Thoughts Without Cigarettes

by Oscar Hijuelos

  Still, at least one person thought highly of what I was doing. Among my classmates, there happened to be a young woman who, running a lesbian press out of Brooklyn, approached me after one of those classes: Would I be interested in publishing my “guidebook” with her house? I declined for reasons, I now think, that involved a slight distrust of her sexual orientation—though I also didn’t particularly care to make my literary debut with so small a house. Also, I knew that however clever some of what I had been writing may have sounded, it really wasn’t very good, or anything that could be called a novel, even if, in those days of the postmodern fragments boom, people were getting away with murder.

  A further confession: I wanted to write as cleverly as a Borges or a Barthelme, as magically and lyrically as García Márquez and Juan Rulfo, and, at the same time, as jiveishly as a James M. Cain or an Iceberg Slim, as realistically and tersely as a Hemingway or a Stephen Crane or a Dos Passos, as funnily as a Malamud or a Philip Roth, as ribaldly as a Rabelais and Frank Harris, as soulfully as a Chekhov and Chaim Potok (whose melancholic Jews really spoke to me), as spectacularly verbally as a Joyce or Yeats, and as sweetly as a Neruda—in other words, as Borges himself might have put it, I was everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

  Indeed I did read everything I could get my hands on, and since I didn’t know a whole lot about literature, and, for what it’s worth, given my spotty education, as a tabula rasa, I had no problems finding room within myself to absorb other writers’ techniques—in other words, I became a good mimic. If I read Conrad on a Monday, I started to write (somewhat) like him on a Tuesday; if I dipped into one of E. A. Poe’s fantasias at bedtime, I dreamed of writing like him in the middle of the night. (My collected prose of E. A. Poe, by the way, which my friend Richard gave me those years ago as a Christmas present, I still have on my shelves today.) Just about everything I read, save for certain aforementioned writers, fired me up, and for at least a few years, while under the spell of Barthelme, I began to reconsider my original notion of becoming a schoolteacher. (Then, thinking about the odds against my ever having a real shot of ever earning a living as a writer, I’d fall back on my old plans.)

  I was superstitious as well, always have been. When, for example, I found out that Jorge Borges and I (“Borges y yo”) shared the same birthday, I went through an afternoon of cigarettes-and-vino-fueled elations, swearing that this coincidence was a sign from God that I had been cut from the same cloth as the great Argentine writer. (On the other hand, I also shared that date, August 24, with Lyndon Johnson.) You’d think I would outgrow such a naïve notion, but decades later, while feeling a terrific lack of confidence about writing another book of mine, A Simple Habana Melody, which was based on the life of the Cuban Tin Pan Alley composer of “El Manicero,” Moisés Simons, who ended up in a concentration camp during World War II—who would believe it, right?—my discovery that he too shared my birthday seemed to me another divine sign, as if the spirit of Simons accompanied me. (And since I’m on that subject, I may as well mention that I also share my birthday with several great Cuban musicians: Benny Moré and Bola de Nieve, who, before I had that knowledge, were already my favorites.)

  As I sat in his office in the Quonset hut one afternoon going over something, Barthelme surprised me by suggesting that I might consider the University of Iowa writing program as a possibility for my future. He apparently had quite a bit of pull there and seemed to imply that if I so wanted to, he could get me in.

  “Would that at all interest you?” he asked me that day, almost nonchalantly. “It might help you shape up.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by the phrase “shape up,” but I knew that the idea of going to Iowa seemed revolting—even unthinkable—to me; it just seemed so “white bread.” I didn’t even consider its reputation as a prestigious first-rate writing school, or that, in fact, Barthelme, a generous but private man, was trying to do me an enormous favor. ( I think he must have viewed my work as very raw but promising.) All I could think was No way, answering Barthelme with a shrug that must have, on some level, pissed him off. Without realizing it, I was turning my back on a golden opportunity: Truth be told, I really didn’t feel that I deserved it, nor did I think in terms of a life commitment to a career in writing. In fact, even though I’d later accept a fellowship into the MFA program at City, mainly to defer having to enter the workplace, I never went through a day feeling that such schooling would ever lead to anything. I considered most of my fellow students far more gifted, smart, and ambitious than I; if this sounds like false humility, you have to remember that, while one part of me occasionally believed in myself, the other continued to be plagued by doubts. Despite an occasionally cheerful exterior, I remained privately morose and overly reflective in a way that was the opposite of hip—which, as I will define it here and now, has to do with an effortless and unforced expression of the inner soul. In other words, I continued to be anxious: Sometimes I’d smoke through a pack of cigarettes even if they tasted lousy, left my throat smarting, and gave me the jitters, simply because, having opened that pack, I felt I had a responsibility to finish them. Mainly, I saw that stupidity as a way of passing my time, to forestall the gloom into which I easily sank.

