The Noise of Infinite Longing (12 page)

My mother had her license to practice law in Texas, a good hus- band, a new baby boy, and she handed out carnations at a gas station. But she had no job, no office.

It took four years and several moves, but finally, in Abilene, she rented an office and put her shingle on the door and opened her firm. Her office was plain, a single room on the second floor of a downtown mall of boutiques, real estate agencies, and doctors’ offices, a row of buildings with facades made to resemble the Alamo and old Spanish missions. Her diplomas were up on the wall, our pic- tures on her desk, law books on a shelf.

She was over fifty, but to see her run up the stairs to her office was to imagine her twenty years earlier. She had such hopes.

You know she really didn’t have that much business, Sara said, mostly poor Mexicans. They couldn’t pay, and you know her, she didn’t charge them.You know how people are here, Sara said. They thought she was Mexican, too, with her accent and her hands ges- turing like Latinos do. She didn’t have clients with money.

I knew.

Sara stopped. We could hear Amaury crying in the kitchen. I looked at the ceiling, thinking, Didn’t mother know?

Yes, Sara said, but she pretended that she was just like any other lawyer.Yes, I said, she was so good at pretending, at seeing only what she wanted to see. But it was hard for us in school, Sara said. I know that behind our backs some of the kids called us wetbacks, at least in the beginning. Sweetwater and Abilene were the worst.Those places seemed to have a larger population of Mexicans, mostly illegals, and we were thrown in with that bunch, especially Carmen and Olga because of their darker complexions and a bit more accent.

That’s when I started telling mother not to speak Spanish to us, especially in public, Sara said. I used to tell people that my last name was Slaughter, like Leon’s. This started with me in Littlefield, she went on. Of course, I was young and silly, and also dumb, because at school my name was Lopez, so I don’t think I was very successful in trying to become an Anglo.

God, I thought, I didn’t really know.

Mother, well, she did all the things to fit in, Sara went on. She did all the expected things. She became a Methodist, she invited the ladies for coffee at home, and served them in her fancy little cups.The ladies smiled those fake smiles, picked up those little espresso cups and barely sipped the black coffee, and sat on the edge of their chairs.They were not used to the formality mother had, they didn’t have espresso

at home, and they never heard someone talk about faraway places they would never want to visit. And mother’s accent, they called it charm- ing, but you know what they meant. They didn’t understand the first thing about us, about Puerto Rico, and here was mother, a career woman, divorced, with all those children but practicing law like the men and having lunch in the cantinas with Mexicans.

But she was happy, Sara said. At least as happy as she ever was in Texas, and after we got older and we started to fit in and have friends, we could do just about anything we wanted. She got home with her newspapers and sat in her chair and didn’t pay much attention. Maybe she didn’t expect the same things from us that she had expected from you and Angeles, she didn’t expect us to get straight A’s and stand out in everything. Our life was so different from yours when you were growing up.We didn’t have the schools you had, the society rules, the fancy parties. So she didn’t have to worry about keeping up.

She didn’t hit you when you disobeyed her? I said, surprised. She didn’t scream? She didn’t make you get dressed up and go to parties in the clubs?

That’s what I mean, Sara said, she wasn’t the same as she was with you, with father. She and Leon didn’t have that life. Leon would come home early and they talked over dinner—mostly mother talked—and, every now and then, when one of us did something she didn’t like, like when Carmen and Olga screamed at each other because, you know Carmen, she wanted her own things and didn’t want anyone touching them, and Olga made fun of her and they would get into a shouting match, then mother would get off her chair and come storming into our bedroom.

But nothing much came of it. Sara remembered one time when mother hit Olga. Mostly she shouted and slammed the door and went back to her newspapers. Then, Sara said, we got older and she got older and she would just shout, I’m tired of this, and Leon would

come to our room and he talked or, if it was something really bad like when we screamed back at mother, he sat us down at the table and he would talk very slowly, you know the way he talks, saying the same thing over and over, that we had to obey our mother. Then he grounded us for a couple of days.

