Thoughts Without Cigarettes Read Free

father from his job as a cook in the Men’s Bar of the Biltmore Hotel. But I have no memories of hearing them speak it. I must have exchanged some words with our elderly, genteel across-the-hall neighbor, Mrs. Blair, or with our German superintendent, the jolly Mr. Hess, rotund and red cheeked, always sweeping with a broom in the halls. But since I spent most of my days as an infant with my mother, going just about everywhere with her—to the nearby Columbia University campus, by whose fountains we would sit, or down the hill to Morningside Drive and the circle that looked eastward over Harlem, where the other young mothers from that block sometimes gathered with their strollers and baby carriages—that language, Spanish, must have permeated me like honey, or wrapped around my soul like a blanket or, if you like, a mantilla, or, as my mother, of a poetic bent, might say, like the sunlight of a Cuban spring.
    It was on Morningside Drive, incidentally, where the first pictures of me as an infant were taken: They show this thin and rather delicately featured child, with curling blond hair, in white booties and a dainty outfit, standing by a bench, a passably cute toddler, but not the sort one would have associated, at first glance, with the usual expectations of what the offspring of a Cuban couple should look like, which is to say, anything but a little towhead americano .
    Now, if I turned out that way, it’s because I owed my looks to a great-great-grandfather on my father’s side who had been Irish; white as white could be, I had hazel eyes, and altogether an appearance that, given my parents’ more “Spanish” looks, set me apart from them. My mother’s antecedents, the Torrens y Barrancas and Olivers y Guap families, were light-skinned Catalans, and my papi , Pascual Hijuelos, a Gallego by ancestry, and blond as a child himself, tended toward a Spaniard’s ruddiness that, in fact, was probably Celtic as well. But both of my parents had dark hair and dark eyes and were unmistakably Cuban in their manner, their speech, and, yes, in that great definer of identity, their body language and souls. My brother, José, fell somewhere in between: He was also fair skinned, his eyes were dark and intense, and his hair, of a brownish-red coloration, bespoke somewhat more Latino origins, though, while growing up and as a ringer in his late teens for that old-time actor John Garfield, he too would hear that he didn’t particularly look or seem Cuban, at least not until he had occasion to speak Spanish. And while I’ve long since discovered that a few of my relatives attracted the same mistaken notion from strangers—“Are ya really Cuban?”—but were hardly bothered by it, for they knew just who they were, I’d find out that vaguely consoling fact years later, after it no longer seemed to matter and the damage to my ego had already been done.
    In the hospital, my mother would sit back, across from me, muttering something to herself—no one being around to help her. Maybe in her moments alone, waiting, she prayed—a little black rosary inside her purse—though I bet that just as often as she asked God for guidance or gave thanks, she chastised him for doing such a lousy job. And why wouldn’t she? Somewhere along the line, during this long period of separation from my family, when that partition between my mother and me became the story of our lives, I had absorbed English from the nurses, doctors, and children of my acquaintance with some kind of desperate ease. English in, Spanish out, or at least deeply submerged inside me—from my childhood onward, I have had long complicated dreams in which only Spanish is spoken.

    The kicker was that I’d gotten sick in Cuba, on a trip born, in part, of my mother’s homesickness. Since coming to New York in 1943 as my father Pascual’s young bride from Holguín, she’d returned only once, with