The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano (8 page)

W
hen I got home the next day, Abuela's presence had spilled out of my bedroom and was creeping into the rest of the apartment. In the living room, two pairs of platform shoes were tossed on the carpet, and Abuela's makeup kit was on top of the television.

I tripped over Abuela's platforms.

“
Cuidado.
Careful,” she said.

She was on the sofa with her hair up in curlers, reading a book. A sweaty glass of water sat on the table in front of her. The precious album was next to the water, and though it was hot in the room, Abuela had lit candles on the side table by my grandfather's picture.

“Dios te bendiga.”

Abuela blessed me, and after a moment of uncertainty, I kissed her cheek and sat down next to her.

“What are you reading?” I asked.

“García Lorca.”

Abuela could see I didn't know what she was talking about.

“He was a Spanish writer,” she explained. “Spanish from Spain. He wrote plays that rebelled against high-class Spanish society.”

“Abuela …”

She rested the open book beside her on the sofa.

“Tell me more about Grandfather,” I said, glancing at Abuelo Emilio's picture.

Abuela's eyes filled with a memory of long ago. “I met him on one of the rare times I was by myself. Now I wonder if he had been waiting for me, like an animal waiting for his prey.”

“Why were you alone?”

“It was in the morning, and my mother suddenly thought she didn't have sugar for my father's coffee and he could not have coffee without sugar. So he wouldn't yell at her, she sent me to run to the plaza and buy some. He — your grandfather — saw me and threw me a flower.”

“Threw you a flower? What kind? A rose?”

“No. He didn't really throw a flower at me. That's just an expression. It means he said something nice to me. He said a compliment to me.”

“Like when a guy whistles at you?”

“
Sí, mija
. He said, ‘
Tantas curvas y yo sin frenos
' — so many curves and me without brakes.”

Abuela smiled at the memory. “The next couple of times when I was with my mother at the plaza, he and I looked at each other but made believe we didn't. It was nice to have a secret away from
mi madre
. I kept hoping and praying for another chance to go to the market alone, but it didn't come. So I decided to make it come. My father, he also loved
aguacate
, avocado, with his dinner. And my mother had saved half of one just for him. One day, just before we sat down to eat, I ate it myself.

“‘¿
Y el aguacate
?' Where's the avocado?” my mother had screamed when she couldn't find it.

“‘I don't know what happened to it,' I said.” Abuela giggled as she continued the story.

“My mother said, ‘Go get me one,
rápido
, before your father finds out.' So I ran to the plaza, and when I saw your grandfather start to walk toward me, I took my time feeling the avocados for ripeness. He got really close, but I made believe I didn't notice him, even when I could almost feel his breath on my neck. My face got hot.”

I remembered how I felt when Wilfredo said my name, like he was eating something sweet.

“And I was embarrassed,” Abuela said. “Maybe I took that feeling of being embarrassed for love. When I got sick to my stomach that night, I was sure it was love.”

We both giggled now.

“The next thing I knew, he was at my door, asking my father if he could see me. I don't think my father would've been comfortable telling a policeman no. And my mother thought it was great that he came from an old Spanish family that had a coffee plantation. So he began to come around every Sunday.”

“Did he wear a uniform?”

“Yes, with the pants that were loose around the waist and thighs and tight from the knees to the ankles. And he wore his revolver, too. “

“His gun?”

Abuela let loose a chuckle. “
Sí
, Emilio was very handsome and in control. I felt very safe with him.”

“How could you not, Abuela? He wore a gun.”

“In truth, all the
guardias civiles
carried guns.”

Abuela rose from the sofa and went to my room. She came back with a flowered drawstring bag. Pulling the pins out of her rollers, she popped them into the bag before unfurling her hair and putting the rollers in the
bag with the pins. Her tube curls bounced as each roller left her head.

She kept up with her story. “After a few months of dating, we got married and moved to this grand house with his parents. That was the first time I ever lived in the countryside. The house was on a coffee plantation. It was a rich person's house.”

“Wasn't it nice living in the house of a rich person?”

“It was nice if you don't mind staring at the same hill and the same cows day after day. In my parents' house, I had to help my mother clean, and cook, and, like I told you, go to the store. But my husband's family had a housekeeper, so there wasn't much for me to do. You know — I always hated housework, but when whole days went by and I had nothing to occupy my time, I wished for laundry and cleaning.”

Abuela went to her makeup bag on the television set and reached in for a mirror and eyebrow tweezers. She tied a huge overhand knot in the curtain to let more light in, then examined her no-eyebrows in the mirror.

“Ouch!” she exclaimed, pulling out a single hair at the top of her face. “I sat around tweezing my eyebrows and playing with my hair, waiting for Emilio to get home from work.”

That explained her missing eyebrows.

“Did you ever have any fun being married?”

“At the beginning we did. We used to go dancing. Sometimes we would even go to the Escambrón Beach Club in San Juan.” She started to giggle again. “It was such a long way off from Ponce, we had to spend the night sometimes. It was fun. The only bad part was that there was only one road that went from Ponce to San Juan. It was so curvy we called it
Piquiña
, because there were so many sharp turns, it gave everybody itchy goose bumps who traveled it.”

