In any event, it was Chaclita who made the effort to show me how to write down my own name. This she did one afternoon as we stood in the hallway, her slender (somewhat bony) hand holding my own and guiding my pencil over each letter across a pad. I did so shakily, and afterward, I couldn’t help looking at the name Oscar Hijuelos over and over again. Fascinated, and treasuring it as if it had some great value, I took that slip of paper around the apartment with me proudly, until, after I’d left the little exercise out on the kitchen table and gone away for a few moments, I returned to find that my mother had thrown it out.
But to be fair to her, my mother also tried to be my teacher, though she could barely read English. What books we had were the kinds that she either found abandoned under the hallway stairs or in boxes left out by the garbage cans in front of our stoop, tomes, for the most part, discarded by the university folks who, at one time or other, had taken temporary apartments in the building. (I recall a few medical students coming and going quickly, and for a while, there was a kindly Lebanese professor, prematurely balding, with two little children, living up on the second floor — I think he was a widower because of the way he doted on the little ones — I can remember him winking at me as I’d watch him speaking with my father from our door.) Among the titles my mother collected for our hallway bookcase: a fancy edition of Oliver Twist with half of its gold-leafed pages missing, a biology textbook, a volume or two of some outdated encyclopedia, a hardcover copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, circa 1930 (which I still have to this day), and other choice sundries like Agricultural Development in the Middle United States, 1954–1955, all of which, I think, she brought home mainly because she thought they might be worth something; but she also treated them, at the very least, like decorations, along the lines of the other bric-a-brac that my mother, who could not pass an item left out on the sidewalk, also brought into the apartment.
My lessons, if they can be called that, unfolded with the aid not of children’s stories of the Dick and Jane variety, nor any of the classics like The Little Engine That Could or of the Golden series, but rather the comics, which my mother called “funny books.” My brother, working in a local stationer’s, brought some home regularly, as did my father, but we also got some from a teenager named Michael Komisky, later a Catholic missionary priest, who lived in the building next door. A gentle and idealistic soul, his comics were not about crime or adventure but featured animal stars like Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, and Felix the Cat. These my mother found the easiest to understand. In a tender way, as I think about it now, the afternoons we spent sitting by the kitchen table or lying side by side on her bed, with such comics opened before us, were our most peaceful and unhurried, though I’m still not sure what to make of those lessons in which my mother did her best to improve her quite minimal English alongside me. Just the same, she tried.
“Felis, wh. . whar. . whers ar-ray. . jew. . jew gaw-gaweeng?” And then, she’d stop and say, “Dejame ver”—“Let’s see now”—and begin the same line again, “Felix, where are you going?” her pronunciation as confounding to me as before. Our movement from caption to balloon, and panel to panel, was always glacially slow, but I didn’t mind those lessons at alclass="underline" I don’t know what or how much I learned from hearing the words of Felix (“Yes, I will take this rocket ship to the moon!”) as they fell from her lips, but my mother’s attempts to meet me midway, as it were, along with her struggles and out-and-out bursts of laughter — from finally understanding what the heck was being said — constituted the only moments that we were together as mother and son when my supposed frailness, my susceptibility to infections, my illness, and all the anxieties she attached to me were thankfully absent as a subject of our conversation.
Of course, I had other moments with her, when, forgetting all the crap I’d put her through, she occasionally became almost tender toward me. During a time when she worked cleaning up after a kindergarten school on 116th Street in the evenings, I’d accompany her, passing the hours playing with blocks in a corner, while she, not really knowing how to clean at all, went about singing to herself most happily, dusting the furniture and washing the floors and bathrooms until about ten o’clock, when, her work completed, she’d take a few moments and sit down behind the upright piano to pick out, by ear, some tunes she remembered from Cuba. (They always put her in a good mood; walking home, she always seemed a different kind of lady, lighthearted and laughing.) And in the autumns, during a soporific late afternoon rain, falling asleep by her side, I’d feel her pulling me close to her and, sensing her soft breathing, I’d drift off into the most wonderful of dreams. “Qué tranquilo y sabroso, eh?” she’d say. “How tranquil and delicious this is!” Later, in unexpectedly good spirits, she’d take me into our narrow bathroom and, singing gaily, wash my hair over the bathtub, the warm spray pouring down on my head, her fingers massaging my scalp, an unexpected maternal sweetness overwhelming me: Everything about that process, from the smell of her perfume and shampoo and the proximity of her body, in its warmth, as she pressed ever so slightly against me, seemed so pleasurable that whenever she washed my hair, I never wanted it to end — and not just for the little niceties of being pampered but because, during such moments, I’d somehow feel a continuity with her past.
“Te gusta?” she’d ask me. “Good! At least your mamá is doing one thing right!”
And she’d laugh and dream aloud: “I’m doing it for you the same way my mamá did it for me, in Cuba.” Then: “If it feels so good, it’s because your abuelita taught me, hijo.” Afterward, she’d towel my head off, stand me in front of a mirror, and comb my hair. Looking me over, she’d rap my back and say: “Ya está!”—“Just fine!”
One afternoon — I was seven — a letter arrived from Cuba, in a nearly weightless envelope. She opened it by the window, at a time of the day when the sun had risen over the tenement buildings across the street, and light came flooding into the living room. Kids were on the street; I could hear them shouting, a ball hit during a stickball game, a car honking, someone calling out, “Run, Tommy, run, ya dumb fuck!” when all at once, as she read down the page, she stopped and looked up, and said, “Ay pero mi mamá, mi mamá.” She shrank within herself just then — I’d never seen her looking so petite; she wasn’t — and began to softly cry, shaking her head, murmuring to herself. Not knowing what to do, I went over to her, asking, “What is it?” But, as she stood in that shaft of light, she kept on weeping until, just as suddenly, she gathered herself and, touching my face, told me: “Mi mamá se murío.” Then, in her English, “Jour abuelita, she is now in heaven.”
As for my homeschooling, I think that period of studying with my mother lasted for perhaps a year and a half or so, until there came the point when — my father had probably pushed for it — my mother, reluctantly believing that keeping me at home wouldn’t do me much good, finally enrolled me in a first-grade class at the local Catholic school, Corpus Christi, run by wimpled Sinsinawa Dominican nuns. The school itself was situated on the Broadway side of 121st Street, just across the way from the Teachers College complex of old turn-of-the-century buildings, its classrooms taking up three floors above the church where I had been baptized, with a rectory where the nuns lived way above.