A union man, local number 6, he paid his dollar dues weekly and kept a book, somewhat the size of a passport, in which each page, subdivided like a calendar, had a square by the date for each stamped payment. The squares were filled with slogans—“Buy the Union brand!” “Support your Union brothers!” He didn’t care for Fidel, of course, given what had transpired in Cuba since the revolution, though his sisters, save Borja and Maya, had remained there without complaint, apparently — none of them left or tried to leave, that I know of — and yet when Marcial García would show up, always with a jug of Spanish wine, to speak in defense of the revolution, my father and mother always heard him out without holding that stance against him. My father was a Democrat, always voted so, but he had his prejudices. He never blinked an eye when a Latino, dark as ebony, might come to the apartment, but when it came to American blacks, the sort who lived in the projects above 123rd Street, he would not go anywhere near them. (When I was about sixteen and had made a black friend, a guitar player I’d met from around, and invited him into the house, my father would not allow him inside. “No, you must leave, I’m sorry,” he told him bluntly by the door.) Nevertheless, he was quite friendly with our mailman, who was black, bald, and cheery, conversing with him often enough in the hall.
Remember that Cuban boxer Benny “Kid” Paret, who got beaten into a coma at the old Madison Square Garden by the champion, Emile Griffith, because he’d so pissed him off, calling Griffith a maricón? His manager, Olga’s husband, came by that same night in the aftermath of that brutal pummeling — Benny, after a few weeks, would die — and when Mr. Alfaro walked in, he carried the bucket containing both sponges and the bloody towels left over from that match and set it down by our kitchen table, where he sat for hours drinking with my father, who did his best to console him.
My father had a terribly distended right elbow, from a childhood fall out of a tree in Cuba, his bulbous ulna bone jutting out a few inches beyond the hinge. You couldn’t miss it, any more than you could help noticing how his hands were often covered with burns and cuts. As I sat by him one evening, watching him smoke cigarette after cigarette and pour himself another drink of rye whiskey, I found myself staring at his elbow and because I’d always search for something to say, I couldn’t help but ask him about why that bone stuck out so far.
“How’d you get that, Pop?” I asked him.
“I got it during the war,” he said after a moment, and he tapped at the bone in a way that made the ash of his cigarette drop off. “A German shot me,” he said.
“You were in the army?” It was a surprise to me.
“Yes,” he said, without equivocating. “I was a sergeant.”
“What did you do?”
He shrugged. “Yo era cocinero.” He sipped at his drink. “I cooked for all the soldiers and for the generals too.”
“Over there?”
“En Europa durante Segunda Guerra Mundial,” he added in Spanish for emphasis: “In Europe during the Second World War.”
Of course, it was a lie, though I didn’t know it at the time. I can only suppose that he made up that fabrication to impress me, his American son. Maybe he did so because war was in the air — Vietnam was just gearing up, and some of the older boys in the neighborhood were going there as soldiers (a few, like Charlie Soto, coming back in a box) — but, even if some moment of patriotic fervor hadn’t compelled that story, I don’t know if he really believed he had anything glorious to report about his life.
“That’s really true — you were a sergeant?”
“Te juro.” And he crossed his heart. “I swear it’s so.”
That excited me, of course, and it left me buoyant. Expecting to go into the army myself one day, I was learning Morse code: I’d sent away for a dime pamphlet about telegraphy and, myopically already half-gone, my lenses as dense and heavy as the bottoms of whiskey glasses, I would sit up late at night, studying those dot dash permutations off a card, without a thought as to how the system had probably become outdated. Nevertheless, that revelation so thrilled me that I actually bragged about my father’s service to my friend Richard, from across the way. “You’re kidding, right?” he asked me, his mouth pursed skeptically as he took a drag of a cigarette.
Still, for weeks, I walked around convinced that he’d told me the truth, and rather proudly so, though, after a while, I couldn’t help but ask my mother about it. The exchange, as I recall, went as follows:
“Hey, Ma, was Pascual in the army during the Second World War?”
“Qué?”
“Was Pascual a soldier? You know. .” And I made like I was firing off a rifle.
“Tu papá? Un soldado? Nunca,” she said once she grasped what I was getting at. “Never!”
“But why would he tell me that?”
“Diga?”
I mustered some Spanish, poor as it was. With her, I always felt like a boat out in some dark bay, sending signals out to a distant lighthouse, always waiting for the light to beam on.
“Fue mentira?” I ventured.
“Si, hijo,” she said sadly.
“But why?” I asked.
“Por qué?” Her face went somewhere else and then she settled down.
She shrugged and rolled her eyes, and, in the only time I’d ever seen her do so, my mother, smiling, tipped her head back and, with her fist closed and thumb sticking out, as if she might otherwise be hitchhiking, raised and lowered her hand toward her mouth.
“But, hijo, don’t you know,” she said, “that he drinks too much?”—“Que tu papá bebe desmasiado?”
Okay: While I knew it, at the same time, a part of me continued to believe him — I couldn’t help it.
The hotel allowed him three weeks for vacation, which he always took in the summer, often while still moonlighting at his other job but still having enough of his days free to do what he most liked, which was to go to the beach, usually Brighton, out in Brooklyn. He’d take me along, when I was eleven and twelve, but never my mother, who preferred to stay at home. (Whether she wanted time off from him or not, she had a belief that too much sunshine would be bad for her skin, and in any case, my few memories of her at the beach always find her mainly under an umbrella, her arms and legs and face slathered with lotion.) We’d ride the fan-aired subway down there, always unbelievably hot, of course, and for these outings, I recall, he’d pack a bag of his favorite sandwiches: salami with pickles and mayonnaise on seeded hard rolls, about a half dozen of them (how less Cuban can you get?). He’d put on a pair of trunks (always oversized) in one of those sandy-floored men’s rooms that reeked of salt water, urine, cigar smoke, and compromised stomachs. Then, once I’d changed, we’d find some spot close to the shoreline, where he’d spread out a blanket, wanting to be near the murky water. He drank beers, which he’d bring along in a shopping bag — and in a pinch, there was always some enterprising chap clopping along the sand in a pith helmet and sandals, selling beers out of a Styrofoam cooler. I seem to remember that he also brought along a thermos — probably filled with whiskey, though I can’t imagine anyone drinking whiskey in that hot sun — and for my refreshments, a bottle of orange juice. Not one for luxuries of any kind, he’d pull from his bag a little plastic, cutting-edge-technology, made-in-Japan transistor radio, hardly much of anything at all, on which he’d tune into a Spanish-language station, a tinny, thin mix of boleros and cha-chas along with an endless promotional patter punctuating the waterside cacophony, similar radios sounding off from hundreds of blankets around us. He liked women, that’s for sure, his eyes never missing a buxom lady’s figure, big hipped or big bottomed or not, as she’d pass by or go wading into the water. Occasionally, he’d strike up a conversation with a woman if she were on a blanket nearby, and somehow, despite his girth, he’d cajole all manner of information from her—“Where do you live?” “What do you do?” “Oh, you have kids — I like kids”—the kinds of things I’d overhear him saying in Spanish. Not that he went off with anyone, but looking back now, I’m fairly certain that he enjoyed the pursuit. He did not swim — rather made his way into the water and plopped down into it, falling back on his hands, or else splashed himself with that foamy rush, always keeping an eye on me to make sure that I kept watch over the plump wallet he’d stash inside his shoes, under his shirt and trousers, on the blanket.