Thoughts Without Cigarettes Oscar Hijuelos

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CHAPTER 8

Our House in the Last World

My work on that book, on the weekends and on most nights after work, became a passion which my mother, amused when I’d ask her questions about Cuba or about what she recalled of my childhood, thought of as my nice new hobby, which she went along with. At the office, where I was rarely seen without a library book in hand, I always got through my duties as quickly and efficiently as I could manage, so as to allow myself more time to write, while some of my coworkers, needing the overtime pay, were far less hurried. I didn’t like working past five, if it could be helped, and some days I worked so frantically that I sometimes missed lunch, my midday meals coming down to a candy bar eaten out in front of the building, followed by a few cigarettes afterward. (I always waited until past noon to have a smoke: I had watched too many people climbing the subway stairs on Fortieth Street wheezing and often stopping before reaching the top just to catch their breath, only to pause on street level to light up a cigarette.) I had long since begun to dress more casually, abandoning my ties and jackets for blue jeans and a shirt, as if I were the office Bohemian. Still, now and then, I’d get offered a better job with more duties—on one occasion, I was asked to run their office in Seattle, a position that would have paid me more money (though not enough) and came with an impressive-sounding title: VP of operations. (I turned it down.) Other opportunities arose along the way (I will not bore you), which I also turned my back on. After a while, management left me alone.

And although I am perhaps sounding rather blasé about my situation there, the fact remained that for every good day when I felt that I was doing the right thing by remaining a willing more or less middle-rung lackey, as long as I could pursue my “art”—the way I’d think about it during my more pretentious moments—there followed two or three days, sometimes a week, when I would take a good look in the mirror and realize that, approaching thirty, for all the wonderful gifts I supposedly possessed (music, drawing, writing), I was, in fact, a hack, a poseur, and, worst of all, a classic underachiever. Like my friend Tommy, I talked a good line, with the difference, however, that I believed it was he who had the real talent. (Another truth is that I considered my older brother, José, more deserving of achieving, so to speak, our family’s first artistic success. Having said this, I am not even sure now if, on some unconscious level, I held myself back as some kind of crazy nod to Cuban familial order.)

Despite the tedium of my daily routines—or perhaps because of them—I began to slowly accumulate a lot of pages, of scenes and dialogue, all the while searching for a voice that somehow sounded like “me”—this fellow, a New Yoikah, with Spanish words, drawn from memory, zipping through his mind like so many pajaritos volando, as my mother might have put it. At a certain point, when I’d decided that I needed a formal opening, my superstitious side got the best of me. Taking a pad along, I left my apartment one Saturday morning and headed over to St. John the Divine cathedral, where I spent some five hours sitting in the knave pews, taking in the organ practice, the piped-in choral music, the ambience of that Episcopalian altar (almost as soul-reaching as a good Catholic altar) while scribbling out, in a most elemental manner, what would become the first chapter of my novel. I went back there on occasion, or, if the weather was fine, I’d sit in the cathedral’s herb garden, fooling with scenes, all the while trying to fight off the nagging depression that would suddenly come over me in waves, shooting up from my knees. (The thing about being inside a church: I just didn’t feel alone—even if I didn’t see a single soul; just the notion that someone might be there peering at me from some timeless, perhaps beautiful place, bolstered my spirits enough to make it all just a bit easier.)

Of course, it was all autobiographical—the first chapters (getting a lot of it wrong) trying to reimagine my father’s courtship and marriage to my mother: To help me along, I’d pore over any maps of Cuba I could find, usually in an antiquated atlas, the sort I’d come across down in Fourth Avenue’s Biblo and Tannen bookstore; just perusing the cartography of Cuba, with its profusion of mysterious names, like the parts of a body, and those etched and writhing lines, sinewy as vinery, that constituted its rivers and roads and borders—all of that fed my imagination. Even if it had been years since I last stepped on that soil as a child, I’d find my pop’s hometown of Jiguaní and trace its route to Holguín, and though I would just be looking over a piece of wafer-thin paper, it was as if I could go back there again. I’d remember that he had once worked as a mail carrier and imagine him riding over the countryside on a horse from farm to farm, cocoa and coffee plantations and dairy centrals abounding, a satchel of letters in his charge. I’d hear the birdsong ringing out from the forests, blue sky and verdant hills surrounding him, and the rain coming down like a waterfall at four in the afternoon, and smell the clay earth giving off a cooling perfumed exhalation, then the heat and humidity rising from the ground. Best of all, I would imagine him as a young man, tall and thin in his saddle, and astride his chestnut mare, as he’d make his leisurely way down toward the Sierra foothills: Simply put, in those bits of research, he’d come back to life!

