Thoughts Without Cigarettes Read Online Free PDF Page A

and old, living nearby and often visiting their household (the Hijuelos-Gallego family tree, based in and around Jiguaní, included the surnames O’Connor, Diéguez, Peréz, Fonseca, García, Cabrera, and Lozano, among others)—he must have been constantly in the company of someone , with little privacy, if any. (However, remembering how he sometimes lived to be around people, I can’t imagine his ever having wanted to be left alone.)
    Ten years his senior and known as a great horseman, my tio Oscar ran the farms alongside my abuelo Leocadio, most of his days spent on a chestnut mare, keeping after their workers. (I’ve been told there were three properties. They sold timber, with pine, ebony, mahogany, and oak woods growing there in abundance.) As the older brother, he would have taught my father to ride at an early age and surely have helped him through the rituals of manhood, taking him to cockfights, perhaps to a bordello, and who knows where else; for the longest time, they were inseparable, going everywhere together and making quite an impression on the people of Jiguaní, who’d remember the older brother for his steely (macho) air of authority and the other for his friendliness. It’s likely that, given the difference in their years, Oscar had loved his younger brother as deeply as he might a son. (Not so long ago, I met a black cubano in his late eighties, a retired New York City schoolteacher, who, remembering them from his teenage years in Jiguani, told me that they were always riding through town side by side on their horses, and that in their height—each was over six feet tall and broad shouldered—they made quite an impression as men to be reckoned with, but affably so: “They were good to one another, above all,” this schoolteacher had told me.)
    Physically, they were practically twins. Each possessed a longish face; broad ridged forehead; large, slightly hooked nose; and protuberant, fleshy ears. Quite fair in complexion, even ruddy, they had wavy dark hair, deeply set dark eyes, and sad expressions of a distinctly Arabic or Semitic cast. It’s likely that some distant Jewish blood flowed through their campesino veins. Just the same, close as they may have been, while Oscar, as a patriarch in waiting, looked after the family’s livelihood, my father spent his time hanging around the arcades and street corners of town, doffing his hat at female passersby or else consorting with friends, with whom, on the weekends, he frequented the dance halls. Over this his older brother must have frowned. But there was something else as well. Leaving the farmwork to his older brother, my father grew quite attached to his sisters, particularly the eldest, Maya.

    One day, Magdalena brought her new suitor home, to their small flat along la calle Miró, and from the start, Pascual made a good impression on her family. My aunt Cheo, her younger sister, would remember my father from those days as “a quiet fellow” with a certain humble but dignified bearing, that he sometimes came riding down their street on a horse, often with a bouquet of flowers in hand. He seems to have gotten along very well with my religious maternal grandmother, María, as well, though I can’t imagine his ever once accompanying her to church, where she, like my mother, took refuge from the sorrows of this world—he just wasn’t that way.
    While their time in Magdalena’s home passed quietly, her visits with Pascual’s family would have been far more socially busy, especially on the weekends when they hosted parties, neighbors and relatives coming from all around to their farm on the outskirts of Jiguaní. On such occasions, she got to know his beloved older brother, Oscar, who, she would swear, always liked her, as did their papi , Leocadio, an enormously tall, barrel-chested man known for his bodily strength and affectionate nature. (He would be remembered for