The Noise of Infinite Longing (5 page)

Amor de Loca Juventud

O

n the eve of my mother’s funeral I thought I would sleep, but sleep didn’t come. My sisters and I had booked rooms in the town’s only motel—it was too far to go back to Sara’s in Dallas for the night, and my mother’s house was crowded, with Angeles and Amaury staying there. It was an ordinary roadside motel, a truck stop where coffee came gritty and lukewarm out of a machine and long-haul drivers gassed up their trucks and stayed on for a couple of beers. I had a room alone, as I wanted it. No conversation, no crying, only silence. Well, not entirely. The old air-conditioning unit rattled, the occasional souped-up car roared out of the drive- way, and murmurs came through the walls. I read the local papers. I leafed through a magazine. I turned on the TV and clicked it off, startled that the world was still going on, Jay Leno laughing, his cackle breaking through the impermeable quiet I was trying to

build around myself. I turned off the lights.

In the dark, I saw my mother in her short, red velvety robe, the one still hanging on the back of the door of her bathroom; I saw her going to the kitchen and drinking a glass of milk before bedtime, and I saw that house of hers, with the tall trees and the garden she tried to plant, where her piano stood like a prized trophy against a living room wall. I saw her china espresso cups shining among the old dishes in her cupboards. They were a gift from Angeles, and mother

had wrapped them in newspapers and carried them from one coun- try to another. She kept the cups for a long-anticipated moment, an evening of great conversation and poetry and piano-playing, where she would serve espresso to convivial company, but that had not hap- pened to her in those last years. So little had.

The funeral was the next day, on a Monday, at noon.

It was the first time that the six of us had been together in one place in more than fifteen years. We all sat together in the second pew, dressed up as she would have liked.We were all in black—a row of black, a row of lost faces.

The church was draped in red. Red carnations, big crimson-and- white wreaths placed around and on her coffin. The stained-glass windows seemed red, which caused the sunlight to stream through in red, like a spotlight. She liked red, and she liked black. I can hardly remember her in blue or green, but she was a tropical woman, she liked her plumage.

We held hands, Angeles on one side of me, Amaury on the other. We stood to pray, and we sat quietly, heads bowed, to listen to some- one play “Für Elise,” the music she had played on her piano. We lis- tened to the eulogies, soft words about a woman, a good woman, but someone I didn’t recognize as my mother, and when we filed out, when they played the “Ave Maria” on the pipe organ, I thought I might cry.

I turned to Angeles and said, She would’ve liked it. Yes, all the people who came, Angeles said.

A

green awning with wide white stripes shaded the chairs that lined up in front of the hole where her coffin would lie. A gravestone had been made, her name—no, not her name, but the name she took when she remarried—had been chiseled into gray

marble. The years, 1918–1994. In quotes, Flor de Borínquen. A poem had been written for her in her youth called “Flor de Borín- quen,” and she had kept it. Borínquen, the tribal name for Puerto Rico. Meaningless and sad in this clay that wasn’t hers.

We stood behind the rows of chairs. Leon, my mother’s husband (I had to remind myself), was already seated in the center of the front row; their son, Leon Jr., and Leon’s family around him. He was a handsome old man, had to have broken hearts when he was at Texas A&M, just like his son, my half brother, Leon Jr., had during the year he spent in College Station, playing football, skipping classes, and finally dropping out. Leon Jr. looked just like him, a tall, light-eyed Texan, brushing back his short hair.The boy had gone into the army, and I hadn’t seen him since he was very young. Little Leon, we called him. He had our mother’s eyelashes, but little else we could find. Old Leon saw us standing back, waved, calling us to his side. The minister, bespectacled, middle-aged, his face deeply lined beyond his years, approached us, clasping a Bible in his right hand. He spoke softly, his eyes clouded behind his glasses. He said, Come to the front row, it’s for family. We nodded but said nothing. He took me by the elbow, gently. I shook my head. Then, knowing that mother would have ordered us to the front row, I smiled, thinking she would under- stand, and said, Thank you, but we prefer to stand back here.

Prayers were said, and the sun beat hard on my back and the soil lost its morning dampness and was now dry red, the fields around us barren.