They, of course, journeyed to America and had two sons, the older named Horacio (after my godfather) and the younger—my stand-in, or doppelganger, as the educated folks say—Hector, I took from a Puerto Rican guy about my age, who worked behind the counter of a liquor store on 105th Street. While I’m at it, I called my pop Alejo—liking its similarity to the Spanish word lejano, “faraway” (but also in homage to Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban writer)—and my mother, or someone much like her at any rate, Mercedes, which was my aunt Cheo’s name. As for mi tía Maya, whom I could only see at that point through my mother’s eyes, I made up the name Buita—which, I suppose, had something to do with buitre, “vulture.”

Gradually, I began to fill those pages with the spine of what I perceived as my life, up until the time of my father’s death. Yet, while I felt that I was probably making some progress toward becoming a writer, if that’s what I really wanted to do, in that process of digging up the dead (and resurrecting them, as it were), I began to experience some very bad nights of restless sleep and disorienting dreams again. (As it would turn out, I’d go through that same upheaval with later books, but this was the worst.) My nightmares got so bad that my girlfriend at the time, a sharp lady on her way to a Ph.D. in statistical analysis at Teachers College, often thought aloud that a little psychological counseling might help me achieve a creative breakthrough and recommended that I see a therapist. But coming from a culture (cubano) and neighborhood (mainly working-class) where, quite frankly, something as bourgeois as therapy was not only unheard of but spurned as a rich man’s indulgence, I couldn’t even begin to take such a suggestion seriously. “Oh, really?” I’d say, feeling somewhat offended. And yet, often hitting a wall (sometimes literally), I eventually did.

The fellow I hooked up with happened to be a cubano who, as he would tell me, had left the island disguised as a priest and, coming to the States from Spain, to which he had escaped with a Vatican delegation, worked for IBM for a decade before commencing his studies for a Ph.D. in psychology, his specialty dream analysis. (He was also something of a humanist, having been mentored by Rollo May.) When I met him for the first time, probably around 1980 (I do not exactly recall), he seemed everything that I was not: tall, dark featured, somewhat macho, soulful, pensive, with a strong but charmingly Cuban accent, and he had the handsome if slightly serious face of a Asturiano matador. Above all, he was a Cuban from Havana, which, it surprised me to learn, actually meant a great deal to me. (Even so, I had my doubts at first, enough that once when I visited Donald Barthelme, I couldn’t help but ask him if he had ever seen a shrink. His answer: “I have found them, upon occasion, useful.” Drag of cigarette, gulp of drink.)

Still, it took me a long time to trust his judgment enough to allow him inside, as it were. But eventually, he became of use to me, at least in the way a priest can be when you go to confession. During those sessions, I learned a few things. It was the first time anyone had ever told me that the kind of year I spent away from my family as a four- and five-year-old would have produced an acute sense of anxiety and depression, insecurity, nightmares, mood swings, and melancholy in anyone (oh, thank you!). But it was all the more traumatic in my case, he reasoned, not only because of the nature of my illness but because of the way my circumstances had, in effect, severed me from my roots (no big news). My darkness had been further aggravated by my sense of guilt related to watching my father, or “tu papá,” descending into a purgatory of self-injury and, the big payoff, his death—something that I, experiencing a survivor’s sense of helplessness, had obviously not yet come to accept. (The flip side came when this psychoanalyst, being a cubano and naturally superstitious, and as someone who had, in reality, almost become a priest, cast doubts on whether anyone could be truly dead. He—the antiscientist and a hater of ese comermierda Fidel, who had outlawed the open practice of Christianity on the island—simply believed in God, and in ghosts, and in spirit transmissions. In other words, bless his soul, he was not your typical psychoanalyst.)

Though I left many of those sessions feeling better, I also wondered if I had turned into some kind of faggot. (Go to my old neighborhood bar and tell one of those wasted guys that you felt depressed and he’d look you over and say: “What you need is a drink and a fine piece of ass.”) Sometimes, I felt so stupid about that therapy that I’d stop for months at a time, only to go back. Most sessions I treaded water, though; once, in what must have been a case of transference (or time travel), the interior of his office somehow became that of a rustic house in Cuba, down to its deeply green smell of palm leaves and dampened earth (swear to God). Somehow, he came to represent for me some paternal Cuban archetype, as if my father and the abuelos I had never known had been magically combined in him. For a few minutes, I had a sense of belonging. On the heels of that experience, which was like a waking dream, he told me, in a voice that sounded just then so much like my father’s, “But don’t you know, eres cubano. You are Cuban, after all.”

