Our House in the Last World

by Oscar Hijuelos

Genres: Classics; Hispanic & Latino; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A first-generation Cuban son comes of age in 1940s New York in the debut––and most autobiographical––novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.

New York City, 1944. Hector Santinio is the younger son of Cuban immigrants Alejo and Mercedes. The fraught family of four shares their small, modest apartment with extended relatives in raucous Spanish Harlem. There are parties, dancing, and dreamy, homesick storytelling about their idyllic island. But life’s realities are nevertheless harsh in the Santinio family’s adoptive land.

Mercedes decides to take Hector and his brother Horacio to visit relatives in Cuba to better know her culture. While there, the three-year-old Hector contracts a serious illness that leads to his terrifying year-long hospitalization and recovery back in the United States. Caught between his overly protective mother’s fears for his health and his father’s macho behavior and disappointments, the adolescent Hector struggles to understand his identity and place in the world.

In the aftermath of his father's untimely passing, Hector staggers towards adulthood, haunted by notions of inadequacy and sadness and wrestles with the truth of his father as a deeply flawed but honorable man.

This is a jewel-box of a tale whose treasure is the hope and yearning of immigrants in America.

Includes a Reading Group Guide.

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 368

Sample

Hector’s mother met Alejo Santinio, his Pop, in 1939 when she was twenty-seven years old and working as a ticket girl in the Neptuna movie theater in Holguín, Cuba. At that time she was still living with her mother, Doña María, in a small limestone house with a tin roof off Arachoa Street, where there was a bakery. Her name was Mercedes Sorrea, and she was the second of three daughters and not married because her last prometido, or “intended,” who worked in a Cuban sour-milk factory, was a louse. At first, he would take her dancing on Saturday nights to the social club or Spanish Society, sweet-talk her, make her laugh, and then afterward bring her out on the iron balcony to discuss the marriage. But he never went through with the wedding; he disappeared for days at a time, and when he was around, he fought with her so that she had to come home and cry on her mother’s lap. After a year Mercedes and this man broke up, and she resigned herself to spending a quiet old maid’s life with Doña María and the ghost of her father, Teodoro, and with her dreams of the much grander house in which they had once lived.

Before her father died in 1929, the Sorrea family owned an immense house of white stone, in the best residential district of Holguín, across the way from a park with towering royal palms and fountains and a bandstand where an epauleted orchestra played Sousa marches, fox trots, and rumbas on Sunday afternoons. Holguín was a city of about twenty-five thousand people, situated on a plain and surrounded by hills in the interior of Oriente province in eastern Cuba, a thickly forested region with its chief commerce in sugar, tobacco, wood, and cattle. Holguín was a center of this trade with a large marketplace and rail lines south to Santiago de Cuba and north to the port towns of Belen and Gibara. An old city, it had always been a center of Cuban insurgency against the Spanish and had seen much death. It was a city of white-, light blue-, and pink-walled houses with tin roofs, well-shaded squares, parks, slaughterhouses, churches, and ghosts.

Life was quiet in Holguín. The world was different then. People believed in God, and children died at early ages of the fever and tuberculosis. Saints and angels walked in gardens. The living called to the dead through spiritualists, horses were left dead in the streets, and honking automobiles frightened swarms of birds off the treetops. Priests were respected, and there were very few robberies, especially in Mercedes’s town, and the poor were provided for by charities and fed with scraps of food given out after the last meal of the day. People were more polite, more elegant, and they liked to go promenading in the park on sunny afternoons. Because people died more easily, there was more praying and there were more funerals, which twisted through the streets with coachmen and pallbearers dressed in long black robes and wide three-cornered hats, and everyone but everyone knew one another’s name and gave greetings as they passed.

