by Junot Díaz
The weather was no good. He was sick often but was able to work through it and succeeded in saving up enough money to start looking for a wife to marry. It was the old routine, the oldest of the postwar maromas. Find a citizen, get married, wait, and then divorce her. The routine was well practiced and expensive and riddled with swindlers.
A friend of his at work put him in touch with a portly balding blanco named el General. They met at a bar. El General had to eat two plates of greasy onion rings before he talked business. Look here friend, el General said. You pay me fifty bills and I bring you a woman that’s interested. Whatever the two of you decide is up to you. All I care is that I get paid and that the women I bring are for real. You get no refunds if you can’t work something out with her.
Why the hell don’t I just go out looking for myself?
Sure, you can do that. He patted vegetable oil on Papi’s hand. But I’m the one who takes the risk of running into Immigration. If you don’t mind that then you can go out looking anywhere you want.
Even to Papi fifty bucks wasn’t exorbitant but he was reluctant to part with it. He had no problem buying rounds at the bar or picking up a new belt when the colors and the moment suited him but this was different. He didn’t want to deal with any more change. Don’t get me wrong: it wasn’t that he was having fun. No, he’d been robbed twice already, his ribs beaten until they were bruised. He often drank too much and went home to his room, and there he’d fume, spinning, angry at the stupidity that had brought him to this freezing hell of a country, angry that a man his age had to masturbate when he had a wife, and angry at the blinkered existence his jobs and the city imposed on him. He never had time to sleep, let alone to go to a concert or the museums that filled entire sections of the newspapers. And the roaches. The roaches were so bold in his flat that turning on the lights did not startle them. They waved their three-inch antennas as if to say, Hey puto, turn that shit off. He spent five minutes stepping on their carapaced bodies and shaking them from his mattress before dropping into his cot and still the roaches crawled on him at night. No, he wasn’t having fun but he also wasn’t ready to start bringing his family over. Getting legal would place his hand firmly on that first rung. He wasn’t so sure he could face us so soon. He asked his friends, most of whom were in worse financial shape than he was, for advice.
They assumed he was reluctant because of the money. Don’t be a pendejo, hombre. Give fulano his money and that’s it. Maybe you make good, maybe you don’t. That’s the way it is. They built these barrios out of bad luck and you got to get used to that.
He met el General across from the Boricua Cafeteria and handed him the money. A day later the man gave him a name: Flor de Oro. That isn’t her real name of course, el General assured Papi. I like to keep things historical.
They met at the cafeteria. Each of them had an empanada and a glass of soda. Flor was businesslike, about fifty. Her gray hair coiled in a bun on top of her head. She smoked while Papi talked, her hands speckled like the shell of an egg.
Are you Dominican? Papi asked.
No.
You must be Cuban then.
One thousand dollars and you’ll be too busy being an American to care where I’m from.
That seems like a lot of money. Do you think once I become a citizen I could make money marrying people?
I don’t know.
Papi threw two dollars down on the counter and stood.
How much then? How much do you have?
I work so much that sitting here is like having a week’s vacation. Still I only have six hundred.
Find two hundred more and we got a deal.
Papi brought her the money the next day stuffed in a wrinkled paper bag and in return was given a pink receipt. When do we get started? he asked.
Next week. I have to start on the paperwork right away.
He pinned the receipt over his bed and before he went to sleep, he checked behind it to be sure no roaches lurked. His friends were excited and the boss at the cleaning job took them out for drinks and appetizers in Harlem, where their Spanish drew more looks than their frumpy clothes. Their excitement was not his; he felt as if he’d moved too precipitously. A week later, Papi went to see the friend who had recommended el General.
I still haven’t gotten a call, he explained. The friend was scrubbing down a counter.
You will. The friend didn’t look up. A week later Papi lay in bed, drunk, alone, knowing full well that he’d been robbed.
He lost the cleaning job shortly thereafter for punching the friend off a ladder. He lost his apartment and had to move in with a familia and found another job frying wings and rice at a Chinese take-out joint. Before he left his flat, he wrote an account of what had happened to him on the pink receipt and left it on the wall as a warning to whatever fool came next to take his place. Ten cuidado, he wrote. These people are worse than sharks.
