The Noise of Infinite Longing (6 page)

unintended slight—an impolite grandchild, a birthday forgotten, a gift not brought.

She would rise up from her chair, wrap herself in the shawl that she almost always had around her shoulders, and taking her walking cane, demand to be taken home. One of her sons would invariably follow, apologizing, and we her grandchildren would obediently call after her, Abuela, abuela!

My father was her glory, the first of her boys to make money, enough money to send his younger brothers and sisters to college. He was twenty-one when he started working at the centrales around Fajardo and Humacao, on the eastern coast, at the old nineteenth- century sugar refineries that were left over from Spain’s colonial era, when sugar was the island’s gold, when acres of coastal sun-scorched fields were worked by African slaves (the native Indians, the Taínos and Arawaks, had long ago been decimated) and the grand landed families, Spaniards and criollos, lived in fabled estates in the cool mountains.

There were no longer slaves in the early 1900s—slavery was ban- ished in Puerto Rico in the mid-1800s, before the American Civil War—but the descendants of slaves and Taínos, the mestizos, the negritos and jíbaros, the illiterate and landless, did the menial work. They were indentured servants, tenants, small-plot farmers, and sea- sonal sugarcane cutters in straw hats and rolled-up threadbare pants. They came down from the hills and the coastal villages season after season, brown-skinned, with hollow chests, their thin-muscled arms bearing the scars of machete cuts.

In those thick fields where the cane grew taller than they, the men endured bug bites, infections, and their bare feet sloshing in mud. At the end of the day, their backs broiled, they carried their bundles of sugarcane, long stringy poles roped around their torsos, the bundles weighing them down. On the edge of the sugar fields, they loaded the

oxcarts that would take the sugarcane to the centrales, the sugar mills and refineries, a collection of sheds and brick buildings with smoke towers that filled the air with plumes of vapor that was sweet with the smell of crushed cane, boiling sugar, and molasses.

My father rarely spoke of his time at the centrales, perhaps because he had hated the heat of the sheds, the monotony of the rounds he made, looking at test tubes, gauging by color and thick- ness the quality of the molasses that would be distilled into a thick, cloying liquid to be poured into wooden barrels to ferment and age until it turned into prime dark rum, cinnamon-colored Puerto Rican rum, the best in the world.

N

uestra clase de gente, grandmother liked to say. I can’t remember the first time I heard her say that, but it was some-

thing I understood very early, hearing her wonder aloud, while sit- ting in the porch with her newspaper, if such-and-such a person in the news, or someone she heard about or just met, was related to such-and-such family in Aguadilla or Lares or Aibonito. She and mother could spend hours doing this, tracing family histories, remembering the connections between a family and a town, and what came of them.

Our world was simple then, and the layers of society seemed clearly marked: good families at the top, and the gentuza at the bot- tom; and the gentuza were definitely not nuestra clase de gente.They were out there, my grandmother said, pointing in no particular direction. They were the masses, the unschooled, the families of the barrios, the men in the bodegas, the people who didn’t know where they came from.

There was nothing new in the system. From the reign of the caciques, who kept lesser tribes away from their plaza, through the

reign of Spain, which built a fortress around its garrison in San Juan to keep invaders at bay and the natives out, Puerto Rico had been ruled by class—no less than the rest of Latin America, no less than the European empires. It was a society built on manners and tradi- tional customs and mores, on riches and exploitation, on the fiction that class was a birthright.

My father came from a good family, my grandmother declared after making her calculations. Perhaps it was not a prominent family, but they were solid, refined, and made up of serious men. My father had manners, he knew to stand up when my grandmother entered a room; he was deferential to my grandfather. He had been a good stu- dent and a devoted son, and on the occasions when he escorted my mother to a dinner or to a dance, he had the bearing of successful men. Era tan guapo, my grandmother remembered. He cut a fine figure, self-assured, a man who could join any conversation. He also had the personality my grandmother fell for; he could charm with words and had the easy confidence of a man of means, of ambition, and in those days, when he was courting my mother, in a society where appearances were everything, he was a proper suitor, nuestra clase de gente.

