Chango's Fire (23 page)
Authors: Ernesto Quinonez
“So, it's not like we were intimate,” she says. “It was just sex.”
“You don't mean that,” I say.
“Of course not,” she erupts. “What is it with you guys. Hey I like you, I don't just sleep with anyone, okay?”
“Well it was a mistake,” I say, and I wish I could tell her more.
“You didn't think so the other night,” she repeats.
“I don't want to talk about it,” I say and go back inside the building.
Helen follows me.
“No, you're going to talk to me,” she says, following me up the stairs. She reaches for my shirt and pulls down on it. I stop walking up the stairs. “Hey are you embarrassed to be seen with me?” she says, her eyes squinting, showing tiny, tiny wrinkles. “Because this is New York City, us together is no big deal.” Helen studies my face again, only this time like a jeweler does a newly bought diamond, looking for flaws. “Do you think that you're the first Latino guy or that I'm only into Latino men? Is that what you think?”
Silence ensues. Helen stands there, waiting to see if my face will tell her anything. She's a good actor, her face is almost unreadable and she knows how to hold the moment.
“The problem isâ” I sigh.
“Yes, what is it?”
“The problem is,” I pause and stare at her baby wrinkles, “poverty brings you shame and makes you do things.” I catch myself, though I want to tell her I have done things and now I am paying for it. When I met her, I thought of Helen as an intruder in my neighborhood. And just when I was about to give that feeling a rest, to step back and reflect on what I had once thought of people like her moving into El Barrio, Elegua had to further complicate my situation.
I am so sure Mario was right. The service was all in good faith, but it was the faces of all those undocumented people that told me Maritza must have those forms. They were so appalled at her speaking about AIDS, and at church, no less. Their eyes were so filled with disdain and disgust, yet they held back, because they wanted something from her.
Helen has no idea what is happening. How can I tell her I am burning her house down, that I am in trouble with the law and that her idol is a fraud? It is too much happening at once, like listening to too many stations on the dial. All I get is static. I can't hear myself think.
“Like what? What does it make you do?”
Instead I choose to return to what we have already argued about.
“Like a man I knew who wrote poems and went crazy?”
“What man?” she crosses her arms impatiently, because she senses I am getting away from what happened between us the other night and into something else. Truth is, it is about us.
“He'd read his poems out loud. In the street, to anyone who listened, and when there was no one around he recited them to himself. He walked around the neighborhood with stacks, reams of his stuff. He was broke, always broke. When he got kicked out of his apartment, he lived on the street and still wrote. One day I found him stretched out on the curb, next to a manhole, writing. You know what he told me?”
“No, what?” she uncrosses her arms, lets them flap loose. She isn't into my story.
“He told me that he was writing poems from the gutter. True poems from the streetâ”
“Do you want to get something to drink?” Helen says, more lost than Columbus. My fault though, I should just come out and say it.
“He lived where you live. Right here. Right here, years before this shitty building went co-op. He survived fires, neglect, inflation, crime, all those things you did not, or will ever face.”
“That is so unfair,” she says in almost a faint whisper.
“Well, all this history, Helen,” I say, “is alien to you and those like you.”
“The people at the church tonight,” she says, her eyes becoming slants of anger, “the new immigrants, don't have a history here either, Julio. You are just afraid.”
“Of what?”
Helen quickly answers, “Afraid of change.”
“Please.”
“This is New York City, Julio. The city changes by nature. The world does.”
“Well, Fifth Avenue never changes, Helen. It always stays rich and white. It hasn't changed. Fifth Avenue will only change when they want it to change. But neighborhoods like mine, though,” I pause as I dig in my pocket for Greg's card, “they change all the fucking time.” I crumble Greg's card and fly upstairs. Leaving Helen to stare up in disbelief at my rudeness.