While I am a little embarrassed to have disclosed such a thing, those sessions, despite the formality of the circumstance, offered me the kind of internal encouragement that I could never get anywhere else, not from my family nor any of my friends. And the process of talking about my dreams, which, in any case, always had either a terrifying or mystical aspect to them, really got the gears in my subconscious working, and even helped me come by the title of my novel one night. It was on the spine of a book, along one of the shelves, the H’s, in the used bookstore around the corner from my mother’s apartment, where I had gone walking in a dream. Noticing my name on the spine of a book, I pulled it out and saw my novel’s title for the first time: Our House in the Last World.

For what it’s worth, I simply don’t know where else that title could have come from, except my subconscious. It was just there. Having said that, I can’t help but point out that were it not for two missing letters—c and j—one could spell my name, Oscar Hijuelos, from it. I know it’s not much, but at the time that little coincidence, even if it is a bit forced, imbued the book with a magical glow.

Good things happened: Sending off the first chapter to a foundation, I received a grant. It paid three thousand dollars, before taxes, a fortune to me at the time, not enough to live on but an encouragement. (I do not remember what I did with that money.) The best part of receiving such a grant, the CAPS, came down to some of the folks I met through it. One of the judges, a Puerto Rican living on 115th Street in East Harlem, Edwin Vega Yunque, or Ed Vega, called me up. He was a novelist, and a fine one at that, who, however, in that climate when no major New York houses published Latinos, had gone critically unnoticed in his own city. (Or to put it differently, completely ignored by the major newspapers.) He treated me well, however, invited me over to his apartment, where, as it happened, I got to know his daughter, Suzanne, an aspiring guitar-strumming singer back then, who, I recall, often performed downtown at a place called Folk City. Ed was a Buddhist, married to an American wife, and as a writer knew just about every Latino author in the city, among them a Puerto Rican poet, Julio Marzan, and the Guatemalan David Unger, both of whom became my friends.

It was just a happy time: Through Vega, I made my debut as a writer, reading from my own work before a Latino audience at a poet’s hutch up in the South Bronx—just a storefront with some folding chairs and a podium on Jerome Avenue. That initiation took place before the kind of down-home crowd you only find in the ghetto, with kids, mothers, pregnant women, old abuelitas, teenagers, and your rank-and-file local poets and teachers responding to your work with both seriousness and enthusiasm. (Afterward, tons of food was served from tinfoil-covered plates, along with beer.)

I also did a reading back then in an East Harlem apartment—think it was at Quincy Troupe’s home: I don’t recall just how long I read from my work—mostly black folks were in attendance, and while I stuck out (as always) and met one hell of a grouchy poet in Amiri Baraka, I felt really good to be hanging out with that crowd. (In a way, outside the office, I had started to lead a secret life.) And yet the reading that made the most difference, with Wesley Brown, took place up at City, where I filled in as a last-second replacement.

It turned out that the audience included one of my former classmates at City, Karen Braziller, who had published my short story in her review, and her husband: They ran a small downtown press—Persea Books, whose offices were on Delancey Street in the same building that once housed Mad magazine (I remember those kinds of things). Having read from a portion of my manuscript, I think it was the husband who inquired whether I had anything else along those lines. Not long afterward, I turned up at their door in their building off Gramercy Park East with a couple of shopping bags filled with the fragments and longer narratives I’d been fooling around with over the past few years: These represented what would become, after intense amounts of work on both our parts, my first novel.

Taking a few years, the actual process went more or less smoothly, and at a far less hectic pace than what publishers would demand today. About the writing itself: typewriters, ribbons, pen and pencil, notepads, white-out, scissors, erasers, Scotch tape, and rubber cement were the tools I used to produce the final manuscript.

As for the editing, I benefited from the expertise acquired by my former colleague at CCNY, Karen Braziller, then a senior editor at E. P. Dutton but assuming those same duties for their press. Spanish proofreading was done by my friend Ed Vega, with whose corrections the novel passed muster. Finally, when it came to a cover, we settled on a painting, found in a book in the New York public library (I think), an early work, circa 1945, by Philip Guston entitled If this be not I? It included so many elements that figured in my novel—columns, a stoop, a figure in what looked like a chef’s toque, and distant tenements—that it seemed the only choice. Over the title, a generous quote from Barthelme, while on the back one found a fairly stern picture of me, going through what I guess was a “Russian author” phase, in a beard.

But until it was actually published, even as I continued my weekly routine at TDI, that book seemed an abstraction, whose eventual quite public nature I hardly even thought about at the time. I doubt, in fact, if I could have written that book were it not for the feeling that it would somehow remain an intimate and private affair: How else could one go ahead and dive into certain personal ordeals and write about them unself-consciously? Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to me that the novel would be read by some of the people it was actually about.

