No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  She expected that it would be a Jewish friend of the Mushnicks, a lawyer like Linda’s husband, perhaps. Next to dentists and doctors, lawyers made excellent money if they applied themselves and had some ambition, she thought. She had dressed to kill and was all smiles when she kissed Vidamía on the cheek as she sat on the couch, ignoring the Spanish soap opera her grandmother was watching. Her six-year-old daughter looked up from her Winnie the Pooh book and literally sighed when she saw her mother.

  “Oh, mami, you smell so good and you look so beautiful! Are you going on a date?”

  “No, baby,” she said. “I’m going to dinner at a friend’s house.”

  “Who?”

  “My friend Linda from school.”

  “When I grow up I’m going to go to college like you.”

  “I know you are, honey,” she said, being sweet with Vidamía but not feeling it at all.

  She walked over to Grand Street, enduring the words of the men as she passed them, words about how fine she looked and was it at all possible that she was an angel who’d lost her way and that being the case they’d be very happy to show her heaven, or from the crasser types, comments that as handsome as they were they’d be glad to have her use their face as a seat, all of them sensing or knowing outright that this was an attractive woman with a child, which meant that she knew about sex but had no one to protect her, no husband, no father, no older brother. She went down the stairs to the station, breathing easier now that she was once again escaping the Lower East Side. She took the D train and then changed at Fifty-ninth Street for the Broadway Local, getting off at Seventy-ninth, enjoying the late-summer breezes drifting up from Riverside Park and the Hudson River. When she arrived, Linda kissed her and Howard immediately asked her what she wanted to drink. “A little white wine,” she said as she handed Howard the bottle of rose she’d brought, feeling uncomfortable because she knew little about wines and hoped that she hadn’t made a mistake. Linda took her hand and walked her down the hall into the living room. All the men stood up, among them a pale young man with wire-rimmed glasses, a very neat mustache, and thinning black hair. She was introduced to two young couples, one of them a fellow junior partner in Howard’s firm and his wife, a very thin young ash-blond woman with a beautiful tan and equally fine manners that set Elsa’s nerves on edge.

  “Elsa, this is Barry López-Ferrer. Barry, Elsa Santiago,” Linda said, introducing her to the young man in the wire-rimmed glasses. “Barry’s company handles the books for Howard’s firm. Elsa and I are working on our M.A.s at Hunter.”

  “How do you do?” Barry said, his voice strong and confident.

  “Fine,” she said, extending her hand. “How are you? I didn’t hear your last name.”

  “López-Ferrer,” Howard interrupted, handing her a glass of wine.

  “That’s López hyphen Ferrer?”

  He nodded and smiled. She noted two things immediately about Barry. He was an extremely neat man and he seemed absolutely sure of himself. At the dinner table, Linda’s guests were discussing Watergate and the subsequent repercussions of the scandal; Nixon’s appearance on the David Frost Show, where he admitted that he’d let the American people down; the establishment of Concorde supersonic jet travel between Paris and New York; the bombing of Fraunces Tavern by the FALN four years prior; Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, getting convicted for obscenity; the ordination of the first female Episcopal priest in the United States; the Son of Sam case, which had recently ended in a conviction. During a very heated exchange between a man whose name she couldn’t recall and the ash-blond woman, who, it turned out, was a staunch feminist, Elsa looked up and caught Barry looking at her in a most intense and admiring way. She almost pointed at herself to have him reassure her that it was she, Elsa Santiago from the Lower East Side, that he was staring at. She smiled warily at him and he returned the smile easily. They hadn’t yet established that he was Puerto Rican, but there could be no doubt about it. The way he looked and spoke were dead giveaways. There was something distinctive about being Puerto Rican. No, it wasn’t being Puerto Rican, because she was often fooled by people from the Island. It was being New York Rican, or Nuyorican, as some put it, that set them apart. There was a certain cockiness, and at the same time a reserve, that educated Ricans in New York had.

