Thoughts Without Cigarettes (6 page)

Sooner or later on those nights, while the music flowed out of the living room record player, which, as with most of our furniture, had been left behind for us by my aunts, with the lights turned low while my mother remained in the kitchen tending to the food or finishing up with the dishes, my father, a sucker for flirtation and a suave
rumbero
, especially after he'd had a few drinks, took to the dance floor, smitten by some woman's engaging glance. By the time my mother finally left the kitchen, she hardly cut an exuberant figure like some of the dolled-up femmes fatales in their tight dresses, whom she thought of as lowlifes. She'd sit back on the couch, her arms folded stiffly across her lap, and, neither drinking nor feeling as jubilantly alive as the other women, take in the proceedings rather somberly.

I suppose that kind of generic Cuban scene of food, drinks, and dancing unfolded in similar apartments across the city circa 1953–54, but in our case, those evenings usually ended on a sour note: For once everybody finally cleared out at some late hour of the morning, leaving behind a disaster of half-finished meals and cigarette-buttfilled glasses everywhere, my mother, unable to forget and forgive my father's treatment of her, would have it out with him. Down the hall in bed, my brother, José, in the room right next to mine or, if we had boarders, in the same room with me, I'd sometimes hear them tormenting each other at night, and loudly so, as if we, their kids, were deaf. And sometimes, I swear, it seemed that we heard things crashing against the walls, plates breaking, hitting noises, and cries—at which point my brother would get out of bed to see what was going on, only to return in tears, having gotten slapped in the face for his trouble. (Here I have to interject that it was from those days onward that my brother formed a poor opinion of my father, a stance that led some years later to out-and-out fights between them on the street, though I never witnessed such and still find that notion hard to believe.)

Not to say, however, that my parents were always at each other's throats; to the contrary, in calmer times, they had their share of laughs and moments of tenderness. He'd sometimes come home with some gift for her, a bottle of perfume or a pair of earrings bought from one of those enterprising vendors who'd go from hotel to hotel, selling goods to the staff at cheap prices. (He must have known every Latino “whole seller” from the Bowery to the Bronx.) Sometimes, I'd see her in the mornings, standing at the end of the hallway by the front door, straightening the knot of his tie and patting down the shoulders of his coat as he'd head out to work. And the fact remains that, however much his attentions may have wandered, they, as a couple, surely fooled around a lot. Once, while crawling across the floor as an infant, I discovered under their bed a white pan of water—a
palangana
—in which floated a wildly distended and somewhat forlorn-looking used condom, which I hadn't the slightest idea about. (At the same time, I can't help thinking of that discovery now without recalling how, on some nights, I'd hear her agitated cries, perhaps of pleasure.) And, as a family, we went places: to Coney Island in the summer, and at Christmas to Macy's for an annual visit to see Santa Claus, or Santa Clows, as my mother pronounced it.

As for the static between them, if it affected me badly, I have no recollection of feeling that way—what was I but a little kid anyway?

Which brings me to that journey I made with my mother and brother to Cuba, in the summer of 1955: It was my father, perhaps in a spirit of largesse or reconciliation, who had paid for our airfares out of his Biltmore wages—$42.50 a week, plus whatever he made in overtime—probably in cash, as he did with all our bills, and since Borja still worked for Pan American airlines, as a bilingual ticket agent in Miami, she had probably gotten him a really good deal for our flight.

I don't recall much, if any, fanfare at our departure, or if my father had even been on hand to send us off—my guess is that he'd gone to his job at the Biltmore—but on a certain morning in late June, someone drove us to Idlewild Airport (now JFK), where we eventually boarded a Pan American airlines clipper for Havana. Since I can't conjure a single moment in later years of my mother ever once relaxing, for even a second, it's hard to imagine that she behaved any differently that day: too fastidious (and vain) to have chewed on her fingernails, when not chatting wildly away with some newfound Cuban acquaintances across the aisle in her one-thousand-words-a-minute Spanish, she, hating to fly, would have been on the edge of her seat and desperate for distractions. I seem to recall that she'd sit very still, back upright, hardly moving at all, as if to do so would have magically jostled that
avion
out of the sky. When the stewardess served us wax-paper-wrapped ham-and-cheese sandwiches, my mother could hardly take more than a few bites. She sighed a lot, looking off into the distance. Later, though she was a first cousin to anxiety, but never imbibed as much as a drink, she must have wanted to during the final leg of our
vuolo.

