At some point, probably the summer after I’d finally come home, we went down to Coney Island by subway—a long trip in those hot electric-smelling cane-seated cars into Brooklyn, in case you hadn’t the occasion to try that delightful ride out for yourself—on one of the few journeys we made as a family, small as ours happened to be. A photograph: I posed on the boardwalk with my dapper, self-possessed older brother, my father in his looming campesino majesty, and my mother, her usual guarded or skeptical expression on her face. I had on a pair of baggy white shorts and a straw hat, and, unless I’m mistaken, I looked plump and soft, perhaps not at all alert, as if I had no idea what I was doing there, not just at Coney—though I recall enjoying the sweetness of its confection-stand air—but with those people, who happened to be my Cuban family.

In those days, with José in school or else working at some part-time job and doing his thing here and there around the neighborhood, and with my pop often at the hotel, getting in as much overtime as he could manage, my mother became the center of my world, often my only companion—and a rather overly vigilant one at that. She constantly washed my hands (and only with Phisohex, the sole antibacterial soap that doctors considered safe for the infectiously prone) or else told me not to put things I found on the floor in my mouth and kept after my every move; it seems that I became her full-time job. Sweeping the floors or wiping down the walls, swatting at skittering roaches, she was always quejando—mainly about the fact that we were too poor for me to get sick again and about “los gastos,” the costs of my medicines and doctors and the hospital visits, some of which my father’s union did not cover, my mother reminding me, “In this country, nobody gives nothing away.” All the while she’d conjure, again and again, those microbes, which seemed to be everywhere, like the very air we breathed, the dust-mote-ridden light through the window, like God.

She’d go on as well about another realm of which I could have only been vaguely aware: her life in Cuba, and the goodness of the people she had known back in Holguín before coming to America—“Este purgatorio”—and about how wonderful a man my father had been to her in the days when they met—“Cuando él me quería, mucho.” “If only I’d known what I was getting into,” she’d say, without ever missing the chance of attacking Maya. “Borja, yes, she was good to me, she even felt sorry for the way I was treated, but that other one?” She’d shake her head. “That witch . . .” And she’d launch into diatribes against my aunt and into the history of their differences, with stories that inevitably began with “One night that woman” or “That one, the evil sister, la mala, thought she could get away with anything, but . . .” Byzantine tales of torment and abuse—my fairy tales—flew from her mouth to my ears, and without her once considering just whom she was talking to, or my age and innocence, as if indeed it didn’t matter if I really understood her at all.

Sometimes, she’d take me down the hill along Amsterdam to the ladies’ pelluquería, or hairdressers, on 122nd Street, which my godmother, Carmen, ran with her younger sister, Olga; in that salon, these Cuban beauties and their female clientele formed the hub of local Latina society, just as Freddie’s Bodega and the liquor store next door to it, farther down the block, formed a hub for the Latino men scattered here and there in that ethnically mixed neighborhood. (There was a Japanese restaurant on 119th, a Japanese grocery on 123rd; Irish bars up on Broadway; and, as a matter of course, we’d occasionally see some mysterious-looking Hasidim, with their wild locks of hair, affiliated with the Jewish Theological Seminary, walking on the street. And the center of Harlem itself, on 125th Street, our Times Square, was a tempest of black and Latino and, in those days, Italian folks.) In Carmen’s, I just enjoyed hanging around and overhearing the ladies discuss some rather touchy subjects, like male infidelity, crushes, sex, heartthrobs—the sort of things I assume they assumed I couldn’t understand, even when Carmen tended to speak to her godson, while smiling and pinching my chin, in both English and Spanish. My mother, in such circumstances, tended to tell Carmen not to bother, with the Spanish at least, but she, my godmother, perhaps flabbergasted at the notion, always went on in that way, saying things like “Magda, you have to give him some encouragements. No seas tan dura”—“Don’t be so hard on him.” She and her sister, Olga, were delicious women, in any case, and quite nice to me. Besides, I just liked the laboratory atmosphere of their salon, with all its space-age-looking hair dryers, ladies in curlers, Spanish in the air, music on the radio, and clients chatting away endlessly in voices that, for the most part, with sunlight pouring down through the window, seemed happy.

And my mother would take me to church occasionally, while my father always stayed home. I enjoyed seeing so many folks dressed up in their Sunday best, the men all wearing hats and ties, and my mother’s friends in their veils and florid hats, smelling nice and looking pretty standing on the steps. While the Mass, in solemn Latin, never failed to put me half to sleep, my mother, nodding at the altar and making the sign of the cross, seemed to take it all to heart, even when she couldn’t always understand the sermons that the Irish priests—Fathers Ford, Dwyer, and Byrne—delivered weekly to a congregation that, bit by bit, was becoming less Irish and more Spanish. We’d sometimes attend High Mass at eleven, to hear my brother, one of the pipsqueaks in the choir, sing, but even then, if a few people started coughing around us, she get me out of there immediately. (And speaking of religion, at home, my mother often punctuated her observations about life with “Ay, Ave María” and “Por Dios!” for no particular reason at all; I’d sometimes see her sitting by our kitchen table whispering to herself as she read some letters, presumably from Cuba, and then, having prayed, make the sign of the cross. If it was a letter from her mother, María, in Cuba, she’d kiss the wafer-thin paper it had been written on.)

Now, you’d think that a child in such close proximity to so loquacious and opinionated a woman would have picked up the pieces of that lost “mother” tongue again, just through constant exposure. But, although that’s just what should have happened, the simple truth is that she never really spoke to me but directed her tirades, her aphorisms, her orders, her stories, at me. If she’d been a different sort—say, like my loving aunt Cheo—my mother might have gently prodded/eased the Spanish language out of me or, at the very least, gone over the sorts of exercises that most Cuban mothers might with their children, like the rolling of the rrrrrs through the repetition of tongue twisters like “Tres tigres tristes,” or, starting from scratch, taught me just what things were called, or how the Spanish alphabet worked and about los vocales, or else, in any case, gently cajoling me to speak more Spanish, day by day. Who knows how my feelings about “refusing” to speak it might have changed. But, for whatever reasons, that sort of patience, organization, and attentiveness were just not part of her nature.

Perhaps she thought my Spanish would naturally come back to me or that, quite simply, it seemed too great a bother, given her more immediate concerns. (Years later, she’d say, shrugging, “I don’t know why you didn’t want to learn,” as if that were something that had been offered. And while I now wish she had been more demanding when it came to my speaking Spanish, my guess is that I would have still found ways of pushing that language away.)

Regardless, by then, I remained indifferent, blocked, and somewhat of a spoiled princeling: She may have filled my ears with her thousand-words-a-minute Spanish, but like a good defender, as vigilant about avoiding the absorption of those words as if they were poison, akin to the Cuban microbes my mother always talked about, I hardly ever let those words in through the walls I’d put up. And so, early on, we adopted our own way of communicating with each other: She’d speak to me in Spanish, which I comprehended but resisted speaking, and I’d answer her in English, a language she barely understood and, in any case, never really cared for.

Standing by my window, I loved it when the scissors man, with a grindstone on his cart, came up the hill ringing a bell and, getting a taker, stopped to sharpen those knives and cutlery, the sparks flying off his wheel; or I’d see a ragman going into certain doors where bags of cast-offs awaited him; and, I swear to God, that neighborhood had its share of midgets—maybe they were hooked up with the Ringling Brothers circus and stayed somewhere on 125th Street—but they’d sometimes come waddling by on the street in pairs. Then there were the Italians in their Alpine hats, three men strumming guitars and mandolins, along with a woman, her ears bejangled like a Gypsy’s, banging a tambourine, who seemed to appear from out of nowhere—from East Harlem perhaps, or Little Italy—and marched up the hill, serenading the tenements with bel canto and Neapolitan songs. (People would lean out their windows and toss down dimes and quarters wrapped in tissue paper.)

