When I Was Puerto Rican (27 page)

“No picking your nose. No sucking your thumb. No speaking unless spoken to.” She pulled up Delsa’s socks and buckled Alicia’s shoes. “No pushing or shoving each other. Say ‘with your permission’ and
‘muchas gracias’
and ‘you’re very welcome.’ ” She pulled up Hector’s pants and tucked in his shirt. “If you need to use the bathroom, aim so you don’t make a mess, and wash your hands afterwards.”

She didn’t really need to go through all the rules on behavior. They were engraved on our brains from constant repetition and the painful results of not following them to the letter. But Mami was not one to take chances with our natural high spirits and tendency to ignore what she told us the minute she turned her back.

“Doña Susana will be there watching you,” Mami warned, unnecessarily, since we expected another pair of eyes as stern and unforgiving as hers to watch our every move when she wasn’t around. “Now go along to church.”

The Iglesia San Juan Bautista de Paz y Misericordia was up the street from our house. It had once been a private home, but its owner went off to train as a minister, and when he came back he held services in his living room. Before long, the congregation had grown so large that he moved elsewhere and refurnished the house with rows of wooden pews and a tiled fountain in the place once occupied by the family’s television set.

“¡Ay, qué lindos!”
Doña Susana exclaimed when we paraded into the churchyard. She tugged on the sleeve of a thin young woman. “Sister Dolores, these are the children I was telling you about.”

Sister Dolores led us to the rear of the house, where she segregated us by age into small groups led by bespectacled young men and well-scrubbed young women.

“You,” she said to me, “are old enough to sit with the congregation.” I joined the older children in the back of the church just as the service began.

In contrast to Abuela’s opulent church, this iglesia was plain, with nothing to divert attention from the service. The white walls were unadorned; the fountain looked like a tile bathtub. The preacher, Don Joaquin, was slight, with child-size hands, delicate shoulders, and a thin neck trapped inside the collar of a starched shirt.

“Sisters and Brothers,” he began in a voice so deep I looked around to see where it came from. But Don Joaquin stood alone in front of his congregation.

In less time than it took me to say the Lord’s Prayer, he had worked himself into a frenzy that sent the congregation to its feet, moaning their repentance and the ecstasy of redemption.

Don Joaquin called on sinners to cast off evil and come to Jesus. Men and women who until that day had been sedate citizens—a solemn storekeeper, the unsmiling man who delivered the mail, the stern school crossing guard, the methodical newspaper vendor—stood up in rapture, ran to the front of the room, knelt in front of Don Joaquin, grabbed for his hand, waved their arms about in jerky motions. Tears streamed down their cheeks, their voices charged with sobs, choked laughter, unfinished prayers, joyous gratitude. These proper folk, who had always maintained an appearance of peaceful reserve, now rolled in the aisles with abandon. Don Joaquín’s voice rose in timbre and pitch, until he seemed to disappear and only his words remained, reverberating against the cement walls, piercing the assembled into delirious convulsions and ecstatic trances.

Every hair on my body stood on end as I witnessed these transformations. A bristling sweat seeped into my clothes, dribbled behind my ears. I wanted to wail, to wave my arms in exuberance, to give myself up right then and there to the un-explainable force that overpowered the others in the room.

But my fear was too great, my conscience too precocious to allow me to relinquish control of my well-guarded soul. I was alone, isolated in a bubble of resistance, watching this surreal scene magnified beyond comprehension. I crumpled onto the hard pew and hid my face behind my hands, through which bright specks of light still danced in circles.

“If she wants to play the piano, let her,” Papi argued, pride in his voice.

“How can we afford a piano?” Mami asked. “We don’t even have a television set.”

“She doesn’t need a piano while she’s studying. Don Luis said she can come over and practice there any time.”

Mami turned up her nose. “That buttery old man!”

“He’s the principal of the school, Monin. Everyone else holds him in high regard.”

“He has shifty eyes, and he can’t sit still.”

“He’s a musician. Those people always seem nervous to the rest of us.”

I had not meant to start a contest of wills between my parents when I mentioned my dreams of playing the piano to Papi. My hands seemed to yearn for action, moving constantly as I talked, seeking textures when I sat reading a book, digging fearlessly into holes on walls, dipping into containers, drawers, boxes with lids that didn’t quite close. Since I loved music, learning to play piano seemed like a good choice, even though I’d never actually seen a piano, let alone had any idea of what it took to play one.

When I mentioned it to Papi, he was excited. The idea of a concert career for me appealed to his vision of himself as a poet and of me as more than a spunky tomboy. He took it upon himself to find me a teacher and came up with the principal at my new school, an elderly gentleman with thinning hair and a thick mustache that seemed pasted on his delicate features. We wouldn’t have to pay anything, Papi said, because “he’s willing to give you lessons in exchange for some carpentry on his porch.”

On Sunday afternoon I set off with Papi for my first piano lesson. I had never seen a teacher outside of school, and as we neared Don Luis’s house, I was scared and dug my thumbnail into the other nails to scrape out any dirt that might have escaped the scratchy bristles of Mami’s vegetable brush.

“i
Buenas
!” he greeted us. I held on to Papi’s hand as to a lifeline, not trusting my knocking knees to hold me up. But Don Luis’s warm smile soon melted my fear into awe at finding myself in his house, away from the unpleasant implications of a student face-to-face with the school principal.

