My Beloved World (6 page)

IN MAYAGÜEZ
, we usually stayed at Titi Maria’s house. She was the first wife of Tío Mayo, my mother’s eldest brother. Titi Maria helped to look after my mother when she was small, and their family bond outlasted the marriage. My mother is close to Tío Mayo’s later families too; she has a talent for not taking sides, which is handy in a complicated extended family. It is a trait I’ve adopted, trying never to lose contact with cousins and second cousins whose parents have separated or divorced. We visit with everybody. There were family members whom I’d never even heard of before; my mother was set on showing Junior and me off to every single one of them over a cup of coffee. At first, people would laugh because our Spanish was clumsy and limited, but within days I could hear myself improving, and people would compliment me on it. Junior would have improved too if he’d have just opened his mouth and said something once in a while. It took me years to appreciate how hard it must have been for him to be always in the company of two chatty and strong-willed women.

At Titi Maria’s house, my cousin Papo always prepared a special welcome. Waiting for me under the sink would be two whole shopping bags of mangoes that he’d gathered from under the trees up the hill in anticipation of our arrival. I ate them all day long, in spite of constant warnings that I would get sick. Looking back, I suspect I was getting a higher dosage of insulin than I needed—not uncommon for
juvenile diabetics in that day—making the added sugar manageable. In any case, I hated the sluggish feeling that high blood sugar brought on, and I didn’t need reminding. I might have had to eat less of something else, but I could indulge my lust for mangoes.

At lunchtime, the whole family came home from work, and Titi Maria cooked a big meal for all her kids—my adult cousins—and some of their kids too. Even those who lived elsewhere would often come for that meal. After lunch we settled down for a siesta. I would read a book—sleep wouldn’t come to me easily—but I loved this time when everyone was gathered at home and quietly connected.

Papo had a job designing window displays for a number of big stores on the island. He claimed to be the first person doing this work as a professional designer in Puerto Rico, and he often traveled to New York to gather ideas. Charo was a high school teacher. Minita was the senior executive secretary for the newspaper
El Mundo
. Evita worked in a government office. It was clear to me even then that the people I knew on the island had better jobs than the Puerto Ricans I knew in New York. When we walked down the street in Mayagüez, it gave me a proud thrill to read the little signs above the doors, of the doctors, the lawyers, and the other professionals who were Puerto Rican. It was not something I had often seen in New York. At the hospital where my mother worked, there were Puerto Rican nurses but only one Puerto Rican doctor. At the larger shops and businesses in the Bronx, there were Puerto Rican workers but rarely managers or owners.

Tío Mayo’s
panadería
was my favorite place to visit. They called it a
panadería
, but it was much more than a bakery. There were loaves of bread and rolls that Tío Mayo started making while it was still dark outside, kept warm in a special case with a heat lamp. There were cases full of cakes and pastries filled with cream, homemade cheese, and guava jam. My uncle’s then wife, Titi Elisa, also got up early to make lunch and snacks to sell to the workers who sewed in the factory across the street. She fried the chicken and roasted the pork, made stews and meat pies and pots of rice and beans. The smells of her cooking mixed with the yeasty smell of the bread, and the coffee, and the whole amazing cloud of flavors spread down the street and up into the balconies.

When the noon whistle blew at the factory, the bakery would fill up in minutes. I helped with serving, and I loved the two-handed challenge of the lunch hour rush. I knew the price of every item, and I knew how to make change—I was discovering that I had a facility with numbers, which I inherited from Papi—and Titi Elisa would let me work the cash register when my uncle wasn’t around. Although he had seen me in action, he couldn’t quite believe it. He wasn’t comfortable with the idea of girls handling money.

When I wasn’t busy helping, I played with my cousin Tito in the alleyway behind the bakery, reenacting scenes from the Three Stooges. Tito was Moe and I was Curly. We could usually convince Junior or someone else to be Larry, the third
chiflado
, but only Tito and I knew all the moves and the right sound effects: a twang for a fake eye poke, a ratchety sound for an ear twist, and the all-purpose “Nyuk! Nyuk! Nyuk!”

