When I Was Puerto Rican (12 page)

“You should never call an
Americano
a
gringo.
It’s a very bad insult.”

“But why?”

“It just is.” It wasn’t like Papi not to give a real answer to my questions. “Besides,
el presidente’s
name is pronounced Ayk, not Eekeh.” He went back to his hammering.

I handed him a nail from the can at his feet. “How come it’s a bad insult?”

He stopped banging the wall and looked at me. I stared back, and he put his hammer down, took off his hat, brushed his hand across his forehead, wiped it on his pants, sat on the stoop, and leaned his elbows back, stretching his legs out in front of him. This was the response I expected. Now I would hear all about
gringos
and imperialists.

“Puerto Rico was a colony of Spain after Columbus landed here,” he began, like a schoolteacher.

“I know that.”

“Don’t interrupt.”

“Sorry.”

“In 1898,
los Estados Unidos
invaded Puerto Rico, and we became their colony. A lot of Puerto Ricans don’t think that’s right. They call
Americanos
imperialists, which means they want to change our country and our culture to be like theirs.”

“Is that why they teach us English in school, so we can speak like them?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m not going to learn English so I don’t become American.”

He chuckled. “Being American is not just a language,
Negrita,
it’s a lot of other things.”

“Like what?”

He scratched his head. “Like the food you eat ... the music you listen to ... the things you believe in.”

“Do they believe in God?”

“Some of them do.”

“Do they believe in phantasms and witches?”

“Yes, some Americans believe in that.”

“Mami doesn’t believe any of that stuff.”

“I know. I don’t either.”

“Why not?”

“I just ... I believe in things I can see.”

“Why do people call
Americanos gringos?”

“We call them
gringos
, they call us spiks.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well,” he sat up, leaned his elbows on his knees and looked at the ground, as if he were embarrassed. “There are many Puerto Ricans in New York, and when someone asks them a question they say, ‘I don spik inglish’ instead of ‘I don’t speak English.’ They make fun of our accent.”

“Americanos
talk funny when they speak Spanish.”

“Yes, they do. The ones who don’t take the trouble to learn it well.” He pushed his hat back, and the sun burned into his already brown face, making him squint. “That’s part of being an imperialist. They expect us to do things their way, even in our country.”

“That’s not fair.”

“No, it isn’t.” He stood up and picked up his hammer. “Well, I’d better get back to work,
Negrita.
Do you want to help?”

“Okay.” I followed him, holding the can of nails up so he wouldn’t have to bend over to pick them up. “Papi?”

“Yes.”

“If we eat all that American food they give us at the
centro comunal,
will we become
Americanos?”

He banged a nail hard into the wall then turned to me, and, with a broad smile on his face said, “Only if you like it better than our Puerto Rican food.”

The yard in front of the
centro comunal
teemed with children. Mrs. García, the school lunch matron, opened the door and stepped out, a bell in her hand. We quieted before she rang it. She beamed.

“Good.” There was whispering and shoving as we crowded the door to be the first in for breakfast. Mrs. García lifted the bell in warning. We settled down again.

“Now,” she said in her gruff voice, “line up by age, youngest first.”

The smaller children, who had been pushed to the back of the crowd by bigger ones, scurried to the front. I took my place halfway between the younger and the older ones, who scowled at us and jammed the line forward with rough shoves.

“Stop pushing!” Mrs. García yelled. “There’s enough for everyone.”

She opened the double doors and we rushed ahead in a wave, goaded from behind by boys who crushed against us with their chests and knees.

The
centro comunal
had been decorated with posters. Dick and Jane, Sally and Spot, Mother and Father, the Mailman, the Milkman, and the Policeman smiled their way through tableau after tableau, their clean, healthy, primary-colored world flat and shadowless.

“Wow!” Juanita Marín whispered, her lips shaped into a perfect O.

People who looked like Mother and Father held up tubes of Colgate toothpaste or bars of Palmolive soap. A giant chart of the four basic food groups was tacked up between the back windows. In a corner, the Puerto Rican seal, flanked by our flag and the Stars and Stripes, looked like a lamb on a platter. Above it, Ike and Don Luis Muñoz Marin faced each other smiling.

“What’s that smell?” I said to Juanita as we shuffled closer to the counter lined with steaming pots.

“It’s the food, silly,” she giggled.

It was a sweet-salty smell, bland but strong, warm but not comforting, lacking herbs and spices.

“It’s disgusting!”

“I think it smells good.” She pouted and took a tray, a pale green paper napkin, and a spoon.

The server picked a blue enamel tin plate from a stack behind her and scooped out a bright yellow blob from the pot in front of her. She dumped a ladleful on Juanita’s plate and slid it onto the tray.

“You’d like some eggs too, wouldn’t you?” she asked me with a smile.

“Those are eggs?”

“Of course they’re eggs!” she laughed. “What else could they be?” She heaped a mound of it in the middle of my plate, where it quivered, its watery edges green where they met the blue.