  New York Puerto Ricans were a definite mixture of Italian tough, Irish melancholy, Jewish wisdom, and black jive, all of it blended with whatever it was that Puerto Ricans brought to the mixture. And what was that? It was a strange concoction of wariness, resignation, pride, and a maddeningly roundabout way of getting at the truth, not to mention blind obedience to benevolent authority on the one hand and an almost murderous intolerance for anyone who breached a personal code after due warning had been given. The age, size, or position of the person didn’t matter when this violation happened; recklessly, they would throw themselves headlong into battle.

  By contrast, Barry didn’t seem like what she perceived Puerto Ricans to be and it intrigued her. He was soft-spoken, listened carefully, smiled readily, and didn’t seem to have a need to be noticed. He appeared sure of himself but devoid of any arrogance. When the party was starting to break up, he offered to drive her home, but she was ashamed to have him know where she lived. He disarmed her by offering to make a detour past the block where he’d grown up in East Harlem.

  “You’ll love it. Very scenic—110th between Park and Lex, across from the projects.”

  “Did Linda tell you where I live?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “That rat.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and said she guessed it didn’t matter. They lingered until everyone had gone before saying goodbye to Linda and Howard. She and Barry took the elevator downstairs and walked down the block to his car. He stopped and she nodded approvingly when he produced keys and opened the passenger door to a very shiny, silver Mercedes Benz 220SL. She got into the car, sinking comfortably into the upholstery.

  Barry got in, started the car, switched on some lite FM music—Barry Manilow or Neil Sedaka—and off they went. Once they crossed Central Park at Ninety-sixth Street, they continued east to First Avenue. Housing developments forced them to go all the way east before they got to his block. At 111th Street he turned west and continued until he got to Park Avenue and turned left to get on 110th Street. Going down Park Avenue, he explained how he used to help his mother shop at La Marqueta on Saturdays. On 110th Street he pointed to a tenement building.

  “Third floor, one twenty-seven,” he said, cruising down the block. “My mother and my three sisters. I was the oldest.”

  “What about your father?” she said.

  Barry shrugged his shoulders as he sped up once more, suddenly wary of a group of men walking down the street toward them.

  “Went back to P.R.,” he said. “We didn’t know why. My mother never spoke about him. One Christmas we were expecting him, everybody talking about what Santa Claus was going to bring us, and he never showed up. It was Nochebuena and my mother had made arroz con gandules, pernil, pasteles, and everything. Seven o’clock came and no papi. My mother said we should wait a little longer, and a half hour passed, and then an hour, and Daisy, the baby, fell asleep, and Marissa, who was five, started crying that she was hungry, so we sat down and ate, except that my mother wouldn’t eat. That was the last time I saw him until I tracked him down in Puerto Rico twenty-one years later, about three years ago.”

  “And?” she asked, as if hearing what he’d done might give her a clue about the sort of feeling she ought to have toward her own father. “Did you ask him to explain his actions?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Barry said. “I just took him for what he was.”

  “What?” she said, thinking of her own father’s philandering and absences.

  “A weak man under a lot of pressure,” he said. “You should’ve seen him. He had very poor eyesight to begin with and his glasses were broken. He looked older than his years and was liv
ing alone, seemingly, in a little shack up in the mountains halfway between Cacimar and Aguas Buenas. He didn’t recognize me and went totally pale when he saw me drive up in this late-model rental car. He thought it was the police.”

  “But wait,” Elsa said. “Your father’s from Cacimar? From the town?”

  “Not from the town. From the hills. There’s a barrio up there called Racimo.”

  “Oh, God,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Your father’s a jíbaro?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Why?”

  “So’s my mother. Stone hick,” she said, using the words that Nuyoricans employ when referring to the people from the mountains—stoic, suspicious, illiterate. “She’s from Barrio Flor. That’s wild that our parents are from the same town.”

  “Small island.”

  “I guess. What did you do? It must’ve been strange seeing your father after such a long time.”

