Rita Moreno: A Memoir (6 page)

There are so many unanswered questions with my mother. Why didn’t she return for Francisco? Why did she sever all ties with Paco? Why did she have to tell me, that day when I stood alone in front of the strange school with all the staring kids, “I’ll be right back, okay?”

Did she avoid all unpleasant confrontation, or was there a deeper reason?

Whatever my mother’s reason, she left me that day, my feet numbing in the slush of the schoolyard, crying in Spanish, and no one understood me. As soon as I could, I started running back to the apartment…. I did that almost every day. If the class had recess, I left.

When I met my mami’s eyes, somehow I could not ask her: “Why?”

Then, just as she would do something so suddenly hurtful, my mother might commit a good deed, also without warning. One gray afternoon, when I came home from school, wept out,
drained, and wanting only to curl up in bed, warm myself, and hug my knees, she said, “Surprise for you, Cooookie…”

She held out a cardboard box with airholes punched in—they looked like openings made with a screwdriver. I could hear something scratching inside, and a low familiar peep.

“Open it, Cookie…. He’s for you…. He’s your little Puchito.” In disbelief, I pried open the carton and there he was—or at least an identical stand-in yellow fluff-ball chick.

This stand-in Puchito was to live in our room at Titi’s—and he did, for a while. He grew fast, and lost his fluff in record time. In a few weeks he wasn’t a sweet fluff-ball chick anymore; he was a goose bump: a pebble-skinned, scrawny, raw-red-necked little rooster who skittered around our room on his big scaly feet and squawked at the Motorola radio. Apart from losing his chick looks, Puchito was firing off gooey greenish gobs of chicken shit and eating a fortune in birdseed. Whenever we sat down to eat, he fixed a beady red gaze upon us, which was uncomfortable, especially when we were having arroz con pollo or any other chicken dish.

Nonetheless, he made me laugh, and I often cut school to stay home with the chicken. Precedents were set; school wasn’t necessarily a given in our apartment. Mami was relaxed about my skipping.

Puchito was the single creature that was making me happy. He reminded me of home.

My mother soon found Puchito an unsuitable pet for apartment life; she exiled him to a poultry cage on the roof. I visited with him and sat on the roof, holding him and stroking his growing feathers. One day I went up for my chicken visitation and found Puchito upside down, his scaly feet in a death curl on his chest. I wept. I had lost my Puchito, and somehow, with his chicken death, he symbolized a second parting from Puerto Rico.

Puchito had been my best friend. I had no friends—no one could speak to me, and I understood no one. That was when I began to concentrate on
inglés
. It hurt to switch languages, to lose my familiar words, but I learned, in secret, to speak and understand.

Mami could speak: She was quick that way, but she dropped all the vowels: This led to her hilarious mistaken pronunciations: “Every Saturday, it’s time for us to change the shits,” and in summer, she would say it was too hot to work for “pissake,” and we should “go to the bitch.” I would correct her: “Say sheets. Say beach.”

And she had a great punch line: “I can’t. You know I got trouble with my bowels.”

But I didn’t want the accent. None of it. If I had to speak
inglés
, I would speak it
perfectly.

And I did.

THAWING OUT

W
e celebrated a single event those first months in the Bronx: As the winter deepened and its bitterness numbed my fingers, toes, and face, something unexpected….

Through the frosted window of my first winter, I saw the unfamiliar lace of descending crystals.

“
Maruca
,” Mami cried out.

“
¿Qué es eso?
” I wanted to know.

“
¡Nieve!
Ice from the sky.”

“Snow.”

“Let’s go up on the roof.” I put on a jacket and a little wool cap. My mother and I ascended to the roof, only a short flight of iron stairs above us. We pushed open the heavy metal security door with the D
O
N
OT
E
NTER THE
R
OOF
warning, and stepped out on the urban equivalent of permafrost—frozen tar. All the ugliness of the city
quickly disappeared, curtained and buffered by that first blizzard we witnessed. As the crystalline flakes flew, my mother and I opened our mouths. I stuck out my tongue and caught the delicious treat—the first offering of my new homeland that I could enjoy.

Maybe there could be miracles in America, after all, I thought. This white magic that dissolved like a quick kiss.

