Thoughts Without Cigarettes by Oscar Hijuelos Page A

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