My Beloved World (9 page)

Aurora was very strict, very religious, and fearful of anything fun, but she did have a few friends who came to visit. Celina would listen to the stories they told over coffee: about who was promenading in the plaza, the ladies on the left and the men on the right; about tea dances at the Hotel Parador Oasis. Walking home from school, she would peek into the entrance and catch a glimpse of shadowy pink archways, but she would never set foot inside. When she woke in the middle of the night to singing and guitars in the street, she could guess who was being serenaded: the same girl who sat there on the balcony in the afternoon, dressed like a princess with her fingernails painted.

One morning, a group of young soldiers were leaving for Fort Buchanan, and some of Celina’s classmates decided to go wave good-bye to them at the train station. Ever since Pearl Harbor, Puerto Rico was in shock, and the boys were joining up as soon as they were old enough, if not sooner. She didn’t even know the ones who were leaving from San Germán that day, but she liked the idea of a
despedida
to send them off. Maybe she still missed Pedro. The girls stood on the platform at the train station and waved till the caboose disappeared into the forest. When they got to school, they were all punished for being late.

Maybe a seed was planted that day. Later she saw an ad in the newspaper: Join the Women’s Army Corps! She knew the instant she saw it: this was her chance. She mailed in her name and address and said she was nineteen. Celina was only seventeen. They wrote back and told her to present herself in San Juan. Celina showed the letter to Aurora.

“You’re crazy,” Aurora said.

“No, it’s an order from the army. I have to present myself! I can’t disobey. I
have
to go.”

It took six or seven hours by train to get to San Juan, and that trip was the best adventure of her short life. The conductor punching the tickets looked like a general in his smart uniform. Passengers came from
who knows where, all over the island, with their bags and bundles and boxes, their
fiambreras
stacked up with what they’d brought to eat. The world zipped past the windows. A car raced alongside the tracks, the driver honking and waving. The train pulled in at little flag stops, not even stations, where kids ran on the platform to sell fruits through the windows. At one crossing, a chain beside the tracks cordoned off a road leading elsewhere, a crimson tunnel carpeted with petals dropped by a
flamboyán
tree in full bloom.

Aurora’s husband had a sister in San Juan, and they had called her on the telephone. She met Celina at the train station and took her to the camp the next day. High on adrenaline, Celina took a whole battery of tests and passed every one of them, mental and physical. Then they asked for her birth certificate. Panic. They said, you leave for Miami in four days. Go home and get your birth certificate. Come back in time to ship out.

She took the train back to San Germán, another whole day traveling and plenty of time to fret. At home she told Aurora what had happened: “You have to find a birth certificate, and it has to say I’m nineteen. Or else they’ll put you in jail!”

“
¡Estás loca!
You’re the one who’s going to jail, not me.” Well,
somebody
would be going to jail if the U.S. Army went to all that trouble to recruit a WAC and then found out she had lied. Aurora went to Lajas and found Mayo. Mayo found a lawyer. Somehow they did what they did, and Aurora came back with a birth certificate that said Celina Baez was born in 1925.

All of this my mother managed on impulse, without any real thought about where she was headed. She would never have much patience with the spirit world, always keeping a safe distance from such things, but in this particular turn of events, so unforeseen and ultimately so fortuitous, she still credits the guiding hand of her mother, who, she believes, continues to watch over her.

My mother boarded the flight to Miami with an incredulous excitement that would never completely fade. The stories of her army days were among the few memories of youth that she shared with friends and family when I was growing up. It was a coming of age, a sudden and sometimes comical meeting with the modern world, and, for all
the military discipline, a time of unthinkable, giddy new freedom. It was also an extraordinary moment in history. My mother was recruited into one of the first Puerto Rican units of the Women’s Army Corps. Over twenty thousand Puerto Rican men had already served in the U.S. armed forces before the women were included. And although the first units were kept segregated because of their limited English, it was for many of these women, as for so many of the men who served, how they came to see themselves as rightfully American.