And I’d feel a definite excitement when the coal truck pulled up—yes, that was a different era in New York—and practically backed into our living room, or so it seemed: From its rear dropped a metal chute down into a basement window, where there was a storage bin, and for half an hour or so, the coal, released from the truck, would come rushing below into that darkness, like so much river water (a sound I still find soothing). From the window, I’d watch as well, with some enchantment, what the local Irish cops on the beat called “shenanigans.” Our black streetlamps, from the turn of the century, had ornate astragal moldings and roundish ridges that made it easy enough for kids to climb, some three stories high, to their finial tops, usually to place or recover what the local mischief makers had left hanging there—trousers and sneakers, and sometimes even underwear, during that unceremoniously humbling process known as “depantsing.” They also played three-sewer stickball in the spring and summer, and games like Chinese and American against the walls, and now and then, as I’d wait for my father to come home, fistfights broke out, usually over some girl, someone calling the cops, a squad car or an officer on his beat arriving to break things up—it all seemed so thrilling to me. (Crazily enough, also on that street at night, some fellow, in celebration of his Celtic roots, think his name was Myles, would dress up in a tartan skirt and tam-o’-shanter and, as if part of an invisible procession, move up and down the block, playing wistful airs on the bagpipes.)

Still, if my mother saw me standing by an open window, she’d pull me away and slam it shut. And then, without much of an explanation, she’d threaten me with the notion that I might not ever get the chance to go out; and so I’d sit down, benumbed and cautious, wondering what the hell was going on.

Several times a day, I had to take a regimen of pills, which I got used to, and occasionally some vile-tasting liquids, possibly mild laxatives, but when it came to food, I had to live off my memories of better times. As such, I felt deeply affected whenever an ice cream truck drove up the street with its tingling bells, or when I saw kids coming up the block carrying a white-boxed cheese pizza from the old hole-in-the-wall V&T’s on 122nd Street, which they’d eat right there on the sidewalk. (In such a state of vigilance, or food envy, you become aware of every box of Cracker Jacks, every Hershey bar, every thirty-five-cent roast beef sandwich on rye bread with mayonnaise and salt and pepper from Adolf’s corner delicatessen that you’ve seen someone eating.) I could not eat anything with salt, most meats, butter, nor the merest bit of sugar, as my nephritis had apparently left me in a prediabetic state. (By then, my eyes had started failing badly—I had no idea of just why things looked blurry a few yards away and thought that normal; but the deterioration of my eyesight was distinctly related to what had happened to my kidneys, a doctor later told me; neither of my parents, nor my brother, had problems with their vision.) Which is to say they’d put me on a diet that no child of six or seven could ever possibly care for: Whatever foods I did eat—potatoes, carrots, and some meat or chicken—were boiled to death, and never anything as delicious as one of my papi’s typical weekend breakfasts of fried eggs with steak or chorizos, onions, and potatoes cooked in delicious Hotel Bar butter and smothered in salt, the aromas of which I had to endure while eating bowls of sugarless cream of wheat farina with skim milk. Whatever the doctors at the hospital instructed my mother, invariably through someone translating, she adhered to their dictums religiously, as if she were frightened to death about what my pop would do to her if I had a relapse.

Nevertheless, that regimen was no easy thing for a kid to put up with, especially given that the one luxury we had in our lives involved food. We may have been “poor”—“Somos pobres,” my mother declared for years afterward—but by the end of each week, our refrigerator practically spilled over with delectable cuts of meat and other victuals that most families in my father’s income bracket—“upper-class poor” is how my brother and I came to think of ourselves—would have never been able to afford.

You see, as a short order cook at the Biltmore Men’s Bar, my father had worked a special deal with the pantry supervisor at the hotel, an Italiano who, for five dollars a week, allowed him to bring home whatever cuts of meat and other delicacies he wanted. He was not alone in this. Earning little despite their membership in the Restaurant and Cabaret Workers Union, local number 6, all the kitchen staff availed themselves of such perks, while management, being vaguely aware of this—and doing the same themselves—looked the other way. (As they did about other things: I grew up eating with monogram-embossed Biltmore utensils and on slightly chipped plates from their different restaurants, and, at one point, an art deco armoire, a cast-off from when the hotel had started refurnishing the rooms, took up a corner of my parents’ bedroom.) Daily, those secreted packets of meat came home with my father without fail. Ambling toward Amsterdam, across the Columbia University campus, from the 116th Street subway, with his slightly limping gait—even in those years when he was in his early forties, he’d balloon up and down in weight—he’d walk in through the door at around three thirty or four in the afternoon, a strong scent of meat and blood preceding him, and particularly so if he’d come uptown in an overheated train or in one that had stalled in a tunnel. Tucked inside his shirt and wrapped in muted-orange butcher’s paper, those bundles of meat and chicken almost always bled through the fabric.

He’d set them down on the table, light a cigarette, and pop open a bottle of sweating Ballantine beer, while my mother, who did most of the cooking, looked over the contents of those packages: On a normal afternoon, they might contain a few pounds of filet mignon or breaded veal cutlets—what she called “empanadas”—or porterhouse steaks or a big plastic bag of Gulf shrimp too, or several whole chickens, or a slab of Swiss cheese, or a few pounds of finely sliced French ham or turkey breast, not to mention a pound or two of ground sirloin beef or a glowing one-pound brick of creamy Hotel Bar butter—items that, on such afternoons, seemed especially tempting since they were strictly forbidden to me.

Such meats jammed the freezer compartment and the shelves of our buzzing Frigidaire. We had so much of that stuff that I can remember my mother lamenting the waste, often throwing out packages of freezer-burned ground beef after they had lingered too long in the dense frost. In a way, when it came to food, my father was a kind of Cuban Santa Claus or Robin Hood, if you like. For whatever he would bring home, he always shared with our neighbors in the building and with his friends.

My mother did as well. For years, Mrs. Walker, “la muda,” could hardly pass by our first-floor apartment on her way home without knocking on the door; often enough, my mother found something from the refrigerator for her to take. I can recall watching Mrs. Walker, who, thin and wan, smoked up a storm herself, always letting her facial expressions stretch like rubber in every direction, her hands wildly working the air while attempting to convey to my mother some simple notion, like coming upstairs for a bite—Mrs. Walker spooning her fingers into her mouth and repeating, “Et, et, et,” while my mother, savoring a dawning moment of understanding, proclaimed in her heavy accent, “Jes, jes—food, food! Comida, ha!” and turned to me, saying, “You see, hijo, I can speaky the English!”

Sometimes, it would work out that we’d head upstairs into Mrs. Walker’s chaotic apartment: Her husband, a bartender working nights, somehow managed to sleep in a room in the back while their kids—Jeannie, Gracie, Carol, Jerry, and Richie—had the run of the house; I mainly remember that piles of clothes were laid out haphazardly all over the place, that she, like my mother, tended to bring in stuff off the street, all kinds of furniture in various states of disrepair lying here and there; and in her kitchen, where we would sit while Mrs. Walker, a nice lady, started to cook some things on the stove—say, some of the steaks my mother had given her—and went on and on about something, which I could barely comprehend, my mother, telling her things in Spanish, with a few words of English thrown in, seemed completely at home with that arrangement. One of those ladies who would smoke while eating, she’d sit down and have a snack, and my mother, sticking to her little finicky rules, refusing anything herself—she’d shake her head, pat her stomach to indicate that she was full—seemed content to bask in their oddly intimate relationship, unrestrained by language. Having a sweet soul, Mrs. Walker, aware that I had been so sick, would just look over at me and smile, blow me a kiss between puffs of smoke, and then, putting down her fork and cigarette, as she did one afternoon, make a rocking motion back and forth before her stomach, mumbling something in her mangled guttural speech, which my mother, tuned in, seemed to pick up on. In one instance, my mother, translating, told me, “Ay, pero, hijo, ella dice que fuiste un bebé muy lindo”—“She says that you were a beautiful baby.” And seeing that my mother had gotten that notion across to me, Mrs. Walker would reach over and pinch my cheek.

We wouldn’t stay long. I used to think that it would have been nice to play with Mrs. Walker’s kids, who had tons of board games on their couch, and the girls skipped rope in the living room, but my mother wouldn’t allow me to join them. Maybe one of them might have a cold without knowing it, and, in any case, there was a mustiness about that apartment, perhaps from all the old stuff that constantly accrued in the place, which must have struck my mother as unsanitary. So we’d head back downstairs, la muda talking up a garbled storm from her door, a nagging sensation bugging me that I had missed out on some fun once again, and the smell of that nicely cooking steak still in my nostrils.

On some evenings, my father cooked for his pals—steaks with onions and French fries or a simple platter of fried chorizos and eggs—dishes they managed to gobble down even while they continued to smoke (puff of cigarette, bite of food). My father always sent those fellows, wobbly legged and well sated by the time they’d leave, often around midnight—how they managed to get to work the next mornings, I do not know—off with a package or two of chicken or with some cold cuts, his generosity, to his mind, an important part of his very Cuban way of being.