He sent no money home for close to six months. Mami’s letters would be read and folded and tucked into his well-used bags.
Papi met her on the morning before Christmas, in a laundry, while folding his pants and knotting his damp socks. She was short, had daggers of black hair pointing down in front of her ears and lent him her iron. She was originally from La Romana, but like so many Dominicans had eventually moved to the Capital.
I go back there about once a year, she told Papi. Usually around Pascua to see my parents and my sister.
I haven’t been home in a long long time. I’m still trying to get the money together.
It will happen, believe me. It took me years before I could go back my first time.
Papi found out she’d been in the States for six years, a citizen. Her English was excellent. While he packed his things in his nylon bag, he considered asking her to the party. A friend had invited him to a house in Corona, Queens, where fellow Dominicans were celebrating la Noche Buena together. He knew from a past party that up in Queens the food, dancing and single women came in heaps.
Four children were trying to pry open the plate at the top of a dryer to reach the coin mechanism underneath. My fucking quarter is stuck, a kid was shouting. In the corner, a student, still in medical greens, was trying to read a magazine and not be noticed but as soon as the kids were tired of the machine, they descended on him, pulling at his magazine and pushing their hands into his pockets. He began to shove back.
Hey, Papi said. The kids threw him the finger and ran outside. Fuck all spiks! they shrieked.
Niggers, the medical student muttered. Papi pulled the drawstring shut on his bag and decided against asking her. He knew the rule: Strange is the woman who goes strange places with a complete stranger. Instead, Papi asked her if he could practice his English on her one day. I really need to practice, he said. And I’d be willing to pay you for your time.
She laughed. Don’t be ridiculous. Stop by when you can. She wrote her number and address in crooked letters.
Papi squinted at the paper. You don’t live around here?
No but my cousin does. I can give you her number if you want.
No, this will be fine.
He had a grand time at the party and actually avoided the rum and the six-packs he liked to down. He sat with two older women and their husbands, a plate of food on his lap (potato salad, pieces of roast chicken, a stack of tostones, half an avocado and a tiny splattering of mondongo out of politeness to the woman who’d brought it) and talked about his days in Santo Domingo. It was a lucid enjoyable night that would stick out in his memory like a spike. He swaggered home around one o’clock, bearing a plastic bag loaded with food and a loaf of telera under his arm. He gave the bread to the shivering man sleeping in the hallway of his building.
When he called Nilda a few days later he found out from a young girl who spoke in politely spaced words that she was at work. Papi left his name and called back that night. Nilda answered.
Ramón, you should have called me yesterday. It was a good day to start since neither of us had work.<
br />
I wanted to let you celebrate the holiday with your family.
Family? she clucked. I only have a daughter here. What are you doing now? Maybe you want to come over.
I wouldn’t want to intrude, he said because he was a sly one, you had to admit that.
She owned the top floor of a house on a bleak quiet street in Brooklyn. The house was clean, with cheap bubbled linoleum covering the floors. Nilda’s taste struck Ramón as low-class. She threw together styles and colors the way a child might throw together paint or clay. A bright orange plaster elephant reared up from the center of a low glass table. A tapestry of a herd of mustangs hung opposite vinyl cutouts of African singers. Fake plants relaxed in each room. Her daughter Milagros was excruciatingly polite and seemed to have an endless supply of dresses more fit for quinceañeras than everyday life. She wore thick plastic glasses and sat in front of the television when Papi visited, one skinny leg crossed over the other. Nilda had a well-stocked kitchen and Papi cooked for her, his stockpile of Cantonese and Cuban recipes inexhaustible. His ropa vieja was his best dish and he was glad to see he had surprised her. I should have you in my kitchen, she said.
She liked to talk about the restaurant she owned and her last husband, who had a habit of hitting her and expecting that all his friends be fed for free. Nilda wasted hours of their study time caught between the leaves of tome-sized photo albums, showing Papi each stage of Milagros’s development as if the girl were an exotic bug. He did not mention his own familia. Two weeks into his English lessons, Papi kissed Nilda. They were sitting on the plastic-covered sofa, in the next room a game show was on the TV, and his lips were greasy from Nilda’s pollo guisado.
