When I Was Puerto Rican (24 page)

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. The idea that you were not supposed to think in school seemed funny. The kids behind me gasped. Sra. Leona’s face turned red.

“What’s so funny?” she growled.

I was laughing so hard that I had to hug my belly. Tears streamed down my cheeks. Slowly, as if a tide were rising around us, the rest of the class laughed while Sra. Leona stood at the front of the room with a dumb look on her face. She grabbed the long pointer from the blackboard and banged it on the desk.

“Quiet. Quiet, I say.”

The pointer cracked in two. The bottom half flew off the desk and out the door into the hall. Kids in the back banged their desks and roared. Sra. Leona held half the pointer in her hand, her eyes bulging behind her glasses, her face red, and her lips pulled back over yellow teeth. She screamed.

“Shut up,
Carajo
!”

We’d never heard a teacher swear. We all shut up at the same time and stared at her. She looked as surprised as we were. In the back of the room a kid giggled, then another, and another. There were footsteps in the hall and Sra. Leona turned to the door with a panicked expression. She shushed us. We were trying to control our giggles, but it was impossible. She was almost at the door when my father appeared.

I jumped from my seat and ran into his arms, sobbing and laughing. He pulled me to the stone steps leading to the outside. Sra. Leona closed the classroom door behind us. Papi wiped the tears from my face with his handkerchief. He held me against his side and rubbed my head.

“It’s all right,” he whispered. “Don’t cry. It’s all right.”

We sat on the steps and I told him how mean Sra. Leona had been. How awful the place we lived in was. How scared I was when I closed the baby’s eyes. It felt good to tell Papi these things. We sat there until the lunch bell rang. Kids filed out of classrooms and looked at us. Some of them pointed and laughed.

“Wait here,” he said. He went into the classroom and I heard him talking to Sra. Leona. He laughed. She laughed. He backed out of the room carrying my books. He waved to her and thanked her. He took my hand and led me down the steps. She came out of the room as we were going out the door. Papi didn’t see her, but I did. She gave me a dirty look and pretended to spit in my direction. Then she turned her back and walked away, her heels clicking on the hard polished floor.

LETTERS FROM NEW YORK

Escape del trueno y di con el relámpago.

I ran from thunder and hit lightning.

I
will not forgive you again.
I’ve closed my heart.
It is useless to cry.
It is useless to call.
I will never forgive you.

The jukebox blared the lover’s troubles. His voice cracked a little when he sang that his heart was closed. But no matter how final he meant it to sound, eventually he would forgive his woman, and they would go on living, loving, and fighting. Just like Mami and Papi.

Once he found us living afloat the black lagoon, Papi wooed Mami back, and we moved to one of Santurce’s busiest avenues. The building had once been a private house, but the new owner had divided it in half to make a two-room apartment in the back and a bar facing the street. He had placed a jukebox in one corner of the front room and a tall formica counter along the side wall. A pool table, lit from above by a single yellow bulb, seemed to float over the sticky tile floor between the music and the liquor.

“You are never to go into the bar,” Mami told us on our first day, “and don’t ever talk to anyone going in or out of there. When you go to school, follow the route we’ve walked, and don’t stop anywhere in between.”

My new school was a few blocks down the congested avenue, through a gate into a cracked cement yard ringed with hurricane fencing. I walked to and from school alone, unable to befriend the sassy girls with budding figures or the boys who leaned against fences and lampposts to hiss and leer.

“If a boy says something to you,” Mami warned, “just ignore him. He’ll find someone else to bother.” But boys paid no attention to my scrawny legs and flat torso. If they took notice of me at all, it was to comment on how fast I walked.

“What are you running away from?” they’d call out as I whizzed past, books tight against my chest, eyes focused on the spot in front of my feet.

At home we grouped into a tight knot, two adults and seven children inside two rooms. The wall dividing our side of the house from the bar was made from shiny sheets of fake wood panelling, but the rest of the walls were rough, splintery boards painted pale green. The front room was just big enough for a table and two chairs, and Hector and Raymond’s fold-out cot. The girls’ beds were along the walls of the back room. Mami and Papi’s bed was against the panelled wall, a curtain separating it from our side of the room.

Our nights were punctuated by the deafening percussion of drunken ballads, clashing billiards, clinking glasses, and nightly brawls.

“I can’t sleep, Mami,” one of us would complain, and Mami would find cotton to stuff our ears.

“Try this,” she said, knowing it wouldn’t help. Nothing helped. Over the din, we heard men laughing, yelling obscenities.

