I somehow got through it alone. I read all the books we were supposed to read, though I don’t remember any now, and magazines like Highlife and Maryknoll. On certain afternoons, we had readings from the Bible, which I loved. My favorite story was of Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt, but Moses’s epic tale, from his abandonment as a baby in the reed marshes of Egypt to his last days on a mountain overlooking Jericho, from whose summit he spied the promised land, before dying, broke my heart—and I took that book’s stories as pure history, burning bushes, water struck from a stone, descending angels, and all. (Another favorite involved a tale from the book of Daniel, in which the evil Babylonian king witnesses God’s own disembodied hand scrawling out words on the wall, the kind of thing I often waited for to happen at night when, unable to sleep, and hearing voices from down the hall, I’d get spooked by the Rorshachian shapes made by the bad plastering in my bedroom.)
Nothing, however, seemed more straightforward than Father O’Reilly’s Baltimore Catechism, which, wrapped in blue covers, contained the simple truths that we children were expected to learn and abide by, lest we one day experience the fires of hell. A simple question (“Why do we pray?”) was followed by a simple answer (“Because God hears us”). In that manner, as I recall, it offered explanations of sin, salvation, and the immortality of the soul and, as if out of a fairy tale, did not skimp on its depictions of the devil, who came across vividly in wonderfully simple but graphic black-and-white ink renderings as a hoofed, betailed, soot-faced creature with pinched backpointed ears, crooked bat wings, and long talons for fingers, holding a pitchfork or else cringing in fear and revulsion when confronted with true sanctity. I believed in the devil as well and, somewhat of a blank slate, took to heart all the other dictums we were taught. (By the time I received my First Communion at the age of ten, I truly thought that my state of grace so guaranteed an entry into heaven that, with a child’s optimism, I’d think it wouldn’t be so bad if I were to be run over by a truck.)
I’d always absorbed religion. For one of the first things I’d ever heard, predating my illness, came down to this: “Hay un Dios,”—“There is a God.” A God to be respected and feared, a God who ruled the universe through the wisdom of His ways. I don’t remember hearing that He, the Father, had ever been a kindly God—that was reserved for His son—but, on the other hand, as my mother used to put it, we owed this world—our very existence—to him, “el Señor.” Even if He’d kind of fucked me, at least in terms of what I had once been or was on the cusp of becoming, I truly believed that His presence was as certain as the air I breathed. And why wouldn’t I, spending so much time as I did with my mother? In some ways she really went for Catholicism: At the beginning of Lent, a cross made by ashes graced her forehead; on Palm Sunday, strands of dried palm reconfigured as a crucifix were put up on the wall as a reminder of what was to come; Good Friday brought the three o’clock gloom, when, I swear, the world seemed to go dark at that exact moment when Jesus was said to have died.
Easter, however, brought the greatest joy, as holy days went. Even to a little kid, it seemed wonderful that the misery of death was transcended by the flower and sunburst triumphs of the resurrection. And it was fun. I recall that even my father attended the Easter services, my brother singing with the choir for the High Mass, the three of us dressed to the nines, going off together to get lost in that rarified atmosphere of incense and flowers, all the while taking in the mysterious and chilling mystical incantations of the Latin (which my mother always appreciated and possibly understood better than the sermons, which were recited in English). Sweetest of all, for a sick kid like myself, I always felt happy—and curious—to see the other children in their Sunday best, their shoes spanking clean, their hair nicely combed, as they sat up in the balcony, facing the altar, in their own separate section. I enjoyed the sense of being around them, of almost seeming to be a part of a group, even if we sat far away: Quite simply, I often felt alone, though it wasn’t as bad in church, where, at the very least, I could count on the company of the angels and saints.
I even had a guardian angel, whom I’d always envisioned as a sword-yielding being of indeterminate sex, with flaxen hair and enormous wings, and Jesus himself, whose picture, which I always admired and felt fascinated by, hung in the hall.
In fact, I’m pretty sure that, with my protected, coddled, and shell-shocked air, I gave off a somewhat otherworldly and “good” impression, the sort that, later, as I got a little older, provoked certain of the nuns to invite me up to their convent above the school, where I was given simple chores, like sweeping the floors or cleaning their long kitchen’s cabinets, in exchange for a handful of candies and fifteen cents or so in pennies. Despite the endless stories I’ve since heard about cruel nuns, and aside from having the back of my head slapped and my knuckles rapped by a ruler, and yes, my earlobes tugged painfully when, getting older and more pent up, I turned into a classroom wise guy, I have always thought only fondly of those women, who, in their black-and-white wimpled habits and ascetically appointed rooms—narrow, with just a bed, a table, a washbasin on a stand, and a crucifix hanging on the wall—seem now to have been nothing less than sincerely devout throwbacks to some other time.