But it wasn’t just that: I agonized over parts of Our House in a way that few people could ever imagine. And while I’ve since learned that it’s not really worth draining yourself emotionally (like I am doing now in this memoir) for what some cooler-hearted folks might categorize as quaintly visceral, as a younger person, I couldn’t help myself from striving to establish, through a book, some sense of just what I had experienced. Even when the catharsis you go through can leave you feeling euphoric or incredibly sad, the fact that you’ve allowed some fairly deep and personal secrets to escape into the world doesn’t hit you until it actually gets out there, coño!

As the date of release approached, I had been told that one can never know about reviews, but bit by bit, over a period of a few months both before and after publication, a number of newspaper reviews, around fifteen in all (which seemed a colossal validation of my work), came out, and all favorably, about the novel. This crop included the New York Times Sunday book section: A certain Edith Milton reviewed Our House along with a novel by a Korean writer, Wendy Law-Yone, The Coffin Tree. And though I didn’t realize it at the time, as kindly as she spoke of my writing, she was the first to pigeonhole me as an “immigrant” writer (translation: “ethnic” spokesman for the primitive people known as Hispanics in those days).

Strangely enough, when Ed Vega reviewed the novel in a literary magazine, Vega, though he really liked it, he pointed out that while it had been quite professionally produced, it was badly lacking in Spanish copyediting. (“Hey, man, uh, you remember that you proofed it?”) Nevertheless, I felt so buoyed by these attentions and rich—I’d made four thousand dollars for my five years of work!—that for the first time in my life, I actually believed I had a writing future.

As it happened, so did the kindly people I worked alongside at TDI, who offered me a fairly large amount of car-card advertising space on the New York city buses at a rate that even I could afford. What’s more, my art director and our production department came up with the artwork for me, while I provided the written copy, which, for the record, went: “A family’s journey through three worlds: Cuba . . . America . . . and the Unknown!” Afterward, a friend of mine, Eddie Egan, head of Bristol-Myers’s production, prevailed upon some of his Chambers Street acquaintances, who operated some of the bigger presses in the city, to do him a favor by printing those ads up for free.

In short order, not a month after the book had come out (on little cat’s feet), some several thousand car-card ads for Our House were gracing some of the more primo bus lines in New York City, among them the much-coveted Fifth Avenue route. And so it wasn’t long before a shopper heading down to Saks or Lord & Taylor on the number 5 line could look up and notice a deeply processed advertisement for Our House right next to one for Marlboro cigarettes. In fact, each bus would have had four or five of them. Other lines, covering Manhattan from east to west, with some extending into the Bronx and Brooklyn, on buses otherwise advertising the likes of The Mists of Avalon, also conveyed the not too spectacular news that a writer named Hijuelos had apparently arrived. Entertaining visions of popular success, I soon learned, however, that no matter how many buses ran ads about a novel, the books had to be in the stores. Only a few that I checked—think Scribner’s and some others downtown, as well Salters on 113th and the Book Forum in my neighborhood—had copies. Now and then, someone from the office would come over to my desk with a copy of Our House for me to sign. And what I usually heard was this: “Oh, but I had to look all ovah the place, just to find it.” (This, before the days of Amazon and ebooks and iPads.)

But people couldn’t have been nicer. I got bottles of booze in the interoffice mail, with notes of congratulations, and one of my partners, Charlie, in subway clocks even took me out to lunch: “So you really fuckin’ did it, didn’t you, kid?” Folks from my neighborhood also appreciated the effort, given that I had captured something of the way they came up. And while very few of them bought my book—I can count those who did on one hand—my pal Richard purchased two, for himself and his brother Tommy, who, as I soon learned, had formed his own opinion about it.

I bumped into Tommy in the park one afternoon, and the first thing he did was to slap me five.

“Good for you, my man,” he told me. “I read your book, and I liked it, though I would have done a lot of things differently.” Tommy took a drag of a cigarette. “And better, you hear?”

“If you say so.” I looked off, leaves whisked up by the wind in pinwheels along the cracked park pavement.

“But the thing is, that novel doesn’t really count ’cause, like, it’s your story, and real books are about other shit, you know?”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said.

That day, I made sure not to seem at all above him in any way: In fact, I told him that I couldn’t wait to see what he was writing himself—even offered to help him in whatever fashion I could. But it was as if it didn’t matter. Lighting one of his Tareytons with the butt of another, and offering me a sip from his can of beer, he said, “Nah, I’m all right—don’t even think about it, man.” Then we talked about hanging out again, and, parting, we kind of embraced. Leaving him, I hadn’t the slightest notion that I’d never see that beautiful and rambunctious dude again.