I think you better leave, she said.
You mean now?
Yes, now.
He drew on his windbreaker as slowly as he could, expecting her to recant. She held open the door and shut it quickly after him. He cursed her the entire train ride back into Manhattan. The next day at work, he told his co-workers that she was insane and had a snake coiled up in her heart. I should’ve known, he said bitterly. A week later he was back at her house, grating coconuts and talking in English. He tried again and again she had him leave.
Each time he kissed her she threw him out. It was a cold winter and he didn’t have much of a coat. Nobody bought coats then, Papi told me, because nobody was expecting to stay that long. So I kept going back and any chance I got I kissed her. She would tense up and tell me to leave, like I’d hit her. So I would kiss her again and she’d say, Oh, I really think you better leave now. She was a crazy lady. I kept it up and one day she kissed me back. Finally. By then I knew every maldito train in the city and I had this big wool coat and two pairs of gloves. I looked like an Eskimo. Like an American.
Within a month Papi moved out of his apartment into her house in Brooklyn. They were married in March.
Although he wore a ring, Papi didn’t act the part of the husband. He lived in Nilda’s house, shared her bed, paid no rent, ate her food, talked to Milagros when the TV was broken and set up his weight bench in the cellar. He regained his health and liked to show Nilda how his triceps and biceps could gather in prominent knots with a twist of his arm. He bought his shirts in size medium so he could fill them out.
He worked two jobs close to her house. The first soldering at a radiator shop, plugging holes mostly, the other as a cook at a Chinese restaurant. The owners of the restaurant were Chinese-Cubans; they cooked a better arroz negro than pork fried rice and loved to spend the quiet hours between lunch and dinner slapping dominos with Papi and the other help on top of huge drums of shortening. One day, while adding up his totals, Papi told these men about his familia in Santo Domingo.
The chief cook, a man so skinny they called him Needle, soured. You can’t forget your familia like that. Didn’t they support you to send you here?
I’m not forgetting them, Papi said defensively. Right now is just not a good time for me to send for them. You should see my bills.
What bills?
Papi thought a moment. Electricity. That’s very expensive. My house has eighty-eight light bulbs.
What kind of house are you living in?
Very big. An antique house needs a lot of bulbs, you know.
Come mierda. Nobody has that many light bulbs in their house.
You better do more playing and less talking or I’m going to have to take all your money.
These harangues must not have bothered his conscience much because that year he sent no money.
Nilda learned about Papi’s other familia from a chain of friends that reached back across the Caribe. It was inevitable. She was upset and Papi had to deliver some of his most polished performances to convince her that he no longer cared about us. He’d been fortunate in that when Mami reached back across a similar chain of immigrants to locate Papi in the north, he’d told her to direct her letters to the restaurant he was working at and not to Nilda’s home.
As with most of the immigrants around them, Nilda was usually at work. The couple saw each other mostly in the evenings. Nilda not only had her restaurant, where she served a spectacular and popular sancocho with wedges of cold avocado, but she also pushed her tailoring on the customers. If a man had a torn work shirt or a pant cuff soiled in machine oil, she’d tell him to bring it by, that she’d take care of it, cheap. She had a loud voice and could draw the attention of the entire eatery to a shabby article of clothing and few, under the combined gaze of their peers, could resist her. She brought the clothes home in a garbage bag and spent her time off sewing and listening to the radio, getting up only to bring Ramón a beer or change the channel for him. When she had to bring money home from the register, her skills at secreting it away were uncanny. She kept nothing but coins in her purse and switched her hiding place each trip. Usually she lined her bra with twenty-dollar bills as if each cup was a nest but Papi was amazed at her other ploys. After a crazy day of mashing platanos and serving the workers, she sealed nearly nine hundred dollars in twenties and fifties in a sandwich bag and then forced the bag into the mouth of a Malta bottle. She put a straw in there and sipped on it on her way home. She never lost a brown penny in the time she and Papi were together. If she wasn’t too tired she liked to have him guess where she was hiding the money and with each wrong guess he’d remove a piece of her clothing until the cache was found.
