Flight of the Swan (21 page)

“Whoever insists that the Americans’ arrival was not a military intervention is pissing outside the pot!” I burst out when I heard Juan’s story. “The invasion of Puerto Rico by the Americans was like cooking beans. First you softened them by pounding and boiling them in water. Then you added the bloody tomato sauce and finally the bacon. A perfect recipe!”

J
UAN’S FAMILY HAD A
tobacco plantation in Cayey which went under. His relatives had been tobacco growers for generations, as his ancestors on his father’s side were descendants of the Taino Indians. Every Taino head of family grew a tobacco plant in his backyard and smoked a handful of rolled-up leaves after each meal. After the Americans arrived on the island, American Cigar, General Cigar, and Consolidated Cigar all established huge warehouses in the central valleys and most of the local planters who had grown tobacco since Spanish times were wiped out. But Juan’s family knew so much about tobacco, they managed to survive.

Tobacco was a very delicate crop, it was the spoiled brat of agriculture and required constant tending. They weeded it and pampered it, watered and stroked it like a baby. The seedlings had to be planted by hand, one by one, and it was a backbreaking job, but the Anduces did it as a family and didn’t mind. The tender saplings needed to be protected under huge mosquito nets so the fleas wouldn’t eat the leaves or the
pegas
—fat green worms—nibble the stems, and the Anduces did it with such love that their tobacco plants were always the lushest of all. At night their valley seemed to be peacefully asleep, spread out under the billowing folds of netting. But nothing could have been more deceptive.

A savage price war broke out in 1902 between the Anduces and the American corporations, and fire ravaged Don Aníbal Anduce’s largest warehouse. Arson was suspected, but no proof was found. Don Aníbal still had three more warehouses full of tobacco leaves, and they were near his house. Every day he supervised the work himself, and he often sent his children, Juan and his two brothers, to scout around after dark. One night when Juan’s brothers were scouting and Juan was home asleep, tragedy struck: the boys were knocked unconscious by a band of hooligans and left inside one of the palm-thatched barns, then it was doused in gasoline and set on fire. Juan woke up to the most terrifying howls he had heard in his life. Convinced a wild animal was devouring his family, he ran out of the house with a shotgun, only to find his father and mother on their knees, pounding the earth with their fists, the charred corpses of his two brothers still smoking at their feet.

Juan’s father never recovered from the tragedy, but he refused to die until he had put his remaining son through school literally puffing on cigar smoke. It also helped that Don Aníbal had married Altagracia, the black woman from the mangrove swamp who was so strong, she could wash the laundry of an entire family in one afternoon and still have enough energy to iron it, fold it, and take it back to her clients on a tray balanced on her head. Thanks to his mother’s efforts and his father’s last tobacco warehouse, Juan bought a ticket and traveled by steamer to New York. He made his way on foot to Harlem and found a job as a dishwasher at a deli. The next day he registered at New York University.

He studied at the university for two years. Then his father died and he had to return to the island, because his mother had to file for bankruptcy. But Juan was from hardy stock. He told Altagracia not to worry; he would take care of everything. He took her to live with his grandmother in the mangroves, and after tying his clothes in a bundle which he slung on his back, he boarded the
California
, an American steamship. He was contracted to work for the Tampa Tobacco Company and planned to work his way to Florida.

“When we neared the Cuban coast we stopped at Daiquiri,” Juan told me, reminiscing about one of the saddest moments of his journey. “Around midnight, a fat American came aboard and picked out two hundred and fifty men who were traveling on deck because we had no money to pay for a cabin. From then on, each time we stopped at a coastal town, a blustering entrepreneur would board the ship late at night and pick out the strongest and healthiest among us to go to the tobacco fields, until only I and several other black men were left on board. At last we arrived in Florida. I managed to jump ship, aided by a kitchen hand who was putting a wicker basket full of dirty tablecloths to be washed on shore. The basket was hardly heavier than before I got in, I had lost so much weight.

“The ship’s captain had informed us that in the U.S. it was illegal to bring workers in on contract, but I knew better. The rest of the men were contracted, but we were not allowed to go ashore because our skin was black. As I abandoned ship, I looked back and wondered what would happen to those poor men left on deck, most of whom were too weak to run away. And I remembered how those who had died during the journey were thrown overboard in sacks.”

