Thoughts Without Cigarettes Read Online Free PDF

the ease with which he could hoist up four of his children at a time and for the tenderness of his spirit; but I haven’t the faintest idea of what he looked like, as I’ve never seen a single photograph of him, though he surely must have had something of my father’s face in his own.)
    The oldest family member, my father’s great-grandmother, Concepcíon Dieguez O’Connor, took in those gatherings from a rattan chair set under a banyan tree in the yard. Born in Jiguaní in 1840 of Irish and Cuban parentage, she was just short of her one hundredth year of life; the myth goes that she owed this longevity to her daily cigars and to a regimen of rum and aguardiente. She too seemed to have seen something lively and worthwhile in my mother, for Concepcíon often asked her to sit by her side, regaling her with tales of her own youth. Of his seven sisters, however, it was only Maya who gave my mother a hard time. In her mid-thirties by then, and married to Pedro, she often stayed on the farm while he went traveling to the states and on tours to Europe. During his frequent absences, she apparently coveted my father’s company at my mother’s expense, and so adamantly that in the midst of those fiestas, my mother and aunt often almost came to blows—and if not, they surely had gotten to the point of insults, my mother’s favorite retort to Maya, so she would later tell me, being that, instead of Pedro, she should have married her brother. Which is to say that from the beginning, things had never been good between the two women.
    Caught in the middle, my father looked the other way, and though his eldest sister no doubt attempted to break them up, the rest of the family liked my mother enough to further encourage her affections toward him. Maya, however, prayed that my mother would go away; and whenever she could, she spread her own vicious rumors about “that Torrens woman,” who had the nerve to think she was better than everyone else. Evidently, Maya’s dislike of my mother, while not enough to dissuade my father’s amorous pursuit of her, still planted enough doubts and misgivings about her character and motives to put off any immediate notions about marriage. Still, at a certain point in the early 1940s, they became engaged: As his prometida —fiancée—she doubtlessly enjoyed a boost in his family’s standing. How Maya must have suffered.
    What my father could have been thinking when he, at Maya’s urgings, tore himself away from my mother, and at some point in 1942, having traveled to New York, first walked in through 419’s front doors and checked himself out in the large mirrors that, facing one another in the entryway, reflected his curious and perhaps bewildered—or excited— campesino face endlessly, is unknowable. He had arrived with money in his pockets, as Leocadio, dying the year before, had left his children an inheritance from the sales of several of their farms to divide among themselves. I like to think that Pascual, leaving my mother behind in Cuba, had made the journey sheepishly, that he missed her. Surely, he had gone to New York first and foremost as a tourist talked into keeping his sister Maya company (and perhaps she had hoped that separating Pascual from my mother would break whatever spell the Holguínera had cast over him). Nearly nightly, he and his two sisters made their way to the dance halls and ballrooms where Pedro and the orchestra performed, my father, always a sport and liking to play the big man, spending his money as if there would be no tomorrow. He bought himself some fancy clothes, sparkling cuff links, two-toned cordovans, and, if anything, had no real plans for his future. Still, as good a time as he was having, he would have hardly thought of staying in New York for long, for while he seems to have liked the city enough to prolong his visit, with the months slipping by, he had his own bouts of