When I Was Puerto Rican (16 page)

Every night, right after dinner, Abuela slipped into her room, put on a faded green nightgown embroidered with small yellow flowers, and undid her hair. Two twisted ropes of hair fell past her knees, one over each shoulder. She combed first one side, then the other, loosening the ropes into strands of white, gray, and a few black hairs, her fingers weaving in and out of them until each side looked like a serene waterfall against a pale forest.

“Our Father, who art in heaven ... ,” I repeated after Abuela.

“Hallowed be thy name ...”

“What does that mean?”

She raked her fingers through her hair, fluffing it, untangling the knots. “It means His name is holy.”

“Hallowed be thy name ...”

“Thy kingdom come ...” Abuela fed me the prayer in short phrases that echoed the rhythm I’d heard when Papi led novenas and when she clicked her beads at night before bed. It was like learning a song. If I left something out, the rhythm didn’t work.

“Give us this day our daily bread....” I imagined a long loaf of pan de
agua,
the kind the baker made with a coconut frond down the center of its crunchy crust.

“And forgive us our trespasses ...”

“What does that mean?”

“We’re asking God to forgive any sins we might commit by mistake.”

“Forgive us our trespasses ...”

“And lead us not into temptation ...” She didn’t wait for me to ask: “That means we’re asking God to keep us from sinning.”

When I’d repeated the prayer several times and could recite most of it without stumbling, she taught me how to cross myself.

“Cross your thumb over your pointing finger, like this.... No, not with that hand.... You must always use your right hand,” she said, holding it out to make sure I knew the difference.

“Why?”

“Because the left hand is the hand of the Devil.”

I wondered if that meant the Devil had two left hands but didn’t dare ask because just saying the word Devil made Abuela drop her voice into a near whisper, as if the Devil were in the next room.

“Then you go straight down to your heart.... Then across ... No, this side first.” I’d seen women cross themselves so many times, it had never occurred to me there was a right way and a wrong way to do it. ”Then you kiss the cross on your fingers.” I did as she showed me. “You must always cross yourself before and after saying the Lord’s Prayer. Let me see if you can say the whole thing.”

I tried to look grave, eyes down, face expressionless, the way people in
velorios
looked when Papi led them in prayer. I lowered my voice to a near mumble, quieted my lips until they barely moved, and let the rhythm guide the words out and up to the sky where Abuela said Papa Dios, my other Father, lived.

“¡Hola, Negrita!”
Mami wore a printed dress she called a muumuu, which stretched across her pregnant belly like a round plot of exotic flowers. I couldn’t get enough of her to hug, so I clung to her hand as she huffed up the three steps into Abuela’s house. “How are you, Doña Margara?” she asked cheerily, as if she knew the answer.

“Oh, I’m fine,
m’hija,
just fine,” Abuela said, pulling out a chair for Mami to sit in. “How about some lemonade?”

“Wonderful!” Mami’s cheeks were flushed, partly from the hot walk down the street, partly because she’d colored them. Her hair was twisted up and held with pins that she kept pushing in so they wouldn’t fall out.

“I hope you don’t mind that I came to bring Negi home. I’ve missed her.” Now that she was sitting, I could hug her around the neck, kiss her soft, powdered face, smell the fruity perfume she put on for special occasions.

“I missed you too, Mami.” I whispered, and she pulled me close and kissed the top of my head.

Abuela brought in a pitcher of lemonade and three glasses. “I thought Pablito was coming on Sunday. We waited all afternoon....”

Mami’s face flashed into the hard expression I’d come to expect when she talked about Papi. “You know how he is,” she said to his mother.

Abuela nodded and poured us lemonade. “Who’s watching the children?”

“My neighbor’s daughter.”

“Who?” I asked. Mami turned to me as if she’d just remembered who I was.

“Gloria.” She sipped her drink. “Guess what? We have electricity!”

“Really?”

“Yes! We only use the
quinqués
if the lights go out.” She turned to Abuela. “Which is every time the wind blows hard.” They laughed.

I leaned against Mami and sipped my drink, listening to them talk about people whose names were familiar, but whom I hadn’t met—Flor, Concha, Chia, Candida, Lalo. They talked about whose daughter had run off with whose son, who’d had babies, who had died, the price of groceries, the hot weather, the rickety buses between San Juan and Santurce. They talked as if they were good friends, and I wondered how that could be since they seldom saw each other. They came back to the subject of Macún, how things seemed to be better now that we had electricity and running water was weeks away.

“Of course,” Mami said, “with Pablo gone all the time it’s hard to know ...” Her face darkened again. She looked down at the floor, rubbed circles on her belly. The silence around her was total, not rich and full like Abuela’s when she crocheted, but empty and sad and lonesome.

“Negi,” Abuela said, “go take a shower and get ready so that your mother doesn’t have to wait for you.” I didn’t want to leave Mami, but Abuela’s eyes were stern, and with her head, she signaled in the direction of the bathroom.