Tití Angela Luisa stood bravely in the heat, in black, her eyes behind sunglasses. My aunt had seen her father buried, her mother buried, her husband buried. Now, her only sister. They began to lower the coffin.We turned our backs at that moment.

Amaury reached for my hand. He looked younger and taller in a suit, a handkerchief folded in the pocket of his jacket, his face shaven,

his mustache clipped, his dark hair combed back. His sunglasses con- cealed his swollen eyes. He had cried all through the service in church, his shoulders shaking.The girls had cried; everyone had cried but Angeles and me.

I thought, If I cry, if Angeles cries, who would be there for the others?

The burial service seemed very fast. We walked away before the coffin had completely gone into the ground, and we separated to get into our cars.We rode, as in a caravan, to the church hall, where the ladies had prepared a lunch for the entire crowd.

Angeles and I didn’t go in for a long time. We stood outside, smoking under the threshold, reviewing the service as if it had been a theater play, trying to see it as my mother would have. She would have liked it, I repeated.

Relatives of my mother’s husband came by, cousins, nephews, aunts, everyone. We smiled, we thanked them, but we could hardly remember any of them.

What are we doing here? Angeles asked me, asking herself.What is this, a lunch after a burial? We laughed. Sara came to get us, some- one came to get us, and we went inside.

Tables had been set up, as if this were a dinner party. The six of us didn’t sit at the table the ladies had for us. This had been my mother’s church group, and she and her husband ate lunch there every Sunday after services. My mother, incredibly, had become a churchgoer in her old age, she whom I had rarely seen in a Catholic church when I was growing up. She had become a Methodist like Leon when she remarried, and lately had been reading that booklet of prayers I saw on her bedside table.

We didn’t stand and wait to serve ourselves from the buffet. We sat in a corner by a window and took pictures of one another with Olga’s camera and acted exactly like my mother would have prohib-

ited, like outsiders, like the private club we had suddenly become. Orphans against the world.

Olga was beside herself, one moment sobbing uncontrollably, the next laughing just as hard, and crying out, Mother, mother is gone. She held on to Angeles, bending as if the pain were centered in her stomach, as if the life inside her were leaving.What am I going to do without her? And suddenly shifting moods, she started taking pic- tures. Amaury had his arm around me. He grew up years that day, I could see it. He seemed stronger, his arm firmer, and he had lost his barrio shuffle. Angeles was the center, where she always was, even when she said nothing. She had become mother.

She was dressed like the rest of us, in black, and wore her sun- glasses even inside the church hall.You look like a movie star, I said to her, half kidding, something exotic and bruised and beautiful (she had a knack for the camera). Well, in this place, she said, taking off her sunglasses, twirling them in her hand, we
are
movie stars.

We huddled side by side, running outside to smoke, and when the lunch was finally over and people dispersed, we took our places on foldout chairs that had been placed on the lawn, to take a big picture. Angeles and I, hair in place, sunglasses on, legs crossed, sat center stage, in the front.Amaury, Olga, Sara, and Carmen stood behind us. People came by, saying their good-byes, saying those sweet things to which no one expects an answer—remembering a gift my mother gave them, the way she spoke, her charming accent, they said. She was such a good person, they said, not knowing what else to say. She was so elegant.Yes, she was, thank you, I said over and over.

But they didn’t know her. At least, they didn’t know the woman in the picture she had given my father when she was young, a year before I was born—“Amaury, te quiero mucho, María Luisa.”

They didn’t know, the two of them.

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In the beginning, when they met, she was a swimsuit beauty, a cheer- leader and sorority queen who rode horses and played the piano. He was already out in the world, the first of eight children, the first in his family to have gone to university, the oldest son of a small-town drugstore owner. He had reached the middle age of his youth. Slen- der, pale-skinned, narrow-faced, jagged already, a twenty-five-year- old man of many women even then. He was a man with a past and the willful temper and ambition of the hard-born.

