“A Dominican vegetarian, are you joking?” I ask her.
“Yes, we jused to be Hare Krishna,” she says. “Angel even have that little cola growing from the back of his clean-shaven head.”
“But why?” I think back to Washington Square Park, trying to remember if I heard any salsa or merengue versions of their incantations. “They are so phony.”
“Why not? You have to open your mind,” Casimiro says. I feel one of his D.R. history lessons coming on. “There were Muslims and Africans who brought los misterios with them during slavery, Taíno animists in the mountains, and Jews who worshipped in secrecy. The Catholic conquistadors—there are all kinds of people with different religions who are dominicanos, chica.”
“I guess I didn’t get that far in school.”
“They are not going to teach you that, Raquel, but the information is yours if you want it,” he says.
“Ay, Casimiro, don’t involve her in your brujería,” Maria snaps. “Do you know one of his putas left something at my door, una cabeza de chivo, a fucking goat’s head in a box, and I lost a belly. She would have come after Angel, like you. That beech cabróna—”
“STOP IT, Maria,” Casimiro yells. “Now is not the time.” Maria doesn’t respond. Emilio doesn’t look up from his plate during her rant. He’s in another world, a state of culinary bliss.
“Bendición, Papi.” Angel appears in the doorway, his T-shirt soaked from an afternoon of playing basketball. Sweat is dripping down his rust-colored arms and his newly developed muscles. I really don’t want to fuck this relationship up. I gave Angel my virginity several months after we started seeing each other, on my sixteenth birthday, to prove it. The only thing I remember about it was my favorite song, Soul II Soul’s “Keep on Movin’ ” was playing in the background. Unspectacular as it was, and as much as I almost immediately regretted doing the nasty with Angel, I didn’t want to risk losing Maria, Casimiro, and 512 Isham. Besides, I feel that Maria may need me as much as I do her.
* * *
After school and tennis, I spend most afternoons at Maria’s apartment, cleaning the kitchen, doing the dishes, and picking up after Angel. Sometimes I accompany Maria to the welfare office, where she volunteers me to translate for other women in the building, which I really fucking hate doing. During the warmer months, I’m also the one who accompanies her to one wake after the other at the Riverdale Funeral Home on Broadway, right next to Golden Rule. We rarely know the deceased, but that doesn’t matter to Maria. She finds peace among the dead and the mourning.
On the days when Casimiro is home from work as a custodian and handyman at the Four Seasons, he spends almost the whole day in bed reading science fiction books he buys at the Strand Central Park kiosk during his lunch breaks. On the days when Maria wakes Casimiro up by screaming at him about a foreign scent she’s picked up on an undershirt or a telephone number without a name she found while looking through his uniform or wallet, he leaves the apartment like a Jedi knight, without fighting back. The rumor on the block is that he, like Papi, prefers to fish in the local pond for company. They are both too damn lazy to cheat outside their ’hood.
One day I walk in on Casimiro, reading one of his science fiction books in bed.
“Hola, Casimiro. Can I watch TV in here?”
“Ay, coño, I got goose bumps,” he responds. “When you walked in through the door, I saw one of your guides, un indio, walk in behind you.”
“What are you talking about?” I say, looking over on the left side of the bed to see if his bottle of mamajuana and shot glass are on the floor next to his stack of books.
“Raquel, I saw my madrina de santo today and she gave me a reading con los caracoles. You came up. She says you will be the one.”
“The one? Like Moíses?” I ask.
“The one to carry on our tradition, who will communicate with others who we really are to the world,” he says. “Your guides are strong enough to carry you even if you don’t recognize them now.”
“Let me read you, Casimiro,” I say, halfway joking. “I can tell you now that you guys are all mierda. Why do you make Maria suffer so much? Why are you playing her dirty with that short fat bitch around the corner? I’m pretending not to know shit, but I hear you have a kid with her.”
“That’s my burden to carry here in this life. Women destroy me. I allow them to.”
