Thoughts Without Cigarettes (49 page)

At the Escorial, that storied royal residence north of Madrid, I felt the heaviness of Spanish history everywhere around me, and it made me sad. I already tended to think about all the people who had died in this world, and in Spain, perhaps because of the aged cripples and maimed survivors of the civil war who were still to be seen begging on the streets everywhere, the fleeting nature of existence followed me about like a ghost. In Seville, I wandered about the Gypsy neighborhoods, on the outskirts of the city, whose passageways and streets were too narrow for police cars to go through, seeking out bars where I might hear authentic flamenco music. (It was a miracle that someone didn't rob me.) In Guernica, my heart stopped: I had gone into a slot machine parlor one evening, feeling smugly self-assured that even if I had been rarely accepted as a Cuban Latino in the states, I could at least pass as a Spaniard,
más o menos
, in Spain when an old man cast a dirty look my way, and then, further shattering my delusions, raised his right arm, his palm held straight up, and saluted me, saying: “
Sig Heil!
” Then he spat on the floor.

On a long train ride in an acrid car reeking of tobacco, animals, and soot across Gallicia, I ached with an inexplicable feeling of belonging (my pop's side of the family were Gallegos after all) and yet, at the same time, I could not produce a single name of a relative or a town to visit there. (That ached as well.) On such a train, one couldn't help but fall into conversation with the farmers who traveled on them: One such farmer, feeling deeply touched (the more educated the Spaniard, the less touched he or she felt by my nostalgia for those roots) by the fact that I was by ancestry a
paisano
, and thinking me a rich American, offered to sell me a farm of some twenty hectares for (converting from pesetas) roughly fourteen thousand dollars. (How interesting that would have been, had I had that kind of money.) Later, I made like a pilgrim, visiting the sacred cathedral in Santíago, but oddly, though I'd been told that it was a very special place—even some of the guidebooks said that it had a mystical air—I, who considered myself cut very much from my mother's cloth, and therefore superstitious, felt nothing at all in that place. Among my other excursions in Gallicia, I took a ferry out to
la isla de
Cies, an island off the Atlantic coast of Spain that had been reconfigured with dunes and trees and white sands and driftwood in the manner of California beaches after Franco, smitten by a visit there and, as a dictator, able to move mountains if he so liked, had ordered it done. I saw my first nude beaches there and narrowly escaped getting beat up by a gaggle of older Spanish women who had happened along the same spot overlooking a cliff where I,
el stupido,
had stood posing before a camera on which I had set off a timer; as those women approached, and I ducked into the bushes, the camera, set on top of a rock, clicked as if I had been waiting, in fact, to get shots of their tanned, spectacularly drooping bodies. (During the two-hour journey back, I had to contend with their accusations, their scornful expressions, and the fact that they told anyone they could that I was “the one with the filthy mind.” Did I care? All I knew was that I wasn't standing on a subway platform somewhere deep in Brooklyn on a hot summer afternoon.)

Traveling all around the Iberian Peninsula, I ended my Spanish journey in Barcelona, where, indeed, many of those Catalans were as fair (and sometimes balding) as I. Roaming its streets, I couldn't help but wonder where my maternal grandfather's family had once lived, or whether my mother and her sisters had been aware of such landmarks as the Parque Guell or the other insanely ornate buildings Gaudí had designed, during their visits there as children. I wandered the old quarters of the city endlessly, bought countless novels from the kiosks off the Ramblas, editions of works by García Marquez, Borges, Italo Calvino, Vargas Llosa, and Neruda, to name a few, for my planned Spanish library in Rome. (I swore that I would get through every single one of them.) I haunted the guitar shops of Barcelona, trying out one instrument after another, no matter how much it cost, despite a budget of about one hundred dollars. Eventually, I bought a real beauty, manufactured by the House of Struch in 1985, an orange wood, mellow-toned guitar, which sits in this very room behind me as I write.

On the very day I was to leave for Rome with my new guitar in hand, my valise weighing even more from newly purchased books, and my head dense with recent memories, I got a little careless and allowed my radar to turn off. Overdoing the
vino
(and cigarettes) at lunch, as I made my way to the central station in Barcelona, all the while feeling as if I were Mr. Slick New Yorker, my wallet with all my cash vanished, some fellow having picked my pocket in the crowded square.

Fortunately, though I had nothing more than a few pesetas in change left, I had kept my ticket and passport stashed inside my shirt; brooding, I settled into my second-class compartment and was wondering what I would do over the two-day journey to Rome for food when into that car came four cheerful, not-bad-looking Spanish nurses in their late twenties, from Merida. They were toting picnic baskets filled with food and wine and chocolates, and hearing the story of how I had been pickpocketed, took pity, and tenderly so, on this
americano.
Europe? God, I loved it!

Though my nearly two-year stay in Italy probably deserves far more space than anyone's patience should allow, I will frame this little part of the book as a love story of a sort, for no sooner had I arrived in that city than did I become intoxicated with the Latino-ness of Rome and a lifestyle that, every day I lived there, somehow conformed with my memories (perhaps) and fantasies (definitely) of what life must have been like in Cuba before the fall, or, in the machinations of that longish narrative I had been fooling around with, Havana itself.