Since we lived near the university, we were sometimes visited by a Cuban professor of the classics, a lonely-seeming baldheaded fellow of middle age, from Cienfuegos, by the name of Alfonso Reina, whom my father had happened to meet one afternoon while walking back from the subway across the campus. The professor always turned up with flowers for my mother and bonbons for her “preciosos” Cuban boys, though I could never have any. His overt gayness, the way his eyes would melt looking at my father and he’d always ask my older brother for a kiss on his mouth, somewhat disturbed my pop, who, in his old Cuban ways, felt somewhat uncomfortable with the fellow’s homosexuality but nevertheless welcomed him into our home for a meal and drinks, as long as there was someone else around, like his friend, the sturdily manly (if occasionally falling apart) Frankie the exterminator, as a buffer. He also welcomed into our kitchen one hell of a blessed fellow, from 119th Street, one Teddy Morgenbesser, formerly of Brooklyn, who worked in the accounts office of the La Prensa newspaper syndicate and had lucked out by falling in love with a bombshell Dominican babe, a certain Belen Ricart, who had two kids and with whom he lived outside of marriage. Jewish, he’d gotten so Hispanicized by her—and from a pretty active nightlife in the dance halls of the 1950s—that he spoke only Spanish in our home. But from what I could tell, he, with his dark hair parted in the middle, dark eyes, and Xavier Cugat mustache, as well as his way of wearing guayaberas whenever possible, seemed quite Cuban, and since I only knew him as Teddy, I assumed that was the case.

My father sometimes took me over to his place. He’d decorated the apartment to resemble, I suppose, an apartment in Havana, with bright fabrics on his art deco furniture, tons of (rubber) palm plants, and hanging beads in the doorways. He had a console on which he played only Latin records, and mostly the big-band mambo music of the 1950s, along with all kinds of folkloric Cuban music, obscure stuff he’d hunted down in Harlem.

On one of those occasions, two things happened that I obviously haven’t forgotten. As I was sitting there one afternoon watching the adults drinking away, my father had Teddy pour me a glass of strong red Spanish wine so that I might try it—why he did so, I don’t know—but it tasted awful to me; I couldn’t imagine why anyone would bother to drink such a bitter thing. (“He’s too young for that,” my father had ruefully concluded.) Later that same afternoon, Teddy, who owned a reel-to-reel tape recorder, conducted, I guess for posterity’s sake, what amounted to an interview entirely in español with my father, during which my father, his face aglow, spoke at length about his early days in Cuba, his life on the farms on which he had been raised, and, in effect, a rather straightforward history of his family and of what must have been much happier times, my father attentively noting the death of one of his younger sisters at the age of two from a fever (his eyes welling up), and on along a meandering road of nostalgia and even more tears, to the sad passing of his older brother, Oscar, which, in such moments, he seemed not to have recovered from.

“He was my life, and my blood, who taught me everything I know,” he said, patting his chest, which had started to heave, at which point, Teddy, having gotten enough down, concluded the session lest my father get more carried away. Now, if it might seem unlikely for me to recall such exact words from so long ago, I won’t dispute that I am perhaps approximating at least the spirit of what he said, but I am now only mentioning this at all to lament the fact that, all these years later, for the life of me, I can’t remember the tone and timbre of my father’s voice, which remains always soft but indistinct. (As a further aside, about twenty-five years later, long after my father had died, I bumped into Teddy on a bus, and among the things we talked about, I asked him if, by some distant chance, he had any of those old tapes around. The answer, unfortunately, was no, to my deepest disappointment, for I would have given my right arm to have heard my father’s voice again.)

Occasionally, if there had been a banquet at the hotel, he’d come home with a box or two of fancy pastries, two dozen chocolate éclairs, and as many creamy napoleons; these too were forbidden to me. It was worse on holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, when my father would turn up with a twenty-pound turkey and bags of stuffing, which my mother served with sweet potatoes, garlic-drenched yucca, and fried plantains, people coming over to join us, people eating away, while I’d sit off with some carefully prepared chicken and the usual roundup of boiled vegetables. At least my father was sensitive to my gnawing desires, and the way I’d look at him as he’d sit down before a plate of filet mignon smothered in onions. It bothered him enough that, now and then, he’d ask my mother if she was sure I couldn’t at least have a little taste of something different from my usual fare, but she, forced to play the heavy, always reminded him of the fact that, as far as the doctors were concerned, I was still sick, and susceptible to many bad things. He’d nod, smile sadly at me, give a little shrug, and then send me off to bed, where the aroma remained so strong that I could hardly sleep.

So for the longest time, the scent of frying plantains killed me. Not once for several years did I consume anything as lively as a quivery slice of flan, the one dessert my mother cooked, and wonderfully so. And while my parents occasionally sprang for a bar of sugarless chocolate for my delectation, the kind of chalky pasteboard confection intended for old folks and diabetics, every so often a two-pound block of dark German chocolate, over which I would salivate, would turn up in our kitchen. This I’d forlornly watch my brother happily devouring, chunk by chunk. My only consolation came from the fact that my papi, feeling for me, often had some ten-cent comic book that he’d bought for me in Grand Central, usually a Superboy or a Flash, which I think he chose because of their torero-red cape and costume. As soon as I’d hear his keys jingling in the door, I’d run down the hall to greet him, his smell of cologne, cigarettes, and meat intact, and find the comic book rolled up in one of his coat pockets; but before he’d hand it over, he’d lean down and say, “Dame un abrazito”—“Give me a hug” (or “Dame un besito, chiquito”), and once I had, into my room I’d go to follow, as best I could since I could not yet read, the adventures of those heroes by looking carefully at the panels, an act that always remained a high point of my boring days.

In those years, my father seemed not to know what to make of me. I can only recall his kindness, and with the biases I eventually developed toward my mother because of language, I got so attached to him that I came to rewrite my history in the hospital. Little as I remembered about my stay in Connecticut, I just couldn’t imagine that he hadn’t ever come to visit me during that time. Fabricating his presence in memory, I’d remember my pop in a trench coat and hat, with the smell of rain and cigarettes and cologne about him, standing by the visiting room doorway and smiling gently at me. I’d see him nodding at those other parents, their faces grown taut by worries, and then, inside that room, holding out his arms to me.

What drove that version, which I’d cling to years later after he was gone, came down to the fact that, however flawed the man might have been, he possessed an abundance of down-home Cuban warmth.

Altogether, he was a funny cat, un tipo bueno, a tender and affectionate man who had his ways. Once when he had to attend a formal wedding and concluded that his two-tone shoes were too scuffed for the occasion, he covered them over with black enamel paint. And when, in his late forties, he began to get slightly nearsighted and, at first, didn’t want to bother with an optometrist, he made do with a pair of glasses that someone had left behind in the bar. (They seem to have worked for a while.) At the hotel, he played the weekly numbers, never winning but kept paying out a dollar a week every Friday for many years, mainly to help out the black man hawking them, a Korean war veteran who had a hook for a right hand. He collected pennies, keeping them in special blue albums, perhaps thinking that they might one day make him rich. He never read books, having neither the time nor patience for them. What he did read: the Hotel and Club Voice newspaper, the Daily News, and El Diario. Also the occasional brochure that someone at the bar had given him, brochures about “Dream Vacation Homes” in New Jersey and on the value of Korean pearls as an investment opportunity being two that I recall. I can remember him far more for his tenderness toward me, at least when I was a kid, than for anything else, but all the while, he had an air of resignation about him and little patience for waiting things out, even gambling. Once, years later, when he took me over to the bazaar at Corpus Christi School and we played a wheel of luck, instead of putting down a few dimes on two different numbers, he put down dimes on all but a few. Of course, the number that he hadn’t bet on came out; he shrugged and we moved on. When this Puerto Rican kid, Fernando, got stabbed in the gut in a basement a few buildings away during a hassle with an Irish guy over a girl, and came staggering up the stairway, blood trailing behind him (the sidewalk would bear those stains for weeks), it was my father who went down to the corner to call the police. Afterward, he calmly sat out on the stoop, smoking and telling whoever wanted to listen about what had just happened. In other words, he could be quite laid-back, in a Cuban country boy manner.

