When I Was Puerto Rican (23 page)

“Why do I have to do it?”

“Because the
curandera
saw you and picked you out from among many little girls for this honor. You should be proud you were chosen.”

“What
curandera?
When did she see me? Who is she?”

“Negi, if you don’t want to do it, I’ll tell her, and then she’ll have to find someone else. But if you want to do it, we have to be there in a few minutes.”

It sounded scary, but I’d never seen a dead baby. I hoped to see its soul trapped inside its head.

Mami pulled out my white pique dress. I was only allowed to wear it to visit relatives. She tied a white ribbon around my waist and held it with a safety pin so it wouldn’t slip.

“I look like I’m going to make communion.”

Mami chuckled. We never went to church. Maybe the Virgin Mary was not protecting me, like she did Catholic children.

Maybe when I went to close the baby’s eyes, the Devil would take both of us down into the black waters. Or maybe God Himself would strike me dead on the spot.

“Shouldn’t we go to church first? Maybe a priest should bless me or something, you know, to make me holy.”

“Turn around and let me fix this bow.”

She never listened. I asked her questions, and she pretended I hadn’t. It made me mad.

“Let’s go.”

My sisters and brothers were with Doña Andrea. She came out of her house and made me turn around so she could look at me.

“Oh, you look so nice,” she said, “so innocent.”

We walked along the dock connecting our house to the main pier from which many other piers and bridges stretched to houses in the water.

Mami pulled me along faster than I could walk. We’d never been this way. The
barrio
was bigger than I thought. An old man sat on the threshold of his house and waved at us. A woman hung laundry on a line stretched between her house and the next one. She leaned way out of her window, until it looked like she would fall in the water. When she saw us, she grinned and went inside.

My patent-leather shoes slipped on the rotting wood of the pier.

“Can you walk a little slower, Mami?”

She waited for me to catch my breath. She curled a loose strand of hair behind my ribboned braids.

“You look so pretty in white,” she said and hugged me.

She was soft, warm. Her arm heavy around my shoulders, she pointed to a house at the end of a long walkway stretching out from a pier.

“That’s where we’re going.”

The house was painted the same bright green as the lizards that hide in plantain leaves. A limp black bow hung by the open door.

Mami tugged on my dress here and there, pulled down her skirt, and grabbed my hand tight. She was as scared as I was. I took a deep breath.

“Okay,” I said, “I’m ready.”

My shoes tapped against the wood, as if I were dancing. It was disrespectful to make so much noise when death was so near. I wished I could float over the wood so I wouldn’t make so much noise. It was hard to do when I was scared. It took a lot of concentration. But by the time we reached the house, I was floating.

The baby’s coffin lay on a table draped in white cloth. Shirred white lace hung on the walls behind him and in a canopy above the coffin.

Two women met us at the door. They held long white rosaries with enormous silver crosses. One of them was dressed in mourning, the other in white, turbaned, her brown skin ashimmer. She had sparse eyebrows over protruding eyes; one eye was brown, the other green.

“Ah,” she said, “here is our little angel.”

She put both hands on my shoulders and kneeled so we could be the same height.

“My name is Nicasia. The lady behind me is the baby’s mother. Do you know her?”

Doña Cony looked familiar. I nodded at Nicasia’s green eye. She looked behind me at my mother.

“Thank you for letting your daughter do this. The Good Shepherd will repay your kindness.”

She stared at me. I didn’t know which of her eyes to look into.

“Are you a little scared?” she asked.

I nodded.

“It is good to be afraid of what you don’t understand.” She closed her eyes.

Her fingers pressed into my shoulders, her nails dug into my skin. I wanted to turn around, to find Mami, but I couldn’t move my head. I could only look into the knot on Nicasia’s turban.

“Dear Lord, bless this child. Bless her and protect her.”

Doña Cony joined the prayer.
“¡Aleluya!
Let Him be adored!” Behind me, Mami breathed hard.

“Dear Virgin, Protectress of Little Children, bless this child.”

“Yes,
Virgencita,
protect all the children.”

“Dear Lord, bless and protect this woman who has brought us her child to perform this sacred duty.”

“Bless her, Lord. And her whole family.”

Nicasia’s eyes were filmy, the lids half covering her pupils. She looked up and scanned the space behind me, where the baby’s coffin was. She hummed and nodded her head, as though agreeing with somebody, but there was no one there. Just the dead baby. She stared at me again, and her face melted. I couldn’t take my eyes off hers. They were so big I could see myself. She let her head fall to her bosom, took a deep breath, and shook all over.

“You have a powerful spirit protecting you. It’s always there watching. It takes care of you so that nothing bad can happen. You need not be afraid.”

My knees rattled. I wanted to float away, or to fly outside the window, but I couldn’t. Nicasia held me down with her strong fingers.

“It’s your guardian angel.” She opened her eyes wide. “Do you know what a guardian angel is?”

I nodded. She smiled. Her two front teeth were trimmed with gold.

“Very good. Are you ready?”

I nodded again. My voice was scared.

Nicasia pressed against my shoulders harder as she stood up from kneeling. Her bones cracked and rattled, as though there were no one inside the long white dress. She led me to the table. There was a white carnation with a small white rosary wrapped around it. Nicasia gave it to me.

“Hold this in your left hand.” She wrapped the dangling ends of the rosary around my wrist.

The coffin was covered with a mosquito net. Doña Cony removed it, and Nicasia turned me toward the baby. I didn’t want to look at it, but I did. It was a small baby, dressed in white christening clothes with ruffles and ribbons and lace. It was smiling. Its eyes were grey with almost no whites. There was nothing inside them.

Nicasia took my right hand and dipped it into a bowl of water.

“This is holy water,” she said.

