The Noise of Infinite Longing (9 page)

and the light splashing of paddleboats.

On the other side of Mexico City, we had the ruins of Tenochti- tlán, what was left of Aztec Mexico, and toTeotihuacán and the Pyra- mid of the Moon. Holding my mother’s hand, I climbed up the slippery steps of the pyramid, nothing but clouds above me. At the top of the pyramid, at the highest level, the world seemed like a painting, and the air was tinged with sunlight but no breeze. Climb- ing down was an ordeal, a steep decline that I climbed down back- ward, not on my feet but on my hands.

We had afternoons when we drove around a city that seemed to have nothing but great monuments, statues, pyramids, and volca- noes.We stopped at road stands at dusk, in the chill of Mexico City’s gray, wet air for ears of corn charred over coal fires, and since that time the smell of those Sundays, the thick smoke from the coal fires, the roasting of corn was Mexico for me.

Life was simple then.

Part Two
A Childhood in Pieces

“Juventud, divino tesoro, ya te vas para no volver!

Cuando quiero llorar, no lloro y a veces lloro sin querer.”

—Rubén Darío, “Canción de Otoño en Primavera”

Chapter Four

Playing in the Fields

H

is picture had been crumpled, the corners torn as if it had been pulled in anger from a frame or a photo album. It lay

under a stack of family pictures my mother had tossed in her boxes when she ran out of room in the scrapbooks. He was wearing the white coat with a round collar that doctors wear, and a stethoscope hung around his neck. He was in his early thirties, but had the bear- ing of a younger man, thinner, with sloping shoulders. His face, which was smooth, almost oval, with a strong chin but soft jaw, was lineless and his hair was ink black, glistening. His mustache, like two lines drawn in ink, looked freshly clipped, and his eyebrows were furry and heavy, drawing attention to his small, dark, somber eyes.

We had seen that picture a hundred times. Mother had blown up the picture and framed it. And she had made smaller copies for us. The photo in the box that Sara had retrieved from mother’s house was in black and white, but mother had had a larger version col- ored—she loved tinkering with pictures, cutting up a good likeness and superimposing it, gluing it, on another not quite as flattering. A good photo of Angeles’s face would be cut out of one picture and pasted on another photo of Angeles that had not turned out quite as well. Pictures lost their true moment, their reality, but we all looked our best.The coloring of my father’s picture gave it a strange, unreal look; father with pink lips.

What is this doing here? I said, picking up the picture, noticing the cracks where it had been crumpled. I can’t believe she kept this picture.

She could never overcome him, Angeles said, no lo pudo sobre- vivir was the way she said it—something she said often over the years.We knew that.We knew that his hold on her never loosened. That was a story we told ourselves over and over, until it became myth, the great romance, the horrible betrayal, undying love, like a song.

When was this picture taken? I wondered. Maybe in Mexico when he graduated, second in his class of one thousand men; maybe then, on the day he got his diploma and walked all the way from our apartment to the Basílica de laVirgen de Guadalupe, a long way, per- haps two, three miles, to kneel before the Virgen, the only time I knew him to have anything to do with the church. Or maybe the pic- ture was taken later, after Mexico, when we were back in San Juan and he was doing his internship in a municipal hospital, before we moved to the east coast of the island and lived on an unpaved road near the district hospital where he did his residency. Maybe then.

We moved so many times for him.

Who wants the picture? I said, looking at Angeles. I already have it, she said, I have the original. Sara reached out and put it back in the box.

Why didn’t he come to the funeral? I asked, relieved that he hadn’t come.

He said he was very sad, very sorry, but he couldn’t come. He said he was too old.

He was seventy-nine years old, and I hadn’t seen him in almost ten years.

I saw him, Amaury said. They kept in touch. Amaury flew to

the island often. He knew him well. He’s not doing well, his heart, you know.

Last I heard he’d bought a yacht, I said, unsympathetic. And he married her again, twice now. Married her, divorced her, and mar- ried her again. Seems he’s not doing so badly.

