My Broken Language

by Quiara Alegría Hudes

  El Coqui, a cuchifrito joint that rivaled Philly’s greasiest, was another get-me-outta-here. The bus picked me up a few blocks from campus and hissed away from the stonewalled fortress, past increasingly Spanish store signs, to a corner where ten bucks meant arroz, pernil, and whatever fritura was under the heat lamp.

  That summer, I came home sweaty and salty after days teaching Inner City camp songs with no AC. I’d allow myself ten minutes of sofa collapse, then head to the stereo and continue my project. I would dub mom and Pop’s entire music library while home. I returned sophomore year with a duffel of tapes like I was ready to set up shop on Kensington Ave, all I needed was a folding table. And one more thing clattered inside that duffel—my old Circuit City typewriter. Yale’s campus was full of clusters—posh labs, dungeon desks, cubbies with dogwoods out the window—but my erasable typewriter in the privacy of my own dorm room, I knew, would be another escape. I scored a rare single. There was room for a cot and a bookshelf, my sixty-one-key Casio, and a tape player. The mattress doubled as my desk. That cubbyhole privacy became my artist’s retreat. There, on a self-guided stroll through my past, I began to study the music of home.

  First came Ramito’s Parrandeando. The record was out of print, despite being the best in Ramito’s oeuvre. His catalogue was massive but vagaries of licensing and archival sloppiness meant that inferior Ramito was all Tower sold. So I worked off a tenth-generation dub, dissecting songs that would soon disappear. The cassette ran for eight or ten seconds before I paused it. I’d hum and plunk out notes, sketching in lightest pencil. I’d replay when necessary to check a tricky run. The ten-bar phrasing was counterintuitive to the eight-bar DNA of Schumann and Haydn that filled my classes. Chunk by chunk the melody filled out, in darker pencil. When the cuatro part was done, I played it on the Casio’s synth guitar, feeling its arc in my fingers. A busy line, showy notes. Then I rewound the tape and began again with the bongo, the trumpet, the vocals. I didn’t know the low notes were a guitarrón; I had never heard of the instrument. So, I transcribed what I took to be double bass. Some parts, like the cuatro, were intricate and dexterous. Others, like the güiro, were simple but required mind-boggling consistency. Each song took at least a day, plus extra to learn to play what I’d transcribed.

  Next came Celina y Reutilio. A Santa Barbara’s piano solo took me an entire afternoon, and it was still a rough facsimile. It was full of chromatic notes that crunched against the root chord. I was confident my Schoenberg-loving professor would be impressed, so I brought my transcription to Composers’ Seminar, year two, and played it for him. His eyes widened during that bewitching solo, but the song itself was folk music, basic stuff, he said with a wave of the hand. Dismissed. Moving on.

  I craved an intellectual home base, a richer conversation with peers. One that didn’t blindfold itself to my culture, that didn’t other entire hemispheres of art. A music professor took pity and slipped me a flyer after class: there was a fellowship for students of color across disciplines to form a two-year scholarly community. The blank field at the top of the application form read “Brief Project Description.” I pondered it while walking home, then grabbed a pen and jotted a phrase: salsa musical. Thus began two years of faculty mentorship, interdisciplinary peer review, and summer funding—twice as much as I’d made teaching summer camp. There was even separate money earmarked for research expenses.

  That’s how I bought three months of piano lessons with Elio Villafranca, an Afro-Cuban expat who’d come to the 215. Elio taught me to tap a clave with one hand while playing a montuno with the other. Swap and repeat. Finger independence—I’d learned that playing Bach fugues. Left-right independence—that had come with Czerny exercises. But rhythmic independence was a beast, and I gained newfound appreciation for the rigor syncopation demanded. I tensed up, accelerating through difficult rhythmic passages. Elio would shake his head, snap the pulse, and refuse to let me pull away. Mas lento, mas lento, as his claps insisted on slow. Every lesson began with “El Manicero,” a simple seven-note melody. Elio made me play those seven notes all summer, looping them until my shoulders relaxed into the polyrhythm. Tension and release. Release and tension. Under Elio’s tutelage I broke old habits, stumbled toward new ones, and learned how contradiction—syncopation—can feel smooth over time, even natural.

  Come August, when our lessons ended, there was $276 left in expense money. I took a Greyhound to New York and searched the bowels of the Times Square 1/9. I’d heard of the legendary kiosk. They specialized in Fania everything and salsa out-of-prints. I laid my cash on the counter. “What are the thirty CDs I gotta know?” Héctor Lavoe, Ruben Blades, Mongo Santamaria, Celia Cruz. Cultural pillars my parents knew well. I had to seek them out, buy them, study ’em ground-up. Just like mom claimed her old pots were some kind of merit badge. She had put in the time and I would, too. I wanted to disassemble those songs like a vintage engine, lay all the parts on my front lawn, reassemble it from scratch. To master the mechanics, to get at the crux of my hometown tunes.

