It was true, but she did send her kids to church and always with money for the offering basket. And she worked long hours at the hospital so we could go to school at Blessed Sacrament. Shouldn’t Father Dolan be forgiving if she needed help? Even if he thought she wasn’t Christian enough, I reasoned, shouldn’t he be more Christian? My reaction was of a piece with the frustration I felt when he stood there at the altar during the Mass, with his back turned to us, as priests did in those days before Vatican II. Show us what you’re doing up there! I always thought. Now when he turned his back on us, it felt like just what it appeared to be: rejection. I was delighted when, a few years later under Pope Paul VI, the Church turned its priests around to face the congregants.
Another week passed in darkness and silence. Another friend of my mother’s, Cristina, asked the pastor at her church to visit Mami. He’d never even met her before, and of course she’d never been to his church, which was Baptist. But that didn’t stop him from coming. They talked quietly together for hours. I was impressed that he spoke Spanish; whether or not he had anything to say that could help, at least he cared enough to try. That I respected.
As spring turned to summer, Mami stayed shut in her darkened room, and I found myself on summer vacation longing for school to start. I didn’t feel like playing outside. I couldn’t articulate exactly what I feared, but I knew I should stay close by and keep an eye on things.
My solace and only distraction that summer was reading. I discovered the pleasure of chapter books and devoured a big stack of them. The Parkchester Library was my haven. To thumb through the card catalog was to touch an infinite bounty, more books than I could ever possibly exhaust. My choices were more or less random. There was no one in my family who could point me toward children’s classics, no teacher who took an interest, and it never occurred to me to ask the librarian for guidance. My mother had subscribed to Highlights for Junior and me, and Reader’s Digest for herself, but by now I was reading whole issues of the Digest myself, cover to cover. “Laughter, the Best Medicine,” was what I sorely needed then. Sometimes when a story caught my imagination, I would search the library for the original book—I understood that these were excerpts or abridgments—but I never had any luck, and that mystified me. Now I realize that a tiny public library in a poor neighborhood would be unlikely to receive new releases.
My favorite book was one that Dr. Fisher had lent me. I had seen it, bound in burgundy red leather, on the shelf in his office and asked about it. He pulled the heavy volume down and said I could keep it as long as I liked. Those stories of Greek gods and heroes sustained me that summer and beyond. I imagined the gods of classical antiquity as versions of Abuelita’s familiar spirits, who interfered in human affairs and kept open lines of communication to the Bronx. The heroes were admirable if flawed, as compelling as any comic book superhero to a kid who was hungry for escape, and there was grandeur in their struggles that the Flash could not match. Riven by conflicting impulses, these immortals seemed more realistic, more accessible, than the singular, all-forgiving, unchanging God of my Church. It was in that book of Dr. Fisher’s, too, that I learned that my own name is a version of Sophia, meaning wisdom. I glowed with that discovery. And I never did return the book.
USUALLY, when I didn’t understand what was going on with someone, I could listen carefully and observe until I figured things out. But with my mother, still sitting alone in darkness behind her closed door, there were no clues. As far as I knew, when Papi was alive, they did nothing but fight. If they weren’t screaming, they were putting up a stone wall of bitter silence between them. I couldn’t remember ever having seen them happy together. And so her sadness, if that’s what it was, seemed irrational to me.
Abuelita’s terrible pain seemed less mysterious, if only because I was so attuned to her feelings. The parties ended. There was no more music and dancing, no more shopping for chickens, no more calling the spirits. Abuelita didn’t dream the winning numbers anymore. “My son died and my luck died too,” she said. She was angry at the spirits, it seemed, for not warning her that something bad would happen to her son, for not even giving her a chance to protect him. The week after Papi died, she forgot, in her distress, to place her usual bet, only to find out later that the winning number had been the number of his gravestone. It was as if the spirits were mocking her.
