The Noise of Infinite Longing (13 page)

Setting up his practice took weeks, while he worked at the hos- pital and waited for the orders of supplies and equipment to arrive. He had prescription notepads printed, and mother had his diplomas framed and his textbooks put on shelves. He charged five dollars a visit, a pittance next to what he could have made in San Juan, but a fortune to the poor who came to his door day after day to see him. His office was set up in a wing by the living room, in two large rooms closed off from the rest of the house except for the doors to the back terrace and to the living room, which he alone and his nurse

were allowed to enter.

Six days a week the office filled with patients as soon as it opened, at nine in the morning.They came with bags of yautías and plantains, pineapples, corn, and peppers, what they grew in their gardens, and they brought him live chickens and river fish, and pots of asopao and platters of pasteles on holidays. The men took off their pavas, their straw hats, when he entered the room, and the women—old ladies with vague aches and pains, their arthritic hands clutching their bun-

dles, and pregnant young women with babies dangling in their arms—held and kissed his hands. He remembered their names, remembered the ages of their children, and threw his arms around them when they came to him.

They think he can perform miracles, his nurse, Carmela, told me.

She said it countless times, her voice dropping a few decibels as if she were telling me a secret, on those afternoons when he was gone and she had locked up the office and I followed her to the back of the house, the maids’ side, where my mother didn’t allow me to go, and I would sit on the stoop with her, watching her smoke, her teeth stained, her breath sour. She would take out a crumpled pack of Chesterfields she kept in the front pocket of her white uniform, break a cigarette in two, jamming one half back into the pack, and light up, dragging deeply, shaking her head, commiserating with the poor souls who walked out of that office believing themselves healed.

He can perform miracles, she said, thinking about it. He’s got the hands. I didn’t know what she meant, but I liked hearing it, liked the way she said it.

W

e were las hijas del doctor, and those words had a clear mean- ing in that town.They set us apart.We were not allowed near

the casino, the dance hall next door where women in rhinestones and slick red dresses mamboed through the night. We were not allowed to stay out past sundown, and we never went to the movies at night.

That first year in Gurabo, when I was ten and Angeles nine, in sixth and fifth grades, we were sent to public school. Years of parochial and private schools had spoiled us.We were such princesi- tas, turned out in ladylike dresses and clean, brushed hair, white

ankle socks and new patent-leather black flats.We were obedient, we stood quietly in line and kept our voices low and listened to the teachers and did our homework without fail.We were not popular. The sixth grade was the graduation class, the end of primary school, but my classmates barely knew how to add, knew nothing of history and geography, and paid no attention to the textbooks the school gave them.They shouted and dropped consonants and slurred
l
’s and
r
’s, and used words I had never heard in my house. I told mother the stories—the girls who smacked gum like cows chewing grass (we were not allowed to chew gum) and hitched up their skirts and wore red fingernail polish (never!) and put their hands on the boys (I didn’t know how to tell mother about that). The boys yelled and hooted in class, making fun of the teacher, a heavyset, haggard

woman who had wisps of graying hair shooting out in disarray.

She wanted to show me off, her prize student, and once she asked me to stand in front of the class and talk about Mexico, but my voice was shaking and I wanted to run out the door.The boys whistled and laughed and the girls turned their backs and eyed one another. I knew they were mocking me, running their hands through their hair and pulling on a lank strand the way I did when I was nervous. I heard whispers of “Blanquita! Blanquita!” The class broke out in laughter and I stood looking at them, trying not to cry.

Like the town, divided between the slums of El Cerro and the tidy homes around the plaza, between the families with servants and the families who were the servants, the school divided itself, light- skinned children pairing off with light-skinned children, dark- skinned students with dark-skinned students, blanquitos, morenos, negros, and we, Angeles and I, were the most blanquitas of all. We had maids who brought us to school and came to take us home; we had traveled far; we had gone to private schools; and we played with the girls and boys who lived around the plaza, the children of parents

who were on occasion invited into our home. I understood only vaguely why the classroom made fun of me, and why the daughters of the seamstress next door averted their eyes when they first met my mother, why the parents my mother invited over for coffee came only once.

