The Noise of Infinite Longing (15 page)

I remember what they were like, she would say, and let it end there.

She had married her high school sweetheart, a tall, serious boy, cheerful and attentive, who knew since he was a boy playing football that he would become an optometrist and inherit his father’s prac- tice. He gave Carmen everything she wanted, security, fidelity, an American family. She never had any other love, dropped out of col- lege and they married and his family became hers. While he studied all those years, she kept an eye on their money and scrimped and managed to make a home even in that little trailer near the Texas A&M campus, taking occasional jobs to help him until they had their first child, a child they planned. She planned things down to the last detail. So she listened to us and made fun of herself—she knew she was a mall girl, who knew every bargain in every store within a fifty- mile radius, who set up bridge evenings with the wives and took cruises every year (at any dock, in Miami or San Juan or St.Thomas, she could name every cruise ship, pointing at the berth she and Bryan had shared and where they had gone and how much it had cost and where she got drunk—accidentally—on margaritas).

Carmen has an incredible memory, remembers everything, Sara would say. It’s just that she doesn’t take herself seriously like we do. She’s the funniest one of us all because she knows herself and makes fun of it.

I knew that, looking over at her, feeling as I had felt when she was born, so small and scrawny, wanting to hold her. I didn’t want any shattering in her.

Olga was sitting next to Angeles. Mi hermanita, she said, hugging Angeles. They had become so close when Olga lived in Honduras, when Olga was in high school and had left Texas to live with Ange- les, to see something of Latin America, to get away from Abilene and mother and Leon. The first time she tried to leave she was three years old. Mother was pregnant with Leon Jr., and Olga couldn’t put up with the idea that she would no longer be the youngest. One day

she packed up a little suitcase and walked out of the house. Didn’t get very far, just to the sidewalk, when mother came running and brought her back. But high school was different. Olga hated it. It was worse than fourth grade when she got into a fistfight because a girl had called her a wetback.

In Abilene, when she started high school, she was miserable. She was picked on because she had an accent and, just as bad, she didn’t look like the other girls with their cheerleader smiles and pressed skirts. Olga walked around in flip-flops, jeans, beads. Those towns were really hick, she said, laughing now.

She was sixteen when she went to Honduras, and wound up find- ing the boy she would marry, a skinny boy who could just as easily party all night as talk about revolution, who became a doctor while she studied architecture at the University of Texas. As certain as she ever was about anything, Olga married Erick, and they settled in New Orleans and now they have two children, a pair of boys, and she and Angeles have the life they lived together in Tegucigalpa, which made them close in a way that one becomes only when you live with somebody.You know the secrets. I envy them that.

Let’s go drive around, I said. I can’t stand to stay here all day.

No one snapped up to attention. Herding a big family takes time, hours. Where should we go? Who drives? Which car do you want to take?

We drove around Dallas with no destination. The heat made the roads weave like reflections in old mirrors. We were sealed in the car, windows closed, the air-conditioning roaring, Sara driving, or was it Olga?

Let’s stop at NorthPark, someone said. I’m not going into a mall, Angeles said, putting an end to that idea. Let’s go by the museum. We drove around Highland Park and the lakes and down Greenville and up and around McKinley.

Expressways that didn’t end, mansions that seemed as quiet as mortuaries, sprinklers rotating on lawns, curtains drawn against the sun, people going about their business downtown, but my mother was gone.

The world should be still. Didn’t they know?

. . .Y no saber adónde vamos/ni de dónde venimos . . .

I heard Angeles say that, so quietly I could hardly make out the words over the hum of the air-conditioning.

Rubén Darío? I said.Yes, mother liked that, Angeles said.

How do you remember? I said. I heard her reciting it many times, she said.

What does it mean? Carmen asked.

I said, Not to know where we are going / nor where we came from....

Thirty years mother had spent on these roads, in these cities without music, without her music, without her poetry. When was she happiest? I wondered.

Were we ever? Maybe when I was eleven, that year and the next, maybe then.