And yet it had been years since I’d seen her talking to Papi as her beloved firstborn, with that glow of adoration that lit up her face. On holidays when he came with us to Abuelita’s house, he would sit silently, looking out the window, the same way he did at home. He might warm up if there was a ball game on TV. Before we got our own set, he might even come just to watch the game, then one of his few real pleasures. Those baseball games, with some good shouting for a change, were such a rare semblance of normal family life that on those nights I would fall asleep with a smile that wouldn’t go away.
But still, looking at it rationally—and I was a very rational child—why should the parties stop when Papi hardly ever came anyway? Why would his not being there make a difference now when it hadn’t before? Why was even Titi Carmen so overcome with grief at the funeral that she tried to jump into the grave and had to be dragged out? I never once saw her eager to spend time with Papi when he was alive.
What was all this adult misery about? I had my theory. They must all feel guilty. If Papi slowly poisoned himself to death, then of course it must be Mami’s fault (as had long been the theory), or maybe Abuelita now blamed herself and the failure of her spirit powers. Titi Carmen too might have faulted herself for not interceding. And how many times had I heard Titi Judy criticized for Tío Vitín’s failure to visit the family more often—even though Tío Vitín was Abuelita’s son and Titi Judy was just his wife? That was how their minds worked: if a man did something wrong, there was a woman to blame, whether wife, mother, sister, or sister-in-law. I recognized that it must be horribly painful to imagine you could have stopped him but didn’t. But I also knew all that was nonsense. There was no saving Papi from himself.
IT IS a day like any other, and the door is still closed. My rational self hasn’t yet noticed it, but I can’t take another minute of this. Before I know what’s happening, I’m pounding with both fists on that stupid, blank, faceless door, and when she opens it, I’m screaming in her face, “Enough! You’ve got to stop this! You’re miserable and you’re making us miserable.”
Such screaming hasn’t been heard in the house in months. She’s just standing there, blinking at me. I can’t help myself, I’m still screaming. “What’s wrong with you? Papi died. Are you going to die too? Then what happens to me and Junior? Stop already, Mami, stop it!”
I turn around and march up the hall to the front bedroom, slamming the door behind me as hard as I can. I grab a book and lie down on the bed. But with my hands trembling and my eyes full of tears, there’s no way I can read. I close the book and sob for a very long time. I haven’t done that in ages. Crying like a stupid baby.
Seven
IT WASN’T UNTIL I began to write this book, nearly fifty years after the events of that sad year, that I came to a truer understanding of my mother’s grief. For most of my life, my sense of my father, and of my parents’ relationship, was confined by the narrow aperture through which I watched them as a child. That sense was frozen in time when my father died. My theory of guilt-induced grief was hardly more sophisticated than Lucy’s psychiatric help at five cents a pop. The vague shame overhanging my father’s alcoholism silenced any conversation among the adults that might have caused me to question what I thought. As we grew, Junior and I would speak more openly to each other, but he could add nothing to my analysis. Although he was six when Papi died, he has virtually no memories of our father or of the time before his death. And so, with the vocabulary of hindsight, I came to assume that the intensity of my mother’s grief implied some form of clinical depression that was never treated but that somehow resolved itself eventually.
&nbs
p; I had never before in all these years asked that very intelligent and perceptive woman for her own version of events. I would be startled by what I uncovered and grateful even at this remove to meet a happier version of my father—and my mother—than I ever knew. My parents’ relationship was richer and more complex than a child could imagine, and the stories that have come to light are all the more precious to me for having been captured as my mother’s memory is fading fast with age.
——
SOMETIMES THE PEOPLE closest to us are those we know the least.
“Where should I begin, Sonia?”
“Begin at the beginning, Mami.”
MY MOTHER’S BIRTH, in 1927, was bad news. It was the reason, or at least the occasion, as she understood it, for her father’s abandonment of the family. Her own mother was sick, an invalid, as far back as she could remember. She believed her father was somehow to blame for that, but the story was never clear, since nobody spoke about him in their home. Toward the end, the sickness afflicted her mother’s mind as well as her body, and she would wander off. Celina would wake up at night alone in the bed they shared, the door open. She would find her mother by moonlight in the sugarcane field, take her by the hand, and lead her back to bed.