In those days Mercedes was a little girl with a Cleopatra hairdo and a red ribbon in her hair. She spent her afternoons roller-skating in front of her house, watching people come and go through the park, waving to them and to the farmers and leather-pantalooned soldiers who traveled the road. She loved the family’s house, all her life she would always remember it. It had twenty rooms and carved mahogany arabesque doors, fine iron grillwork of stars and flowers. It had a large central gallery, a shaded rear patio of pink and blue tiles, and a courtyard with large potted palms and an arched entranceway. Her father had filled that house with wagonloads of furniture: tables and chairs with animal feet, a piano, mirrors, Chinese vases, and crystal everywhere to capture light. There were wide, pleated curtains and high arched windows that let in a serene white light, strongest in the parlor. The house was surrounded by bushes with flame blossoms and by tamarind and orange trees. Everywhere there was sunlight. Blossoms streamed down the walls and between the slats of the white picket fence. Flowers were everywhere. And from everywhere it seemed her father, Teodoro, was looking at her and smiling.

Teodoro Sorrea was a bald, plump, distinguished-looking man with an aristocrat’s nose and dark intense eyes. He dressed like a gentleman, with a stiff collar and lace bow in the Victorian fashion, and he wore a perfectly folded pañuelo, “handkerchief,” in his vest pocket. Despite the tropical climate, he never abandoned his formal attire and maintained the image of the proper señor until the day he died. He was in the timber business and knew the names of all the dark and light woods of the forest. He always carried a cane and a ledger book and would sit on a pile of white stones by the Jigüe River, giving orders to his men who hacked down trees with machetes and loaded them into the truck that would carry the timber into Holguín. Twenty men worked for his business. At home Teodoro employed a cook, a laundress, a seamstress, and a maid. He paid decent wages and was known as a good patrón. At the day’s end he would ride homeward on a squat, shaggy-maned palomino that he loved very much. He was fond of animals. He kept a parrot and six German hounds that he and his daughters took walking in the park at night.

Teodoro came to Cuba in 1897 with the Spanish army and was posted as a captain of the guard on the main road into Holguín. He liked Oriente enough to emigrate from Majorca with Doña María, who would never get over leaving her family back in Spain. Remembered over the years for his pro-Cuban sympathies, Teodoro came to be well respected in Holguín. He held local magisterial posts, was highly placed in the Masonic society, and knew all the politicians of the province. And he was regarded as a greatly cultured man. In Spain the Sorreas had owned a tannery and an orthopedic shoe business, and had always been patrons of the arts. Teodoro’s father had had some fame as an opera singer in Madrid, and his talent had passed down to Teodoro and to Hector’s mother, Mercedes, both of whom had fine voices. Teodoro also wrote poetry. Carrying a pad of bleached newsprint and a pencil, he would sit in the garden composing verse. He published regularly in the Holguín Sol, and poets and professors from the province often visited him and would sit in the parlor to hear him recite poetry. He wrote about the world as a garden where people were like blossoms that fell from the most aromatic trees when they died.

When Teodoro sat at a small desk in his study, composing, the house seemed to fill with light. Curiously watching him work on rainy afternoons, Mercedes sometimes noticed a frightened butterfly lingering by the dry glass of the window, as if waiting to be carried into the refuge of one of Señor Sorrea’s poems.

We live in the garden

butterflies resplendent

in the sun

joyful because one day

our brilliant wings will

carry us upward

and we will not burn

but prosper.

Imitating him, Mercedes wrote her own verse and gloried in the applause of their refined, educated visitors. She lived for her father’s approval and followed him everywhere, proud to be a Sorrea. She wrote so well that she won prize after prize for composition and poetry, and dreamed of going to the university to become a poet or a teacher. When she was seventeen years old, she won first prize in a province-wide Catholic essay contest. Her winning essay was called “On the Lost Souls of the Titanic,” in which she compared the world to a ship heading into an iceberg of sin. The award ceremony was held in the park and broadcast over the radio. Stands with seating for a thousand people were erected on the green, and the prize-winner in each category was given a blue ribbon bearing an image of our Blessed Mother and a bouquet of roses. Mercedes would always remember sitting beside the Bishop of Havana and shaking his hand, and that when she looked down at her classmates in their white and blue dresses, she saw her sisters and mother and father proudly smiling. Standing before the microphone, Mercedes gave a little speech in which she said she had never been so honored in her life, and this message boomed and echoed across the park and was met with great clapping from the crowd.