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When I was young I imagined the years beginning and ending in summer, perhaps because those years seemed to revolve around that time of year when the days ran one into the other, when there was nothing but time for the gathering of dreams, piñata parties, and pic- nics in the far hills, legs sunburned and scraped, running hard from the sudden afternoon storms.

That summer when I was eleven, when I played softball in the plaza and twisted the middle finger of my right hand, and rode

bicycles with the boys far into the fields and raced with them in roller skates, and lost each time to Angeles in games of Monopoly, that summer comes back on days like this, somnolent, barely stirred by a seaborne breeze, the sun bleaching the sky, almost white with heat.

Mother was pregnant. My father had bought a new car, a two- tone beige-and-olive-green Pontiac Catalina, with shiny chrome and fins, fancy as a Cadillac in that town. We hired more maids. Rosa made our meals; Estrellita took care of Carmen and Sara; Luz cleaned the house; Lorenza, the lavandera, came once a week to take away the dirty laundry, bringing it back folded in a cloth bag she car- ried on her back. Mother made lists: the grocery list for Rosa, the laundry list for Lorenza, and the housekeeping list for Luz.

The maids lived in a small windowless room behind the kitchen, in the well under the back stairs. Their door was usually closed, but I could hear them at night with their radio, and talking and laughing on the kitchen steps. Angeles and I were not allowed back there, night or day, but on those afternoons when Carmela the nurse was having her cigarette or Rosa was showing me how to make a cake (she battered the mix with sugar, butter, and milk, and I scraped the bowl, licking my fingers), I could hear them talking about their men and the women in the barrio.

Once, when they didn’t know I was in the kitchen, I heard my father’s name and their snickering. Servants’ talk. I ran out of the kitchen.

They said father was un mujeriego. That he liked women. What does that mean? I wondered. I wanted to tell Angeles, but I didn’t, any more than I told her that the maid in Fajardo had told me that father had another daughter, a girl older than I, who looked like me. I didn’t believe that either.

My father was filling out in his middle age but he was still a man

of looks—he liked to say he felt like a boy of eighteen, said it any- time he had a few drinks—and he was spending more and more time out of the house. His dinners sat on the stove.

Long after we were in bed and the maids had gone to their room, mother paced around the house, biting her nails. Her stomach was getting bigger, but even though she was pregnant for the sixth time, she had a slim figure, and her robe, an open throw over her long sheer nightgown, clung to her body’s shape, to her swelling breasts and the slopes of her thighs.

In my bed, in the dark, under the mosquito net, I waited half asleep, watching the light of the moon and the streetlamps casting moving, ghostly shadows on the walls. Under our closed bedroom door, a spill of light came from the den, where mother rummaged, pulling a book, any one, from her bookcases, maybe reading a sen- tence, trying to distract herself. Some nights the phone rang, a patient calling for my father, and my mother said that my father was out on an emergency. At midnight, at an hour that I always thought of as midnight, his car swerved up to the carport, the tires scraping to an abrupt stop, and the door clicking shut. From the hall down- stairs he called out to her and her light step came closer to the other side of my door, beside the top of the stairs. She moved quietly down the long stairway. Low voices downstairs, whispers, and then my father’s voice would wake up the house. Her cries followed him as he climbed the stairs, the leather soles of his shoes making the sound of his steps heavier and slower. Sometimes I shut him out, shut them out, but there were nights when she cried harder, and I got out of bed and went to him, asking him to stop. After so many years of pleading, I finally gave up, I don’t know when, and tried not to hear. At the end of that summer, for reasons I didn’t know, Angeles and

I were sent to live with our grandmother, and we returned to the private school in El Vedado where we had gone when were five and

six years old, after returning from Mexico. We were back in the house on Pérez Galdós that many years later we would remember as it was then—the living room with the cane-bottom rocking chairs, the glass cabinet with grandmother’s blue-and-white china, our nar- row beds in the room that still had Tití’s dresser, her mirror, her smell (Joy de Jean Patou), and grandmother’s old Singer sewing machine.

Over the five years since we had last lived there, little had changed in that house. My grandmother’s flowers still grew in the planters in the front yard; the bougainvillea climbed up the walls; the guava tree in the backyard, near the outdoor sinks where clothes were washed, had grown taller and we could pluck ripe guavas off the branches.