Before she left Puerto Rico, my mother had lived in Lajas and San Germán and had seen very little of the island beyond the neighborhoods of her childhood. She was eager to show us places that she’d heard about but had never seen herself. We went to the beach at Luquillo. It was nothing like Orchard Beach in the Bronx, which was the only beach I knew. There were no traffic jams in Puerto Rico, no waiting for hours packed in a hot car to get there, no dirty sand, no standing in line for the bathroom. Progress has caught up with the island since my childhood, and it has its share of traffic jams, but the water is still warm and clear, and the sand is perfectly white. When you look down into the water, you can see the bottom, and it rolls out blue until it meets the blue of the sky.

The Parque de Bombas in Ponce fascinated me, a fantasia of red and black stripes that wouldn’t go away even when you closed your eyes. The fire truck looked like a giant toy with its ding-dong bell, and I couldn’t imagine it in action. How did they ever put out a real fire? “
Mi’ja
,” said Mami, “all those little wooden houses burned down anyway. But they did the best they could.” She would say that about a lot of things: they did the best they could.

Of all the sights, the art museum in Ponce left the deepest impression. I had never been to a museum before. The building is beautiful
and seemed to me then as grand as a castle with its staircase that sweeps in a big circle on two sides. It was so magnificent that I just had to run up and down the stairs to see what it felt like. It felt horrible when the guard yelled at me. So I walked slowly and looked at the paintings one by one.

I figured out that portraits were pictures in which a person from olden times just stood there or sat, wearing fancy clothes and staring very seriously. I wondered who these people were. Why did an artist choose
them
to be in a picture? How much work was it to paint this? How long did he have to stand there like that? Other paintings were more like stories, though I didn’t know what the story was. Why did she cut off his head? I could tell that dove was not just an ordinary dove that happened to be flying by. I could see that it had a meaning, even though I didn’t know what the meaning was. When I got tired of not understanding the stories, I noticed other things: Sometimes you could see the brushstrokes and the thickness of the paint; other times it was smooth, without texture. Sometimes things in the distance were smaller, and it felt as if you could reach into the space; other times it was flat like a map. I wondered, were these the things I
should
be noticing? I could tell that there was more going on than I could describe or understand.

Does it seem strange that a child should be so conscious of the workings of her own mind? I have clear memories of many such moments, often turning on a recognition of something I didn’t know, an awareness of a gap in my knowledge. A framed reproduction of a painting that mesmerized me hung for years on the wall in Abuelita’s living room. Who knows how it got there, but it was a scene, I’m assuming in hindsight, from the French Revolution, a broad staircase leading from a public square up into a stately building, with a balcony where several elegant figures formed a cluster, including a woman—Marie Antoinette?—with a pale blue dress and imposing hair. In the street below, many other people approached, more poorly dressed, but my eye was drawn to an old man on the lower steps, shabbily clad, leaning one-legged on a cane, his back to the viewer. I knew nothing of the history, the social and political background that informed the painting, but I understood that
a message was somehow intended when the artist contrived to place this man front and center. I spent a lot of time wondering about him and trying to imagine his face. But that was as far as I could get.

“
SONIA
, we’re going to visit your grandfather. My father.” This got my attention. My mother had never so much as mentioned his existence before. When I questioned her, she answered in a voice that sounded as if she were reading aloud from the small print on the back of a package of medicine. “I don’t know the man. He left when I was born. I haven’t seen him since then. But Tío Mayo and Titi Aurora want me to come with them to the hospital to see him, and they say you should come too.” The unknown grandfather was not the whole mystery. I usually knew what Mami was thinking from the flash in her voice, the speed of her smile, as rare as it was then, the telltale arch of her brows. This woman speaking with such flat indifference was not the mother I knew.

Tío Mayo led us to the bed at the far end of the room, by the window. As we walked the length of the ward, I hardly saw the patients in the other beds, so intently was I focused on my mother and our looming destination. Nothing was going to slip by me, though I had no idea what to expect or even what I should be wondering about. Would she greet him with a kiss? How do you relate to a father you don’t know?