Abuela put away her tweezers. I was glad. Her plucking was giving
me
goose bumps. Digging around in the makeup bag, she came up with a jar of Pond's cold cream and slathered it on.

“Oh, God, that's when I really saw terrible things.”

“What terrible things?”

“Have you ever heard of the Depression?”

“I think I'll learn about that next year in school.”

“Well, you'll learn it was very bad in the United States, but you might not learn that it was ten times worse in Puerto Rico. Children dying from starvation and tuberculosis every day. People living in straw shacks, with no water. Families sleeping on the floor. Children with no shoes.”

A flash of shame crossed Abuela's face. “But I was young and didn't care anything about the Depression. I would paint my nails red and pin my brown hair up.” She stopped, and then added, “It used to be brown in those days.”

Abuela continued with her story. “After a while, Emilio started to just come home and eat, then go out with his friends.”

“He never took you with him?” I asked.

“No — I liked it better when he brought his friends over to the house.”

“Because then you wouldn't be alone?”

“No, because they always talked about the Nationalists. I learned the most by being quiet while I served them coffee. They hated the leader of the Nationalists, Pedro Albizu Campos, for saying all of Puerto Rico's problems were because Puerto Rico belonged to the United States.

“Anyway, the more Emilio's friends came over and drank, the more they blamed everything that went wrong in Puerto Rico on the Nationalists.”

Abuela went back into her room and came out with two sticks of incense.

“You know, I found this handsome black man selling these in the street — I had to buy some.” She lit them and waved them around. “Smells good, right?”

By now her curls had relaxed, and rolling her hair up had actually made it look smoother than ever. She put a scarf over the lamp, and the room got pink. This new light made her look different. Younger.

“I got pregnant almost right away so I began to spend more time with my mother. It was good. It also gave me a chance to get away from him.”

“Get away from him?”

“Well, I can't say that I ever really loved him, and in those days, it was perfectly accepted that a pregnant girl would want to stay with her mother — so I took advantage of that. Emilio agreed and left me off at Mami's when he went on duty that day of the massacre. My mother and I went to church and then went to the Nationalist parade. After the first shots, everybody screamed and ran, and my mother grabbed my hand and wanted me to go home with her. It was terrible. I never saw a man dead in the street before.”

She pulled up the flabby skin on her cheek to see how it looked, frowned, and went on with the terrible story.

“Then we went home and waited for Emilio to pick me up. We were in a daze, like in a dream. My mother and I made some
surullitos de maíz
, and the three of us, my father, my mother, and I nibbled, wondering what was to become of our little town of Ponce.

“Emilio finally walked in. He was white as a sheet, trembling, scared. We asked him what had happened.

“He said, ‘I was following my
órdenes
. They were not supposed to march. They were supposed to do what they were told.'

“Evelyn, I remember my mother turning away to make coffee for Emilio, and my father respectfully nodding.” After pursing her lips a bit, Abuela went on.

“I asked my husband what he was told to do.

“‘To stop the march, what do you think!' Emilio snapped at me. My mother gave him coffee, and he sucked it down like a little boy with his milk and then said he had to go back to his headquarters. I spent the rest of the evening sitting in a rocking chair on the wraparound porch, thinking about everything and nothing at the same time.”

Abuela fell silent. I could see her face as a young person coming through her features. “Anyway,” she said finally, “life just went on like nothing had happened. Emilio picked me up the next morning and we went back to the countryside. But things were never the same in my heart. A revolution began there I could not control. In the following weeks when my husband came over with his friends, I saw them as being loud macho guys, but really weak.”

Mami came in then. “What is that smell?”

We were pulled back into the smallness of our apartment.

“Just some incense, Mami,” I said, annoyed at the interruption.

Mami shook the knot out of the curtain angrily. Then, looking around for other things to be unhappy about, she zeroed in on the candles. “Why are these candles lit in the daytime?” Now Mami focused on the bag of rollers and the tumble of makeup on top of the television. “And what about this mess?” But then her eyes cut to Abuela's pictures of the massacre, and that made her pause.

“Why are you bringing this into the house? Will you ever be done with it?”

“I am just showing Evelyn about herself.”

“By telling her lies about her grandfather?”

“It is not a lie.”

Mami pointed to the man in the photo. “This is not him!”

“Yes, it is!”

“No, it isn't!”

Like two little girls fighting over something they couldn't do anything about, this fight went on and on. I hated seeing Mami and Abuela argue. I slipped out of the living room and went up to the roof.

They didn't even notice I was gone.

Later that night, when Mami and Abuela were both out and my stepfather was at the
bodega
, I looked through Abuela's album to see if I could tell if the shooter was my grandfather.

But the pictures Abuela had shown me earlier were not there. Somebody had ripped them out.

That night as I slept on my sofa bed, I dreamed there was a policeman on the roof of my building shooting flames on everybody down in the street. In the dream, when I tried to stop him, the killer had no face.