Las Christmas (20 page)

Mayra Santos Febres

Mayra Santos Febres was born in Puerto Rico and has won numerous prizes for
her fiction, including the
1994
Letras de Oro Prize granted by the University of
Miami. She is also the recipient of the Juan Rulfo Prize for short fiction written
in Spanish. Her collection of stories,
Urban Oracles,
was published in
1997
by
Lumen Editions, a division of Brookline Books.

A LITTLE BIT OF BLISS

IN PUERTO RICO, the Christmas holidays are a long and intense season of greetings and celebrations. They start the night of Thanksgiving and end January 18, after the San Sebastian festival in Old San Juan. Since Puerto Rico has always been a colony, first of Spain and then of the United States, we take the hand-me-down traditions we inherited from both “mother countries” and turn them inside out, transform them into customs that barely resemble what they originally were. In our version of Thanksgiving (a celebration we call Turkey Day) there is no cranberry sauce, no pumpkin pie, no baked yams. Nobody watches the football game, even though we can get it, Eastern time, on cable TV. We keep the turkey, but prepare it with spices that make it taste like traditional holiday pork (we call our invention the
pavochón
). As stuffing, we use ground plantain with lots of garlic and pepper (
mofongo
style). We serve the bird with rice and pigeon peas,
tembleque, morcillas, gandinga,
and other typical foods; colorful, tasty dishes made with leftovers from this and little scraps of that. Our slave food, our poor campesino food, transforms, through imagination and loving care, into a magical paradise of taste and delight. We do with the food what we do with our traditions, salvage a little morsel of this, add leftovers from that, and piece together a sense of being who we are: Puerto Ricans, painfully happy to be alive.

 

Christmas Eve is another story. In a way, it is a continuation of the holiday celebrations that start on Turkey Day, but it retains a glow of its own, a special kind of magic. It is another chance to celebrate the time we have spent on the face of this earth with friends and family, those who have had the luck to survive another long year of tribulations. It is an epic celebration, a prize for having won the small battles of everyday life. To reach Nochebuena with your body and soul still able to laugh is no small achievement in any part of the world. Puerto Rico is no exception to the rule.

As children, my brother Juan Carlos and I were filled with apprehension as Christmas Eve neared. That's because our mother, Mariana Febres Falú, was a genuine Christmas-party animal. I don't know why she loved the season so much. Perhaps because she worked so hard the rest of the year, correcting exams, cleaning the house, taking care of my father, my brother and me, and the fact remains that she outdid herself each Christmas.

For days, Mom nagged my father to repaint the house, even if there wasn't a speck of dirt to be discovered on any wall. She dragged us week after week through shopping malls, to find the perfect Christmas decorations. Each year, she organized a party that would be the mother of all parties, and each year she tried to surpass the last. Our neighborhood turned into a mayhem of arches and Christmas lights, and lists were made. Doña Victoria would bring the rum and Doña Olga the
pasteles,
Don Agapito would buy the
lechón
and Don Cheo would arrange the sound system. My aunts would also participate, and my grandmother and cousins. When Christmas Eve arrived we were ready. We had our best dresses on, our best faces on, and our best intentions to celebrate the birth of Christ with a bang, and have the time of our lives.

Now that I think about it, my mother's enthusiasm for Christmas was a bit excessive. Maybe it had to do with her childhood, all those Christmases spent with no food on the table, no lights on the porch, and nothing to celebrate. But she was a Febres woman, and somehow the Febres women found the strength to defeat all obstacles. They seemed invincible. Cruzjosefa, Cusita, Nena, Cuca, Cuchira, and Mariana. Their dark reddish skin glowed in the sunlight, from the tip of their toes to the base of their necks. Their bodies were towers of clean, sweet-smelling flesh, rising towards the sky. And they knew how to welcome happiness when it arrived, especially at Christmas.

My father was different. He was the only one who could escape my mother's Christmas charm. He did come with us to picnics and school activities, or take us for Sunday drives through the mountains. But he never went to any family gatherings that involved my mother's sisters, especially during Nochebuena. He never explained why. But then again, there were many things my father never explained to us.

Juan Santos was a quiet man. Now he is a preacher. He runs a small Pentecostal church across the street from where he lives with my youngest half-brother, Carlos. But when he was young, he was a fairly successful AA baseball player and a high-school world history teacher. My house was always full of maps, of books explaining Carlo Magno's conquests or the succession of Egyptian pharaohs. He spent hours preparing classes for his students, his hands smelling of ink and burned rubber bands, the dining room table filled with maps and encyclopedias. We used to play a game, the only one he played with us. Some afternoons he sat in the living room, called us at the top of his voice, and drilled Juan Carlos and me about the capitals of the world: “Nicaragua's capital?” he would ask. “Managua!” we would scream out. “Japan's capital?” “Tokyo!” “Czechoslovakia's?” “Prague!” We dreamed of going to those countries with our father, who would ask the names of capitals and tell us stories about civil wars, agricultural production, and archaeological treasures. In those dreams, our father laughed and played many games with us: hide-and-seek in the Parthenon, races up the steps of the Vatican. He would be happy.

