Thoughts Without Cigarettes

by Oscar Hijuelos

  And my pop? Altogether, it’s hard to imagine that he, born in 1915 into a long-established farming family, experienced anything like loneliness while growing up in a house with so many siblings around: the two eldest, María Teresa (or Maya, as she was called when I knew her) and my father’s hermano major, Oscar, born in Jiguaní in 1903 and 1905 respectively, were followed in the next decade by Concepcion, Manuela, Isabel Regina, Graciela Antonia (or Chelo), Borja Angeles, and, in 1920, Olga del Carmen. (Caridad Luisa, the least fortunate of that family of otherwise long-lived females, who would have brought the number of Hijuelos-Gallego sisters to eight, was born in 1910 and died in 1912, probably of a fever.) Include my grandmother and grandfather, Regina Gallego and Leocadio Hijuelos; a retinue of household help (Negritos mainly, with shacks on a property consisting of hundreds of hectares of fruit, timber, and tobacco land); as well as countless relatives, both young and old, living nearby and often visiting their household (the Hijuelos-Gallego family tree, based in and around Jiguaní, included the surnames O’Connor, Diéguez, Peréz, Fonseca, García, Cabrera, and Lozano, among others)—he must have been constantly in the company of someone, with little privacy, if any. (However, remembering how he sometimes lived to be around people, I can’t imagine his ever having wanted to be left alone.)

  Ten years his senior and known as a great horseman, my tio Oscar ran the farms alongside my abuelo Leocadio, most of his days spent on a chestnut mare, keeping after their workers. (I’ve been told there were three properties. They sold timber, with pine, ebony, mahogany, and oak woods growing there in abundance.) As the older brother, he would have taught my father to ride at an early age and surely have helped him through the rituals of manhood, taking him to cockfights, perhaps to a bordello, and who knows where else; for the longest time, they were inseparable, going everywhere together and making quite an impression on the people of Jiguaní, who’d remember the older brother for his steely (macho) air of authority and the other for his friendliness. It’s likely that, given the difference in their years, Oscar had loved his younger brother as deeply as he might a son. (Not so long ago, I met a black cubano in his late eighties, a retired New York City schoolteacher, who, remembering them from his teenage years in Jiguani, told me that they were always riding through town side by side on their horses, and that in their height—each was over six feet tall and broad shouldered—they made quite an impression as men to be reckoned with, but affably so: “They were good to one another, above all,” this schoolteacher had told me.)

  Physically, they were practically twins. Each possessed a longish face; broad ridged forehead; large, slightly hooked nose; and protuberant, fleshy ears. Quite fair in complexion, even ruddy, they had wavy dark hair, deeply set dark eyes, and sad expressions of a distinctly Arabic or Semitic cast. It’s likely that some distant Jewish blood flowed through their campesino veins. Just the same, close as they may have been, while Oscar, as a patriarch in waiting, looked after the family’s livelihood, my father spent his time hanging around the arcades and street corners of town, doffing his hat at female passersby or else consorting with friends, with whom, on the weekends, he frequented the dance halls. Over this his older brother must have frowned. But there was something else as well. Leaving the farmwork to his older brother, my father grew quite attached to his sisters, particularly the eldest, Maya.

  One day, Magdalena brought her new suitor home, to their small flat along la calle Miró, and from the start, Pascual made a good impression on her family. My aunt Cheo, her younger sister, would remember my father from those days as “a quiet fellow” with a certain humble but dignified bearing, that he sometimes came riding down their street on a horse, often with a bouquet of flowers in hand. He seems to have gotten along very well with my religious maternal grandmother, María, as well, though I can’t imagine his ever once accompanying her to church, where she, like my mother, took refuge from the sorrows of this world—he just wasn’t that way.

