The Noise of Infinite Longing (3 page)

Josefa’s oldest daughter, my grandmother, Monserrate Guevara

Muñoz, was born in Aguadilla, and grew up with the privileges and comforts enjoyed by only a few on the island. Along with this came the emotional distance from her parents that was the custom in fam- ilies whose names were passed on to the next generation like heir- looms.

I can’t see my grandmother ever being an infant or a child, play- ing freely, getting dirty in the mud with other children. But I can see her at the piano, her back straight, shoulders high. I can see her embroidering a dress, and dancing in a white gown, the hem of which she would hold up with a long, manicured hand. She was a striking young woman, long-necked and lean, who held forth in any conversation, sprinkling bon mots and charm on the serious talk of politics and theater she grew up hearing around the dining table in that house where her father, Agustín Guevara Santini, a marshal of the courts, was a quiet force.

When she was in her early twenties, still living in Aguadilla, she married a shy and bookish lawyer and journalist, Angel Torregrosa, a slight man with wavy light brown hair and owlish eyes that were made more owlish by his wire-rimmed reading glasses.There are no letters and no family stories about a great passion between them, nothing to tell us that their marriage was the culmination of a soul- ful love affair. It was a proper marriage, a matter of accommodation and tradition. He was an inch shorter than she and stoutly reserved, son of a family of note, whose father, Luis Torregrosa, a pharmacist who, like many men of his class at that time, was more politician than businessman. He served in the parliament and helped establish the Republican Party.

The strain of politics ran thick in my grandfather’s blood. Even before my mother was born, Angel Torregrosa was publishing a weekly newspaper of political debate, fighting for the end to Amer- ican colonialism and for independence. They were the only Torre-

grosa family on the island, tracing back their origins to Torregrossa, a Catalán village near Barcelona.

My mother once tried to trace the family’s history and she got as far back as the nineteenth century, when the Torregrosas left Spain, not to escape persecution or to find fortune, but, according to lore, to minister to the New World colony in the name of Spain, to claim land and farm it, to educate the people and improve health services. They were professors, lawyers, and pharmacists, and they spawned a family of professors, lawyers, and doctors.

In the town in the mountains of the Cordillera Central where my grandparents moved after having their three children, the town where my mother grew up, Don Angel was a considerable figure, a judge and a writer, and, oddly for a man of introspection, a theater producer, something of a dashing impresario, friend of the actors and writers who came through town to stage plays in the theater he sup- ported for years.

When my mother grew old, in her last years, this was the town she most longed for; this was her Puerto Rico, where she grew from a child into a fierce girl of fixed ideas and grandiose dreams, where she learned to ride horses and had boys circling her on the dance floor. Her roots, she said, ran deepest there, in those mountains.

She dreamed that one day she would build a house at the top of one of those hills, and she would stand in her garden in those cool mornings of the hills, drinking her black coffee, looking out to the Caribbean Sea in the far horizon to the south.

The town, Cayey, was surrounded by hills of coffee and tobacco farms and pineapple fields hoed and planted on the skirts of the mountains. On the higher ground, near hilltops that seemed unreachable from the spinning two-lane road that cut through the island north to south, campesinos tended their banana and vegetable patches and lived in one-room houses they built of wood and scraps

of tin, tiny houses that seemed like pin-sized spots of yellow or blue, so high up in those hills they could touch the clouds.

Cayey was built like all the other towns on the island, around the plaza.The plaza was the center of the world.The layout of the town reflected the rigid social structure that predated even colonial times: the farther from the plaza, from the municipal buildings and the church, the poorer the houses, the poorer the people. The best homes fronted the plaza, their trellised verandas looking out on the social and commercial life of the town, on the church and its pro- cessions, on the strollers and the soft glow of globe-shaped street- lamps, on the ferias of music and dancing.

Sitting on their balconies, as the sun went down, even in the heat of breezeless days and on rainy dusks, the flies gathering on merien- das of sugary coffee and cakes, the women chaperoned the passing of the day, watching out for their husbands to come home, and keeping an eye on the children playing hopscotch and jumping rope in the plaza in that hour when the children were allowed out, just before dinner and bedtime. For it was women who sat on those porches, mothers, grandmothers, greeting visitors, telling their tales, chat- tering about the things women chattered about, loves and children, weddings, and the situation with the servants.