She was twenty-two, a face imperfectly sculpted, smooth as rain- worn stone, the nose not quite aquiline, the eyelids perhaps too sor- rowful, but cheeks perfectly boned, sharp slants toward her mouth. It was the mouth, always, which betrayed the consuming ardor, the consuming longing that had been born in her. Dark-haired, with the sighful movements of a Dolores Del Río (in
María Candelaria,
flowers cascading from her goddess head) and lips just a moment before pout- ing, just a shade softer than rose, she played the leading roles in all the worlds she lived in, and in all those worlds, she was imperious and yet submissive, and men fell on their knees, or broke her heart.

She was a party girl. A brilliant girl, studying law like her father, but capriciously, absorbing books like air, because the stuff of books, and words in all forms, came easily to her. She liked to say that when she and my father came together, it was destiny.They met in passing, and he ignored her. She was his sister’s college roommate, too young for him, virginal. But he must have noticed something because months later, after that one fleeting meeting, he still remembered her face. He called her and invited her to dance.

What a dancer he was.

The palm of his blunt broad hand on her waist, he swept her, lit- erally, across waxed floors, heat rising on her cheek, on her bare neck, on her breasts, their hands clasped, bodies infinitesimally apart, then as one, swirling, circling, a storm rotating, dipping,

brushing everyone else aside. She was his already, her legs entwined, her feet following without thinking, clouds under her. Boleros never seemed to end for them, and tangos that exhausted passion until they closed out the night. In the dawn, pearl gray like her eyes, his white dinner jacket was soaked with her, her chiffon gown limp, her mouth half open on his lips.

Era el amor de loca juventud. . . .

He wrote her letters. His unintelligible scrawl became so famil- iar, she knew the words by the slant.The slashes he made.They were pictures to her, and she imagined him in the port town where he lived, on the eastern end of the island, a mountain-edged region of sugarcane fields and flat sea heat. She thought she knew the details of his days, his routine. But she knew only what he wanted her to know. His letters in those first months when they knew each other had the force of a life totally outside her own, outside the familiar circles of the life she knew in San Juan. The story of his days rushed at her,

along with his desire and his raw ardor.

She found his tenacity, his strength, irresistible, and she fell in love madly—madly being the only way she could have ever loved— and in that madness she did not see the smallness in him, the earth- iness, the brooding anger.

When they first met, my father was a chemical engineer. He was the first professional in a family whose ancestors came from the province of Galicia, driven out of the red-rock fallowness of Spain a century before, a poor, sullen, hardy, stocky people, their skin blanched white. His father, Ernesto López Orengo, owned a drug- store at a time when such a thing on an island town, owning any store, gave a family a certain stature in the town’s society. Guayama, where my father was born, and where his father had his first drug-

store, was a placid city of Spanish-colonial homes, sugarcane fields, and pasofino horses on the southeastern coast. It was out of the way of the major east-west and north-south commercial traffic of the island, but for a time it was rich in sugar, coffee, and cattle.

My father was a grown boy when Don Ernesto moved his busi- ness and his family to the northeast coast, to Fajardo, a shabby, con- gested port town of busy commerce and big refineries, fishing villages, sugar landowners, and the droves of mountain people who came down to the coast for work.

The drugstore was a small shop, surviving on foot traffic, doing well enough during the Depression to support my grandparents and their large family, but my grandfather was not a moneymaker. He was a man behind a desk, a courteous storekeeper rising affably to attend a customer, moving carefully around the store shelves, peer- ing through his thick glasses, studying the labels on the potions and powders. He was not an imposing figure. He had a square, robust frame, same as his sons in their middle age, and a dour face, with somber, dark eyes behind black-frame glasses.

He died before I was born, and there are few stories about him, but everyone said he was a man of few words, reclusive and quiet around his wife, Josefina Candal Feliciano. She was a round-hipped little woman who bore eight children, four boys and four girls, and dominated the family even in her old age, when her hair had turned thin white, and her eyes had gone to a filmy light brown.

Even with her children grown and married, she commanded them with her piercing shrill voice and her pinprick, puckered, dis- approving mouth. She terrified the women her sons had married; strong women themselves, they became sheepish in her presence, fearing the enraged temper her sons had inherited. Defenseless as she appeared with that sweet, little girl’s face of hers (she had the face of nuns I had known), she could explode in anger over some