The Noise of Infinite Longing (2 page)

I glanced up and down the hallway, where her diplomas were hanging in the same frames I remembered, and the picture of her I most loved, taken when she was twenty-three, just before I was born. It was in a cluster of family pictures. I stood before it the way I stood, when I was very young, before the statues of the Virgin Mary, the way I later looked at posters of movie stars.

I want a copy of that, I said.

The house where she had lived for the last five years of her life was full of people, more people, I was sure, than had ever been in it when she was alive. Townspeople, neighbors, her husband’s relatives, peo- ple I had not met or had forgotten. My sisters were already there, and my brother, and my aunt, Angela Luisa, with her son, Jacobo. I was startled to see him, immaculately dressed in a dark business suit, res- olute and somber, standing at her side, just a step behind her, atten- tive but distant, at her elbow but not quite touching it. I wouldn’t have recognized him now except for the close-set eyes and foxlike face, the same look he had when he was a boy.

One by one they came to me.

But, nena, you look the same, my aunt said. It had been many years, more than two decades since I had last seen her.

You look the same, too, I lied, throwing my arms around her, relieved to see someone who had shared my mother’s life, who had shared our childhood.

She said, I came because I knew that if I didn’t come you and your sisters and brother would not have anyone here that was real family. I embraced her again. She was right.The sadness in her, the sorrow that had to be in her after losing her only sister, her older sister, seemed muted, cut off. She had never been one to show much emotion.

When I was a child, she had been a spire to me. She was a writer, a journalist, the center of attention in rooms crowded with power- ful men whom you read about in the papers, and with women in

demure cocktail dresses who kissed her on both cheeks. She had been my model, tall and light-haired, unadorned yet shining in her silk scarves, elegant like a swan. But she didn’t look the same, how could she? She was seventy-four years old, two years younger than my mother, and she was less agile and a bit stooped. Her hair was a blond gray curled by beauty parlor hot rolls, combed in tight waves. She had on a silken dress with long, flowing sleeves, the sort she would wear to a theater opening. Her strand of pearls was draped loosely around her old woman’s neck. But she had the brightness about her that I remembered, her glow, her playful smile, and the warmth she seemed to hold mostly for Angeles and me.

Your mother, she said, taking me aside, should have lived the life I had (she meant fame, travel, awards all over the walls), and I should have had hers.

I didn’t believe her, didn’t believe that she would’ve traded lives with my mother, but I did believe that my mother would have wanted my aunt’s life.This was a comment, I thought, meant to sug- gest something about my mother more than about my aunt, and she said it as if revealing a secret, something she had thought about all those years. It felt like the point of a blade touching briefly, coldly, against my skin, before it fell to the ground.

When she embraced me again, she let her long, ringless fingers rest on my shoulder, and stood back to look at me. I wanted to scream,Where is she, where is she?

Angeles came out of a room, and we held each other for a very long time. She looked older than I, her hair a sea gray that was oddly almost black like the depths of the sea. She held me like a doll, tight to her, and her tears touched my face, making it impossible for me to cry. Holding her was as close as I could ever get to holding my mother again, but we still played the roles we had played since we were children. She cried, I didn’t.

She looked so tired after a twelve-hour flight, arriving only to learn that she was too late, that our mother was already dead. She felt so small in my arms, even though she was bigger than I, and I brushed back her hair.

She laughed suddenly, pulling away from me, and took me to the room where she had been hiding from the crowd in the living room and in the kitchen, where my mother’s second husband, Leon, a Texan with the bearing of a onetime football quarterback, was receiving the townsfolk.

We didn’t want to have anything to do with those people, in-laws we didn’t know, the mayor of the town, the beautician, the store- keepers, the women who set up bingo games in the annex of the church, who belonged to the ladies’ auxiliary and put up notes on missing pets on the town hall’s bulletin board—the people who had been my mother’s everyday acquaintances, people who called my mother a Good Samaritan, so ready to help with all the town’s activ- ities.

Your mother was so kind to our community, they said with little variation as they filed in, carrying pies and casseroles, the usual in those parts. She was so good to our town, so interesting, so charm- ing.We will miss her so.