  “A little bit.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I hugged him and asked him if he needed anything.”

  “You did?”

  “Sure,” Barry said, surprised at her attitude. “What would you do if you hadn’t seen your father in more than twenty years?”

  “The same, I guess,” she lied, fearful that he would disapprove of her.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he was all right, that he was growing all his food and had some goats, a pig, and some chickens and went into Cacimar to do plumbing work once in a while. I gave him a few hundred dollars and said I’d like to stay in touch and he said that would be fine. He asked me about my mother and sisters and I said they were fine. Carmen and Marissa had gotten married and Daisy was in her last year at Queens College.” Barry explained that he’d bought his mother a house in Jamaica, Queens, the year Daisy started high school.

  “It was the second year of having my own business and we did pretty good.”

  “Have you seen him again?”

  “I went back two months later to get at the truth. I guess I should go back again, but I haven’t been able to get myself to do it.”

  “Why?” she asked, wondering if he had developed the same reluctance toward his father that she had toward hers.

  “I don’t like talking about this, but I feel I can trust you.”

  “Thank you,” she said, attributing Barry’s trust to her skills as a therapist.

  “While I was talking with him another man came in. My father introduced his friend Ramón and said proudly I was his son from New York. The man smiled, nodded, and then disappeared into the other room of the shack. I asked my father if Ramón, his friend, lived there with him. My father said the man was mute, that he did live with him, and that he was sorry.”

  “He was gay?” she said, the words coming out of her without disapproval, but with absolute surprise and amusement. “Really?”

  “No, it wasn’t anything like that.”

  “What, then?”

  “He said there had been a problem and alluded to something that had happened with his older sister, Josie. I had heard relatives in New York talk around the subject whenever I visited them growing up. I always wondered why my Aunt Josie looked like she did. Everybody said she’d had an accident, but I never believed it. I asked my father if it was about Josie. He nodded, and asked me to go for a walk with him. He told me she had been beaten and he had avenged his sister’s assault. No details, except to allude to a crime and mention a man’s name. When I got back from Puerto Rico, I talked with some people up in the Bronx. One of them is one of my best friends, Israel Caraballo, a cop who works in narcotics. He told me what he thought happened. He found the file on an unsolved case.”

  “What do you mean?” she said. “Your father?”

  Barry then told her a story about his aunt, Josefina, who was a bit of a party girl. She had been in an after-hours club in the Bronx, and this hood, from one of the gangs that controlled business in the Bronx Terminal Market, took an interest in her. Elsa asked if he was Italian and Barry said no, that he was Puerto Rican and that Puerto Ricans had a fairly well organized underworld, adding that his firm had helped legitimize several such operations. Anyway, this hood came in, got acquainted with Josefina, who was both a beauty and a bit of a loose cannon, very bawdy and demanding, and the two of them left together. The next day they found Josefina wandering around naked on the edge of the Bronx side of the Harlem River, near the old factory buildings by the Third Avenue Bridge. She had so many bruises on her body and her face was so swollen that the police thought she was a black woman. Every tooth in her mouth had been broken and her eyes were swollen shut. Josefina was in the hospital six months. When she came out she looked grotesque, her nose bent, her jaw askew, and her right eye replaced by a glass one. Her larynx had been removed. When she talked she did so through an artificial voice box.

