Rita Moreno: A Memoir (2 page)

I don’t know the rules: that contagious people must be removed from the tenements—no exceptions. Otherwise the whole city can be infected. These are the days of epidemics, but I haven’t seen the evidence yet: the kids with withered polio legs, braces, scars from chicken pox. You never see some kids, the ones with the fever-melted brains who have to be taken care of till they are old people still in diapers. I haven’t heard about Sister Kenny yet and how she invented physical therapy for withered polio legs. I
don’t know about iron lungs, or the many diseases that can spread so fast and kill everybody.

I want to go back to the one lousy room, even just to die from chicken pox on my bedbug-infested mattress with my mami, who’ll kiss me and scream she wants to die with me. That would be better. Or maybe, if I can’t do that, maybe it is better to escape from this, like the little bird that died of fright in my hand? Escape to heaven and know no more pain, no more crazy itching, and get away from these guys who are laughing and joking over my body.

So there I am at age five; I am up to, “To be or not to be?” and that is the question I don’t answer for almost thirty years—and then I get the wrong answer. You’ll see.

Burning-hot hundred-and-three-degree temperature. I itch like crazy, but I am still alive when they unbag me, and I look around their miserable Misericordia ward, with all the other dead-looking bodies, or the ones like me, all the moaning, infectious-disease people, and my one Spanish-speaking little boy: “Hey, boy.”

“Hey, boy.”

“Shut up.”

“Shut up, boy.”

And there, in one instant, in a bed of the infectious-disease ward, are the themes of my life: scared to death, fighting to survive, forever a foreigner in more ways than you can imagine. Right then, at age five, right there in the hospital ward, I get it. I’m on my own; I’m alone. How am I supposed to take care of myself?

This is me, the shivery little Puerto Rican girl—feeling lost in the world. Make like I am tough! Maybe, “Hey, boy,” is my first line as a make-believe “spitfire.” At that moment I get that role right: I’ve got to
pretend to be somebody I’m not. Inside I am shaking so hard—is it fever or is it fear? Do the symptoms fit the feelings that are already there?

Is that when she—that dark presence that hisses only doubt and fear in my ear—first accosted me?
You won’t fool anybody
, the voice whispers in my ear.
Who do you think you are?

I just don’t let my feelings show. Pretend to be someone I’m not.

This idea lasts through my whole life: I always play a part. For so many years, I have to be a “smoldering sexy spitfire.” Rita Moreno—funny and bold and golden as all her statuettes. The Hispanic heroine with all four gleaming prizes—Oscar, Tony, Emmy, Grammy—big money, hot lovers, “perfect” forty-five-year marriage, with a gold medal hanging around my neck and shelves filled with award statuettes but still, inside, who is she? Who am I? Rosita Dolores Alverio? Or Rita Moreno? Rita or Rosita? Who am I?

This book is my real story. The record of my journey. The story of how I found myself. The story of who I am…

PUERTO RICO

M
y journey begins on December 11, 1931, in Juncos, Puerto Rico. Humacao “claims” me now because I became famous…but sorry, Humacao, I am not from you—I was only born in a hospital there. From Humacao, swaddled, I was carried by my mother—my pretty dark-haired mother, Rosa Maria, who was then only seventeen—back to her village, back to Juncos.

Juncos blooms like a flower in my memory; Juncos is color, scent. And Juncos is music: my mother and the other women singing, laughing. No one was ever alone in Juncos.

Why did we ever leave Juncos?

“Because we had nothing there,” my mother said.

Of course, to a five-year-old, we had everything in Juncos. What would the unknown America offer that I did not already have? I was running and laughing; all life was warm, sweet—a
dance, a game. I had a baby chick, just popped from the egg: Puchito. Puchito knew me because I was the first thing he saw in his whole little chicken life. He was already following me around and chirping to me. I had my own mami and Paco and my grandfather, my
abuelo
.

Everybody loves me then and gives me treats. Everything I taste is delicious: the ripe guavas that burst to the bite, mangoes and papayas that slide down like cool velvet on my tongue. Mami’s silken flan with the glazed caramelized sugar crust, brown and glistening like glass: oh,
crunch
. So sweet—Mami always makes extra syrup for me. Oh, all my life is sweet. I am allowed to suck on stalks of sugarcane hacked straight from the field. There could be no better candy.

