The Noise of Infinite Longing (10 page)

That Christmas I got a baby goat from Tití Angela. She almost never came to visit. She hated the one-hour drive from San Juan on the potholed highway, winding by the beaches of Luquillo and the rain forest of ElYunque. So when she came, it was a celebration. She was light, a nightingale flitting about in our airy rooms. Her voice, as usual, had the high pitch of excitement, calling out our names, and we ran to her car, not letting her get out before we jumped around her. She handed out her wrapped gifts with special notes to each of us and, gathering us around, would tell the latest stories from her world so far from ours. In the shade of the front porch, sipping their sugary

black coffee, she and mother talked and talked and laughed, like young girls in their room. I stayed nearby, listening to them, trying to make out what they were talking about, but their conversation had a code of its own.There was always a big dinner, lechón asado or paste- les, or mother’s paella. In the long evening of eating and drinking, after my sister, my brother, and I had been put to bed, a moment would come when my father, having his iceless tumblers of dark Don Q, his eyes watery from laughing at his own jokes, would turn to my mother, to her disapproving pursed mouth. He would stare at her, his eyes narrowing, fist tight against his lips, and pour himself another shot of rum.

Tití would titter girlishly, changing the conversation, finding a way to distract him, to flatter him with her attention while drawing mother away from him, from his glare. She had always put herself between them, between him and all of us. She would make him laugh, and the evening would wind down with fading chatter and the clatter of dishes and glasses.

But she didn’t stay long, a day, a night. I would watch her get in her car, her thin ankles pale against her bright capri pants and strapped flat sandals, her hair in a silk scarf, her sunglasses giving her the aura (I thought) of a movie star. Too soon she would disappear from my sight down the road. I wanted to go with her, wanting the life we had had in San Juan, when she made us party costumes and cut our hair and baked us cakes.

I didn’t know why she gave me a goat. But I kept it and kept the satin ribbon she had put around its neck. I named it Pepita. I tied her up with a long rope to a fence in a field behind the house. I fed her and gave her water every day and played with her, grabbing her and rubbing her gray forehead and stubby horns. Months later, when we moved to the pink house up the road, my parents refused to take her along and she was slaughtered, her long neck slashed

with one stroke of a machete, her skinned carcass hung upside down. For a long time I went around by myself looking for her, call- ing out her name, listening for her cry.

The pink house was new, a cinder-block square with a flat roof, tile floors, and a carport. Out back there was a henhouse, and at dawn the roosters strutted, shaking their plumage, crowing us awake. Our maid—was it Lola then?—wore her apron and slippers, fed the chickens, running out after them with a handful of kernels of corn she cast wide on the ground.The fat hens with puffed-up chests and their chirping chicks came waddling in feathery flocks, flapping their wings, stretching their beaks, and pecking at her legs, their claws scratching for the kernels scattered in the dirt.

The yard had plantain plants, mango and tamarind trees with thick trunks and heavy limbs that I climbed when my parents were not around. Perched high off the ground on bending tree branches, I looked down on the tin shed nearby where orange and grape sodas were bottled.The bottles came from scrap, used over and over, with dents and fading letters. The cranking of the bottling machines and the whistles and loud talk of the boys stacking the bottles broke the afternoon silence, the quiet that spread over the fields after the lunch hour.

Our yard was wild with flowers. They grew in patches, in uncut grass, watered by the afternoon showers, blooming and withering with the seasons. A shallow gutter separated our front yard from the road, and across the way there was a big open field where the boys played ball, and beyond it, on the other side of an overgrown empty lot, stood the municipal clinic, a one-story cement building painted a mustard brown, rain-stained and dilapidated, where my father spent his mornings.

My father was a man of routines. Up at dawn, showered quickly

and fragrant with aftershave cologne, he dressed simply, in a loose guayabera, or an open-necked plaid shirt. He didn’t need a clock and never wore a watch. He didn’t wear ties or jackets, and had stopped wearing the fedora he had worn in Mexico. His mustache was gone and his hair was receding, combed back flat on his head. But he still had a slight frame, the bony body of a swimmer, slim back, trim torso.