“But you are one of the smartest people I have ever met. How can you invite so much drama into your life?” Papi, who embarrassed me when refusing to shake Casimiro’s hand the other day on Seaman, didn’t possess the understanding or curiosity that his nemesis, this uneducated raven-complected campesino, from Dajabón did. “You are so much more worldly than Papi. I hate him. I am sorry he wouldn’t shake your hand. He thinks he’s better than everyone.”
“Leave that man alone. He’s lost. He’s ashamed of who he is,” Casimiro says. “You have been born blessed, chosen to do something here, Raquel. Listen to what I’m saying.”
“Cabrón, I hear you have a son.” Maria walks in screaming. “I saw him. He looks just like you but with fucking light green eyes.”
“Maria, please don’t fight with me. I—”
“I curse him and you, maricónaso. I’ve accepted all of your fucking little bastards, and this is how you repay me?” she screams, clawing at Casimiro with her nails. Droplets of blood surface through the welts on his face and bare chest. Maria’s eyes are wild, her ponytail wet. “Raquel, get dressed. There’s a wake on Broadway, and I think I know the poor kid’s mother.” I don’t want to go, but I know better than to say that right now.
The boy’s mother, sitting in front of the open casket, looks familiar to Maria, but she can’t place her or the teenager, lying in eternal slumber in a simple wooden casket, with certainty. She sits in the back, tears streaming down her face as she looks straight ahead at the dead kid. He looks to be around the same age as Angel. I have a feeling she isn’t crying for the deceased, his family, or the street violence doing more to wipe us out than any tyrano back in the old country could. Maria is crying for herself. She’s crying for the circumstances that led her to this cold and unwelcoming city, into the arms of a cheating prick. She’s crying because Roberto is probably not going to be her golden ticket to early retirement. She’s crying because she may have missed destiny’s revelation to her. Surely, Maria wasn’t meant to take care of crazy old senile men like Leonicio and, by default, his tecato son, Jesús, for the rest of her life—or was she?
I try to understand where Maria is coming from. Leonicio lives on the Upper West Side with his crackhead son who stripped their tiny apartment bare and who, Maria told me, sucked dick in their hallway when there was nothing left to sell. Their apartment was almost totally devoid of life. Leonicio slept atop a mattress on the floor at night and sat on an old plastic-covered chair for hours during the day. Maria, whom Leonicio confused for his long-dead wife, Mima, used some of the money from her paltry paycheck to buy him a small used TV set, one of those shitty ones that Jesús couldn’t exchange for crack on the street.
I recently went to pick her up at the old man’s apartment. There he sat in thick diapers under his shorts. “Mima, I have to go to the bathroom,” Leonicio yelled at her. “Now, hija de puta!”
“Control yourself for un minuto,” she said, “and I’m Maria, not Mima.”
She struggled to peel the old man from the plastic-covered chair. I stood, frozen, by the door. When she did finally get him up, shit started running down his leg and onto the floor, making a trail to the bathroom. “¡Puta madre!” Leonicio screamed. From where I stood, I could see Maria wiping his ass and flushing the toilet before helping the old fleshy man into the narrow shower stall. She bathed him like a baby, helping him to the bed before cleaning the foul-smelling shit from the linoleum floor.
Leonicio cackled from his mattress as Maria cleaned up after him. “That’s all you good for, Mima, you piece of chit.” Maria held her tongue. Her shift was almost over
. The old man’s gaze shifted toward me, and the room became silent, only the sound of the tiny fan whizzing an insignificant stream of air in his direction filled the air. Leonicio stared through me and started sweating as profusely as Ms. Mabel used to.
“¡Mira viejo sucio, stop doing that right now!” Maria screamed at him.
Leonicio was jerking off under the covers. I was his unknowing muse.
“Thank God Jesús wasn’t here, or he may have join in también,” she joked anxiously. “Less go out of here.”
None of Maria’s sons understand how fucked up and degrading her job really is, not even Casimiro. Here, at the funeral home, she is free to cry without guilt or judgment. It doesn’t matter to her that I’m sitting here. Maria lets it all out. I think she is jealous of the kid in the coffin. If she were fated to clean Leonicio’s shit for the rest of her life, Maria preferred to die.