They never fought, Leon and mother, Sara was saying. (I was thinking, But how did she stand the boredom?) I never saw them fight, I said, echoing her. Of course, I was never around. Came once a year and it was always the holidays and mother wanted everything perfect, and of course it wasn’t because we could not all be in the same room without somebody saying something hurtful, and Amaury and Angeles getting drunk. . . . I hated those visits, I said, especially when father came and we all had to pose like the Holy Family. And Leon was there, too, I said. It was so strange to me that Leon didn’t mind father being there. He treated father like he would have treated any other guest, deferential and respectful. It was odd, I said, having the three of them together like everything was all right, as if everyone got along and we were a happy family.

Remember 1987? I said. I had gone to Abilene for Christmas, and there was father staying in a motel with Amaury. Mother was so nervous, setting the table, burning the yams or whatever it was, and we all sat together pretending that it was perfectly normal for the three of them to be together, that we were all together. None of us believed it. Angeles didn’t, Amaury didn’t. But mother wanted to believe it.We did it for her.

Sara didn’t say anything. She saw trouble coming a mile away and turned the other way.

After a while, I said, Angeles handled it better. You know, the whole thing, mother, Leon, father, everyone in one room, opening gifts, hugging and kissing.

Angeles came more often, Sara reminded me, a reproach that I

let pass. That’s why we’ve been closer to her—we told her every- thing that was going on, Sara said. We would stay up nights talking about boys and, of course, about mother, always the same story.

Mother and I couldn’t talk, not really, I said.

She knew that, Sara said. It hurt her you were so distant.

But we couldn’t talk because there were things she didn’t want to hear, I said. It was like that since I was very young. But that’s not why I didn’t come often like she wanted me to, I said. Sara said she knew I felt like a stranger there. I didn’t say anything. I thought I made myself a stranger. I had made myself a stranger to my family for half my life. But I didn’t say that to Sara. I said, It was depressing seeing her trying so hard to fit in, seeing her please father after all those years.... My voice trailed.

But she was secure with Leon, Sara said. She didn’t worry with him.That was the important thing to her that you don’t understand; she didn’t doubt him.

Maybe, I said, but she was sad all those years. No, that’s how you saw her, Sara said.

The gray light of dawn came faintly through the bedroom win- dow. Sara and I had been talking for hours, and the lamp in the kitchen had been turned off. Angeles and Amaury had gone to bed. Sara was still talking when I fell asleep.

In the morning, Sara brought me a cup of coffee, and I heard Tití speaking in the living room. She was leaving for San Juan in a few hours and wanted someone to write an obituary that she could place in the newspapers in San Juan. I wondered why she didn’t write it herself, but she insisted that I do it.

“La abogada María LuisaTorregrosa Slaughter murió el 10 de sep- tiembre en Edgewood, Texas, a los 76 años de edad... .”

I made it brief: one sentence of biographical background and the list of survivors. I had never written an obituary. What does one

include? What does one leave out? I took the sheet of paper from the printer and gave it to Tití. I knew it said almost nothing about mother, nothing really about her life.

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Miles inland from the northern coast, perhaps just ten miles if a ruler were put to the sky, or if the earth lay flat and barren, unob- structed by mountain or river, the island’s core rises in waves of breast-shaped hills of coconut and mango groves and serrated peaks of volcanic rock and limestone canyons draped thickly in Spanish cedar, sandalwood, and pine forest.

From San Juan south on Route 1, before steel-and-concrete bridges were built over gorges, before hillsides were shaved and bull- dozed to make way for the north-to-south autopista that in just ninety minutes now connects the capital to the southern coast, the drive to Caguas took an hour or more on a crooked, twisting two- lane road crowded with flatbed trucks carrying timber logs, sacks of flour, coffee and tobacco, pigpens and chicken coops.

Breaking away from Route 1, a narrower tar-topped road angled away from Caguas by the banks of the Río Gurabo. Route 189 may have been ten miles long altogether, a link to other country roads that bridged the scattered towns, villages, and aldeas of rural north- eastern Puerto Rico. At a midway point on the road, where it flat- tened and straightened out for a few kilometers, with flowering flamboyán trees on either side, the town of Gurabo had grown from a settlement in Spanish times to a backwater town at the foot of a hill called El Cerro, a place of maybe five thousand people, little more than a gas stop for trucks, buses, and cars.

