The Noise of Infinite Longing (24 page)

The drums saved him, gave him a dream.

A year later he returned to Puerto Rico, refusing to go back to the piney hills and the one-stoplight towns of Tennessee and the bar- ren barracks where boys gnashed their teeth and cried into their pil- lows at night. Discipline was not one of the things he had learned, and mother, not knowing what else to do, sent him instead to the private school where Angeles was finishing high school, a few blocks from mother’s new house.

In the first year I was gone to college, my mother had a house built on a lot she bought near Pérez Galdós, after her divorce from my father. Now she had the house she had wanted for so long, using the blueprints she had drawn and redrawn. It was a simple quadrangle, its exterior painted light sienna, not quite beige, not quite almond, a soft shade in a row of yellow and pistachio-green houses. She had check- ered black-and-white tile floors, built-in cabinets lacquered in pitch- black, a courtyard of dwarf palms and climbing blue, pink, and lavender bougainvillea.We had deep sliding glass doors to the patio and a flow of air and light that left no corner without sun.The piano, the white-enameled piano, was in its place in the living room, and the glass-topped table with the driftwood base anchored the sofa just as it had for so many years, moving from one house to another.

Her friends, the Glorias and Sorritos and Mirtas, andTití came in the evenings, had their beer on the patio, and made girlish talk and plans for weekends at Caneel Bay. But the ravages of the last years with my father was written on her face, and her frame, always slight, was frail. She was so thin that doctors ordered her to leave the island and spend months in Madrid recuperating, which she did, spending one summer eating tapas night and day and fainting at the bullfights.

So much changed from summer to summer. I was a sophomore in college and Angeles, who was sixteen, was in her freshman year at the University of Florida. She didn’t last long there. For her, it was another prison. She didn’t fit in, she didn’t want to fit in, she didn’t want to be an American, she didn’t dress the part, she didn’t act the part. She stayed out nights, she drank, she flirted, she skipped classes, yet somehow she managed excellent grades. But she hated being there, and finally she exploded one day in class, when a pro- fessor made a sly, insulting reference to Puerto Rico. She jumped up and yelled at him, Mierda! That was the end. The professor banned

her from the class and her course credits were taken away. She left the university and returned to Puerto Rico.

She was in between colleges the summer after my sophomore year, partying and drinking, a girl so strikingly lovely that when she was fifteen she had made her debut in a movie, a melodrama set in the hills in western Puerto Rico. It played briefly in the movie houses around the island—there she was, with that long, wavy hair falling on her shoulders, and her seductive eyes flashing innocently under her long eyelashes, her name in the film credits, her picture in the papers. Angeles, teenage movie star!

A

maury, who had lost his sweet boyish shyness, spent the sum- mer days out of the house, driving around the city with friends

and, when he was home, locking himself in his room in a tantrum, banging the drums for hours.That was his escape. His anger and hurt ran through him, but he didn’t talk about it. He no longer cried over the divorce of our parents; his sorrow had turned bitter, had become part of him, unspoken. He was not a bookish boy, school was a hard- ship for him, and my mother’s lectures only angered and embarrassed him. He could never be as smart as Angeles and me, he said, he could never measure up. But music freed him. He was Elvis then, a shock of black hair falling on his forehead. He practiced, hitching up his hips, dancing with Angeles in the living room.

In those years after their divorce, we still had our Sundays with father, but now they were more infrequent and he no longer took us to the beach as he had when we were younger. And he didn’t take us on the rounds to visit uncles and aunts and cousins. He was heavier, heavier every year, growing fat around the middle, his stomach bulging against his shirt, popping like a balloon over his waist. His

eyes, too, had changed.They seemed smaller, narrower under heavy eyelids, and swollen pouches underneath.The years of hard drinking were sculpted on his face. But he had not lost his bad temper.When he drank too much, his mockery, a sarcasm laced with humor, was still directed at my mother, but she made it a point not to be present when he came to pick us up or to bring us back to her house.

