When I Was Puerto Rican (39 page)

Often I would be asked to translate for other women at the welfare office, since Mami told everyone I spoke good English. Their stories were no different from Mami’s. They needed just a little help until they could find a job again.

Every once in a while I could tell that the people I translated for were lying.

“What do you think?” they’d ask. “Should I say my husband has disappeared, or that he’s a
sinvergüenza
who refuses to help with the kids?”

Women with accents that weren’t Puerto Rican claimed they were so that they could reap the benefits of American citizenship. A woman I was translating for once said, “These
gringos
don’t know the difference anyway. To them we’re all spiks.”

I didn’t know what to do. To tell the interviewer that I knew the woman was lying seemed worse than translating what the woman said as accurately as I could and letting the interviewer figure it out. But I worried that if people from other countries passed as Puerto Ricans in order to cheat the government, it reflected badly on us.

I never knew if my translations helped, but once an old
jíbara
took my hands in hers and kissed them, which made me feel like the best person in the world.

“Where have you been?” Mami screamed one day when I came home after school later than usual.

“In the library.” I showed her the stack of books.

“You know I don’t want you out after dark. The streets are dangerous. What if something were to happen?”

“Nothing happened ...”

“Don’t you talk back!”

“I’m not talking ...”

My sisters and brothers scurried away. Tata, Don Julio, and Chico left their domino game in the kitchen to see what was going on.

“Monin, leave her alone,” Tata said, her hand on Mami’s shoulder.

“Don’t you tell me how to raise my children!” Mami screamed, backing away from her.

My knees shook. What if Mami knew that I hitched my skirt up so I wouldn’t look so dumb? What if she knew that I sometimes wore eye makeup and washed it off before I came home? What if some nosy neighbor had told her that a boy had once walked me halfway home from the library?

I stood by the door, arms laden with books, my winter coat still on, too terrified to move. I knew I must have done something to cause her rage, but I didn’t know what it could be. I wasn’t about to admit to anything before she accused me.

“You think just because you can speak a little English you can do anything you like!”

“That’s not true.”

She came at me, her hands raised, ready to strike. My books dropped to the floor, and before I knew it I was holding on to her hands, gripping the wrists tight. I didn’t know I was that strong, and Mami was surprised too, because she backed off, her face startled.

“Hit me, go ahead. You can kill me if that makes you feel better,” I screamed loud enough for the world to hear. I stood in front of her, shaking all over, hands at my sides, martyrlike, fully aware of the dramatic moment that might backfire but willing to take the chance.

“What?” she croaked and then came at me again. I didn’t move. She stopped just short of a blow. I kept my eyes on hers. She must have seen the fear in them, and the defiance. “Get out of my sight,” she snarled, and Tata grabbed me and dragged me into the kitchen.

Mami and I didn’t speak for days. But she never, ever, hit me again.

After we came to Brooklyn, all our time was spent indoors. We lived cooped up because our neighborhood was filled with “
gente mala,”
bad people. The little girl who was raped and thrown over the side of a twenty-one-story building in the projects was only one of the gory crimes I read about in El
Diario.
Every day there were murders, rapes, muggings, knifings, and shootings. In Puerto Rico the crimes had always happened somewhere else, in cities far from Macún. But in Brooklyn bad things happened on our block.

One day Don Julio, who already looked like a boxer who had taken too many hits, came home bloodied and bruised, his eyes lost behind swollen cheeks and nose.

“¡Ay, Señor, Dios Santo!”
Mami cried. “What happened to you?”

“Some kids jumped me as I came out of the subway station.”

They had used bats, pipes, and chains. Once they had him on the ground, they stole his wallet, which Don Julio claimed had only four dollars in it, and his Timex watch, a gift from his oldest daughter.

“They didn’t see my gold chain with the medallion of the Holy Virgin.” He pulled it out from inside his shirt and kissed it. “I guess She was looking out for me, or they would have killed me.”

It was still early, around 7:30 P.M., when Don Julio was attacked in the same subway station where Mami took the train every day. From that day forward I sat pretending to read by the window, watching for Mami to come down the street when she was supposed to. Every minute that went by and she wasn’t home added fuel to the images from the newspapers of women lying in pools of blood on cracked sidewalks, their handbags torn from their arms, split open, the contents spilled over them like garbage.

The men they beat up; the women, they raped. I couldn’t stop thinking about it as I walked to school, or home from the library: every man was a potential rapist, and every dark doorway was a potential hiding place for someone waiting to hurt me.

There were gangs, whose slogans and names were painted in bold letters on the sides of buildings or on sidewalks.

“Don’t ever walk down that side of the street,” a classmate told me once. “It’s not our turf.”