And, as I have mentioned, he’d speak to me in English, not always, but when he did, it was with a quiet authority and without my mother’s befuddlement and confusion. Whereas my mother remained, for all her life, an ebullient woman, incapable of holding back, her nervous energies flowing all over the place, he comported himself with his younger son with a minimum of words: “Come here,” “Go on,” “What do you want?” “Ask your mother.” And, at least until things got too hard for him, he rarely showed any anger toward me or the world. I just found something comforting about him, even if I would never get to know what he was really about.

Yet, while he offered me affection, that cubano, a union man and hotel cook of simple tastes and longings, he never really taught me anything at all, not how to dress (though he could be quite dapper), nor how to dance the mambo or rumba (at which he, like my mother, had excelled), nor, among so many other things, even how to drive a car (he, raised on farms with horses, never would learn). And when it came to something as important as restoring that which had been taken from me, a sense of just who I was, I doubt that, as with my mother, it occurred to him that something inside of me was missing, an element of personality in need of repair. Earthly in his needs and desires, he just didn’t think that way. Though he never once accompanied me to a doctor and really didn’t take much care of himself, he simply must have seen me as the son he had almost lost, and, at first, for the longest time, always deferred to my mother when it came to matters of my health.

After a while, my father began to feel sorry for me. One night, I remember, when my mother was out with some friends, he could not take the wan expression that had come over my face as he stood over the stove, cooking up a steak in butter with onions, along with fried potatoes, in a skillet. Turning to me, he asked in his quiet way, “Quieres un poquito?”—“Do you want some?” And though I felt reluctant to answer him, as if to say yes would be wrong, he filled my plate anyway. Unfortunately, my stomach had grown so unaccustomed to such rich foods that not an hour later, I got deathly ill and, coming down with the shivers, had to throw everything up, and took to my bed, worried that my mother would find out; and yet, with my father telling me, “Not a word to your mother, huh?” I passed the night, reeling with the memory, however fleeting, of that delicious meal.

Naturally, I came to prefer his company, which is not to say I didn’t care for or love my mother in the same way as my father. If I felt a different kind of affection for her, it had more to do with the way she’d sometimes look at me when I’d speak to her in English, as if I were doing something wrong, or worse, as if I were some stranger’s kid trying to give her a hard time. I was too hyper to always notice, too insensitive to become morose, but I can remember occasionally wondering if I were nothing more to her than a burden that she had no choice but to contend with.

Though strict about my diet, she had her inconsistencies. Once she handed me a glass of orange juice in which I saw floating the cellophane body of a dead cockroach, its antennae curling along the surface. When I refused to drink it, she made a face, and, in one motion, picked the insect out with her fingers and threw it in the garbage. “Está bien, ahora”—“It’s fine now,” she told me. And when I still refused to as much as take a sip, she grabbed the glass off the table and emptied it into our sink, all the while muttering, “It’s like pouring money down the drain.” Turning, she scolded me, “I can’t believe how spoiled you are! We’re not like los ricos—la gente rica, after all!” Then she sat down, oblivious to just how startled and bad I felt.

On another afternoon, when we were in the kitchen, as I sat by the table across from her, eating something, she started looking at me in an odd way. And just like that, she tilted her head back and, gasping, her eyes rolled up in her head; and she cried, “Help me, hijo, I can’t breathe!”—“No puedo respirar!” Slumping forward, she laid her head in her arms, still as a corpse. What could I do but panic? My stomach went into knots, and I started, without really knowing what was going on, to tug on her dress: I felt so anxious, I thought of running over to Carmen’s for help, but, at the same time, I worried about leaving her alone, and pulling at her arm, I kept repeating, “But, Mamá, Mamá, are you okay?” That’s when I saw the crest of a smile forming on her lips, and her eyes popped open, and sitting up straight, she triumphantly told me, “Ah, but now I know that you care whether I live or die!” She was laughing while I withdrew deeply into myself, wishing I could slip into the walls: I can remember her telling me, “Pero qué te pasa? I was joking. Fue un chiste!” When she saw that I hadn’t lightened up, she waved me off, saying: “You’re too serious for so little a boy.” Then I think she pinched my cheek and, shaking her head, left the kitchen, saying, “But now I know you love me. Yes, I do. Now I know.”

Okay, so she was a bit unusual and perhaps still as mischievous as she had been as a girl. But the truth is, not having any basis for comparison, nor choice, I got used to her. Still, though she meant well, she obviously (so I now think) couldn’t help but let her resentments affect her judgment. Out of curiosity one day, I happened to ask her where I was born. And without hesitating, she said, “But, Son, don’t you know, I found you in a garbage can, right out in front.” And she took me over to the window, pointing to some cans by the railing. “It was in that one, at the end. I heard you crying and when I saw you, I thought I just had to bring you home.” And she, always inventing stories—what she called “relajos”—laughed and crossed her heart. “I swear to God that’s the truth.”

I suppose she wanted me to feel a deep gratitude; I suppose it was her way of telling me how lucky I had been to have been rescued from the hospital, but while I didn’t really believe her—for on the other hand, she was always reminding me about how she carried me in her stomach for nine months—a part of me did. Later, looking in the mirror and never really liking what I saw, I truly wondered if the truth had finally come out. Years after, every time I’d hear about that Sesame Street puppet, Oscar the Grouch, who lived in a garbage can, I’d think of that afternoon.

Not to say that my life in that household with my mother was just a misery—to the contrary, long before I had made any of my own friends, like my pal from across the street, Rich, the ladies who’d come by to see her always treated me nicely. Having a simple liking for my mother’s elemental personality, one of them, Chaclita, came by at least a few times a week. Always smelling nice from some mild eau, she wore pearls and, with her dyed blond hair and flapper wardrobe, seemed the most elegant woman to have ever entered our house. She’d bring along bags of fancy hand-me-down clothes for my mother, and, as well, little packages of the European-style marmalades left over from her trips abroad. A sunny spirit who laced her Spanish with French and always spoke of a love affair she once had with a singer named Nelson Eddy, she, in addition to concertizing, taught violin out of a flower-adorned apartment on Morningside Drive. She never had a bad thing to say about anyone, not even my father, whom she must have occasionally encountered in one of his less robust states.

In any event, it was Chaclita who made the effort to show me how to write down my own name. This she did one afternoon as we stood in the hallway, her slender (somewhat bony) hand holding my own and guiding my pencil over each letter across a pad. I did so shakily, and afterward, I couldn’t help looking at the name Oscar Hijuelos over and over again. Fascinated, and treasuring it as if it had some great value, I took that slip of paper around the apartment with me proudly, until, after I’d left the little exercise out on the kitchen table and gone away for a few moments, I returned to find that my mother had thrown it out.

But to be fair to her, my mother also tried to be my teacher, though she could barely read English. What books we had were the kinds that she either found abandoned under the hallway stairs or in boxes left out by the garbage cans in front of our stoop, tomes, for the most part, discarded by the university folks who, at one time or other, had taken temporary apartments in the building. (I recall a few medical students coming and going quickly, and for a while, there was a kindly Lebanese professor, prematurely balding, with two little children, living up on the second floor—I think he was a widower because of the way he doted on the little ones—I can remember him winking at me as I’d watch him speaking with my father from our door.) Among the titles my mother collected for our hallway bookcase: a fancy edition of Oliver Twist with half of its gold-leafed pages missing, a biology textbook, a volume or two of some outdated encyclopedia, a hardcover copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, circa 1930 (which I still have to this day), and other choice sundries like Agricultural Development in the Middle United States, 1954–1955, all of which, I think, she brought home mainly because she thought they might be worth something; but she also treated them, at the very least, like decorations, along the lines of the other bric-a-brac that my mother, who could not pass an item left out on the sidewalk, also brought into the apartment.

My lessons, if they can be called that, unfolded with the aid not of children’s stories of the Dick and Jane variety, nor any of the classics like The Little Engine That Could or of the Golden series, but rather the comics, which my mother called “funny books.” My brother, working in a local stationer’s, brought some home regularly, as did my father, but we also got some from a teenager named Michael Komisky, later a Catholic missionary priest, who lived in the building next door. A gentle and idealistic soul, his comics were not about crime or adventure but featured animal stars like Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, and Felix the Cat. These my mother found the easiest to understand. In a tender way, as I think about it now, the afternoons we spent sitting by the kitchen table or lying side by side on her bed, with such comics opened before us, were our most peaceful and unhurried, though I’m still not sure what to make of those lessons in which my mother did her best to improve her quite minimal English alongside me. Just the same, she tried.

