Somewhere along the line, however, there came the moment when I didn’t seem well. My mother’s always claimed that I had the worst habit of drinking from puddles in the countryside, especially after a rainfall, and while you’d think that such water — Cuban water — falling from God’s skies would be pure as any could be, I came down with something anyway, my face and limbs blowing up, and my manner becoming so listless that I was confined to a bed for days, my uncle and aunts convinced that I had perhaps suffered from an allergic reaction to an insect bite. I don’t recall at which point this happened. But those first signs of my illness could have taken place after we’d made a trip to see my father’s family in Jiguaní, which was about fifteen miles away, though, if so, I would have been too late to meet my great-grandmother, Concepcíon, who’d died the year before, at one hundred and thirteen, from diabetes. (Her mind was intact and spirits good, even if both her legs had been amputated; among her last words, I’ve been told, were: “I may have been ugly, but I was lucky in life.”) Or perhaps I’d gotten sick, so my mother has also claimed, from something I’d eaten, perhaps a piece of delicious pork, an undercooked morsel, or one I’d picked up off the ground the day when those tarantulas fell from the tree. Or at the beach near Gibara, a prickly mollusk had jammed something vile into my foot, and it had gotten infected without anyone knowing. Or, perhaps, in the midst of some Cuban miasma, for in the woods there were an abundance of stagnant mosquito-ridden ponds, I had sucked into my lungs some germs, or what my mother called “microbios.” Still, I can’t say just when the symptoms of my illness first came over me, and what recollections I have of that little piece of Cuba hardly summon up any moments of particular discomfort. But during that summer when I turned four, from some mysterious source, those microbios, which my mother, with an almost medieval panache, would describe as “animalitos”—or little animals — slipped inside my body, those parasites (or whatever they were) filling my system with their venom.
Still, whatever ailed me took several months to really manifest itself, and even then, I’m not sure of the day and hour when my mother or any of my other relatives became aware that what I would come to think of as my Cuban disease had taken hold, or even if it was noticeable enough to be truly worrisome to them at first. In any event, by the end of that summer of 1955, I just wasn’t up to snuff, low of energy, and perhaps even more apprehensive and nervous looking than before.
Maybe I’ve come to read too much into the slightest of my expressions, but the single thing I have to go by comes down to the only photograph taken of me in Cuba. It was posed in the salon of my aunt Cheo’s house in Holguín. Cheo’s daughter, the pretty auburn-haired Miriam, with the serious expression of a young girl who had recently lost her father, and my ethereally pretty cousin Cuza were standing beside my mother and brother, his face unfortunately partly obscured. I’m sitting out front on a little chair, dolled up like a little Lord Fauntleroy, my hair blond and wavy, my cheeks covered with freckles, my pudgy knees dimpled, and on my face, if I’m not mistaken, is a look of not just timidity or shyness but of anxiety, as if I knew what was to come.
By the time we eventually returned to New York, late that summer, I had become bloated and listless, with a constant fever and an overwhelming desire to sleep, a crisis coming about one evening in our apartment when, in whatever manner such discoveries are made, my mother found a shocking amount of blood in my urine. What ran through her mind in such a moment, I can’t say, but she must have been frightened to death over what my father might do to her if something bad happened to me. Off in his own universe of pots and pans, steaming soups, hamburger platters, and grilled steaks by day, and coming home to manage as best he could through those evenings, clouds of cigarette smoke wafting through the apartment, it’s possible that he hadn’t particularly noticed the way I looked, or my lethargy. With his early morning/afternoon schedule at the hotel and his habit of staying up late with his chums, perhaps he just hadn’t been paying attention. But whatever his state of awareness, when my mother, in shock or denial, without knowing what else to do, finally let him in on my condition — she must have been shaking and worried out of her mind — Pascual, speaking much better English than she, rose to the occasion. Having a good side — a kind of calmness and a reasoning manner about him when he hadn’t been drinking — he quietly tapped on our neighbor’s door to use the telephone. But if the elderly Mrs. Blair didn’t own one yet (though I remember that, in her hallway not far from her door, a heavy black old-fashioned rotary telephone sat on a table), he probably went down to the corner pharmacy to call our doctor, a Sephardic Jew of advanced years named Altchek, who had an office on 110th and Lenox in East Harlem. In that distant age when New York physicians responded quickly to house calls, he arrived at our apartment within the hour, to find me lying on their bed, barely able to move. Always impeccably dressed, Dr. Altchek, whose dark and liquid eyes, I remember, were filled with both sorrow and compassion, quickly went to work. What examinations he administered I do not recall, though I have the distinct memory of his feeling around my swollen abdomen with his fingers and of his thumb opening my right eyelid, that he shined a light into my pupils. It wasn’t long before he, declaring my condition muy grave (grave is the word my mother always used), told my parents that I had to be rushed to the closest hospital, St. Luke’s, fortunately only five blocks away.
It’s likely that my father carried me there himself, my mother in a frantic state following by his side, or perhaps they had sprung for the luxury of a taxi ride, with Altchek, no doubt, accompanying us. It’s possible that I was so listless as to approach unconsciousness, gone under like my uncle in Cuba after his fall; the truth is I don’t remember much about that evening — I probably don’t want to, or, as is likely, I had lapsed into a coma. I haven’t the slightest idea of the treatments they administered in the emergency room, nor the day of the week, nor at just what hour I had been given a little wristband, admitted officially as a patient, then transferred to an intensive care ward, but that night, as my mother later put it, that carajo—the burden — my illness brought my family began.
No doubt she spent the passing hours nervously, and if my father remained true to form, having already become one of those conscientious fellows—un trabajador through and through — who perpetually worries about his image as a worker, he would have stayed in the hospital until it was time for him to begin his daily morning trek to the 116th Street subway on Broadway in silence, likely consumed with anxiety and bewildered. He probably spent that night smoking one cigarette after the other in the waiting room, all the while perhaps thinking about his older brother, the first Oscar Hijuelos, the parallels between us disturbing him. Later at the hotel, on the same morning after I had entered the hospital, while ensconced in the kitchen of the Biltmore Men’s Bar with his chums, he probably had his first drink earlier in the day than usual — compliments of the bartender, a cubano, who took care of him. At least he must have felt blameless about me, but my mother? Told that I was suffering from a severe infection of the kidneys, she must have despaired at my misfortune and felt mystified by her plain bad luck. Perplexed as she waited in the hospital, her own uncertainties heightened, she must have certainly felt her own twinges of guilt. After all, I had gotten sick in her care and nearly died that very night, and for months afterward, my condition remained, to quote my brother, “touch and go.”