The Noise of Infinite Longing (14 page)

A woman is not complete without a man, she told me years later, when she wondered why I didn’t marry.

The idea made little sense to me as a child, but later I began to notice around me women who served their husbands, sitting with heads bowed at dinner tables while the men carried on their conver- sations. Women who gave birth year after year, women who had no career of their own except being wives and mothers, who stayed home with the children and passed their days watching telenovelas and making meals. In school, in church, girls were taught obedience and, above all, to remain pure, and that marriage and having children were our destiny. That litany was deep in the traditions and social ways of the island as the gnarled roots of old trees. My mother was caught, trapped by tradition and her own fantasies of romance. She was María Félix, and he was Jorge Negrete in those weepy Mexican melodramas of insatiable passion and bitter betrayal.

H

er life in Caguas was separate from her life in Gurabo. She drove out to work early in the morning, after telling Rosa

what to prepare for lunch and dinner, after kissing us good-bye. Some days in the summer, when Angeles and I didn’t have school, she took us with her, like she used to take us to the mercados in Mexico, and I sat in the front of the car with her, Angeles in the back, both of

us expectant, children going to the city. In her old Ford, she made the twenty-minute drive in a trance, daydreaming, humming to her- self, laughing at our chatter.

At ten o’clock she called out to one of her secretaries for an espresso, which she took at her desk, while talking to Gloria, her old friend and assistant, about Gloria’s girls and husband or whatever happened to be on their minds that morning. Gloria was round-faced and stocky, looked much older than my mother, with breasts heaving heavily on her rotund stomach. She had known mother since child- hood, and they had the familiarity that comes with knowing things that one never speaks about. It was to Gloria that mother confided, and I could tell when something serious was being discussed because Angeles and I were sent out of the room. I knew it had to do with father. Every problem, I already knew, had to do with father.

At the lunch hour, around twelve, we walked with mother to Gloria’s house. Mother had lunch at Gloria’s nearly every workday, and after lunch, mother took her little nap there, on Gloria’s bed. And it was there where she went alone, closing the door, when she couldn’t bear it anymore. Angeles and I didn’t know then, but we knew in the way that children know. We went off to play with Glo- ria’s daughters, girls our age, who were like us, the best friends of our lives, of our lives then.

Sometimes, in the late afternoon, mother took us to the stores, stopping at Delia’s boutique, where she bought her dresses and hats and our clothes. A trim, tall woman who talked of Paris as if it were next door, Delia catered only to friends, and her store was a salon, something she had seen in Paris. She strode from a backroom and draped herself around my mother, kissing both cheeks, bringing out dresses, measuring and fitting, exclaiming, discarding one dress for another, announcing as she did to all the mothers who came to her store that she was putting on a children’s fashion show for the ladies’

club and that, of course, we had to be included. Mother flushed with excitement, red blotches traveling from her upper chest to her cheeks, every time she heard Delia say that, while Angeles and I sat quietly, glancing at each other, but smiling politely like mother had taught us.

Mother could not have enough invitations. She had cocktails at the Lions Club and the Rotary, where few women were permitted and she was a center of attention, and she had her lunches with women who would not be seen without hats and gloves, women who entertained themselves with banquets and sororities, who packed their daughters off to finishing schools abroad and organized the annual balls and the fashion shows and ran the charities.

Gurabo was almost a prison to mother (she did not tell us this, she told Tití); she had the house to run, the maids, father, the obli- gations of family, and, worse, she had my father’s friends with their matronly wives, simple women of simple tastes, who read paperback romances and endured in silence their husbands’ mistresses. These women never wore hats and gloves.

She insisted that my father join the clubs in Caguas, and he did, and they went to the balls and the banquets, but he was very much like his friends and their wives, a man of simple tastes. All he wanted was a place in the country where he could hang a hammock.

He bought it, had talked about it for months, each time my mother objecting—Why do we need a farm? Aren’t we going to move to San Juan?—but one day he came home with the papers, the deed to the land. He wanted us to see it and packed us all in his car. The property, some one hundred acres, was nearby, on a hill on the outskirts of town.The hill sloped down to the main road. It wasn’t a big hill.There were no palm trees on it, or groves of fruit trees, or a creek. It had a dirt road and dry pastures, fallen wire fences, and an old herd of cattle, their scarred skins spotted with sores.There were

maybe fifty cows, all ribs and rumps lying here and there on bare patches, chewing dry grass. He had bought the farm, the cows, a shed where the cows were milked, and a palm-roofed house where the farm’s majordomo lived with his family.