Along the way, in the church rectory, the Irish priests must have had some kind of discussion about the changing demographics of the neighborhood, for they began to give Hispanic-flavored sermons. At those nine A.M. Masses when the children filled the galleys, from the pulpit came little parables about a boy and girl, José and María. Typically, these were simple moral tales: María finds a wallet with money in it: Should she return the wallet, even if she has her eye on a dress or her mother could use the money? What should she do? This was the kind of thing she’d ask José. Righteous and good at coming up with answers, he’d advise her to do the right thing. Or they’d feel troubled over some hardship in the family and were thinking resentful thoughts toward others, only to learn that was not the right way to behave. The devil would come to them in disguise and advise them to do whatever they wanted but then they’d meet a gentle and quiet man with the most saintly face, and he would tell José and María to take
the high road, never to sin, and in that way they would find their happiness. Sometimes he would tell them his name: Jesus; or it would turn out to be a guardian angel—but in any case, the point of those sermons always came to the triumph of good over evil. And so it went; I would sit listening, surrounded by real-life Josés and Marías in the pews, fascinated and rapt by the telling of such simple tales.
Unavoidably, in those years of my childhood, we’d go to the clinic at St. Luke’s. I went once a month, sometimes more, for tests mainly. But I hated going. I was already sick of doctors, or at least the anonymity of them, kindly though some may have been. (I didn’t like to be touched, palpated, or examined by strangers.) For the longest time, just the prospect of a hospital visit made me gloomy—and I would become so reluctant about those appointments that I could barely raise my head sometimes as I’d amble down the hall, to the point where my mother would call me, as she sometimes did my pop, “un trastornado”—or schlemiel loser, to translate it loosely.
Inevitably, I always went, however, my mother tugging at my hands, indignant over what she thought of as my ingratitude. She seemed to believe that I never appreciated the stuff she’d gone through for me—“What do you think I am, a witch?” Now, when I had to abandon my comic books or when she’d disrupted my reveries, which were mainly about becoming like the other kids, and I wasn’t in the right mood, I sometimes fled down the hall from her. I’m pretty sure that she first slapped me in the face on one of those days, when, cornering me and fed up with having to chase me around, she really let me have it, the ritual of punishment, or the threat of it, becoming a part of those outings. While heading out for our clinic visits, she didn’t help matters by telling me, “Don’t forget, hijo, that you almost died.”
One winter, I was about nine, it was snowing, and just that short trek to the pediatric ward of St. Luke’s Hospital on 114th Street required that I get bundled up in a hundred layers as if we were on an outing to the Siberian tundra. I felt manhandled as my mother pulled tight my coat and out we went, down the block, and, as we’d round the corner, heaven forbid I’d stop, enchanted by the soda shop window, where some new cheap toys had been put on display. “We don’t have time for that, nor the money,” she told me. “One day, when you get better, you can look at whatever you want, but you’re still sick and weak—muy débil y enfermo—and whether you like it or not, we’re going to the hospital.”
On any given day, it was jammed full with row after row of mothers and their kids, mostly black and Latino from the projects and Spanish Harlem and even farther uptown, folks who seemed far poorer than ourselves. (My father, after all, had a job.) There just weren’t too many white kids around, and, turning heads as we walked in, as if I gave off some bad smell or perhaps because my mother, without realizing it, tended to look upon people of color in a somewhat aloof way, I felt a distinct discomfort every time we had to go there. Aside from that, however, I just never liked having a thermometer stuck up my ass, nor blood taken, nor peeing into a little paper cup behind a curtain while a nurse looked on.
And there were the hours we spent before we’d see any doctors. In those pre-Medicaid days, hospitals like St. Luke’s operated on a sliding scale and were in effect, with their steep discounting, much like public health and union-sponsored clinics when it came to treating the more financially disadvantaged folks who had no doctors of their own. The visits cost two dollars, the medicines and tests somewhat more, though not much, but the price for such a good deal—and, believe me, there were mothers in those crowds who couldn’t pay even those cheap fees—required that one wait and wait and wait. An eleven o’clock appointment could mean that you might get seen at four, and, as the cutoff seemed to be around five, I can recall more than a few occasions when, after so long a wait, we were told to come back the next day.
C’est la vie, at least with some.
