The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize (45 page)

“Us. You help us, not her. She is our servant.”

The unspoken “and so are you” filled him with a sense of otherness, his color.

After that, he and Tata settled into a damaged relationship, quiet and aloof except for a dry explanation about how her job was her livelihood and she could not afford to lose it, and that, in the future, he would make new friends. Although he understood the anxiety his nearness caused her, he still sought her out only to be pushed away. By the year Tata went away, leaving him with the household chores, the boy had accepted and lived with the pain of separation, the loss of kind, loving banter for a long time.

No matter how much he begged, his “aunts” refused to allow him to attend school with other children by saying they did not want him among ruffians and individuals with strange ideas, although they did not say specifically what these strange ideas were. They educated him at home with tutors.

“That way we can watch you ourselves,” they said.

The first of the soon-to-be-many contracted teachers looked from the “aunts” to him and asked, “What exactly do you require?”

“We want to know if you can teach him anything,” they answered.

In one of his rare impetuous moments the growing child spoke with pride, “I can learn anything.”

Like something out of a dream, he felt the blows before his eyes registered long rustling skirts coming at him so quickly that their feet did not seem to touch the floor.

“Speak only when spoken to,” Josefa screamed. Shame burned his face as he hung his head in front of the stranger.

“No hitting!” the teacher said, a bit too loud. “I don't teach that way.” The indignant young man straightened and stuck out his chin. “Besides, the boy is right. Why shouldn't he be able to learn?”

His other “aunt,” Isabel, more controlled and businesslike, answered him, “Thank you for coming, but we will not need your services.”

When he recovered from his stunned silence, the tutor said, “My references are impeccable.”

As the young scholar kept his eyes locked on Rodríguez, the “aunts” showed him the door without reply and continued to interview.

Although he was present during subsequent exchanges, the boy heard nothing as his thoughts filled with the difference yet similarity between Tata and the teacher. Although white, creole, educated, and outspoken enough to try to defend him, the teacher had been just as powerless to help as his former friend.

Finally after several teachers were hired, Rodríguez—damned if he would let himself fail—toiled through his lessons while the small white women listened, sat side by side, and waved their fans.

“Excellent student,” his tutors reported. “He learns everything the first time it is taught to him. You may want to consider an additional, more advanced teacher.”

“We will.”

“Also, I want to enter one of his essays in a competition.”

“No, we don't wish to become a laughingstock in case he wins. We forbid it.”

“But he's brilliant!”

Yet, listening behind doors, Rodríguez also heard those same thin, immaculately groomed scholars say, “I would never have thought a Negro could be that intelligent.” Often the spinsters reminded him of fat hens fluffing their feathers in front of a rooster as they fanned themselves and cooed through tight, smug smiles.

“It is, no doubt, our influence.”

They taught him proper manners and educated him, but he hated their control. Wrapped inside the cloak of adoptive caring maidens, their grasping fingers and greedy hands stroked him intimately when he was long past proper age. If he objected, with “Stop. What are you doing?” he was punished, made to stand in the patio where the midday sun roasted his skin and scalded him until he felt faint.

During those times he stood erect, closed his eyes against the dazzle of sun ghosts dancing in the air. He allowed perspiration to drip down his temples past his lips, soak his chin, and continue all the way to wet his socks and shoes. Rodríguez let the streams trickle without once wiping himself off, every thought focused on not allowing his knees to buckle in a faint before one tutor or another arrived to rescue him.

Sometimes his “aunts” gave in out of fear they might kill him and rushed to him in the patio carrying water, or a
pava
, a straw hat.

“You are very lucky and must respect our affection,” they said, “without making improper insinuations.” Calmly, they fitted their white lace gloves on each stubby finger. “We consider you our own even though you aren't. Even
though you're black, we are very grateful to do so much for you.” They flounced away to church fanning themselves.

As he watched their mantilla-clad heads retreat, his hatred for Spanish domination grew strong as did his desire to understand how he could be considered lucky. Inherited lands and money did not come free.

A slave is a slave.

Why had the white spinsters adopted him? If, as they said, he had been born out of wedlock to a poor family from Loíza Aldea, had they started out with good intentions that deteriorated through time and circumstance? Rodríguez thought not, or else his “aunts” would have accepted one of the many white or mixed-race babies offered daily by distressed parents who could not bear to watch their children starve.

Fueled by the conviction that his fate decreed great accomplishments because he believed himself more logical than others, he often promised himself that someday Negroes from Loíza Aldea, including the natural parents who gave him up, would have the same opportunities to make a good living as the ruling class, and would never have to forfeit their children again.

Obsessed with freedom, Rodríguez studied history to find out why the Cuban revolution against the Spanish succeeded, while the Puerto Rican cry of independence organized the same year of 1868 by his exiled idol Betances had been aborted in its infancy. He read pamphlets detailing Puerto Rican lack of armaments, traitorous informers, and about patriots jailed together and abandoned to yellow fever.

“So what?” he thought. No fight for freedom ever lacked these same elements. He found nothing in the records to provide an answer to the question, “Why did the revolution just stop?”

On the eve of his sixteenth birthday, Rodríguez formulated a theory. As he sat in a large metal tub full of heated water, he watched the two women with amusement as they soaped and sponged his penis and testicles. He had gotten too old for this ritual and knew this had to be the last bath they gave him. As determined as they looked to make the most of it, he also determined not to get an erection they could laughingly chide him about. Rodríguez watched their flushed faces concentrate on keeping their composure while they stuttered and stammered.

“Get more water.”

“No, you get it. I'll continue scrubbing.”

Both refused to leave, and Rodríguez thought,
One, I can strangle. Two, …

“The numbers!” he said, raising a soapy index finger.

“W-what?”