Rife with birdsong, blossoming gardens, high arching palm trees, and tropical vegetation everywhere, as well as a populace of outspoken, charismatic, friendly, occasionally curmudgeonly, stylish, and earthy people—with no end to the dazzling women, of all ages, there—Rome, that “great outdoor museum,” as Malraux once put it, pressed so many wonderful buttons inside me that for much of my time there, I became a new and improved version of myself, still tightly wound but, for the most part, really enjoying my life for a change.

Just walking those streets, especially in neighborhoods like Trastevere or by the Aventine, I'd stroll through the markets, absorbing, with almost a hunger, not just the scents of the marvelous breads and herbs and flowers that were everywhere, but the bel canto of the Italian language itself, which, for some reason, I felt far more at ease navigating than even my ancestral
español
. In fact, I used the Spanish I'd more or less improved upon during my recent travels to help me get along with the Italians. (Down in Naples, the Italian almost sounds like Castilian sometimes.) They understood me completely, and, because it was not my emotional turf to defend, I eventually flourished, or at least more easily in a street-friendly getting-around fashion. Though I attempted to decipher the daily newspapers, which were always remarkably slangy, and the writings of Borges, Cortázar, and Calvino in their Mondadori translations—incredibly, as in Spain, “literature” could be found in the racks of the sidewalk kiosks alongside Donald Duck or
Paparone
comics, religious tomes on Padre Pio, and some of the raunchiest porno I'd ever seen—it wasn't anything I came close to mastering, at least not in the way that a few good solid years of study would have afforded me.

Nevertheless, I loved visiting the used book shops of Rome, where I indulged my interest in graphics and printing, often coming away, for only a few dollars in lire, with some fantastically illustrated volume, its production values incredible, with colors as deeply realized as those one remembers from childhood. My purchases included an antique edition of
Le Avventure di Pinnochio
by Carlo Collodi and a version of Dante's
Divine Comedy
as told by Topolino (Mickey Mouse), as well as a turn-of-the-century star book, among other items, which I have continued to treasure to this day.

It wasn't long before my second-floor room at the academy filled with such books, as well as the occasional knickknack from the market. Humble by any standards, it looked out onto a courtyard with a fountain and two high pine trees, its gravel paths often sounding with the footfall of visiting scholars and fellows, Italian voices murmuring upward along with birdsong—it was Borges who said his favorite word in English was
nightingale
, while I would think that
uccello
would qualify as mine in Italian. My furnishings included a bed, a desk, a few lamps, two chairs, and dresser. The room had a sink but no toilet, and I depended upon a communal bathroom for showers, etc. On a stand sat a heavy black telephone with a rotary dial, which I used mainly for calling the
portieres
, most of whom spoke quite good English, though one of them, the night man, appropriately named Orfeo, used only a Roman dialect that for some (like myself) was nearly impossible to understand. International calls always had to go through a special operator, and one would have to sometimes wait and wait, before finally giving up. (Though I had no one to call.)

Arriving at the villa, in addition to my room, I had been given my own little studio off the edge of a Tuscan-style garden—a run-down tile-covered shed with cracked windows, endless drafts, spiders, and salamanders, that was wedged up against the ancient Aurelian wall, which the Romans, back when, had built as a defense (it's been supposed) against the barbarians. (In the spring, it would overflow with wisteria.) My windows had a view of an unbelievably serene and beautiful landscape, of orange-blue Roman skies and umbrella pines, and among the buildings in view, sharply defined like mannerist silhouettes in the twilight, a sixteenth-century domicile that Garibaldi had once used as a headquarters during his defense against the French, and where Galileo, at a time when a country road passed through those grounds, had once stayed. (The walls of such buildings and of those surrounding the garden were riddled with bullet holes.) I'd climb a series of cracked disintegrating steps, the path overgrown, to get to my studio, and there, when I was not wandering the city, I sat by an enormous desk before a little Olivetti. With pads of paper and a pile of manuscript that I'd dragged around Spain in my suitcase (as if they were songs), I'd set out daily, more often than not, to fool around with my second novel, which had already started to take on a new direction.

If you will recall my uncle Pedro, of the Cugat orchestra, then you can perhaps imagine how, in a moment of insight, I transformed my superintendent character, one Cesar Castillo, into a musician whose band, the Mambo Kings, had once performed here and there in New York City in the 1950s.

Back on 106th Street, long before I'd left for the academy, I'd had this notion for my book—of a superintendent who had once had a glorious past, though just what that past was about, I really could not say. But gradually I got some clues. As I'd ride the elevator, its operator, a soulful and quite melancholic fellow of middle age, from the Dominican Republic, named Rafael Guillon, would begin singing to himself, as if withdrawing into an inward dream. His voice was so moving, so resonant and rich, that I'd sometimes invite him into my apartment during his breaks. Taking hold of one of my guitars, he'd commence upon a bolero—classics like “Solamente Una Vez” or “Historia de un Amor”—and with such a professionalism that I just had to ask if he'd ever performed publicly. To that he answered: “Yes, back in my country, I made a number of records, and I was somewhat well-known.”

I'd wanted to ask him how on earth he had ended up spending his days in an elevator—the very life my Pop had once cautioned me to avoid—but he preempted me, simply shaking his head and looking forlornly out the window as if at his own past, the way my father used to: “
Pero no sé lo que me pasó,
” he told me. “But I don't know what happened to me.”