You’re just like your mother, he would say to Angeles, his words cutting, insinuating, without saying what exactly he had in mind. Seated next to her, I imagined something dark and secret and awful—an unmentionable affliction that only he knew or suspected, or maybe the insanity that he liked to say ran in our family. He laughed saying these things, and Angeles, going along, protecting herself, cleverly avoiding a fight, a provocation with a frown or a question, laughed along. But I could barely look at him.

All I wanted was to escape from him, from them. The tension in the house, even when mother was not there, was like the humidity in the air, like secrets they had that I knew nothing about. The time away from home had left me a stranger, had left a hole I could not fill, an emptiness that kept me separate from the people I grew up with, separate from my own family, and the island.The island was my family, what I had known, and now the island seemed very small, iso- lated, too crowded, backward, noisy and dirty, always living in dreams, believing its own lies.

Angeles and I smoked, drank. That alone made us different from other girls our age and from many of the women in the world in which my family lived. But Angeles got away with it, got away with her peculiarities, as mother would politely put it, like the artists in the family, the prodigals, so many of them in our family, and that made her one of them. Her passion for family, for the island, and for her Latin blood, something she displayed with audacity, without any

timidity, drew them to her. She was one of them. She stayed within the circle, she played dangerously, daring everything, but she didn’t go away from them, she didn’t stray too far. I was different. I pulled away. I had lost track of most of my old friends, knew almost no one my age, and felt no connection with anyone I met. Half my mind, more than that, stayed hidden, shut down. I talked to no one but Angeles about my life away from home.

You’re changing, you’ve changed, she said one night. I knew. I already knew I was leaving my family, and the island with them, as if the people and the place were one and the same.

You’ve become a gringa, Angeles would say then, poking fun, the worst thing she could think of. Some nights, when she came home from her parties, we would stay up talking. Around that time she was reading Marx and the Latin American leftists, convinced that the United States had sacked Latin America, and that Puerto Rico had sold out, that the governor, Muñoz Marín, our grandmother’s cousin, was a worm, un gusano. Because she could outthink me, because I knew that she was right, I listened, but politics didn’t interest me the way it consumed her, and my life in the United States had nothing to do with Marx or Castro. I had become an American, I told myself, with my American friends and my American attitude, looking down on the island, with my head full of big ideas. I wanted to go to New York, I wanted to become a journalist away from the journalists in my family; I wanted to write books and poetry but not like other Latin American writers. I wanted to write in English, to read books in English; I wanted a larger world. I was reading Thomas Wolfe, Faulkner, Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Sartre, Camus. I saw myself on the Left Bank, in Green- wich Village, and I went around muttering, with Dostoyevsky, “My liver is diseased.” I was bored with Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë and Chaucer, the required books in English class my sophomore year, the year I was seventeen and punching holes with my bare fist into the

glass panes of the college doorways.

It happened suddenly, this punching into glass doorways. Happened only a few times, just around the time I stopped wear-

ing my nice blouses and started wearing my roommate’s brother’s khaki shirts, around the time when my handwriting changed into a scrawl and I scowled in class.You’re a sane Norman Mailer, my phi- losophy professor told me, and I took it as a compliment, as if his say- ing it made me a writer, the way the boyish khaki shirts and messy handwriting made me different. Some days I skipped class and stayed in my room, reading, writing, daydreaming. Sometimes I longed for home, I worried about mother now that father was gone and remar- ried, but I never wanted to go back.There’s no unthreading the tan- gles. Was it the divorce of my parents, the awful sense of abandonment? Was it a mere phase of growing up? Was it anger and loneliness? I didn’t know, but eventually I stopped talking about my family as if I had sprung out of nowhere. My world at times seemed dark to me, unknowable and forbidden.