  That Celia montuno became a song in scene one.

  That Mongo Santamaria jam, the cold-ass shekere? That became a dance number mid-show.

  Two- and four-bar patterns, in my hands, got flipped, switched, and adapted into new music, with new lyrics and a story.

  It was called Sweat of the River, Sweat of the Ocean, and yes, it was as earnest as it sounds. In the story, a Santera dies and her agnostic daughter has nine days to properly dismantle mom’s altars. This disassembly must be done according to strict ceremonial mandates—it is no task for cynics. Scene four included a coconut divination. In scene five, characters constructed a throne for Yemayá. There were lyrics about cowrie shells and cascarilla. To immerse myself in the poetics of Ifá, I studied anew all those books mom had given me. Four New World Rituals and The Way of the Orisa became late-night reading once again. My old underlines were compass needles, guiding me to powerful passages.

  I schlepped my Casio to the casting room, where I’d accompany vocal selections. Amber Cruzado walked in and sang “A Boy Like That”—what else was a Boricua Yalie gonna audition with? Felix Torres hadn’t prepared a song. Tone deaf, he claimed. This is a musical, I told him. I know, he responded, but there’s a play with Puerto Rican characters so what was I gonna do, stay home? I requested “Happy Birthday” or “Amazing Grace” a cappella. His voice trembled and a timid “How sweet the sound” emerged. He was not tone deaf, just shy. Amber and Felix landed the roles. Three more left to cast.

  Out in the hallway, waiting for names to be called, were campus Latinos of all hues and backgrounds. Unfamiliar faces mostly. Cats from American Studies and Psychology. All us Latino undergrads scanning the room going, “How do we not know each other?” Perhaps we had crossed paths at one of La Casa Cultural’s holiday parrandas, but Yale’s campus was diffuse. Here were aspiring Latino performers, squeezed on a few benches in a hallway, united by a script and some very rough demos. My doing. Cuz I had written a story. Just being in a room together felt, at Yale, like a statement. It almost resembled American Street. Except the host of today’s gathering was not Abuela, but me.

  Nick Chapel was a forty-five-seat black box. No backstage, and a playing space too small for musicians. Karaoke tracks would be the only way to pull off a musical. Gene gave me the keys to the studio. I had to wait till cover of night, when Sprague Hall closed, and I was under strict orders not to tell my coworkers. I was entrusted to manage the session alone.

  Aunt Linda, from dad’s side, and Uncle Rik drove up from New York. They would be playing piano and trumpet respectively. According to family lore, Linda had laid my bassinet beneath her keys so Bach’s Italian Concerto would be my first language. I couldn’t corroborate, but I did remember at five how she stacked two phone books on the bench and dropped the needle on Champion Jack Dupree. Play along, she said, and left me alone to figure it out. On weekend trips to New York, she had snuck me i
nto pot-hazed dives where Steel Pulse and Etta James brought the night to its knees. Queen Etta even put me on blast between songs. Girl’s too young, get her out, this is grown folks’ music. But I stayed. The exquisite populist music that Linda and Rik gifted me made Yale’s insularity all the bleaker. Now, for tonight’s session, they would be professional anchors to a mostly student band. Our Peruvian percussionist was getting a PhD. He was apparently monstrous on the timpani but when I told him the first song required a cáscara beat, he looked at me like, huh? I had to write it out for him, as Elio had for me. Our Spanish guitarist was another pre-doc. I had recorded his all-Bach recital and recruited him, assuming he had a Fender or six steel strings at least. Not so. The cat was a dedicated nylon-stringer. Nylons have a ruminative timbre ill suited to rhythmic parts, but you work with what you got.

  Setting levels was tricky. The mics were engineered for classical instruments in concert halls. They could pick up a mosquito in the third row, but bass amps and cowbells threatened to blow them out. After conducting the band through a take, I ran up to the third-floor console to check if we’d hit the red, which we often had. I adjusted the levels, ran back down, fixed microphone placement, ran back up to hit record, and then back down once more to conduct the next take. Balancing the sound was a game of whack-a-mole. For the nylon strings to be audible, I had to max out the mic level. But that meant catching a lot of bleed from the congas, even when they were exiled to an upstage corner. How to marry these disparate instruments, create cohesion from chaos, fix it in the mix?

