Now, you’d think that a child in such close proximity to so loquacious and opinionated a woman would have picked up the pieces of that lost “mother” tongue again, just through constant exposure. But, although that’s just what should have happened, the simple truth is that she never really spoke to me but directed her tirades, her aphorisms, her orders, her stories, at me. If she’d been a different sort — say, like my loving aunt Cheo — my mother might have gently prodded/eased the Spanish language out of me or, at the very least, gone over the sorts of exercises that most Cuban mothers might with their children, like the rolling of the rrrrrs through the repetition of tongue twisters like “Tres tigres tristes,” or, starting from scratch, taught me just what things were called, or how the Spanish alphabet worked and about los vocales, or else, in any case, gently cajoling me to speak more Spanish, day by day. Who knows how my feelings about “refusing” to speak it might have changed. But, for whatever reasons, that sort of patience, organization, and attentiveness were just not part of her nature.
Perhaps she thought my Spanish would naturally come back to me or that, quite simply, it seemed too great a bother, given her more immediate concerns. (Years later, she’d say, shrugging, “I don’t know why you didn’t want to learn,” as if that were something that had been offered. And while I now wish she had been more demanding when it came to my speaking Spanish, my guess is that I would have still found ways of pushing that language away.)
Regardless, by then, I remained indifferent, blocked, and somewhat of a spoiled princeling: She may have filled my ears with her thousand-words-a-minute Spanish, but like a good defender, as vigilant about avoiding the absorption of those words as if they were poison, akin to the Cuban microbes my mother always talked about, I hardly ever let those words in through the walls I’d put up. And so, early on, we adopted our own way of communicating with each other: She’d speak to me in Spanish, which I comprehended but resisted speaking, and I’d answer her in English, a language she barely understood and, in any case, never really cared for.
Standing by my window, I loved it when the scissors man, with a grindstone on his cart, came up the hill ringing a bell and, getting a taker, stopped to sharpen those knives and cutlery, the sparks flying off his wheel; or I’d see a ragman going into certain doors where bags of cast-offs awaited him; and, I swear to God, that neighborhood had its share of midgets — maybe they were hooked up with the Ringling Brothers circus and stayed somewhere on 125th Street — but they’d sometimes come waddling by on the street in pairs. Then there were the Italians in their Alpine hats, three men strumming guitars and mandolins, along with a woman, her ears bejangled like a Gypsy’s, banging a tambourine, who seemed to appear from out of nowhere — from East Harlem perhaps, or Little Italy — and marched up the hill, serenading the tenements with bel canto and Neapolitan songs. (People would lean out their windows and toss down dimes and quarters wrapped in tissue paper.)
And I’d feel a definite excitement when the coal truck pulled up — yes, that was a different era in New York — and practically backed into our living room, or so it seemed: From its rear dropped a metal chute down into a basement window, where there was a storage bin, and for half an hour or so, the coal, released from the truck, would come rushing below into that darkness, like so much river water (a sound I still find soothing). From the window, I’d watch as well, with some enchantment, what the local Irish cops on the beat called “shenanigans.” Our black streetlamps, from the turn of the century, had ornate astragal moldings and roundish ridges that made it easy enough for kids to climb, some three stories high, to their finial tops, usually to place or recover what the local mischief makers had left hanging there — trousers and sneakers, and sometimes even underwear, during that unceremoniously humbling process known as “depantsing.” They also played three-sewer stickball in the spring and summer, and games like Chinese and American against the walls, and now and then, as I’d wait for my father to come home, fistfights broke out, usually over some girl, someone calling the cops, a squad car or an officer on his beat arriving to break things up — it all seemed so thrilling to me. (Crazily enough, also on that street at night, some fellow, in celebration of his Celtic roots, think his name was Myles, would dress up in a tartan skirt and tam-o’-shanter and, as if part of an invisible procession, move up and down the block, playing wistful airs on the bagpipes.)
Still, if my mother saw me standing by an open window, she’d pull me away and slam it shut. And then, without much of an explanation, she’d threaten me with the notion that I might not ever get the chance to go out; and so I’d sit down, benumbed and cautious, wondering what the hell was going on.
Several times a day, I had to take a regimen of pills, which I got used to, and occasionally some vile-tasting liquids, possibly mild laxatives, but when it came to food, I had to live off my memories of better times. As such, I felt deeply affected whenever an ice cream truck drove up the street with its tingling bells, or when I saw kids coming up the block carrying a white-boxed cheese pizza from the old hole-in-the-wall V&T’s on 122nd Street, which they’d eat right there on the sidewalk. (In such a state of vigilance, or food envy, you become aware of every box of Cracker Jacks, every Hershey bar, every thirty-five-cent roast beef sandwich on rye bread with mayonnaise and salt and pepper from Adolf’s corner delicatessen that you’ve seen someone eating.) I could not eat anything with salt, most meats, butter, nor the merest bit of sugar, as my nephritis had apparently left me in a prediabetic state. (By then, my eyes had started failing badly — I had no idea of just why things looked blurry a few yards away and thought that normal; but the deterioration of my eyesight was distinctly related to what had happened to my kidneys, a doctor later told me; neither of my parents, nor my brother, had problems with their vision.) Which is to say they’d put me on a diet that no child of six or seven could ever possibly care for: Whatever foods I did eat — potatoes, carrots, and some meat or chicken — were boiled to death, and never anything as delicious as one of my papi’s typical weekend breakfasts of fried eggs with steak or chorizos, onions, and potatoes cooked in delicious Hotel Bar butter and smothered in salt, the aromas of which I had to endure while eating bowls of sugarless cream of wheat farina with skim milk. Whatever the doctors at the hospital instructed my mother, invariably through someone translating, she adhered to their dictums religiously, as if she were frightened to death about what my pop would do to her if I had a relapse.
Nevertheless, that regimen was no easy thing for a kid to put up with, especially given that the one luxury we had in our lives involved food. We may have been “poor”—“Somos pobres,” my mother declared for years afterward — but by the end of each week, our refrigerator practically spilled over with delectable cuts of meat and other victuals that most families in my father’s income bracket—“upper-class poor” is how my brother and I came to think of ourselves — would have never been able to afford.
You see, as a short order cook at the Biltmore Men’s Bar, my father had worked a special deal with the pantry supervisor at the hotel, an Italiano who, for five dollars a week, allowed him to bring home whatever cuts of meat and other delicacies he wanted. He was not alone in this. Earning little despite their membership in the Restaurant and Cabaret Workers Union, local number 6, all the kitchen staff availed themselves of such perks, while management, being vaguely aware of this — and doing the same themselves — looked the other way. (As they did about other things: I grew up eating with monogram-embossed Biltmore utensils and on slightly chipped plates from their different restaurants, and, at one point, an art deco armoire, a cast-off from when the hotel had started refurnishing the rooms, took up a corner of my parents’ bedroom.) Daily, those secreted packets of meat came home with my father without fail. Ambling toward Amsterdam, across the Columbia University campus, from the 116th Street subway, with his slightly limping gait — even in those years when he was in his early forties, he’d balloon up and down in weight — he’d walk in through the door at around three thirty or four in 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.