And, as I have mentioned, he’d speak to me in English, not always, but when he did, it was with a quiet authority and without my mother’s befuddlement and confusion. Whereas my mother remained, for all her life, an ebullient woman, incapable of holding back, her nervous energies flowing all over the place, he comported himself with his younger son with a minimum of words: “Come here,” “Go on,” “What do you want?” “Ask your mother.” And, at least until things got too hard for him, he rarely showed any anger toward me or the world. I just found something comforting about him, even if I would never get to know what he was really about.
Yet, while he offered me affection, that cubano, a union man and hotel cook of simple tastes and longings, he never really taught me anything at all, not how to dress (though he could be quite dapper), nor how to dance the mambo or rumba (at which he, like my mother, had excelled), nor, among so many other things, even how to drive a car (he, raised on farms with horses, never would learn). And when it came to something as important as restoring that which had been taken from me, a sense of just who I was, I doubt that, as with my mother, it occurred to him that something inside of me was missing, an element of personality in need of repair. Earthly in his needs and desires, he just didn’t think that way. Though he never once accompanied me to a doctor and really didn’t take much care of himself, he simply must have seen me as the son he had almost lost, and, at first, for the longest time, always deferred to my mother when it came to matters of my health.
After a while, my father began to feel sorry for me. One night, I remember, when my mother was out with some friends, he could not take the wan expression that had come over my face as he stood over the stove, cooking up a steak in butter with onions, along with fried potatoes, in a skillet. Turning to me, he asked in his quiet way, “Quieres un poquito?”—“Do you want some?” And though I felt reluctant to answer him, as if to say yes would be wrong, he filled my plate anyway. Unfortunately, my stomach had grown so unaccustomed to such rich foods that not an hour later, I got deathly ill and, coming down with the shivers, had to throw everything up, and took to my bed, worried that my mother would find out; and yet, with my father telling me, “Not a word to your mother, huh?” I passed the night, reeling with the memory, however fleeting, of that delicious meal.
Naturally, I came to prefer his company, which is not to say I didn’t care for or love my mother in the same way as my father. If I felt a different kind of affection for her, it had more to do with the way she’d sometimes look at me when I’d speak to her in English, as if I were doing something wrong, or worse, as if I were some stranger’s kid trying to give her a hard time. I was too hyper to always notice, too insensitive to become morose, but I can remember occasionally wondering if I were nothing more to her than a burden that she had no choice but to contend with.
Though strict about my diet, she had her inconsistencies. Once she handed me a glass of orange juice in which I saw floating the cellophane body of a dead cockroach, its antennae curling along the surface. When I refused to drink it, she made a face, and, in one motion, picked the insect out with her fingers and threw it in the garbage. “Está bien, ahora”—“It’s fine now,” she told me. And when I still refused to as much as take a sip, she grabbed the glass off the table and emptied it into our sink, all the while muttering, “It’s like pouring money down the drain.” Turning, she scolded me, “I can’t believe how spoiled you are! We’re not like los ricos — la gente rica, after all!” Then she sat down, oblivious to just how startled and bad I felt.
On another afternoon, when we were in the kitchen, as I sat by the table across from her, eating something, she started looking at me in an odd way. And just like that, she tilted her head back and, gasping, her eyes rolled up in her head; and she cried, “Help me, hijo, I can’t breathe!”—“No puedo respirar!” Slumping forward, she laid her head in her arms, still as a corpse. What could I do but panic? My stomach went into knots, and I started, without really knowing what was going on, to tug on her dress: I felt so anxious, I thought of running over to Carmen’s for help, but, at the same time, I worried about leaving her alone, and pulling at her arm, I kept repeating, “But, Mamá, Mamá, are you okay?” That’s when I saw the crest of a smile forming on her lips, and her eyes popped open, and sitting up straight, she triumphantly told me, “Ah, but now I know that you care whether I live or die!” She was laughing while I withdrew deeply into myself, wishing I could slip into the walls: I can remember her telling me, “Pero qué te pasa? I was joking. Fue un chiste!” When she saw that I hadn’t lightened up, she waved me off, saying: “You’re too serious for so little a boy.” Then I think she pinched my cheek and, shaking her head, left the kitchen, saying, “But now I know you love me. Yes, I do. Now I know.”
Okay, so she was a bit unusual and perhaps still as mischievous as she had been as a girl. But the truth is, not having any basis for comparison, nor choice, I got used to her. Still, though she meant well, she obviously (so I now think) couldn’t help but let her resentments affect her judgment. Out of curiosity one day, I happened to ask her where I was born. And without hesitating, she said, “But, Son, don’t you know, I found you in a garbage can, right out in front.” And she took me over to the window, pointing to some cans by the railing. “It was in that one, at the end. I heard you crying and when I saw you, I thought I just had to bring you home.” And she, always inventing stories — what she called “relajos”—laughed and crossed her heart. “I swear to God that’s the truth.”
I suppose she wanted me to feel a deep gratitude; I suppose it was her way of telling me how lucky I had been to have been rescued from the hospital, but while I didn’t really believe her — for on the other hand, she was always reminding me about how she carried me in her stomach for nine months — a part of me did. Later, looking in the mirror and never really liking what I saw, I truly wondered if the truth had finally come out. Years after, every time I’d hear about that Sesame Street puppet, Oscar the Grouch, who lived in a garbage can, I’d think of that afternoon.
Not to say that my life in that household with my mother was just a misery — to the contrary, long before I had made any of my own friends, like my pal from across the street, Rich, the ladies who’d come by to see her always treated me nicely. Having a simple liking for my mother’s elemental personality, one of them, Chaclita, came by at least a few times a week. Always smelling nice from some mild eau, she wore pearls and, with her dyed blond hair and flapper wardrobe, seemed the most elegant woman to have ever entered our house. She’d bring along bags of fancy hand-me-down clothes for my mother, and, as well, little packages of the European-style marmalades left over from her trips abroad. A sunny spirit who laced her Spanish with French and always spoke of a love affair she once had with a singer named Nelson Eddy, she, in addition to concertizing, taught violin out of a flower-adorned apartment on Morningside Drive. She never had a bad thing to say about anyone, not even my father, whom she must have occasionally encountered in one of his less robust states.