  On opening night of Sweat of the River, Sweat of the Ocean, New Haven tasted a little like North Philly. Nuchi never traveled, Flor was on the lam, Abuela was frail, and Toña’s weight kept her close to home. But cars full of cousins and tías headed north on 95. The Perezes descended on Yale. Danito’s cheeks still were round from baby fat. A few whiskers waved hello on JJ’s upper lip. The boys had never stayed in a hotel room. “A hundred dollars a night, Qui Qui!” they said outside the theater. I took their tickets and handed them programs. “Yo, mom and Pop went all out! There’s two huge beds and free breakfast plus TV! We brought Sega and we about to play all night after the party!” Gabi could congratulate me in my actual name now: “I’m proud of you, Quiara!” I was no longer Ra Ra. And the boy came, too. No college girl had stolen him yet. Ginny and George purchased a few cast albums. In addition to being librettist, lyricist, composer, conductor, and sound engineer for Sweat of the River, I was box office, usher, and merchandise, too.

  I was also audience. Lights faded and a hush fell. Mom patted my hand. The room experienced that brief interstitial darkness where the day is over but the show has not begun. That ceremonial bit of suspension. I realized, in those few seconds, how the piece was saturated with mom’s influence. Her poetry and cadences unmistakable in the dialogue. Her morning tapes woven into my melodies. Lyrics inspired by Orisha books she gave me. Homage and grapple in every scene. Mom had sewn some costume pieces over winter break—a skirt for Yemayá, a gorro de Orisha ceremonial hat. But beyond that I had crawled into an artistic cave, losing contact with her as I wrote and rehearsed the show. Mom didn’t know what she was about to see. Nor, perhaps, did she know how closely I’d been watching all my life. The first few notes rang out—my spin on a traditional aguinaldo, played on nylon strings rather than the typical cuatro. But it was close enough: música jíbara filled an Ivy League basement. The cast sang in unison.

  Cowries para Yemayá, cowries para Yemayá

  In my altar I bring you treasures

  Te traigo tesoros en mi altar

  The numinous world of Ifá burst onstage. Rather than apologizing for the Orisha, as I’d done many times, rather than insisting they were not black magic or ignoring my friends’ disturbed gazes, I had created a space where the Orisha required no explanation. Where the Afro-Boricua could be hilarious and true, contradictory and complicated. I hadn’t fully clocked the implications while creating the thing. It had felt, in process, like following curiosity’s thread: longing to know the difference between danzón and son, between guaracha and guajiro. I had only meant to escape Schoenberg, for Christ’s sake, and spend a few summer months with bomba y plena on loop. Perhaps also to run toward my elders’ lexicon rather than away from it, to outgrow my inner escape artist. Perhaps, even, I’d gone rooting for a narrative complex enough to carry my name. But watching the show as mom grasped my hand, I understood the event as more than curiosity or personal reckoning. I was no longer an Ivy imposter. I had invited Yale to our family table and it had joined the feast, ready to break bread. In that way, I had bettered the institution.

  Mom squeezed my hand over and over, a Morse code of connection, wiping tears, mouthing thank you. That is, until scene four, the coconut divination. When the padrino character lifted his palms, mom gasped. “Is he going to throw the coconuts?” “Sh.” “Quiara, he can’t do that!” “Mom, sh!” “Stop him now, he has to be consecrated!” “Mom, be quiet!” “Quiara, those aren’t energies you just toy with—” The actor opened his cupped palms and the coconut pieces toppled to the stage. All four landed fruit-side up. “Aláfia!” mom gasped. The highest blessing. She laughed up at the lighting grid, exultant.

  Trumbull College hosted the after-party. North Philly Boricuas were pulling sparkling ciders off silver trays. Mom made a show of praising the student actors in Spanish; they relished her cariño. Our faculty host had even asked my input on catering. No question. “El Coqui on Grand. Here’s what to order.” I wrote down the proper dishes and there they were—arroz con gandules, guineos en escabeche, pollo guisado—in glistening buffet trays. The host had made one woeful addition—salad. Boricuas don’t eat salad at parties. No disrespect, but Puerto Rican salad makes the iceberg wedge look sophisticated—we just hack up cheap lettuce, spritz white vinegar on top, and let it wilt as we fight over pork cracklings. Cuca and Ginny praised the tostones. The crispiness-to-garlic-salt ratio was spot-on. “Qui Qui! How far is this place?” We made plans to hit up El Coqui for breakfast. I was psyched they’d hang in my favorite cuchifrito joint. There were murals of El Yunque on all the walls, plus El Coqui’s Chinatown plates added to the experience. Arroz con pollo tastes better when it’s served on Year of the Pig melamine. Danito shoved catered alcapurrias in his face till Titi Ginny scolded him for embarrassing the family. “But, mom, dem jawns beat the bricks they be giving out at Porky’s Point.” And we had to laugh because Porky’s Point was responsible for half of all Gas-X sales in North Philly.