He learned to swim like the country boys, leaping nude from rocky banks into rushing rivers near Guayama, where he was a child, before his family moved to Fajardo. I never saw him in a swimming pool or diving from high boards, but in the sea he moved as if the water were air, his arms like paddles cutting through the waves.

On our Sundays at the beach in Luquillo, he tried to teach me to swim, lifting me at my waist and holding me on the open palms of his hands while I flayed and gulped salt water. Standing up to his stomach in water, his swimming trunks billowing, he rotated his arms back and forth, head down, showing me the motions. He had no impatience then, and on the afternoon when I first managed to keep afloat on my back for a single minute, he rubbed my head, the way he had done in Mexico when he let go of my bicycle and I rolled on alone.

Luquillo beach, a half-moon of grainy beige sand and soaring palm trees, their ripe coconuts heavy with juice and crusty bark, was crowded on weekends, packed with cars parked between the trees, fender to fender. Multitudes of children, loose from their mothers, raced in packs to the edge of the water, carrying inflated rubber tubes. Family parties gathered around the concrete tables on the beach grounds, slicing chunks of roasted pig, the charred pig skin dripping fat. Music came from everywhere, from the car radios tuned up to mambos and merengues, from the old men in straw hats

with string guitars and maracas who strolled down the beach.

Mother sat in the shade of palms, on a towel spread on the sand, one hand shielding her face from the sun, the other holding a maga- zine or a newspaper. She rarely came into the water, and when she did, in her dove-white Esther Williams swimsuit, she would jump high with every cresting wave, laughing, holding on to us, her turban twisted tight around her pinned-up hair. Somehow not a drop of water splashed on her face. She couldn’t swim and cared nothing for it. She didn’t walk far into the sea, but stopped just as the water inched above her thighs. She didn’t show fear, but she was afraid of the sea, afraid of what she didn’t know.

Those days at the beach were for us, not for her. For us, she sat bored through four or five hours of sand on her skin and sun on her legs. She would bring egg sandwiches she made at home and her potato salad, which was crunchy with cut-up apples. At the end of the afternoon, she would walk each of us to the public showers, see- ing that we stepped carefully around the shards of broken glass in the sand and the dirt that people left in the stalls. A few years later, she became a member of the Caribe Hilton Swim & Racquet Club, and she had us take swimming lessons. One day, while she sat in a loung- ing chair poolside, I climbed to the high board, and looking down to her, and to the water that seemed miles away, I dived headlong into the pool, shivering with terror, burning my skin and sinking toward the tiled bottom, knowing I would not make it to the surface, and when I finally did, she was standing in her belted white linen pants and espadrilles on the edge of the pool, applauding.

Sundays together in Luquillo, or anywhere else, in El Yunque (father’s car huffing up the narrow mountain road to the peak of the rain forest, my father driving it at full throttle, one hand on the wheel, the other arm resting on the window) or at Las Croabas, the rocky

coastline north of Fajardo, were like the family pictures mother glued to the pages of her photo albums, frozen moments a woman chooses to remember.

M

y father’s footsteps began and ended our day. My mother always got up with him, their conversation immediately insis-

tent, discussions in bed that seemed filled with urgency. Then came the shuffling of feet and the familiar sounds of my mother in the kitchen. She was boiling water for her black coffee, warming the cereal for my brother.

The first silver light of day filtered through my bedroom window, shining hard on my face through the mosquito net. Folding my sleep- ing rag, the same I had had for years, I climbed off the bed and, with Angeles in her swollen sleepy eyes, knocked on my parents’ bed- room door for the morning kiss.

Water ran in the bathroom basin, the shower splattered on tile, and moments later my mother would come out in her robe and stand in front of her dresser, looking at her reflection in the mirror, lining her eyes, uncapping the tube of lipstick, screwing her earrings in pierced lobes, spraying perfume behind her ears, on the hollow of her neck. She dressed slowly, turning her breasts away from the mir- ror, strapping on her girdle, fastening her stockings to the garter belt. She pulled on the seams of her stockings until they were per- fectly straight, brown lines running up her slender calves. Coming out of the bedroom, she raised her face to my father’s, kissing him lightly on his closed lips, and he left for the day, banging shut the front door behind him.

