Thoughts Without Cigarettes Read Online Free PDF Page B

homesickness and surely missed my mother.
    Now, although Pascual had indeed returned to marry her, sometime in 1943, it must have disillusioned her further when, finishing up some business with his brother, he left her alone in Cuba again. (But, before seeing her, he’d gone to a jewelry shop in New York City, where he’d bought her a beautiful diamond ring whose tiny stones were set in an intricately engraved gold band, a ring that she never took off, not even years later on the night when, mugged on a street near where we lived, some hoodlum threatened to cut off her finger.) Finally, after some months had passed, Pascual, having decided to give a life in that city a try, sent her the money to join him; and dutifully, with her heart in her throat—for since her father’s death, she had never ventured far from home—Magdalena made her way to Havana with a single valise, the sort of cane suitcase with soft cloth inner pockets that would sit in a closet for sixty years. She took a ferry to Miami, which was only a five- or six-hour trip, before boarding an overnight train bound for New York. Bold in so many other ways, she sat terrified, and demurely so, for most of that journey. When an American fellow, a G.I., tried to pick her up, she didn’t have the slightest idea of whatever the heck it was that he said to her; and even if she somehow had, my mother, in her ignorance of English, and as a matter of pride, dared not to speak with anyone. And there was something else: Surely dreading the fact that once she arrived Maya would be in the apartment with her, she made dozens of visits to the toilet, emptying her guts often, so tangled were her nerves. By the time she stepped off that train, her stomach in knots, she was doubtlessly relieved to find my father and Borja, the kindlier sister, waiting for her among the burgeoning Penn Station crowds.
    Later, at a certain moment of the day, when, for all I know, it could have been raining, or sunny, or snowing outside, Magdalena too first walked into that building and saw her startled face reflecting back at her infinitely in the hallway mirrors; she probably felt faint as she entered the apartment and looked around. A believer in intuition and prophetic dreams in the first place, thanks to good old Cuban superstition, she needn’t have been a sibyl to figure out that her life would never be the same again. No doubt she felt relieved to be with my father, who, for the most part, treated her in a courtly and affectionate manner in those days. Borja, balanced and affable, made her feel at home as well. It’s the agitated, scolding Maya who probably gave her one of her dismissive looks the moment their eyes met. With Borja and Eduardo sleeping in the master bedroom, my mother spent her first night in New York in one of the apartment’s back rooms—where I would one day stay—beside my father, breathlessly. How strange she must have felt to be there, for to someone from the tropics, New York must have seemed a rather purgatorial and strange place at best, and overwhelming: On some level, she must have despaired—I’d never hear her once say she “loved” the city the moment she arrived—and yet, she was now with her husband. Besides, not knowing more than a handful of words in English, if any, what was she to do?
    By then, my father had decided he would stay in New York for the long run. He’d made new friends, for in that epoch, however far away or scattered the Cubans of that city were, they inevitably found one another in the dance halls and on the streets, or just turned up one day, knocking on the door. He’d also started to run out of his inheritance money—some five thousand dollars, I’ve heard—and, bored with just hanging around the apartment, kept his eyes open for a job. He was a bright man, though a little too trusting of strangers, a country boy with a decent secondary school education from