A girl in the dorm became an obsession, the way other girls, when I was younger, had become obsessions, and that was fright- ening and exhilarating, as it had always been. I didn’t know why this happened, these obsessions that took me completely and shook me and then left me saddened, lonelier. But for the time they lasted I had a mooring, a drama of my own invention, a fantasy. I wrote her bits of poetry, I gave her books, I read to her aloud, and she devoured the attention, holding me with green eyes that seemed created just for me. I had that curse, seeing only what I wanted to see, painting others the way I wanted to see them, infusing them with a love they did not feel. I saw my own lies and believed them. One evening in my dorm room, an evening like any other, the room crowded with girls talking about boys and girls, loves and sex, one of the girls said, teasing me, You like girls, don’t you? I

stared at her, stunned. I leaned back on my bed, closer to the wall. I shook my head, and she kept smiling, teasing, and I kept shaking my head. No, it’s not like that, I said, and I began to cry. I cried all night.

Angeles didn’t know that. But she knew something.

She was seeing that summer that she was losing me, or worse, that I was rejecting them, and at times it seemed that all that remained between us were our memories and a simmering anger and the bed- room we shared—our lavender bedroom in mother’s new house, the bedroom with the gallery posters mother had chosen.

I can’t come back here, I said one night. Angeles lay on the bed, leaning against her pillow, hunched over, and said nothing. She lit a cigarette.

We all have problems, she said.Amaury is wild. He’s lost. I drink, and you, you have a problem, too. She said it softly, tenderly. I knew instantly that she had figured it out.

What problem? I asked, afraid she would tell me.

You know, she said, but said nothing else. Then she said, Maybe you should see a shrink.

I shook my head.

Can’t live here, I repeated. I imagined the scandal I would become, imagined my mother’s reaction, my family’s shock. I couldn’t live with that. I didn’t fit in. I didn’t fit into any of my mother’s dreams for me. Marriage, children.

I spent most of that summer away from the house, like a guest passing through. I worked at my aunt’s newspaper during the day and worked at a theater company at night. Mornings I rushed to get into Tití’s car for the ride to the paper. We took off in mid-morning for the coffee shop across la Plaza de Armas; we had long lunches at La Bombonera and La Mallorquina; I tagged along to the receptions where women fawned all around her. There she was, taller than

nearly anybody else, with the mayor of San Juan; there she was, hold- ing a bouquet of flowers or yet another prize, award, or encomium that she would hang on her office walls.

I loved those times in the island, the barroom discussions with Oscar the Chilean director and Helena the Argentine actress, the same one I had interviewed for a school assignment when I was thirteen years old, only now she was rounder and more regal, fierce in her beauty. Her theater company had been going for a few years, but it still had the raw nerve of an amateur company, and with that came the fights backstage (Helena’s temper was frightening, her small body shaking, her blue eyes devastating). Everyone screamed, everyone slammed doors, everyone threatened to quit. On opening night, when everyone seemed to fall apart just before curtain time, I ran back and forth, checking off the prop list—phone, glass, bell, book, slippers, gun (it was a murder mystery set in Juan-les-Pins). Raising the curtain brought instant calm and we had nothing but perfect timing, no missing props, no flubbed lines, and always flowers and kisses when the curtain fell and the applause rose.There was total immersion for me in those nights at the theater, and in the newspaper, as if I were someone else.

But that ended, too, with the summer of 1962. I was leaving for my junior year of college, and this time I would stay away for a long time. I didn’t know that then, but I would be the first one of us to leave the island, to leave the family. I had no way of knowing that my departure was the beginning of the dispersion of our family away from the island, a scattering none of us had ever foreseen.

T

hat’s when Amaury started a rock band, in the sixties, and that’s when he was caught stealing cars.

He stole them not to keep them or sell them, but just to drive them, to feel the wind, to feel the speed, to do it because he believed

he could get away with it. It was easy. He had it down to a science. He and a couple of friends would drive to El Condado, the most affluent residential area of San Juan, and cruise up and down Avenida Ashford, along the beach hotels and the mansions, looking for Porsches,Triumphs, MGs, anything shiny, convertible, and fast. Hop out, someone on the lookout, and wire up the Porsche and take a spin, and then, to make a point of it, he would park the stolen car right in front of mother’s house, right on the street. Amaury would tell this laughing, still laughing about it years later.

One day the police called my mother. Amaury had been caught.