My older brother, for what it’s worth, made no bones about telling me that my mother had been upset by the book (as if she could read it?), that she could not bear any of the passages about Pop’s drinking, and that, on top of it all, I had gotten a lot of stuff wrong. And he thought that my portrayals of family friends like Olga were offensive—that I had no business describing her (or someone like her) as the kind of vainglorious cubana who would parade around in negligees and brassieres, and undress, to reveal her fabulous figure, in our living room.

“You know that she’s going to feel offended by that, don’t you?” he told me.

In the end, I believed him, and took to skulking up my block whenever I’d visit my mother. Worried about running into any of the folks I had portrayed, I had almost gone ducking behind a car at the sight of Olga coming out of my mother’s building one day. But she saw me: “Oscarito, come over here!” she ordered. I did.

“Why are you avoiding me? I’m not going to bite you.”

“I know.”

“Well, there’s something you should hear,” she said, with the severity of the Old World Spaniard she, with her curled Coco Chanel hairdo and intensely dark features, resembled. “I read your book, and I will tell you, mi vida, that I loved it!” And she flashed me a sweet, toothy smile. “And thank you for putting me in it—you got me right.”

Indeed, Olga, in her sixties, well past her prime by then, seemed to have enjoyed the fact that I had more or less described the way she had once been as a shapely Cuban bombshell, whose mere glance left men breathless. But she did chastise me about other things. “You were too hard on your mother. I don’t blame you,” she said. “She could be difficult, but you were still too hard on her.” She did not mention my pop, though she must have been thinking about him as well. Happily though, as I went by her on the stoop, on my way to see my mother, whose face peered out at me from behind the venetian blinds, Olga gave me a kiss on the cheek and a slap to my bottom. Her final appraisal, as I blushed: “We’re proud of you. Fue un libro, muy muy lindo!”

And my mother? As my brother had surmised, she wasn’t too pleased by whatever she had managed to read of that novel. Having come a long way since my childhood, in terms of her ability to understand written English, she had made it a monthly ritual to visit the corner bookstore and return with a bag full of romance novels, which she’d go through methodically, with, I believe, the help of a Spanish-English dictionary. Otherwise she passed her days working in some Harlem-based version of a temp agency like Manpower, or else she, knowing every Latina in the neighborhood, made some extra money watching the comings and goings of customers in a friend’s clothing shop along Broadway. However she spent her days, she seemed to have enormous amounts of time to read, though I think it took her weeks after I had given her an inscribed copy of Our House to get around to deciphering the text. Once she began to, however, she became quite circumspect about it. The only things she ever had to say about that novel? “Why did you have to write me in that way? Yo no fui tan mala! I wasn’t that bad!” And, as I recall: “Yes, your father was a good man who could be angry with me sometimes. Pero me quería mucho. But he loved me very much.”

(Of course there was more to her reactions than those few words: Sometimes when I’d come over to see her with some Chinese food from Broadway, while sitting across the kitchen table from her, I’d catch her looking at me wistfully, as she used to when I was a child, as if I were a stranger who had somehow learned all about her. At least once, she told me, in such a moment: “But I never wanted to hurt Pascual in any way.”)

She once mentioned that she could never get past a certain point (I never knew if the text became too difficult for her, or whether she could take only so much of her own life, however roughly, thrust back in her face), but whatever she may have felt about that book, my mother took the trouble to carefully wrap her copy in plastic so that it would not become worn-out on the shelf. Learning how impressed her New York Times—reading friends, like the Zabalas sisters and classy Chaclita, were by the fact that I had been reviewed there, she took to keeping a copy of that notice in her purse, ever willing to show it off to anyone she bumped into. Obviously her pride over the fact that she had a published author as a son overrode any reservations or hurt that my mother had surely felt over what she perceived to be its content.

For my part, I can recall riding the subways uptown from work and thinking that even if that book couldn’t ever sell very much—I think maybe only fifteen hundred copies had been printed—I had begun, in some small way, to make something of myself. But aside from that feeling—ever so fleeting at three o’clock on a dreary afternoon—virtually nothing else had changed in my life. Though I had avoided the fate of so many would-be writers, I kept at my full-time job.