  While their time in Magdalena’s home passed quietly, her visits with Pascual’s family would have been far more socially busy, especially on the weekends when they hosted parties, neighbors and relatives coming from all around to their farm on the outskirts of Jiguaní. On such occasions, she got to know his beloved older brother, Oscar, who, she would swear, always liked her, as did their papi, Leocadio, an enormously tall, barrel-chested man known for his bodily strength and affectionate nature. (He would be remembered for the ease with which he could hoist up four of his children at a time and for the tenderness of his spirit; but I haven’t the faintest idea of what he looked like, as I’ve never seen a single photograph of him, though he surely must have had something of my father’s face in his own.)

  The oldest family member, my father’s great-grandmother, Concepcíon Dieguez O’Connor, took in those gatherings from a rattan chair set under a banyan tree in the yard. Born in Jiguaní in 1840 of Irish and Cuban parentage, she was just short of her one hundredth year of life; the myth goes that she owed this longevity to her daily cigars and to a regimen of rum and aguardiente. She too seemed to have seen something lively and worthwhile in my mother, for Concepcíon often asked her to sit by her side, regaling her with tales of her own youth. Of his seven sisters, however, it was only Maya who gave my mother a hard time. In her mid-thirties by then, and married to Pedro, she often stayed on the farm while he went traveling to the states and on tours to Europe. During his frequent absences, she apparently coveted my father’s company at my mother’s expense, and so adamantly that in the midst of those fiestas, my mother and aunt often almost came to blows—and if not, they surely had gotten to the point of insults, my mother’s favorite retort to Maya, so she would later tell me, being that, instead of Pedro, she should have married her brother. Which is to say that from the beginning, things had never been good between the two women.

  Caught in the middle, my father looked the other way, and though his eldest sister no doubt attempted to break them up, the rest of the family liked my mother enough to further encourage her affections toward him. Maya, however, prayed that my mother would go away; and whenever she could, she spread her own vicious rumors about “that Torrens woman,” who had the nerve to think she was better than everyone else. Evidently, Maya’s dislike of my mother, while not enough to dissuade my father’s amorous pursuit of her, still planted enough doubts and misgivings about her character and motives to put off any immediate notions about marriage. Still, at a certain point in the early 1940s, they became engaged: As his prometida—fiancée—she doubtlessly enjoyed a boost in his family’s standing. How Maya must have suffered.

  What my father could have been thinking when he, at Maya’s urgings, tore himself away from my mother, and at some point in 1942, having traveled to New York, first walked in through 419’s front doors and checked himself out in the large mirrors that, facing one another in the entryway, reflected his curious and perhaps bewildered—or excited—campesino face endlessly, is unknowable. He had arrived with money in his pockets, as Leocadio, dying the year before, had left his children an inheritance from the sales of several of their farms to divide among themselves. I like to think that Pascual, leaving my mother behind in Cuba, had made the journey sheepishly, that he missed her. Surely, he had gone to New York first and foremost as a tourist talked into keeping his sister Maya company (and perhaps she had hoped that separating Pascual from my mother would break whatever spell the Holguínera had cast over him). Nearly nightly, he and his two sisters made their way to the dance halls and ballrooms where Pedro and the orchestra performed, my father, always a sport and liking to play the big man, spending his money as if there would be no tomorrow. He bought himself some fancy clothes, sparkling cuff links, two-toned cordovans, and, if anything, had no real plans for his future. Still, as good a time as he was having, he would have hardly thought of staying in New York for long, for while he seems to have liked the city enough to prolong his visit, with the months slipping by, he had his own bouts of homesickness and su
rely missed my mother.