The neighborhood, the horseshoe-shaped street, now had a supermarket on the corner, and we had new neighbors next door, a house of sand-colored stucco almost touching our wall. The traffic was heavier, and Eleanor Roosevelt Avenue seemed narrower, a race- course for cars and buses, and for people trying to cross to the other side. There were more taverns and bodegas, more food stalls, more taxis. Little boys sold cigarettes on the street. Women in mesh slip- pers smoked lazily on the steps of shacks built around food-and- drink stalls tacked up with Camel and Carta Blanca signs. Music blasted from radios round the clock, mambos and plenas, merengues and boleros. Pérez Galdós itself, a street that in the late forties, when my grandmother had her house built, was mostly vacant, now had houses, large houses, with grilled balconies and arched porticos, car garages and grassy yards hosed down in the late afternoon.

There was construction all around the neighborhood.The crank- ing of cement mixers and the shouts of construction workers woke me in the early morning. A big shopping mall was being built several blocks away, and on the dead-end streets that paralleled our street, a

new subdivision was going up. Everyone seemed to have a car, and residential areas were being laid out like so many grids of tract houses, all square, all with flat roofs and carports, that people could buy with small down payments and government loans.

San Juan was spreading, barely able to contain its million people. It was already a city with several commercial centers and suburbs, rich and shabby neighborhoods cropping up side by side, ranch-style homes walled from overcrowded government-run caseríos of low- rise buildings and concrete yards.

The emigration that began in the thirties and forties to NewYork and other American cities had crested in the mid-fifties, and within the island itself more people were moving, leaving the small farms and remote villages for the bigger towns and busy port cities. Man- ufacturing was taking the place of sugar as the island’s biggest source of revenue, and Muñoz Marín’s plan to modernize the economy had become a blueprint for the salvation of small countries. Sociologists wrote about it, scholars came to study it. Abroad and at home, Muñoz was described as a hero of democracy in the Caribbean. He was no Batista, no Trujillo, no Duvalier. He was invited to the White House. He spoke at the United Nations. He published policy papers in
Foreign Affairs
and lectured at Harvard. It was the spring of his reign as governor, and the bohemian poet who once wrote about la patria and revolution while living the artist life in Greenwich Village had become the master politician, balancing the poor against the feu- dalists, balancing the island between colonianism and freedom. So they said.

The island became a refuge for intellectuals and artists from Franco’s Spain and from the military dictatorships of South America. The Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, a Nobel Prize winner, exiled himself to Puerto Rico, and the cellist Pablo Casals, a Catalán whose mother was Puerto Rican, made San Juan his home, starting the

Casals Festival of Classical Music, bringing to the island celebrities from the United States and Europe, names we knew only from the papers and the movies.

Tití Angela was a guest at the inaugural concert, and it was all she could talk about for days—her meeting with Don Pablo, who was eighty, and his twenty-one-year-old wife, Martita, and the stars who came for him, the stars the government flew in to advertise the fes- tival and the island to the world.

Marilyn Monroe was everywhere, in all the newspapers, on tele- vision, arriving at the concert in a flood of flashbulbs, curtsying in front of Don Pablo. Puerto Rico was an island of farándula and what could be more farándulero than Marilyn Monroe embracing Pablo Casals.

T

ití and Jacobo were now living in the apartment above my grandmother’s.They had moved there after their son was born,

and in the evenings, dressed for a reception or the movies, they stopped by—Jacobo chain-smoking and telling his macabre jokes.

Grandmother laughed every time even if she didn’t understand the joke, fawning over him, charmed by his attention. We all laughed with him. Tití now had her own child and her newspaper column and no longer had time to make our dresses or bake our cakes, but we were still her girls and she took us to Saturday mati- nees, sitting through Disney movies with her eyes closed, dozing off, and she took us to the Caribe Hilton to swim and to the Chi- nese restaurant she and Jacobo liked, and to the Mallorquina in Old San Juan and the Swiss Chalet, where the waiters wore tuxedos and the menu was in French.