In my self-mortifying Catholicism, I eventually came down with the worst case of eczema, so bad that even folks in my office noticed. My arms, chest, back, and neck were raw and dry; high-strung and feeling guilty, I lived with a picazón—an itching — that drove me crazy and intensified every time I’d sit down to write. It got to the point of being so painful that I felt myself on the brink of giving up on that novel, if not on writing entirely. It just wasn’t worth it. I was in such a bad way that no hydrocortisone cream made a difference, and I had to sleep with my arms held out over the sheets, anything to keep the fabric from touching me. (I even went to a dermatologist — and that wasn’t easy. She told me that she hadn’t seen such a bad case before and seemed puzzled that nothing she prescribed seemed to work.)
I was at the height of that discomfort when I had a lovely dream: Walking in a meadow, maybe in a place like Cuba, in the distance I beheld a river, and in the water, there stood a man. As I approached, I could see that it was my pop, Pascual, awaiting me. There, he told me, shaking his head: “Porque te mortefiques?”—“Why are you tormenting yourself so?” And with the kindest of expressions on his face, he, reaching into that water, brought up cups of it in the bowl of his hands, which he washed over my arms, my face, my back. I don’t recall exactly how it resolved, but I do remember feeling a sense of relief, and, though a dream it may have been, in the morning when I awakened, my skin had cleared of it soreness.
CHAPTER 8. Our House in the Last World
My work on that book, on the weekends and on most nights after work, became a passion which my mother, amused when I’d ask her questions about Cuba or about what she recalled of my childhood, thought of as my nice new hobby, which she went along with. At the office, where I was rarely seen without a library book in hand, I always got through my duties as quickly and efficiently as I could manage, so as to allow myself more time to write, while some of my coworkers, needing the overtime pay, were far less hurried. I didn’t like working past five, if it could be helped, and some days I worked so frantically that I sometimes missed lunch, my midday meals coming down to a candy bar eaten out in front of the building, followed by a few cigarettes afterward. (I always waited until past noon to have a smoke: I had watched too many people climbing the subway stairs on Fortieth Street wheezing and often stopping before reaching the top just to catch their breath, only to pause on street level to light up a cigarette.) I had long since begun to dress more casually, abandoning my ties and jackets for blue jeans and a shirt, as if I were the office Bohemian. Still, now and then, I’d get offered a better job with more duties — on one occasion, I was asked to run their office in Seattle, a position that would have paid me more money (though not enough) and came with an impressive-sounding title: VP of operations. (I turned it down.) Other opportunities arose along the way (I will not bore you), which I also turned my back on. After a while, management left me alone.
And although I am perhaps sounding rather blasé about my situation there, the fact remained that for every good day when I felt that I was doing the right thing by remaining a willing more or less middle-rung lackey, as long as I could pursue my “art”—the way I’d think about it during my more pretentious moments — there followed two or three days, sometimes a week, when I would take a good look in the mirror and realize that, approaching thirty, for all the wonderful gifts I supposedly possessed (music, drawing, writing), I was, in fact, a hack, a poseur, and, worst of all, a classic underachiever. Like my friend Tommy, I talked a good line, with the difference, however, that I believed it was he who had the real talent. (Another truth is that I considered my older brother, José, more deserving of achieving, so to speak, our family’s first artistic success. Having said this, I am not even sure now if, on some unconscious level, I held myself back as some kind of crazy nod to Cuban familial order.)
Despite the tedium of my daily routines — or perhaps because of them — I began to slowly accumulate a lot of pages, of scenes and dialogue, all the while searching for a voice that somehow sounded like “me”—this fellow, a New Yoikah, with Spanish words, drawn from memory, zipping through his mind like so many pajaritos volando, as my mother might have put it. At a certain point, when I’d decided that I needed a formal opening, my superstitious side got the best of me. Taking a pad along, I left my apartment one Saturday morning and headed over to St. John the Divine cathedral, where I spent some five hours sitting in the knave pews, taking in the organ practice, the piped-in choral music, the ambience of that Episcopalian altar (almost as soul-reaching as a good Catholic altar) while scribbling out, in a most elemental manner, what would become the first chapter of my novel. I went back there on occasion, or, if the weather was fine, I’d sit in the cathedral’s herb garden, fooling with scenes, all the while trying to fight off the nagging depression that would suddenly come over me in waves, shooting up from my knees. (The thing about being inside a church: I just didn’t feel alone — even if I didn’t see a single soul; just the notion that someone might be there peering at me from some timeless, perhaps beautiful place, bolstered my spirits enough to make it all just a bit easier.)
Of course, it was all autobiographical — the first chapters (getting a lot of it wrong) trying to reimagine my father’s courtship and marriage to my mother: To help me along, I’d pore over any maps of Cuba I could find, usually in an antiquated atlas, the sort I’d come across down in Fourth Avenue’s Biblo and Tannen bookstore; just perusing the cartography of Cuba, with its profusion of mysterious names, like the parts of a body, and those etched and writhing lines, sinewy as vinery, that constituted its rivers and roads and borders — all of that fed my imagination. Even if it had been years since I last stepped on that soil as a child, I’d find my pop’s hometown of Jiguaní and trace its route to Holguín, and though I would just be looking over a piece of wafer-thin paper, it was as if I could go back there again. I’d remember that he had once worked as a mail carrier and imagine him riding over the countryside on a horse from farm to farm, cocoa and coffee plantations and dairy centrals abounding, a satchel of letters in his charge. I’d hear the birdsong ringing out from the forests, blue sky and verdant hills surrounding him, and the rain coming down like a waterfall at four in the afternoon, and smell the clay earth giving off a cooling perfumed exhalation, then the heat and humidity rising from the ground. Best of all, I would imagine him as a young man, tall and thin in his saddle, and astride his chestnut mare, as he’d make his leisurely way down toward the Sierra foothills: Simply put, in those bits of research, he’d come back to life!