“Nothing.”

He found his answer. In contrast to Puerto Rico, Cuba's population had been numerous with many more mistreated slaves motivated to fight for freedom. Less simple-minded in their acceptance of fate and better educated, Cubans even had Negro generals to lead their revolt.

Rodríguez despaired for his fellow Puerto Ricans and began to think of them as Simple Simons.

He did not object to giving his “aunts” a rare, farewell kiss on the hand as he packed his suitcase in preparation for his studies abroad.

“Make us proud,” they said. “Keep your attention on your studies and not on inappropriate women.”

Pausing from stuffing shirts into his soft leather satchel, he turned to face them.

“Who is inappropriate?”

“Those neither educated nor virtuous.”

How many Negro women will have my schooling?

Elated to be rid of the short, square women, Rodríguez looked forward to studying in France, possibly meeting with the exiled patriot Betances. He expected to practice medicine in Spain and obtain freedom in the middle of his enemies.

During his education in Europe, the French and Spanish of the late 1880s greeted Rodríguez with comments like, “Isn't it wonderful that someone from the colonies can also have all the opportunities.”

“Someone like you,” is what he heard and dove into his textbooks.

Beautiful Spanish women from large cities had many wealthy suitors and no interest in Rodríguez once they satisfied their curiosity about his studies, his travels, and his homeland, marveling over the generosity of his “aunts,” so Rodríguez sought the company of the less attractive. He first found the “little mothers” in Spain's countryside, small white women with slivers of lips stretching from one ear to the other and square jaws atop square bodies. They lived for one compliment after another on their “good looks.” Loving to be called
guapa
, the women flirted shamelessly to hear it.

He found them all amusingly similar until he met La Mercedes, a younger, more charming woman who did not avert her large, black eyes to speak to him and laughed easily about her gypsy blood, offering to read his palm for a gold coin.

“Aha!” she said. “A very long life line.” He laughed. “But my goodness, look at this. No love line, yet many wrinkles at the side where children are supposed to be numbered.” He laughed again, more loudly.

“Señorita, children are the furthest thing from my mind. If you plan to make your living from palmistry I fear you will miss a few meals.”

“Speaking of which,” she said, “dinner is served.”

With that, she took his arm and escorted him to the dining room. There he repeated his often-told tales of France and Puerto Rico to her parents and her brother, each of whom invited him to return.

Fooled by their polite hospitality, he thought her family found him intelligent and attractive enough for serious consideration as a marriage mate to Mercedes, especially since the recent death of his “aunts” had made him a wealthy man. But when he returned her attentions in a self-deceptive need for real love, her horrified expression at his overtures for a formal relationship convinced him otherwise. She shunned him politely with an insipid excuse.

“You're an educated man,” she said slowly, suddenly averting her entire face, “but I'm already engaged to one of my brother's colleagues and I never thought of you as anything but a friend.”

Knowing otherwise, that obvious unsubstantiated lie was a bigger blow to his ego than if she had simply said, “No, I don't love you nor do I want to marry a Negro.” He might have understood such an explanation since he had a first-hand understanding of prejudice. He cursed his stupidity over misinterpreting what he meant to Mercedes as real feeling rather than as simple entertainment.
What can be more pathetic than a needy person?

“Forgive my imprudence,” he said, kissing her hand. When he had taken his leave, vowing to sever the friendship, he mourned his situation. Too dark-skinned for educated white women and too educated for dark-skinned women working as domestics, he would have to search far and wide for a soul mate.

After obtaining his second medical degree, he practiced in Spain for almost two years until a poor country couple came to see him.

An elderly farmer who had not bothered to change out of his stable-scented work clothes pushed a thin, very young woman toward him.

“I've buried three wives,” Pepe Soto said, without looking at him. “Now this one won't give me sons either.”

Milk white, the girl's skin paled further as she kept her eyes on her fingers. His patients fell into two categories. The first came to stare at his dark face and the second, too poor to afford another doctor, averted their eyes.

“How old is your wife?”

“Fifteen.”

“Does she menstruate regularly?”

“That's the trouble.” Pepe struck a blow on her arm. She lost her balance, almost fell. “She bleeds every month.”

“It might be her youth. Suppose I examine you first.”

“Not me. There's nothing wrong with my functions.”

“What a dumb fool,” Rodríguez thought. In spite of four supposedly infertile wives, it had not occurred to the old cretin that it might be his own infertility keeping him from having children. Knowing he could do very little, he put a bottle of tarlike tonic in the hand of each.

“These will take time,” he said. “Please return in three months.”

After the allotted time, she returned by herself. Assailed by her husband's complaints and distressed by his sexual demands, the unattractive young wife begged Rodríguez for help.

“Look what he did to me,” she said, uncovering her back. “Every time I menstruate, he beats me.”

As he applied salve to raised red welts on her white skin, Rodríguez, moved to pity, identified with her predicament.

“Ignorance is a terrible enslavement,” he said. “In my country, life is so hard that many accept themselves as Juan Bobos, content with a despicable and unexamined existence.”

With eyes blank and mouth open, she stared. “Señor Doctor, your words are too difficult for me.”

Unconsciously, he reached out and patted her hand, “What I mean …” He paused when she squirmed at his touch and withdrew her hand. As he looked straight into her small, close-set eyes, he could hardly believe her presumption that he was trying to make an improper overture. Still in love with Mercedes, he found her with her large nose, ugly by comparison. This had happened once too often and it awoke his sleeping fury of rejection, of being considered inferior. “You're a beautiful woman,” he lied, “and your husband is a very stupid man. If this happens again, I will talk to him.”

The next time the homely young woman visited him, he gave her a bouquet of flowers and some perfumed soaps he ordered from Madrid.