“Felis, wh . . . whar . . . whers ar-ray . . . jew . . . jew gaw-gaweeng?” And then, she’d stop and say, “Dejame ver”—“Let’s see now”—and begin the same line again, “Felix, where are you going?” her pronunciation as confounding to me as before. Our movement from caption to balloon, and panel to panel, was always glacially slow, but I didn’t mind those lessons at all: I don’t know what or how much I learned from hearing the words of Felix (“Yes, I will take this rocket ship to the moon!”) as they fell from her lips, but my mother’s attempts to meet me midway, as it were, along with her struggles and out-and-out bursts of laughter—from finally understanding what the heck was being said—constituted the only moments that we were together as mother and son when my supposed frailness, my susceptibility to infections, my illness, and all the anxieties she attached to me were thankfully absent as a subject of our conversation.

Of course, I had other moments with her, when, forgetting all the crap I’d put her through, she occasionally became almost tender toward me. During a time when she worked cleaning up after a kindergarten school on 116th Street in the evenings, I’d accompany her, passing the hours playing with blocks in a corner, while she, not really knowing how to clean at all, went about singing to herself most happily, dusting the furniture and washing the floors and bathrooms until about ten o’clock, when, her work completed, she’d take a few moments and sit down behind the upright piano to pick out, by ear, some tunes she remembered from Cuba. (They always put her in a good mood; walking home, she always seemed a different kind of lady, lighthearted and laughing.) And in the autumns, during a soporific late afternoon rain, falling asleep by her side, I’d feel her pulling me close to her and, sensing her soft breathing, I’d drift off into the most wonderful of dreams. “Qué tranquilo y sabroso, eh?” she’d say. “How tranquil and delicious this is!” Later, in unexpectedly good spirits, she’d take me into our narrow bathroom and, singing gaily, wash my hair over the bathtub, the warm spray pouring down on my head, her fingers massaging my scalp, an unexpected maternal sweetness overwhelming me: Everything about that process, from the smell of her perfume and shampoo and the proximity of her body, in its warmth, as she pressed ever so slightly against me, seemed so pleasurable that whenever she washed my hair, I never wanted it to end—and not just for the little niceties of being pampered but because, during such moments, I’d somehow feel a continuity with her past.

“Te gusta?” she’d ask me. “Good! At least your mamá is doing one thing right!”

And she’d laugh and dream aloud: “I’m doing it for you the same way my mamá did it for me, in Cuba.” Then: “If it feels so good, it’s because your abuelita taught me, hijo.” Afterward, she’d towel my head off, stand me in front of a mirror, and comb my hair. Looking me over, she’d rap my back and say: “Ya está!”—“Just fine!”

One afternoon—I was seven—a letter arrived from Cuba, in a nearly weightless envelope. She opened it by the window, at a time of the day when the sun had risen over the tenement buildings across the street, and light came flooding into the living room. Kids were on the street; I could hear them shouting, a ball hit during a stickball game, a car honking, someone calling out, “Run, Tommy, run, ya dumb fuck!” when all at once, as she read down the page, she stopped and looked up, and said, “Ay pero mi mamá, mi mamá.” She shrank within herself just then—I’d never seen her looking so petite; she wasn’t—and began to softly cry, shaking her head, murmuring to herself. Not knowing what to do, I went over to her, asking, “What is it?” But, as she stood in that shaft of light, she kept on weeping until, just as suddenly, she gathered herself and, touching my face, told me: “Mi mamá se murío.” Then, in her English, “Jour abuelita, she is now in heaven.”

As for my homeschooling, I think that period of studying with my mother lasted for perhaps a year and a half or so, until there came the point when—my father had probably pushed for it—my mother, reluctantly believing that keeping me at home wouldn’t do me much good, finally enrolled me in a first-grade class at the local Catholic school, Corpus Christi, run by wimpled Sinsinawa Dominican nuns. The school itself was situated on the Broadway side of 121st Street, just across the way from the Teachers College complex of old turn-of-the-century buildings, its classrooms taking up three floors above the church where I had been baptized, with a rectory where the nuns lived way above.

This happened late into the year so that I had only a few months of schooling at that level. It was just as well—I’d felt terrified and not at all used to being around other children, let alone such an ethnic mix, for the kids in that school, just as in the neighborhood, included blacks and Puerto Ricans and Cubans, as well as Irish and Italians, among others. I felt, from the start, with my mother by my side, tremendously self-conscious and uncomfortable, not just because I’d been apart from normal kids for so long, but because of the way I’d come to believe that there was something wrong with me, for not a day had gone by when my mother hadn’t reminded me that my body, like the world, was filled with poisons.

Just being out of the apartment on a regular basis threw me, and in my social awkwardness, I must have struck most of those kids as something of a lost soul. Though I had enjoyed the odd outing with my family into someone’s home, going to school scared me, and my face must have shown it. I can recall always feeling out of sorts. In my quietude, I just seemed different from the other kids, down to my unusual last name, Hijuelos, and the face and complexion that didn’t seem to go with it. Neither the Irish nor the Spanish-speaking kids knew what to make of me. Given my timidity, as if I’d have preferred to disappear into the walls like a ghost, and, as well, the fact that I didn’t have any real inkling how to read, my situation wasn’t helped by my mother, who made sure that everyone knew about my condition. While the other kids were dropped off by the entryway doors below, she not only walked me up to my classroom each morning, on those days when the weather permitted me to go to school at all, but, in her broken English, told my first teacher—I believe her name was Sister Mary Pierce—that I was still a very sick child and that I had to be watched over carefully. My fellow students would have probably noticed this without the two cents she’d deliver by the doorway: “My son, he is not so good in the kidneys.” And when I had gotten upset one day because the sister asked that we come to class with a ten-cent box of Crayolas, which my mother claimed she could not afford because we were “poor,” as I sat forlornly in the classroom, later that morning, my mother, having changed her mind, turned up with a box of those crayons in hand. These she delivered at the door, but not without cheerfully announcing to everyone, “Mi niño, Oscarito, he was crying and crying for them.” (I remember feeling stunned with embarrassment and wishing that I could turn into a bird and fly from that room.)

I still missed days, especially if it rained or snowed or if I showed the slightest signs of any fatigue. That my mother refused to let me out of the apartment in the bad weather must have seemed pathetic to some of the kids, but the sisters were more forgiving. (Maybe they thought she was a little troubled and felt sorry for me.) As I got around to becoming, more or less, a full-time student, my mind always wandering, I would feel confused about whatever the nuns were teaching us, as if some part of me deep inside couldn’t help but cling to a notion that I was stupid, mainly because I couldn’t get my mother’s voice out of my head. It took me a while to fall into stride there, having already turned into an overly cautious and suspicious child, somewhat rigid in my ways. For the first few years, I preferred to be quiet during our classes, which began after we’d recited our morning prayers (an “Our Father,” a “Hail Mary,” and the Credo) and the pledge of allegiance, whose words I could never quite get straight. Having started out later than most kids, I lived in dread of being called on, and lacking self-confidence, I always felt that I had to play catch-up when it came to reading and writing, over which I agonized, all the while thinking that I wasn’t very smart. And not just because I was often too distracted by my own anxieties to concentrate well, but out of some sense that my mother and father’s limitations, when it came to English, had become my own: Just attempting to read—anything really—I’d feel as if I had to swim a long distance through murky water to fathom the meaning, and, at the same time, though I eventually improved, shell-shocked though I was, I always had the sense that the language was verboten to me, as if I needed special permission from someone to take it seriously. No matter how hard I tried, or how well I did on the tests, I secretly believed that my mind was essentially second-rate—all the other kids just seemed brighter than me.

Told to paint a picture of a house in a field during the sessions that passed as art class, I tended toward using a single color, like green, as if to venture into a variety of colors, like the other kids, remained somehow beyond me. My brushstrokes were clumsy, too wide and sloppy, which was particularly vexing to me, since my brother, José, had not only always possessed an artistic temperament but had already, as a somewhat worldly streetwise teen, begun drawing quite well—for he was already getting locally known as an artist. I also lacked his fine singing voice, having failed to please our well-known choirmaster, a certain Mr. MacDonald, who during an afternoon audition turned me away with disappointment. And as I mentioned in passing before, I couldn’t see very well, already squinting and barely making out what the nuns wrote in chalk on the board. It took a while for anyone to notice my nearsightedness, and once my mother began to suspect that something was wrong with my vision, she, holistically minded, or believing in the old wives’ tale, resorted to feeding me a bag of carrots a day for months, before finally taking me down to a union optometrist on Twenty-seventh Street, who, for five dollars (upon presentation of a union card), fitted me with my first pair of awfully thick-lensed eyeglasses, my vision so far gone by then that just seeing things as they really were seemed a revelation.

