When I was born in 1951, at about five thirty on a summer morning, at the St. Luke’s Woman’s Hospital, my father named me after his brother, and I suppose for that reason alone, my father always accorded me a special affection. I’ve been told that as a baby I was good-natured and on the quiet side, that I rarely carried on or cried and had a certain dulzura—a sweetness — about me that, I’ve always believed, must have come from him. By the time I’d entered my infancy, his sisters had finally moved out, relocating to Miami. Borja left when her husband, Eduardo, suffering from a bad heart, became ill, and Maya and her husband soon followed. As for my father? Dividing his days between his job at the Biltmore and home, he still threw the occasional weekend party, as he and his sisters used to, the apartment filling with Cubans and Puerto Rican couples — probably a mix of his friends from the hotel and from the dance halls — as well as a few single strays, male and female alike, from around the neighborhood. On those nights, the drinks and food flowed — my father spending “too much,” as my mother would later complain, on sponging fulanos, most of whom he’d probably never see again and who, in any case, couldn’t give ni un pío—a piss — about him; but because he found it almost unbearable to be alone, those parties took place at least once a month, if not more often. His guests came for their doses of Cuban warmth, the congeniality, the music, blaring on those nights from a living room RCA console, and, aside from the fully stocked bar and the ice-packed bathtub filled with bottles of beer, the immense quantities of food, which lay stacked on platters in the kitchen. It wasn’t long before the crowd, revved up, would get onto the living room floor, dancing away. And there I would be, the little “rubio”—blondie — the cute little americano-looking son of that nice guy Pascual, crawling innocently along our living room floor, bounded by a forest of pleated trousers, shapely nylon-covered legs, and kicking two-toned and high-heeled shoes. My brother swears that, innocent though I may have been, I’d roll onto my back and pass the time doing my best to steal a peek at the mysteries residing inside the plump upper reaches of those swirling ladies’ dresses.
Sooner or later on those nights, while the music flowed out of the living room record player, which, as with most of our furniture, had been left behind for us by my aunts, with the lights turned low while my mother remained in the kitchen tending to the food or finishing up with the dishes, my father, a sucker for flirtation and a suave rumbero, especially after he’d had a few drinks, took to the dance floor, smitten by some woman’s engaging glance. By the time my mother finally left the kitchen, she hardly cut an exuberant figure like some of the dolled-up femmes fatales in their tight dresses, whom she thought of as lowlifes. She’d sit back on the couch, her arms folded stiffly across her lap, and, neither drinking nor feeling as jubilantly alive as the other women, take in the proceedings rather somberly.
I suppose that kind of generic Cuban scene of food, drinks, and dancing unfolded in similar apartments across the city circa 1953–54, but in our case, those evenings usually ended on a sour note: For once everybody finally cleared out at some late hour of the morning, leaving behind a disaster of half-finished meals and cigarette-buttfilled glasses everywhere, my mother, unable to forget and forgive my father’s treatment of her, would have it out with him. Down the hall in bed, my brother, José, in the room right next to mine or, if we had boarders, in the same room with me, I’d sometimes hear them tormenting each other at night, and loudly so, as if we, their kids, were deaf. And sometimes, I swear, it seemed that we heard things crashing against the walls, plates breaking, hitting noises, and cries — at which point my brother would get out of bed to see what was going on, only to return in tears, having gotten slapped in the face for his trouble. (Here I have to interject that it was from those days onward that my brother formed a poor opinion of my father, a stance that led some years later to out-and-out fights between them on the street, though I never witnessed such and still find that notion hard to believe.)
Not to say, however, that my parents were always at each other’s throats; to the contrary, in calmer times, they had their share of laughs and moments of tenderness. He’d sometimes come home with some gift for her, a bottle of perfume or a pair of earrings bought from one of those enterprising vendors who’d go from hotel to hotel, selling goods to the staff at cheap prices. (He must have known every Latino “whole seller” from the Bowery to the Bronx.) Sometimes, I’d see her in the mornings, standing at the end of the hallway by the front door, straightening the knot of his tie and patting down the shoulders of his coat as he’d head out to work. And the fact remains that, however much his attentions may have wandered, they, as a couple, surely fooled around a lot. Once, while crawling across the floor as an infant, I discovered under their bed a white pan of water — a palangana—in which floated a wildly distended and somewhat forlorn-looking used condom, which I hadn’t the slightest idea about. (At the same time, I can’t help thinking of that discovery now without recalling how, on some nights, I’d hear her agitated cries, perhaps of pleasure.) And, as a family, we went places: to Coney Island in the summer, and at Christmas to Macy’s for an annual visit to see Santa Claus, or Santa Clows, as my mother pronounced it.
As for the static between them, if it affected me badly, I have no recollection of feeling that way — what was I but a little kid anyway?
Which brings me to that journey I made with my mother and brother to Cuba, in the summer of 1955: It was my father, perhaps in a spirit of largesse or reconciliation, who had paid for our airfares out of his Biltmore wages—$42.50 a week, plus whatever he made in overtime — probably in cash, as he did with all our bills, and since Borja still worked for Pan American airlines, as a bilingual ticket agent in Miami, she had probably gotten him a really good deal for our flight.
I don’t recall much, if any, fanfare at our departure, or if my father had even been on hand to send us off — my guess is that he’d gone to his job at the Biltmore — but on a certain morning in late June, someone drove us to Idlewild Airport (now JFK), where we eventually boarded a Pan American airlines clipper for Havana. Since I can’t conjure a single moment in later years of my mother ever once relaxing, for even a second, it’s hard to imagine that she behaved any differently that day: too fastidious (and vain) to have chewed on her fingernails, when not chatting wildly away with some newfound Cuban acquaintances across the aisle in her one-thousand-words-a-minute Spanish, she, hating to fly, would have been on the edge of her seat and desperate for distractions. I seem to recall that she’d sit very still, back upright, hardly moving at all, as if to do so would have magically jostled that avion out of the sky. When the stewardess served us wax-paper-wrapped ham-and-cheese sandwiches, my mother could hardly take more than a few bites. She sighed a lot, looking off into the distance. Later, though she was a first cousin to anxiety, but never imbibed as much as a drink, she must have wanted to during the final leg of our vuolo.