The Noise of Infinite Longing (4 page)

Almost every afternoon, around sundown, we had company, grandmother’s sisters and her cousins. She brought out glasses full of chilled tamarind juice, or cups of freshly made coffee, and a platter of white cheese and membrillo. Standing on the ledge of the porch, by the bank of daffodils and azaleas grandmother watered at day- break and at dusk, I spotted the visitors coming down the road and announced them to my grandmother.

One day I saw a strange woman rounding the street corner, walk- ing in our direction in a hurry, appearing out of the rain like a mad ghost, dressed in black, the hem of her flapping dress touching the pavement. Her hair was a wild mass of wiry gray, her skin parchment white. She carried a leather-bound book of uncut pages, what turned out to be a collection of her poems.

Her unexpected appearance was a big occasion. My grandmother reddened with excitement, taking down from the shelves of her glass-fronted china cabinet her porcelain espresso cups and saucers, the ones with the blue birds and blue mountains, waterfalls and rivers and tiny Chinese houses with concave roofs. Seeing my grand- mother so excited, I wanted to know who the woman was. Grand- mother turned to me, putting her long index finger to her lips, quieting me, and said that this wild woman who would flit in an out of our house over the years was her cousin, a poet. Clara Lair she called herself, her pen name.

Grandmother held the book of Clara’s poetry on her lap, finger- ing the leather jacket. She called Clara una lumbrera, a brilliant woman, a light in the firmament, a word that brought images of suns to my mind. Clara didn’t stay long, ignored me as if I weren’t there, and then flew out, gone as suddenly as she had appeared.

She’s a little mad, grandmother said to me later, smiling. Insanity runs in the family.

Our other visitors were not quite so mad or quite so lumbreras.

Mostly, they were my grandmother’s sisters.

Nana was a spinster who so hated being touched by children that she squirmed and jerked back when I kissed her cheek. She sat stiffly, hands folded on her lap, in the wooden recliner by the porch table, sipping black coffee, her lips pursed, barely touching the cup. She had a government job, in the Treasury Department, in an office where she kept the books. Every day she wore her work uniform, the same round-collared, buttoned-up-to-the-neck pink cotton blouse and dark blue skirt that covered her knees. Her face was heavily caked, a chalky pink blush that she put on like a mask, stopping just below the hairline, leaving an odd thin line of white skin showing between her forehead and her hair. I was fascinated by that line, that bare space, I wanted to touch it.

Seven days a week she rose at dawn and went to Mass, walking the mile to the nearest church in a black mantilla. She rarely missed a day. The Church and baseball were her passions, the only ones I ever knew about.

Every now and then, grandmother let me go see Nana in her one- room flat in the building next door that was owned by another of my grandmother’s sisters, Isabel, the rich sister, who had married sugar money. Nana had a half refrigerator with a bottle of milk and almost nothing else in it, and she had a bedside table where she kept her prayer book and a rosary of worn black beads. There was little else in that narrow room with the shuttered window, a single bed, a radio. On those evenings that she and I spent together, we didn’t talk very much.We listened to the ball game, shouting and jumping with every strike and every score, her ear pressed to the radio, her fingers squeezing a handkerchief.

For a time, Tití Angela Luisa lived in the spare room in grand-

mother’s house, where she made our party dresses, just as she had made mother’s gowns. She worked on my grandmother’s old Singer sewing machine, her long foot hard on the pedal, her hands guiding the cloth—silk, crinoline, satin—under the machine’s needle, tat- tat-tat, a whirr filling the house.

But first, Tití, the name we always called her, lay down the crin- kling dress patterns that she had bought at a store. She placed them on the floor and laid the fabric she had ironed over each paper pat- tern. Leaning on her knees, she trimmed and folded the cloth, her lips clamped around straight pins. Later, when the gown was sewn, by her hand and her machine, she selected from plastic bags she kept in her sewing box the sequins and the beads, glassy, slippery pieces. She squinted as she threaded the needle through holes that were invisible to me. She sewed each bead by hand.

