Thoughts Without Cigarettes

by Oscar Hijuelos

  “Gracias, señora, for saying so,” he told her.

  A good-natured fellow, with a young and shapely wife, who looked to me both hopeful and on the verge of tears, he wanted to shake my hand, but he did so with difficulty and weakly, for he could barely lift his arm up. Nonetheless, he smiled kindly, and with that, as a nurse appeared by the door, we left the room, but not before my mother told him, “Have faith in God—you will get better!” And to his wife, she said: “They will fix him in no time, I promise you that!” The wife smiled, nodded gratefully, and with that, my mother, feeling as if she had done them some good, took hold of my hand and guided me down the hall. “What a nice man—with such a nice family,” she kept repeating ever so cheerfully in earshot of the room, before falling silent. In the elevator, descending to the main floor, however, my mother began shaking her head and repeating, with a little click of her tongue, “Ay, pero el pobrecito. Oh, but that poor man. Did you see how scared he looks? And how bad he seems? Oh, but I don’t have a good feeling about him at all. Oh, I hope he doesn’t die,” she said, confiding, “but he probably will.”

  And that was all. At the doors opening to the main lobby, I almost didn’t mind it when my mother went about the ritual of pulling on my galoshes, buttoning my coat, securing my bufanda snugly around my neck, and tying, as she always did, the hood ever so tightly, because once we left that sterile place and passed through its revolving doors and out onto the sidewalk, as a snowplow pushed slowly along the avenue, through the carbon blueness of upper Manhattan at five thirty or so, with the buildings across the way resembling misted and barely lit palaces, that most lovely and soul-cleansing of things in this world, snow, was falling everywhere around us.

  Behind this recollection is another, of sitting in that same ward one day when I was about twelve and noticing, just across that room, an auburn-haired girl who seemed awfully familiar. She also looked at me in the same searching manner: She wore braces and, in pigtails, with brightened cheeks, had greenish eyes that I seemed to have seen before. My mother noticed her as well and, realizing something, told me: “But don’t you recognize that girl? Don’t you remember her? It’s Theresa from that time when you were in the hospital! You used to play together.” She was sitting beside her mother, a somewhat prim and anxious woman, and once my mother had figured things out, she smiled, saying in her best English: “Theresa—this is my son, Oscar, from the hospital,” and with that, Theresa smiled and, standing up, startled me—not only because she too, sitting in that ward, had the same lost air about her but because, though she was quite thin from her waist up, I could see that beneath the hem of her violet dress, her ankles were badly swollen. Of course, she was there to receive a dialysis treatment, and, truthfully, she did not seem too happy about that—how could she have been? Still, I did my best to hold a conversation with her: I think it came down to “How have you been doing?” To which she responded with a shrug; and while I sat beside her for a few minutes and I thought we might become friends, I still felt, at the same time, so awkward—and ashamed—of my year in that hospital that I could barely think of anything else to say.

  “But you’re okay?” I finally asked her.

  “I guess so,” she answered, shrugging again.

  But I knew better, even then: A funny thing, I could almost feel the sickness of her kidneys emanating from her lower back, and from her expression, as if she wanted to cry but couldn’t, I saw that she felt trapped by a physical condition that, in her case, had never really improved—and she knew it. At the same time, however, as much as I vaguely recalled playing with her, I really didn’t feel a thing for Theresa, my emotions about that hospital stay too raw to revisit, muted. It was probably the same from her end, and so we just sat together for a while, until she was called inside. I never even learned where she lived and have no idea now of what happened to her, for I never saw her again.

  That image fades into a conversation between my mother and father one night, a few years after I’d started school. Because I was such a nervous sleeper, they’d sometimes let me fall asleep in their bedroom, just off the kitchen. I’d take that opportunity to listen to the television shows that sounded in the courtyard from the windows of our upstairs neighbors: The Jack Benny Show is the one I remember in this instance, a particular episode in which Mr. Benny and his butler, Rochester, discuss what sort of Christmas gifts they should get for Mr. Benny’s friends—“How ’bout a hoss for John Wayne, boss!” Rochester asks in his cheerfully raspy voice; at the same time, my mother and father had started discussing some insurance policy they’d taken out for me. Assuming that I didn’t understand Spanish well enough for them to veil their words, their conversation went as follows:

  “Ten dollars a month is a lot of money,” my father said. “He seems healthy enough.”