Angeles looked around and said,Who are these people?

I found a chair, and Amaury swayed toward me, his eyebrows raised in anger.

Where have you been?You’re the last one to arrive. I couldn’t come any faster, I said, brusque, lying.

He knew. I glared at him, turning away. He had that way about him, saying the wrong thing, miscalculating, and he reminded me of my father.

I’ve been here since yesterday, he said, an accusation. I took the first flight out of NewYork.

He was the good son, he was saying, and I was the selfish daugh- ter. He was wrecked, his face darker than I remembered, the limp in his right leg more pronounced.When he was a boy, maybe four years old, he fell off a swing and broke his arm. I let him lie on the ground while he cried. It was Angeles who came running to him. She still did that, and now, when he needed to stop crying, she came to him again.They cracked a joke that I didn’t get. I was separate; they sep- arated me from them.We smoked, we had Lone Star beer.We let the ashes fall on the floor and the bottles pile on a table.

Angeles refused to go out to the kitchen and meet all the people and thank them for coming. But I went, my aunt insisted. I found room at the kitchen table, and sat quietly, thanking strangers who took my hands and looked at me with blurred eyes. Are you the jour- nalist? I smiled, nodding.

Your mother talked about you all the time, the ladies said.

I knew that; she talked about all her children, always pulling our old pictures out of her wallet.

In front of me, on the table, was a bowl of fake fruit (mother loved fresh fruit—why would she buy waxed apples, pears, bananas? I wondered). Scoops of potato salad and slices of honey-glazed ham were put on a plate for me and I pushed it aside. How could I eat? Finally, it was time to go view the body.

I’m not going, I said. Angeles is not going. Amaury is not going.

The others—Carmen, Sara, and Olga—all went, parceling their cars, dragging their husbands and children with them.

Angeles and I stayed in the den, and Amaury stayed with us. Together, we thought ourselves a trinity—the three oldest, the ones who really knew the story. We were our parents, their reflection. Angeles more than any of us.

Now we were going through my mother’s things, her boxes, plain shoe boxes, all unmarked. We were looking for anything of hers.

Angeles had already gone through the box on my lap, holding each letter, some many years old, in her own childlike handwriting. She took the letters out of envelopes, glancing over them, and putting them back in the box, in order, just as they had been placed there by my mother.

She said nothing when she handed me the box. She reached for a cigarette and lit it with the burning butt of the one she had just smoked.

Mother wanted to be cremated, Angeles said finally. It’s in there, in her handwriting.

I opened the box. I found the note, on top of the pile of yellow- ing papers. I read it quickly. I never saw this before, I said, injured.

I did, years ago, Angeles said.

Why not me? I said, our little jealousies rising above the pain.

The letter was undated, not addressed to any of us. Mother wrote it on plain drugstore stationery and she had folded the single page in half. The ink was fading, the paper stiff. In handwriting that still retained her fluid slope, but was now a little more crooked and shaky in her old age, she had written that she wanted her ashes spread in her garden.

So why was she not cremated? I asked. Amaury looked at the floor. He didn’t know. He had just read the letter for the first time. Angeles whispered, It’s too late. She’s already embalmed, every-

thing had been arranged before we got here.We didn’t know.

But why is she being buried here? I said, repeating myself, help- less, furious that I had not known before, that her wishes had been ignored.Why were we not asked?What does she have to do with this town? She belongs in Puerto Rico, I kept saying, a meaningless thought since she had not lived on the island for thirty years. But it was the dream I thought she had, a dream I had for her. It was her home, I said. It was our home.

#

We were born in a place of no particular consequence, on an island of certain beauty, at the intersection of two cultures, where the Atlantic meets the Caribbean, a place of crosswinds and hurricanes, jumbo jets and puddle jumpers, a stopover for travelers going by sea or by air to one or another tourist resort in the American tropics. Island colonies, all of them, outcrops of sunken landmasses, dead rims of ancient volcanoes, pieces of land conquered and abandoned, hot, sensuous, primitive, ocean-lapped and wind-lashed. Places like this island have no history, their beginnings pulverized by time and indifference, their moments of heroism and cowardice passing unno- ticed by the grander world.