When I was three, she dressed me like a ballerina, complete with dancing slippers and a glittery crown on my light brown curls. All through our childhood, she made pinafores and piano recital gowns for Angeles and me, and on our birthdays, she made the dresses and baked the cakes and mixed the icing, squeezing the icing through a cloth funnel, writing our names in pinks and yellows.

Sometimes, like magic, a long white dress would appear, a grown-up dress with a scooped neck and a big flowing floor-length skirt.That was the dress she made for me for my first debut, when I was seven, at a children’s ball at the Caribe Hilton. She pulled my long, wavy hair away from my face and took the sides of my head into her hands. She creamed blush on my cheeks and outlined the rim of my lips with her black makeup pencil, eventually painting my small lips bright red. Just above my upper lip, she painted on a tiny black beauty mark. There I was, in the great lobby of the Caribe Hilton, with a flower in my hair, and a long lavender lily in one hand, lean- ing over a water fountain, looking ten years older.

Every morning she left for her newspaper job, driving off in her secondhand Volkswagen, pushing the gas pedal as hard as she pushed the pedal on the sewing machine. She was too tall for the car. She was bony, thin and angular, and, to me, quite glamorous with her loose blondish hair and her head scarves. In her late twenties, she was old for a single woman of that time, but she was different in other ways. She was a woman who traveled abroad alone, who was the hostess or the guest at the interminable lunches, interminably pho- tographed, at the Club Cívico de Damas (she was the one without a hat), a woman whose name was the byline of a weekly column in the newspaper.

It seemed to us that she would never marry, and in her striking solitariness, she was someone who belonged alone.

But she did marry. She married late but quite romantically, to a journalist, a man almost thirty years older than she, who was quite debonair and bohemian. All her friends said he was a charming sto- ryteller and he had written books against the death penalty and against American control of the island. These were books people called important, and he seemed to know everything and everyone. Jacobo andTití first lived in an apartment house in another neigh- borhood.The apartment was tiny—the refrigerator was in the stair- well, the bathroom had no tub, only a shower stall. But it was like a dollhouse to me.When Angeles and I visited, she made us hot choco- late and let us play canasta with them until bedtime. For a long time, for many of the years of my childhood, Tití took Angeles and me everywhere, to the movies, to restaurants, to the drive-in. She took me to my first European movie,
La Strada,
and tried to explain a plot that made little sense to me but seemed very sad. I still see Giulietta Masina in her clown face. The first time I had Chinese food, at a large, bright restaurant on Franklin Delano Roosevelt Avenue, the sort of restaurant where the waiters bowed when she came in and

stood at attention near her table (she feigned modesty but clearly expected the beer to be poured just so and the cook to make what- ever changes she wished), she taught me to use chopsticks.The first time I saw a newspaper coming off the presses, I was with her. That was at the old building of
El Imparcial,
a blood-and-guts tabloid where she began her career as a society columnist, chronicling births and debuts and weddings.

We were standing in a corridor, at a wall of glass through which we could see the presses churning below. Huge, noisy machines occupied the entire basement. She had to shout so I could hear her.

Mira, mira, she shouted—look, look.

My face was touching the glass. The machines roared and news- papers rolled off cylinders, piling one on top of another. She took me by the hand, and we ran down the stairs to the press room. She shouted to a pressman, and he handed her a newspaper, and she gave it to me. It was warm, like freshly pressed clothes, and it smelled like nothing I had ever known.

Some years later she was on a television quiz show modeled after
What’s My Line?
With that and her Sunday column, which she had moved to another newspaper,
El Mundo,
then the island’s largest, she became something of a celebrity. She took me to the television stu- dios of Telemundo, where I was seated in a guest room behind the cameras and watched the show.

The studio was air-conditioned, freezing, and the cameras blocked my view of her face. But I could hear her voice, higher pitched when she was on the air. She was funny, I could tell. When she made a comment, the audience laughed all around me. After the show, people crowded around her, asking for her autograph. I stood beside her, watching her, and watching the people who treated her as if they knew her personally: Angela Luisa, Angela Luisa. I wanted

to be her. Craning my neck, I studied how she made her signature, the rounded
A
and the curly
L,
the sharp
T,
and the flourish in the
g
’s. But after years of giving autographs and signing her name to her col- umn, she no longer had to use her last name. Angela Luisa was enough.

