The Noise of Infinite Longing (23 page)

Mother was a woman nearly destroyed.We were caught, their six children, trapped in their madness, and that took longer to kill than their marriage.

Marriages end with a flip of a pen and papers put away in a lawyer’s office, but passion takes much longer to die.

The unraveling would take all of us with it.

By midsummer I had completed the credits I needed to finish high school. I was done with summer school at the University of Puerto Rico and received my diploma, not one I could frame and hang on a wall but an ordinary piece of paper. Now I could go on to college. I had sent away for several college applications, Columbia, NewYork University, Maryland, having no idea that the schools had already chosen their freshman classes, that I was too late.

It didn’t matter in the end.

One night, when the time had come to send in application fees and I was asking my father for the money, he interrupted me, laugh- ing at my plan to go to school in New York. Tienes la cabeza en las nubes, your head is the clouds as always, he said.

My mother was standing a few feet away, in the doorway, stand- ing in the wings. She glared at him, and said all she could mutter in anger. But, Amaury, you promised her. He didn’t bother to answer. Her face was a mirror of mine, in a rage.

He turned to me.You stay here in Puerto Rico, he said, and go to the university. He was standing by the dresser, looking down on me. It was the same high-polished dresser they had had most of my child- hood, with the wide drawers and gold handles and the mirror with the beveled edges.

You’re a woman, he was saying, all a woman needs is to learn to cook and get married. I heard the words and ran them slowly through my mind. All a woman needs is to learn to cook and get married. I sat straight up on the edge of their bed and stared back at him. I hated his voice, his mouth, his face. I hated the island.

I’m not staying, I said.

For weeks, mother and I looked at brochures from small, inex- pensive colleges. She discovered a women’s school in South Carolina we could afford. Look at that campus, she said when the brochure arrived, so pretty. I knew almost nothing about the South and had met no southerners, but I had read the books, seen the movies. It was no place I had ever wanted to see. NewYork had been my dream, liv- ing in a garret in Greenwich Village, writing poetry in the cafés, and trying out for parts in off-Broadway plays. But when the letter came from South Carolina, telling me I was accepted into the freshman class, I ran around the apartment, shouting with joy, holding the let- ter like a trophy, my ticket off of the island, and freedom.

All that time, Angeles was reading Marx and flirting with boys much older than she and drinking at parties, and Amaury was playing drums and guitars in his room—Elvis singing at full volume. He was not going back to military school.The parties didn’t stop because my

family was falling apart, and Angeles and I were being fitted for the gowns we would wear on the night of our debut in San Juan.We had practiced for this all our lives, parading in girls’ dresses at children’s fashion shows, dressing up in costumes, giving parties big and small, raising our gloved hand just so, wearing girdles and seamed stockings, dancing easily in heavy, hoop-skirted gowns and high heels.

Angeles had the face of a model, oval, strong cheekbones, and fine black hair that she liked to pull back into a twist or let loose around her face. Ah, Rita Hayworth! On the dance floors, she moved as if she had no bones, so limber, her legs and hips flowing with music. I was sixteen, she was fifteen, but she seemed the older of the two of us, with a woman’s face and a womanly frame, as if she had skipped clumsy adolescence like she had skipped so many grades.

On the night of the debutantes’ ball, we looked like mannequins in long dresses of many layers, gowns that bounced and floated off the dancing floor.The hotel ballroom was festooned with candelabras and chandeliers and tables laden with flowers. Tití, the master of cere- monies, chosen for that role because she was well-known, stood at the bottom of the long stairway, introducing each of us as we came down, chins up, backs straight, the trails of dresses flowing behind us, the tiaras glinting. At the bottom of the steps, boys in tuxedos waited, their arms stiff at their sides. Roland was waiting there for me, sur- prisingly handsome in his tuxedo, and my mother, in a jade-colored chiffon dress that made her look slimmer and younger, sat with other mothers at the chaperones’ table. She looked radiant to me, more so than all the debutantes, in her dangling emeralds and long gloves.

We danced all night and drank champagne and watched the sun come up over the Atlantic. By morning, the ballroom was strewn with withered orchids and roses, confetti and broken glasses.

The next day the newspaper had an article about the ball with a

picture of two dozen girls standing in rows, the picture so small we couldn’t see ourselves in it, but mother found us. Angeles looked composed, serious, a strand of hair falling on the side of her face. I had my face turned to her.

