When I Was Puerto Rican (17 page)

The men set up a domino table and took turns playing, the losers giving up their chairs to the ones waiting their turn. The women cut up chickens, peeled plantains, cubed potatoes, made sofrito, washed dishes, brewed coffee, and tended babies. The
muchachas
huddled in a giggly group between the plantains and the mattresses, while the
muchachos
crouched against the wall opposite, pretending to play cards. We kids played among ourselves or circulated among the various groups, observing the domino game, snatching boiled chicken hearts or livers, carrying mysterious messages from the older boys to the older girls.

Every so often a thump quieted everyone, and arguments erupted about which tree had fallen in which direction. The cows and pigs couldn’t be heard above the roar of the wind, the thunder, the crashing zinc sheets from less sturdy roofs, and the flying outhouses lifted in one piece by the wind and swept from one end of the
barrio
to the other.

After we had our
asopao
with plantain dumplings, we curled against one another on the mattresses and slept, lulled by the crackling radio inside and the steady gusts of the hurricane outside.

We heard the ominous quiet of the hurricane’s eye as it passed over us. Papi and Dima, Doña Ana’s son, pried the door open a crack. It was raining lightly, gray misty drops like steam. The men stepped outside one at a time, looked around, up to the sky, down to the soaked ground that turned into muddy pools wherever their feet had sunk. The women clustered at the door, forming a wall through which we children couldn’t pass, although we managed to catch a glimpse by pressing against their hips and thighs, crouching under their skirts, between their legs, against their round calves striated with varicose veins and dark, curly hair.

Mist hung over the yard littered with branches, odd pieces of lumber, a tin washtub that seemed to have been crushed by a giant, and the carcass of a cow, with a rope around her neck still tied to a post. Doña Ana’s barn still stood, and the animals inside whimpered softly, as if their normal voices would make the wind start up again. The men walked the edges of the yard in a semicircle, their hands outstretched like the stiff figures I liked to cut from folded newspapers.

A sliver of sun broke through like a spotlight and travelled slowly across the yard, forming a giant rainbow. The women pointed and held up the smaller children to see, while those of us big enough to stand by ourselves crowded the door in awe of that magic spectacle: the figures of our fathers and brothers moving cautiously in a world with no edges, no end, and that bright slice of sun travelling across it, not once touching them.

“We had eleven avocado trees and nine mango trees,” Mami was saying. “Now there’s only the two avocados and three mangos left.”

“My entire coffee patch washed right off the hill.” Doña Lola spit into the yard. “And you can see what it did to my medicinal herbs.... Even the weeds are gone.”

Doña Lola’s house, nestled at the side of the mountain, had been spared, but the adjoining kitchen had disappeared, except for the three stones of her
fogón.
Our outside kitchen, too, had flown away, as had our latrine. The whole
barrio
had been stripped of anything too flimsy, too old, or too weak to withstand the winds and rain that had pelted the island for hours, flooding towns and washing downhill entire communities built along the craggy slopes. No one in Macún died, but many lost their belongings, poultry, pigs, milk cows, vegetable gardens, kiosks for selling fried codfish fritters, and shops where rusty old cars received one more chance at the road.

“Pablo said the government will help rebuild ...”

“¡Sí, cuando las gallinas meen!”
Doña Lola laughed, and Mami chuckled, her eyes twinkling at me to see if I understood what Doña Lola meant by “when hens learn to pee.” I’d been around enough hens to know they never would.

Papi and Uncle Cándido repaired our house, replaced parts of the roof, extended the house to incorporate a kitchen and a site for a bathroom, anticipating the day when water would be piped down the hill to our end of the
barrio.
They rebuilt the latrine with shiny zinc walls and added a new, more comfortable seat. Mami propped up her pigeon pea and annatto bushes, which had been flattened by the storm, and soon they bloomed again, their leaves as new and fresh as babies.

For months after the hurricane all people talked about was money. Money for the cement and cinder blocks that rose out of the ground in solid, grey walls and flat square roofs. Money for another cow, or a car, or zinc for the new outhouse. Money to install water pipes, or to repair the electric wires that had gone down in the storm and hung like limp, useless, dried-up worms.