Home was a little wooden shack of a house near Lajas, in the middle of the fields, with a dirt floor in the kitchen and an outhouse. There was no running water. It was the child Celina’s job to draw water for cooking from the hand pump at her uncle’s house by the road and carry the pail back carefully, without spilling. For washing they collected rainwater in drums.
The farm had belonged to her mother, but she had sold it to raise bail when her husband landed in some drunken trouble. A brother, he of the water pump, provided some help for the bedridden mother of six, but grudgingly. There had been a prouder time, and traces of it were still visible in the way that Celina’s grandmother carried herself, in her long crinoline skirts and high lace collars in the Spanish style. “Raise your head!” she demanded if she caught Celina hunching over. “You don’t have to be ashamed of anything.” She was strict and insisted on manners. Even Celina’s brothers, rough as they were and country people, knew how to be polite.
Celina was the youngest, and her siblings raised her, their mother helpless. Aurora found work sewing. When Celina was still a toddler, Aurora, sixteen years older, was the first to marry. That’s when she left for San Germán, though she never really left behind the responsibilities that had cut short her childhood. She would come back every two weeks to collect piecework from women who sewed handkerchiefs, and to pay them; she was always in a bad mood, always a dark cloud hanging over her. She taught Celina to sew too. Celina had to make two dozen handkerchiefs a week, stitching the little hems and ironing them. She didn’t get paid, of course. That work was her contribution to the household. Aurora made the clothes and paid for shoes, one pair every year.
Mario Baez, the eldest brother, who was nicknamed Mayo, fed the family. He went fishing in the mornings at La Parguera before reporting to his job loading the sugarcane wagons at the train station. When he got married, he built another little house for himself, closer to the road, and his wife, Maria, did the cooking. But Celina ate mostly fruits that fell off the trees: poking around in the grass like a little bird, looking for mangoes, grosellas, tamarindos … She didn’t like fish.
In the absence of a father, discipline was in Mayo’s hands, and he was rough about it. Celina got the belt for climbing a tree, for coming home late from school, having stopped to wade in the stream. For standing outside Tío Foro’s store, where the men were drinking, so she could listen to the jukebox. For buying candy with the three cents they gave her to mail a letter. That was a bad one; she never did that again. Her mother would get up to put sebo de flande on the welts, Celina crying from the pain and her mother crying too as she rubbed the sticky salve into the child’s skin. Pedro, the brother closest to her in age, never got the belt. Pedro was the dear little one, the light of Mayo’s eye. Celina was only trouble.
She hated Mayo for those beatings, hated him with such a passion that she swore she would never go back to Puerto Rico after she left. But of course she did, and now my mother tempers her judgment with forgiveness: he was doing the best that he knew how; a girl gone wrong would have been a terrible load to carry. With their mother helpless and their father missing, it was kids raising kids and just her bad luck to have been the youngest. At least they sent her to school. She was grateful for that, and in her warm remembrances of school I sense the stirrings of her passion for education.
When she was very small, she went to a tiny little school nearby, and later all the way to Lajas, about an hour away if she had to walk. Walking was hard because her shoes were always too small, so she’d wind up carrying them, barefoot. But often a farmer’s cart would pass and she’d thumb a ride, with the bullocks swaying ahead of her and the sugarcane behind. When she wandered home afterward, there was the temptation of streams and the house where an old woman would wave to her to come have a snack.