  Nevertheless, I seemed to take what I can only think of now as my endless reserves of nervous energy and let it pour into my writing—pages and pages of it, and with a one-foot-in-front-of-another manner, as if, in fact, I were constructing the brick wall of a house. I had a very working-class attitude about writing, as if turning up at a job—I guess that was my pop’s lingering influence. As a student, I mainly aimed to please. Though I tended to be guardedly friendly with Mr. Barthelme and remained respectful of his standing (as a critical darling of The New York Times and a longtime contributor of fiction to The New Yorker magazine, he was at the peak of his reputation), I felt thrilled whenever he liked something I had come up with, even if he, in general, thought I was a little heavy-handed in my treatment of emotions. (Once when I had the hubris to tell him that I felt like I was making clocks when I write my stories, he answered, rather skeptically, “Yes, clocks that go BONG, BONG, BONG!”)

  Altogether, he didn’t seem to mind the notion of hanging around me. One Christmas, he came up to my place on West Eighty-third from the Village with a fifth of Johnnie Walker Red and sat in a chair in the corner while a party of much younger folks raged around him, refusing, incidentally, to touch as much as a morsel of food, his energies dedicated to sipping his Scotch and smoking instead, without much of a word to anyone. And years later, as he did with so many of his former students, he occasionally welcomed me into his apartment for drinks (many of them), but I was most stunned by the fact that when I finally did get married to my girlfriend of some three years, Carol, think it was 1975, and sent him and his wife, Marion, an invitation to what would turn out to be a quite tacky reception, held on the rooftop terrace of a midtown hotel, in a cordoned-off area right next to a busy swimming pool—“You make such a nice couple!”—he honored me by showing up. Throughout this low-budget affair, which my well-off in-laws begrudgingly paid for—only booze and hors d’oeuvres were served—Donald passed his time with his wife and several of my fellow students from CCNY, sitting by a table, nursing his drinks, stroking his beard, and taking in that fiasco with the amused expression of a rather sophisticated man who probably couldn’t have imagined himself in such a place in a million years.

  Well, once again, I led a double life. Coming uptown to visit with my mother, I did my best to become a dutiful son, though my mother never had any idea of what I was doing with myself. (When I graduated from City with a B.A., with the distinction of becoming the first SEEK student to have done so, and my mother asked me, “Qué hay de nuevo?”—“What’s new?” and I answered, “I just graduated from college,” she seemed genuinely bemused.) In the meantime, the period of our troubles, which had followed my father’s death, when his ghost filled the house, had slipped away. Oddly enough, through death he ha
d become somewhat sanctified in her mind. With his presence lingering in the halls—as if both his struggles and, more pleasantly, his peaceful, stoic quietude in the mornings had left aftertraces that one could literally still feel—the reality that he was gone had finally set in. “I now realize how much he loved me, el pobre,” she would say. For my part, I couldn’t disagree: Better to have her speak of my pop kindly than not, though she had, in the meantime, made that apartment a museum to their life together and it would always feel frozen in time.

  Now and then I’d turn up with the lady I’d married—they got along well enough despite their long episodes of linguistic confusion—and we’d all take a subway to Brooklyn to spend the afternoon with my brother and his family. Often, when I’d end up with her alone, for my wife was often away on acting tours, my mother could drive me crazy, mainly asking a bit too much about my private life, and why on earth did I settle down with a woman of Jewish ethnicity, instead of a nice “católica”? It’s the old story, of course, but the truth is I didn’t know myself: I was so naïve about Jewish folks, it never occurred to me that she was, nor did I care; her parents, in any case, were not religious, and as far as I was concerned, real Jews were like the Hasidim I’d see frequenting the Guss’s Pickles stand down on Essex Street, or those Talmudic scholars in their grave black frocks, from the Jewish Theological Seminary on Broadway. I doubt that my mother had any biases against them, and in fact, when she once heard someone tell her that I looked far more Jewish than Cuban—I’d also heard that I looked more Irish or Polish than Cuban—she happily jumped on the notion, exclaiming, “But, of course, look at his big head—he’s got brains!” During those long trips to Brooklyn, when she tended to recount to me the minutiae of her days—from her every meal, conversation, dream, notion, store sale, bargain bought, and numerous “relajos,” funny stories from the neighborhood—it seemed that she couldn’t bear the idea of silence, as if it would take her to a dark place: I would inevitably think back to my childhood with her, and I’d naturally become a little solemn, even occasionally annoyed. Waiting for a train to come, I’d get up to check out the newsstand or buy some penny gums from the column dispensers, over and over again, just to give myself a breather.

