When I Was Puerto Rican (6 page)

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W
henever Mami was fed up with Macún, or with Papi, she ran away to Santurce, a suburb of San Juan, which, by the early fifties, had become as much a metropolis as the capital, though with little of its cachet. It was a commercial center, with distinctly drawn neighborhoods that separated the rich from the poor. Hospitals, schools, private homes, banks, office buildings, restaurants, and movie theaters butted one against the other in a jumble of color and pattern and noise. Softly rounded rectangular buses chugged up and down the streets, trailing a stream of black smoke that made your eyes water.

Mami’s mother had been one of fifteen children, and Mami had endless aunts, uncles, and cousins in the
barrios
that stretched like tentacles from the wide avenues and shady plazas. By the time we arrived in Santurce from Macún, with our bundles and expectations, my grandmother, Tata, had left for New York to join her sisters in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, a place said to be as full of promise as Ponce de León’s El Dorado.

Our new home, in La Parada 26, Stop #26, a
barrio
named for an old trolley station, was a one-room wooden house perched high on stilts over sticky black mud that we were forbidden to touch. Most of the houses around us were no better than the ones in Macún, but there was running water into the kitchen and electric light bulbs in the middle of every room. Alongside our house ran a trench that filled with sewage when it rained.

We shared a bathroom with another family. It was a square cement building with a shower at one end and a hole on the floor so the water could drain into the open sewer. During the day, the bathroom was our playhouse, until the men came home from work and reclaimed it, filling the air with the humid scent of Palmolive soap.

I’d been taken out of first grade in the middle of the week during my first semester and, within a day, was in school in Santurce. My new school, made of concrete blocks, was much larger than the one in Macún and had a playground with swings, a slide, and a metal seesaw that was usually too hot to sit on, because the sun fell on it all day long.

“The city is different,” Mami told us on our first day. “There are many mischievous people, so you have to be careful where you go and who you talk to.” When I walked to school, Mami instructed, I was not to look at or talk to anyone all the way there and back. But there were too many things to see in Santurce. I learned to walk down those rich streets, eyes humbly cast down, with no sense of what lay ten feet in front of me, but with an exquisite awareness of what was on either side.

The way to school took me over muddy sidewalks strewn with garbage, across narrow streets teeming with traffic, people, and stray dogs, and past bars with open doorways and loud jukeboxes that always played boleros about liquor and women. A stand offered for sale fruits and vegetables that in Macún I’d been able to pick off the trees. Bright dresses and
guayaberas
in front of a dry-goods store swayed in the breeze like ghosts in daylight. An austere Evangelical church rose next to a
botánica
where one could buy plaster saints, African idols, herbs, candles, potions for finding love and driving away unwanted influences, and protections against the evil eye and ailments of mind or body. In between the buildings, hiding in the shadows of alleys leading to the
barrios,
there were stands for passion-fruit juice and pineapple ices. Carts carried coconut candy, sticks of sugarcane, molasses toffee, and dried papaya slices. And on every corner there were
piraguas
in white paper cones, gleaming pyramids of ice into which the
piragüero
dripped bright-colored syrup.

I was fascinated by the dark doorways of private homes crushed between shops and restaurants. They were barred with ornate wrought iron fences and gates, and inside, women in flowered shifts dusted plastic covered furniture or sat on shaded balconies looking out over the commotion below.

Sometimes, if I walked fast, I caught a glimpse of the Catholic schoolchildren lined up in twos, being led into the chapel by black-clad nuns whose faces were milky white and waxy. The students wore navy blue uniforms with pale blue shirts, navy knee socks, and blue loafers. Their hair was neatly combed, and they looked cleaner than anyone I’d ever seen. I envied them the order of their lives, the precision with which they marched with no prodding and no harsh glances, the mysterious black figures beside them like veiled anchors. I wondered what their lives were like, how many sisters and brothers they had, if they slept in their own beds or had to share, if they ate rice and beans and salted codfish with onions. I knew they were different, or rather, I was different. Already I’d been singled out in school for my wildness, my loud voice,.and large gestures better suited to the expansive countryside but out of place in concrete rooms where every sound was magnified and bounced off walls for a long time after I’d finished speaking.

“What a
jíbara,”
children jeered when I recited a poem in the dialect of Doña Lola.

“What a
jíbara,”
when I didn’t know how to use the pencil sharpener screwed to the wall of the schoolroom.

“What a
jíbara,”
when Christmas came around and I’d never heard of Santa Claus.

“What a
jíbara
... What a
jíbara
... What a
jíbara.”

In Santurce I had become what I wasn’t in Macún. In Santurce a
jíbara
was something no one wanted to be. I walked to and from school beside myself, watching the
jíbara
girl with eyes cast down, the home-cut hair, the too large gestures and too loud voice, the feet unaccustomed to shoes. I let that girl walk home while I took in the sights of the city, the noise and colors, the music, the pungent smells of restaurants and car exhaust. At night, in the bed I shared with Delsa and Norma, I listened for the
coquí
tree frog to sing me to sleep but instead heard cars backfiring, people fighting, music blaring, and Mami’s moans in the dark.