“Oye, nena, you look like one of them mixed Black chicks from the seventies with your big curly hair and that dashiki top,” yells Blackie out the fourth-floor window as I walk up the stairs to 512 Isham. Blackie and his thunder-crotch wife, Charo, must be the last boricuas on the block, certainly in the building.
“What’s a dashiki?” I yell back, not understanding that the colorful shirt I’d bought at Antique Boutique had a name. “It’s that Native Tongue shit, ‘black medallions, no gold.’ know what I mean?”
“Sure, whatever,” he yells back over the salsa blaring out of his apartment. When Charo isn’t home, he turns the music up, way up. “You look like you could be from anywhere, Rachel. Yesterday you looked Egyptian or something, your face looks like this photo I seen in my National Geographic.”
“Really?”
“Oh, and I read this story about this African tribe in Senegal, and one of the women looked just like Natalie—dark and round, with fine features, wearing a long-ass weave.”
“Word? I guess Natalie could pass for an africana,” I yell up at him.
“I swear. I’ll bring el deso down if I find it,” Blackie says. “Is Maria home?”
Nobody in the building gets Charo and Blackie’s relationship: They are opposites in every way. He’s skinny and looks like a cross between Bobby Valentín and Oscar D’León, mustache and all. Charo is tall and fat, with hair the color of avena and light-colored eyes and could easily be mistaken for a white girl if not for her hair.
Blackie may be the happiest doorman in the city. He works at one of the fanciest buildings on the Upper West Side, where he opens doors, signs for important packages, and stores dry cleaning—even the occasional bag of weed and coke—for a juicy list of famous people. In return for his discretion, Blackie is so well laced with money, liquor, and drugs during the holidays, it’s the only time of year he can afford to buy peace from his mean-ass wife without sacrificing any of his vices.
Charo is a social worker for the city, but since she got her master’s degree and a promotion to manager she’s started to force-feed her husband’s balls to him every night. He makes more money than she does, but Charo’s job, she thinks, takes more brains and therefore yields more power. She’s so devoted to her work that she brings it home with her, talking to her husband like the social workers do their clients at the welfare office: as if they’re worthless.
Blackie is even-tempered and a jokester. Charo is brutal and clumsy in her own skin, the bearer of bad news and bochinche. I swear it was Charo who told Maria about Casimiro’s son around the corner. She wants everybody to be as miserable as she is.
“I’ve got the munchies,” Blackie yells down. “You think Maria has a little something extra for me?”
“Of course. You know she cooks extra food in case anyone drops by,” I yell back up. “Come down.”
“What?”
“Come. Down.”
Blackie runs down four flights of stairs so fast we arrive at Maria’s door at the same time.
“Peace, my sista,” he says, laughing and pumping his right first in the air. Blackie’s breath reeks of alcohol.
Maria is cooking white rice and pollo guisado for dinner in the kitchen. Natalie, Maria’s next-door neighbor, is sitting next to Raquel, the prettiest woman ever to live at 512. A tiny light-brown Chihuahua is resting on Raquel’s expensive high-heeled leather boots. She looks exactly like Dorothy Dandridge, an actress who starred as Carmen Jones in one of those old movies Alice forced me to watch with her when I was younger. I love that we share the same name.
Because of the patronage of the white man who lives in her apartment sometimes, everything Raquel wears is really dope. She is so well paid that when she heard me talking about Antique Boutique and Basic Basic with Marie the other day on Maria’s phone, she paid me in clothes to take her down to the Village. On the train, Raquel showed me thousands of dollars her boyfriend had given her crumpled up like garbage at the bottom of her Gucci bag. “It’s dirty money,” she said, laughing. “That’s why I treat it so poorly.” In a few hours Raquel spent almost every hundred-dollar bill she had in the bag. We headed back uptown with just enough money for a couple of tokens.
Raquel is a kept woman, though I imagine she could have made stupid loot as a supermodel. Instead, she plays different men into buying her clothes and shoes, paying for her hair appointments, rent, and food in exchange for her company.
