Bodega Dreams (20 page)

“Arrepiéntete, arrepiéntete, Cristo salva! Arrepiéntete, arrepiéntete
,
Cristo salva,”
they sang. Blanca, her heavy body, baby and all, joined in the song. The sounds of feet stomping, hands clapping, tambourines shaking, and the sobbing of both men and women filled the room. Whole families were worshiping: aisles full of husbands; wives near the broken piano, babies asleep in their arms, as if angels were covering their tiny ears so they wouldn’t wake up as everyone praised the Lord at full volume.
“Hoy se ven todas las señates! El fin está cerca, arrepiéntete, arrepiéntete, Cristo salva!”

Afterward, Roberto said a prayer, and when he had finished everyone murmured Amen. The church now had its feet back on the ground. Everyone was back on planet Earth, the Holy Spirit had left the building, and casual conversations started up.

Blanca hugged me. “I’m so happy you came,” she said.

“I’m happy you’re happy,” I replied. From the corner of my eye I saw Roberto Vega join his parents and hug them. Others came up to shake his hand, congratulating him on such a great sermon.

“So you’re Claudia. I’ve heard all these good things about you,” I said in Spanish to Blanca’s sister in faith, but she didn’t acknowledge my presence. Her eyes were still on Roberto Vega.

“She’s in love with him,” Blanca whispered as Claudia left to go to Roberto’s side. He was the Lord’s stud, swarmed by sisters in Christ who all hoped to be his chosen.

“Let’s go meet him.” Blanca took my hand and led me toward him. I was just happy that the fight we’d had earlier seemed to be forgotten.

“That was beautiful. As if Paradise was there in front of me,” a teenager gushed to Roberto.

“All praise be to my Lord, Jesus Christ. We are all but vessels for Him to use,” Roberto said modestly. Sweat streamed down his face and his shirt was drenched. His mother was holding his hand, his father standing tall because his family had been touched by God.

“When he was just nine years old,” his mother told the brothers and sisters that surrounded them, me and Blanca among them, “I remember I was cooking. I was making
pasteles
and Robertito walked into the kitchen. He had the most beautiful expression you can imagine. His face was always handsome but that day his face was so beautiful that I knew something had happened. So I asked him—”

“Mami, please, not again—” Roberto protested, half joking.

“Just one more time, Robertito.… He walked into my kitchen,” she continued, “and his face was like a fire. And he said, ‘Mami, I want to get baptized.’ I said, ‘You are too young to get baptized. You have to study more about the Bible before you can make a commitment like that.’ But his face was still aflame, and that’s when he told me, ‘Mami, last night, He came and spoke to me, Christ spoke to me.’ And it was his face that made me believe him.”

“So he took his Bible studies,” his father interrupted, to his wife’s annoyance, “and got baptized at nine years old.”

“And later,” his mother jumped back in, “later he told us that the Holy Spirit had told his soul he had been anointed.” No one questioned them. No one doubted for a second. Who would after that speech? I wouldn’t. If that kid was going to heaven to rule with Christ, then I just hoped he wouldn’t forget the little people and would put in a good word for me and Blanca.

Claudia extended a nervous hand toward him and introduced herself. He smiled and asked her where she was from. Blanca butted in and invited Roberto, his family, and Claudia over for dinner. I knew what she was up to. Fortunately, they politely declined her offer. That’s when Pastor Miguel Vasquez joined us.

Pastor Vasquez was in his late fifties. He always wore polyester suits, even during the summer. He was from Ponce but had grown up in the neighborhood, and when he gave his sermons he’d stress how Christ had saved him from a life of petty street crime. I had seen him in action a couple of times, when his church picked a corner and, using the electricity from a lamppost, plugged in a mike and some electric guitars and preached the hell out of the neighborhood. You could hear them blocks away.
“Cristo salva! Alleluia! Ven regresa al Señor!”
They’d hand out leaflets and later jam their church salsa, with the guitars and tambourines and a drum set. All that church music bounced off project walls, circling its way around the neighborhood. I had seen Blanca join in those sessions, but I had always avoided the chosen corners.

“Julio, qué bueno verte, muchacho!”
Pastor Vasquez called out. He always spoke in Spanish, though he understood and could speak English when he needed or wanted to. My parents are the same way.

