Later we’d play hide-and-seek behind the trees and go charging like little bulls through the sheets that had been hung up to dry alongside the houses, or we’d sit by my aunt’s doorway watching the black laundresses—negritas buenas, as my mother called them — go by with their baskets balanced on their heads. About a block or so away, there stood an icehouse — what better thing was there to do than stand by its entrance to cool off or to chew on some of the chips that had dropped from those perspiring blocks of ice into the gutter? I seemed to be always thirsty, so my brother has told me — several times he had to stop me from sipping water from a curbside trough, and it seems that early on, I had already acquired the nervous habit of eating anything offered to me — deep-fried banana fritters, a piece of raw sugarcane, or a strip of bacalao, or salted cod (which I had never really liked but ate anyway). One afternoon, while sitting on the curb, I watched my brother, fooling with a hose in front of Cheo’s house, turn its gushing spout on a very dapperly dressed man, all in white and wearing a lacquered cane boater, as he rode by on a bicycle. With my brother spraying him with abandon, that scene, at least in memory, played out like something from a 1930s Max Roach comedy: He got off that bicycle fuming and, scolding José, began to chase him around in circles, my brother keeping just ahead of his grasp, until my mother, hearing the commotion, stepped from the doorway and, in her loveliness and charm (or outrage that a grown man would harass a boy, however mischievous, of eleven or so) calmed him down, his anger dissipating in a way that seemed to elude her sometimes when it came to our father, Pascual.
Of course, we’d come to visit my aunts, Cheo, with whom my mother and I stayed, and her oldest sister, María, in whose home my brother usually slept, a few streets away. If there’s any one thing I can tell you about Cheo, it would come down to her kindness and demure, self-effacing manner, though it’s my guess that there was a lot more to her moods than just that. But as a boy, the only things that registered with me were her kisses, her embraces, her generally sweet and maternal ways. I didn’t know that she was a recent widow, nor that she spent her days working in a department store along one of Holguín’s shopping streets, and that her life must have been difficult, what with two daughters to look after and support. She never let on about her grief, however, not to my brother and me, and, in any case, seemed to cope with her circumstance by keeping busy — cooking, sewing, cleaning the house, and praying — yes, she was the most religiously devout of my mother’s sisters. Mainly she oozed affection, being the sort of woman who spoke only endearments, as with “What do you want, my love?” and “Are you hungry, mi vida?” and always with the sweetest smile. I sometimes slept alongside her at night—“Somos familia,” “We’re family,” she’d say quietly, and “Soy tu tía,” “I’m your aunt,” as she’d hold me close, and I’d half strangle her, returning her affections, so precious and warm she seemed.
Those evenings slipped one into another, without a lot of variation: Once night fell, the unused rooms were kept dark, to save money, I suppose; after dinner, which Cheo improvised over a hot plate or small stove, my cousins serving, we’d listen to the radio. That was a big deal in those days, and very exciting, for most programs, featuring popular music, were beamed in from Havana — acts like El Trio Matamoros (the “moor killers”) and singers like Olga Guillot and Beny Moré, among so many others, as well as soap operas and comedies. (And to impose my future knowledge about something I would have hardly been aware of back then, the news bulletins would have occasionally been about the rebel forces of Fidel Castro, then encamped in the Sierra Maestra some fifty miles or so to the south.) Sometimes, we’d join our other cousins, Cuza, Beboy Macho, y Gladys, María’s offspring, and go strolling along those streets, to congregate, as so many other Holguíneros did, in the nearest plaza, where a municipal band might be playing and where a stand sold freshly made papaya and coconut-flavored ice cream. (“How you loved your sweets!” my mother would tell me.)
I do recall playing in a small park nearby, El Parque Infantil, where there were swings, and that I’d go there with my cousin Miriam, who, as she has told me a thousand times since, treated me like her little muñeca, her blond-haired doll; we also slept side by side sometimes, but the only telling anecdote I know of our time together comes down to something she recently told me: Along that street stood a pepper tree, which I always picked at as if the hanging brilliantly red peppers were lollipops, and that I constantly ate them even when I was told not to, to the point that my lips burned so much that my cousin had to coat them over with honey — I was just that way, and if I take satisfaction in saying so, it’s because such a detail reminds me of the fact that, once upon a time, I was a Cuban.
Altogether, life in Cheo’s household unfolded peacefully and without much happening at all, though one evening, I must have been dozing in my aunt’s front room, which was her sala, whose door opened to the street, and as I happened to look over, I saw my mother and Aunt Cheo holding each other. Perhaps it is a caprice of memory, but one of them was crying on the other’s lap — perhaps my mother, lamenting her life in New York, or, remembering his good traits, simply missing my father and wondering what might have gone wrong between them, or if she’d done the right thing marrying him. Or perhaps it was Cheo — with her bottled-up widow’s grief and feeling the burdens of her responsibilities and of her own kind of Catholic loneliness, for she would wait her entire life to be reunited in eternity with her husband — who needed her sister’s comforting. To be honest, I can’t recall just which of those Torrens women felt like falling to pieces that night — or perhaps they both were — but that blurred memory, from so long ago, has stayed with me just the same.
Now, Holguín, unlike the far more raucous city of Havana, shut down completely at about ten at night, with such stillness that a raised voice from some dwelling a block away could be heard, and, after a while, the cicadas took over. In my bed, which I shared with my mother and sometimes my aunt, I waited for the dense midnight humidity and heat to lift — it was a Cuban summer after all — and yet, finally closing my eyes, after tossing in sweat, I’d just as soon awaken to the somewhat cooler morning and rooster calls, and carts and hawkers passing by on the street, cans and bells clanging, ever so happy to do what I, as a young boy, was prone to do, which was to eat and eat things like sugar-covered pieces of bread fried in lard and to sip from my own cup of heavily sweetened café con leche. Occasionally, as a special treat, my aunt boiled up a pot of condensed milk, to which she’d add an exotic and deliciously nutty flavoring, so deep and dark that for years, well into my twenties, I wondered just what that magical “Cuban” drink had been. It was one of the tastes I most vividly — and fondly — remembered from my stay in Holguín, and I truly became convinced that its Cuban origins were what made that drink so special, as if its uniqueness had been distilled from some obscure roots in the deepest jungle; this was an illusion I held on to until the day came when my mother, breaking that spell of decades-old nostalgia, advised me that my magical Cuban elixir, something I believed had come from heaven and considered better than honey and cinnamon and all the sugars in the world combined, was nothing more than Borden’s milk mixed with a few tablespoons of Hershey’s syrup.