The flight took some three hours and had been routine enough until, while crossing over the Florida straits on our approach to Havana, something ignited inside the airplane's left wing fuselage, and just like that, flames started shooting out of its engines. Billows of thread-ridden plumes of smoke, like a rocket's exhaust, spilled into the surrounding clouds, and those silvery gold sheaths of fire seemed to roll back and forth over the wingspan. As the engines sputtered, then fell dead, so exciting to a child but terrifying to adults, the plane breathing ever so heavily, my mother, like so many others around us, made the sign of the cross and began to pray and pray, as if the world were about to end; then she took hold of our hands, squeezing them tightly and only letting go when, after a bumpy descent, we'd miraculously landed safely.

There, in Havana, along the periphery of the airport, royal palms rose in the distance, the sky ever so blue, and as the cabin hatches sprang open and the dense tropic humidity warmed the compartment, we waited while a ground crew wheeled a mobile stairway up to the doors. Shortly, along with a retinue of Cubans and any number of festive, perhaps blasé tourists and commuting businessmen, we disembarked from that clipper and stepped onto the tarmac, where I first breathed the Cuban air.

Later, we caught a bus for Holguín, and during that twelve-to-eighteen-hour journey (I've heard both numbers) as we crossed Cuba, mainly in the dead of night, going from little pueblo to pueblo along the northern coast toward the east, I apparently did not turn out to be a very good traveler. Could have been the intense humidity, or some on-the-run snack we'd picked up from one of the vendors swarming the dusty station stops, but the more deeply we entered Cuba, the more I trembled from chills, squirming about on my mother's lap. Soon enough, whatever I had come down with spread into my guts, so each time we stopped, I'd get off the bus, my mother holding my hand, to vomit into the darkness. (My brother, José, has told me that I did so over and over again.) At some point, my face drained of color, I fell limply asleep on her lap, my mother peering down at me. I have a memory of the bus pulling into another stop, my mother fanning herself with a newspaper, Cuban voices murmuring from the road, where the male passengers, taking a break, stood about outside puffing madly, and inseparably so, on their cigars, columns of bluish smoke curling around them like incense, an almost impossibly loud chorus of cicadas—night bells—sounding from the brush, moths crawling about in agitated circles on the windows, clouds of gnats swirling around the lantern lights. En route again, as I looked out the bus windows, I doubtlessly saw wonderful things: the ocean horizon, like a rising plain reaching up to all the stars, then endless fields of sugar and pineapple, and forests passing, their silhouettes so reminiscent not of vegetation but of contorted shadows standing at attention in row after row, like the dead (my mother along the way touching my sweating brow). Cuba itself seemed enormous to me, and as that night wore on, I probably saw a ghost or two roaming through its darkness—Cuba was full of spirits, I remember my mother telling me—and that sky, I swear, occasionally wept shooting stars.

Then morning came, and a few farmers, black cigarillos in their lips, boarded the bus with caged hens, and as roosters crowed, vendors selling little paper cups of coffee came down the aisle, and the music of a radio—a woman's mellifluous voice, perhaps someone like Celia Cruz or Elena Burke—sounded from the doorways of the houses: I can remember thinking, sick as I felt, that I had been traveling through an immensely interesting tunnel, like that of an arcade attraction in an amusement park, but one that went on and on, seemingly forever.

Once we arrived in Holguín, however, I got better, attended to by my affectionate aunt Cheo and her adolescent daughters, Miriam and Mercita. Our days together went happily enough. Always treating me kindly, they did their best to keep their youngest cousin, a few months short of turning four, well-fed and entertained—oh, but we played in the back, where a mango tree stood, lizards crawling about and a smell of jasmine and wildflowers so strong they left one yawning and sleepy. And while their modest house was just a one-story
solar
and nothing special on a nondescript side street in Holguín, I've always considered it my own little piece of Cuba.