His house was detached from those around it, surrounded by flowers that bloomed in splendid colors and overwhelming fragrances. The inside was small but as ornate as the yard, with lace curtains, glass-topped tables, invitingly curvy furniture, and, dominating the back wall, an enormous reddish-brown piano, lustrous and dust free, majestic against a fabric-covered wall. I looked at Papi, who winked at me and smiled. We shared the joy of being in this room, in the home of an artist, a person whose life was gracious and carefree, whose furnishings and decorations were as impractical as ours were utilitarian.

“Well,” Papi said, “I’ll get to work outside.” He left me in the room, which suddenly became as foreign as another country.

Don Luis led me to the piano and showed me how to open it to reveal the gleaming white and black keys that welcomed me to a world as removed from my everyday life as I could ever hope to get. He ran his fingers across with a light touch, and I noticed how long and tapered they were, how feminine. “You place your hands on the keys like this.”

He led me through the lesson. In the background, Papi sawed and hammered in a rhythm much more musical than what I conjured from the piano. But when the hour was over, Don Luis insisted that I showed aptitude and suggested that in the future I should come at a different time because Papi’s hammering interfered with my timing.

After that, Mami walked me to Don Luis’s house then let me come home by myself. She didn’t insist that I dress up, as long as my clothes were neat and clean. But Don Luis cared what I wore. He often commented on the color of a blouse or the cut of a skirt, and once he suggested that next time I wear the same sleeveless scoop-neck dress. Its blue flowers, he said, were pretty. When I told Mami she made a face, and that night she muttered to Papi about “what that dirty old man is up to. You know she’s casi
señorita.”

Until then Mami had used the excuse that I was almost pubescent to warn me against playing with boys, to insist that I do something useful like housework or cooking, and to remind me to sit with my legs together. But now she was using the familiar phrase as a warning to Papi, not to me, as if it were he who had to do something about my semistatus. It excited me that being “casi
señorita”
meant my piano teacher saw me as more than a gifted student. The next time I went for my lesson I wore the sleeveless scoop-neck dress, which until then had been a favorite only because it kept me cool, and its broad skirt made it possible to sit cross-legged without my panties showing.

“So pretty,” Don Luis said as I came in. “So nice.”

We began the lesson with my tortured scales, but he interrupted to put his arm around me, to demonstrate, he said, the proper position of my wrist. He was as fragrant as the flowers outside his window, as slight, but he trembled with a warmth I’d never felt before, an almost imperceptible tremor that somehow transferred to me. I nudged him, respectfully, as if by accident. He returned his arm to his own body and slid over.

“Ahem,” he said and straightened his collar.

I continued playing but was unable to concentrate because I kept the corner of my eye on his restless hands, the elegant fingertips that danced against the pale blue fabric of his pants.

“No, no, no!” He took my fingers into his left hand and, with the right, slapped me hard.

I hopped off the bench, humiliated. “Why’d you do that?”

“You’re striking the keys like they’re conga drums. This is a very delicate instrument. The touch has to be light, light....” He wiggled his fingers in the air. “Now sit down and try again.”

I sat as far away from him as possible without falling off the bench, elbows butterflied to give me even more room. He stood up, walked behind me, bent over, and gently pushed my arms close to my ribcage, held them there.

“Better,” he said softly.

He hovered above me, his fingers on my elbows as light as flour, his skin shivering against mine. I pounded my unease into the keys, hoping the discordance would drive him away, but he held on. His breath fanned my hair as he bent closer. I hunched away from him and saw how the neckline on my dress puffed out for a clear view, to anyone standing above, of the slight mounds, like egg yolks, that had recently begun to ache on my chest. I jumped up and pulled the neckline of the dress up until my fists were against my chin. He stepped back, hands in front of him in a position similar to the one I used to keep Mami from striking me. His eyes were wide, his skin mottled pink and white, his mouth invisible behind his mustache.

“¡
Viejo asqueroso!”
I screamed in a voice and tone borrowed from my mother. “Filthy old man!”

Shame rose from the ground and wrapped me in a hot, turbulent funnel that I wished would lift me out of this room, away from my school principal’s startled blue eyes and quivering, elegant fingers. I shuddered with fear and rage. I felt soiled, as if his gaze had branded my naked chest. He spoke, but I couldn’t make sense of what he said, nor did I stay to listen. I backed out of his house, confused, arms wrapped around myself, head heavy, as if it had grown until I felt I had no body.

That night, when I told them what happened, Mami and Papi had a loud fight. I was not to study piano anymore, and Papi was to have a talk with Don Luis. As if she didn’t trust Papi to do it right, Mami went to school the next day to have her own discussion with the school principal. And for the rest of the year, whenever we passed in the hall, Don Luis sought the distance directly above and beyond me, as if I had become invisible as dust.

If I stepped out of our new house on Calle Castro Viña, up the block and to the left, I could walk through a quiet, shadowy street that curved in and out of unpaved alleys and, within minutes, be sitting at my grandmother’s table, eating
guanimes,
which were cornmeal patties stuffed with cheese, wrapped in a banana leaf, and then boiled. Mami didn’t make
guanimes.