Raquel likes her job. She enjoys being in the company of men, even the ones who don’t speak Spanish, because she can’t stand being alone. Natalie, who introduced us to her, told us that Raquel’s mother abandoned her as a child for six years in a campo in Moca with her father. Apparently, Raquel took too long to load into the car with her other siblings.
“That’s cold,” I said. “Natalie, how did she end up in New York, in 512?”
“Raquel met an American tourist in Santo Domingo who promised to take her to New York City and enroll her in English classes,” Natalie said, “but his real plan was to take advantage of her.”
“How it happen?” Maria asked.
“Well, don’t tell her I told you,” she said, “pero the motherfucker took her directly from JFK to this dirty apartment and locked her ass in there—bolted the windows shut, left her with the clothes she came in, no food, nada—and he was married!”
“Ay, Dios mío que estás en el cielo,” Maria screamed, holding on to her chest as if she were about to throw up her heart. “Oh my God, I have to make some cafécito.”
“He tortured her, raped her, starved her until one day she decided to play along and fuck him real good,” Natalie said, pausing to finish the plate of moro con pollo Maria had made that night, “and when he fell asleep, she took his keys, locked him in, and ran out of the apartment in the snow with nothing but his shirt on.”
“I don’t believe it, Natalie, that’s wack as hell, but—” I said.
“I swear. Her sister confirmed the story,” she said. “So finally, she found a cousin here who took her in and set Raquel up in a factory job only to steal her money. Her family is real fucked up.”
“How did she end up here?” I asked.
“She met the old man who owns this Dominican restaurant she ate at one day, and he fell so hard for her that he set her up here.”
I almost felt bad that we were making so much fun of how fucking strange Raquel acted sometimes, but we couldn’t help that she gave us fodder for our jokes, usually at the expense of Chino and his physically challenged assortment of girlfriends.
“Mira, Raquel is giving us this little baby Chihuahua,” Maria says to me. “She’s rabiosa like you, and even has your face, but we need to give her a different name so we don’t confuse her or anyone else in the house.” Everyone, except me, explodes in laughter.
“Oh my God, she does have your face,” Blackie says. He’s become a fixture at dinner over the last several months because Charo is working late to complete some special project.
“And look, she has your wife’s face, Blackie, but on the other end of her culo,” I snap back.
“Don’t listen to
them, they’re just bothering you,” Raquel says. I don’t know how she communicates with her white boyfriends, not knowing a lick of English. The conversation abruptly shifts to Chino, as it often does when Raquel is over.
“You just missed Chino, did you see him downstairs?” she asks.
“No. I didn’t.”
“He was with that other prieta, Lesbia, the one who is taller than he is by half a foot and looks just like a man.”
We brace ourselves for what Raquel may say next. “You know he likes ugly girls,” Blackie says. “He must be fighting with Blanca again.”
“Oh, I would give anything to watch them make love on the roof,” Raquel says. “I would have to wear panties so I don’t wet my jeans.”
We are stunned, dumbstruck by the mental picture Raquel has drawn for us, especially in front of Maria. Natalie doesn’t look up from her plate.
“I wonder if she has a penis,” Raquel says, laughing. “I bet you she has something interesting down there or she would be too boring and ugly to fuck.”
“Raquel, where do you come up with these things?” I ask.
“It’s just my imagination. Have you seen her in jeans? Not even your wife looks that bad,” she says to Blackie, who’s snooping around the cabinet looking for Casimiro’s stash of mamajuana.
“My wife is beautiful, maybe not as much as you or the Chihuahua’s twin, but she is a bad—”
“Come on, Blackie, just because she has Children of the Corn hair and the complexion of a Glo Worm doesn’t make her pretty,” I say.
“That’s the only thing that saves her,” Raquel says. “I wish I was a natural blonde.”
Angel walks in and says, “Bendición, mami,” giving Blackie a pound. “Que Dios te bendiga, my son,” Maria says, frying her second stack of maduros over the hot stove. Something is different. He doesn’t make eye contact with me as he washes his hands in the sink. He smells kind of funky, like Night Queen oil and sweat.
Bird of Paradise Page 11
