The apartment, in any case, breathed his memories: In the early mornings, at about five thirty, when he used to get up and head to the hotel, I’d awake swearing that I’d heard his quiet shuffle in the hallway, his keys fiddling with the lock. And sometimes, cigarette smoke, though no one smoked inside the apartment — I never did in front of my mother — seemed to linger particularly in the kitchen. (And it wasn’t just I who noticed: My godmother, Carmen, coming downstairs to check in on my mother, would sometimes shiver, shaking her head, saying: “He’s still here.”) It so spooked me that I almost found it impossible to fall asleep without keeping a light on: I’d lose myself in a few comic books or some science fiction novel, or Mad magazines, though hardly an hour went by on those fitful nights when I wouldn’t think about what had happened. At the same time, if I heard anything, even something as mundane as water humming through the pipes or the rumbling of the boiler beneath, I’d imagine him roaming through the basement, with its twisting passageways, on his way out to visit us. I always expected that, any moment, he’d push open the door to my room, and if I’d happened to finally doze, I would soon enough shoot up in fright. I got to the point that I could not turn off the lamp, nor make my way through the night without listening to a transistor radio: I always dialed past the Latin music stations, preferring the talk shows of Barry Farber, a conservative broadcaster, and Jean Shepherd, whose comical stories, along with Farber’s antihippie harangues, simply kept me company.
But the persistence of memory killed me: images of him, drifting in from the permanence of the past, much like the smoke one has blown from a cigarette, going off to the heavens.
The situation wasn’t helped by my mother’s state of mind. She hadn’t been so bad during the weeks that her sister Cheo, coming in from New Jersey, slept by her side, but once my aunt went back home and Borja, another angel, returned to Miami, she really started losing her grip. She went off the deep end — perhaps some old buttons regarding the loss of her father, from a stroke too, when she was a girl, had been pushed — and doubling over with grief, she wandered back and forth in the hallway muttering, despite all the shit they’d put each other through, “Ay pero, mi Pascual.” That was one thing, but at night, resting in bed, at first sighing, then tossing and turning, she tended toward talking to herself and, as it were, hosting both sides of a conversation with my father.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing, woman.”
“Then why are you looking at me that way?”
“Because you are so pretty.”
“Ah, hah, and that’s why you abandoned me!”
Then she would call the spirits and witches of her childhood into the apartment, praying to Santa Misericordia and, on her knees in the hallway in a cracking voice, offer her spirit up to God so that she might follow him to wherever he had gone.
I tended to find any excuse to stay out of the apartment, even if I’d just sit out on the stoop at night, where my pop used to, staring out at the lifeless street, where Columbia had put up its new institutional buildings, or I’d go upstairs and knock on Marcial’s door — he might show me a few new things on the guitar, and I’d sit watching his fingers work the fret board, all the while sipping a glass or two of dark Spanish wine. In general, folks were really kind to me, even the neighborhood pricks — at least for a while — but I’d have to come home sooner or later and then my mother, seeing my father in me, would start up with all kinds of crazy shit; she couldn’t resist letting me know that I was just like him — maybe nice in some ways, but only on the surface, and that deep down she knew I was up to no good and that I was a spoiled prince who’d treated her like a slave going back to the times of my illness, though occasionally she’d mess up and address me as Pascual, and what business did I have thinking that life might be easy, when we all should know that for some folks it will always be a hell. She’d go on as well about how I couldn’t have possibly really cared for him and that he knew it — why, I didn’t even let him embrace me on that day when I went to Miami and saw him for the last time; she saw that from the window. And for that matter, since when did I care for anybody else, particularly my own mother, who gave her life up for me, I was so obviously wrapped up in myself. Her tone was always indignant, often hysterical, and sometimes she’d yell out Pascual’s name in the middle of the night, doubtlessly waking everyone in the building up, but without a single neighbor saying a peep (I’d just hear some windows shutting), and while I couldn’t blame her — what a horrid grief she must have experienced — it seemed to me that we had, as a family, so little to hang on to that I resolved to bring us together, as those phone-in radio shows might put it.
But whenever I approached my mother tenderly and did my best to reach out, even speaking my half-assed Spanish and with my heart pricked by thorns; I’d say something sweet: “Pero, mamá, no sabes que yo te quiero”—“But, Mamá, don’t you know that I love you,” or I’d say, as she’d go into a trance, “Por favor, cálmate!”—“Please, calm yourself!” She’d not only come back to reality but take the occasion to dismiss my efforts. “What are you saying? Why, you can’t even speak Spanish! That’s how little you care.” And she would start in on me, the way she used to with my father, and that would be enough to drive me back out onto the street, where I’d smoke a few cigarettes, sometimes one of those stale things from the pack left on his dresser, and nursing each one, all the while thinking of him, my little way after all of communing with my pop, who, as it turned out, I would never really get to know.
PART TWO. What Happened Afterward
CHAPTER 5. Getting By
My pop’s union had contributed a thousand dollars for his funeral expenses, his wake having been held over three long days at the Ecchevaría & Bros. funeral home on West Seventy-second and his farewell service at the church of Corpus Christi. I’ll tell you that it was a delight, my brother and myself flanking his open coffin from ten in the morning until eight at night, with the occasional break for lunch, as if anyone could eat, or, as with me, slipping outside to smoke a cigarette. I remember having to buy a new pair of shoes for the occasion, and that my upstairs neighbor Marcial lent me the money for them. I remember that a lot of folks rapped my back in condolence. I shook hands with the mourners as they came by to pay their respects, a few of the fellows pausing to whisper — or sob — a few words into his ear, or someone commenting, “How handsome he looks,” or the occasional fellow, drunk out of his brains, with eyes like cracked glass, breaking down like a child — while I hardly showed very much emotion at all.
Afterward, one of his fellow workers from the hotel would occasionally turn up at our door to offer my mother an envelope filled with a few twenty-dollar bills, or in the mail we’d receive contributions from folks who addressed the envelopes to the family of Caridad or Charity. And neighbors, ringing our bell, came by with pots of cooked food or else left them with a note in front of our door. Sometimes an old friend from the hotel, like Díaz, would come by with a package of T-bone steaks. These we, of course, gratefully accepted. Along the way, one of the priests from church sometimes stopped by with an aluminum-wrapped package of something left over from a parish bingo, but no matter what, things were not the same with us as when my pop was alive and brought home that plentiful bounty from the cornucopia that was the Biltmore pantry.