  “Oh, but, Pascual, what are you thinking? Don’t you remember what the doctors told us about his nephritis?” my mother asked. “The kidneys can go anytime again from an infection.”

  “I know, I know, but he seems so much better,” my father said. “And he doesn’t look so bloated as before.”

  “Okay, so what?” my mother told him. “He’s only better because I’ve kept him on that special diet, and the medicines.... I’ll tell you I’m sick of being the witch—when I come to him with his pills, he hates me. How do you think that makes me feel?”

  “Yes, I know,” my father said. “But do you really believe he’s going to get sick again? I don’t think so, and, mi vida, that monthly bill is killing me. So why don’t we let it go?”

  He lit a cigarette: Someone must have given him a Ronson lighter, or he’d found it left behind at the hotel bar. Its metallic lid clicked shut.

  “Why? Why?” she cried out. “Because if he dies and we have no insurance, how will we pay for him?”

  “Maybe the union will help,” my father said calmly.

  “Your union is spit,” she told him. “And anyway, what would the insurance company give us back?”

  “One hundred and fifty dollars. Maybe a little more.”

  “On a fifteen-hundred-dollar policy?” she asked. “After all the money we’ve been paying for him all this time?”

  “Yes, that’s what the fellow said. I talked to him today.”

  “But, Pascual, I don’t know,” she said. “Do we really need it that bad?”

  “We always need money,” he told her.

  “And for what?” She clicked her tongue. “So that you can spend it on your friends?”

  “Please, woman, don’t start,” he told her in the strongest manner he could muster when he hadn’t been drinking. “It’s just something we could do. That’s all I mean. Think about it, huh?”

  “Yes, think about it—as if what I think matters to you?” she went on. Then, after deliberating a bit: “Do whatever you want,” she finally told him. “But if he dies, you and your drunk pals can get some shovels and bury him in the park. You know?”

  “No, no, Magdalencita,” my father told her, exasperated. “It’s not going to happen that way. Tomorrow, I will call the agent and see what we can do about the policy. And please, don’t look at me that way—I just don’t think he’s going to die, and that money will help us in the end, okay? Maybe I can buy you something nice.”

  “Yes, something nice,” she muttered.

  To be honest, once I sort of put what they were saying together, that they were talking about a burial insurance policy, it startled me. I thought about every single picture I’d seen of Jesus being laid in his tomb, and how the priest at church, with his scarlet complexion and rosy cheeks, sermonizing from the pulpit, said things like “Dead, though we may turn to dust, we shall rise again” and all of that, mixed up with Mr. Benny and my parents’ voices, somehow left me picturing my interment in Riverside Park (though I would have settled for the woods along one of the terraced walkways of Morningside). And so naturally, I couldn’t help but call out, “Good night!” the way I always did whenever I became anxious in the
evenings. That night, however, as soon as they heard me, my mother hushed my father—“Pascual, please, lower your voice—and not another word more about the policy,” as if she thought there might be some chance in a million that I’d understood what had just been said. I called out again, and with that they called back, “Good night, hijo!” which somehow made me feel a little calmer.

  Later, after Mr. Benny’s show ended, and my parents had managed to make their own peace, it was my father who came to get me; not so long before, he would have carried me down the hall to my room, but I weighed more than one hundred pounds in those days, something I’d just found out while standing on the penny scale at the corner pharmacy. And so he, a cigarette between his lips, walked me down the hallway to my room, and with a little pat on my bottom, sent me off to bed. That same night, I dreamed about a stone rolling away from the tomb of Jesus, and then of myself running across a field, clouds of microbios, as frenzied as a plague of flies, chasing after me, and I jumped up, screaming, the sheets beneath me, with their plastic cover coverings below, seemingly catching fire and then becoming, just as quickly, damp with my urine.

