The Noise of Infinite Longing (27 page)

Nicaragua. She made it her country.

And it almost broke her. She left when she saw the end coming, when the end came for her.The war and the American embargo had left Nicaragua broke, its coffee and banana fields ravaged, the coun- tryside charred, its people in tatters, whole towns in ruins, Managua a crater for a revolution. In an atmosphere of desperation, rulers turn on one another, and everyone is suspect. Foreigners were no longer welcome, and Angeles, not only a foreigner but an American citizen no less, was no longer of any use. In late 1987, she left Nicaragua.Two years later, the Sandinistas lost the presidential elec- tion. By then, there was little left of the revolution.

When she came to New York in 1992, I hadn’t seen her in five years, I repeated to Sara, not since that Christmas in Abilene in 1987. But in 1992, in New York, Angeles wasn’t as frail as she had seemed that Christmas; she didn’t have that sick pallor. She stayed with me a few days, and we talked and talked, with her spilling ashes all over the sofa bed. One night she was talking about father and mother, and she started crying, and she doesn’t cry easily but she was crying that time, and she said there was something inside her she

couldn’t get out, but she didn’t know what it was.

I know, I said, but I didn’t know. I put my hand on her shoulder, barely touching her. I didn’t want her to shrink back as she usually did, as if her skin hurt. She seemed so young then, at that moment, but just as soon as she started crying she started laughing—Such drama, she said.

We analyze everything to death, she said, and we can twist any- thing anyway we want. She reached for her beer.

So how was Managua? I asked her. I remember her lifting her shoulders and making a face, her mouth turned down. I could see the ridges around her mouth.

I said to Sara, She never talks about it, not much, about her years

in Managua. Instead she asked me about Manila, about Imelda and the article I had just written for a big magazine. So, no, she didn’t tell me what happened to her in Managua.

I heard footsteps behind me and I stopped talking.

Were you talking about me? Angeles had come back from her room and was standing at my side in Sara’s kitchen, pulling at my hair, joking.

Her hair was fluffy, blow-dried, brushed back, and her face had some powder on it, smoothed, bright. She was wearing a clean top, those loose cotton jerseys she had in every color, each the same, just so she wouldn’t have to think about what to wear. Her feet were in sandals, black rubber-soled sandals. She was locking the clasp on her Rolex.

So, she said to me, pulling her top down over her hips, are you staying another day or going tomorrow?

No, I said, grabbing her hand, I know you want me to stay, but I can’t. I really need to go.

Well, she said, shaking her head. She had expected that answer.

I always left first, last one to arrive, first to go. My family visits were bracketed, as if staying longer would in some way pull me down into the endless mire of their drama, but I knew there was something else. My life had been separate for so long that I had become an artifact to them, more an idea than a person. I lived a life they didn’t really understand, with no husband, no children, in cities they didn’t choose. I felt set apart, had set myself apart. For a long time, I believed that seeing me hurry away freed them, freed them from me, just as it freed me from questions not asked, from answers not given, from their embrace.

It was so much more complicated than that, I knew, but I settled for the easy explanation—I was different, I didn’t fit in. I didn’t want to admit that I left quickly only because I couldn’t bear to part from

them. Leaving them would bring on an emptiness I couldn’t stand to feel—like the solitude I felt when my mother first left me, when I was fourteen, at my new school in Pennsylvania—and so I had become accustomed to quick good-byes, turning my eyes immedi- ately on the road ahead while knowing they were standing together waving, watching me go.

What time do you leave? Angeles asked. Around noon, I said.

Good, she said, late enough for me.We’ll all pile into the cars and go like a caravan to see you off, she said teasing. I could see that, the interminable ride to the airport.

Uh, Carmen offered to take me, I said.You know how I hate these things with everybody going. Better just Carmen, no?

I didn’t want Angeles to go to the airport—I would not have been able to leave then.