Still, I had my occasional moment of glory. Not long after Our House came out, I got a call from the Endicott bookstore on Columbus Avenue and Eighty-first, then one of the great independents in Manhattan. Their manager, a lady named Susan Berkholtz, asked me if I wouldn’t mind coming by one morning to sign some books, and since I hadn’t ever done anything of that nature before, and because it felt like such a professional thing to do, I eagerly accepted. Leaving my office at about eleven, I made my way uptown. When I came in sight of that store’s two massive front windows, I almost fell over: One of the windows had been filled with pyramids of Our House in the Last World, copies adorning the wall in a row, and nothing else. It seemed the fulfillment of a dream, and, once inside, I passed the next hour or so by the front counter euphorically signing my book for the occasional customer—perhaps twenty in all, not a bad turnout. Afterward, Ms. Berkholtz, later an agent best known for representing Latino authors, had me sign some stock copies, and that also left me floating on air. Beaming with accomplishment, I sipped a cup of coffee, and thanking all her employees, I walked out of the store sometime after one, intending to go back to work.

But once I got outside again, I couldn’t help feeling overwhelmed by the moment. I was filled with such pride that instead of heading downtown, I thought, “To hell with it,” and hailed a taxi instead, giving the driver my mother’s 118th Street address.

I found her in the kitchen preparing a big pot of lentil soup, one of her favorite meals, as she had become quite a health food nut by then, and one bent on preserving herself into eternity—she was just a few years short of seventy. (Her dresser drawers, aside from containing a number of artifacts from her life with my pop, and religious pamphlets and rosaries, also brimmed over with Spanish-language magazines about health and diets.) When I walked in, after giving three quick trills of the timbre, she was surprised—and vaguely delighted—to see me in the middle of the day. She felt put out, however: My mother hadn’t gotten around to making herself up or bothered to get dressed. She wore only a robe and seemed as if she had not awakened too long before, and though she told me to sit down, and started to putter about the stove, I just said: “Mamá, get dressed, I want to show you something.”

“Sí?”” she asked.

“Sí, mamá, a surprise.”

“Ah, una sorpresa,” she replied, rather happily.

It took her a while: Years later, I’d learn the hard way that her side of the family had arthritic maladies in their blood, and as she moved deliberately but slowly about her bedroom, getting dressed, I could hear her giving little cries of “ay, ay, ay!” Finally, she had gotten herself together, and, escorting her down the street, rather impatiently, as I couldn’t wait for her to see that window, we finally reached the corner, where I hailed another taxi. By then, because of my mother’s rheumatic condition, it was always an operation getting her in and out of any vehicle, but did I care? My moment had arrived! No matter how often my mother asked me where we were going, and why, the only thing I could say to her, and gleefully so (you know, like a good son), was that she would soon enough see something to make her happy and proud of me.

So we hurried downtown, and even though only an hour at most had passed since I’d left that store, by the time we pulled up to the curb, the window had already been changed, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose now in the place of honor so briefly given to me.

Having no choice but to take her inside, the only thing I could show her were a few of my books on a shelf. The staff seemed embarrassed, as did I, but afterward I took my mother to a pastry shop nearby and bought her some napoleons, the sort my pop occasionally brought home. I don’t think she ever had a clue as to how crestfallen I felt: At least I got some insight, right there and then, into the nature of that business.

As for those bus ads? They ran for about three months, and though my novel did not fly off the shelves, the enticement that I would produce a similar advertisement and space for a paperback induced a fellow named Pat O’Connor, at Washington Square Press, to spring for the paperback rights, a big twenty-five hundred dollars (half of which I split with the publisher). In exchange, they’d benefit from another ad campaign. I recall riding buses and seeing people looking up and checking out that advertisement, and occasionally I’d run into a friend who’d noticed it, but if it made my name and book known to the public in any way, I wasn’t particularly aware of it.

Only once did it make a real difference. I think the paperback ads had started to run in the autumn of 1984, and that same October, I came down with another one of my horrific flus. Having become the sort of person who would do everything in his power to avoid seeing a doctor, I reluctantly decided to drag my sorry ass over to St. Luke’s emergency room one night, but only after I had started coughing up blood. (That scared me: Despite my plaguelike symptoms—bad stomach, aching bones, diarrhea, scorched throat, and burning nose—I had managed to continue smoking my Kool cigarettes until I could barely swallow.) Once I got to that waiting room, filled with every variety of junkie, alcoholic, stab victim, abused wife, and sick child, as well as a contingent of bloodied and bruised homeless people, I fell into an immediate gloom. Not only did going there again remind me of my childhood visits to that place, but I knew that however bad I felt, I’d have to spend half the night waiting.