Nevertheless, those eyeglasses, however helpful, added another unwelcome dimension to my self-image: four-eyes. I already had to live with kids calling me an Oscar Mayer Wiener, and though my name would later invite more pleasant permutations among my friends, like Oscar Wilde, Oscar Petersen, and Oscar Robinson, among others, I could never stand it: The name that now seems far more elegant because of my uncle’s importance to my family in Cuba, which I wasn’t even really aware of back then, became something I never felt proud about as a kid. In fact, I can recall feeling envious over a cowboy’s name on Rawhide, a show my father liked to watch at night on one of the second- or third-hand television sets he’d buy from a used appliance shop in Harlem. The show’s main character was called Sugarfoot, and I suffered greatly that my parents hadn’t named me something that wonderful. (Years later, when I first thought I might publish somewhere, I seriously considered adopting the nom du plume Oliver Wells, and to jump even farther ahead, during the kind of journey I could never have imagined making as a child, I signed my name on the guest registry of the archeological museum in Ankara, Turkey, as Alexander Nevsky, the kind of thing I’d do from time to time.)

I never dallied in front of mirrors for long, and when I did, the face staring back at me through the half-moon wells of distorting glass seemed as if it should belong to someone else, not an Hijuelos. (I hated looking at myself: Once, after I’d somehow gotten hold of a water gun, I went around the apartment shooting out any lightbulbs that happened to be near a mirror—oh, but the beating I got for that.) That feeling used to hit me particularly hard when, during the rare outing with both my mother and father into the outside world—a trip by subway to Queens to see my cousin Jimmy and his beautiful wife, María, or up to the Bronx, where my papi liked to hang out with his fun-loving friends on evenings so long they drove my mother into fits of despair—I always felt dismayed and vaguely saddened by seeing our reflections in any sun-drenched window: For while I could “read” my parents’ faces easily, their dark features so clearly defined, my own, whitewashed by light, seemed barely discernible. Put that idiosyncrasy together with the fact that I was too aware of my body, that cumbersome thing that had gotten all messed up and needed special care and medicines, I sat in the classrooms of Corpus with such self-consciousness that I hardly ever relaxed or felt at ease like the others.

Along the way, however, I experienced my first publication, the moon ditty that appears earlier here in the epigraph. In its simplicity, it says a lot about me back then, and predicts (I think) my later life view. Just something I had scribbled down during class, it ended up in Maryknoll magazine—the sisters had sent it to their missions in Africa, South America, Hawaii, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Formosa, and Japan, as an “example of the originality and imagination of a fifth grader.” (Mainly, I am amazed that it’s one of the few things my mother kept of my doings from those years.)

There’s not much more about my childhood schooling to tell, except to say that, in some essential sense, I somehow got through it alone. I read all the books we were supposed to read, though I don’t remember any now, and magazines like Highlife and Maryknoll. On certain afternoons, we had readings from the Bible, which I loved. My favorite story was of Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt, but Moses’s epic tale, from his abandonment as a baby in the reed marshes of Egypt to his last days on a mountain overlooking Jericho, from whose summit he spied the promised land, before dying, broke my heart—and I took that book’s stories as pure history, burning bushes, water struck from a stone, descending angels, and all. (Another favorite involved a tale from the book of Daniel, in which the evil Babylonian king witnesses God’s own disembodied hand scrawling out words on the wall, the kind of thing I often waited for to happen at night when, unable to sleep, and hearing voices from down the hall, I’d get spooked by the Rorshachian shapes made by the bad plastering in my bedroom.)

Nothing, however, seemed more straightforward than Father O’Reilly’s Baltimore Catechism, which, wrapped in blue covers, contained the simple truths that we children were expected to learn and abide by, lest we one day experience the fires of hell. A simple question (“Why do we pray?”) was followed by a simple answer (“Because God hears us”). In that manner, as I recall, it offered explanations of sin, salvation, and the immortality of the soul and, as if out of a fairy tale, did not skimp on its depictions of the devil, who came across vividly in wonderfully simple but graphic black-and-white ink renderings as a hoofed, betailed, soot-faced creature with pinched backpointed ears, crooked bat wings, and long talons for fingers, holding a pitchfork or else cringing in fear and revulsion when confronted with true sanctity. I believed in the devil as well and, somewhat of a blank slate, took to heart all the other dictums we were taught. (By the time I received my First Communion at the age of ten, I truly thought that my state of grace so guaranteed an entry into heaven that, with a child’s optimism, I’d think it wouldn’t be so bad if I were to be run over by a truck.)

I’d always absorbed religion. For one of the first things I’d ever heard, predating my illness, came down to this: “Hay un Dios,”—“There is a God.” A God to be respected and feared, a God who ruled the universe through the wisdom of His ways. I don’t remember hearing that He, the Father, had ever been a kindly God—that was reserved for His son—but, on the other hand, as my mother used to put it, we owed this world—our very existence—to him, “el Señor.” Even if He’d kind of fucked me, at least in terms of what I had once been or was on the cusp of becoming, I truly believed that His presence was as certain as the air I breathed. And why wouldn’t I, spending so much time as I did with my mother? In some ways she really went for Catholicism: At the beginning of Lent, a cross made by ashes graced her forehead; on Palm Sunday, strands of dried palm reconfigured as a crucifix were put up on the wall as a reminder of what was to come; Good Friday brought the three o’clock gloom, when, I swear, the world seemed to go dark at that exact moment when Jesus was said to have died.

Easter, however, brought the greatest joy, as holy days went. Even to a little kid, it seemed wonderful that the misery of death was transcended by the flower and sunburst triumphs of the resurrection. And it was fun. I recall that even my father attended the Easter services, my brother singing with the choir for the High Mass, the three of us dressed to the nines, going off together to get lost in that rarified atmosphere of incense and flowers, all the while taking in the mysterious and chilling mystical incantations of the Latin (which my mother always appreciated and possibly understood better than the sermons, which were recited in English). Sweetest of all, for a sick kid like myself, I always felt happy—and curious—to see the other children in their Sunday best, their shoes spanking clean, their hair nicely combed, as they sat up in the balcony, facing the altar, in their own separate section. I enjoyed the sense of being around them, of almost seeming to be a part of a group, even if we sat far away: Quite simply, I often felt alone, though it wasn’t as bad in church, where, at the very least, I could count on the company of the angels and saints.

I even had a guardian angel, whom I’d always envisioned as a sword-yielding being of indeterminate sex, with flaxen hair and enormous wings, and Jesus himself, whose picture, which I always admired and felt fascinated by, hung in the hall.

Inevitably, I always went, however, my mother tugging at my hands, indignant over what she thought of as my ingratitude. She seemed to believe that I never appreciated the stuff she’d gone through for me—“What do you think I am, a witch?” Now, when I had to abandon my comic books or when she’d disrupted my reveries, which were mainly about becoming like the other kids, and I wasn’t in the right mood, I sometimes fled down the hall from her. I’m pretty sure that she first slapped me in the face on one of those days, when, cornering me and fed up with having to chase me around, she really let me have it, the ritual of punishment, or the threat of it, becoming a part of those outings. While heading out for our clinic visits, she didn’t help matters by telling me, “Don’t forget, hijo, that you almost died.”

One winter, I was about nine, it was snowing, and just that short trek to the pediatric ward of St. Luke’s Hospital on 114th Street required that I get bundled up in a hundred layers as if we were on an outing to the Siberian tundra. I felt manhandled as my mother pulled tight my coat and out we went, down the block, and, as we’d round the corner, heaven forbid I’d stop, enchanted by the soda shop window, where some new cheap toys had been put on display. “We don’t have time for that, nor the money,” she told me. “One day, when you get better, you can look at whatever you want, but you’re still sick and weak—muy débil y enfermo—and whether you like it or not, we’re going to the hospital.”