The season of parties was over, and I started working atTití’s news- paper,
El Mundo,
rearranging her files and sorting the mess of maga- zines and pictures that lay all about her office. After weeks of this, she gave me an assignment, a story on a new theater company. I did the interviews and spent a day or two writing the story. She didn’t say any- thing when she read it, marked up a word or two and was done with it. I didn’t dare ask if she liked it.The next day she came by our apart- ment with the newspaper and handed it to me. I looked through it quickly. I found my story and my name above it, the byline seeming much bigger to me than any other words on the page. I looked at the words I had written as if someone else had written them, but they were mine.

Tití came by every morning in her car to pick me up and, driv- ing through the traffic jams to Old San Juan, we talked about the newspaper and her column, but mostly she was lost in thought, and I wondered about her life. I wanted mine to be like hers: interviews with the governor and artists and movie stars, afternoons secluded in an office with the bay breeze fluttering the stacks of paper at my desk, and my fingers clacking the keys of the typewriter.

But I didn’t want to live in Puerto Rico. I didn’t want to grow up in her shadow and in all the other shadows of my family. I didn’t want to see the darkness that came to my mother’s face when my father’s name was mentioned. I didn’t want to marry and have children.

Days flew as they always did in August.The storms came with the season, and I broke up with Roland at the top of the stairs to the apartment, when he leaned over abruptly and kissed me on the day I was going away to college.

Part Three
A Scattering of Dreams

“Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today?”

—Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel”

Chapter Nine

A Boy and His Drums

S

o you don’t want to come with me to the airport, Amaury said, turning to me. We were in the kitchen, plates piled up with grilled steak and Carmen’s potato salad. She made it exactly like mother had, with boiled eggs and crunchy bits of apple—the best

potato salad in the world.

Now he was angling for me, but I ignored him. He laughed, the mock laughter he used to show his anger. And he was hurt, I knew. I could hear it in his sneer.

Being with me is too much for you, eh?—and he kept pushing.

He did that to me anytime we were together, saying exactly the thing that would set me off. It wasn’t what he said precisely, but the way the words fell on me. Even his compliments—you are so suc- cessful, we read your articles—came out badly, a beautiful rose handed to me, but the thorns of its stem prickling. Not that poeti- cally. The rancor was there, the resentment, envy, and the distance we had traveled separately, by different routes, to different destina- tions.

I could hear my father in his voice, in his tone.Tienes la cabeza en las nubes, just like father used to say to me, you have your head in the clouds. Amaury was glancing over at Angeles, checking to see if she approved, as if proving a point to her, See, she thinks she’s too good for me.Angeles glared at me, and I knew she was thinking, why

couldn’t I soften up on him? Everybody else looked the other way, talking to one another, ignoring Amaury’s little drama.

In this family we were experts at that. We refused to see the blood.

I let it go.Then I said, with a forced smile—the one I had when I wanted to make friends, when I wanted to paper over pain—It isn’t that, it’s just that I leave in the morning and you leave in the after- noon. I was lying. He knew that was not the reason; they all knew.

He got up from the table, went to the ice cooler, and dug up another beer. His hands wet from the melting ice, he grabbed the bottle and gave the cap a twist and took a long gulp. His limp was usually worse, more noticeable, when he was drinking. He dragged his bad leg just a little and stood with the leg thrown out, as if it weren’t connected to his hip and didn’t belong to his body.

Like his mind and his words—disconnected, like his life. But I knew so little about his life.We had lost track of each other, like only sisters and brothers can drift apart, separated by the distance the heart puts between us, the years, and the things we hide from each other, but we were never totally apart, never completely severed.

He’s your brother, mother reminded me every time she asked me to call him to see after him.

Just because he’s my brother doesn’t mean I have to like him, I blurted out once, a slap. I was thinking about the words I had said the last time I had seen her, in NewYork, two years before her death.

I remembered the words and studied him. He was taking another gulp of beer, the bottle almost upside down, his head turned up to the ceiling. He’s gotten old and tired, I thought, wanting to rush up and embrace him. But I didn’t.