Juan finally arrived back in New York, and his knowledge of cigar manufacturing led him to look for a job as an overseer at a small tobacco factory on First Avenue and Thirtieth Street. It was called El Morito. Like many tobacco workshops at the time, it was a meeting place for immigrants, anarchists, and revolutionaries. As the workers stripped the tobacco leaves, chopped them up for cigarettes, or rolled them up for cigar “tripe,”—the gut or inner lining—they sat at long tables at the head of which an official read to them. The books chosen by the
tabaqueros
for their distraction were often indirectly of a political nature: Chekhov’s
Uncle Vanya
, Dostoyevsky’s
The Possessed
or
Notes from Underground
. No tobacco worker ever fell asleep listening to them.

Juan felt unwelcome at first. He had arrived from the island recently, while most of the men there had spent fifteen or twenty years scuttling under the skyscrapers, struggling not to perish in the freezing winds that wrapped their thin flannel overcoats around their bodies like paper envelopes. Soon he found them friendly enough, however. Puerto Ricans were as close as ticks; they stuck together like dandruff, and left their doors open to friends in need. Juan was strong, and he was always ready to help out—he carried furniture in and out of tenements, pulled vegetable carts when the horses got sick, carried the ill to the hospital in his arms when the ambulance didn’t arrive.

In Harlem, sometimes three families shared the same room, together with rats and cockroaches. They survived thanks to
ron pitorro
—a strong, amber rum distilled in bathtubs—and
la bolita
, the illegal lottery everyone was always dreaming about.
La bolita
gave people hope, and soon Juan became a
bolitero
and had a profitable business going. When people dreamed about spiders, scorpions, or beetles, they ran to Juan, who interpreted what their dreams meant and sold them a number.

It was because of
la bolita
and its consequences that Juan eventually returned to the island. Marta Gómez was a beautiful
tabaquera
, and one day she went to hear Juan reading
Les Mis
e
rables
. He had been named official reader because he was very tall and could be heard more clearly than his co-workers above the crowd. Juan had a university education and he loved novels; he would explain their meaning to the
tabaqueros
. Novels were very similar to dreams. In both, you escaped menaces unscathed and often found solutions to your problems.

Marta asked Juan to tell her the meaning of a dream she had had: A chicken was pecking away at a handful of corn in the yard of her old family house in Naranjito, near the mountains of Barranquitas, and she laid two eggs. A cat appeared out of nowhere and pounced on her. The chicken started cackling like mad, but couldn’t get rid of the miniature tiger. Soon the chicken was too weak to run and collapsed under the paws of the cat, who then proceeded to suck the eggs dry.

Juan looked at Marta, who was chubby and rosy-cheeked, with pale white skin the color of jasmine in moonlight, and he fell in love with her. “There is a man stalking you; you must be careful and not go out alone. Meanwhile, play the double zero, since the chicken laid two eggs. If
la bolita
hits your number and you win, I’ll help you protect the money and nobody will steal it.” Marta did as Juan said, and when
la bolita
hit the double zero and she won ten thousand dollars, she immediately put it in the bank under Juan’s name, without telling her parents or anyone else about it.

Marta’s family came from the mountains and tried to pass for Spanish. If you were from Naranjito or Barranquitas, towns high in the
cordillera
which shone like hives of glowworms at night, your eyes might be blue and your hair honey-colored, and this made a huge difference when you were looking for a job in New York. But if you came from the coast, there was a good chance that you looked like Juan’s mother, Altagracia, and it was more difficult to find work.

Juan didn’t mind being called a spic, and he never denied his origins. But he believed that if he asked Marta to marry him, she would think he was doing it because of the ten thousand dollars she had put under his name in the bank. Months passed and he didn’t dare confess his love. Finally, one day the owner of a
placita
in East Harlem that sold fresh vegetables and fruit went to see Marta’s father and asked for her hand. The father was elated—Don Gúzman owned his own business and his daughter would lack for nothing, and he immediately said yes. But when Marta found out about it, she ran to where Juan was carefully ripping the veins out of a tobacco leaf and said, “If you don’t marry me right now, I’ll throw myself from the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn.”