I pulled my hand away. I was afraid the holy water would burn my fingers. But Nicasia stuck my hand back in and held it there. The holy water felt cool and soft.

Nicasia held my hand above the baby’s face and tucked my thumb, ring, and little fingers into my palm.

“Just hold your fingers like this and listen to the prayer. When I tap you on the shoulder with the rosary, you put your fingers on the baby’s lids and hold them down until I tap you again.”

I nodded. The sun splashed in the door and hit my legs but didn’t warm the rest of me. Mami stood behind me, breathing quietly. I tried to follow her breath, my eyes closed so that I wouldn’t have to look at the baby’s empty face.

Nicasia mumbled words I didn’t understand. Doña Cony clicked her rosary and whispered “Amen” every once in a while. Nicasia tapped me on the shoulder lightly. I opened my eyes and let my fingers rest on the baby’s lids and held them there as Nicasia continued her foreign prayer. The baby’s skin was cold. His eyes felt like egg yolks. If I pressed hard, they would pop.

Nicasia tapped me on the shoulder and I took my hand away. She looked inside, and Doña Cony and Mami stepped closer to the coffin. The baby’s eyes were shut. The lids were wet from the holy water, which made the baby look as if he’d been crying. I scraped my fingers against the pique of my dress. It felt rough and dry, but I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that death was stuck to me.

Mami hugged me, and Nicasia hugged me, and Doña Cony hugged me. I was cold and moved toward the door, where a rectangle of sunshine called me.

“I want to go home,” I said to Mami. My throat hurt.

“Okay, okay. In a minute.” She and Nicasia talked quietly. Doña Cony pulled the mosquito net over the baby.

“I want to go home.” My head was heavy with muttering voices. My tongue was large and thirsty.

“Just a minute!” Nicasia handed Mami a small bottle. Mami thanked her and backed toward me, still talking.

“Please, Mami.”

She frowned. The air was stiff. Outside, a breeze rippled water against the pilings. A seagull landed on the dock and stepped toward the door.

“Get out of there,” it told me.

Doña Cony hugged Mami and shook her hand as if checking to see if it was still attached. I backed out of the house and down the steps. The seagull flew to the end of the walkway, to the pier that led to my house.

“Stay right there,” Mami warned. “Wait for me.”

The sunlight was yellow. Sweat soaked my scalp and dripped down my forehead, into my ears. It tickled, but the voices went away. My head felt light, my tongue its normal size. The seagull stepped along the pier, looked at me, then flew toward the mountains. Mami came out of Doña Cony’s house.

“It’s very rude to leave without saying good-bye,” she said, shoving me ahead of her.

We walked quickly down the pier. The old man no longer sat in front of his house. The woman who hung out laundry was now sweeping the dust from her house out the door. When we reached the bridge by our house, I ran as fast as I could and took the steps in one leap.

I ripped the white ribbons out of my hair and threw them out the window. I clawed at the dress, trying to get it off as fast as I could. Mami yelled because I was not careful and the dress tore. But I wanted to get out of it. I stepped out of my panties, socks, and patent-leather shoes and ran into the shower. The cold water gave me shivery goose bumps. I rubbed castile soap into my hair, under my arms, between my toes. But most of all, I scrubbed the two fingers that had touched the baby. No matter how much soap I put on them, they felt cold and oily, and I didn’t know if I’d ever get the feeling of death off them.

I’d never hated going to school before. But I couldn’t stand Sra. Leona, and even though this was the nicest school I’d ever seen, I didn’t want to go there.

Sra. Leona didn’t like me either. She called on me when she thought I didn’t know the answer. It irritated her that most of the time I did. I read ahead in my books, so she couldn’t catch me, so she could ask all she wanted. I refused to give her the chance to make fun of me.

My favorite classes were geography and social studies. I had a different teacher for them. Her name was Srta. Juárez. She was surprised when I drew a map of the continents with the countries, the major rivers, and the mountain ranges all in the right places.

When he lived with us, Papi sometimes helped me with homework, and when he saw how good I was with maps, he said I would grow up to be a cartographer. When I had told Miss Jiménez, my teacher in Macún, she had said I was more of a topographer, because cartographers’ maps were flat, while mine had the bumps and dips of mountain ranges and valleys.

“Today,” Sra. Leona said, “we will write a composition using the words you were assigned.”

She wrote the words on the blackboard. Someone asked if we were supposed to use all ten words, and she laughed and said that would be impossible.

“Use as many as you can, but not less than five.”

It was a stupid assignment. I hated her.

I wrote the words at the top of the page. Sra. Leona walked up and down the aisles between our seats, and stopped and hovered over me.

“Esmeralda, try to form those letters better. I always have trouble reading your handwriting.”

The point on my pencil broke. She looked at me through her thick glasses, and I wished I were bigger and could punch her.

“Go sharpen your pencil.”

She treated me like I had a disease. If I died and never came back to school, she’d probably be happy. But not for long. I’d come back to haunt her. I’d fill her inkwell with glue. I’d put hot peppers in her face cream. I’d curl a snake under her pillow.

I sat down to write the stupid composition using her ten stupid words. I would use all of them, just because she thought I couldn’t.
Incandescent and Caramelize
must go together somehow.
Bannister and Delimitation. Boundary.
“A cartographer draws the Delimitation of Boundaries in maps.” There, I’d even given her a word bigger than the assigned ones. What else could I say about cartographers? I had to think.

The door of the classroom was open. Across the hall, someone recited a poem I knew by heart.

“Esmeralda, is there something in the hall you’d like to share with us?”

Kids laughed. Sra. Leona hated it when my mind went elsewhere than her classroom.

“I was just thinking, Sra. Leona.”

She curled her lip.

“Well. This is no time for daydreaming. You’re supposed to be writing, not thinking.”