This was our new home, Gurabo, where we moved when I was

ten years old.

The town had no great history, no claim to any place in the books. It had sprouted between hill and valley, like windblown seeds on pas- tureland, and was incorporated in 1815, with a swelling population of mestizos, mulattos, and blacks from the hills and the sugarcane fields, subsistence farmers mostly, squatters and mill hands, cane cutters with plows and machetes and squinty, sun-aged faces.

There were some comfortable people in the town, who had trav- eled, a few landowners, men with two hundred hectares of sugar- cane or tobacco and herds of cattle, and some who had been to the vocational schools, who ran the drugstore and the food markets, families who read the newspapers and sent their sons and daughters to university.These were the families who lived around the plaza, the people who had maids and cars. But the great mass lived in the maze of barrios and dirt alleys, on half-paved streets and hard-clay roads that spread out in expanding quadrangles beyond the plaza.

We arrived in our old Chevy, all of us hanging out the windows, looking right and left, taking in the garbage piled up in alleys and the ramshackle houses built with planks of wood and rusting sheets of tin. On the main road, along the strip of storefronts, garment shops, beauty parlors, and bars, wiry men with hard faces, with thin mus- taches and greased hair, milled in the doorways of bodegas, playing dominoes, smoking and gulping down beer, whistling at the broad- hipped, heavy-breasted girls in skintight shiny skirts strolling by.The road cut the town in half, the slums of El Cerro on one side, and the church and the plaza on the other. The San José Church, a typical colonial church with flaking pink paint and a bell tower, stood at the head of a tree-fringed plaza of lampposts, benches, and strung-up lights.

We turned toward the plaza and passed the movie house. Torn movie posters flapped off the front wall. Wooden houses with tin

roofs and narrow porches, and houses made of cinder blocks, with arches and flowerpots on balcony ledges, lined the blocks around the plaza, and everything was painted in magentas and oranges, sky blue and turquoise and shades of yellow.

Our house fronted the plaza, a house with many rooms, with ter- razzo floors and five terraces. It was built in the thirties, made of cin- der blocks, bricks, and stucco and painted a light shade of yellow, almost vanilla, with dark-brown trimming. It was on the far side of the plaza, on a corner lot, in the shade of drooping trees. The house had been empty for years, after the owner was killed, stabbed to death by his drunken son, so they said, and the house had been aban- doned, left to the spiderwebs and to the stories told around town of screams and blood splatters on the staircase and a woman in a black gown who was seen on certain half-moon nights in the upper bal- cony, her hair a monstrous tangle, a thicket of silver and black.

The house was a wreck. Weeds grew through the cracks in the carport, and leaking faucets had left rivulets of rust and mold on bathroom walls. Most of the tiles on the terraces were broken, tossed carelessly in jagged piles.The house was the only one in town with two stories, and it was the only house with a yard, with land around it. Plants of all varieties grew under the shade of mango and magnolia trees and scattered bamboo stands. Our treetops reached high, up to the top of the second floor, touching the sloping tin roof. The three terraces upstairs had no roof, no awnings, and when it rained they flooded, the water rising two, three inches on the unleveled, unfinished floors. When it stormed, the wind drove the rain, whooshing, wheezing, banging against the roof, knocking wildly against the shutters.The rain blew through the gaps in the ter- race doors and the cracks in the slatted shutters. Water dripped down the joints of the roof planks, filling the tin pails the maids scat- tered in rooms.

My mother asked that the entire interior of the house be repainted all one color, an earth tone she liked, a pearl cream. Instead, it came out a beige mustard color she immediately hated but did not bother to change. But the cobwebs were gone, the rooms aired and dusted, the faucets fixed, and the tile floors polished and buffed. Nothing else was done to the house in the four years we lived there.

The town called it the doctor’s house.

In a few months after our arrival, my father opened his clinic in our house. He didn’t need to announce the opening. Everyone knew. He was the only doctor in town. He put up the bronze-plated name- plate that my mother, who had envisioned the day he would open a private clinic in San Juan, had given him when he passed the medical board exams.