Juan was impressed, and they immediately went to see a judge on Second Avenue and Thirtieth Street, who married them in their tobacco workers’ overalls. That evening, however, when they went to see Don Roberto, Marta’s father, to tell him the good news, he went berserk. “But this man is tar black! Have you gone crazy? No one in our family has a drop of bad blood in them. Blacks are lazy, filthy descendants of sugar-cutting slaves. Our people are from the mountains; we’re civilized, hard workers. Go to the judge this minute and have him annul the marriage.”

But Marta was strong-willed, and she withstood the assault. Her father was in the kitchen serving himself a
ron palo viejo
, and she told him, her hands on her hips, “We’re from New York now, Father; there are no mountains and no sugar coast here, and it’s cold as hell. The color of our skin doesn’t keep us any warmer than Juan’s. I’m his wife now and that’s that.” Marta’s father was peeling a lemon at that moment to put in his drink, and he began to hurl insults at her, calling her a whore, headstrong as a mule—didn’t she understand she was throwing her life down the drain? Marta tried to calm him and Juan put his arms around her to protect her, but it was too late. Don Roberto suddenly turned around to face his daughter and plunged the knife deep into her ribs.

When Juan finished his story, there were tears in his eyes. Until the end of his days he cried whenever he spoke of Marta, and I respected the memory of his beloved.

Once back on the island, Juan established contact with his socialist friends, and it was then that he met Diamantino Márquez at one of their meetings. Diamantino was just a kid with a chip on his shoulder then. “I never would have guessed that one day he’d have the guts to defy Adolfo Bracale, the famous theater agent. But the kid was tough, and he stood up to Bracale. He wasn’t just a reporter scribbling verses as his godfather had said.” When he got back from the States he had published several articles in the press denouncing the producer’s corrupt dealings, in which famous stars came to the island with hoodlums like Molinari escorting them to extort bigger payments from the theater owners. After the tragedy at Teatro Tapia, Bracale served several months in prison. He was finally set free by the sugar entrepreneurs who had put up the money for his business ventures in the first place.

Diamantino wanted to make his own place in the sun, not in the shadow of his famous father. That was why he defended political independence so fiercely. Everything he did, his poetry and his journalism—he always wrote about patriotic themes in
El Diario
—even his violin playing—he often played
danzas
which he had arranged himself from the original piano versions—were ways of reaffirming his political ideals vis-à-vis Don Eduardo Márquez, who was always compromising.

Juan knew all this, and he agreed with me that that was why Diamantino became a friend of Los Tiznados, the suicide riders who hid in the hills. “Our island is so small it can hold no secrets, Masha,” Juan told me, “and many people saw Diamantino ride with them, but they kept it from Don Eduardo. Los Tiznados remind me of my tobacco-worker friends at El Morito, the cigar factory in New York—only their faces are blackened with sugarcane soot rather than tobacco grime. They are willing to die for political independence, but I don’t agree with them. What do they want political independence for? So hacendados like Don Pedro can exploit us all the more?

“The important thing is to be independent from poverty, Masha, to empower the working class! It’s better to have ‘La Internacional’ as our national anthem instead of ‘La Borinquena,’ Morel Campos’s aristocratic
danza
. I can just see it—Don Pedro as president of the republic, whip in hand, making ninety percent of our population, black and white, plow his fields like oxen, after making sure that we remain illiterate. By that time, Diamantino and Los Tiznados will be mercilessly wiped out, because that’s what happens to idealists in a republic.

“I’m a warrior—a strike to me is like a war,” Juan said. “And in every war there are bound to be casualties. I know that Los Tiznados won’t stop at anything, that they are willing to kill for what they believe, and I don’t have a problem with that. But I don’t believe in wasting bullets, and one should only shoot for the right reasons.”

W
HEN JUAN HAD READ
Dandré’s ad in the paper for a shoemaker to repair the dancers’ slippers, he had been curious about the company. He was a great admirer of Russia and knew quite a bit about it from the
tabaqueros
’ readings at El Morito, so he went to the Hotel Malatrassi and answered the ad. Then Dandré left for the States and Diamantino Márquez joined Madame’s troupe. Juan was full of enthusiasm; he knew who Diamantino was and admired the young man.