“Estoy tan ansioso de cenar con ustedes este viemes.”
As soon as Roberto’s mother heard that Pastor Vasquez was coming for dinner on Friday, she had a change of heart.

“Of course we’ll have dinner with you, Hermana Mercado,” Roberto’s mother told Blanca. Claudia’s face lit up.

Afterward, Blanca stocked up on the religious cards, booklets, and leaflets she hands out every Saturday morning. Then she kissed half the women in the congregation goodbye, making small talk along the way. I waited patiently because it meant a lot to her. Finally, after more goodbyes and gushing about how great a speaker God’s anointed was, Blanca and I were out the door and walking home.

“So that’s Roberto Vega. Impressive. I thought he was very convincing.”

“You should see, sometimes brothers come from as far away as New Jersey to hear him talk.”

“Blanca,” I said, “if you know Claudia is in love with Roberto, why did you invite him to dinner? He’s only seventeen and Claudia looks at least thirty.”

“She’s twenty-seven.”

“For a Latina that’s not married, twenty-seven is ancient. Nobody is going to want to marry her.” Okay, I could have phrased that better. I waited for Blanca’s wrath. I had just patched things up with her and now here I was, starting something new. But Blanca didn’t get mad, in fact she agreed.

“Yes, isn’t that terrible, Julio?” I was surprised at her reaction. “That’s not one of our finest qualities.” I wasn’t sure if Blanca meant Latinos or her church. “It’s a terrible thing that we feel a single woman at twenty-five is over the hill. You should listen to some of the sisters in the congregation bug her. ‘So when are you getting married, Claudia? So when are you going to have children, Claudia? You’re not that young anymore, Claudia,
te vas a quedar jamona.
’ So much pressure on that poor girl. Meanwhile all the single brothers, young or old, want nineteen-year-old virgins. It’s amazing.”

I started laughing; I liked it when she trashed them.

“Don’t laugh, Julio. Roberto Vega is different. True, he is still young, but he is as mature as a man in his thirties. And Claudia is the most
spiritual girl in the congregation. Once he sees that, he might marry her.”

I laughed even harder. “So you think, Blanca, that Roberto Vega is going to give up his celebrity status in your religion to help this girl from Colombia? Blanca, you can be so dumb.” She knew I was half kidding.

“So? It could happen. It could happen. If it’s God’s will it will happen,” she insisted, laughing in spite of herself.

“Of course it’s God’s will. I know God. We go way back,” I said.

Blanca just rolled her eyes at me, punched me softly in the stomach, and said, “Stupid.”

Then she said, firmly, “Well, if Christ wants it to happen, then it will happen.” She knew that part of Roberto’s appeal was not just that he was young and anointed, but single, too. If he got married at eighteen he’d be ruining all that. But she had hopes.

I gave her a quick kiss on the forehead. I was glad I had gone to church, because it had made her happy. That night, walking home with Blanca near me, the streets seemed cleaner, the neighborhood quieter and gentler. We saw a little kid kicking a garbage can bigger than him, yelling that he was the Master of the Universe. What was he doing out so late? If he had been a little girl, I bet his parents would’ve been more concerned. When he kicked the can over and all the garbage spilled on the street, his mother yelled at him from a window above. “
Mira
, Junito, get your ass up here,
o te meto una pela.
” We burst out laughing, then began talking about the baby. About names again and about education. We talked in a cute and silly private language of our own. But all that was broken when we reached 109th and Third, three blocks from our home.

“Chino! Chino! Blanca!” A man we knew came running over toward us. It was Georgie Vato. We called him that because his name was George and he was Mexican. When we were kids the play
Zoot Suit
was very popular, and the characters in it kept calling one another
vato.
The name stuck. Plus, he was a fat little kid and we would tease him, jeering, “Georgie Vato ate all his tacos and then his
gato.
” He would protest, “Yo, I ain’t got a cat!” which was the dumbest thing to say because then we could answer, “Thass right, cuz you ate him.”

But that night, his face was serious.

“Chino! Blanca! Your house is on fire!” he called out urgently. “The trucks are still there.”