Trudging up the hill, mother sank her shoes in mud and in cow plops covered with flies, and she walked through stinking stalls to watch the cows give milk, Mario, the majordomo, squeezing shriv- eled teats in filthy hands. For us, who trudged behind her, and for my father, she suddenly played the great farm lover, recalling her days on horseback, fantasizing, paper in hand with the drawings she had made, that the hill would have her house on it, a house, she imag- ined, with fabulous vistas.

Como una casa de campo, she said, promising.

Now my father saw himself as a big landowner, un hacendero, a man of property with so many hectares valued at this much, and with so many heads of cattle and a majordomo of his own. He talked about retiring from his practice at forty-five and living up on the hill. He wanted to be like his friend Willie—fat, rich Willie—who did nothing all day, it seemed to me, but drink beer, ogle the women of the streets, and play dominoes in the casino.

With the farm, my father’s routine changed. He left the house at five in the morning, wearing a wide-brim straw hat, the sort farm- ers wore, and rubber galoshes that came up to his knees. He talked about bales of hay and selling the dairy’s milk in the town, but those sad cows never gave enough milk to sustain the farm, let alone make him rich. But the land was his.

Every morning he brought home milk tanks he tied down in the trunk of his car, the milk sloshing on the trunk’s carpet. Rosa boiled it, and we drank it lukewarm with our coffee, milk clots floating and rising, like moss in a lagoon, leaving streaks on the glass.

I hated the milk, hated the farm from the first time I saw it, hated

it because I knew my mother hated it, hated it because they fought over it. I didn’t like the smell of Mario, and I felt sorry for the cows. And I knew, swatting flies off my arms, stepping around manure, and holding my nose in the cowshed, that the farm would keep us from ever leaving Gurabo.

S

ummer in the island was el tiempo muerto.

The zafra, the sugarcane-cutting season, was over, and the centrales slowed their production of sugar, molasses, and rum. The sugarcane fields lay fallow, scorched, and the men of the fields con- gregated in the town, trying to make a living, setting up roadside vegetable markets and piragua stands, crowding around the plaza and along the strip of stores in the main road. They came to find work and to the gatherings at the plaza, to the fiestas patronales, the street carnivals, and the holidays of flags and balloons, maracas and tim- pales. They came to the political rallies of Luis Muñoz Marín, the island’s first elected governor and founder of the island’s largest political party, who, in 1952, in one of those moments of political theater that would make him a legend, had walked up to El Morro to raise the Puerto Rican flag above San Juan Bay, establishing after almost five hundred years of Spanish and American rule the island’s right to its own flag and anthem.

In the fifties, the years of his Jalda Arriba, the Operation Boot- strap that would transform the island from an agrarian to an indus- trial society, the banner of his Popular Democratic Party with a silhouette of a jíbaro in a straw hat over the words
pan, tierra y liber- tad
flew in thousands of rural homes and in every town of the island. In those years, he was at the height of his political power, his physi- cal presence (he was a bulky, fiftyish man, with fleshy jowls and sunken, dark eyes, and a bushy, graying mustache) and bellowing

voice brought thousands of people to the plazas, coming by mule or car, from the barrios and the slums, from the bohíos and factories, from the coast and the hills.

My mother, who had cried when Adlai Stevenson lost the presi- dential election in 1952, who could argue about politics, citing rhythm and verse and history back to Columbus, her voice breaking with excitement, who had politics in her blood and had made it a religion, was a socialist of the sort bred by the educated classes, by the criollo elite, Spaniards to the bone but born on the island, colo- nials, descendants of an old, dissipated aristocracy. She was senti- mental about humanity, about the condition of the poor on the island (and everywhere else), and she was, like many in her family, a nation- alist. By blood ties and political conviction, she was a Muñoz loyal- ist, still believing like many Puerto Ricans did at that time that he would bring independence to Puerto Rico.