*   *   *

The suffering of winter gave way to the sudden city summer. New York City heat was different from Juncos heat—it was not so gentle. It descended like Mami’s two-ton hand iron and pressed onto the tar of the roof and the asphalt of the streets. Everything softened and stank of the tar. But it was heat.

And to the two of us Puerto Ricans—who froze through that first winter—it was a heaven-sent relief. Throughout that first torturous winter, I would have done anything to get warm—I even sat on top of the radiator, nearly burning my bottom. Always, my mother and I huddled for that heat, and it seemed as if our entire migration was going to be a heat-seeking mission, a constant attempt to get warm.

Then one day my mittens and socks, draped on the radiator to dry after being frozen nearly solid with slush, gave off a fragrant steam. It was not just the radiator hissing steam but the radiant heat of the new spring sun streaming through the window. The window glass felt warm. Then summer struck in an instant: A fly appeared and buzzed.

Though it may have been only April or May, the temperature rose, and with it my emotional thermostat. If I could stay warm again, life would not be so bad; I would not have to cling so hard to Mami in the bed, and dread crawling out from under the bedcovers so much.

As if the warmth unlocked our paralysis, we migrated again at once—to a new neighborhood, a better apartment.

“Come on,” my mother said. “Let’s find a place of our own.”

*   *   *

As soon as my mother could sew enough dresses and scrub enough Anglo apartments, and we could fold a small garden of tissue-paper flowers that we could then sell to the five-and-dime, we did move to a place of our own. The first place was a single small room, with one twin bed that featured an iron headboard and footboard that dug into her forehead and trapped her feet. But it was our own.

We moved up in the world—a literal ascension—to “the Heights.” The new neighborhood, in Washington Heights, was dramatic. The neighborhood was made up of steep hills that posed a challenge for residents on foot. We had to use the “step streets,” which were long stone staircases, sometimes a series of them, staggered, to make half-mile climbs across the neighborhood. We moved to Fort Washington Avenue—the highest-elevation point in Manhattan. You could actually feel the rise of the earth—a giant hill and the world seemed to open up on the horizon and soar across the river on a silver bridge.

For the first time in the city, I could see the skyline and the river. It wasn’t lush or beautiful like Juncos, but there was a wild uplift, an excitement that life here might be possible after all.

Our building was one block from the George Washington Bridge, and our apartment was on the top floor—we could not go any higher. The neighborhood rose and crested toward the steel ramparts that formed the metal extension of its fortunate topography. From our roof, the George Washington Bridge looked like a layered wedding cake. I felt I was on top of the world.

To a child, it seemed that our new home propelled us straight upward and onto the bridge entry. A constant hum and thrum of traffic sounded from this great portal. At night, the stream of headlights and red brake lights lit the access ramp and the bridge itself, and fired across the river like tracer bullets.

In the seventeen hundreds, Fort Washington had been an actual fort and had stood right here, where Mami and I lived. It was here that George Washington himself set up the defense against the British. And it was here that Rosa Marcano won her own battle for independence, a new home, and a new husband.

I shared a history with the George Washington Bridge; it was born the same year I was—1931. And both of us were still young and new when I moved next to it. The GWB was both impressive and frightening, and when I was older I was invited to run across it, hide under it—play the GWB games that attracted all the braver kids in Washington Heights…but I cringed and held back.

I adjusted better to the more natural environment the Heights offered. While not the same lush and gentle landscape of Puerto Rico, it at least did not share the dreary sameness of our Bronx neighborhood. The new neighborhood was not all cold stone, steel, and brick. To the north, there was a city version of a forest, Fort Tryon Park, without palms and ferns, but offering some respite from concrete. In the spring and summer, the border greenery, the turquoise oasis of the public swimming pool, the “secret” little red lighthouse below, and the Cloisters castle would offer enticements….

Even to a child, the buildings in Washington Heights looked better, homier than the massive apartment complexes on Mohegan Avenue; the Washington Heights houses were built in the early nineteen hundreds on a more human scale than the Bronx
apartment warrens, with better construction, before the shoddiness of post-Depression, post–World War I building.