Nevertheless, during those waits, my mother always managed to find some kindred Latina spirit to sit next to, so that they might talk about life and, often enough, the health issues affecting their children. “My son is a diabetic,” one might say, or “My daughter has a murmur in her heart,” but for whatever reason, my mother, loving any modicum of sympathy, and quite charming when she wanted to be, took a particular pride in trumping the others when it came to me: “Mi hijo, casi se murío de una infección de los riñones”—“My son nearly died from an infection of the kidneys,” she’d say, a nearly penitent and saintly manner coming over her. “Fue muy muy grave [He was very grave]—it’s a miracle that he’s even alive.” And she’d make the sign of the cross, glory be to God in the highest. I tended to feel embarrassed by such remarks, perhaps even more so because they were rendered in Spanish, and that embarrassment deepened when, suddenly, one of these ladies whom my mother inevitably befriended, while noticing how I seemed to have tuned out, leaned close to her, quizzically asking, “Pero habla español?”—“He speaks Spanish, doesn’t he?” a query to which she usually replied, “Un poquito,” her eyes looking afar, her head shaking.
“He spent too much time in a hospital when he was little.” And confiding more, she’d add: “Es más americano.”
For my part, I’d either fidget around, wondering why, if that was so, it seemed something that I should be ashamed about, or, even given that it happened to be true, how I had become so. Though it defined me in those days, that Cuban illness seemed, by my lights, to have always been there, this black hole from which, as if out of a fairy tale, I had crawled into as a little cubano and, after a deep sleep, had emerged as something else: a young prince in the making turned into a freak.
When the nurse, usually Irish, finally called us to the front desk for our appointment, we often suffered from the slight indignity of hearing the pronunciation of our last name mangled: Hijuelos, a rare enough Spanish appellation, came out as Hidgewellos, Hidgejewloos, and worse. One thing about my mother, having her pride, she took personal offense at the error, often making a point of pronouncing the name properly over and over again for the nurse, so that she might not repeat it the same way (“Okay, okay, lady, what do you want from me?”—as if she, or anyone else, could not care less).
And off we would go, to sit in yet another room, in the pediatric wing up on the next floor. Its waiting room walls, as I recall, were cheerfully decorated with large flowers and suns and bumblebees, and, depending on the time of the year, the nurses would put up cutouts of Halloween pumpkins, of witches on brooms, and pictures of Santa Claus, snowflakes, and holiday trees at Christmas. That room seemed nicer than the one below: At least they had piles of comics and Golden Book fairy tales for me to look at, and I always felt intruded upon when we would be finally called in for my examination.
Our appointments always began with an interview. None of the doctors spoke Spanish, but there always seemed to be a Puerto Rican nurse around to help things along.
“Anything unusual going on with him?” she’d ask my mother in Spanish.
“No,” my mother answered, looking down chastely.
“Is he sleeping well?”
“Yes,” she would answer, which wasn’t quite true, but since I suffered regularly from nightmares, I suppose it wasn’t anything my mother cared to share.
“And did you bring along the sample?”
“Ah, sí.” And my mother would pull out this plastic container from a paper bag, which she, waiting outside the bathroom door, had me fill the morning or evening before. I could never bear to look at it and felt anxious and ashamed as hell when my mother handed it over to the nurse, as, aside from my sense of violated privacy, the sample might contain enough microbios to put me back in the hospital.
The doctors were always brisk: They’d examine me all over, and on one of those visits, it was discovered that I suffered from psoriasis, just like my father did. Then I’d get on a scale. I always weighed too much, a mystery since I was supposed to be on a strict diet. The hematology tests were the worst, however—I hated the tube tied around my forearm, t
he deep pricking that followed, and the sight of my blood filling up the hypodermic, but at least that aversion to needles would one day keep me from becoming a heroin addict like so many of the kids in my neighborhood. Sometimes, a more arcane series of tests, taking up much of the day, required that I go to the nephrology ward. That usually took up another hour or two, and we’d sit around in that room, facing other children, their worried-looking parents beside them, while my mother, hopeful that another Latina might be among them, carefully sized them up. More than once I’d seen her lean forward and, smiling at a “swarthy”-looking Italian or Greek woman, say something to her in Spanish, only to sit back, sucking in air through her lips, in disappointment.
That winter afternoon, my mother had caught wind from a nurse that a nearby room had been occupied by a Latino just recently admitted to the hospital for nephritis, and for some reason, after I had finished with my ordeal and we had gathered our coats, she insisted that we drop in on him to say hello. His wife and two children were in the room beside him. A handsome man with a wonderful smile, he already had an IV line hooked up to his right arm, but, aside from the fact that his face had turned deeply red, as if he had been baking in the sun, he didn’t particularly look sick to me. Once my mother introduced herself—“Soy la Señora Hijuelos, but you can call me Madgalena”—she began peppering him with questions about what he did and where he had come from (second-generation Dominican, a car salesman in Queens by trade, I seem to recall) and pulled me over to his bed saying, “Mira, Ernesto, this is my son. He has nefreetees too,” she said, as if I still had it, and as if that fact, if still true, would hold a special meaning for him. “But he is already getting much better than he was—as I am sure you will too. Los médicos son muy sabios. The doctors are very wise.”
Thoughts Without Cigarettes Page 10