Dear Julio,
You are so unfair. Regardless of what I wrote to you about my town, you have no idea that my town, like many of them across America, shares certain universalities with Spanish Harlem. There is a powerful feeling of kinship between us all in the community, and this may be hard for you to believe, but my town has a tolerance for human eccentricities, too. Just like your Spanish Harlem gutter poet, there are people in my town who are just as crazy. The Toad Lady, for instance, who every Sunday during the summer months bakes cookies and leaves them at the edge of the pond so frogs can have some sugar. Yes, it's true. She is also so religious that she makes the justice of the peace drive for miles over to her house so he could marry her farm animals to each other. So even her animals won't fornicate without approval from the Almighty. My town is a place where we still vote with pencils on paper ballots, where the preschoolers sing “Horse With No Name” for ecology lessons. Where, as a kid, I would go and find the mayor at his house and ask him for the keys so I could open the library and read all by myself.
Julio, I understand your anger (and fear maybe) toward your neighborhood changing. If you could give me a few more lines, I'd like to tell you about when the cows left town. How it broke my heart. The sun didn't rise for me till I was much older. The memory of Gregory Fallis's cows being marched up a metal ramp and into a truck was frightening. It took four hours to gather up the whole herd, and then the truck started its slow decline down the hill and out to the auction block sixty miles away toward Concourse. Seventy cows in that truck, it was a small herd by Wisconsin standards, but it represented the last dairy farm in Howard City. The next day, when my mother was driving me to school, we passed by Gregory's land and I caught a glimpse of him disassembling the feed carts. I knew the milking machines would be next. In the back seat I cried and couldn't be consoled. His barn was an auto graveyard in a vacant lot, like the ones you played in as a kid in Spanish Harlem, his barn was its equal for me. Julio, you should've heard how Gregory talked about his cows. About his town, about how it was full and lush and filled with farms. “Back then,” he'd say, “everyone had a few cows,” and you could see the moisture in his eyes, the gravel in his voice. “No sir, no one had to go to the general store for milk, back then.” Now that I think of it, he sounds like you.
I guess by now, Julio, you know this is not a love letter. I hate to fight. It's such a waste. Julio, the entire planet is changing.
For better or worse? I don't know. I'm only certain of two things. I like you, a lot. And that the paintings at the Met dream in color when the museum is closed on Mondays.
Helen
P.S. Please come to the opening, at least to pick up your watch. You left it that day. I would have slipped it under the door, with this letter, but â¦
Pops sees me by the bookshelf. Just by the look on his face I know he got to it before I did. It's the same smile he gave me when I received the first letter. I don't get mad at him though. I should, but I don't. He smiles a little smile and hopes that I talk to him about it.
“Hey,” Pops says, with a trumpet and a cloth in his hand, “sorry I read your letter but it's better than if it had been your mother.”
“It's all right, Pops.”
“I mean it was just lying there underneath the door.” Pop shines his instrument as if a genie will appear. “I thought it was a bill, you know.”
“Don't worry about it, Pops.”
“I read âDear Julio,' and you know my name is Julio, tooâ”
“It's all right, Pops,” I say.
“I didn't read all of it, I hope you knowâ”
“I said it's okay.”
“What you going to do now?”
“I don't know.”
“You did that altar,
pa'
Ochun. See what happens.” Pop points a finger at me, “I'm not like your mother, I respect that religion and I know, because of Hector Lavoe, that that shit works!”
Pops makes me happy when he talks, at times. He can place salsa music heydays into any conversation.
“Your room now is starting to look like a botanica, Julio. Incense and all those altars. But that stuff is real, Hector knew it too. See, like that song,” he sings,
“tu me hiciste brujeria, bruja, bruja.”
“Okay, Pops,” I say, “what would Hector Lavoe do?”
“Hector wouldn't care one bit. He was a genius but not one of the nicest of peopleâ”
“Wow, you trashing Lavoe.” This is a first.
“No what's true is true,
ese hombre no respetaba a nadie.”
“Okay so what would you do?” I ask.
“I would first take that letter out of that book, because if your mother finds it, forget it. She'll have you married with childrenâ”
“So what's wrong with that?”
