Of course now I wish I’d been more receptive to him in those moments, but the truth is, I didn’t know it would be the last time I’d see him alive.
This is what happened: I’d been down in Miami for a few days and put to work by my uncle on one of his sites, mainly hauling bags of cement around. My uncle, incidentally, as a former musician, took an interest in the fact that I’d brought along a guitar and, on my second or third night there, had me follow him into his garage, where he kept his old double bass, the very one he had played for years with the Cugat orchestra. Bringing it out, he spent a few hours trying to teach me some old Latin standards like “Perfidia” and “El Manicero,” my uncle, in Bermuda shorts, attaining such a look of fierce concentration on his face, even if only playing an alternating bass line, while I, trying to fathom the arrangements, did my best to keep up with him. We weren’t bad nor good together, but he was not discouraging of me, even if he had better things to do. Along those garage walls were numerous photographs of my uncle Pedro in his glory days, posed on bandstands with his fellow musicians, all in evening coats and tails, an air of glamour about them: Some found him seated in a posh club with celebrities the likes of Errol Flynn, and, as I recall, Desi Arnaz. What he must have made of me, with my longish hair and blue jeans, I can’t say, but he, who had once been quite dapper in his time, seemed to have decided that he would have to take me downtown at some point to get me better clothes. As things turned out, there wouldn’t be much time for that to happen.
My aunt Maya, by the way, of course, rebooted her efforts to lure me away from home. I won’t go into too many details about that — with Cubans, some things never change, and her old animosities and disparagements of my mother picked up where we had left them some ten years before, but mainly she kept to her old mantra that I would be much better off with them and that it was my mother at the heart of my father’s problems in life. (I suspect that once we had that telephone installed after my pop’s heart attack, she’d had some conversations with him when he could hardly get his words out straight.) But she also had some new tricks up her sleeve: Where before, she’d ply me with ice cream and toys and clothes, Maya, knowing that boys will be boys, did her best to fix me up with a neighborhood girl, a pretty Cuban who, if the truth be told, did not seem particularly thrilled by the notion. Her name I honestly do not recall, though I can tell you that she had longish auburn hair and a figure that in tight jeans was too luscious for me to bear. In any event, come the first Saturday after I’d arrived, we went out to a club near Miami Beach, this loud crazy place jammed to the rafters with young kids, where, at about nine that night as we were dancing — that is to say, while I, considering myself a musician, attempted to dance in that darkened room, its ceiling filled with twirling stars, and the music of Joe Cuba’s Latin boogaloo hit “Bang Bang” raging through enormous speakers — I felt this sudden and strange fluttering going up the right side of my body: It was so pronounced that I began shaking my arm wildly, and I must have had a strange expression on my face, for my date, if that’s what she was, looked at me oddly. Then, as quickly as it came, it went away.
Sometime later, perhaps an hour had passed, I heard my name announced over the loudspeaker system. It was muffled, the music was so blaring, and at first I ignored it, until, during an interlude between songs, I heard it clearly: It went, at first in English and then in Spanish, “Would Oscar Hijuelos please come to the front office.” When I reached that office, my aunt Borja was sitting inside, a look of utter bewilderment and exhaustion on her face. “Come on,” she told me. “We have to go home.”
Not once did anyone tell me what had happened, but I somehow knew. Back at my aunt Maya’s so late at night, I had to pack. My aunt Borja had called the airlines, trying to get us a flight to New York, but the best she could do was to book something quite early in the morning, which is why, I suppose, we spent that night not in Maya’s house but in a motel not far from the terminals. I honestly wish I could describe how Maya behaved throughout, except that I couldn’t look at her without seeing tears in her eyes, while Pedro, a stoic sort, shaking his head, had hung around by a kitchen table without saying a word — what could anyone say? We left well past midnight. At the motel itself, with my aunt Borja, who could have been my father’s female identical twin, in a bed across from me, sighing as she smoked cigarette after cigarette (she lived to be ninety, by the way), I passed the late hours kind of knowing what must have happened but without knowing anything at all — it was as if no one could say more than “Your papá has had an accident.” I watched TV, an old-time movie: Enchantment starring David Niven, one of those classy tearjerkers Hollywood used to make — now and then I’d look over and see Borja wiping a tear from her eyes — and I kept on watching that film until its elegiac conclusion, at which point the station went off the air. Though my journey home early the next morning remains dim, I can remember coming into an apartment crowded with neighbors, and my mother’s unbridled, chest-heaving bereavement; Borja’s kindness and composure throughout; and meeting up with my brother that next Monday. Sometime in the early afternoon, we went downtown to Bellevue Hospital. There, someone at a desk escorted us to a certain room. It was a simple room with curtains drawn closed. At a certain moment, as we stood there, the curtains opened to a large window, and from some floor below, we could hear a lift operating. A platform came up, and on it rested my father, covered in a dark hooded shroud.
A few days before, he had been working in the kitchen of Butler Hall’s rooftop restaurant as usual, but it seemed to everyone around him that he’d not been feeling well that evening. He had been sweating, his face was flushed, and he had trouble breathing. One of his fellow cooks in that place, a black man who by coincidence was also named Joe — my father sometimes went by that American shorthand — had even urged him to go home, and one of the waitresses there, a lady named Sally, would remember thinking to herself that my father had seemed rather exhausted and slow-moving, but when she’d asked him if everything was all right, he, in his quiet and self-effacing manner, perhaps worrying about holding on to the few extra dollars he’d make that night, just shrugged good-naturedly and told her that nothing was wrong. Perhaps getting a bit of air might help, he must have thought, and so, stepping out onto the terrace, which had a nice view over Morningside Park eastward to Harlem, he had pulled from his shirt pocket a package of Kent cigarettes in the soft wrapping and, lighting one, had taken a few drags, when, so Sally later reported, he had looked around in confusion, his right arm shaking, and the cigarette dropped from his lips, as he himself, his eyes turned to the sky, collapsed onto the roof tarpaulin.
This happened at nine thirty on July twenty-sixth, about a week after the first moon landing and some twenty-seven years since he’d first arrived in the United States from Cuba. He was fifty-five, and the outpourings of grief at his passing, from his fellow hotel workers and friends from around the city, seemed unending.
It’s hard to explain the supernatural things that happened after he was gone. It was hard to forget him, to put from one’s mind that not so long ago, he had, in fact, been sitting by that same table: I couldn’t go into the kitchen without thinking about him, and even when I managed to put him from my mind, some remembrance would hit me, just like that. Holed up in my room with the same pack of cigarettes he’d been smoking that final evening, for his belongings were delivered in a plastic bag, I’d leave them overnight in a drawer, then find them next morning sitting on the radiator or under my bed. I doubt that I sleepwalked and can’t explain how they got there any more than I can find a reason for the way pictures, of my folks in Cuba mainly, fell off the walls at night, or find an explanation for why the front door would abruptly open at around three thirty or four in the afternoon, when he used to come home, even after we’d taken care to shut the lock.