I live in one of the “ice-cream houses,” as I thought of the Juncos village cottages that clustered, friendly as the people, in different shades of pastel colors—pink, yellow, pale blue, creamy white. In most of my memories I live in the prettiest house of all, the little pink house draped in rose hibiscus and scarlet bougainvillea.

In every yard, spiky green plants,
maguey
, wear inverted eggshells, white caps speared on every green sharp-pronged leaf, which could cut you so badly. They were also called
bagoneta
. I thought we placed the eggshells there just as decoration—so pretty. Now I think maybe the eggshells were to protect us from getting cut on the thorny spikes.

The
maguey
are a kind of aloe yucca, a species of the century plant—so named because every hundred years the plant blooms with a flower, which gives off an unbearable stink. I never smelled it, but I believed my grandparents, who remembered it well. Before it blooms, the
maguey
, decked in eggshells, are beautiful.

Even the low fences and gates are pretty: metal, curlicued like
the spit curls on the painted maidens who appear on every printed advertisement.

On the side of our pink cottage, there is one dazzling white patch of pure sand, kept separate for a special purpose. In the rest of the yard chickens scatter or nestle in their own deepening dust beds to lay their warm white eggs. Their contented chorus of clucks and crows harmonizes with the wild birdsong that begins at dawn and quiets at night. But even the night is still alive with sound; the tiniest frog in the world, the coquí, whistles his high notes. None of these noises alarm me; they were long ago absorbed into my memory as background sound.

The ice-cream houses sit near the center of a fragrant jungle, into which we children run barefoot, our little soles and heels toughened like shoe leather. We run behind the more stately procession of our mothers, who wear towering headdresses of laundry, as they walk the path. The women are all pretty, all with the same waist-long hair. In Puerto Rico women do not cut their hair. It is a sign of femininity, how long it will grow. As they walk, their hair and hips sway. I see all the women as beautiful, but my mother is the prettiest; surely she is the youngest.

Later I will wonder, What did my father want? Who would want someone else? Why cheat on young Rosa Maria, with her full lips and deeply curved waist? Surely he could find no one more desirable. Other men would want her; we would find out soon enough. Looking back, it was desire more than destitution that evicted me from Juncos, the most sensual place in the world….

All around us are the ferns, breadfruit and palms of El Yunque rain forest. Even the insects seem beautiful, unthreatening. One of my first memories is of lying on my bed, watching a large, hairy, hot-red-orange spider climb the wall. I am absently
fondling myself. My awareness of being alive is near sexual. Every day I awaken aquiver to a world of pleasures.

El Yunque mountain rises in the mist, and the lush jungle sings to me. According to ancient Indian legend, the spirit Yuquiyu ruled from the mountaintop, protecting Puerto Rico. When we enter the rain forest, I can inhale the perfume of the earth. Often we find orchids—purple and white, or a deep yellow spotted with magenta—curled and twining up the vines…or hanging down in long, graceful tendrils. We do not touch these orchids, but allow them their long lives.

Elsewhere in the jungle, my mother delights in picking the special jungle plants—medicinal herbs, edible leaves. Part of her delight is that somehow, even at five, I can identify them, all the plants, common and obscure. I have a “nose,” and taste buds to discern the most subtle differences. Somehow I retain their names. This makes me something of a prodigy in Juncos. Mami shows off my special talent for her friends. She holds up exotic leaves for me to identify.

“Sniff, Rosita…and what is this leaf?”

“
Recao
,” I cry out, and everyone laughs and claps.

“Oh, Rosita, she is so clever. She is so pretty. She is so charming, what an adorable little girl.
¡Muñequita!
Little doll!” my mothers’ friends say.

My mother smiles, so pleased.
“¡Qué delirio!”

Every chore seems part of a delightful game—even kneeling at the stream and scrubbing clothes clean against the flat rocks. While the mothers scrub the wet clothes, they laugh and gossip; sometimes they sing, not low but loud, at the top of their young lungs. They are bellowing love songs.

There are tribes of mothers; another group of women calls across from the opposite shore; they sing their own songs.

How wide was that fast-running body of water? In my memory it is a river, too far to cross. We balance and jump from the hot rocks. The children wade and splash in the dazzle of sunshine on water.