From my father's lips I heard for the very first time that Puerto Rico was a colony. We did not have a real capital like Nicaragua, had not fought any war that won us independence. Maybe that was the reason he was so serious all the time, so angry he could not have more, a country to call his own, a place big enough for his standards and dreams of becoming a big man. He argued about politics with my mother, who was pro-Commonwealth, called her a coward colonialist. My mother mocked him. “
Ay,
negro,
I am more Puerto Rican than you are. My heart is here, but the money is in the U.S. So what do you want me to do? To starve in the name of freedom? I've starved all my life, and let me tell you it ain't uplifting. There is no freedom in poverty.” Then, she would turn the radio on, hike up her short denim pants and go on with the housework. Everything tidy, everything clean. After one of those political arguments, the entire house glowed, the driveway would be spotless, and our uniforms would hang in the closet freshly pressed and waiting to be worn and wrinkled. My mother would sing and mop and dance and water the plants and forget all about my father calling her a coward. Calling her a coward! Now, that was daring! And stupid! If it wasn't for her
cowardice,
we would not be as well-off as we were.

And we were well-off, better than most people who lived on our street. The biggest house in the neighborhood belonged to us, to Mariana and Juan and their two children. The dark-skinned, elegant, intelligent couple of schoolteachers lived at the corner of the street in a big, white house with two cars in which they took their two children to a Catholic private school. They both worked for the pro-Commonwealth government in schools for specially gifted children, a job awarded to those with high connections in the Department of Education. “They have sisters and sisters-in-law working in the mayor's office,” the neighbors whispered when we passed by. It was true that my mother's sisters had those high positions in the government and that my aunts pulled strings to help my mother and father get their jobs. But it was also true that my father's hands smelled of burned rubber and chalk, and that my mother's voice was hoarse from screaming multiplication tables all day long. I used to get so angry when I heard the neighbors gossiping about us, but my mother calmed me down. “It's plain envy, baby,” she'd say. “Ignore them and smile. Let them know they cannot harm you with their silly comments, that they'll have to try harder to see you cry.”

One Christmas Eve, when I was about ten or eleven, my mother and father had a particularly heated argument. We were celebrating Christmas at my grandmother's house that year. All my aunts were coming. The plan was to eat dinner at Grandma's and then go next door to a party we had organized with the next-door neighbors. We would provide the food, and Doña Gladys and Don Agapito the music. Don Agapito had lived most of his life in the city, but he was originally from Cidra, a small town in the mountains. He knew lots of musicians of typical music, those who perform at
lechoneras
and little bars in the mountains, entertaining friends and customers while they ate baked sweet potatoes,
lechón asado,
and drink a couple thousand beers. Don Agapito invited those musicians, especially Don Benny, a taxi driver by day, musician by night. Don Benny had amplifiers, microphones, and all the gadgets for sound equipment, plus a brand-new electronic keyboard and music box that was the sensation of all Cidra. With Don Benny at the party, we were sure to have a blast.

That night, my mother invited my father to come to Don Agapito's party. We were all crammed into the bathroom, my mother and me in front of the big wooden mirror that faced the handbasin. My father stood in the corridor, watching us go about our business. Juan Carlos was half dressed, sitting on the toilet, waiting for my mother to help him find a lost shoe. She was wearing a black halter dress, stockings, and shoes, her hair still in rollers. We were all in a good mood. I was happy because I had managed to convince my parents to let me use lip gloss that night, a banana-flavored one I bought with my own allowance at the corner drugstore. The lip gloss lay on top of the bathroom cabinet, right in front of the big mirror where Mom was brushing my hair. I was very proud of my powers of persuasion that day. To think that I was only eleven, and already capable of convincing my folks to let me wear makeup!

My mother had the Vitapoint ointment in one hand and the big plastic comb in the other. She untangled my hair carefully and then parted it into small sections to braid. I was handing her bobby pins, one by one, and holding two bright white bows in my other hand. Mom would tie them to the end of my braids after she was done. As she finished my second braid, my mother turned to my father.

“
Coño,
Juan, come with us this time,” she said. “I didn't get this beautiful to be all alone tonight.”

“Are your sisters going to be there?” my father asked, changing the tone of his voice.

“Of course,
negro,
” she smiled, absentmindedly.

“Then, I won't go.” My father's reply fell into the bathroom like a bucket of cold water. All of a sudden, my mother's eyes changed. I could see them in the mirror. Slowly they filled with a cold fire, a glare that pierced like a large wet knife. They reminded me of Grandma's butcher knife, the one she used to cut chicken's necks whenever she wanted to make fresh
asopao.
I looked at my brother nervously. He just sat on the toilet, minding his own business, unaware of the storm approaching. I guess he thought that this was another of our parents' small fights, a little misunderstanding that would leave an uncomfortable silence roaming about the house for a few hours. A silence my mother would break with her broom and her laughter. But my mother's eyes said something else. Her eyes wanted to cut my father's neck; they would cut him and pull his skin off and throw him into a pot to cook.