He had the same breakfast every day—fried eggs and coffee— and left the house carrying his battered leather bag, which he had

owned since his university days. He walked down the road to the clinic, where dozens of patients were already waiting with bundles of plantains and yuccas for him.

At noon, when his appointments at the hospital were done, he walked back across the field, his head lowered to the sun. Our maid had his lunch ready—pork chops, steak, rice and beans, plantains, an ordinary meal, staples of the Puerto Rican table. His tastes didn’t vary, and he never ate the tomato and green bean salads that were placed beside his plate. He ate quickly, as he did everything else, barely tast- ing the food. He bit his tongue or the side of a lip eating so fast, leav- ing tiny spots of blood on his napkin. After his siesta, a half hour he rarely gave up for anything, he sat in the only armchair we had, his textbooks stacked by his side, and he would read, marking the pages, muttering, memorizing for the board exams. In the afternoons, he hitched up a footpath to the district hospital, a gray building on a hill where he worked mending broken bones, taking out appendixes, blood splattering on his white uniform, leaving maroon stains.

After he was gone in the mornings, Angeles and I had our break- fast, and mother drew up the grocery list for Lola. Six months preg- nant, sallow around the eyes and thin as a bone, mother walked to the gas station on the highway to wait for the car that came by at seven every morning for the hour-long trip to her job in San Juan. Kissing each of us good-bye, she left the smell of her perfume on our hair and smudges of lipstick on our cheeks.

In our starched green-and-white uniforms, my sister and I were driven in a hired car that came every morning, with much crunching of tires and slamming of brakes, to our house to take us to school.The school was in the center of town, in a bluish concrete building, a rec- tangle with a paved courtyard. The classrooms opened to the court- yard, and nuns in their black habits, their head coverings pinned at the brow and their capes billowing, patrolled the playground and the hall-

ways. Laughter and chatter were forbidden in the classrooms, and at recess the children were penned in the playground, the nuns watch- ing like sentries. One day Angeles fell while playing, scraping her face and legs and splitting her lip. Blood dripped from her mouth and a front tooth came out in pieces. I was holding her, crying with her, but a nun grabbed her by a hand and took her to Mother Superior’s office, blaming her for running too fast.

Around three in the afternoon, when the school let out, we were taken home by the same driver who picked us up in the mornings, a gruff old man who shoved the children into his car, packing us in tight because every head was money to him. He dropped us off along a route from the center of town past the new residential suburbs of square squat houses to the outskirts where we lived.

The house at that hour always seemed still. Lola was in the back- yard, taking the dry laundry off the line to press it on the ironing board she set had up in the dining room. Angeles and I dumped our books on the dining table and sat across from each other, doing home- work and drinking juice. Schoolwork was effortless for us, but just a little more effortless for her, and she could get hers done just a minute or two faster than I, the way she played the piano just a little better, as if she had been born knowing the keys, and the way she danced, her blouse off one shoulder, her hips loosened. Books closed, notebooks stacked, pencils sharpened, I jumped into the cold shower, and with my hair still wet and pulled back in a ponytail, I ran out to the ball field on the lot across the road. Several inches shorter than the boys, I was the only girl they let play. I was not a born ballplayer but I ran hard and threw the ball with heart. I practiced in front of my bedroom mirror, a mean look, a lift of the leg, my arm thrown back.

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ife on a miserable rural road had little to offer my mother, who had her social airs and her work in the capital. Even when she

was in the last months of pregnancy with her fourth child, she insisted on working, putting herself through a grueling drive every day, sitting in the back of a stifling car with other passengers and their smells. She was home from work at sundown, her blouse damp from the plastic-covered car seat, her skirt wrinkled. She called out for us and was full of kisses, her arms around us, asking about school, listening to the stories of our day and the catechism lessons we were taking for our confirmation. She didn’t talk to us about her work, but I imagined an office in the Supreme Court, her desk piled high with those heavy books with frayed bent spines that she had inher- ited from my grandfather.