Landing in Miami, the new recruits were transferred from the airport to the train station, where, shivering on the platform in their cotton dresses, they waited for the Pullman. It was December, but none of the girls from Puerto Rico had coats or stockings. A kindly black conductor found blankets for them to use until they got to Georgia, where they were headed for basic training.

At Fort Oglethorpe, the sergeant took the whole band to the PX and let them choose nylons and garter belts and brassieres to wear with their new uniforms. They were screaming with laughter, showing each other what to do with them. Many of that ragtag bunch had joined up wearing homemade underwear and had never touched such fancy things in their lives. And when they learned how to march, the stockings fell down, causing my mother to laugh so hard she got KP duty as a penalty.

The basic training was difficult, because there was so much to learn: not just the military life and duties, but simply functioning in a world that was new to her. Never having used a telephone on her own, she didn’t know not to hang up when she went to find the officer someone was calling for. All the instructions were in English, which to her had been just another class in high school until then. Her schoolbooks had said nothing about KP duty, about how to light a chimney stove, how to peel a potato.

Though the war seemed far away, the WACs understood that every task given them would have required an able-bodied man. For every woman in the force, a man was freed to fight the war. After basic training, my mother’s group was assigned to New York, and that was the real beginning of her new life. They lived in the Broadway Central Hotel and worked at the post office on Forty-Second Street, sorting letters and
packages for the troops in Europe. They practiced their English, learned their way around the streets and the subways, learned how to be on their own. For Celina, there was also a lesson that others already knew: learning how to have a friend.

Carmin was the first real friend Celina had, and emotionally it was like learning to walk. Together the two of them explored the mesmerizing town. In those days Forty-Second Street was a beautiful place. It was classy, not yet the seedy peep-show district it would become in the 1970s or the garish tourist zone it is today. Just walking down the street you felt liberated. The restaurants and the shows—they saw Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey—and so many other things were free because they were in uniform. Celina and Carmin were in a movie theater when the reel stopped and the lights came up for the announcement: the Germans had surrendered. They went out in the street, and then came the scene that my mother would describe so many times, always with the same look of wonder. “Beautiful pandemonium,” she called it. Thousands of people, all the soldiers and all the girls, everybody kissing and hugging, yelling their heads off, embracing strangers, everyone so jubilant. It was magic; it was electric. Like nothing she’d ever seen.

Carmin had friends in the Bronx, and one day they braved the long subway ride to go to a party, getting up at every station so as not to miss the stop at Intervale. They had never taken the subway anywhere except back and forth between the hotel and the post office.

That was the day she met Juan Luis Sotomayor. The family called him Juli (
Juu-li
), in the typically creative Puerto Rican approach to nicknames. He saw that Celina was shy, and he was very gentle. And fine looking,
guapísimo
. She liked the way he paid attention. No one had ever paid attention to her. He talked to her about things he read in the newspaper; they both read the whole of
El Diario
every day. No one had ever talked to her about reading before either. Afterward, he would write letters, just to tell her about his day—and to ask when she was coming back. There was always a reason to come back, always another party. Even after the WACs were reassigned to Camp Shanks, somehow Celina and Carmin would find their way down to the Bronx, to 940 Kelly Street.

And at the same time as Celina fell in love with Juli, she fell in love
with his mother too. “Don’t call me Doña,” she said, introducing herself that first day. “Call me Mercedes. Doña is for old ladies.” Mercedes loved people, drew them around her, and was the life of the party. She
was
the party. She always found something to laugh at, something to argue about, news to share. Coming into that family, for Celina, was an awakening to life and energy, to the joy of being with people. She could forget about being an orphan.

Mercedes and her son were two of a kind, both of them
embusteros
, spinning tall tales that swept you along, right up to that moment when it dawned: That can’t be true! And the poetry that followed after the room went quiet and each looked to the other, mother and son, to see who would begin—the pleasure of that moment of anticipation.