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Angeles was born exactly two days after my first birthday, in the same month, in the same hospital, our stars set on a similar course from that day. For all our childhood we celebrated our birthdays together, dressed almost identically.We attended the same schools, found the same presents under the Christmas tree, always a room- ful of packages, toys and clothes, dolls, tricycles, roller skates, and, when we were a little older, Schwinn bicycles, hers dark blue, mine deep green. We shared a bedroom and playmates. We played the piano side by side, we danced together, staged singing skits for our parents and poetry readings. We brought them perfect report cards.

Mother called us las nenas, even when we were grown-ups. We were always indistinguishable in her love, but from the day of her

birth Angeles was a child quite different from me. She chafed at the world, this child, crying to go back, wailing at night as if she had been pulled away, torn, from the only place she would ever find safe.

There was no peace in her.

S

he grew up so fast. Everything she did seemed ahead of her years (except getting married—for that she waited). At thir- teen, she confronted our father with his infidelity; at fifteen, she made a movie; at sixteen, she was expelled from the University of Florida; at seventeen, she fell in love with a middle-aged artist whose radical politics made him irresistible in her eyes, but it was an impossible affair, and, escaping from him, she left Puerto Rico to study architecture in Monterrey, Mexico. She came to see me in NewYork on her way there, and she brought me a small painting he had done of her that I later lost in one of my many moves from city

to city.

I was living in Brooklyn then, after finishing college, in a second- story walk-up across from Prospect Park, where I opened the windows in winter and dangled on the sill, playing Grieg and Rach- maninoff at full volume, the snow hitting my face, and the ambitions I had then rolling in my head like the dense clouds across the sky.

Are you writing? she asked me that night she stayed with me.

I had no job, had floated from one fifty-dollar-a-week job to another, desk jobs, licking envelopes, filing magazine-subscription renewal cards. I had been fired once, twice. I was lying to my mother, never telling her in my letters that I was broke, that I had walked up and down the avenues knocking on the doors of every publishing house I had ever heard of, looking for a job, any job, receptionist, secretary, anything to get me close to books, and that every time I had been turned away at the door. Applications filled

and filed away forever. I couldn’t even get to the junior assistants. I didn’t have the right credentials—I had gone to a college in South Carolina nobody ever heard of. Did you go to Radcliffe, Vassar, Columbia (the names tolling in my head like the bells of a cathedral), the receptionists asked, barely looking up at me, giving me a pen so I could fill out the application forms. And my accent and my unpro- nounceable name!

Where are you from? they asked.

I didn’t tell mother that my phone had been cut off, that I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor, that I spent evenings aimlessly walking in the Village, that once, on Fourteenth Street, a street like any other in the barrios of San Juan, with the blaring mambos and the garish clothes and the tacky shops, and the oily Puerto Rican men shifting their legs in the come-on of the streets, places I would have never walked into in Puerto Rico, I didn’t tell her that once, walking by a store, someone yelled out, Paisana! Are you from the island? And I kept walking, shaking my head.

In a few months in New York, I had learned shame, had learned that being a Puerto Rican meant the back kitchen, the bottom, something I had not felt in the Deep South or in Pennsylvania. But in New York City, where I had not expected it, it came at me from all sides.There was the day when my boss at the Long Island University library, a refined academic who adored Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy, told me, while in a tantrum over her withering potted plants, which I was expected to water, that I was like the Puerto Ricans who hung out laundry on their balconies in the projects. I was so stunned, I could only glare at her, but vomited every morning before getting to the job.

Taxi drivers, shop clerks, people at work felt it necessary to remark time and again that I didn’t “look” Puerto Rican. What does a Puerto Rican look like? I would invariably ask, but I knew what

they meant. It was unmistakable.

How could I tell my mother? How could I tell Angeles? For them, and for myself, I kept silent. I pretended my life was great.

So, are you writing? Angeles repeated that night in the apartment on Prospect Park. She looked around the bare floors, bare walls, two chairs and a foldout table in the kitchen, the bedroom window that let in no light but looked out on a brick building and the garbage dump in the alley.

I was writing some poetry, I said, but I tore it all up.

You’re not writing, she guessed, an accusation that went right through me. She was right, I was not writing. I had tried, but I had no idea what to do with it. I couldn’t figure out who could help me, where to take it, and I didn’t have the courage to show it all. There were thousands of writers in New York, I told myself. I was just another one.

