Read Online Thoughts Without Cigarettes by Oscar Hijuelos - Free Book Online Page A

Cubans who, never caring for baby talk, always spoke to children as if they were adults, it’s to Pepito that I owe one of the few statements that I can actually remember word for word: “ Sabes que eres cubano? No te olvides eso ,” he told me one day when he had taken us up to a beach near Gibara, along the Atlantic coast. “You know that you’re Cuban? Don’t forget that.” That afternoon at the beach, when he had taken off his guayabera , the flowing crests of white hair gushing from his chest astonished me. Later, as he carried me into the ocean, I may as well have been riding upon the shoulders of a silver-haired faun, his fur matting in the foam. Laughing and grabbing hold of my arms as I desperately tried to hang on to his neck, Pepito, waist-high in the Cuban sea, began to swing me around in circles, the horizons of both ocean and land spinning around me. I was reeling dizzily when he set me down into the water just in time for a high wave to come crashing over us: another taste, of burning salt water, like brine, in my throat, my thin arms grasping his legs (bony and hairy as well) for dear life, until he hoisted me up once again into the safety of his embrace, Pepito patting my back as I trembled with relief.
    Later, I fell asleep under a tree, and I felt drowsy still as my uncle carried me back through the narrow streets of that little sun-parched town, folks standing by the doorways of their palm-thatched houses along the way, calling out and waving at us. At any rate, I guess I can say that on that day, I had been baptized in the Cuban sea.
    Now, while staying on Pepito’s farm in the countryside outside Holguín, I became deeply fond of nature, or so I’ve been told. In that campo persisted a strong, almost overwhelming scent, not of animal dung or of burning tobacco but of an aroma I still recall from that visit—the air always smelling like the raw inner marrow of a freshly cut or snapped-open sapling branch, redolent of the juices of its white and yellow fringed fibers, of the earth and water, and of greenness itself. There were insects everywhere, and blossoms peeking out from the dense bush and forests around us, and at night, when mosquito netting draped the windows, beetles the size and weight of walnuts pelted the walls, with no end to the tarantulas, lizards, and vermin inhabiting the raised-on-pylons under-portion of the house, where the smaller livestock sometimes slept. The crystal night sky over rural Oriente, with a dense sprinkling of stars as seen from Pepito and María’s porch, still remains clear to me, but it was the farm’s animals that I grew most attached to. I seem to have felt a special fondness for the pigs, into whose pens, to my mother’s consternation, I often wandered. Or else I kept chasing after those plump and squealing creatures in the front yard, spending so much time with them that it was easy for me to imitate their guttural swallowing, as if I were a bristly snouted animal myself instead of a spindly boy whom my cousins had already nicknamed “ el alemán ,” or “the German,” for his looks. Apparently, I pecked at the ground like the hens and cawcawed like the roosters, doubtlessly running barefoot in their leavings. I played with chameleons and bush lizards as if they were my friends.
    One morning, when the family had decided to throw a party for their neighbors, Pepito, ordering some hands to dig out a pit in the yard under a tamarind tree, called my brother and me to his side so that, I suppose, we could witness the slaughtering of a pig. The poor thing must have known what was going to happen, for my cousins Bebo and Macho, in their sturdy teens, struggled while dragging it out from its wire pen, and it put up a terrible fight, trying to run away, until with a quick thrust of a blade against its neck, Pepito ended its struggles. (It squealed in terror, snorted, collapsed, and then, trembling