He had a wife, a Puerto Rican he had met in NewYork in the early 1980s. I had seen her only twice. The first time I met her, in New York, during my mother’s visit in 1992, she didn’t wait a second to

throw her arms around me, her body like a rubbery cushion, and, surprised, I patted her back with the tips of my fingers, that gesture of tentative affection. Taking a beer, she sat back on a corner of the sofa, smoothing her skirt (I could tell, or guessed, she had made up her face and coiffed her hair for the occasion). She laughed loudly when she spoke, and was all endearments—mamacita, amorcito— toward all of us. But, I thought, she’s tough, hard, and demanding. Her skin was the color of light coffee, and she had a broad, fleshy face, puffy under the eyes. Her two children came with her—a sullen boy who looked at us shyly, his eyes peering at the floor, answering in monosyllables when we addressed him; and a hefty girl with frizzy big hair who was as brassy as her younger brother was timid. She stumped into the room and shook her body inside her tight skirt and thrust out her chest. They were not Amaury’s chil- dren, but he treated them as his own, pampered them, stood by them in and out of trouble.

We saw one picture; Amaury saw another. Tamara was a woman from small-town Puerto Rico who had grown up in the New York barrio like thousands of others, struggling in a city segregated by color and race, but she had pushed herself up. Amaury was proud of that—she has a master’s degree, he boasted, one of the best teachers in the Bronx. She’s good for him, mother would say, takes care of him, keeps him under control. Eventually, they left the projects in the Bronx and moved out to Queens to a house in a quiet neighborhood. But we still wondered,What was that life he was living, the years they lived in the Bronx? How could he have lived like that? He knew we thought that, every one of his sisters. This came up usually when he was drinking. Even with Angeles. One time with her, when I was not around, he started ranting, You’ll never accept me, all of you think you’re too good for me.They were in a car, and Angeles, who treated him almost like a son, who had brought him up to her way of think-

ing, who had bailed him out of trouble time and again, who had been there for all his falls, stopped the car and walked out.

Now, in Sara’s kitchen, I watched him standing with his beer, making jokes, swaying just so. He’s spent, I thought.

After a minute, I left the kitchen, found a magazine, and sat alone on the sofa in the living room. He turned to follow me and stopped at the sofa, set the bottle down on the big coffee table where Sara had a bowl of drooping flowers and a stack of gardening books. He took the far side of the sofa, sat on the edge, head down. I offered him a cigarette and pretended to look at the magazine, flipped a few pages, waiting. His eyes drifted off my face. I used to smoke these, too, he muttered, but now, with my stomach, I’m not smoking anymore. I looked at him, concerned.Your stomach? I asked.Yes, they say it’s an ulcer, so I had to quit. Good, I said, but what about drinking? He shrugged.

We didn’t know how to talk to each other—not like Angeles and he talked with each other, not with that ease, with that comfort.That time comes, too, when you forget the language of family, and it had come to him and me a long time ago, when we were children. All we had now were greeting kisses, tight embraces that promised some- thing, a buoy at sea, and memories we could not know were differ- ent one from the other, or the same. I knew so little about his life. I had lost him so early.

#

When he was ten, maybe older, he got his first set of drums. He wanted to be Gene Krupa and pounded on those drums for hours. Rock ’n’ roll star, that was Amaury, that was what he saw in his mirror.

He was in a military school in Tennessee, where young boys would grow up to be men, drill sergeants, captains, men with met- tle, with stiff spines, taught manly discipline, made to endure physi- cal pain with whiplashes and wooden paddles breaking splinters on their bare backs, forced to stand at attention for hours on the parade grounds, trembling in the cold wind of winter.

Mother had sent him there after the divorce, thinking a boy needs the company of other boys and firm discipline. She was too buried in her own grief to deal with this boy of hers who, after our parents separated, would hide in the bathroom crying, muffling his own loss. She had no idea what to do with him, not really. Sending him off to a military academy was her answer, so off he went, barely out of shorts, with his bony body and his big watery eyes—a picture shows him in his gray uniform, saluting, his face on the verge of tears. He hated it, hated the barracks, the barren grounds, the distance from everything he had known, and the sneer on the face of the bigger American boys when he spoke English with an accent. He despised the school like nothing he would despise in his life. Luckily, he found a place in the school band. He became their drummer, his boy’s fury held between two fingers. He had been left partly deaf by a fall from a horse when he was eight and he could not read music, so music was nothing he learned, it was all there in his mind.