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

slightly, eyes expanded, gave out a final cry before dying.) Soon, they’d dragged it into another shed, where it was cleaved in half, its guts pulled out, and then each side, tied by the hooves, was hung off a hook, buckets left underneath to catch the dripping blood. The penetrating smell of that pork flesh and its blood made me step away; it was probably a pal of mine, but I remained on hand when those sides were hauled out into the yard to cook over a smoldering pit. It would take hours to roast the lechón to “crackling perfection,” as the cookbooks might say, but in the meantime, something awry happened—an iguana, crawling over, embedded itself inside one of the flanks. The easiest solution, it seemed, came down to smoking it out, and so they hung that side up under a tamarind tree and built a fire underneath it. However, the wood was too green, or the flame too high, because shortly a column of thick, black smoke went billowing upward into that tree and, at a certain moment, a commotion arose in the branches; soon the tarantulas that had been nesting there panicked, for from its lowest branches, a rainfall of those creatures came dropping down by the dozens, like black flowers, and began scattering wildly in all directions in the yard. There were so many that even the women were recruited to hunt them down, the family rushing after the creatures with brooms and shovels and pans lest they get underneath the floorboards and take over the house for good. Indeed, I remember that.
    Somewhere along the line, however, there came the moment when I didn’t seem well. My mother’s always claimed that I had the worst habit of drinking from puddles in the countryside, especially after a rainfall, and while you’d think that such water—Cuban water—falling from God’s skies would be pure as any could be, I came down with something anyway, my face and limbs blowing up, and my manner becoming so listless that I was confined to a bed for days, my uncle and aunts convinced that I had perhaps suffered from an allergic reaction to an insect bite. I don’t recall at which point this happened. But those first signs of my illness could have taken place after we’d made a trip to see my father’s family in Jiguaní, which was about fifteen miles away, though, if so, I would have been too late to meet my great-grandmother, Concepcíon, who’d died the year before, at one hundred and thirteen, from diabetes. (Her mind was intact and spirits good, even if both her legs had been amputated; among her last words, I’ve been told, were: “I may have been ugly, but I was lucky in life.”) Or perhaps I’d gotten sick, so my mother has also claimed, from something I’d eaten, perhaps a piece of delicious pork, an undercooked morsel, or one I’d picked up off the ground the day when those tarantulas fell from the tree. Or at the beach near Gibara, a prickly mollusk had jammed something vile into my foot, and it had gotten infected without anyone knowing. Or, perhaps, in the midst of some Cuban miasma, for in the woods there were an abundance of stagnant mosquito-ridden ponds, I had sucked into my lungs some germs, or what my mother called “ microbios .” Still, I can’t say just when the symptoms of my illness first came over me, and what recollections I have of that little piece of Cuba hardly summon up any moments of particular discomfort. But during that summer when I turned four, from some mysterious source, those microbios , which my mother, with an almost medieval panache, would describe as “ animalitos ”—or little animals—slipped inside my body, those parasites (or whatever they were) filling my system with their venom.
    Still, whatever ailed me took several months to really manifest itself, and even then, I’m not sure of the day and hour when my mother or any of my other relatives became aware that what I would come to