Blanca and I looked at each other. In El Barrio you always think that the fire engines are headed to someone else’s house. You never think it will be your own home that’s on fire, but when it is, all the toughness, the calloused nonchalance of watching fires and hearing sirens falls away. It takes away your immunity, makes you knock on wood and count your blessings the next time you hear a siren at night.

We ran home. From a block away, it looked as if they were filming a movie. Red lights were flashing. The red-orange blaze engulfing the building looked surreal. The people looked like extras on a set, watching in a tight group from across the street. Every time the fire consumed a new window, the wind creating fireballs that would fly out into the air and dissolve in mid flight, the people who didn’t live in the building would yell, “Olé! Olé!” I saw a woman run down the fire escape with a bucket of water. When she reached the floor where the fire was she threw the contents through the window. Everyone laughed. “Oh, that’ll help.” Someone said the fireman that was escorting her down the fire escape let her do it, because she wouldn’t go with him otherwise. When we reached our side of the street, Blanca drew herself toward me and, shaking, buried her face in my arms. When she pulled away from me a bit, she saw one of our neighbors.

“Are you all right?” Blanca asked.

“I’m fine, everyone got out. And we didn’t have much,” she answered, half in tears as her kids clung to her legs. It might not have been much, I thought, but it was hers. Blanca nervously placed her hand on her stomach. I knew she was thanking the Lord that the fire had happened while she, the baby, and I were at church.

“
Cristo salva, gracias al Señor.
It’s not the end of the world.”

As we watched the fire grow more stubborn, fighting the firemen and their hoses, our faces were blank. I knew Blanca felt what all of us who lived in that building were feeling. Displaced. Disoriented. No insurance, no new place, everything lost.

Then something happened.

Someone appeared. Someone who looked like he came out of the
fire itself. Slowly, like a mirage from a desert sandstorm, a figure emerged walking toward the people. A tall, elegant man came into focus with his arms outstretched and a face of pure empathy. It was Nazario. When the people saw him, they rushed him. They all wanted to touch him as if his touch could make the blind see, the deaf hear, and the mute speak. Blanca and I just stayed where we were.

“Who’s that?” Blanca asked.

“I don’t know,” I said automatically, because when our eyes locked, even from a few feet away, Nazario’s eyes told me all I needed to know.

Fischman had done it. The fire was in retaliation for Salazar. The war was in full bloom.

A
FTER
the fire was put out, we tenants were let back inside to retrieve what remained of our belongings. The building had been completely drenched with water and the stairs had become little waterfalls. Glass, pieces of Sheetrock, broken furniture, cups, nail polish, pans, hair brushes, mirrors, bottles, plates, rugs, clothes—almost everything imaginable floated in streams of water from apartments that looked like flooded basements. The elevator didn’t work and all the windows were broken. The firemen had axed their way through what seemed to be every wall and every door, leaving the place looking like a bomb had gone off. The fire had left the ugly smell of smoke stamped and sealed on every piece of clothing that had survived the flames.

Soon word spread around the building that someone had spilled gasoline down the trash chute. A match had been dropped in and the fire had shot straight up to the roof. Between the fire and the water damage, no apartment was habitable. No one in their right mind could have spent the night in that building.

Blanca and I tried to salvage what we could. We needed Vera’s ring more than ever. And I also needed to find the Apple Jacks box containing Sapo’s stuff.

Meanwhile Nazario played his part beautifully. His face led you to believe his place was among the ruins. Nazario was moving from apartment
to apartment, reassuring the tenants that they’d have a place to stay within a month. I believed him; I knew Bodega had three buildings on 119th and Lexington that were almost ready to house people.

I always knock the people in Blanca’s church, but a lot of them were right there that night helping us move our things, everyone splashing around ankle-deep in water. If we hadn’t had Blanca’s spiritual brothers and sisters we would have been moving things out all night.

I had left the ring on top of the bureau, but it wasn’t there. No doubt it had been knocked down like everything else. I bent down low, looking for a reflection of light in the water, and then I saw it glittering like a goldfish. I reached through the water, snatched it up, and put it in my pocket. The Apple Jacks box was a problem, and I started to get a bit scared when at first I couldn’t find it, but then I saw it floating, the paper box dissolving like a wafer. I took Sapo’s stuff out and hid it under my shirt.