We have known voyagers in armor, and voyagers who happen upon us, travelers who come to invent us, enamored of islands and of their moist seduction. Poets are born under the susurration of coconut palms, in the black nights of the islands, and out of the incomprehensible beauty around us, out of this brilliant palette, come these people, who over centuries of copulation have shed and grown layers of skin and color, a people indefinable, irreducible, pas- sionate and unforgiving, penitent and superstitious, rootless, insular, without horizons.

A people confined by water, surrounded by the infinite, with nothing but dreams.

They dream they came from a land across the water, from a con- tinent of magnificent riches and ancient races, a place they could only dimly remember so many centuries later, but that gave them a strength in the blood, a way of moving and talking, a music older than any memory. They dream they came in royal galleons, across cold purple seas, to conquer lands of fabled treasures, a red earth engorged with gold and silver, and endless shores of sands without

footprints.They came, those in armor and those in tri-cornered hats, the barons and dukes, the knights and masters of empire, sailing under the silken banners of a kingdom, to plunder and Christianize, to spread their seed, to take.

Blood flowed in rivers, and in the openmouthed bays of the islands, deathless stone monuments were built to the conquest. Fortresses in Habana, in Santo Domingo, in San Juan, all proclaimed Spain’s sovereignty, and cathedrals proclaimed the triumph of the Church over the primitive and uncivilized. In the cities spawned by the Spaniards, once scattered settlements of fruit-laden jungle and sheltering palm trees where the Taínos had made their bohíos and tended their yuccas and corn and cassavas, in nearly every new cap- ital of the West Indies, the face of history became Spain. The French came later, and the English, and the Dutch, and the Africans in chains. But the bloodlines were to Spain, the passions and fatalism and poetry, the madness and the isolation, the irrational pride, the treachery and cruelty.

Those dreams, that history, became transmuted in time, embel- lished, living on in a few, the historians and artists, the poets, and in the families who claimed ancestors from the arid mountains of Gali- cia, from the vineyards of Andalusia, from the Mediterranean coast of Catalonia. And in those stories, the life of the island became ancient and romantic, filled with treasures found and lost, with nobility and bravery.

Illusions are the breath of life in a place of little importance.

T

he northwestern coast of the island runs jagged against the pounding surf of the Atlantic, a moody sea along that coast, heaving high, rugged waves against rocky beaches the color of bones. Ships and sailboats and adventurers cruise those waters, finding

anchor and shelter in the seaside town of Aguadilla, where, they like to say, Columbus first landed in Puerto Rico, stopping for water at a spring that is now the center of the town’s Parque El Parterre. The town has its Mediterranean airs, and retains some of the architec- tural curlicues and social snobbery of colonial times.

Out of this storied town, where family name and position deter- mined destinies, came my mother’s family. She was born there, in September 1918, when a Great War was devastating Europe and the island was a colony of the United States. She was a middle child, one of three children.The three of them, a boy and two girls, were born into a family where nothing but brilliance was expected, where cer- tain things were assumed—manners and social graces, discipline and studiousness, and in time, good marriages.

My grandmother, a woman of the old world, had been brought up by governesses and tutors, had grown up at dinner tables fre- quented by men who would one day figure in history books. She was the oldest in a family of six girls, daughters of Josefa Muñoz Rivera, who in a picture my grandmother kept in a gold-leaf frame on her dresser seemed forbidding and severe, with a stern, dour look. It was a face rounded by middle age, with hardened eyes, and hair so dark it seemed dyed. Doña Josefa’s ancestors had come from Spain in the eighteenth century and settled in the central mountains of the island. Her grandfather, Luis Muñoz Iglesias, a captain in the Spanish mili- tia, had gone into politics after making the months-long journey from Castilla la Vieja, a province north of Madrid. One of his sons, another Luis Muñoz, became a mayor and had five boys and three girls, among them Josefa, my great-grandmother. His oldest boy, Luis Muñoz Rivera, became a journalist, a poet, and a nationalist (the history books call him a statesman). Josefa did what women of that time usually did, marry and have children.