  Now, although Pascual had indeed returned to marry her, sometime in 1943, it must have disillusioned her further when, finishing up some business with his brother, he left her alone in Cuba again. (But, before seeing her, he’d gone to a jewelry shop in New York City, where he’d bought her a beautiful diamond ring whose tiny stones were set in an intricately engraved gold band, a ring that she never took off, not even years later on the night when, mugged on a street near where we lived, some hoodlum threatened to cut off her finger.) Finally, after some months had passed, Pascual, having decided to give a life in that city a try, sent her the money to join him; and dutifully, with her heart in her throat—for since her father’s death, she had never ventured far from home—Magdalena made her way to Havana with a single valise, the sort of cane suitcase with soft cloth inner pockets that would sit in a closet for sixty years. She took a ferry to Miami, which was only a five- or six-hour trip, before boarding an overnight train bound for New York. Bold in so many other ways, she sat terrified, and demurely so, for most of that journey. When an American fellow, a G.I., tried to pick her up, she didn’t have the slightest idea of whatever the heck it was that he said to her; and even if she somehow had, my mother, in her ignorance of English, and as a matter of pride, dared not to speak with anyone. And there was something else: Surely dreading the fact that once she arrived Maya would be in the apartment with her, she made dozens of visits to the toilet, emptying her guts often, so tangled were her nerves. By the time she stepped off that train, her stomach in knots, she was doubtlessly relieved to find my father and Borja, the kindlier sister, waiting for her among the burgeoning Penn Station crowds.

  Later, at a certain moment of the day, when, for all I know, it could have been raining, or sunny, or snowing outside, Magdalena too first walked into that building and saw her startled face reflecting back at her infinitely in the hallway mirrors; she probably felt faint as she entered the apartment and looked around. A believer in intuition and prophetic dreams in the first place, thanks to good old Cuban superstition, she needn’t have been a sibyl to figure out that her life would never be the same again. No doubt she felt relieved to be with my father, who, for the most part, treated her in a courtly and affectionate manner in those days. Borja, balanced and affable, made her feel at home as well. It’s the agitated, scolding Maya who probably gave her one of her dismissive looks the moment their eyes met. With Borja and Eduardo sleeping in the master bedroom, my mother spent her first night in New York in one of the apartment’s back rooms—where I would one day stay—beside my father, breathlessly. How strange she must have felt to be there, for to someone from the tropics, New York must have seemed a rather purgatorial and strange place at best, and overwhelming: On some level, she must have despaired—I’d never hear her once say she “loved” the city the moment she arrived—and yet, she was now with her husband. Besides, not knowing more than a handful of words in English, if any, what was she to do?

  By then, my father had decided he would stay in New York for the long run. He’d made new friends, for in that epoch, however far away or scattered the Cubans of that city were, they inevitably found one another in the dance halls and on the streets, or just turned up one day, knocking on the door. He’d also started to run out of his inheritance money—some five thousand dollars, I’ve heard—and, bored with just hanging around the apartment, kept his eyes open for a job. He was a bright man, though a little too trusting of strangers, a country boy with a decent secondary school education from Cuba, which meant that he could read and write and cipher, but what skills he possessed—that of a farmer, work that he had no taste for, and of a horseman who had once spent a year as a mounted postal courier delivering mail in the countryside around Jiguaní—could hardly lead to any job possibilities in the city. (And his English was not so good yet, sabes?)

  In the end, the only kind of work he, without any particular skills, managed to find, even during those war years, came down to busing tables and washing dishes in one of the restaurants of a famous midtown hotel, the Biltmore, which took up the entire block at Madison Avenue and Forty-third; it was a job he’d landed through a Cuban fellow named Rubén Díaz, whom he’d met at one of those joints, maybe in the roof gardens of the Hotel Pennsylvania or at the Savoy, where Pedro and the Cugat orchestra sometimes performed. And while he’d eventually work his way up in the kitchens, making breakfasts for on-the-go businessmen in the second-floor dining room and then as a short order cook in the Biltmore Men’s Bar—what my brother and I would always more grandly refer to as a “chef” because he wore a white toque—he had started at the bottom, which didn’t seem to bother him at all.