  Nevertheless, I came to admire my mother in ways that I couldn’t have imagined. In the five or so years since my father had died, she had begun to build a new, fairly independent life for herself. She had her friends, her daily rituals, her doctor’s appointments, her continuing education classes in the evenings (English I think, typing, some basic secretarial), her routines at church, at which she became a popular presence (particularly at funerals, where she could manage to either out-mourn the most devastated of mourners, or, if in an entirely different mood, cheerfully sweep into a parlor as if a new and better day had come), her favorite shops to frequent, her little part-time jobs along Broadway, and to my surprise, she began a sincere attempt to read in English, mainly by way of the five- and ten-cent romance novel paperbacks she’d pick up here and there in the neighborhood. But there was something else going on at the same time: Though I had some memories of having seen her, while I sat quietly in a corner as a kid, scribbling something down with a pencil into composition notebooks, I never knew until those years later that she had been in fact resurrecting one of her childhood enrichments: the writing of poetry, at which she had apparently always excelled and which, given the much longer moments of her loneliness, she had taken up with a vengeance.

  When I’d come over to the apartment, one of the first things she did was to regale me with some ditties she had just written the afternoon or night before (often involving the departed spirit of my father, and situated in an eternal Cuban garden of her imagination, in which she made her cameos as a bird, a blossom, a winged butterfly, while he entered into those poems as a handsome stranger, a wandering mariner, a confused angel whose heart inevitably held the secret to a lost love), and listening to them, I had to admit that there was something wildly creative, if not out-and-out gifted, about them.

  And while she had hardly ever been a reticent soul, with each new outing, her delivery, which she refined after readings for her friends—like Chaclita and Carmen and the women she knew from church—became more brazen, self-confident, and, in her manner, theatrical, as if indeed my mother, who believed in spiritualism, had channeled her father, to the point that she would tremble saying her own words. (Then she’d break out laughing over her own pompousness—“Soy loca, sí?” she’d ask.) Those visits were always interesting, if sometimes a little hard to take—even for my older brother, who, speaking Spanish, remained the closer of us to her, because, while José had his painterly aspirations and I had my occasional longings to make something of myself as a writer, it was she—not us—who held court and demanded that we pay her homage as an artist, perhaps the only real one in the family. (After all she had gone through back in the days when she first arrived in America, and for all the miercoles she had to endure ever since, I couldn’t blame her.)

  Here, for the record, is one of her poems:Este es mi libro

  Este es mi sueño

  Esta es la flor

  Que perfume mi alrededor

  Este es el niño

  Que llora porque

  Sueña que está perdido

  Este es el agua

  Que corre sin

  Saber que es un río

  Este es mi corazón

  Que gime y

  Ríe a la vez

  Porque fue martirizado

  Hoy no sufro

  No padezco

  Sólo confío en Dios

  This is my book

  This is my dream

  This is the flower

  that perfumes my room

  This is the boy who weeps

  because he dreams he is lost

  This is the water

  that flows without knowing

  it is a river

  This is my heart that laughs and moans

  Because He was martyred

  I do not suffer

  nor do I want

  I trust only in God

  Fine as her poetry could be, however, she still sometimes overstepped the limits of our patience. Never a shrinking violet, in her widowhood she had become something else, her personality, always charming and winsome, sometimes bordering on arrogance. “Son bonitos, no?”—“They’re good, aren’t they?” she’d inevitably ask about her poems, all the while expecting only one kind of answer.

  But at heart we appreciated her creativity. In fact, in the years that have since passed, my brother, and I have come to agree that, however else our upbringing may have been fucked-up, we at least were given a sense that we came from creative roots—viz., our maternal abuelo and our mother. We’ve even joked about the fact that we are the “skipped” generation. It’s the American dream, after all, for the first-generation children of immigrants to exceed their parents and go into certifiably venerated and practical professions like that of medicine or law or engineering, to name a few, with the expectation that their offspring, rebelliously prone, drift off into the impractical field of art. But we had somehow skipped over that, though, I must say, without once taking advantage of the few connections we had to further our progress. To put it differently, if it were not for my brother’s practical decision to find a secure job in teaching, or my own eventual luck, we could have easily ended badly, without a pot to piss in or anyone on whose help we could fall back.

  By graduate school, I’d actually gotten fairly serious about doing something with the story line that I had been given. Slowly, I began to write about my father—something that never came easily to me—and while on the one hand, I found that process somewhat fulfilling, in that I seemed to be finally writing something “real” for the first time, and felt soothed for a while, I inevitably paid for such indulgences in many ways. Bad nightmares, in which I would see the ghost of my father standing in a shroud in my living room, fire burning through me, and my old choking dreams
returned, so that I would shoot up in bed, my heart beating so quickly. And in a new bodily reaction to that stress, horrific rashes, by way of a quickly and magically spreading eczema, would break out all over my chest and back and arms with such vehemence that I wouldn’t dare write a word for days. (Ironically, however, having a few smokes and a good slug or two of vodka worked wonders as far as calming me down, or at least in putting me in the frame of mind to forget how my skin would turn into parchment just by contemplating certain things.)