Thoughts Without Cigarettes by Oscar Hijuelos Page A

seemed to have withdrawn into myself, what else could she do but stare at me with dismay, shaking her head at this puzzling sea change, or else sit back in her chair in frustration? What else could she do but sigh, her striking dark eyes widening, as she muttered something under her breath? That same puzzlement would always enter her voice when she’d address me in the future, “ Me entiendes? ”—“Do you understand me?”—becoming one of the stock phrases she’d use to punctuate our every conversation, as if her own son had become a stranger who’d suddenly dropped into her life, an americano whose timidity and fears she needlessly (and perhaps selfishly) confused with laziness (“You didn’t want to speak Spanish after all!”) or with aloofness (“ Por qué me miras así? ”—“Why do you look at me that way?”).
    I’d often turn away from her, or shrug, or pretend that she wasn’t there. It must have killed her.
    On one of those afternoons, however, deep into my stay at the hospital, I was allowed to leave the ward and go outside for a while. I know this because of a photograph, the only one I’ve ever had to commemorate my stay at that convalescent home. I’m in a heavy coat, bloated and lost and seemingly staggered by the brilliance of spring, my distinctly rounded, very pale face partially washed out by the sun, nothing less than a child’s apprehension and bewilderment contorting my mouth. Someone, perhaps a family friend like mi padrino Horacio, had snapped it, since my father, in all that time, never once came to see me, and my mother didn’t know how to—for I had never seen her take, in all my life, a single photograph (she was not that way). But thank God someone did, for after so many years, even that memory, of me standing in a field, would, like so many other things about that time, have likely been forgotten.
    Eventually, there came the day I left Connecticut and found myself in a taxi with my mother crossing 125th Street over to the West Side from Lenox Avenue, where we’d gotten off a New York Central Railroad train. It must have been close to Christmas, for the store windows blinked with colored lights, and pine trees for sale lined the streets. Across the intersections hung banners and enormous glass and wire snowflakes, and here and there along the Harlem sidewalks, vendors were out hawking dolls and toys and all kinds of household goods, crowds of people bumping into each other, enchanting me. I know I wore a heavy wool coat with a hood because my mother kept tightening the cords each time I squirmed about while trying to loosen them from around my jacket collar, and, as would happen a thousand times in the future, she told me, pulling my hands away, “Stop that! Or you’ll get sick again!” Then, just like that, we were on our way up that long hill on Amsterdam and making a left onto 118th, our six-story tenement building being the fourth one along that block on the uptown side. As we stopped in front of its gray Doric-columned stoop, screaming kids were inside playing running games like tag and hide in the front hall, among them little Jeanie Walker, the deaf lady’s daughter, a little slow in the head but her pretty and expressive face breaking out into a huge grin of happiness at the sight of me: First thing she did was to wrap her arms around me in a hug, but just the same, I had trouble placing her.
    Our apartment, number 2, was the first one to the left once you had climbed a few marble steps inside the mirrored hallway. I don’t know just what I should have felt when my mother pushed open the front door and I saw a framed picture of Jesus with his burning heart in hand, but it was my brother, José, who led me down that hallway to the kitchen, with its buckling linoleum floors, its pipes covered in rust and mold, and walls streaked with amber trails left by the cockroaches