  He came by that job just in the nick of time, for it wasn’t long before my mother had become pregnant with my brother, José. Nevertheless, neither his new position nor my mother’s delicate state seemed to slow him down when it came to his passion for New York nightlife, and it seems that while he still had some money, he didn’t allow his marital status to get in the way of his primal enjoyments. She found this out when one of his admirers mailed her a barely literate letter. Whoever this lady happened to be, she scribbled down her confessions in pencil and shakily so, her writing and spelling so bad that my mother, waving the letter in my father’s face, gloated: “She’s not only a whore, but ignorant as well!” Still, her pain at finding out that he had turned into a parandero—that is, a roving sort with an eye for the ladies—must have been intense. She’d always say that it wasn’t really in his nature, or at least he had never been that way in Cuba (though maybe he was). Left alone in that apartment on those nights, she could have hardly been thrilled when he finally came home at three or four in the morning, reeking of booze, perfume, and who knows what else.

  For her part, to add insult to injury, she soon learned, thanks to Maya, about the true nature of her status in that household: as a servant whose job was to cook and clean the apartment and to otherwise tend to everyone’s needs. (“I was nothing more than a slave,” she’d one day say.) In that inescapable circumstance, my mother became a virtual captive, and whether she liked it or not, each day Maya, home from her job and expecting to be waited on, found new ways to torment her. The insults were one thing, the ordering her about like a Cuban Cinderella another; but the worst of it was that she threatened to put my mother, pregnant or not, out into the street.

  Not that my mother lived in complete despair or had no friends whatsoever. My future godfather, Horacio, tended to keep my mother company on those nights when my father and his sisters went out. (Nothing romantic ever took place between them, by the way—for the perennially unmarried Horacio happened to be the kind of man who, if a shapely woman and a handsome fellow passed by at the same time, chose to check out the latter, with a quick turn of the head, a slight redness rising in his face.) It was during those years that another Cuban family, the Garcías, moved onto the block, and here and there, usually at Sunday Mass, which she was allowed to attend with her sisters-in-law, she’d meet some of the other Latinas in the neighborhood—sending out radar, they just found one another. Somehow a few of her English-speaking neighbors took a liking to her as well. Never having any inclination or opportunity to study English, my mother somehow managed to get by with those neighbors with smiles, nods, and a handful of words and phrases. Along the way, she made a few English-speaking friends, who were patient with her syntax or perhaps found her way of talking amusing—among them, and most wildly so, a certain Mrs. Betty Walker, or “la muda,” from up on the fourth floor, a deaf mute with a brood of kids to look after, whose grunts and wild gesticulations were easier for my mother to follow than any English, the two of them often carrying on in the hall about heaven knows what to any passerby’s amusement.

  None of her new acquaintances, however, were as gracious or attentive or sophisticated as the forty-year-old Argentine beauty Jacqueline Vidal, who, working as a wartime volunteer in the obstetrics ward of the St. Luke’s Woman’s Hospital on East 110th
Street, had been on hand to assist in the delivery of José, in December 1944. That’s how they became friends, not only because Jacqueline, or Chaclita, as she would be nicknamed, spoke a soothing Spanish in a ward where none of the other nurses did, but because she, a musical prodigy on the violin who often performed with her sister María-Luisa on the classical circuit of New York, exuded the kind of cultural refinement that simply reminded my mother of the people she had known during her childhood. Which is to say that, bewildered and stranded as my mother may have felt, it was Jacqueline, whose artistic hands were the first to touch my brother’s brow, who became her lifelong friend.

  Of course it wouldn’t be right to say that my father never took my mother anywhere: She visited Central Park and the Bronx Zoo and saw such landmarks as the Empire State Building, which, however, she never ascended. (In one of the photographs of her from that time, she sits, rather well turned out, on a park bench, looking frostily uncomfortable between her female in-laws, though the one I most like from that period is of my father, dapper in a hat and scarf and topcoat, posed in Central Park, holding with pride a chunk of snow in his begloved hands.) In general, aside from being sequestered in the household like a “slave,” my mother, speaking only Spanish, rarely got around on her own. Once my brother was born, however, and she was further housebound save for occasional excursions with a baby carriage out to the park, another complication in her life arose. This had to do with the fact that Maya, having reached her forties, was childless.