As it is with matters of the heart … 
Y entre canto y canto colgaba una lágrima …
^*
Celina had always loved poems, as far back as Lajas, copying them onto little slips of paper so that she could learn them. But she had never heard anyone recite them so they came alive.

When she was coming up for discharge, she decided she didn’t want to go back to Puerto Rico. Juli said: Stay in New York; we’ll get married as soon as you’re out of the service. They did, at city hall, with no more ceremony than a couple of signatures and a kiss. When she moved in, it was she and Juli, his brother Vitín and his sister, Carmen, all living with Mercedes and Gallego, the whole family piled into two bedrooms, girls in one, boys in the other. Until the newlyweds got their own place downstairs. The building was an old tenement, with dark and narrow rooms, but their kitchen was big and Juli made it beautiful. He put up curtains and pretty tiles. He raised a scaffold and mixed different colors and painted the old plaster molding on the wall. It was glorious, bouquets of flowers on her kitchen wall. Juli had such flair.

When friends came over, he always had something to offer them, knew how to make them at home. He taught his bride to dance. Bolero. Cha-cha-cha. Merengue. She was clumsy, apologetic. “You’ll do okay, Celina,” he said. “You’ll do okay.” She was learning to be like him, and that was all she wanted.

On her birthday, she went into the bedroom, and there on the bed was a new dress, the skirt spread wide, with roses scattered around it. Juli did everything with creative exuberance; in his heart of hearts he was an artist. He’d taught himself to sculpt and made busts of Roosevelt, Truman, and MacArthur, with nothing but newspaper photographs to go by. One day he made Celina’s face. It was a strange feeling to see how he saw her, with arched eyebrows, wearing a turban. That face was stunning, and yes, somehow it looked like her, even though she had never imagined herself to be beautiful. It was stranger still when she saw how they used it as a model at the mannequin factory where he worked. There they were, a whole crowd of Celinas with those eyebrows and turbans, headed for shop windows, who knew where.

My father’s education was minimal, though he had demonstrated a prodigious numerical aptitude early. Sixth grade was as far as he’d got before he joined other members of the family working full-time in a button factory in Santurce. His father got sick with tuberculosis, which was endemic on the island then, with no treatment available, so Juli had to help support the family. At one point, however, something extraordinary happened. Some professors from the university in San Juan had somehow heard about his math talent and came to watch him doing calculations in his head. They wanted to give him a scholarship to go away to school, but his mother—my
abuelita
—couldn’t bear to let him go. He would stay by her side until he was twenty-two, when Abuelita decided to move the entire family, which by then included Gallego, to New York in search of work. My father arrived on the U. S. Army Transport
George S. Simonds
, which then ferried workers from the Caribbean, just days before Christmas of 1944—within days of my mother’s arrival.

When he worked at the mannequin factory, they recognized his talent. He loved that job, but the factory closed, and he went on to work at a radiator factory. There they realized he was good with numbers,
and they took him off the shop floor to do their bookkeeping. People could see his intelligence, but with no education the opportunities were limited.

Despite having lost his own chance for an education, my father never resented my mother’s ambitions. On the contrary, he encouraged her. She managed to finish high school, do a secretarial course, and study to qualify as a practical nurse in the first years of their marriage. In many ways, he defied the macho stereotype of a Latin male. It took my mother seven years to get pregnant, and though she felt the pressure of Abuelita’s impatience and comparisons with others, it was never my father who gave her a hard time. When I was finally born, he was overjoyed. She was the one, not he, who doubted her ability to be a good parent.

The family has always told stories about how difficult I was as a baby, and what a terror as a toddler. They say I learned to walk at seven months and to run the very same day, ever after the hot pepper—
¡Ají!
—a menace to myself and everyone else. How many times had they rushed me to the hospital in a panic? Once a fireman neighbor had to rescue me when I got my head stuck in a bucket, trying to see what my voice sounded like in the enclosed space.