The Beaux Arts style, better-than-tenements midsize apartment houses had grand marble steps and ornate balustrades. Our first and longest-term residence, 715 West 180th Street, retained an external elegance in its carved stone, marble facade, and wrought-iron fire escapes with scrollwork. Inside, the main staircase was wide and took a graceful swerve at the bottom. The building was so old that it had been constructed before elevators; it was a very long climb up to the fifth floor, even on the wide marble stairs. It seemed in Washington Heights I was always climbing stairs—inside and outside. Wherever I went, I felt small.

Inside, the building was a Tower of Babel—a different language and cuisine on every landing. Curry and Urdu on one, Chinese and Hunan sauce on two, Italian and marinara on three, Russian borscht and cabbage on four…

This had its positives and negatives: Some spices tantalized; others turned rancid. This held true for behavior as well: A father one floor down beat his two daughters so regularly it became a sound track to life at 715—the repeated
whack, whacks
and high-pitched cries. But the girls seemed to accept this—and after a while, I did too; the shouts and whacks were a fact of life here.

And there were other facts of life we had to bear. For instance, the grandiose architecture ended in the hallway. Inside, the apartments were narrow, with tiny rooms; our one tiny bathroom was so minuscule that we had to walk sideways to get to the toilet, and the toilet paper roll was behind our heads, which created a challenge. We had a miniature table in our miniature kitchen. Even our appliances were miniature. As soon as icicles hung outside our kitchen window, we set a galvanized tin box out on the sill to augment our midget Frigidaire. Whenever we
reached for a glass milk bottle from the windowsill box, a frigid blast of winter would hit us in the face.

But that was later. When we moved to the Heights, it was on a sultry day in summer and the neighborhood looked leafy, the building grand with its appealing features—not the least of which was the fire escape, with its ornate wrought iron.

We took to the fire escape as if it were a balcony; I enjoyed sitting on the wrought-iron-grille base beside an open window, listening to the radio perched on the windowsill. Our new radio, shaped like a small cathedral, blared music to me—and to any other appreciative Latinos within earshot.

The outdoors, the outdoors. At last we could again enjoy being outdoors. We soon appropriated the roof into our lifestyle, too. By day, it was our “tar beach,” my favorite leisure location. I could sit in the sun on a disposable blanket. “Pick one with rips,” my mother advised. “The tar can stain when it heats up.” It did heat up, and I could smell the melting creosote as I lay back to take in the city sunshine. I would carry up refreshments—a large jar of juice, the bottle saved from some spiced vegetable, and take sips throughout my long Saturdays of relaxation. I could read or, with my eyes closed, dream I was home…in Juncos.

At night, the roof became a star-and-skyline-lit patio accented by the diamond dazzle of the bridge. On summer nights we would carry chairs up to the roof and relax there, have drinks and even dinner. We enjoyed the setting.

Inside the apartment, a series of hard-won purchases were proof that our life was improving: the cathedral radio, first a small one, then a massive floor model; a telephone. Oh, life was better; Mami was right. For a time, life in the Heights continued its emotional ascent. Soon we were documenting our new lifestyle and joy in a series of photographs taken in our living room—posing
in front of the Motorola cathedral-style floor-model radio (eventually replaced by a tiny screened floor model Motorola TV), me holding the new black rotary telephone receiver, aglow with pride. I would be dressed in hand-sewn frilly costumes—Carmen Miranda was a standout, complete with “fruit salad” headdress. Even the furniture was dressed up; my mother sewed slipcovers to cover everything: toaster, radio, TV. Rosa Maria left no living being or inanimate object undraped by her creative hand. She even made doorknob cozies, and when my aunt Titi was visiting and wanted to leave, Titi couldn’t turn the knob because of the cozy. “Son of a bitch! What did you do to the door?” But Mami kept going—covering more and more objects—even the large floor-model radio, completely encased; only the face of the radio peeked out from a little “window” my mother left open for the screen and dials to show.

For the first time in so long, since leaving Juncos and losing everyone there, I felt lighter, happier. In my new joy, I spun around the apartment in a spontaneous twirl. I had no idea at the moment of that spin that I was launching my show business career—that I would spin for the next seven decades onto stages and then film sets. All I knew was that blur of happiness and the sound of my mother and her friends’ applause. Rosita was dancing.