  It may be a coincidence, but that same year, we’d come by a 1959 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia. A rather dashing and earnest young Cuban salesman, going from building to building in my neighborhood and concentrating on a Spanish-speaking clientele, had knocked on our door. He must have been persuasive, because, as with all purchases, my mother remained tight about money. I can remember seeing him from the hallway: Drop-dead handsome and somewhat priestly in his demeanor, qualities that left my mother half-breathless, he went into a whole explanation about such a set being indispensible to any child’s education and, therefore, to “el futuro de la familia.” Later, after she consulted with my father, they signed off on a payment plan and, within a few weeks, that fount of knowledge, shipped in two boxes, arrived. My father called me into the living room and proudly stood over me as I pulled out each cellophane-wrapped volume from its box: After all, these were the only freshly purchased books that would ever come into our house. Looking them over, I was fascinated, thought all of the illustrations, especially the transparencies showing the different systems in overleaf of the human body, fantastic. My mother stood by the doorway, asking me, “Y qué?” And I nodded, thrilled that something so new, even if they were books, smelling so nicely, had arrived.

  It’s since occurred to me that they may have paid for that encyclopedia with the refund money from my burial policy, but what does it matter? Those volumes would sit in that same living room cabinet for the next forty years, and they did make a difference to me. For I’d consult the volumes for school assignments, as when I’d write little pieces about the War of the Roses or an American state, like Indiana. You know, the kinds of subjects that further enhanced my distance from the hallucination that had been my Cuban past.

  It was around 1960 when, despite my ongoing “delicate health” and, no doubt, over my mother’s objections, my father had decided to send me and my brother down to Miami to spend time with Maya. Though my pop must have suspected that Maya had some ulterior motives—as did my mother, who at that point could not, for the life of her, mention Maya’s name without muttering some long simmering aside (“Oh, but that woman hates me; why should we send her our sons?”)—he perhaps thought that, deep down, his sister Maya had only good intentions. (I also imagine that, despite the expense of sending us south by railroad, he figured he might save himself some money over the next few months.)

  By then Maya and her dapper husband, Pedro, had settled into a new life, and prosperously so. Since moving to Florida back in the late 1940s, he’d left the music business for good, gone to school, and set up a business as a building contractor. I was about to turn nine that summer, in 1960, and my brother, at fifteen, could look forward to earning some extra money working as a hand on one of my uncle Pedro’s construction sites. With the city of Miami just coming out of a decades-long state of torpor and decline, my uncle, an employer of more than a few recently arrived Cubans who, at that early stage, had already fled Fidel Castro’s revolution, also happened to be the man who, over the next decade, would put up many of the exiled community’s new houses.

  Whatever my father’s reasons, after a thrilling train trip south, my brother and I found ourselves staying in Maya’s mightily airconditioned Spanish-style house in North Miami, whose banyan- and blossom-bush-filled front patio and backyard, jammed with mango and papaya trees, somehow reminded me of Cuba. (I’m pretty sure that the damp earth smell and the florid perfumed air took me back to Holguín, and, at the same time, I felt dropped into the lap of luxury, for they seemed to have it all.) By then, always expecting to be waited upon, I had a softness and naiveté about me that must have left my aunt Maya salivating over my potential for manipulation. I can remember feeling taken aback when seeing Maya (and Borja) for the first time: They shared so many of my father’s features—the longish, somewhat hooking nose, the sad, vaguely Semitic-looking dark eyes, drooping jowls, and thin-lipped smile—that it was as if I were looking at female versions of him, or to put it differently, at women who were far more handsome than pretty. Since I resembled him in more ways than my brother, my aunt Maya, gasping, then clutching at her breasts, off which hung a gold crucifix, declared, after seeing me for the first time: “My God, but you look just like your father did at this age!” And with that, Maya pulled me close to her and, squeezing me half to death, whispered, as she often would on that visit, “But, child, look at me, can’t you feel the love I have for you? And look around you and see what your nice tía Maya can provide.”

  I did, taking in the sturdy glamour of a stereophonic console with a gleaming veneer and rack of recordings from Pedro’s days as a musician, walls that were not flecking, ceilings that were not sagging, wall-to-wall carpeting, new furniture and adornments, all nicely clean thanks to a woman who came in weekly. A kind of arboretum took up a room off the sala, in which a great twisting tree rose up toward a raised skylight in the ceiling, birdcages surrounding it; there were humming air conditioners, which I considered an unbelievable luxury; modern appliances, including an immense refrigerator that almost took up an entire wall, one side of its interior filled with Pepperidge Farm frozen turnovers, Pedro’s favorite, and other treats—all for the asking, she told me. Outside, parked in the driveway, was Pedro’s second Cadillac, which also impressed me.

