The Noise of Infinite Longing (22 page)

ing cars, everything slowing, and breaking piece by piece by piece.

I said nothing. I didn’t move. I didn’t reach out to her. I don’t even think I cried.

They were divorced in a matter of weeks. There was no hearing, no court case. Without a meeting between them, the papers were filed and signed, and my mother dropped my father’s name. His pic- tures came off our walls, and she began to refer to him rarely by his name, but as “your father.” She would come home from work, gather the afternoon newspapers, and lie in her bed until dinner, reading

the news or staring at nothing.

After the divorce was final, my father came to the house, walked into my mother’s bedroom, where we had been waiting for him, my mother and the three of us, Angeles, Amaury, and I. He looked shrunken in his baggy pants, his upper arms thinner, and his face looked sallow. He stood at the door of the bedroom. We looked at him and quickly looked away and turned to mother. She said noth- ing. She wasn’t looking at him.

He said he had come to ask each of us a question: Who do you want to live with?

He knew the answer, but he had to ask.And each answer, each the same, the one word, whispered, penetrated some awful place in him, and his hurt spread across the room. I felt a pity for him, for that man so small.

For the rest of the summer he came on Sundays to pick us up. Without knocking, he opened the front door and walked in as if he lived there, joking with the maid, asking for something to eat. Occa- sionally, not every Sunday, he went upstairs to my mother’s bed- room. We could overhear them arguing. His voice had lost no volume. It cut through walls. There were Sundays when he went up and we heard them talking under their breath, and sometimes there was silence. He would reappear downstairs in varying states of agi- tation, and reached out to embrace each of us again, glum, demand- ing, or, in his good moods, doing a little shuffle, a little dance, telling jokes. Only Angeles laughed at his jokes, even when he was mocking her voice. He made fun of her big lips, her pigeon-toed walk.We sat around him, nodding at his stories. In these stories, he was at times a wealthy man of land and ranches, or he was a small-town doctor, a man with nothing but his good name. He was not yet forty-five years old, but he had his last will and testament prepared, he said, his properties and assets in order, the dairy farm, the hill, and the other

acres he owned. He used money as a weapon, threatening us time and again over the years that he would drop us from his will if one of us displeased him.We, of course, believed none of it.

On his visiting days, he took us to the beach, driving us to Luquillo, the only beach he knew, where he had spent days of his youth, where he had taken us when we lived in Fajardo. But he no longer went into the water.

He waited for us under a palm tree, not in swimming trunks but dressed in his street clothes, a short-sleeve shirt and long pants, his tie-up shoes sunken in the wet sand. He hunched beneath the palm fronds, leaning against the tree trunk, drinking the milk of a ripe coconut. He was restless, walking to the edge of the water in his shoes, leaving heavy prints, and waving us out, calling out our names, signaling that he was ready to go, just as we had gotten our suits wet. More often on those Sundays, we went to see his family. We made the rounds, going from house to house, from El Vedado to El Condado, a ritual of family obligations, little kisses and hugs from our assortment of aunts and uncles. My father, in high spirits with his family, drank all afternoon like the men in the family did. He didn’t get drunk, but ordered the wives around, the maids, the children. I didn’t like him then, didn’t like that he was loud and vulgar, that he didn’t seem successful the way I had wanted him to be. I didn’t like the smell of defeat about him, the ordinariness about him.

I

n the late fifties, in the island, divorce was still unthinkable, the sort of thing that didn’t happen in good families. Men had their mistresses and their bastard children, as they did in other Catholic countries, in Spain, in France, in Italy, all over Latin America. Soap operas were built on these stories. The wives feared the scandal of divorce more than the infidelity of their husbands and looked the

other way, performing their public roles as wives and mothers, ladies of the house, their place in society secure. They let themselves become old women while they were still young, their sexuality neg- lected, their sham marriages papered over.

My mother, who had pursued boys in her youth, who had betrayed and been betrayed, who had known about my father in a way that a woman knows, could no longer pretend that nothing had happened when he flaunted his affair, and she would no longer suf- fer in silence.When she found out, when she could not deny it any- more, she left him.