As Christmas neared, the walk to school took on a different tune. The songs floating out of jukeboxes were still about women and liquor, but they had a Christmas twist. A man sang that he would never forgive the ungrateful woman he once loved because she had abandoned him at what was supposed to be the happiest time of year. A woman sang that the man she loved had betrayed her, so she would spend the holidays dreaming of what might have been. And a group of men sang about what a sad Christmas it would be now that their love was away. I felt sorry for the people in those bars.

At home we listened to
aguinaldos,
songs about the birth of Jesus and the joys of spending Christmas surrounded by family and friends. We sang about the Christmas traditions of Puerto Rico, about the
parrandas,
in which people went from house to house singing, eating, drinking, and celebrating, about pig roasts and
ron cañita,
homemade rum, which was plentiful during the holidays.

Even though Papi didn’t live with us, he often came to see us and once showed up with strings of red and green electric bulbs, which we tacked around windows and doors.

From the beginning of December, Mami spent most of her time in the kitchen. For weeks the house smelled of crushed onions, fresh oregano, and cilantro. Relatives I’d never met appeared to sit for hours at the kitchen table with Mami and, if he were visiting, Papi, to eat rice with pigeon peas,
pasteles
wrapped in banana leaves, crispy fried green plantains, and boiled yucca. After dinner they drank anisette and I was given the crunchy diamonds that formed in the sugarcane strings inside the bottles. Aunts and uncles came up the alley trailed by girls in white patent-leather shoes and flouncy dresses, their hair rolled into finger curls. The boys hung back, their pomaded hair and scrubbed faces serious, their pressed pants making them look as stiff as paper dolls. Within minutes the girls were playing house with Delsa and Norma, while I chased the boys up and down the alley, getting good and dirty.

My mother’s brother, Tio Cucho, came by with a pretty woman named Rita. She was short and dark and wore tight dresses cut low to show the tops of her breasts. Long earrings dangled from her lobes, and bracelets jangled when she moved her hands. She was much smaller than Tio Cucho but made up for it with heels so high she walked on tiptoe. I could tell Mami didn’t like Rita by the way she screwed up her nose when Rita walked by or looked away when Rita bent over to rub her leg and her breasts almost tumbled out of her blouse. But Mami was polite and served Rita food and drink as if she didn’t mind, laughing at her jokes.

I liked Rita, especially the way she smiled, with bright red lips and large white teeth that reminded me of a billboard for Colgate toothpaste. As they left, Mami took Tío Cucho aside and told him she never wanted him to bring that woman into her house again. Tio Cucho was offended and said if Mami didn’t want Rita around, then she wouldn’t see him either. But the next weekend he came without her.

According to Mami, Rita was a terrible woman. She lounged in bars and went home with any man who bought her drinks. Mami didn’t say this to me. I heard her talking with our next-door neighbor while we were shelling pigeon peas.

“But doesn’t she have children?”

“Of course she does. Two boys. And she just leaves them alone to roam the streets like urchins while she’s out partying.”

“Doesn’t your brother care?”

“He’s always leaving her, only to come sniffing around her skirts after a few weeks.”

“Some women bewitch men.”

“Bah! That woman’s no witch. She’s a slut who’ll spread her legs for anything in pants.”

Doña Mina looked at Mami and pursed her lips toward me. Mami seemed startled to see me. She took my half-full bowl of shelled peas and emptied them into hers.

“Negi, bring these upstairs. And while you’re there, check to see if Hector is up from his nap.”

I took the bowl and strolled away from them, hoping they’d keep talking about Rita, who I hoped was a
puta,
although Mami hadn’t used that word. But they both watched after me. I pretended not to care and bounced up the steps, the peas jiggling back and forth inside the bowl. Their voices fell into whispers then rose again in laughter. I felt so left out and angry, I wanted to stumble and spill the beans, but if I did, Mami would make me pick them up, one at a time, my knees scraping across the splintery floor.

The yard next door was decorated with gold-colored ribbons strung on tall bamboo stems. They waved in the breeze, and flashes of sun winked from within, like stars inside a yellow sky. Someone on the other side of the tall fence raised a bamboo stick with more ribbons attached to it, only these were wet and shimmered brighter than the ones already up. Smoke rose from the front of the yard, along with the delicious smell of oregano and garlic, rosemary, fennel, toasted annatto.

“What are those, Mami?” I asked one morning when the entire yard looked like a sea of yellow, rising and falling in bulbous waves.

“They’re pig’s guts,” she said without looking up from her darning.

“Yecchh!”

She laughed. “They’re used to make pork sausages. Our neighbors cook meat in spices and then they stuff them into the pig guts. We had some yesterday, remember?”

“But pig guts are full of ...”

“They wash the guts out carefully, and they hang them up to dry so that the sun cures them.”

It was hard to imagine that the delicious sausages I’d had just the day before were encased in the small intestines of a pig.

“What else was in those sausages?”

“The heart, the liver, chunks of meat, rice, spices, and some blood.”

“Blood!”

“To make them solid, so they don’t fall apart.”

“We eat blood?!”

“What do you think
morcillas
are made of?” she asked with a laugh.

“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”