Now and then I’d turn up with the lady I’d married — they got along well enough despite their long episodes of linguistic confusion — and we’d all take a subway to Brooklyn to spend the afternoon with my brother and his family. Often, when I’d end up with her alone, for my wife was often away on acting tours, my mother could drive me crazy, mainly asking a bit too much about my private life, and why on earth did I settle down with a woman of Jewish ethnicity, instead of a nice “católica”? It’s the old story, of course, but the truth is I didn’t know myself: I was so naïve about Jewish folks, it never occurred to me that she was, nor did I care; her parents, in any case, were not religious, and as far as I was concerned, real Jews were like the Hasidim I’d see frequenting the Guss’s Pickles stand down on Essex Street, or those Talmudic scholars in their grave black frocks, from the Jewish Theological Seminary on Broadway. I doubt that my mother had any biases against them, and in fact, when she once heard someone tell her that I looked far more Jewish than Cuban — I’d also heard that I looked more Irish or Polish than Cuban — she happily jumped on the notion, exclaiming, “But, of course, look at his big head — he’s got brains!” During those long trips to Brooklyn, when she tended to recount to me the minutiae of her days — from her every meal, conversation, dream, notion, store sale, bargain bought, and numerous “relajos,” funny stories from the neighborhood — it seemed that she couldn’t bear the idea of silence, as if it would take her to a dark place: I would inevitably think back to my childhood with her, and I’d naturally become a little solemn, even occasionally annoyed. Waiting for a train to come, I’d get up to check out the newsstand or buy some penny gums from the column dispensers, over and over again, just to give myself a breather.
Nevertheless, I came to admire my mother in ways that I couldn’t have imagined. In the five or so years since my father had died, she had begun to build a new, fairly independent life for herself. She had her friends, her daily rituals, her doctor’s appointments, her continuing education classes in the evenings (English I think, typing, some basic secretarial), her routines at church, at which she became a popular presence (particularly at funerals, where she could manage to either out-mourn the most devastated of mourners, or, if in an entirely different mood, cheerfully sweep into a parlor as if a new and better day had come), her favorite shops to frequent, her little part-time jobs along Broadway, and to my surprise, she began a sincere attempt to read in English, mainly by way of the five- and ten-cent romance novel paperbacks she’d pick up here and there in the neighborhood. But there was something else going on at the same time: Though I had some memories of having seen her, while I sat quietly in a corner as a kid, scribbling something down with a pencil into composition notebooks, I never knew until those years later that she had been in fact resurrecting one of her childhood enrichments: the writing of poetry, at which she had apparently always excelled and which, given the much longer moments of her loneliness, she had taken up with a vengeance.
When I’d come over to the apartment, one of the first things she did was to regale me with some ditties she had just written the afternoon or night before (often involving the departed spirit of my father, and situated in an eternal Cuban garden of her imagination, in which she made her cameos as a bird, a blossom, a winged butterfly, while he entered into those poems as a handsome stranger, a wandering mariner, a confused angel whose heart inevitably held the secret to a lost love), and listening to them, I had to admit that there was something wildly creative, if not out-and-out gifted, about them.
And while she had hardly ever been a reticent soul, with each new outing, her delivery, which she refined after readings for her friends — like Chaclita and Carmen and the women she knew from church — became more brazen, self-confident, and, in her manner, theatrical, as if indeed my mother, who believed in spiritualism, had channeled her father, to the point that she would tremble saying her own words. (Then she’d break out laughing over her own pompousness—“Soy loca, sí?” she’d ask.) Those visits were always interesting, if sometimes a little hard to take — even for my older brother, who, speaking Spanish, remained the closer of us to her, because, while José had his painterly aspirations and I had my occasional longings to make something of myself as a writer, it was she — not us — who held court and demanded that we pay her homage as an artist, perhaps the only real one in the family. (After all she had gone through back in the days when she first arrived in America, and for all the miercoles she had to endure ever since, I couldn’t blame her.)
Here, for the record, is one of her poems:
Este es mi libro
Este es mi sueño
Esta es la flor
Que perfume mi alrededor
Este es el niño
Que llora porque
Sueña que está perdido
Este es el agua
Que corre sin
Saber que es un río
Este es mi corazón
Que gime y
Ríe a la vez
Porque fue martirizado
Hoy no sufro
No padezco
Sólo confío en Dios
This is my book
This is my dream
This is the flower
that perfumes my room
This is the boy who weeps
because he dreams he is lost
This is the water
that flows without knowing
it is a river
This is my heart that laughs and moans
Because He was martyred
I do not suffer
nor do I want
I trust only in God
Fine as her poetry could be, however, she still sometimes overstepped the limits of our patience. Never a shrinking violet, in her widowhood she had become something else, her personality, always charming and winsome, sometimes bordering on arrogance. “Son bonitos, no?”—“They’re good, aren’t they?” she’d inevitably ask about her poems, all the while expecting only one kind of answer.
But at heart we appreciated her creativity. In fact, in the years that have since passed, my brother, and I have come to agree that, however else our upbringing may have been fucked-up, we at least were given a sense that we came from creative roots — viz., our maternal abuelo and our mother. We’ve even joked about the fact that we are the “skipped” generation. It’s the American dream, after all, for the first-generation children of immigrants to exceed their parents and go into certifiably venerated and practical professions like that of medicine or law or engineering, to name a few, with the expectation that their offspring, rebelliously prone, drift off into the impractical field of art. But we had somehow skipped over that, though, I must say, without once taking advantage of the few connections we had to further our progress. To put it differently, if it were not for my brother’s practical decision to find a secure job in teaching, or my own eventual luck, we could have easily ended badly, without a pot to piss in or anyone on whose help we could fall back.