Up by the desk, manned by a Puerto Rican nurse who had the hardened demeanor of someone who had seen every possible permutation of human suffering, her porcelain face a mask of cinnamon indifference, I filled out a medical questionnaire and handed it to her. As she looked it over, her brows rose with interest: “Hijuelos? Where would I have seen this name before?” I didn’t connect anything with it and shrugged. But then something hit her: “Oh, yeah, I know, I seen it on a bus—the numbah eleven Amsterdam line—could that be?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You wrote a book, is that right?”

“That’s me.”

“Well, for God’s sake—good for you.” And she smiled. “Lord, I wish I could do that—oh, the things I’ve seen! You wouldn’t believe it.” Then she took a good long look at me—at my deathly sweaty pallor, my bloodshot eyes, my drooping body—and, leaning forward, confided: “Tell you what, to save you time, I’m gonna admit you right away, okay, honey?”

“You kidding?”

“Why would I kid an author”—she pronounced it Arthur—“like you?”

I ended up getting out of there about an hour later, and it took me almost a week to get better; and when I did, I dropped a copy of the paperback of Our House off at that ward, inscribing it to that admitting nurse, whose name, it turned out, for all her toughness, was Daisy.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was about the extent to which those bus ads helped me.

In the interim, a few interesting things happened: At one point, enriched by my final advance of some eight hundred dollars or so, I flew out to Southern California to visit my former down-the-hall neighbors from Eighty-third and, while staying in their complex in San Diego, began a poolside romance with a twentyish divorcée in progress who happened to be a former Miss Los Angeles. I won’t dwell on the tawdrier details, though I will say that after I had come back to New York, we often spoke by telephone in the evenings. As it happened, these took place during a period when, for reasons involving one of my cousin’s husbands, my line was tapped.

You see, back in 1983, the FBI had listed my cousin Miriam’s husband, Eduardo Arocena, who had stayed in our apartment back when, as their number one most wanted fugitive. He was suspected of having been the head (and founder) of an anti-Castro organization, Omega Seven, and of ordering or carrying out the assassination of a Cuban diplomat. Personally, I found it hard to believe that Eddie, un hombre muy callado, a quiet and gentle man, could be behind such a thing, but the truth was that he had been on the lam, as they’d say in gangster movies, for some time (though it had not stopped him from calling me up the previous Christmas to wish me well, while also proclaiming, “Viva Cuba libre!”)

Eventually, the search became so intense that the FBI sent two officers over to 118th Street to interview my mother, and though she had fallen back on the claim that she spoke “too leetle Engeleesh,” one of the officers, a very well dressed American “Negrito,” as she described him, naturally hit the clutch and slipped into a ridiculously fluent Castellano—Castilian Spanish—that dazzled my mother. (That’s what she mainly talked about for weeks—about how that American black man had spoken such a refined Spanish.) In the end, she had nothing to tell them; she certainly did not know of his whereabouts—why would she?

Nor did I, but that did not stop the FBI from messing with my phone. Suddenly, I’d pick it up and hear all these clicks and sonic hums, and switches—even voices in the incredible distance, ever so faint but audible, saying things like “Roger that” and “Roger out”—whistles too, sometimes so loudly that I’d have to pull my head away. (My brother and mother experienced the same disturbances.) This bugging happened to coincide with my Southern California romance. Calling me nightly, she loved to go recount the details of what we had once done, what she would do the next time she saw me, the places where she ached inside, how she was touching herself just thinking about me, and, along the way, moaning as she’d breathlessly bring herself around—in short, a bit of phone sex. What those agents made of it, I can’t say, but on a few occasions, I’d hear a click, and static and screeches, as someone (I think) listened, until the poor guy on the other end couldn’t take it anymore.

As for Eduardo, the poor soul, eventually apprehended and tried, was sent to jail, where he continues, I think unjustifiably, to linger to this day.

All in all, I really didn’t have much to complain about. As a Latino writer—no matter how I looked upon myself, that’s what I happened to be—I had already done quite well. My book had come out with a New York house, a very rare thing; I had been reviewed in the Times, an even rarer occurrence for a Latino writer; and, best of all, along the way, I found a place, however peripherally, with my own special community of writers. Not just the inner-city thing with friends like Julio Marzan and Ed Vega, but in a scene so erudite, yet social, that it was to become known as a hub of Latin American literature in New York City.

Situated in a McKim, Mead & White Georgian brownstone on Sixty-eighth Street and Park Avenue were the offices of the Americas Society, an organization dedicated to the promotion of cultural ties between the United States and our hemispheric partners: Canada, the Caribbean Islands, and Central and South America. Also known as the Center for Inter-American Relations, its ground floor boasted an art gallery, whose shows were mainly dedicated to exhibitions culled from the Latino diaspora to our south. On an upper floor, reached by a winding robber-baron staircase, were several ornately appointed salons in which all manner of programs, from music recitals to business lectures, along with a profusion of poetry and prose readings, literary panels, and such took place nearly every night of the week, each event followed by cocktails.