She was very happy in those days, but then things started to come down around her.

Teodoro Sorrea, good businessman and poet, was not a good judge of character. His troubles started in the 1920s when he involved himself in politics, giving out loans and making campaign contributions to liberal party candidates. Among mayors, senators, and ministers he had a reputation for reliability. During elections he often went out on a truck, making speeches through a megaphone to the people of small towns. One of the men he supported with an enormous loan eventually became the eighth president of the Republic of Cuba. This was President Machado, who once visited the house and bounced Mercedes on his knees. His first term, from 1925 to 1929, was considered most productive. He built the Central Highway that linked Cuba east to west, brought new electrical generators to Havana, and increased economic investment by Americans in Cuba. But during his second term he began to seek total power. Fighting widespread opposition, President Machado shut down schools, tried to disband labor unions, set up torture prisons, and almost brought the economy to ruin.

He was given a nickname by the poor people: “Second Nero.”

Machado owed Teodoro a large sum of money that was supposed to be paid in a tax-skimming scheme. Teodoro waited and waited but never received a cent. He had overinvested in a number of projects and was on the verge of bankruptcy when he decided to approach Machado personally. One day in 1929 Teodoro arrived in Havana and roamed the halls of the presidential palace. It was a most opulent mansion with glittering chandeliers, Venetian mirrors, and Greek statues adorning the halls. With so much wealth in evidence, Teodoro thought Machado would surely be able to pay him back. But after three days of patient waiting, after making countless requests to one minister after the other, Teodoro did not meet with Machado. He returned to Holguín, sick from worry and depression. Unable to sleep at night, he paced the floors, smoking cigar after cigar, until morning. He did not spend the usual time before the mirror, looking himself over; his eyes were heavy with sadness.

One evening he heard Mercedes crying out from a bad dream. He went to her room. In the dark he was as wide and high as a mountain:

“Mercita, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, Papa. I was having a dream.”

“Don’t be worried.”

“But it was terrible,” she told him. “There were dead butterflies in my dream.”

“Your dream was made of air,” he told her. “Just remember when you see the butterflies, they are made of air.”

But during the succeeding nights the air filled with more of the dead butterflies that weren’t there, and one evening an immense butterfly fluttered down the hallway and fell to the floor, crying. The next day Teodoro came home, ate dinner, sat in the patio with his pad of bleached newsprint and pencil, grew drowsy, went to bed, and died in his sleep.

There was tremendous confusion that week, and many flowers were brought into the house. A line of mourners that stretched past twenty of the largest houses went from the street to the door and into the parlor where Teodoro rested in his coffin on a bedding of lilies and orchids. Farmers and poor people came dressed in clean guayaberas. The poets came and then military men and politicos, Teodoro’s workers and his banker, the local priests and merchants, fellow members of the Masonic lodge, his doctors, young señoritas who carried parasols, the tough young machos of town with their mothers, nuns and the local prostitute, feeble old women and the youngest children, who did not know about death. Inside the room they looked into the coffin and prayed for his soul. Mercedes, who greeted the mourners without looking at their faces, sat beside her mother, trembling.

The funeral paralyzed the main road of Holguín for the several hours the procession of wagons and horses needed to make its way to El Campo Santo, the cemetery where Teodoro Sorrea was buried in a fine white tomb in the shade of a tree. Mercedes would not too quickly accept his death. She would not believe it even though she had run her fingers through his hair and touched the bucket of ice that was kept under the coffin as it stood in the parlor, not after she had touched his face and he still did not move, not when they took him out and the procession wound through the streets, past countless mourners who crowded the walkways, and not even when he was put in the ground and she watched a basket of flowers float down into the dark of his tomb.