I set my glass down and went. Although I leaned against the bathroom door, trying to hear what they said, I only caught snatches: “always been that way ... ,” “upsets the kids ... ,” “think of yourself .. ,” “alone with children ... ,” “make it work ... ,” “don’t know how....” And, in a louder voice, “Negi, why don’t we hear water running?”

I opened the faucets and let cool water wash over me, wishing it could melt away the fear that made the thumps of my heart louder than usual. When I came out, my hair dripping, the tips of my fingers wrinkled, Mami and Abuela still sat across from each other. Abuela’s face was sad, and she looked older, as if years, rather than minutes, had passed since I last saw her. Mami’s rouge was streaked, and her eyes were swollen. She pretended to smile, and I pretended not to see it as I went by wrapped in a towel, stepping lightly, as if the floor would break under my weight.

I dressed to their murmurs in the other room, their voices soft but strained, and I wondered if men ever talked like this, if their sorrows ever spilled into these secret cadences. I combed my hair, put on my socks, buckled my leather shoes. And still they talked, and I couldn’t understand a word they said. But their pain bounced off the walls and crawled under my skin, where it settled like prickly bristles.

It seemed to me then that remaining
jamona
could not possibly hurt this much. That a woman alone, even if ugly, could not suffer as much as my beautiful mother did. I hated Papi. I sat on the bed in his mother’s house and wished he’d die, but as soon as the thought flashed, I slapped my face for thinking such a thing. I packed my bag and stepped into the room where Mami and Abuela sat. When they looked up at me, it seemed as if we were all thinking the same thing. I would just as soon remain
jamona
than shed that many tears over a man.

MAMI GETS A JOB

Con el agua al cuello y la marea subiendo

With water to the chin and the tide rising

T
e sky fell to the tops of the mountains. The air hung heavy, moist. Birds left the
barrio
, and insects disappeared into hidden cracks and crevices, taking their songs. A cowboy rounded up the cattle in Lalao’s
finca,
and on her side of the fence, Doña Ana led her cow to the shack behind her house. The radio said Hurricane Santa Clara was the biggest threat to Puerto Rico since San Felipe had destroyed the island in 1918.

“Papi, why do they name hurricanes after saints?” I asked as I helped him carry a sheet of plywood he was going to nail against the windows of our house.

“I don’t know,” he answered. The hurricane warning must have been serious if Papi couldn’t stop to talk about it.

Mami bundled our clothes, pushed her rocking chair, the table and stools, her sewing machine, and the pots and pans into a corner, tied everything to the socles, pressed it all against the strongest wall of the house, and covered it with a sheet, as if that would keep everything from being blown away.

“Negi, take the kids to Doña Ana’s. We’ll be there in a while.”

I rounded up Delsa, Norma, Hector, Alicia, and Edna. For once I didn’t have to chase them all over the place, didn’t have to threaten, yell, or pull their ears for ignoring me. They lined up solemn as soldiers, Alicia and Hector hanging on to Norma’s hand, Edna on Delsa’s hip. The baby was asleep in his hanging cradle, but Mami took him out, bundled him in flannel sheets, and handed him to me.

“Take Raymond. Make sure no drafts get to him.”

The baby was thirty days old, and we had to be careful about infections, foul breezes, and the evil eye. Mami had strung a nugget of coral and an onyx bead on a safety pin and attached it to Raymond’s baby shirt at birth. It was the same charm she had used on all of us, kept in a little box among her thimbles and needles between babies, to be brought out and pinned to the tiny cotton shirts, supposedly for the first forty days and forty nights of our lives. She claimed she didn’t believe “any of that stuff,” but each time, the charm stayed on long after it was supposed to.

We trudged single file along the path connecting our yard with Doña Ana’s. Her sons had nailed plywood sheets to the windows and along the front of her house, so that the only way in was the back door leading to the latrine, barn, and pigsty. These structures had also been reinforced with plywood, and debarked tree limbs buttressed every wall. As we passed from the barn, we heard the muffled and frightened moo of the cow, the frantic squealing of pigs, and the rustle and cackle of hens and roosters.

Inside the house, every crack and chink had been plugged with rags to keep the wind out. Mattresses were stacked, bunches of green bananas hung from the rafters, the gash where the machete had cut dripped white sticky ooze onto the floor. The room was shadowy, lit with
quinqués
and fat candles, steamy with the fragrance of garlic and onions. Several old hens had been sacrificed and everyone contributed something to the communal meal that would be cooked on our kerosene stove, spiced with Doña Lola’s fresh oregano, and shared by the four families who would pass the hurricane in Doña Ana’s one-room cement house.

Papi and Mami brought in bundles of food, clothes, blankets, and baby diapers. Papi put his battery-operated radio on a shelf and kept it tuned the whole time the hurricane blew, even though all we heard was static. Although Doña Ana’s house was no bigger than ours, its sturdy concrete walls and roof made it safe and cozy. The warmth of the thirty or so people inside, the familiar aroma of spices and good cooking, and the hushed play of children was extraordinarily comforting, the way wakes were, or weddings or baptisms.