But his had been the life of a small-town patrón, nightlong games of dominoes, Sunday fiestas at the farms of his friends, roasting pigs and having their drinks, their beer, their tumblers of rum. Nights spent with street women, fathering unclaimed children. Putting money on the table, taking care of wives and mothers, and the campesinas, the servants, the women they took at will.

His heart had calluses, and his dreams the confines of that narrow island life, an insular life bounded by mountains and sea. He longed for possession—to have, to own, to control and command—and once he met my mother he wanted nothing more than to possess her. It took him no time.

What a distance she crossed for him. She who adored attention, who demanded and got center stage in the theaters where she played Camellia, radiant in the footlights. She could hold a room in a spell reciting the nostalgic, tormented verses of Rubén Darío and García Lorca, and she dazzled in any field she chose to enter (she even won in basketball and was photographed in swimsuits, her hair up in a turban, for society magazines). She who had everything had fallen for a man who had never set foot in a theater, who never read books, who had never thought of Madrid, Paris, Rome, the places she had longed for all her life.

He was a man who didn’t send her flowers.

He was no poet, she knew, but she said she had had the poets and their fragile words, and the nervous young men who came with gui- tars and violins to serenade her from the street below her bedroom window.They brought orchids for her hair and sentimental sonnets she put away in scrapbooks. She had had boyfriends, men her parents liked, men from the right families, but none had made her shudder the way my father had, none could bend her to their will as he had, as he did.

Era un hombre fuerte, un hombre de ambiciones, un romántico— he was strong, ambitious, a romantic—she told me many years later, trying to explain, as she had for most of her life, his possession of her, trying to forgive not him but herself.

T

hey married one July, on a day blazing and humid with the pent-up rains of the hurricane season. It was not a big party,

not the society wedding one would have imagined considering the circles she lived in. It was a quick civil ceremony in front of a judge at city hall. All their months of romance and letters and impassioned courtship had culminated that day in July, in a plain room, in a plain ceremony with plain words.

In the island, at that time, at any time, a Catholic girl, a society girl, had no bigger dream than her wedding day, the beautiful white gown, the church dressed in flowers, music from a choir, the bless- ing of friends and family. Only elopement was more disgraceful than a civil ceremony.

But my mother, the incurable romantic, a woman who never lost sight of her place in society, defied convention, and denied herself her own dream.

As a child I had imagined her in white, the trail of her dress sweep- ing down the church aisle, my father in coattails anxiously waiting to take her hand, and I believed that picture until many years later, when I heard the stories—that my mother was pregnant and wanted to hurry the wedding, that my father had been married before and the Catholic Church wouldn’t marry him again, that fearing society gos- sip, she had wanted to let the date of her wedding go unnoticed.

I didn’t ask her, not ever. I didn’t want to hear a lie, and I didn’t want to hear the truth.

On that day, no pictures were taken, or none were kept. There was no announcement in the society pages, no engraved invitations, no ballroom reception. In my mother’s scrapbooks, which record almost every year of her life then, there is not one remembrance of her wedding.

Those were the war years, after Pearl Harbor, when Puerto Ricans, colonials with American citizenship, were drafted to fight in lands they barely knew, whose names they could barely pronounce, heroic places they heard about in the dark of movie houses, on the grainy Movietone newsreels narrated by baritone voices with end-of-the- world urgency.The names of those places would soon become famil- iar, postmarks on letters home from the front. From the hills of the campesinos, from the mud slums of swampy San Juan, the men were recruited, outfitted in the drab olives of the United States Army, and

sent off to fight under a flag that was not ours, a flag that bore no star or stripe of our own, to which we pledged allegiance every day in the schoolhouses of the island.