  From the start, she kept me by her side; on days when my brother went off with our uncle, Maya would take me over to a shopping center, which was across a highway not far from her home. She’d buy me new clothes, to replace the “rags” that I had come down wearing, and along the way, though I felt vaguely disloyal to my mother, I took in Maya’s version of their history, nodding: “Your father made a big mistake going with your mother,” she’d tell me. “She tricked him—you know that, and the poor man, with the soul of a saint, fell for it—and what does he have now? But a job that will never get him anywhere in life and a spouse who will drive him into an early grave! Are you listening?”

  And while I was too young to really understand the depths of her feelings about my mother’s apparent shortcomings, I got the drift: “Without that crazy woman, your papi would have been a much happier and successful man. You know, chiquito,” she said at one point, “without her, he would have certainly turned into something more than a cook, el pobre.” Then, a little more rancor and vitriol against my mother: “You know that your tío Pedro has offered to help your father with work in the construction business if he came here to Miami, but your mother wouldn’t hear of it, and that’s why he has to work like a slave to make ends meet. . . .”

  As she’d go on, I’d drift off naturally: I felt homesick for our apartment, missed my folks, even my mother, and yet, what could I do?

  “And your mother,” she’d say, shaking her head. “If you nearly died, it was her fault. As I’d always tell your father, ‘Be careful with that woman, she’ll lead to no good,’ and—
yes, she’s crazy, anyone can see that . . . and careless—if she wasn’t, then you would have never gotten sick in Cuba; no, no—that’s something that I would never have allowed to happen.”

  My brother, by the way, took this in from a sly distance and, quite aware as to what my aunt Maya was about, told me, “You know the score; be nice to her and see what you get for it, but don’t believe most of the stuff she tells you, hear?”

  But she kept trying, day after day; buying me new finery, she’d say: “Now, if you were to live with your dear aunt Maya, anything you’d want would be yours.” I didn’t know what to make of her campaign, and I can’t imagine what she expected me to do, even if she were to persuade me that, in fact, I should leave home to stay with her, as if it were a matter of my choice in the first place.

  Along the way, my aunt Maya seemed to have found something quite lacking even in my religious education. She took me to Mass on Sunday in Miami, while her husband and my brother slept in late; I think it was St. Mary’s Cathedral, and while, like any young kid, I found those services an agony, so tedious, there came the moment when I, not yet having received my first communion, went up alongside Maya waiting for the Host, though when the priest came to me, and I refused to open my mouth, she shot me a furious look. Later, after I’d lit a few candles for the souls of the dead, and my aunt asked me if I’d put any money in that box, and I hadn’t—their glowing aureoles had looked so pretty after all—you might have thought that I’d spit on a grave. After we’d come home, she forced me to empty my pockets, and taking me back to the church, she stood over me as I put all my coins into the poor box. Then she had me kneel down by the altar to pray. “Oh, what that woman did to you,” she repeated over and over again. “And to such an innocent.”

  On his end, my brother spent most of his days lugging about twenty-five-pound sacks of concrete, which he mixed in a wheelbarrow with water and shoveled into a cable-jointed foundation trench. I know this because I sometimes went out there. Sitting in the shade, in a straw hat, eating an ice cream cone (without anyone objecting) in that infernal heat, I’d watch him working, though from time to time my princely laziness annoyed the hell out of my uncle Pedro, who’d give me an easy job, like washing trowels in a pail, or he’d send me around to collect any loose tools. At lunchtime, Pedro and his workers, speaking in Spanish, would carry on about a wide range of subjects—baseball, boxing, Cuba, that shit Fidel—and about who’d just come over lately, family left back there, and did some of them know the whereabouts of a certain so-and-so from Holguín? At one point, someone recommended a bordello in Hialeah. They never minced words around me: From them I learned about a young beauty, fairly newly arrived from Cuba, who, at eighteen, worked in a house set at the edge of a field and had a chocha that apparently tasted clean and sweet as a spring peach. I remember feeling vaguely confounded as to just what they were talking about, but from their cheery smiles, even I knew it was something naughty.