The years that followed Teodoro’s death were not good to the Sorrea family. Never paid by Machado and without an income, Doña María had to finally sell off the house, the furniture, and the grand decorations and move away to Arachoa Street, one of the roads the farmers took on their way to market. Mercedes’s days were spent quietly on the porch with Doña María, reading romantic novels, the Bible, and movie magazines. She wanted to be with her father, but he was gone, and so she sometimes saw his ghost. Resting in bed, she would hear a noise and see on the wall a sprinkling of light, like the sun rippling on water, and her father would appear for a moment, shaking his head. Or she and Doña María would go to the cemetery, pray for his soul, and then come home to find him in the living room looking for something. For years she could not stop thinking about him and their old life together. That is the way with the dead, she thought, see him one day and not see him the next. It turned her into a nervous prankster. She played tricks on her sisters and loved to show them how she could still laugh. But at night she dreamed about Teodoro: about walking with him up the white steps of Palo Alto, a mountain in Holguín, to sit before a statue of Jesus; about being a little girl again with a Cleopatra hairdo, happy as a mouse by his side; about feeling his kisses on her face and hearing his voice when she went to bed.

Thinking of him influenced her life. One day, after a long bus ride, she arrived in Santiago to take a scholarship exam for a teacher’s school. This was her great hope, and she was certain to pass the exam with ease. But in the middle of the exam she began to think about her dead father, and soon she couldn’t answer the questions or decipher the numbers on the pages, and she broke down crying, excused herself, and ran from the examination room. She never attempted the scholarship exam again. So she remained with her mother, María, and watched her sisters Rina and Luisa find men, get married, and move into their own houses. When she became bored at home, she went to work as an accountant’s assistant for a family friend with a tobacco concern in Holguín. She passed a few years in this job. But in the riots of 1933 the building she worked in burned down. Then she didn’t do very much for three years. She spent time with a few different novios, but these romances amounted to nothing. Sometimes she dabbled in prophecy and entertained herself and friends with predictions about love. One afternoon Mercedes decided to go to the movies at the Neptuna movie theater, where Snow White was playing. Just as she was going inside, the manager of the theater came out and asked if she would like a job as a ticket girl. She accepted.

There is much more to be told… One day Hector and his older brother Horacio would hear all the different stories, and it would amaze them that for all her ability and talent their mother ended up tearing tickets off a spool and pushing them out under the window of a gold painted booth. She sold those tickets for a peseta each. Sometimes she looked up to find the god Neptune with trident staring back down at her from the marquee, and she would leave the theater and walk the street, sad because she did not have a good man, sighing as the other couples passed by her and strolled to the park where they held hands and kissed behind the trees.

Sometimes, as she waited in the booth, blossoms blew over from the park. One whiff of the enlarging fragrances and she began to think about her father, Teodoro Sorrea, standing in the parlor of the grand house, in all the sunlight, with the famous poets and other admiring visitors. And she would hear his fine voice speaking of nightingales and stars. She would daydream about these things until someone rapped at the window and interrupted her, saying, “Señorita? Señorita?” or someone caught her eye, like Alejo Santinio, whom she saw one day standing a few feet away from her.

In those days, on Sundays, Alejo Santinio used to take the bus into Holguín from his town of San Pedro, about ten miles away, and go walking down the avenue by the park. San Pedro was a nothing town, known long ago as a center for trading and selling slaves. It had a town square of pounded-down dirt that sent up clouds of dust any time a strong wind came along. Going into Holguín was thrilling to Alejo because that city, surrounded by hills, had everything from a movie theater to an enormous dance hall. On Sundays there were crowds and music in the park and young couples strolling and friends to be met, sweets and fruit to be eaten.

For a small town dandy, Alejo was a good dresser. He usually wore an embroidered guayabera but sometimes put on a flashy linen suit with light blue stripes and a pair of black and white spatted shoes. He was tall, nearly six feet in height, with broad shoulders, a large nose, dark eyes and hair, and a typically sad Galician expression. Several generations back his family had emigrated from Galicia, Spain, to the Canary Islands and then to Cuba. Then his grandfather had done something in the slave trade. He had sailed the seas between the Canaries and Santiago de Cuba with that terrible cargo, made some money, and settled in San Pedro where he bought up farmland. Alejo was not a handsome man. Nor did he look particularly Cuban or Spanish. His immense ears and longish face gave him the air of a gypsy. But he was very clean, well manicured, and well shaven, with skin fragrant with a lilac after-shave lotion that attracted the stingless bees of the park as he walked along.