“What does that mean,
turf?”

“It’s a part of the neighborhood that belongs to a gang.”

“But what if I have to visit someone on that side of the street?”

“Believe me, you don’t want to know anyone over there,” she claimed.

Mami said that at night gangs roamed the streets doing all sorts of mischief.

“Like what?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know,” she warned.

When the days became shorter and night came earlier, we were only allowed out to go to school. We couldn’t even go to the
bodega
across the street. When the weather was warm and people sat out on their stoops, Mami insisted we stay inside, unless she could come out to watch us. Not even Tata was trusted with keeping an eye on us, and least of all me, since I’d already proved an unreliable baby-sitter.

If I told Mami exactly where I was going, who I was going to see, how long I would be there, and when I’d be back, she’d sometimes let me go off alone on a Saturday afternoon.

“Don’t walk on any of the side streets,” she’d warn. “Keep to the avenues. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t accept any rides. If there are too many people milling around a sidewalk, cross the street and walk on the other side.”

In Puerto Rico when Mami had laid out the same general rules, I’d found ways of, if not completely ignoring them, at least bending them to suit my curiosity. Her caution then seemed to have more to do with keeping us from hurting ourselves. Now it was directed at preventing other people from hurting us.

I couldn’t imagine why neighbors would harm me or my sisters and brothers. But I also couldn’t imagine how they could help us if we needed them. We lived separated by thick doors with several bolts, windows with iron grates, peepholes. No one dropped in unannounced to chat. An unexpected knock would set our hearts thumping, and we’d look at one another with questions in our eyes before peeping through the pinhole on the door, or opening it a crack, with the chain secured across the narrow gap.

“I can’t depend on anyone,” Mami often told us, and we knew that to be true.
El Bosso
could lay her off any minute. The welfare workers never believed a strong-looking woman like Mami couldn’t find work. Tata was sometimes dependable, but just as often she was incoherent, or laid up with aches and pains. Our neighbors were strangers, or worse,
gente mala.
There was an extended family, Mami’s aunts, uncles, and cousins, who dropped in and out of our lives with warm clothes, advice, and warnings. But Mami was too proud to ask them for more than they volunteered, and we were all developing the same stubborn pride, behind which our frightened selves hid, pretending everything was all right.

A SHOT AT IT

Te conozco bacalao, aunque vengas disfrazao.

I recognize you salted codfish, even if you’re in disguise.

W
hile Francisco was still alive, we had moved to Ellery Street. That meant I had to change schools, so Mami walked me to P.S. 33, where I would attend ninth grade. The first week I was there I was given a series of tests that showed that even though I couldn’t speak English very well, I read and wrote it at the tenth-grade level. So they put me in 9-3, with the smart kids.

One morning, Mr. Barone, a guidance counsellor, called me to his office. He was short, with a big head and large hazel eyes under shapely eyebrows. His nose was long and round at the tip. He dressed in browns and yellows and often perched his tortoiseshell glasses on his forehead, as if he had another set of eyes up there.

“So,” he pushed his glasses up, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I don’t know.”

He shuffled through some papers. “Let’s see here ... you’re fourteen, is that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you’ve never thought about what you want to be?” When I was very young, I wanted to be a
jíbara.
When I was older, I wanted to be a cartographer, then a topographer. But since we’d come to Brooklyn, I’d not thought about the future much.

“No, sir.”

He pulled his glasses down to where they belonged and shuffled through the papers again.

“Do you have any hobbies?” I didn’t know what he meant. “Hobbies, hobbies,” he flailed his hands, as if he were juggling, “things you like to do after school.”

“Ah, yes.” I tried to imagine what I did at home that might qualify as a hobby. “I like to read.”

He seemed disappointed. “Yes, we know that about you.” He pulled out a paper and stared at it. “One of the tests we gave you was an aptitude test. It tells us what kinds of things you might be good at. The tests show that you would be good at helping people. Do you like to help people?”

I was afraid to contradict the tests. “Yes, sir.”

“There’s a high school we can send you where you can study biology and chemistry which will prepare you for a career in nursing.”

I screwed up my face. He consulted the papers again.

“You would also do well in communications. Teaching maybe.”

I remembered Miss Brown standing in front of a classroom full of rowdy teenagers, some of them taller than she was.

“I don’t like to teach.”

Mr. Barone pushed his glasses up again and leaned over the stack of papers on his desk. “Why don’t you think about it and get back to me,” he said, closing the folder with my name across the top. He put his hand flat on it, as if squeezing something out. “You’re a smart girl, Esmeralda. Let’s try to get you into an academic school so that you have a shot at college.”