I’d first caught wind of that place while lugging my corrected manuscript of Our House around a book fair on the East Side. A friend had suggested that I introduce myself to a woman at one of the booths, a director of programs at the Americas Society, Rosario Santos, a transplanted Bolivian who couldn’t have been kinder when I shyly (terrified of the notion of having to speak Spanish with her) introduced myself and, eventually, left her that copy. In turn, she had passed it on to her deputy there, a vivacious, wildly attractive young Hispanist, a certain Lori Carlson. One of those rare creatures unable to resist helping others, she, upon reading Our House, later hosted me as the special guest speaker at a program of her design called Books and Breakfast. On that occasion, just after the novel had been published, I gave a reading from it and answered questions for a small gathering of mainly Latin American businessmen, all before the hour of nine in the morning, after which I went off to work, attending to my subway clocks. She also assigned a cubano, Enrique Fernandez, to write a critical—and as it would turn out, quite positive—piece on Our House for the literary journal she edited, Review, an honor, as far as I was concerned, given the incredible caliber of the authors whose work she championed in its pages.

Ms. Carlson, whose Grace Kelly looks and sweet temperament turned more than a few heads, also officiated over a number of literary evenings in which a nobody like me could not only attend charlas—lectures—by some of the most prominent writers of the Latin-American boom, but afterward find himself rubbing shoulders (bumping into literally, the rooms were so crowded) with the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, Luisa Valenzuela, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Poniatowska, Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal, and, among so many others, the towering, Lincolnesque Julio Cortázar. (Which is not to say that there weren’t any non-Latinos around. Two I can recall were the poet/memorist William Jay Smith and the novelist William Kennedy, fresh from winning a Pulitzer for Ironweed. He couldn’t have been more cordial and respectful of me, and took pains to pronounce my last name as accurately as he, married to a Puerto Rican, could. Both he and Smith were real gents.)

I also made the acquaintance of some Cubans there, among them Héberto Padilla the poet, as well as the greatest of Cuban novelists, Guillermo Cabrera Infante (a wonderful man), whom the center had first introduced to an American audience. Other Cubans turned up, sometimes from the island, like Pablo Armando Fernandez, but since one side always boycotted the other, you never saw the pro- and anti-Castro writers in the same room at any given time. (Somehow, after attending a reading by Fernandez, I met his father, who, at hearing my story of my Cuban/American conflicts—which is what I tended to talk about with some folks—he told me, “Well, being half-Cuban is better than not being Cuban at all.”) Another Cuban writer, who would become most famous posthumously in a film, Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas, thin and wan, and wretchedly broke, also frequented the center and had gotten his first job in New York, teaching writing, through its office. I happened to have met Renaldo, whose short and slight body was topped by an implausibly large head, his skin quite pocked, his handsome features ever so tender, in Books & Co. on the East Side one evening. We spoke (in Spanish—how I did it, I do not know) about the fact that he had grown up in Holguín, where my mother came from; I told him I had just published a novel, and he seemed quite touched to meet a kindred soul. (I gave him a copy of Our House, which I got off the shelf and paid for. He accepted it, while confessing he couldn’t read English. “Pero gracias, hombre,” he told me, handing me his card in exchange.)

Most impressively, the center also hosted one of my idols, Jorge Luis Borges, whom I met briefly, and whose hangdog but beatific otherworldly face I have obviously not forgotten. Altogether, those fetes, which welcomed everyone, were of a moment that would never be seen again, a moment when such a place, like the Americas Society, afforded two worlds, that of Latino and non-Latino, the opportunity to come together and celebrate the grandeur of a shared culture. (I am not certain of too many things, but I will venture to say that I doubt the word spic had ever been uttered, or even thought of, in that building.) Compared to any American literary cocktail party I’d ever attend, those evenings seem now like some distant dream.

I may have had an ordinary job, and I may have had a hundred doubts about myself as a Latino, and all kinds of gripes about a million things, but, lordy, when I’d leave that center, I’d feel really good about my Latin roots, and in a way I never had before, even if, by the next afternoon, after trudging through one subway station after the other and catching a few stiletto glances stabbing into the back of my head, from Latinos who didn’t like whitey, that glow of belonging—and relating to that literature—might ebb and eventually fade. All I know is this: Since those days, I’ve never again experienced a literary scene so inclusive, nor so nurturing through the sheer heft of intellectual sharing, nor one in which being a Latino writer really counted for something.

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