Papi’s best friend at this time, and Nilda’s neighbor, was Jorge Carretas Lugones, or Jo-Jo as he was commonly known in the barrio. Jo-Jo was a five-foot-tall Puerto Rican whose light skin was stippled with moles and whose blues eyes were the color of larimar. On the street, he wore a pava, angled in the style of the past, carried a pen and all the local lotteries in his shirt pockets, and would have struck anyone as a hustler. Jo-Jo owned two hot dogs carts and co-owned a grocery store that was very prosperous. It had once been a tired place with rotting wood and cracked tiles but with his two brothers he’d pulled the porquería out and rebuilt it over the four months of one winter, while driving a taxi and working as a translator and letter-writer for a local patrón. The years of doubling the price on toilet paper, soap and diapers to pay the loan sharks were over. The coffin refrigerators lining one wall were new, as were the bright green lottery machine and the revolving racks of junk food at the end of each short shelf. He was disdainful of anyone who had a regular crowd of parasites loafing about their stores, discussing the taste of yuca and their last lays. And though this neighborhood was rough (not as bad as his old barrio in San Juan where he had seen all his best friends lose fingers in machete fights), Jo-Jo didn’t need to put a grate over his store. The local kids left him alone and instead terrorized a Pakistani family down the street. The family owned an Asian grocery store that looked like a holding cell, windows behind steel mesh, door reinforced with steel plates.
Jo-Jo and Papi met at the local bar regularly. Papi was the man who knew the right times to laugh and when he did, everyone around him joined in. He was always reading ne
wspapers and sometimes books and seemed to know many things. Jo-Jo saw in Papi another brother, a man from a luckless past needing a little direction. Jo-Jo had already rehabilitated two of his siblings, who were on their way to owning their own stores.
Now that you have a place and papers, Jo-Jo told Papi, you need to use these things to your advantage. You have some time, you don’t have to break your ass paying the rent, so use it. Save some money and buy yourself a little business. I’ll sell you one of my hot dog carts cheap if you want. You can see they’re making steady plata. Then you get your familia over here and buy yourself a nice house and start branching out. That’s the American way.
Papi wanted a negocio of his own, that was his dream, but he balked at starting at the bottom, selling hot dogs. While most of the men around him were two-times broke, he had seen a few, fresh off the boat, shake the water from their backs and jump right into the lowest branches of the American establishment. That leap was what he envisioned for himself, not some slow upward crawl through the mud. What it would be and when it would come, he did not know.
I’m looking for the right investment, he told Jo-Jo. I’m not a food man.
What sort of man are you then? Jo-Jo demanded. You Dominicans got restaurants in your blood.
I know, Papi said, but I am not a food man.
Worse, Jo-Jo spouted a hard line on loyalty to familia which troubled Papi. Each scenario his friend proposed ended with Papi’s familia living safely within his sight, showering him with love. Papi had difficulty separating the two threads of his friend’s beliefs, that of negocios and that of familia, and in the end the two became impossibly intertwined.
With the hum of his new life Papi should have found it easy to bury the memory of us but neither his conscience, nor the letters from home that found him wherever he went, would allow it. Mami’s letters, as regular as the months themselves, were corrosive slaps in the face. It was now a one-sided correspondence, with Papi reading and not mailing anything back. He opened the letters wincing in anticipation. Mami detailed how his children were suffering, how his littlest boy was so anemic people thought he was a corpse come back to life; she told him about his oldest son, playing in the barrio, tearing open his feet and exchanging blows with his so-called friends. Mami refused to talk about her condition. She called Papi a desgraciado and a puto of the highest order for abandoning them, a traitor worm, an eater of pubic lice, a cockless, ball-less cabrón. He showed Jo-Jo the letters, often at drunken bitter moments, and Jo-Jo would shake his head, waving for two more beers. You, my compadre, have done too many things wrong. If you keep this up, your life will spring apart.
