They, of course, journeyed to America and had two sons, the older named Horacio (after my godfather) and the younger — my stand-in, or doppelganger, as the educated folks say — Hector, I took from a Puerto Rican guy about my age, who worked behind the counter of a liquor store on 105th Street. While I’m at it, I called my pop Alejo — liking its similarity to the Spanish word lejano, “faraway” (but also in homage to Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban writer) — and my mother, or someone much like her at any rate, Mercedes, which was my aunt Cheo’s name. As for mi tía Maya, whom I could only see at that point through my mother’s eyes, I made up the name Buita — which, I suppose, had something to do with buitre, “vulture.”
Gradually, I began to fill those pages with the spine of what I perceived as my life, up until the time of my father’s death. Yet, while I felt that I was probably making some progress toward becoming a writer, if that’s what I really wanted to do, in that process of digging up the dead (and resurrecting them, as it were), I began to experience some very bad nights of restless sleep and disorienting dreams again. (As it would turn out, I’d go through that same upheaval with later books, but this was the worst.) My nightmares got so bad that my girlfriend at the time, a sharp lady on her way to a Ph.D. in statistical analysis at Teachers College, often thought aloud that a little psychological counseling might help me achieve a creative breakthrough and recommended that I see a therapist. But coming from a culture (cubano) and neighborhood (mainly working-class) where, quite frankly, something as bourgeois as therapy was not only unheard of but spurned as a rich man’s indulgence, I couldn’t even begin to take such a suggestion seriously. “Oh, really?” I’d say, feeling somewhat offended. And yet, often hitting a wall (sometimes literally), I eventually did.
The fellow I hooked up with happened to be a cubano who, as he would tell me, had left the island disguised as a priest and, coming to the States from Spain, to which he had escaped with a Vatican delegation, worked for IBM for a decade before commencing his studies for a Ph.D. in psychology, his specialty dream analysis. (He was also something of a humanist, having been mentored by Rollo May.) When I met him for the first time, probably around 1980 (I do not exactly recall), he seemed everything that I was not: tall, dark featured, somewhat macho, soulful, pensive, with a strong but charmingly Cuban accent, and he had the handsome if slightly serious face of a Asturiano matador. Above all, he was a Cuban from Havana, which, it surprised me to learn, actually meant a great deal to me. (Even so, I had my doubts at first, enough that once when I visited Donald Barthelme, I couldn’t help but ask him if he had ever seen a shrink. His answer: “I have found them, upon occasion, useful.” Drag of cigarette, gulp of drink.)
Still, it took me a long time to trust his judgment enough to allow him inside, as it were. But eventually, he became of use to me, at least in the way a priest can be when you go to confession. During those sessions, I learned a few things. It was the first time anyone had ever told me that the kind of year I spent away from my family as a four- and five-year-old would have produced an acute sense of anxiety and depression, insecurity, nightmares, mood swings, and melancholy in anyone (oh, thank you!). But it was all the more traumatic in my case, he reasoned, not only because of the nature of my illness but because of the way my circumstances had, in effect, severed me from my roots (no big news). My darkness had been further aggravated by my sense of guilt related to watching my father, or “tu papá,” descending into a purgatory of self-injury and, the big payoff, his death — something that I, experiencing a survivor’s sense of helplessness, had obviously not yet come to accept. (The flip side came when this psychoanalyst, being a cubano and naturally superstitious, and as someone who had, in reality, almost become a priest, cast doubts on whether anyone could be truly dead. He — the antiscientist and a hater of ese comermierda Fidel, who had outlawed the open practice of Christianity on the island — simply believed in God, and in ghosts, and in spirit transmissions. In other words, bless his soul, he was not your typical psychoanalyst.)
Though I left many of those sessions feeling better, I also wondered if I had turned into some kind of faggot. (Go to my old neighborhood bar and tell one of those wasted guys that you felt depressed and he’d look you over and say: “What you need is a drink and a fine piece of ass.”) Sometimes, I felt so stupid about that therapy that I’d stop for months at a time, only to go back. Most sessions I treaded water, though; once, in what must have been a case of transference (or time travel), the interior of his office somehow became that of a rustic house in Cuba, down to its deeply green smell of palm leaves and dampened earth (swear to God). Somehow, he came to represent for me some paternal Cuban archetype, as if my father and the abuelos I had never known had been magically combined in him. For a few minutes, I had a sense of belonging. On the heels of that experience, which was like a waking dream, he told me, in a voice that sounded just then so much like my father’s, “But don’t you know, eres cubano. You are Cuban, after all.”
While I am a little embarrassed to have disclosed such a thing, those sessions, despite the formality of the circumstance, offered me the kind of internal encouragement that I could never get anywhere else, not from my family nor any of my friends. And the process of talking about my dreams, which, in any case, always had either a terrifying or mystical aspect to them, really got the gears in my subconscious working, and even helped me come by the title of my novel one night. It was on the spine of a book, along one of the shelves, the H’s, in the used bookstore around the corner from my mother’s apartment, where I had gone walking in a dream. Noticing my name on the spine of a book, I pulled it out and saw my novel’s title for the first time: Our House in the Last World.
For what it’s worth, I simply don’t know where else that title could have come from, except my subconscious. It was just there. Having said that, I can’t help but point out that were it not for two missing letters—c and j—one could spell my name, Oscar Hijuelos, from it. I know it’s not much, but at the time that little coincidence, even if it is a bit forced, imbued the book with a magical glow.
Good things happened: Sending off the first chapter to a foundation, I received a grant. It paid three thousand dollars, before taxes, a fortune to me at the time, not enough to live on but an encouragement. (I do not remember what I did with that money.) The best part of receiving such a grant, the CAPS, came down to some of the folks I met through it. One of the judges, a Puerto Rican living on 115th Street in East Harlem, Edwin Vega Yunque, or Ed Vega, called me up. He was a novelist, and a fine one at that, who, however, in that climate when no major New York houses published Latinos, had gone critically unnoticed in his own city. (Or to put it differently, completely ignored by the major newspapers.) He treated me well, however, invited me over to his apartment, where, as it happened, I got to know his daughter, Suzanne, an aspiring guitar-strumming singer back then, who, I recall, often performed downtown at a place called Folk City. Ed was a Buddhist, married to an American wife, and as a writer knew just about every Latino author in the city, among them a Puerto Rican poet, Julio Marzan, and the Guatemalan David Unger, both of whom became my friends.
It was just a happy time: Through Vega, I made my debut as a writer, reading from my own work before a Latino audience at a poet’s hutch up in the South Bronx — just a storefront with some folding chairs and a podium on Jerome Avenue. That initiation took place before the kind of down-home crowd you only find in the ghetto, with kids, mothers, pregnant women, old abuelitas, teenagers, and your rank-and-file local poets and teachers responding to your work with both seriousness and enthusiasm. (Afterward, tons of food was served from tinfoil-covered plates, along with beer.)