O

ne morning, midway through the school year, I stumbled off my bed, and my father, taking a look at my face and peering at

my eyes, picked me up in his arms and, with my mother gripping my hands, put me in the back of his car and drove madly, speeding all the way, to a hospital in San Juan.

I had hepatitis. The nurses came with long needles, and the doc- tors came with their stethoscopes, taking my father aside, speaking into his ear. I was secluded in a hospital room with a big window, a room large enough for a cot where my mother stayed. Flowers came and my cousins brought me stacks of comic books. Mother kept me company night and day and read to me from the newspapers not so much to tell me the news but to keep herself entertained, and the nurses washed me in the evenings and brought me the pills I had to take and the trays of blanched food I was allowed to eat, quivering boiled eggs and boiled vegetables. Everything had to be boiled and no one could touch anything I touched. I was contagious.

After the hospital discharged me, I lay in a bed alone at home for three months, and my hair grew to my shoulders and I read all the Superman and Tarzan comics and the classics mother brought me, imagining myself as Hamlet or the Count of Monte Cristo as I dozed off, books flopped open on my lap. My father came up three, four times a day from his office downstairs, and he would put his hand on my forehead, look into my eyes, rub my head. No one else was

allowed to get close to me, but Angeles would stand on the threshold and tell me about school, which sounded far more boring to me than my days reading comic books and looking through movie mag- azines.

My skin, sunless for months, was almost transparent, it was so pale, but the filmy yellow had begun to clear from my eyes. My father let me out of bed for a few minutes each day, and in the afternoons when she came from work mother would take me to the front porch, holding me up because I no longer knew how to walk, couldn’t move my legs without thinking about it.

I would sit on the balcony and watch the people on the streets and down in the plaza—the girls jumping rope, my friends flirting with boys, and Angeles biking at top speed on the bumpy sidewalks. I was frightfully thin and had grown out of childhood, and the quiet that had always been in me, in that small place that children know but cannot explain, had become more silent, where I lived with books and with the friends who were the characters in the books and the voices I heard on the radio and the romance and adventure that lay beyond the mountains I could see from my bed, beyond the distant hum of a crop-dust plane that passed over the fields every day at the same time in the afternoon, at that precise time in the afternoon when time seems to stop, and the world seems

still.

In those months in the back bedroom, with the smells of oregano and onions wafting up from the kitchen, fresh gardenias in my room, and my mother’s perfume on my pillow, I turned eleven years old. The spring semester was almost over when I returned to school, but I finished the sixth grade with top honors, a bouquet of white lilies in my hands, resting on the lap of my white lace dress, a picture taken in the plaza in Gurabo, on a bench in front of a low white

picket fence, on a day in May.

M

other gave birth that month to my third sister, her fifth child.

They named her Sara after one of my father’s sisters, and she had the same round face, small features, and light hair I had had as an infant. She was a good baby, mother said, smiled easily, and rarely cried at night. Carmen Monserrate, who had been born two years earlier, all bones and whimpers, had grown round, with pudgy arms and plump legs, but her face, with enormous oval eyes, even more sculpted than my mother’s, and a nose so finely shaped it seemed chiseled, was a face already formed, the same one she would have at twenty.

Las nenitas, mother called them, and from that day on, from the day of Sara’s arrival, they shared a bedroom, schools, clothes, maids. They were the last tier, the children who came in the middle age of my parents’ marriage.

When mother became pregnant with her sixth child, almost immediately after giving birth to Sara, she was thirty-five years old. In that twelfth year of my parents’ marriage, we lived the way my mother had wanted, the way she had been brought up to live, with servants, with china and linen tablecloths—but the silver, kept in a velvet-lined box, was taken out only to be polished and the fine china lay untouched in the dining room cabinets, and there were no sit- down dinners or elegant cocktail parties. She bought a few pieces of furniture, in the blond hardwood style of the fifties, and she had a coffee table made with a heavy beveled glass top supported by a piece of gnarled driftwood, a limb of rough bark she had picked up on a beach. She brought her upright piano from my grandmother’s house and had it fine-tuned and lacquered a glossy dove white, and

she put it in the foyer.