That was the version my mother told. There were other stories, other versions that I heard years later, but the basic facts were invari- able. She filed for divorce—irreconcilable differences, said the papers she signed, not adultery. She was not going to put that word to it.

W

e lived splintered lives, Sundays with father, the rest of the week with mother. But they didn’t talk to us about it, about

the divorce, and we didn’t talk about it to one another. We were locked in silence.

Mother went to work, read her newspapers, and in the evenings she gathered on the patio with her friends, drinking espresso and nibbling on cheese. She had plans, she told them, plans to move to San Juan, plans to send Amaury away to military school—he needs men around, she said, and the discipline—and she had plans to send Angeles along with me to Linden Hall in the fall.

After a while, life seemed normal, a whirl of parties, dances, boyfriends. There was the Ecuadorian who sent me handwritten notes vowing eternal love, and I had Roland when no other boys were around, his voice breaking, his eyes brooding, saying I had changed, that I had become like American girls. I laughed him off.

He took me to parties and brought me orchids that wilted on my wrist. Nights passed with the rhythms of mambo drums and twirling conga lines, the perfumed sweat of pressed bodies, the words of songs he hummed in my ear.

But I knew he was right. I had changed. Everything seemed smaller to me, his ambitions, his presence, the towns, the island itself. Some days stretched endlessly, afternoons when the house felt empty, nights when I could hear my mother crying, afternoons when Amaury locked himself in his room, refusing to come out until Ange- les came to him. He didn’t want to go away to military school, he wanted father back. Angeles held him and sometimes she cried with him. I felt helpless, I just wanted to go away, and many mornings I walked alone to the cathedral in the plaza and sat for a long time in

a back pew, saying the rosary, or doing nothing at all.

One day just like any other, I took out a pile of letters and other things I had written and burned them all. I dumped all the papers in the backyard, tearing them into pieces, struck the match, and watched all of it burn down to a heap at my feet. I watched the pieces of blackened, ashen paper float up and fall, crumpling on the ground. I stomped on all of it. Anger came like that, but I didn’t know it was anger, didn’t know it was desperation.

I got letters almost every day, letters from Barbara and Jean and Judy, from the girls whose lives seemed so unreachable to me, living as I was in a place they could hardly pronounce, on an island they saw as a postcard. I didn’t speak to them about my parents’ divorce. I couldn’t tell them that my father had another woman, someone who was only five years older than I. I couldn’t tell them that I had seen her once or twice walking in the plaza in Gurabo, her breasts bulging out of low-cut blouses, her legs bare in stiletto heels. I was a child then, but I noticed. She strode slowly, swaying her lower body, and as she passed, the men whistled and craned their heads, watching as

she disappeared at the end of the street.

She had the skin of almonds and black hair down to her waist, a woman from the barrio, with the body, full, loose, fleshy, that Latin men want to own.

I didn’t know who she was, didn’t know her name. I found out later that she had been my father’s mistress for years and that every- body in town had known about it. Those lonely nights of my mother’s, when she waited for him, their late-night fights, the pain in my mother’s face, the violence in my father’s, all that now had a name, a face.

B

y the end of the summer, my mother was planning to move us again, this time to San Juan, farther from my father and the gossip about him that made the rounds. She was sending Amaury to junior military school in a remote town in Tennessee, a place no one had ever heard of, and he was suited in gray uniforms and caps, a boy made to look like a man. Angeles didn’t want to go to Linden Hall, but mother had her mind made up. The three of us—Angeles,

Amaury, and I—would be gone.

On this trip to the United States, there were no days at the Wal- dorf, no Radio City Music Hall or stroll down Central Park. Mother didn’t come with us.

Angeles and I flew straight to Philadelphia. Angeles was miser- able, sulking. She seemed so small and lost those first weeks in school, and I avoided her, angry that she didn’t want to fit in, that she didn’t want to be the American girl I thought I had become. We no longer fought like children, with nails and teeth and knuckles. We fought with words.

