Free Thoughts Without Cigarettes by Oscar Hijuelos Page A

about that evening—I probably don’t want to, or, as is likely, I had lapsed into a coma. I haven’t the slightest idea of the treatments they administered in the emergency room, nor the day of the week, nor at just what hour I had been given a little wristband, admitted officially as a patient, then transferred to an intensive care ward, but that night, as my mother later put it, that carajo —the burden—my illness brought my family began.

    No doubt she spent the passing hours nervously, and if my father remained true to form, having already become one of those conscientious fellows— un trabajador through and through—who perpetually worries about his image as a worker, he would have stayed in the hospital until it was time for him to begin his daily morning trek to the 116th Street subway on Broadway in silence, likely consumed with anxiety and bewildered. He probably spent that night smoking one cigarette after the other in the waiting room, all the while perhaps thinking about his older brother, the first Oscar Hijuelos, the parallels between us disturbing him. Later at the hotel, on the same morning after I had entered the hospital, while ensconced in the kitchen of the Biltmore Men’s Bar with his chums, he probably had his first drink earlier in the day than usual—compliments of the bartender, a cubano , who took care of him. At least he must have felt blameless about me, but my mother? Told that I was suffering from a severe infection of the kidneys, she must have despaired at my misfortune and felt mystified by her plain bad luck. Perplexed as she waited in the hospital, her own uncertainties heightened, she must have certainly felt her own twinges of guilt. After all, I had gotten sick in her care and nearly died that very night, and for months afterward, my condition remained, to quote my brother, “touch and go.”
    Years later, when I’d ask her just what had happened, she’d always look down into her hands, as if just mentioning it left her feeling ashamed. She would always have the expression of a woman who, having tried hard to protect me, believed that she had failed. Sitting with her in the kitchen, I’d get the impression that my mother, unapproachable in so many ways, almost felt that she had no right to me as a son, and that deep down, she wanted to wrap her arms around me but couldn’t: It was on such an occasion that she once declared, “But, oh, hijo , it wasn’t anything we wanted for you.”
    For the longest time, all I would know was that I had gotten sick in Cuba, from Cuban microbios , that the illness had blossomed in the land of my forebears, the country where I had once been loved and whose language fell as music on my ears. Of course, diseases happen anywhere, and children get sick under any circumstances, but what I would hear for years afterward from my mother was that something Cuban had nearly killed me and, in the process of my healing, would turn my own “Cubanness” into air.
    The few things I do remember about my initial hospitalization—tubes shoved up me and medicinal smells, and dreary wards, and a terrible loneliness, blood being constantly taken and bitter-tasting pills—seem to have unfolded in the kind of darkness that children experience in bad dreams. Bloated and seeping blood, I must have felt that something had gone wrong, but did I even know? Was I even awake at first? After all, it was common for nephritis to put children under for two and three weeks at a time, sometimes longer, if they awakened at all, and even if I had been aware of it, what on earth could I have been feeling?
    They moved me to the St. Luke’s Convalescent Hospital in Greenwich after a month or so, and from what I can recall, I was constantly given pills. Nurses pushed along carts on which sat quivering little white paper cups of diuretics and antibiotic tablets, though some of the kids, off in the deeper end,