But she would not go to his rallies, would not stand in the sweat of the crowd or wave the miniature Puerto Rican flags like the mul- titudes at a parade.

One day in the summer, Muñoz’s caravan came to Gurabo. The workers set up the stage next to our house; lights were strung up on trees and around the plaza; flags were hung from telephone poles and balconies; and flyers with pictures of his craggy face were tacked on trees and storefronts. The town was papered with him, the skies exploding with firecrackers and floating balloons, the streets thun- dering with the noise of the crowd.

My mother, dressed as if she were to sit on the dais, in the flood- lights, watched out for his arrival from our front porch, and he made his way, with the men sidled around him, and stopped at our steps, opening his arms for her, for his cousin’s daughter. It was a minute, no more. Bending down toward her, he embraced her, swallowing her in his heavy arms, an old man suddenly, embracing an adoring young girl.

That night I did not go to bed early. I stayed up with her on the balcony, watching her mimic the words he spoke to the crowd, the same ones she had heard most of her life. An entire town sprawled around him, old women squatting on the grass in the plaza, fanning themselves; children up on the trees waving flags; bare-chested men and their women shouting his name as if the name alone would bring them wealth. Long after he had gone and the trucks had packed up, we could hear the chorus of people dancing and partying late into the night.

The next day, the town’s sweepers came with the brooms and garbage cans to pick up the trash. The lights were taken down, and the town seemed empty—as it seemed every year when the carnival folded its tents and the roller coaster came down and the carousel stopped going around. Things went back to being what they were. The church bell rang on the hour, and the people went to Mass.

But the evening had left mother with something to talk about, a story she would tell Gloria several times over, reliving each moment with the same excitement she had felt leaning over the balcony, hear- ing the cheers of the crowd.

Chapter Six

Turning Points

M

other had been buried a day, twenty-four hours in the ground, and we were done crying, I thought, taking the cup of coffee

Sara handed me.

Mornings are like that sometimes.You wake up empty, having left the pain to the night, and the sun shines, the sky brightens, and the world returns to the familiar, creating the illusion that we are safe now, that we are stripped clean, and we go about our business in slow motion, stirring the sugar in the coffee, lighting a cigarette, picking the cat hairs off the sofa.

It lasts a moment.

They are going tomorrow, Sara said to me. Do you want some toast?

I shook my head, looking out the kitchen window. It was going to be a hot day.

All but Angeles, Sara went on. She’s staying for a week.Yes, I said, she came such a long way. Carmen is driving back home, Olga is fly- ing to New Orleans. Tití had already left early that morning, so quickly I thought she had never been there.

Amaury woke up with that sweet face he had after a bad night, a look of remorse and innocence, a boy who had been bad, but he was good at making it up, throwing his arms around Sara, the way he had twirled mother, making her face light up. He rubbed his swollen eyes

and put his hand on my shoulder. Nos tirámos una Angeles y yo, he said, sorry. Can’t remember when I fell asleep, he said, laughing, did we keep you up? I kissed him on the cheek. He smelled of stale beer.

Angeles shuffled in, her T-shirt swallowing her, her hands shaking as she lit her first cigarette, but she was smiling. The ruptures, the cracks that were running in all of us, were not showing so early in the day. The words we’d flung the night before seemed forgotten, dried up like the tears.

Sara had cleaned the kitchen, and together we listened to the coffeemaker and got up for one, two, three mugs of coffee, saying nothing.

When are you leaving? Angeles asked me. Tomorrow.

Why don’t you stay longer? she said. I’m staying.

I can’t, I said. I could have stayed longer. But what were we going to do, what were we going to talk about? I wanted my things around me. No, I was lying; I wanted to escape.

The day was long, nothing ahead.

The clock in the kitchen seemed to have stopped. The boys had gone off to buy beer. A tuna salad Rick had made sat untouched on the counter. Sara had been lucky with Rick—married very young, carefree and wild, Rick turned out to be a good husband, I thought as I put away the salad. Carmen looked rested as usual, as if she had had seven hours of sleep. Her makeup was on, her earrings were on, and as usual, she listened and said little. She believed her life of housewife and mother was so dull next to ours, but that was her choice, a life that was orderly and conventional, a life she had created to armor herself against chaos. It was the very opposite of our par- ents’ life.