Thoughts Without Cigarettes (61 page)

But to go back to the day when I first received the news, it wasn't until the later afternoon, with the gloom of that day finally lifting, that did I experience, while traipsing out into the emerging sunlight, a moment of true elation. I was in the front yard, relieved to be off the telephone, when I sensed in the shifting of light across the lawn my pop's presence. I will swear that as the light swelled, blinking, around me, he was there, standing just behind me and, I like to think, smiling, his spirit aglow with pride over my sudden accomplishment—not just because I would have my name and picture in the newspapers (though I would be proud of the fact that millions of people would see the rare surname
Hijuelos
in print) or because Tom Brokaw would nearly mispronounce my
apellido
over the air that next evening, but perhaps because I had taken so many disparate energies and hard emotions from
our
lives and turned them into something that so many people, across these United States and, as well, the world (I wonder what my pop would have made of seeing a Spanish-language edition of my book published in Madrid, in the windows of shops near the Prado, or in Japanese, sold off a Tokyo kiosk), might well enjoy and appreciate. I remember feeling that although he had not lived long enough for me to really know him, my novel,
The Mambo Kings
, was my way of doing just that, of holding a conversation with him, though he had long since been dead. His spirit, for better and for worse, in its kindness and gentleness, in its melancholy and, alternately, exuberance, his love of life, fear of death, his passions and vices—down to the thousands of drinks he had consumed and cigarettes he smoked—were all there, transformed, in that book. Or to put it differently, he was alive again, if only as a momentary illusion—and that, ladies and gents, felt absolutely superb.

I
would like to thank my brother, José-Pascual, for his input about the chronology regarding my mother and father's lives in the 1940s, as well as for the rooftop photograph that graces the cover of this book. And to my cousin Natasha Bermudez, upon whose research I have largely based my references to the Hijuelos family line.

Thanks should also go to Lori Marie Carlson, for her translation of my mother's poem featured in this book, as well to the Free Press, in whose publication,
Burnt Sugar
, an anthology of Cuban poetry, “This Is My Book” first appeared. Further thanks go to the teachers who influenced my development as a writer: the late Susan Sontag and Donald Barthelme, and Frederic Tuten, who is, I am happy to say, still writing away. At Gotham, my thanks go out to William Shinker, who first encouraged this work, and to Lauren Marino and Cara Bedick. My gratitude also goes out to Jennifer Lyons, Karen Levinson, Lorna Owen and José Miguel Oviedo, whose inputs were invaluable. As for the others, from Richard Muller-Thym, a lifelong friend, to those who have always mattered to me, I also give thanks.

Finally, I thank all the wonderful Latinos—misunderstood as we may sometimes be—who have supported and shown me affection in the past.