“You are not to repeat those bad words, or you’ll get a mouth full of hot peppers,” she’d scold.

Sometimes a woman’s voice broke through, and then the men shouted louder, glass shattered violently, and the songs on the jukebox went from boleros about betrayal to
guarachas
and
merengues
about the good life.

“Those are not good women. Decent women don’t go into such places,” Mami explained, a scared look on her face.

We slept with windows and doors bolted. At night, the bar’s customers, in search of a bathroom, found their way to the rear of the building, where they peed against our walls or retched under the tree. Mornings, on our way to school, we hopped over curdled puddles of vomit and fetid urine stains on the dirt.

“At least,” Mami said, “we have electricity and running water. We didn’t have that in Macún.”

Raymond’s foot was still raw and blistered from his accident almost a year earlier. Sometimes, with no warning, he’d develop a high fever, and pus formed in angry bubbles along the scars left by many operations. Mami would rush him to a clinic, where the wound was once again scraped and dressed in bandages. After many such visits the doctors finally told her that it might be best if Raymond’s foot were amputated.

“Are they crazy?” Mami complained to Papi that night.

“They can’t figure out how to cure him, so they just give up.”

“They know what they’re doing, Monin.”

“Whose side are you on, anyway?” She scooped Raymond onto her lap, with effort because he was already five years old, tall and gangly. “Just because everyone has given up on him doesn’t mean I’m going to.” She cradled him and rocked him back and forth until even I could feel her warmth, her yielding softness. “Don’t worry,” she muttered into his hair, “I won’t let them cut off your foot.” Raymond reached up with his skinny arms and grabbed her by the neck tightly, as if that alone would keep the thing from happening. “I’ll find a specialist ... someone who knows what he’s doing ... not like those charlatans in white coats that call themselves doctors.” Her voice was soft but angry, as if it were the doctors’ fault Raymond’s foot got snared on a bicycle chain. I folded inside myself, wishing I could go back to the dusty road in front of our house and grab Raymond off the bike before Jenny rode away with him.

“There’s a letter from Tata!” Mami sang, waving a thick envelope. She ripped it open. “With a note for you, Negi.”

My grandmother in New York didn’t write very often, but when she did, I sent her one of my best school compositions, or a drawing, or a joke copied from the newspaper. She rarely responded directly but sent hugs and kisses in Mami’s letters.

The lined airmail paper was so thin I took it into the shade because the midday sun shone right through it. She had folded it tightly, as if she didn’t want anyone else to open it. “Dear Negi,” she wrote in a broad, graceful script. “Thank you for the story you wrote for school. It was very good, but I had trouble reading it because your penmanship is so poor. It’s always hard to read what you write. Next time, take more care forming your letters for this old lady. Love and kisses, Tata.”

My eyes burned, and a trembling pain started in my gut and moved out, like water into an overfilled glass.

“Oh good!” Mami exclaimed as she read her letter, a happy expression on her face. She turned the page with an eager smile, her right hand over her heart.

I crumpled Tata’s letter and threw it into the yard.

Mami looked up. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I collapsed into her lap.

“What’s wrong? What did the letter say?” She was as upset as I was, her eyes darting from my sobbing face to the balled-up letter in the yard. “Héctor!” she called to my brother, who was practicing marble shots into a hole in the ground. “Bring me that piece of paper.” She read it, took in a breath, and put the paper under her thigh so the breeze wouldn’t blow it away. She held me for a few minutes then raised my face up and wiped my cheeks with the hem of her dress. “From now on, when you write to Tata,” she said with a smile, “print.”

That night, as Felipe Rodriguez sang that his love had left him with nothing to keep him company but a bottle of rum, I heard Mami and Papi murmuring in their bed. The noise coming from the bar made it impossible to hear everything they said, but after a while Papi was angry and rolled out of bed. I heard him open the door to the outside, and go out into the night. He didn’t come back for days.

Because of all the running around she had to do with Raymond, Mami couldn’t work a steady job anymore. Still, his medications and doctor visits meant we needed money, so Mami talked our landlord into paying her for cooking a daily
caldero
of rice and beans and a stack of fried chicken pieces or pork chops, which he then sold at the bar. Sometimes she left the house, not in her work clothes but dressed a little better than what she wore around the house. She didn’t tell us where she was going on those days, and it was years before I learned that she went to clean other people’s houses. One day I came back from school to find a rope stretched across the front room and men’s white shirts, clean and crisp, hanging in a row.