  There was no DJ so I got full rein on the CD player. For the first hour it was all Cachao—old-school, midtempo, loosen up the vibe. Now I popped in Celia and “No Me Cambie Camino” busted out with that saucy opening montuno. Cuca began pulling my roommates into salsa spins and I wanted to find mom, to dance with her, but I realized she had left the party.

  I found her in a powder room far from the action. Past the caterers in the kitchen. Tucked beneath a stairwell. The door was cracked open and mom was talking to herself. “Mom, are you okay?” “Sh, come inside.” Her palms cradled four coconut pieces like baby birds. “Mom! Did you steal our props?” Rather than answer, she closed her eyes and recited mantras over the fruit. Finally, she kissed the coconut pieces and handed them to me. “I slipped them in my pocketbook after the show. Now at least they have the proper intention attached to them. Keep them in water so they don’t dry out.” Felix Torres, the actor playing the babalao, threw aláfia at every single show.

  The Serenity Prayer

  Flor reappeared Thanksgiving junior year. An unannounced comeback years after the bathtub fiasco. I keyed through our heavy front door—delicious how it turned with satin ease, one of the original set, grooves well worn. Familiar click of the bolt, truest welcome. There is no colder homecoming than a new finicky lock. My duffel parked on the sofa and no sooner did I holler “Guess who’s baaaaack?” than Flor danced at me from the kitchen. She salsa-stepped
past the table, hips in a Celia Cruz fast-forward. The radio was full-tilt—important to ensure delicious pasteles. Thanksgiving meant blowing out the subwoofer for two days of meal prep. Flor held her hands above her head—No me toques! My fingers are covered in masa!—and an assault of cheek kisses was upon me, with squeaks, sniffs, and mews for emphasis. She nibbled my shoulder, smelled my neck. She smiled that Flor smile so warm and innocent it made her tattoos seem like Sunday comics.

  “Qui Quiiiii­iiiii­iiiii­ii! I bet you’re surprised to see me!”

  Instructions flew my way. I was to describe Yale’s campus. Then play my latest Chopin. Was I still with the blond, el gringo, from high school? Ay thanks god, Abuela loves that boy, I gotta meet him! Will he come for Thanksgiving? Qui Qui, grrrrrrrrl, we got catching up to do! So I was a music major at Yale, huh? Did I teach them to salsa yet? Are they real conceited there?

  Flor scrubbed the masa from her hands—two squirts of Palmolive—and was hungry for details. Her white turtleneck looked very L.L. Bean, a surprising style choice, but the sleeves were rolled for food prep, showing more tattoos than I remembered. Her skin was bronzer than last time, cheeks downright supple. Her butt was juicy and filled her jeans with confidence. Good signs. “I really missed you, Flor.” “Me too, Qui Qui. We’ll talk. We’ll talk.” We mashed plátanos for pasteles, found the porcelain in the basement, searched for matching cloth napkins, played an old parranda tape. It wasn’t Christmas yet but we were singing “Dame la mano paloma!” to some scratchy cuatro riff. Through it all, Flor reminding me: “We’ll talk, Qui Qui. We’ll talk.” When the lasagna was baking and the arroz soft to the bite, she led me to the upstairs couch. It was ceremonial, sitting together like that—the formality of a confession, the eye contact of a friend. She began by reaching into her shirt and pulling out a gold nameplate. It didn’t read Flor, but rather N.A. Narcotics Anonymous. To honor her anniversary of being clean. She spoke softly, with pride that weighed little more than a feather. There were keychains for each sober month, goalposts in a marathon. But she had run a mile and treated herself to a necklace. I want you to know, she said. I ain’t proud of things I done, but I ain’t ashamed neither. She painted sobriety’s landscape, detail by detail. Cocaine’s lovely high, the loneliness of cravings. She quit booze, too, so no more Bud Light in Titi Ginny’s backyard. Newports and Kools still lived in her purse. Tattoos helped. The twelve steps were a work in progress. Lots of amends still unmade. Lots of damage done, zero time machines. No Band-Aids big enough for the wounds inflicted. Perhaps her children would forgive her one day; for now they were battling their adolescent demons.