One Sunday his girl had refused to go kissing with him behind one of the trees, so he left her alone—to hell with her, she was a prissy virgin—and crossed the wide avenue and walked down the side street until he found himself on the corner where the Neptuna movie theater stood. Looking around, he noticed the ticket girl staring at him, so he smiled and nodded and called out, “Señorita, Señorita,” which made her blush and return to counting the receipts. But she kept taking peeks at him, and seeing this, Alejo decided to make her acquaintance.

An Edward G. Robinson double feature was playing, and the big posters that fluttered like ghosts off the theater pillars showed a gangland floozie hanging from the leg of her man. This must have put certain thoughts into Alejo’s mind. He straightened his hat and walked over. Noticing blossoms on the sidewalk, he stepped down and gathered them into a bouquet, went to the booth, and shoved the flowers into the opening saying, “Señorita, if I may be forward, my name is Alejo Santinio and these flowers are for you. Flowers for the flower. Señorita, you are very pretty.”

She blushed and, giggling, said, “And I think you’re a little crazy, Señor.”

From this beginning sprang their romance. She kept the flowers and he went into the movies free. This was a good deal for him, and he returned week after week. He liked the movies and he liked Mercedes. Soon he began to take her out. She would meet him in the back of the theater and sit beside him in a creaky chair, fanning herself as they watched the newsreels. In those days there were Nazis marching arrogantly down European squares and shots of a scowling Hitler and movie stars and shots of Eastern European refugees, so poor and lost. “Persecuted,” as Mercedes would say, “even though they believe in God, too.” They would see cartoons and then Laurel and Hardy (El Flaco y el Gordo), funny enough because when Alejo would grow older and world-weary, his face would grow round and heavy, and he would begin to resemble Mr. Hardy more and more each day. After the movies they would get lost in the park and wander in the orange grove, watching the moon in the wash of stars. They kissed behind prickly trees and under gaslights as bright as the moon. They walked under luminous clouds, sighing and speaking in whispers. In little cafeterias, they feasted on rum-drenched sweet cakes and guava paste, then went to the dance halls and the three-hundred-year-old Central Gallego with its Spanish pillars, endless mirrors, and archways. They inhaled each other’s breath, kissed under the shadows of church walls, and wandered in the cemetery among the white tombs held aloft by apostolic hands and by exhausted saints, and they sat on the low white benches of the placitas throughout town ecstatic in their mutual love.

Who knows what caused the original love. Was it the taste of the tongue that had been sipping a creamy café con leche? The weight of his body pressing her fearful body, thin and soft, against a stone wall? Gentlemanliness on his part, ladylikeness on hers? Was it religion? The shadows on the street? Or the fact that when she mentioned her father’s name, Alejo took hold of both her hands? Or was it the twisted, deformed elbow he had gotten from a childhood fall? His sad eyes? The air of chivalrous melancholy about him? Her fears? Was it because he took her to a friend’s house, or to a shed in the slaughterhouse part of town, or up north to the beach whenever he pleased? Did she ever try to resist?

Who knows? But when Alejo brought Mercedes home to Arachoa Street, they would find Doña María sitting by the front window watching the street and shaking her head because so many of the young people of the 1930s were starting to go where they pleased without a chaperoning aunt or mother—a dueña—to keep an eye on them. In María’s youth she could go nowhere with a male unless her mother accompanied her. But now things were different. Poor Doña María, even though she was infuriated by this change, she wanted Mercedes to find a man and have a life of her own. Even though she was very old herself and might be left alone if Mercedes married.

So when she saw them coming to the house, holding hands and playing around, she remained silent. As they sat on the porch, María’s head would appear silhouetted behind the curtains and then disappear. She constantly spied on them and rarely smiled. When Alejo called out to her from the porch in a cheerful voice, “Good evening, Señora!” she remained silent, perhaps nodding. The only emotion she seemed to show was sadness, which had been her way since she first came to Cuba with Teodoro. That sadness had made her very strict with Mercedes and her sisters. Perhaps it had turned her hair white. Even though she loved Cuba, María refused to forget Spain, and this. . .