My grandmother’s three children were exactly two years apart, a perfect scale. Children to her were adornments, the inescapable obligation of women. In this house voices were not raised, and dis- approval was shown not with screams but only with a raised eyebrow and a glowering stare. My mother, her sister and brother, all had nursemaids and cooks, and they took piano lessons and learned to recite verses and to perform in public.

They were model children, my grandmother claimed, setting for me an example. But then, pausing for a minute, she would turn to me and whisper, Except for your mother.

I learned to enumerate all my mother’s sins: She was moody, dis- obedient, stubborn, bossy, opinionated, and, worst of all, she couldn’t sit still. Children are meant to be looked at, not to be heard, my grand- mother said repeatedly, another of the old sayings she seemed to have for nearly every occasion.

Grandmother painted my mother as half genius, half tyrant. Your mother was too smart, too quick with that mouth of hers,

didn’t like to study but got the best grades, everything came too eas- ily to her, and she had no patience for anything that wasn’t perfect, for anything that wasn’t the way she saw it. She believed she was always right, and she drove Angela Luisa to tears. Poor Angela Luisa, she was so meek, so quiet, she did everything your mother wanted. She made her dresses, she brushed her hair, she put on your mother’s makeup, she ran errands for her. She was always there, in the back- ground.

Your mother was such a terror—she said this with a sigh not of resignation but rather of admiration. Look, one day your mother left school and went to the stables and got on a horse and we didn’t know where she was for hours. We couldn’t find her anywhere. That was the time, my grandmother said, building up the story like a fairy tale, when your grandfather hit her. Grandmother raised her right arm high to show me how grandfather had done it.That was the only time he raised his hand against any of his children, she said. I couldn’t see my grandfather hitting anyone, least of all my mother.

But this was not the time, she said, when your mother was thrown off her horse—that was later. Her boot was caught in the saddle and the horse ran wild and dragged her down a rough field, her head bouncing off rocks and pebbles, bleeding, unconscious— that time, we almost lost her, she almost died.

These stories about my mother were recycled, embroidered, woven from vaguely remembered episodes and stray moments

shaped out of half-truths, dimmed and shaded by pride and hurt, and the layers of years, like all memories.

Sometimes, when the rain came in the afternoon and we had nothing to do but sit in the porch, grandmother would come out of her bedroom with her pack of old photos: mother and Angela Luisa in sailor dresses, their hair cut the same, in a bob with bangs, look- ing almost like twins; mother, Angela Luisa, and José Luis, teenagers posing for a formal picture, my uncle in suit and jacket, the girls in grown-up dresses; my mother, maybe sixteen years old, wearing a long party dress, her mouth slightly open in a smile, her eyes gazing directly at the camera.

Your mother was a beauty, my grandmother would say. She said that often.

She would pull out more pictures. Here was my mother in her riding jacket and tight, knee-high black boots, and in ball gowns, posing with her girlfriends, my mother standing at the front, every- one else radiating around her. She was already a full woman, her breasts clenched in a corset, her hair falling over part of her face, her eyes riveting with promises.

Her lips were shaped perfectly, as if they had been drawn on her. They were rich, defined. Even without the red lipstick that she usu- ally wore, her mouth had a way of speaking its own language, pursed or tightly closed, crooked in disapproval, carelessly open in laughter. On the theater stage, she was a star, carnations falling at her feet.

She was not yet eighteen, still in high school, when she founded with her brother the Farándula Bohemia, a theater ensemble that for sev- eral years toured the island. Grandmother kept the old newspaper clippings and read them to me, and I saw my mother, in front of the crimson velvet curtain, her hands raised in triumph, welcoming the applause, her head thrown back. But eventually she left the theater company and left, too, a wreckage of smitten boys who serenaded

her with moonlight songs, who brought her gardenias and azucenas, who swept her around dance floors.

She left Cayey for the University of Puerto Rico. She was going to study law.