“Nada, mijo.
I just don't want your mother to get her hopes up. It kill her if this is nothing. Is this nothing, Julio?”
“I don't know, Pops.”
“Well, you left your watch at her place, so it's something.
Mira que tu ma
is from a time when girls wouldn't give anything away unless they had a proposal. So just make sure that you and that girl don't have her making plans and then feeling stupid.” He taps my shoulder, making sure I understand. “Your mother is the only person to consider. The rest is nothing. I just don't want your mother hurt.”
“Really? Her being
blanquita
is not a factorâ”
“What you talking about, Julio?
Mira,
you kids these days are more white than some of the white kids. For us, it was a big problem. I could never be with a white girl in my time, crazy. For you kids, it's not that bad. See what I mean, jelly bean.”
“Pops,” I say, “it's not just the
blanquita
that's been on my mind. I think we'll have to leave this place.”
“What you mean?” His eyes get smaller.
“I don't think we can keep it afloat, that's all.”
“But we are doing good. You even quit that other job of yours. Is it that? Is it that other job of yours coming back to get you?” Pops knows the score, unlike Mom who would be asking God the questions. Instead he asks me.
Still I can't seem to tell anyone what's really happening.
“No, it's just that we're going to need another loan, and I don't think we can get it. Maybe we should go to Puerto Ricoâ”
“I don't want to go back to Puerto Rico,” he says, making this face like he just swallowed a lemon.
“Why? I thought all people your age wanted to go back?” I say, not that I want to go back but it's better than the alternative. Because to me the island is a myth. It's just something that, as a kid, I kept hearing about day and night. How things were beautiful there, and how wonderful the island was. How it was paradise, and I, as an asthmatic child, could not get sick there because I could run through the hills and the air was so clean. Green hills and freedom. I was told this not just by my parents but by everyone around me. When my mother finally took me there when I was nine, we landed in San Juan and I got sick. I got real sick.
“Not me, Julio. Your mother maybe? But I've stopped talking like that years ago. When I first came here, I hated the cold.
Un frio peluo.
But now, El Barrio is my home.”
Mine, too. The last time I went back to Puerto Rico was when I was eighteen, and by then Spanish Harlem was what was real to me. I had grown up with people waving that flag up and down, right and left, parading every year in an avenue that wasn't even ours. On an avenue where none of us lived or could ever afford as a people. Fifth Avenue was the wealthy face of New York City, yet that afternoon we owned it. But by the next day, it was back to reality, and that's when it hit me. Being Puerto Rican is more than waving a flag on the second week of June.
“You know Julio, to go back to Puerto Rico would be to lose all that stuff that we recreated here in El Barrio. The sounds, the smells, the tastes of the island. Right here.”
“But Pops,” I say, “that barrio is gone. It's been gone for a few years now. There's only pockets left, and those are fading, too.”
“Hey,
todo tiene su final; nada dura para siempre”
Pops quotes from a Hector Lavoe song,
“tenemos que recordar que no existe eternidad.
I know all things must stop, Hector Lavoe knew it too. I walk around here now, and there are blocks that are so safe and white, and then I turn the corner and I'm back in the seventies. I know that. But though this barrio is no longer what it used to be, I'm still alive, and to me, this is home.” He walks over to the closet where his other musical instruments are stored. He places the newly polished trumpet in a case.
“But you always said you want to be buried in Puerto Ricoâ”
“I do. But I don't want to live there. Know the difference, Julio?”
“Whatever Pops. I don't want to go back either. But we have family there and maybe we can find another house,” I say, and Kaiser comes out from under a sofa. “Or stay in New York and move to the Bronx or something. I just don't think we can stay here.”
“But with my disability checks, your job and your mother's at the hospital we can keep this place. What we have to do is fix those rooms and rent them.”
“Yeah Pops,” I sigh and pick up the cat. “Yeah that's what we'll have to do.” I leave it at that.
