Free Another Spaniard in the Works by Oscar Hijuelos

Foreword
    Some truths really are self-evident, and among them are these: that Oscar Hijuelos changed the history of American Literature; that he was among the best writers of his generation; and that his books were vital, alive, and a delight to read. I have noticed some other aspects of Oscar Hijuelos’s work, and while these are not quite so obvious on first reading, they still exist nevertheless. For instance, he was able to invoke a concern for our humanity, for our most intimate longings and fantasies, and he did this with a delicacy of touch and an almost spiritual grace that I find heartbreaking. This profoundly poignant and reassuring quality is present in its most intense form in this story, Another Spaniard in the Works.
    To be precise about this tone, I’d like to invoke another story of his, Lunch at the Biltmore . Here is one of those exquisitely delicate moments. At the end of Lunch at the Biltmore a scene takes place between a son and a father. Both have been sick, and the son has not been able to eat the rich food that was served in the Cuban household where he was growing up. The father has just had a heart attack and is somewhat frail, but he takes his son to the Biltmore, where the father works, and there he asks a cook to make the son a delicious hamburger, just the variety of food that the son had been forbidden.
    It is described like this:
    Then he called out to Diaz, “Ruben, how about making one of your finest hamburgers for my boy.” My father cut up some Idaho potatoes, and cooked them with onions, butter, and oil. Soon, those wondrous and forbidden delicacies appeared on a platter before me. My father smiled, watching me as I happily ate. “It is our little secret,” he said to me.
    The delicacy and humanity here is in the invocation of the moment when a child begins to become an adult, since this takes place the first time a child understands and keeps a secret with a grown-up.
    In Another Spaniard in the Works, that same delicacy exists, but on a scale that is almost impossible to invoke. The subjects this tone enhances are not only a matter of coming of age, but an almost complete list of those items human beings are concerned with, such as mortality, fame, fantasies, politeness, character (in the sense of how to feel and to behave), ambition, hopes that didn’t quite work out, and, of course, expectation.
    I don’t want to do any spoiling of what happens in this story, since what is going to happen is part of the pleasure of reading it, but a mention of some of the characters in the beginning, in the setup of this lovely story, is a way of suggesting two things: the fun of the story, and to hint at the delicacy that is so much a part of this.
    The story is an account of a young man—our narrator—obviously of Cuban descent, who has a dull office job in Manhattan in that time, now so seemingly innocent, just before John Lennon was murdered. This young man is a sort of Bartleby the Scrivener, but unlike Bartleby he has a profound consideration for other people, not to mention that he has a very clear idea of his own circumstances and the nature of his dreams, which are at once large and touchingly, achingly real. On his way home from work he buys from a street vendor a copy of John Lennon’s A Spaniard in the Works. When he gets to the Upper West Side, he finds John Lennon and Yoko Ono in front of a newsstand near the Dakota, where Lennon is buying some magazines. It is a perfect expression of Hijuelos’s sensibility that he mentions the magazines that Lennon buys with just the right combination of an understanding of humanity and a delicate lack of judgment.
    The young man speaks to Lennon, who responds like such a gentleman, with such politeness and consideration that the story begins to move into that realm of informed sensibility that is haunting. I say “informed” because, of course, the world of this story, while sweet, is still brutal, too. Still, the narrator, who has just