Though I can't describe how the rooms were laid out, in which part of the house I slept, or even where the
baño
with its toilet—what my mother always called the “
inodoro
”
—
had been situated (think it was in its own shed, just off the back patio, where there was possibly a shower as well), I do know that the mornings smelled wonderfully from the fragrant and dense blessings of a nearby soda cracker factory, and that down the way, along a descending cobblestone street, on a shady corner, stood a bodega where the local
campesinos
, coming into town on donkeys and horses, would stop to have a few drinks, its wooden floor reeking of pungent beer. A mulatto in a straw hat passed his days there, in a narrow space behind a juice-dripping counter, chopping up pineapples, splitting coconuts, and occasionally brandishing on the tip of a machete some chunk of mango or papaya for me to eat. I'd go there with my brother in the afternoons and marvel at the thin and bony hunched-over farmers, whose faces seemed half-hidden under their hats, and at the way sunlight poured in from the back through an open door, casting their shadows into infinity.

For their part, those men, who'd grown up as rustics like my father had on a farm, chewing on their cigars and speaking as if their mouths were stuffed with cotton, must have been amused by the sudden appearance of a small blond boy in their midst. “Cheo's
nieto
,” it was explained, the one who came down from New York with his mother, you know, that good-looking brunette who left Cuba with that fellow Pascual and who, however often she smiles, must have regretted it,
por Dios!
—it was written all over her face. They might have rubbed their eyes a few times before getting a second look at me (the story of my life); it took them a while to absorb that such a towheaded boy could have been the offspring of an Hijuelos from Jiguaní. Those
campesinos
would have probably known my father from the old days before he came to the States, when he used to ride the countryside on a horse himself. They would have recalled his languid demeanor and friendly but sad expression, and would have appreciated and respected me and my brother for the very fact that my father's family had been in Oriente for over a hundred years. And in those days when every Cuban from Holguín and Jiguaní knew each other, they would have likely remembered my mother from earlier times, from seeing her at Carnival, or from the local dance halls where she, in her late adolescence and young womanhood, had so bloomed as a dancer.

And yet, however warmly those
campesinos
might have thought of my mother, they would have still puzzled over the fact that I didn't look Cuban at all.

But, even if they may have been at a loss for what to make of me, they were friendly. The owner always prepared the most delicious Cuban fruit shakes for my brother and me, his machete cleaving into the counter with sharp whacks, the juices dripping down, that taste of what I suppose now had to be
batidas
, which might have been spiked with a little Cuban rum for flavoring, ever so delicious on my tongue. Now and then, one of those fellows would take my brother and me outside and put us on his horse, and back and forth we would go, pulled along the street, jostling by the open-shuttered windows and doorways of the houses and waving at everyone, my head muzzled in its bristly mane, people smiling at us just because we were children.

Later we'd play hide-and-seek behind the trees and go charging like little bulls through the sheets that had been hung up to dry alongside the houses, or we'd sit by my aunt's doorway watching the black laundresses—
negritas buenas
, as my mother called them—go by with their baskets balanced on their heads. About a block or so away, there stood an icehouse—what better thing was there to do than stand by its entrance to cool off or to chew on some of the chips that had dropped from those perspiring blocks of ice into the gutter? I seemed to be always thirsty, so my brother has told me—several times he had to stop me from sipping water from a curbside trough, and it seems that early on, I had already acquired the nervous habit of eating anything offered to me—deep-fried banana fritters, a piece of raw sugarcane, or a strip of
bacalao
, or salted cod (which I had never really liked but ate anyway). One afternoon, while sitting on the curb, I watched my brother, fooling with a hose in front of Cheo's house, turn its gushing spout on a very dapperly dressed man, all in white and wearing a lacquered cane boater, as he rode by on a bicycle. With my brother spraying him with abandon, that scene, at least in memory, played out like something from a 1930s Max Roach comedy: He got off that bicycle fuming and, scolding José, began to chase him around in circles, my brother keeping just ahead of his grasp, until my mother, hearing the commotion, stepped from the doorway and, in her loveliness and charm (or outrage that a grown man would harass a boy, however mischievous, of eleven or so) calmed him down, his anger dissipating in a way that seemed to elude her sometimes when it came to our father, Pascual.