The ballet, the theater, the newspaper, her world was mine, and I thought that if I grew up to be like her, I, too, would have front- row seats at the theater and fine dinners at elegant restaurants with movie stars, and newspapers hot off the presses every night.

E

very day grandmother fixed our breakfast, whatever we wanted—soft-boiled eggs, cream of corn, oatmeal—and forced us to drink glasses of warm milk. She didn’t eat, but she stayed in the kitchen, keeping up a commentary with no one in par- ticular, her voice rising above the clatter of pans and running water,

her hands deep in soapy water.

She had a maid to clean the house and do the daily wash out back, but she liked to do the cooking herself. Sometimes she went out, making her visits to her sisters. But she never went to church, and she seldom went shopping, having been brought up with servants to do the housekeeping and the groceries, having been brought up to make her own clothes or to have a seamstress make them for her.

When she had no maid, she managed somehow by herself. She bought vegetables and fruit off the carts that came down the street, and she made daily lists of groceries she needed and paid the street boys to get them from the supermarket at the corner. Occasionally she had lunch delivered. In those days there were places—bodegas, storefront kitchens—that made entire meals to order and delivered them in fiambreras, aluminum containers that were stacked one on

top of another.All over the neighborhood, you saw delivery boys car- rying fiambreras, the food steaming, the smells of rice and beans, mofongo, alcapúrrias, lingering in the air.

Each day around noon she sat beside her radio and listened to my uncle’s comedy show—Now, she would say to me, sit still and listen, José Luis is on the radio. He came to my grandmother’s house occa- sionally, making his entrances with much fanfare (which was mostly my grandmother’s, who preened around him, giving up to him her rocking chair, bringing him a cup of coffee, though she knew he would’ve preferred a shot of rum). His voice carried from the street, full of theater. I recognized it instantly. He sounded just as he did on the radio. He was not a big man, but he had girth, blocky shoulders and a large face, a large nose, a big mustache, and thinning hair. Blus- ter, he had bluster, and a raucous, hoarse stage voice, and exploded with laughter at his own jokes, which he invented on the spot. Once he went to Spain and he carried on as if he had discovered it—After Spain, there’s only heaven, he said over and over, looking up at the sky. Pictures of bloody bulls ran through my head.

When a crowd gathered at his house, as it often did, he enter- tained in his pajamas and slippers, a handkerchief soaked in bay rum on his forehead. Standing in the middle of the room, he played magic tricks, bringing on laughter each time, and dashed off verses, which he recited with expansive gestures, his arms taking in the whole room, flowery lines that he later wrote down and dedicated to any of us in even more flowery language and signed in a heavy bold hand. My grandmother rarely went to his house, and months would pass between his visits. She seldom told me stories about him, but she didn’t miss his show—those slapstick skits and street jokes she hardly understood but that people loved. The crazy but lovable down-and-out characters he created made him a familiar figure, famous, a picture in the papers, a man known just by his last name.

Late in the afternoon in those days, el panadero came by the house, always at the same time, crying out, Pan, pan, pushing his wheeled cart, which he stacked high with fresh loaves of bread wrapped in plain white paper. My grandmother would go out in her slippers, pick from the cart the warmest loaf she could find, and give the man his five cents. Then she would sit in the dining room and break off a crusty piece and spread it with soft butter. I would climb on a chair and bend over her big steaming cup of coffee, soaking my piece in it, crumbs of soggy bread and melting butter running down my chin.

Just as the sun was setting, after the rainbow that came with the afternoon showers had faded, my mother would arrive from work, walking from the bus stop, a newspaper in her hand, her heels click- ing on the pavement. Angeles and I would run to her and hold her around her waist. With a cup of coffee and the newspaper folded beside her, she would sit on the porch with us, holding us to her lap, humming to us, her voice a breeze in my ear, Ese lunar que tienes, cielito lindo, junto a la boca, no se lo des a nadie, cielito lindo, que a mí me toca.

Chapter Two