School was a pleasure because it got her out of the house, but it was not easy. The kids were cruel in a thousand small ways. They would attempt any kind of silly burla—making faces or doing a little dance behind the back of the teacher as she wrote on the board—just to make Celina laugh her nervous laugh. Then she would be the one to be punished. Whack! It was just the way she would then punish her own pupils. When she got home and there was no one to play with or talk to, she taught her lessons to the trees: “Children, repeat after me!” And when they didn’t get it right, she would swat them with a stick. It helped her remember the lessons, and she liked being surrounded by the trees. Nature was a solace and a kind of freedom.
The best part of school was the library and carrying home a book. She loved to read, hoarded magazines and pamphlets, any scrap of writing she could find. When the sewing was finished, she read stories into the evening, by the light of the quinqué with the moths dancing around the kerosene flame.
It was an evening like that when her mother died, when she was nine, the same age I was when Papi died. People came to the house that very same night for the wake, drinking and talking until dawn, with the quinqué burning all night long. They brought ice to put on top of the box and under it, since there was no embalming, nothing to slow the ravages of the hot days and nights. They buried Doña Francisca Toro Torres in the morning.
After her mother died, what little remained of the household was broken up. Pedro moved in with Mayo, and Celina was sent to live with Aurora in San Germán. Her brother Abraham had already left for Mayagüez. He was young still, but old enough to run off with a woman and old enough to step into the ring. He loved boxing, but he didn’t know how and he lost every bout.
The house in Barrio Bosque where Aurora lived with her husband was just one street over from the train station. From the little room by the kitchen where Celina slept, she could hear the sound of the train escaping down the tracks. It was the last link to Lajas, to so many people who vanished from her life. Pedro came to visit a couple of times but gradually lost touch. He got married, joined the army. She never saw her grandmother again. That was just the way it was. There was never any choice, so there was not much room for feelings. But it could have been worse: usually orphans got sent to work in rich people’s houses. Aurora had saved her from that fate.
Aurora was busy with the handkerchiefs, working long hours and traveling to collect piecework from other women who sewed. Celina still made her two dozen handkerchiefs every week. She cleaned the house on Saturdays and did small things to make it nice, picking flowers to put beside the photographs in frames. They had electricity, though the toilet was still outside. Aurora’s husband, Emmanuel, was an old man and crazy in his own way. He was a blacksmith, but he spent more time fussing over his son Alfred than he spent working. Alfred was just a baby but the center of his universe, and people talked about how Emmanuel seemed weirdly obsessed with the child.
In sch
ool Celina was lonely all the time and so quiet that practically no one knew she was there. She lived in the library and often read so long that there was no time left to study. Her grades suffered, but she knew a wealth of words from those precious books, words that nobody would ever guess she knew.
Walking between school and home, or during the break at lunchtime, she had the freedom of the town. San Germán is like a cap on the dome of a hill, with a sky that’s bigger than you’d expect in a place where the forest closes in tightly around. She would wander and look at the fine houses that seemed to be dressed in lace, with colored windows and filigreed gates and porches that wrapped around like shawls. She used to go to the post office just to watch the girls come from the college to mail their letters, with their chaperones waiting outside, lined up on the bench: nannies for young women, really. Only the rich girls or the very intelligent ones went to college. What would happen to a girl who thought herself neither?
She didn’t know then how to make friends. If she had any at all, they were just the neighbors, people who recognized the same raggedy girl passing by every day. There was a lonely old lady who lived down the street in Barrio Bosque. Her granddaughter had become a prostitute and didn’t visit anymore. So Celina went to sit with the grandmother in the afternoons.
Aurora was very strict, very religious, and fearful of anything fun, but she did have a few friends who came to visit. Celina would listen to the stories they told over coffee: about who was promenading in the plaza, the ladies on the left and the men on the right; about tea dances at the Hotel Parador Oasis. Walking home from school, she would peek into the entrance and catch a glimpse of shadowy pink archways, but she would never set foot inside. When she woke in the middle of the night to singing and guitars in the street, she could guess who was being serenaded: the same girl who sat there on the balcony in the afternoon, dressed like a princess with her fingernails painted.
My Beloved World Page 6