On any given day, it was jammed full with row after row of mothers and their kids, mostly black and Latino from the projects and Spanish Harlem and even farther uptown, folks who seemed far poorer than ourselves. (My father, after all, had a job.) There just weren’t too many white kids around, and, turning heads as we walked in, as if I gave off some bad smell or perhaps because my mother, without realizing it, tended to look upon people of color in a somewhat aloof way, I felt a distinct discomfort every time we had to go there. Aside from that, however, I just never liked having a thermometer stuck up my ass, nor blood taken, nor peeing into a little paper cup behind a curtain while a nurse looked on.

And there were the hours we spent before we’d see any doctors. In those pre-Medicaid days, hospitals like St. Luke’s operated on a sliding scale and were in effect, with their steep discounting, much like public health and union-sponsored clinics when it came to treating the more financially disadvantaged folks who had no doctors of their own. The visits cost two dollars, the medicines and tests somewhat more, though not much, but the price for such a good deal—and, believe me, there were mothers in those crowds who couldn’t pay even those cheap fees—required that one wait and wait and wait. An eleven o’clock appointment could mean that you might get seen at four, and, as the cutoff seemed to be around five, I can recall more than a few occasions when, after so long a wait, we were told to come back the next day.

C’est la vie, at least with some.

Nevertheless, during those waits, my mother always managed to find some kindred Latina spirit to sit next to, so that they might talk about life and, often enough, the health issues affecting their children. “My son is a diabetic,” one might say, or “My daughter has a murmur in her heart,” but for whatever reason, my mother, loving any modicum of sympathy, and quite charming when she wanted to be, took a particular pride in trumping the others when it came to me: “Mi hijo, casi se murío de una infección de los riñones”—“My son nearly died from an infection of the kidneys,” she’d say, a nearly penitent and saintly manner coming over her. “Fue muy muy grave [He was very grave]—it’s a miracle that he’s even alive.” And she’d make the sign of the cross, glory be to God in the highest. I tended to feel embarrassed by such remarks, perhaps even more so because they were rendered in Spanish, and that embarrassment deepened when, suddenly, one of these ladies whom my mother inevitably befriended, while noticing how I seemed to have tuned out, leaned close to her, quizzically asking, “Pero habla español?”—“He speaks Spanish, doesn’t he?” a query to which she usually replied, “Un poquito,” her eyes looking afar, her head shaking.

“He spent too much time in a hospital when he was little.” And confiding more, she’d add: “Es más americano.”

For my part, I’d either fidget around, wondering why, if that was so, it seemed something that I should be ashamed about, or, even given that it happened to be true, how I had become so. Though it defined me in those days, that Cuban illness seemed, by my lights, to have always been there, this black hole from which, as if out of a fairy tale, I had crawled into as a little cubano and, after a deep sleep, had emerged as something else: a young prince in the making turned into a freak.

When the nurse, usually Irish, finally called us to the front desk for our appointment, we often suffered from the slight indignity of hearing the pronunciation of our last name mangled: Hijuelos, a rare enough Spanish appellation, came out as Hidgewellos, Hidgejewloos, and worse. One thing about my mother, having her pride, she took personal offense at the error, often making a point of pronouncing the name properly over and over again for the nurse, so that she might not repeat it the same way (“Okay, okay, lady, what do you want from me?”—as if she, or anyone else, could not care less).

And off we would go, to sit in yet another room, in the pediatric wing up on the next floor. Its waiting room walls, as I recall, were cheerfully decorated with large flowers and suns and bumblebees, and, depending on the time of the year, the nurses would put up cutouts of Halloween pumpkins, of witches on brooms, and pictures of Santa Claus, snowflakes, and holiday trees at Christmas. That room seemed nicer than the one below: At least they had piles of comics and Golden Book fairy tales for me to look at, and I always felt intruded upon when we would be finally called in for my examination.

Our appointments always began with an interview. None of the doctors spoke Spanish, but there always seemed to be a Puerto Rican nurse around to help things along.

“Anything unusual going on with him?” she’d ask my mother in Spanish.

“No,” my mother answered, looking down chastely.

“Is he sleeping well?”

“Yes,” she would answer, which wasn’t quite true, but since I suffered regularly from nightmares, I suppose it wasn’t anything my mother cared to share.

“And did you bring along the sample?”

“Ah, sí.” And my mother would pull out this plastic container from a paper bag, which she, waiting outside the bathroom door, had me fill the morning or evening before. I could never bear to look at it and felt anxious and ashamed as hell when my mother handed it over to the nurse, as, aside from my sense of violated privacy, the sample might contain enough microbios to put me back in the hospital.

The doctors were always brisk: They’d examine me all over, and on one of those visits, it was discovered that I suffered from psoriasis, just like my father did. Then I’d get on a scale. I always weighed too much, a mystery since I was supposed to be on a strict diet. The hematology tests were the worst, however—I hated the tube tied around my forearm, the deep pricking that followed, and the sight of my blood filling up the hypodermic, but at least that aversion to needles would one day keep me from becoming a heroin addict like so many of the kids in my neighborhood. Sometimes, a more arcane series of tests, taking up much of the day, required that I go to the nephrology ward. That usually took up another hour or two, and we’d sit around in that room, facing other children, their worried-looking parents beside them, while my mother, hopeful that another Latina might be among them, carefully sized them up. More than once I’d seen her lean forward and, smiling at a “swarthy”-looking Italian or Greek woman, say something to her in Spanish, only to sit back, sucking in air through her lips, in disappointment.

That winter afternoon, my mother had caught wind from a nurse that a nearby room had been occupied by a Latino just recently admitted to the hospital for nephritis, and for some reason, after I had finished with my ordeal and we had gathered our coats, she insisted that we drop in on him to say hello. His wife and two children were in the room beside him. A handsome man with a wonderful smile, he already had an IV line hooked up to his right arm, but, aside from the fact that his face had turned deeply red, as if he had been baking in the sun, he didn’t particularly look sick to me. Once my mother introduced herself—“Soy la Señora Hijuelos, but you can call me Madgalena”—she began peppering him with questions about what he did and where he had come from (second-generation Dominican, a car salesman in Queens by trade, I seem to recall) and pulled me over to his bed saying, “Mira, Ernesto, this is my son. He has nefreetees too,” she said, as if I still had it, and as if that fact, if still true, would hold a special meaning for him. “But he is already getting much better than he was—as I am sure you will too. Los médicos son muy sabios. The doctors are very wise.”

“Gracias, señora, for saying so,” he told her.

A good-natured fellow, with a young and shapely wife, who looked to me both hopeful and on the verge of tears, he wanted to shake my hand, but he did so with difficulty and weakly, for he could barely lift his arm up. Nonetheless, he smiled kindly, and with that, as a nurse appeared by the door, we left the room, but not before my mother told him, “Have faith in God—you will get better!” And to his wife, she said: “They will fix him in no time, I promise you that!” The wife smiled, nodded gratefully, and with that, my mother, feeling as if she had done them some good, took hold of my hand and guided me down the hall. “What a nice man—with such a nice family,” she kept repeating ever so cheerfully in earshot of the room, before falling silent. In the elevator, descending to the main floor, however, my mother began shaking her head and repeating, with a little click of her tongue, “Ay, pero el pobrecito. Oh, but that poor man. Did you see how scared he looks? And how bad he seems? Oh, but I don’t have a good feeling about him at all. Oh, I hope he doesn’t die,” she said, confiding, “but he probably will.”

And that was all. At the doors opening to the main lobby, I almost didn’t mind it when my mother went about the ritual of pulling on my galoshes, buttoning my coat, securing my bufanda snugly around my neck, and tying, as she always did, the hood ever so tightly, because once we left that sterile place and passed through its revolving doors and out onto the sidewalk, as a snowplow pushed slowly along the avenue, through the carbon blueness of upper Manhattan at five thirty or so, with the buildings across the way resembling misted and barely lit palaces, that most lovely and soul-cleansing of things in this world, snow, was falling everywhere around us.