Who’s this girl you liked so much? Angeles said. I knew she would ask.

Hmm. I knew her in school. She paints . . . she was in my dorm, a year older than me.

Those are her paintings? Angeles asked, looking at a stack of can- vases leaning against a wall.

Yes, I said, glancing over at them, dark, crazed portraits of women.

Not very good, Angeles said casually, an offhand statement I didn’t bother to argue with, and she turned back to me.

Where is she? she said.

She’s gone, she was here for a month or so, then she went home. She cracked up. It’s what happened, her personality began to change until she believed she was three different people, and I didn’t know from one day to the next who was living with me. I would spend afternoons at a Brooklyn library reading about multiple personali- ties, trying to understand, trying to hold on to her. But I couldn’t tell

Angeles that.Who would believe it?

So that’s the problem, she said, that’s why you stopped writing.

What happened?

Her parents, I said. They came to get her, threatened to write mother. So I wrote mother . . .

Yes, I heard, Angeles said, waiting to hear the rest, her eyes fixed on my face.

I didn’t want to talk about it, but Angeles kept staring at me. She was great, mother was, I said. Wrote me a beautiful letter,

said she would come to New York if necessary to stand by me. She believed I had done nothing wrong. Angeles nodded. I’m not sur- prised, she said, mother understands in her way, she may not like it because she doesn’t want you to be unhappy, and she believes, you know, that without a man and children, a woman can’t be happy.

Then, rising from the chair, planting her drink on the table like a fist, she said,You have to get out of this place.You’re doing noth- ing here.

But where am I going to go? I thought. A day later, she left for Monterrey.

I left NewYork shortly after, in January 1964, to stay with mother in Texas. I was broke and she gave me a home. She was pregnant with Leon Jr. and had no job to keep her mind occupied. My company was the closest she could come to her previous life in Puerto Rico. Days became weeks, and I got a job atTexas A&M University, editing pam- phlets on drought and corn and cotton growing, boring work that paid me well enough to buy a car and a stereo. Abuelita died that spring, and mother went to Puerto Rico for the funeral, and when she returned she said, Mita would have liked the funeral. Everyone came, even Muñoz Marín.

Mother gave birth to Leon Jr., and the time came for me to leave. I couldn’t stay in Bryan, Texas, one moment longer. I was dying in

that town, just as Amaury had been dying, and my mother knew it. She didn’t try to stop me when a newspaper in South Carolina offered me a job. She had Leon Jr. in her arms as I packed my car, the stereo, books, one suitcase, my pillow. I knew she stood on the car- port a long time watching me drive away.

All this time, Angeles was planning to leave Monterrey and go to Italy to study. Father was paying her way. He was making up for what he hadn’t given me, I thought, the money to go to college. She had a way with him I didn’t have. She tolerated him, even liked him, and she flew often to Puerto Rico to see him, staying with him and his wife in the house he had built on his farm. She enjoyed his jokes, repeating them years later, and she liked his family stories—she understood him, and had long ago forgiven him. But with me there was no forgiving.

I could hardly imagine her in Milan. I could barely imagine Milan. Milan, I had to say it aloud. Angeles walking the avenues of Milan, the most beautiful girl in any cafe, drinking vino in little glasses, chain-smoking, the ashes of those skinny, filterless cigarettes piling on a saucer, her body exhaling as if her soul were being expunged, smoke rings twirling, breaking off around her hair. Ange- les, bella.

Milan bored her, and she took the train to Paris, and from Paris I got a postcard, a copy of a painting by Klee; on the other side, in black ink, in her handwriting—blocky, with a designer’s angles, an architect’s cubism, it said, “What can I say? Paris is Paris.”

I knew she felt lost, and horribly alone.

Next I heard, through mother, who was our hub, where all the family news was deposited and circulated in every direction to us, that Angeles had returned to Monterrey, had gone back to the Tec- nológico, and was living with an architecture student, Guillermo, a nephew of one of the former presidents of Honduras—prominent