“They don’t look like eggs.”

Ignacio Sepúlveda poked his tray into my ribs. “You’re holding up the line!”

“They’re
huevos Americanos,”
said the next server, whose job it was to spear two brown sausages with a fork and slip them onto the plate. “They’re powdered, so all we do is add water and fry them.” She arranged my sausages to flank the eggs. “And here are some
salchichas Americanas,
so you can put some meat on those bones.” She laughed, and I gave her a dirty look. That only made her laugh harder.

The next server slapped margarine on two bread squares, which he laid like a pyramid over the eggs. Next, a girl not much older than the kids behind us poured canned juice into a bottom-heavy glass, which she put on our trays so carelessly it splashed out and made watery orange puddles that ran to the corners of our trays.

We sat on long benches attached to plastic tables, Juanita and I across from one another.

“This is great!” she chirruped in her reedy voice, lips wet with anticipation. Her black eyes took in the colors of our American breakfast: maroon tray, blue plate, yellow eggs, brown sausages, milky white bread with a thin beige crust, the hueless shimmer of margarine, orange juice, pastel green paper napkin, silvery spoon. “Wow!” she oohed again.

I rearranged the food so that none of it touched and dipped my spoon into the gelatinous hill, which was firmer than I expected. It was warm and gave off that peculiar odor I’d smelled coming in. It tasted like the cardboard covers of our primers, salty, dry, fibrous, but not as satisfyingly chewy. If these were once eggs, it had been a long time since they’d been inside a hen. I nicked the tip of the sausage with the spoon and tongued it around before crushing it between my teeth. Its grease-bathed pepperiness had a strong bitter aftertaste like anise, but not sweet. The bread formed moist balls inside my mouth, no matter how much I chewed it. The juice might have had oranges in it once, but only a faint citrus smell remained.

I was glad the food wasn’t tasty and played it around the blue plate, creating yellow mountains through which shimmering rivers of grease flowed, their edges green, the rolled up balls of white bread perfect stones along strips of brown earth studded with tiny black flecks, ants perhaps, or, better yet, microscopic people.

Are ju slippin? Are ju slippin?

Bruder John, Bruder John.

Mornin bel sar rin ging.

Mornin bel sar rin ging.

Deen deen don. Deen deen don.

Miss Jiménez liked to teach us English through song, and we learned all our songs phonetically, having no idea of what the words meant. She tried to teach us “America the Beautiful” but had to give up when we stumbled on “for spacious skies” (4 espé chosk ;Ay!) and “amber waves of grain” (am burr gueys oh gren).

At the same time she taught us the Puerto Rican national anthem, which said Borinquén was the daughter of the ocean and the sun. I liked thinking of our island as a woman whose body was a garden of flowers, whose feet were caressed by waves, a land whose sky was never cloudy. I especially liked the part when Christopher Columbus lands on her shores and sighs: “
¡Ay
! This is the beautiful land I’ve been searching for!”

But my favorite patriotic song was
“En mi viejo San Juan,”
in which a poet says good-bye to Old San Juan and calls Puerto Rico a “sea goddess, queen of the coconut groves.”

“Papi ...” He was on his knees, smoothing the cement floor of the new kitchen he was attaching to the house.

“Si....” He put his trowel down and squeezed his waist as he stretched his back. I squatted against the wall near him.

“Where was Noel Estrada going when he was saying goodbye to Old San Juan?”

Papi reached over and turned the radio down. “I think he was sailing from San Juan Harbor to New York.”

“It’s such a sad song, don’t you think?”

“At the end he says he’ll come back someday.”

“Did he?”

“The last verse says he’s old and hasn’t been able to return.”

“That makes it even sadder.”

“Why?”

“Because he says he’s coming back to be happy. Doesn’t that sound like he wasn’t happy in New York?”

“Yes, I guess it does.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to go.”

“Maybe.” He picked up his trowel, slid a thin layer of cement on it, and levelled it on the floor, smoothing and stretching it in arcs that formed half circles, like grey rainbows.

“Look how pretty this is!”

Mami held a yellow blouse with a ruffled collar against her bosom, patted the neckline into shape, and stretched it across her shoulders to check the fit. It was a wonderful color against her skin, making the freckles on her nose look like gold specks.

“I’ll put it away for now. It’s a little small.” She was pregnant again, and her belly pressed against the fabric of her dress and strained the seams that zigzagged down the sides, where bits of flesh showed pale and soft between the stitches. She folded the blouse and pulled a dress out of the box. Delsa and I both grabbed for it, but Mami yanked it out of reach and crossed her arms, crushing it against her.

“Stop that! Let me see what size it is.” She held it up. It was perfect for me. It had red dots on white puffy sleeves, a white bodice, a white skirt with a stripe of red dots at the hem, and two dotted heart-shaped pockets.