Behind this recollection is another, of sitting in that same ward one day when I was about twelve and noticing, just across that room, an auburn-haired girl who seemed awfully familiar. She also looked at me in the same searching manner: She wore braces and, in pigtails, with brightened cheeks, had greenish eyes that I seemed to have seen before. My mother noticed her as well and, realizing something, told me: “But don’t you recognize that girl? Don’t you remember her? It’s Theresa from that time when you were in the hospital! You used to play together.” She was sitting beside her mother, a somewhat prim and anxious woman, and once my mother had figured things out, she smiled, saying in her best English: “Theresa—this is my son, Oscar, from the hospital,” and with that, Theresa smiled and, standing up, startled me—not only because she too, sitting in that ward, had the same lost air about her but because, though she was quite thin from her waist up, I could see that beneath the hem of her violet dress, her ankles were badly swollen. Of course, she was there to receive a dialysis treatment, and, truthfully, she did not seem too happy about that—how could she have been? Still, I did my best to hold a conversation with her: I think it came down to “How have you been doing?” To which she responded with a shrug; and while I sat beside her for a few minutes and I thought we might become friends, I still felt, at the same time, so awkward—and ashamed—of my year in that hospital that I could barely think of anything else to say.

“But you’re okay?” I finally asked her.

“I guess so,” she answered, shrugging again.

But I knew better, even then: A funny thing, I could almost feel the sickness of her kidneys emanating from her lower back, and from her expression, as if she wanted to cry but couldn’t, I saw that she felt trapped by a physical condition that, in her case, had never really improved—and she knew it. At the same time, however, as much as I vaguely recalled playing with her, I really didn’t feel a thing for Theresa, my emotions about that hospital stay too raw to revisit, muted. It was probably the same from her end, and so we just sat together for a while, until she was called inside. I never even learned where she lived and have no idea now of what happened to her, for I never saw her again.

That image fades into a conversation between my mother and father one night, a few years after I’d started school. Because I was such a nervous sleeper, they’d sometimes let me fall asleep in their bedroom, just off the kitchen. I’d take that opportunity to listen to the television shows that sounded in the courtyard from the windows of our upstairs neighbors: The Jack Benny Show is the one I remember in this instance, a particular episode in which Mr. Benny and his butler, Rochester, discuss what sort of Christmas gifts they should get for Mr. Benny’s friends—“How ’bout a hoss for John Wayne, boss!” Rochester asks in his cheerfully raspy voice; at the same time, my mother and father had started discussing some insurance policy they’d taken out for me. Assuming that I didn’t understand Spanish well enough for them to veil their words, their conversation went as follows:

“Ten dollars a month is a lot of money,” my father said. “He seems healthy enough.”

“Oh, but, Pascual, what are you thinking? Don’t you remember what the doctors told us about his nephritis?” my mother asked. “The kidneys can go anytime again from an infection.”

“I know, I know, but he seems so much better,” my father said. “And he doesn’t look so bloated as before.”

“Okay, so what?” my mother told him. “He’s only better because I’ve kept him on that special diet, and the medicines.... I’ll tell you I’m sick of being the witch—when I come to him with his pills, he hates me. How do you think that makes me feel?”

“Yes, I know,” my father said. “But do you really believe he’s going to get sick again? I don’t think so, and, mi vida, that monthly bill is killing me. So why don’t we let it go?”

He lit a cigarette: Someone must have given him a Ronson lighter, or he’d found it left behind at the hotel bar. Its metallic lid clicked shut.

“Why? Why?” she cried out. “Because if he dies and we have no insurance, how will we pay for him?”

“Maybe the union will help,” my father said calmly.

“Your union is spit,” she told him. “And anyway, what would the insurance company give us back?”

“One hundred and fifty dollars. Maybe a little more.”

“On a fifteen-hundred-dollar policy?” she asked. “After all the money we’ve been paying for him all this time?”

“Yes, that’s what the fellow said. I talked to him today.”

“But, Pascual, I don’t know,” she said. “Do we really need it that bad?”

“We always need money,” he told her.

“And for what?” She clicked her tongue. “So that you can spend it on your friends?”

“Please, woman, don’t start,” he told her in the strongest manner he could muster when he hadn’t been drinking. “It’s just something we could do. That’s all I mean. Think about it, huh?”

“Yes, think about it—as if what I think matters to you?” she went on. Then, after deliberating a bit: “Do whatever you want,” she finally told him. “But if he dies, you and your drunk pals can get some shovels and bury him in the park. You know?”

“No, no, Magdalencita,” my father told her, exasperated. “It’s not going to happen that way. Tomorrow, I will call the agent and see what we can do about the policy. And please, don’t look at me that way—I just don’t think he’s going to die, and that money will help us in the end, okay? Maybe I can buy you something nice.”

“Yes, something nice,” she muttered.

To be honest, once I sort of put what they were saying together, that they were talking about a burial insurance policy, it startled me. I thought about every single picture I’d seen of Jesus being laid in his tomb, and how the priest at church, with his scarlet complexion and rosy cheeks, sermonizing from the pulpit, said things like “Dead, though we may turn to dust, we shall rise again” and all of that, mixed up with Mr. Benny and my parents’ voices, somehow left me picturing my interment in Riverside Park (though I would have settled for the woods along one of the terraced walkways of Morningside). And so naturally, I couldn’t help but call out, “Good night!” the way I always did whenever I became anxious in the evenings. That night, however, as soon as they heard me, my mother hushed my father—“Pascual, please, lower your voice—and not another word more about the policy,” as if she thought there might be some chance in a million that I’d understood what had just been said. I called out again, and with that they called back, “Good night, hijo!” which somehow made me feel a little calmer.

Later, after Mr. Benny’s show ended, and my parents had managed to make their own peace, it was my father who came to get me; not so long before, he would have carried me down the hall to my room, but I weighed more than one hundred pounds in those days, something I’d just found out while standing on the penny scale at the corner pharmacy. And so he, a cigarette between his lips, walked me down the hallway to my room, and with a little pat on my bottom, sent me off to bed. That same night, I dreamed about a stone rolling away from the tomb of Jesus, and then of myself running across a field, clouds of microbios, as frenzied as a plague of flies, chasing after me, and I jumped up, screaming, the sheets beneath me, with their plastic cover coverings below, seemingly catching fire and then becoming, just as quickly, damp with my urine.

It’s since occurred to me that they may have paid for that encyclopedia with the refund money from my burial policy, but what does it matter? Those volumes would sit in that same living room cabinet for the next forty years, and they did make a difference to me. For I’d consult the volumes for school assignments, as when I’d write little pieces about the War of the Roses or an American state, like Indiana. You know, the kinds of subjects that further enhanced my distance from the hallucination that had been my Cuban past.

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.

My father, never a man of too many words, once told me that Fidel Castro was fighting for “la libertad”—“freedom.” Given that most of his family still lived there, the revolution’s outcome meant a lot to him, and on many a night, as his usual cohorts gathered, it became the main topic of their conversations. (That and his job at the hotel, along with work issues and how they all could be doing better wage-wise.) And no more so than on New Year’s Day 1959, when word came out that dictator Fulgencio Batista had fled Cuba: A party inevitably ensued, the apartment filled to bursting with friends, and in the smoke-dense kitchen, my father’s face aglow from exultation and booze, he could not have been more happy—even my mother seemed unabashedly to share his joy. And while I remember that as a day of a hope fulfilled, I needn’t go further now as to the disappointment they, as Cubans, were destined to feel.

Still, while knowing what would happen within a few years to Cuba, it’s hard to resist mentioning how my father once had the distinction of shaking Nikita Khrushchev’s hand, for in 1958, he and Díaz had moonlighted at a dinner banquet held in honor of the Soviet premiere at the Commodore Hotel during his famous visit to New York. It was attended by some well-known diplomats of the day—Andrei Gromyko, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Cyrus Eaton—and at some point in the evening, after the meal concluded, Khrushchev himself insisted on personally thanking the waiters and cooks, who, as workers, had served him so well. Called out from the kitchen, my father had waited alongside Díaz in his apron and whites as the husky premier made his way down the receiving line, offering his hand to each. Some years later, when the Russians began pouring into Cuba, my father must have considered it a dubious honor, and yet, I think, riding home on the subway that night, after the glamour of such an evening, he, as a former campesino from the sticks of Cuba, had probably reeled from the thrill of it all. Such was his life sometimes in that city.

It also happened that my father had been among a group of people gathered around Fidel in 1961 as he, having visited Columbia University fresh from addressing the UN, stood about on its campus, posing for photographs, shaking hands and holding forth with his quite adequate English—back in the early 1950s, he’d lived on West 84th Street or thereabouts for a few months—in one of his last public appearances in New York. What my father must have thought looking Fidel over or if he said something to him, I don’t know, but however much he would come to resent the revolution, some part of him must have been impressed by the worldwide attention that Castro, from the countryside of Oriente like himself, had attracted.