She lived on the floor above me, and being a grade apart, we had different classes. Days went by when we hardly spoke to each other,

not even to read each other letters from home. I wanted to see her happy; I wanted her to fall in my steps. I wanted her to make me look good in front of my friends. But she knew immediately she didn’t want to become one of them. They’re silly, she said, dismissing me with them. She didn’t want their lives, their boyfriends, their school. It’s like a convent, she cried out. She got sick, lost weight, and spent holidays in homes that were like graveyards to her. She wrote letters home, longing to return, consoling my mother and pleading with my father, begging them to reconcile, forgiving him. We argued about that, too. She was forgiving; I was not.

Soon that fall, my mother started writing letters full of father. He was courting her, bringing her flowers, taking her out to restaurants, telling her he had left the other woman and that he wanted mother back, for all of us to be together again. I thought, How can she believe him? But I didn’t tell her that.

It was winter, January, when they came to the school, a big sur- prise. We were called to the headmaster’s office, and in the parlor stood my father in a suit and tie, a hat in hand, and my mother in a black overcoat. He had one arm around her shoulders.

We didn’t run to them; they gave us no time. Their arms were around us instantly. They had remarried and flown to NewYork, had a room at the Waldorf, went dancing and drinking at the Stork Club. They were young again, my mother exclaimed over and over. But they were not. He was portly, with a scowl even in the picture someone took of them at the Stork Club. She looked coquettish but older, with her hair curled and shorter. They stayed three days with us, in the town’s inn, and there, my father announced that I would not be returning to the school for my senior year, that he wanted me and Angeles back with them. I looked at my mother for help, and she looked not at me but at him. I saw she agreed with him. I knew I had lost. But I fought back, and finally he promised to send me to any col-

lege I wanted if I finished high school that summer in Puerto Rico.All I needed were a few credits that summer to finish high school a year in advance. I could skip my senior year and go straight to college.

I want to go to Columbia, I said. I’m studying journalism. Fine, I’ll send you there, he said.

We had dinner with Judy and her parents that evening. They had driven from their coal town just to meet my parents. My mother came out in a fancy ruffled blouse and black skirt, high heels, ear- rings, her face blushed. She was meeting new people, she was going out, and nothing made her come to life more quickly than that. In a dark suit, my father looked very much the successful surgeon, open- ing the door for my mother, speaking in a soft tone. They ordered drinks and my father, his jacket still buttoned, making himself taller, more important, spoke about his plans to move to Spain to special- ize in cardiology.That was the first we had heard anything about this, but Angeles and I knew, with one glance at each other, that this was my mother’s idea, her price for taking him back. She wanted a com- plete change, a new city, a new country, a bigger profession for him. She wanted complete oblivion.

I didn’t believe it for one minute. I could never see my father in Madrid, but my mother dreamed it, planned it, and spoke about it with the conviction she could bring to anything she wanted.

Worlds fall apart like that.

The school year ended, and gone were my walks with Jean and our talks about moving to NewYork together and becoming writers. She still had another year at Linden Hall. Angeles and I returned to the island to yet another new home, an apartment half the size of our earlier houses, on an ordinary street of middle-class homes a few blocks from Pérez Galdós, close to grandmother’s house.

The apartment was a way station. It didn’t have my mother’s touch, no garden, no bookcases, nothing to suggest we were settling

down there. A porch was our escape from four walls. But I liked the apartment, liked that we were back in San Juan, that Tití dropped by in the afternoons to have her beer, and she and mother sat together until dark, the canvas awning over the porch flapping in the breeze that came with dusk.

There was little left of my parents’ marriage. Even after his sec- ond marriage to my mother, after all the flowers and promises to her and to us, he had returned to his mistress. He came to the apartment a few nights, but he was not really living there; his suits hung in the closet, but that was all he we had of him.There was no more talk of moving to Spain, and late at night on those evenings he spent with us, the arguments between them had the wretched hopelessness of endings, lost arguments relived and lost over and over again.