Thoughts Without Cigarettes by Oscar Hijuelos Page B

at night. Off my parents’ bedroom and directly above our basement boiler, the kitchen’s floors were shaking as I walked in. I’m pretty sure it was a weekend day that I arrived, but I can’t really say—only that my father, Pascual, or papi, was sitting by our Formica-covered table with some of his friends.
    â€œ Recuerdas a tu papá? ” my mother asked me , just as he looked over at me. “Remember your father?” With his heavyset melancholy Gallego face, he seemed friendly enough, and because I did not know what else to do, I ran into his arms, his huge hands gently caressing my back, his eyes, always sad in memory, almost filling with tears over the fact of my miraculous return. My mother then told me, “ Dale un beso ”—“Give him a kiss”—and as I did, my face pressing up against his, a strong scent of tobacco and booze mixed with Old Spice cologne rose into my nostrils. Maybe he had asked me, “ Cómo andas, hijo? ”—“How are you, son?”—or said, “I’m so happy to see you at home,” in English. Perhaps he had an early Christmas gift for me, some toy he would have gotten downtown; perhaps he introduced me to his Mexican buddy, Mr. Daniel Martinez, superintendent from up the street, with his languid jowl-laden face and mariner’s tattoo on his forearm, or maybe his drinking pal supreme, Frankie the Puerto Rican exterminator, was on hand; perhaps a man I knew only as Díaz, one of my father’s fellow cooks from the Biltmore, a dead-on Cuban look-alike for the actor Lon Chaney Jr., also sat by that table—but who knows, it was so long ago. Of one thing I’m fairly certain: My father, in the company of friends and in clouds of cigarette smoke, had exuded, while embracing me, something I hadn’t felt in a long time, a simple kindness, which I hungered for; or perhaps, as I sometimes think now, it was pity.

    Then, as I remember, I was taken to my room at the end of the hall, and that too seemed vaguely familiar; one of the few souvenirs I’d brought back with me from my trip to my aunt’s—a smallish conga drum with an animal skin head on which was painted the word Cuba —had been set in the corner; a bag of toys accumulated during my stay in the hospital, filled mostly with rubber soldiers that some kindly neighbors had bought for me, my mother placed down on the bed. She pulled up on its sheets, the mattress below—“This one is new!” she insisted—fitted with a plastic cover, as she’d been told by the nurses that I’d started to wet myself at the hospital. Though the steam pipes sizzled, as if frying up things in their paint-mottling juices, my mother, despite that terrible heat, went over to the window and gave it an extra push shut. Then, almost cheerfully, she told me: “ Tienes que descansar ”—“You must rest now.” And while I didn’t feel like napping, and even if it was midafternoon, my mother made me get into bed, explaining that I had been very sick. Naturally, I obeyed. I don’t recall that she kissed me, but, in any event, she turned off the lights and closed the door, leaving me, her most frail and delicate child, to stay awake for hours on end, peering out through the window, which only looked onto a desolate back courtyard anyway, wondering what to make of having to lie there in all that darkness.

CHAPTER 2
    A Few Notes on My Past
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    F or the next two years, I rarely went out, except to St. Luke’s Hospital for checkups and to a few places in the neighborhood, my mother always by my side. She even felt leery about letting me into the hallway to play with the Walker kids, who daily swarmed up and down the stairs and charged along the marble floors. As for the often rowdy children on the street just outside our front windows, the kind of kids who’d shout, “Hey, Johnny,