And over the airwaves that crackled and faded, beamed from Washington to the Caribbean, the voice of Franklin Delano Roo- sevelt was heard nightly on the radios in the living rooms of San Juan. In the distant towns of the Cordillera Central, FDR’s picture was nailed to tar-board walls along with the portraits of the Virgin and Christ on the Cross you see in the homes of the humble in Catholic countries.

My father was not sent off to fight. He did not see Normandy or Naples or Corregidor. He saw nothing of the war. He was too old and flat-footed. But he joined the Army Corps of Engineers and was assigned to a desk job in the barracks in San Juan and wore his army uniform every day, creased and shiny. He wore it with that male pride that comes with stripes and snappy salutes. He was fatless and slight but looked stronger than he was, with an air of authority. By now twenty-seven years old, he was settled in, fully grown-up, mature in the way that men in their twenties were at that time, men with families and large responsibilities.

All her life my mother bragged about my father’s unselfish sup- port of her career during their first years of marriage, when she, who had never had the slightest affinity for the kitchen, who couldn’t mend a sock and had absolutely no interest in keeping house, spent most of her days debating tort law, attending lectures on civil and criminal law (she favored civil law), and disputing fine legal points. Telling the story of those early years, she described my father’s pride in her, his wife the lawyer, and his exuberance when he introduced her to his friends as his wife—Una mujer brillante!

How she liked to embellish her image of him.

But my mother was lying. He had not wanted her to finish law

school.When I was old enough to understand, my grandmother told me that he had wanted to take her away from the city to his town on the east coast. He wanted her to give him children and cook his meals, like the wives of his friends. But he had had no choice. My grandfather insisted that she had to finish law school.

She was the only one of my grandparents’ three children to fol- low in grandfather’s steps.They took pride in that, in a family where a good name and accomplishment were the only inheritance. They had no wealth, no land, no sugar fields, no coffee farms. They had cared little for the making of money but placed immense store in lin- eage, in ancestors, in books written and honors gained, in their name appearing in the chronicles of the island’s history.

My mother was in her last year of law school, pregnant with me, small-bellied and thin, but she did not leave the university or take to rocking chairs to wait nervously for the birth of her first child. She was close to completing her last semester in law school when I was born, in late March, in a clinic in the San Juan district of Río Piedras, in a building that no longer exists, not far from her parents’ apart- ment, near the university.

She had an easy birth. She liked to say I was a perfect baby, per- fectly shaped and perfectly behaved. I didn’t cry all night. Many years later, on one of my birthdays, she sent me a few verses on bond paper, written in her slanted longhand. It was a celebration of my birth. She wrote it in tears, I was sure reading her words, feeling her intimacy, embarrassed at the lyrics overflowing with sentiment, the joy she described in the very act of having me come out of her, her flesh and blood, inseparable from her.

But I had also brought her enormous physical pain.Within weeks of my birth she had cysts removed from her left breast, caused by excess milk she produced while breast-feeding me. She went through surgery without anesthesia, with only a local painkiller, and fell

unconscious from the pain when the surgeon punctured her skin and cut into her breast. She was left with six scars. She was never again able to breast-feed her children.

She romanticized even that gruesome pain, making a drama of it, telling the story when we were grown, always ending it with a flourish.

Your father says it was butchery, she said each time, almost tri- umphantly.

Those stitched wounds on her breast, which turned into grayish spots with time, were marks of courage, like the jagged indentations on her scalp, on the crown of her head, barely visible scars from the day when she was sixteen—or was it eighteen?—and a horse threw her off with a sudden jerk and her boot was caught in the saddle, and the horse, its reins loosened, raced off, dragging her along, her body bouncing over pebbles and hard dirt, the back and top of her head skinned, torn, soaked in blood.

At the end of the spring when I was born, she put on her black graduation robe and mortarboard and received her law degree. In a picture, my mother looks intriguing, distant, with a finely drawn face and enormous pupils of liquid black, almost translucent. She now had the title that lawyers carry with all the weight given to titles in Latin America, la licenciada, la doctora. My father’s surname did not appear on her diploma, nor on the brass plaque she later hung out- side her office. She would not change her name.