Even children talked about money. We scoured the side of the road for discarded bottles to exchange for pennies when the glass man came around. Boys no older than I nailed together boxes out of wood scraps, painted them in bright colors, and set off for San Juan or Rio Piedras, where men paid ten cents for a shoeshine. Papi made
maví,
bark beer, and took two gallons with him to the construction sites where he worked, to sell by the cup to his friends and passersby. Even Doña Lola, who seemed as self-sufficient as anyone could be in Macún, cooked huge vats of rice and beans to sell in the refillable aluminum canisters called
fiambreras
that men took to work when their jobs were not near places to eat. Mami talked about sewing school uniforms and actually made a few. But she soon realized that the amount of work she put into them was more than she was paid for and abandoned the idea while she thought of something else.

“Negi, help me over here.”

Mami stood in the middle of the room, her dress bunched on her hips, hands holding fast a long-line brassiere that didn’t want to contain her. “See if you can catch the hooks into the eyes, all the way up.”

The cotton brassiere stretched down to her hipbones, where it met the girdle into which she had already squeezed. There were three columns of eyes for the hooks spaced evenly from top to bottom. Even when I tugged on both ends of the fabric, I had trouble getting one hook into an outermost eye.

“It’s too small. I can’t get them to meet.”

“I’ll hold my breath.” She took in air, blew it out, and stretched her spine up. I worked fast, hooking her up all the way before she had to breathe again in big, hungry gulps.

“Wow! It’s been a while since I wore this thing,” she said, pulling her dress up. “Zip me up?”

“Where are you going?”

“There’s a new factory opening in Toa Baja. Maybe they need people who can sew.”

“Who’s going to take care of us?”

“Gloria will be here in a little while. You can help her with the kids. I’ve already made dinner.”

“Will you work every day?”

“If they hire me.”

“So you won’t be around all the time.”

“We need the money, Negi.”

Mami twisted and sprayed her hair, powdered her face, patted rouge on already pink cheeks, and spread lipstick over already red lips. Her feet, which were usually bare, looked unnatural in high heels. Her waist was so pinched in, it seemed as if part of her body were missing. Her powdered and painted features were not readable; the lines she’d drawn on her eyebrows and around her eyes and the colors that enhanced what always seemed perfect were a violation of the face that sometimes laughed and sometimes cried and often contorted with rage. I wanted to find a rag and wipe that stuff off her face, the way she wiped off the dirt and grime that collected on mine. She turned to me with a large red smile.

“What do you think?”

I was ashamed to look, afraid to speak what I saw.

“Well?” She put her hands on her hips, that familiar gesture of exasperation that always made her seem larger, and I saw the unnatural diamond shape formed by her elbows and narrowed waist. I couldn’t help the tears that broke my face into a million bits, which made her kneel and hold me. I wrapped my arms around her, but what I felt was not Mami but the harsh bones of her undergarments. I buried my face in the soft space between her neck and shoulder and sought there the fragrance of oregano and rosemary, but all I could come up with was Cashmere Bouquet and the faint flowery dust of Maybelline.

She woke early, sometimes even before Papi, cooked the beans and rice for our supper, ironed our school uniforms and her work clothes, and bathed, powdered, and stuffed herself into her tortuous undergarments. In whispers, she gave me instructions for the day, told me when she’d be back, warned me to help Gloria with the children, promised to sew the buttons on Hector’s shirt when she came home that night.

Papi was not around as much once Mami began work, and our mornings took on a rhythm that left him out the days he was home, each one of us engaged in our own morning rituals of waking, dressing, eating breakfast, and walking the two miles to school. My classes began the earliest, at 7:30, and I left home while the air was still sweet and the ground moist, our neighbors’ houses looming like ghosts in light fog or receding behind greyness when it rained.

My Uncle Cándido’s house was halfway to school. He complained to Mami that I never looked up when I went by, never greeted anyone, never looked anywhere but down at the ground.

“If you keep walking like that,” he said, “you’ll develop a hunchback.”

But that threat wasn’t enough to keep me from wrapping my arms around myself. Books pressed against my chest, I strode head down, looking closely at the way the ground swelled and dipped, listening to the crunch of my hard school shoes on the pebbled stretches and their swish on the sandy patches. And when I didn’t look at the ground, I was blind and would sometimes get to school and not know how. On those mornings my eyes closed in on me and showed me pictures inside my head, while my legs moved on their own up the hills, down the ruts, through the weeds, across gullies, between the aisles of my schoolmates’ desks and to my own, alphabetically in the rear of the classroom. I’d sit down, open my notebook, write the date at the top of the page, and look up to Miss ]iménez and her cheery “Buenos
días, clase.”
I would then realize I’d come all the way to school with no memory of the journey, my mind a blank slate on which I would write that day’s lessons.