  They were now heading downtown and Barry went on, telling Elsa what his father, with a sense of relief and a wish for forgiveness had confided in him on his second visit, when Barry told him the police had discontinued the investigation. When Cipriano López, Barry’s father, asked his sister Josefina who had beaten her so brutally, she readily told him and said she didn’t care if they killed her, but that he shouldn’t say anything because they’d come after him. Cipriano López patiently located the man, Bobby Ramos, and with the stealth of a great cat began stalking him, learning his routine, and it just so happened that on that Christmas Eve, while heading home for dinner, he caught up with him by chance when Ramos was a bit tipsy and about to visit a woman on Tiffany Street in the Bronx. Cipriano couldn’t pass up this opportunity. It was cold, the sky red, a threat of snow in the air. The street was deserted near the empty lot, and Ramos stepped out of his car and took just a few steps before López hit him. The first blow from the two-foot length of inch-and-a-half pipe made a strange thud as Ramos’s hat was smashed into the skull, the bone into the brain, knocking him to the ground unconscious. His friend Caraballo had said that the force was so great that the coroner established that Ramos had died instantly. Fear and rage making his heart race, Cipriano looked up and down the street, then pulled Ramos’s coat over his head and pounded his skull over and over until he was exhausted. The coroner’s report also stated that both of Ramos’s eyes had been forced out of their orbital cavities and that there was no discernible difference between one lobe of the brain and the other, the entire mass a liquid miasma that had seeped out of the shattered cranium. Looking through Ramos’s pockets, Cipriano found the keys to the car and nearly $800. He drove to the deserted riverfront, tossed the pipe into the water, and went on to the airport, purchasing a one-way ticket for the following week since everything was booked for the holidays. He lived in the airport, finding shelter in warehouses, eating in the airport cafeterias, and washing himself in the public bathrooms. Eventually, he got on an airplane and went to Puerto Rico.

  Elsa was speechless. She had grown up with street violence but generally the crimes had to do with drugs and money. This was something else. The sheer passion of it unnerved her.

  “I was twelve and was hoping to get electric trains,” Barry said.

  “How did you feel when you found out why he’d left?”

  “Confused, just like you felt when I told you,” Barry said, pulling onto the FDR Drive at Ninety-sixth Street. “It’s not everybody who finds out their father’s murdered someone.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “I didn’t think you had. On the plane back to New York the first time I felt hurt that I had endured the things I did because my father left. I didn’t know then what it was, but I could see that whatever crime he had committed had really affected him. It was like he was in permanent shock. I’m sure his friend Ramón hiding out up there in the mountains had done something equally horrible.”

  “Is that why your name is hyphenated?” she asked.

  “Very perceptive,” he said. “Exactly. I guess it’s a comprom
ise. I didn’t want to lose my father’s name, but I didn’t want it to be how I completely defined myself.”

  “Did you tell your mother and sisters why your father had to leave?”

  “I told Carmen and my mother. Carmen shrugged her shoulders. My mother doesn’t believe it.”

  “And the cops?”

  “When I discussed the incident with my friend from the Narcotics Division, he said that I should forget everything. As far as the police were concerned they were glad to be rid of the guy. It hadn’t been the first time he’d beaten up a woman, and there had even been a couple of them who hadn’t survived the attacks, but they never got anything on the guy. They knew that Ramos’s demise had nothing to do with his underworld work because of the manner of the attack. They figured it had to be personal. Ramos’s associates had the same idea, and they, too, let matters pass. Both the police and the underworld closed their files on Bobby Ramos and his excesses. My friend said there’s at least a hundred cases like that a year in New York,” Barry told her. “The papers ignore them. The police archive the files. People forget about the cases.”

  Elsa was silent a long time as the car moved down the highway. She thought about her own father, who was always leaving and coming back. Over and over again until he finally left the house altogether. Out of the corner of her eye she watched the delicate features of this man who seemed to break all the stereotypes of what Rican men were supposed to be like. Barry drove smoothly, and she felt safe as they wove in and out of traffic, among the lights of the city, the tall buildings and the bridges over the East River to Brooklyn magical in their dark splendor. Suddenly, without warning, her heart felt a lovely tugging and she looked at the man next to her, his suit still unrumpled.

  Just then he turned and asked her if he could tell her something. When she said sure, he said that she was a gorgeous, intelligent, delicious-looking woman and that all he’d thought about all night long was marrying her.

  “This is a joke, right?” she said. And then she lapsed into street Rican, and told him, “Yo, like aguanta la yegua and whatnot”—literally, “Hold the mare.” “I’ve heard some lines before, but that one is very, very special.”