We don’t think to swim; no one swims in Juncos. Only later do I learn about swimming, that in Puerto Rico, swimming is something tourists do and we don’t. I hear the mothers chatter about how hard the return walk to the village is—they carry the now heavy wet wash bundles on their heads. Then they walk single file on the dusty road, on the edge of the jungle. Maybe it is harder for the mothers, but they still laugh and sing; the birds fly above and call good news to one another, and warble declarations of love.

At home, in their ice-cream houses, if it gets very hot, the women snap open large handheld fans; the pleats become the magic skirts of dancers—the señoritas we will someday become. Our mothers, who were once like the painted beauties on the fans, hang their laundry on lines strung across the yard. Then, before the wash is fully dried, my mother runs out with her heavy flatiron, to the special white sand patch. That sand will burn your feet. She runs on sandals, and—quick—sets the iron down to superheat, then even quicker runs back inside to iron our clothes, to press out any wrinkles. This is a relay—she has more than one iron. As she irons with the first hot iron, the second iron absorbs the fierce heat of sun on sand. Somehow this works to perfection. My dresses are crisp. Everything smells of sunshine and an indefinable sweetness that must be the magic scent of Juncos.

It is more of a challenge to clean us children than our clothes. We are dusty; my tough little feet seem permanently browned by running barefoot. Sometimes, if we get dirty by the creek, our
mothers wash us right there, soaping us up in the ice-cold rushing water while we screech. If we get filthy at home, into a galvanized bathtub in the yard we go, to sit solemn as our mothers wash us with rags and sponges, until they can smile and admonish, “Stay that way. Don’t get dirty,” which of course we do.

Then the children get smacked, sometimes with a strap—me too. My mami—who always calls me so sweetly her “Monkey” or “C
ooo
okie,” drawn out like a coo—“
Coooookie
”—and cuddles me so close that I feel the heat of her warm body, her full breasts—is no exception.
Slap, slap, smack, smack
. Behave yourself or the belt. Back then in Juncos, no one calls these smacks abuse. Slaps are light; hitting is not serious; it is called raising children. And we know we are loved like crazy and will get whacked, smacked, slapped again next time we are bad, which we will….

At first we live in a little vanilla-cream-colored house, and I sleep in my own room, a tiny white stucco chamber, cool like the alcove of a church. Very soon, though, there is my dimpled look-alike baby brother, Francisco, and we move to the pink house, to another room, with bunk beds, and I sleep above baby Francisco, sleep my happy, untroubled sleep in the top bunk, until the roosters’ crows wake me better than any alarm clock.

I love having a baby brother. Before long, Francisco is toddling and can be my playmate and partner in mischief. Francisco and I love chasing little coquí frogs and catching them so we can race them. The tiny frogs are elusive little creatures because of their diminutive size—not even as big as my thumb—and they can hop as if they have springs in their legs. All this to the accompaniment of the coquí’s piercing cries. The coquí frog makes the loudest sound for its tiny size; it gets its name from that shrill whistle:
co-keeeee, co-keeee.

Needless to say, sometimes it takes us hours to catch them.
We place them in a small plastic bucket with a bit of water and leaves so they won’t get too frightened; then we cover the top of the bucket with a torn banana leaf to prevent their escape. After catching eight coquí, Francisco and I go to a flat, dry area where the sand makes almost a racetrack. We create “racing lanes” on the ground and race two at a time. Usually we find big pieces of wood and half bury the wood in the soft earth to hold them up—high enough to make the coquís think they can’t hurtle over these hurdles. We put fine chicken wire over the top of the construction to keep our racers from escaping. What follows is a cacophony of shrieks, admonitions, and raucous declarations of victory.
“¡Yo gané! ¡Yo gané!” I won! I won!

We play so many creek games: We go with our friends to the rockiest section of the creek and see who can jump the farthest from rock to rock. My grandfather, Abuelo, fashions little sailboats out of banana leaves. Other times he uses the whole bananas and add sails made of rose leaves held up by slivers of bamboo. Those banana boats are the best, because they last the longest and also serve as lunch. Abuelo tried small melons as well, but you have to scrape them down to the skin or they sink from the weight. The best boat he ever made was from a hollowed-out papaya; we saved the seeds and used them to be our make-believe little sailors. We play at that creek an entire day, to the point where some family member has to come fetch us, or the jungle dark will overtake us.