Thoughts Without Cigarettes by Oscar Hijuelos Page B

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