Thoughts Without Cigarettes (16 page)

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.

Uncle Pedro, in any case, hired many newly arrived Cubans: One of them, a black fellow, the sort whose sunburnt cheeks looked purple, he referred to as “
mi negrito
,” and while my uncle—and the other lighter-skinned Cubans—addressed him with affection, I realize now that, being from the old school and in a city whose water fountains and public restrooms posted WHITES ONLY signs, they might have done so to remind him of his place in the social pecking order. What this
negrito
made of me, so blond and fair, and related to the
jefe
, I don't really know, but when he'd unscrew a thermos and pour the strong coffee he drank at lunch and breaks, he'd always nod my way, winking.

Now, my uncle in his spare time would take me around Miami— he liked to eat Jewish delicatessen food in one of those art deco diners along the main street of South Beach. Funny to think about him now: this former ballroom dandy who played stand-up double bass with Xavier Cugat, and in his prime dazzlingly handsome, sitting by one of those counters, examining the free multicolored pickles left there for the taking, as if perusing jewelry. If he was religious, he kept it in a drawer. Once at a diner late on a Friday night, at about eleven, on the way back from a Shriners' meeting, where he schmoozed (I suppose) with fellow members to drum up business (he also played canasta with them, while I sat in a room watching TV), he ordered a ham and cheese sandwich on toasted white bread, an act that absolutely shocked me, given Maya's super-religiosity and the fact that, in those days, eating meat on Friday was strictly forbidden to Catholics. When I reminded Pedro, timidly, that he was about to commit a mortal sin, he, obviously a man of the earth and a pragmatic soul, simply shrugged, looked at the clock, and told me, “In Jerusalem, it is already Saturday.”

Later, we stopped at a Sunoco gas station, where, within a few minutes, as we sat in his idling Cadillac, a blizzard of green arrowhead-shaped insects, coming seemingly out of nowhere, had overwhelmed the place—teeming like
microbios
. They were so densely packed that one could hardly see anything but the faint glow of some distant highway lamps, and though much of that cloud moved on, enough of those insects remained behind to cover every surface of that place and were so thick in the air that the gas station attendants locked themselves inside: No sooner did my uncle roll up his window than he decided to drive away, and as we did, tearing out of that place, I could not help but wonder if the sudden plague had anything to do with my uncle's attitude about that ham and cheese sandwich. Of course it didn't, but I believed it did.

Generally, Pedro treated me as if it were only a matter of time before I'd grow up and become a more responsible person—for example, he kept showing me tool catalogues from outfits in New York City, where he wanted me to make some purchases on his behalf (why he didn't do so with my brother, I can't say), while Maya, going on nearly daily about all the awful things that my mother had done—“We all prayed for you, nephew, and thanked God Himself when you survived your illness”—continued to treat me as a fairly helpless infant who would be so much better off in her care.

And yet, one day, she, so accusatory toward my mother and her carelessness, fumbled badly. Maya had taken me to the beach, where we walked along the shore; later I romped in the water, shirtless and in a pair of shorts, and though I'd been out in the sun for only a few hours, my fair skin, exposed to that torrid heat without the benefit of any lotion, began to blister. And not in any small way: By the time we'd gotten back home, enormous bubbles plump with oozing liquids—and quite painful—had risen over my shoulders and arms and chest in such an alarming fashion that Maya called in a doctor. (They resembled, I remember thinking, jellyfish.) Soon enough, I was put to bed, shivering, in a back room, its window looking onto an overgrown rear garden with mango trees. A local girl, a sometime babysitter with whom I had seen a matinee of
Psycho
just a few days before, had been paid to watch over me, though she seemed to spend most of her time in the living room with the TV; but now and then, she'd look in to make sure I hadn't tried to pop any of those blisters, which by then were suppurating: I had to take antibiotic medicine, and some kind of cream was placed carefully around the burns' raw edges, or what doctors might call their diameters. But mainly, for a week, until those potentially infectious blisters began to go down, I relived that old hospital isolation again. I can remember falling in and out of some very strange bouts of sleep, thinking, because of all the tropical foliage just outside the window, that I was back in Cuba and getting sick all over again. That isolation so depressed me that I was grateful when anyone ever-so-carefully tiptoed in to see how I was doing, even my brother, who surprised me one afternoon by walking in wearing a Frankenstein mask.

And there was Maya, of course, asking that whatever else I might want to talk about with my mother and father once I got home, not to mention a word about how I had gotten sick under her care; my brother apparently had pledged to do the same.