A

few years later, my grandparents moved to San Juan. My mother had already finished her undergraduate degree and had entered law school. My grandfather went to work for a government agency and published newspaper articles on politics and theater and adoring biographies of men he admired.They had an apartment near the university, just off the Avenida Muñoz Rivera, a modest flat where my parents came to live after they were married, where I first lived. This was where my grandfather, still wearing his suit and tie, would pick me up and, putting my baby feet on his buffed cordovans,

would dance with me in his old man’s shuffle.

He was a man of habit, spending his evenings secluded in his room, reading, writing, and, a family story has it, drinking. One day he came home from work with a terrible headache, took to his room, and was found hours later dead of a brain hemorrhage. He was not sixty years old.

Widowed suddenly, my grandmother left the apartment where he had died and with us moved to El Vedado, a neighborhood of old Spanish-colonial homes and smaller bungalows.We had a large house of constant breezes and the shade of big trees, a one-story house that was yellow like my grandmother’s amapolas. It was a house, like all of my grandmother’s houses, that seemed always to be full of com- pany, aunts and cousins and distant relations. She didn’t live there very long, perhaps two years, before she built a house nearby, on Calle Pérez Galdós, but I remember the coolness of floor tiles in that old house where I learned to walk.

Now and then I see flashes of rainy afternoons at Pérez Galdós. My grandmother has her long dark hair pulled up in a bun, her loose, faded dress falls down to her bony ankles, and she’s sitting back in her rocking chair, reading the newspapers to me. She read the obit- uaries, pointing out this or that person she had known. For hours she would tell me these stories of our family, nationalists and journalists, writers and poets, names given to avenues in San Juan, to town streets, to public schools and parks and plazas. I grew up with their names and faces in my head, men with heavy mustaches and specta- cles, austere men in dark regalia, whose sepia portraits appear in the histories of the island.

My grandmother’s house, built near the Avenida Eleanor Roo- sevelt on a lot in a new section of El Vedado, was designed by my mother, who had an eye for architecture and liked to walk around in her heels in the unplowed lot, imagining floors being laid down and walls going up. This house, which would be my grandmother’s last home, had two stories and it was square and flat-roofed in the trop- ical style, with a front porch that butted a rectangle of grass edged by flowers my grandmother planted. They were her favorite yellow and red hibiscuses, pink poinsettias, and shrubs I could not name.

Grandmother lived on the ground floor. It was a big flat with two large airy bedrooms, a small maid’s room, and a sunny living room with crank-up slatted windows. She kept her old caned chairs there, the ones she had inherited from her mother, and her upright piano and her radio.To the side, she had a small dining area that looked on a small side porch, and a kitchen that caught the breezes when the door to the outside was opened, letting in light and the voices of neighbors from across the wall that separated our house from the building next door.

Every morning grandmother was up before sunup, in her slippers and apron, making coffee, pouring it through the damp cloth filter.

She and mother were reading the papers, drinking coffee from little cups, by the time Angeles and I woke up and got dressed. Mother left early for her job at the Justice Department, taking the bus to Old San Juan. Usually my father was away at the United States Army bar- racks, where he, a chemical engineer who knew nothing of war and was too old to go to the front, was serving his tour of duty shuffling papers at a desk job.

All day long I had grandmother to myself.

She was a tall woman, with a long narrow back slightly stooped by age, a deeply featured face with a hooked Roman nose, and the bluish freckled skin of someone who never sat in the sun. Her skin was wrinkled tight around the bones of her forearms, and her frame was fragile and flat, but her face, lean and creviced, with high cheek- bones, loosened when she laughed, a birdlike fluttering around her favorite visitors.

On the days she went out, she wore her hairpiece. She kept it in a bottom drawer of her mahogany armoire, where her dresses were hung high, too high for me to reach. The closets in her house were for us, not for her. She would not put her things in a closet, a place without the wood scent that I could smell on her clothes. Her hair- piece was a thick round bun, like a crown, which she said had been made from her own hair. She let her long, fine hair fall down to the middle of her back. Then she would wrap it around the hairpiece with long hairpins and combs. She took great care. She powdered her face, she splashed on blush, and she wore a silk camisole over her bare, flattened, sagging breasts. In the flesh-colored stockings she always wore and her stacked-heeled black leather shoes (her feet were so big), with an heirloom brooch pinned to her blouse and her hair up in that soigné style, she looked head to foot like the matri- arch she was, even taller and stronger, with an air of command in her face.