Free Thoughts Without Cigarettes by Oscar Hijuelos

think of as my Cuban disease had taken hold, or even if it was noticeable enough to be truly worrisome to them at first. In any event, by the end of that summer of 1955, I just wasn’t up to snuff, low of energy, and perhaps even more apprehensive and nervous looking than before.
    Maybe I’ve come to read too much into the slightest of my expressions, but the single thing I have to go by comes down to the only photograph taken of me in Cuba. It was posed in the salon of my aunt Cheo’s house in Holguín. Cheo’s daughter, the pretty auburn-haired Miriam, with the serious expression of a young girl who had recently lost her father, and my ethereally pretty cousin Cuza were standing beside my mother and brother, his face unfortunately partly obscured. I’m sitting out front on a little chair, dolled up like a little Lord Fauntleroy, my hair blond and wavy, my cheeks covered with freckles, my pudgy knees dimpled, and on my face, if I’m not mistaken, is a look of not just timidity or shyness but of anxiety, as if I knew what was to come.

    By the time we eventually returned to New York, late that summer, I had become bloated and listless, with a constant fever and an overwhelming desire to sleep, a crisis coming about one evening in our apartment when, in whatever manner such discoveries are made, my mother found a shocking amount of blood in my urine. What ran through her mind in such a moment, I can’t say, but she must have been frightened to death over what my father might do to her if something bad happened to me. Off in his own universe of pots and pans, steaming soups, hamburger platters, and grilled steaks by day, and coming home to manage as best he could through those evenings, clouds of cigarette smoke wafting through the apartment, it’s possible that he hadn’t particularly noticed the way I looked, or my lethargy. With his early morning/afternoon schedule at the hotel and his habit of staying up late with his chums, perhaps he just hadn’t been paying attention. But whatever his state of awareness, when my mother, in shock or denial, without knowing what else to do, finally let him in on my condition—she must have been shaking and worried out of her mind—Pascual, speaking much better English than she, rose to the occasion. Having a good side—a kind of calmness and a reasoning manner about him when he hadn’t been drinking—he quietly tapped on our neighbor’s door to use the telephone. But if the elderly Mrs. Blair didn’t own one yet (though I remember that, in her hallway not far from her door, a heavy black old-fashioned rotary telephone sat on a table), he probably went down to the corner pharmacy to call our doctor, a Sephardic Jew of advanced years named Altchek, who had an office on 110th and Lenox in East Harlem. In that distant age when New York physicians responded quickly to house calls, he arrived at our apartment within the hour, to find me lying on their bed, barely able to move. Always impeccably dressed, Dr. Altchek, whose dark and liquid eyes, I remember, were filled with both sorrow and compassion, quickly went to work. What examinations he administered I do not recall, though I have the distinct memory of his feeling around my swollen abdomen with his fingers and of his thumb opening my right eyelid, that he shined a light into my pupils. It wasn’t long before he, declaring my condition muy grave ( grave is the word my mother always used), told my parents that I had to be rushed to the closest hospital, St. Luke’s, fortunately only five blocks away.
    It’s likely that my father carried me there himself, my mother in a frantic state following by his side, or perhaps they had sprung for the luxury of a taxi ride, with Altchek, no doubt, accompanying us. It’s possible that I was so listless as to approach unconsciousness, gone under like my uncle in Cuba after his fall; the truth is I don’t remember much