“Oh, but, Pascual, what are you thinking? Don’t you remember what the doctors told us about his nephritis?” my mother asked. “The kidneys can go anytime again from an infection.”
“I know, I know, but he seems so much better,” my father said. “And he doesn’t look so bloated as before.”
“Okay, so what?” my mother told him. “He’s only better because I’ve kept him on that special diet, and the medicines…. I’ll tell you I’m sick of being the witch — when I come to him with his pills, he hates me. How do you think that makes me feel?”
“Yes, I know,” my father said. “But do you really believe he’s going to get sick again? I don’t think so, and, mi vida, that monthly bill is killing me. So why don’t we let it go?”
He lit a cigarette: Someone must have given him a Ronson lighter, or he’d found it left behind at the hotel bar. Its metallic lid clicked shut.
“Why? Why?” she cried out. “Because if he dies and we have no insurance, how will we pay for him?”
“Maybe the union will help,” my father said calmly.
“Your union is spit,” she told him. “And anyway, what would the insurance company give us back?”
“One hundred and fifty dollars. Maybe a little more.”
“On a fifteen-hundred-dollar policy?” she asked. “After all the money we’ve been paying for him all this time?”
“Yes, that’s what the fellow said. I talked to him today.”
“But, Pascual, I don’t know,” she said. “Do we really need it that bad?”
“We always need money,” he told her.
“And for what?” She clicked her tongue. “So that you can spend it on your friends?”
“Please, woman, don’t start,” he told her in the strongest manner he could muster when he hadn’t been drinking. “It’s just something we could do. That’s all I mean. Think about it, huh?”
“Yes, think about it — as if what I think matters to you?” she went on. Then, after deliberating a bit: “Do whatever you want,” she finally told him. “But if he dies, you and your drunk pals can get some shovels and bury him in the park. You know?”
“No, no, Magdalencita,” my father told her, exasperated. “It’s not going to happen that way. Tomorrow, I will call the agent and see what we can do about the policy. And please, don’t look at me that way — I just don’t think he’s going to die, and that money will help us in the end, okay? Maybe I can buy you something nice.”
“Yes, something nice,” she muttered.
To be honest, once I sort of put what they were saying together, that they were talking about a burial insurance policy, it startled me. I thought about every single picture I’d seen of Jesus being laid in his tomb, and how the priest at church, with his scarlet complexion and rosy cheeks, sermonizing from the pulpit, said things like “Dead, though we may turn to dust, we shall rise again” and all of that, mixed up with Mr. Benny and my parents’ voices, somehow left me picturing my interment in Riverside Park (though I would have settled for the woods along one of the terraced walkways of Morningside). And so naturally, I couldn’t help but call out, “Good night!” the way I always did whenever I became anxious in the evenings. That night, however, as soon as they heard me, my mother hushed my father—“Pascual, please, lower your voice — and not another word more about the policy,” as if she thought there might be some chance in a million that I’d understood what had just been said. I called out again, and with that they called back, “Good night, hijo!” which somehow made me feel a little calmer.
Later, after Mr. Benny’s show ended, and my parents had managed to make their own peace, it was my father who came to get me; not so long before, he would have carried me down the hall to my room, but I weighed more than one hundred pounds in those days, something I’d just found out while standing on the penny scale at the corner pharmacy. And so he, a cigarette between his lips, walked me down the hallway to my room, and with a little pat on my bottom, sent me off to bed. That same night, I dreamed about a stone rolling away from the tomb of Jesus, and then of myself running across a field, clouds of microbios, as frenzied as a plague of flies, chasing after me, and I jumped up, screaming, the sheets beneath me, with their plastic cover coverings below, seemingly catching fire and then becoming, just as quickly, damp with my urine.
It may be a coincidence, but that same year, we’d come by a 1959 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia. A rather dashing and earnest young Cuban salesman, going from building to building in my neighborhood and concentrating on a Spanish-speaking clientele, had knocked on our door. He must have been persuasive, because, as with all purchases, my mother remained tight about money. I can remember seeing him from the hallway: Drop-dead handsome and somewhat priestly in his demeanor, qualities that left my mother half-breathless, he went into a whole explanation about such a set being indispensible to any child’s education and, therefore, to “el futuro de la familia.” Later, after she consulted with my father, they signed off on a payment plan and, within a few weeks, that fount of knowledge, shipped in two boxes, arrived. My father called me into the living room and proudly stood over me as I pulled out each cellophane-wrapped volume from its box: After all, these were the only freshly purchased books that would ever come into our house. Looking them over, I was fascinated, thought all of the illustrations, especially the transparencies showing the different systems in overleaf of the human body, fantastic. My mother stood by the doorway, asking me, “Y qué?” And I nodded, thrilled that something so new, even if they were books, smelling so nicely, had arrived.
It’s since occurred to me that they may have paid for that encyclopedia with the refund money from my burial policy, but what does it matter? Those volumes would sit in that same living room cabinet for the next forty years, and they did make a difference to me. For I’d consult the volumes for school assignments, as when I’d write little pieces about the War of the Roses or an American state, like Indiana. You know, the kinds of subjects that further enhanced my distance from the hallucination that had been my Cuban past.
It was around 1960 when, despite my ongoing “delicate health” and, no doubt, over my mother’s objections, my father had decided to send me and my brother down to Miami to spend time with Maya. Though my pop must have suspected that Maya had some ulterior motives — as did my mother, who at that point could not, for the life of her, mention Maya’s name without muttering some long simmering aside (“Oh, but that woman hates me; why should we send her our sons?”) — he perhaps thought that, deep down, his sister Maya had only good intentions. (I also imagine that, despite the expense of sending us south by railroad, he figured he might save himself some money over the next few months.)
By then Maya and her dapper husband, Pedro, had settled into a new life, and prosperously so. Since moving to Florida back in the late 1940s, he’d left the music business for good, gone to school, and set up a business as a building contractor. I was about to turn nine that summer, in 1960, and my brother, at fifteen, could look forward to earning some extra money working as a hand on one of my uncle Pedro’s construction sites. With the city of Miami just coming out of a decades-long state of torpor and decline, my uncle, an employer of more than a few recently arrived Cubans who, at that early stage, had already fled Fidel Castro’s revolution, also happened to be the man who, over the next decade, would put up many of the exiled community’s new houses.