He had Mami’s light eyes. Framed by the white of his hair, the white mustache, the white of the sheets, their sea-green color seemed even lighter, bluer, more startling. He was a handsome man but gaunt. His arms were just sticks poking from the sleeves of the hospital gown. A thousand questions ran through my head, but I didn’t dare speak any of them out loud: Why did you leave Mami behind? Who are you? Do you have a wife? Do you have other kids? Where have you been living?

I climbed onto the chair and watched. My mother walked up to the bed and stood looking down at the old man. In an ice-cold voice she said, “
Yo soy Celina
.” That was it. He didn’t say anything to her. He didn’t ask how her life had been, what it was now. There were no tears, no revelations.

Titi Aurora led me by the hand to the bedside and introduced me. I got barely a nod from him. I retreated, climbed back onto the chair, and
watched as Titi Aurora chattered about nothing and fluffed his pillows. Tío Mayo was there and not there, talking to the nurses, taking care of business. But in all this nothing, I understood something: that my mother had been wounded as deeply as a human being could be.

I have carried the memory of that day as a grave caution. There was a terrible permanence to the state that my mother and her father had reached. My mother’s pain would never heal, the ice between them would never thaw, because they would never find a way to acknowledge it. Without acknowledgment and communication, forgiveness was beyond reach. Eventually, I would recognize the long shadow of this abandonment in my own feelings toward my mother, and I would determine not to repeat what I had seen. The closeness that I share now with my mother is deeply felt, but we learned it slowly and with effort, and for fear of the alternative.

I
T WAS IN
April of the year that I turned nine. I was heading straight home after school that day because Papi had stayed home sick from work. Usually, Junior and I would go to Ana’s first and then play outside till Papi got home. I didn’t need to check in with Ana, because she would know that Papi was home. My mother had coffee with Ana every day before she went to work; there was nothing about each other’s lives that they didn’t know instantly.

When we came round the corner, I could see Moncho, Ana’s husband, hanging out the window on the third floor of their building, washing the windows but also looking intently at passersby. That was odd, I thought. When he saw me, he waved at me. He didn’t stop. He kept on waving furiously, signaling to me, and then he yelled “Sonia! Junior! Come upstairs!” in a voice that meant business. Junior bounced ahead of me, happy to see Moncho.

But when Ana opened the door, something was terribly wrong. Her eyes were puffy from crying, and her face was pale. This wasn’t some everyday fuss that just happened to reach the level of tears; something had shaken her deeply. She wouldn’t explain, but she started to cry and made us wait while she phoned Mami, saying to Moncho, “Celina should tell them.” Moncho was quieter than I’d ever seen him. This was all so strange that I was scared but also riveted as I watched to see what would happen next. Ana said, “Let’s go,” and we walked downstairs and across the way to our building. It was the shortest of walks, but
it took forever. It was hard to move my legs, as if dread were weighing them down.

Alfred opened the door to our apartment. His eyes, too, were red. Tío Vitín was there, and I could hear other voices. I looked into the living room and saw many faces looking back at me with the same teary gaze. Mami was sitting in the chair by the telephone in the hallway, staring into space, her eyes wide and wet. Junior said to her, “Where’s Papi?”

“Dios se lo llevó.”

God took him. I could see that Junior didn’t understand. I did. She meant that Papi had died. But what did
that
mean? Had he become a spirit? I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel, or say, or do. As if from a far distance, I could hear my own voice joining all the other voices crying. I ran down the hall and threw myself on the bed. I was sobbing, pounding my fists, when Ana entered the room.

“Sonia, you have to be a big girl now. Your mother’s very upset; you can’t cry anymore. You have to be strong for your
mami
.”

So that’s what I’m supposed to do? I stopped crying. “I’m okay, Ana.” She left me alone. The stillness in the room was louder than the noise down the hall. I remembered that morning how Papi had called out from the bathroom, saying that since he wasn’t going to work, he wanted to make us a Sunday breakfast, even though it was a weekday. Mami had yelled: “Go back to bed if you’re sick, the kids don’t have time, they have to get to school, and why are you taking so long shaving?”