On the Saturday afternoons when my father was away some-

where, she would play for hours, adagios, allegros, largos, De Falla’s “Malagueña,” Beethoven’s sonatas, and, her favorite, “Für Elise.” Her hands, which were strong but short, ran over the keyboard, her fin- gertips caressing the keys, her eyes closed. She played as she recited poetry, from memory, enraptured.

She had a new job, register of deeds for the Caguas district, one of the largest in the island. She had a dozen assistants, women who came to work in the government office uniform, navy skirts, white or pink blouses, and pored all day over heavy threadbare ledgers.The Registry of Deeds took up the fourth floor in a new building in Caguas, and while her assistants worked at metal desks in an open room, she had an office with a large window and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with law books. Her desk, elaborately carved, was cleared of papers except for the casework she was reviewing at the moment. Her signature went on every paper, on every record, a smooth signature slanted to the right, perfectly legible. Many times I watched her as she signed her name twenty, thirty times, her foun- tain pen held gently as if it were a plume, her eyes fixed on the hand- written scrawl on the pages before her. She ignored distractions, even me, restlessly walking around her office, pulling law books off shelves, waiting for her, teasing her, telling her she had an easy job, reading and signing, which seemed no work at all. She liked to tell me, with her slightly crooked smile, that she was paid for what she knew, not for what she did.

For at that time, and considering she was a woman, she had a big job. She didn’t have the law firm she had wanted and she rarely went to court anymore, trying civil cases as she had done several times before the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico. But as the register of deeds, a political office, she was something of a figure in Caguas, a woman with connections and social position. Men came to her office—sultanito this, fulanito that—hat in hand, briefs under arms,

lawyers and businessmen with cases to challenge, and she offered them coffee and a chair close to hers. She stretched herself taller in her swivel chair, her crossed legs sheathed in sheer hose and high heels, her mouth freshly lipsticked. She could twirl the conversation, argue any point with ferocious logic (my father said, not always with admiration, that she could make you believe white was black), and within minutes the men were agreeing, laughing with her, caught in those flashing eyes, in a face that seemed to gather all the light.

Mornings she was up before six, and Rosa the cook came up the back stairs, slithering up the narrow steps in bedroom slippers, her unwashed hair strung back in a ponytail. Rosa carried a coffee tray that, without looking at my mother, she set on my mother’s dresser. My father was already up and in the bathroom, clearing his throat, the sink water running for a long time. I could hear him from my room. In their bedroom, my mother was dressing. She snapped on her girdle, then her garter belt, pulled up her stockings, screwed on earrings, brushed her hair. He would come out of the bathroom in his undershirt and pants, his fine hair raked back; his hands, when he embraced me in the mornings, smelled of soap, and were pink from the cold water.

They never had breakfast with us. In their room, there was their morning discussion, words I could occasionally overhear, mutterings from my mother.Their voices rose almost in unison when they quar- reled, continuing, as if there had been no sleep in between, the quar- rel of broken dishes of the night before, and the mood for the day was set right there—the slammed door, or the kiss.

Seeing her brooding eyes, I wondered why she stayed with him. Years later Tití told me about a time when, after one of my parents’ fights, she asked mother,Why don’t you leave him? Mother, pointing at her pregnant stomach, lashed out, It’s this, if it weren’t for this, I would leave him.

Of course, mother denied having ever said such a thing.

I had two views of her (at least two), the daytime mother, a lawyer in a world she dominated, and the other woman, my father’s wife, subject to his will and enamored of him. I lived her contradic- tions, adjusting my vision of her, trying to fit in my mind the San Juan woman, the dancer and performer, enchanting, vibrant, and fearless, and the woman she became in his hands, an obedient wife, dutiful and submissive.