Talk of our father came to me mostly in spurts, bitter remarks I couldn’t resist and they raked Angeles and Amaury, who had been closest to him, who stood up for him, who had found in him in his later years a man I didn’t know.

This was our second evening together, another night for the six of us after mother’s funeral, and father was a specter.Typical, he was there but not there. Carmen refused to listen to this and left the room because, she would say, she remembered him too well. Sara and Olga had been so young, and their memories of him had filters that mother had created for them.

But you never cared for him, Amaury lashed out at me.

What do you know? I said, bristling because he had put a finger on a scar that ran so deep I often forgot it was there.

Let’s go have dinner, Sara interrupted, seeing the cycle begin, wanting to break it before it was too late. There’s a Mexican restau- rant we like, she said. It has great margaritas. Now, it’s nothing fancy. It’s just Tex-Mex, you may not like it.

She was smiling her desperate smile, tight-lipped, on the brink of screaming, and she went about picking up the box of pictures and putting it away on a shelf, and smoothing down nerves.

The moment dissolved.

We piled into the cars, and took over the back tables at Felix’s and ordered rounds of dripping, boat-sized margarita glasses rimmed with salt and stacks of tacos and enchiladas. Angeles didn’t eat and I didn’t eat, but Amaury had three, four drinks and shambled

in his chair, the only person I know who can shamble while sitting, his left leg jerking up and down, like a dance, and his hands moving like my father’s moved, quickly, pointing here or there, closing and opening, speaking their own words.

Watching him, hearing his voice, his jokes, I thought about father, tried to frame father’s face in my mind, to hear his voice, to see him. I couldn’t. But I could hear his tone the last time he and I had spo- ken. He had called me in NewYork. He was visiting relatives in Con- necticut. His call surprised me. I had no idea he was nearby. My hands trembled. I could hardly speak.

I want to come down and see you, he said. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement. I was silent. He repeated it. I wanted to get off the phone.

No, I said finally, like wresting a knife out of me, or into him, I didn’t know.

No, I can’t, I heard myself say.

What do you mean, he said, you can’t see your father? No, I said. I don’t want to.

There was a brief silence.Then he said,That’s too bad, I feel sorry for you. The words crashed on me, his anger filling my head. The words bounced in an empty chamber. I feel sorry for you.The phone went dead. I sat for hours alone, staring at a wall.

#

Our family moved to the rhythm of my father’s life.

Mexico, San Juan, Fajardo.We were city people, with a car and a maid and our books and travels abroad, but this year, when I was eight, we were living on a rural road in the outskirts of Fajardo, where he was doing his residency in the district hospital and running

a smaller municipal clinic nearby, delivering poor women’s babies, making house calls in the middle of the night, and studying for the medical board exams before going off into private practice.

On the northeastern coast, Fajardo, the town of my father’s youth, was becoming a big commercial center, a rough-looking place with a ramshackle shipping port that had once harbored pirates, a city with little of the charm of old Spanish-colonial towns, but with a spectacular shoreline of plunging hills and coral reefs that one day would be cluttered with packaged-tour resorts, honeymoon hotels, and million-dollar condominiums.

Small factories were opening around that time, shoe factories, garment factories, shops making small auto parts and electronics. New roads were being plowed through hills and flat coconut farm- land. The countryside was being cut up into small plots to give the jíbaros a piece of land of their own for their bananas and pineapples, pigs and chickens and goats, the everyday fare sold in the open-air mercados and at roadside stands.

The road where we lived was nothing but a rutted dirt path off the Fajardo–San Juan highway, an unmarked turn by a gas station.We lived among the laundrywomen and field hands and the children who went to public schools in broken-down buses that left them off out on the highway.

Our house was set up on concrete blocks, a simple place with buckling floors and drafty wooden walls, not much different from the houses down the road where the field hands lived. Rain clattered like pebbles on the tin roof, torrents running down the grooves of the roof, seeping into the cracked walls. Chickens and stray dogs rooted in the damp ground under the house, and pigs, fattened for the kill, grunted in barbed-wire pens in the patchy mud yards nearby. The house was little more than a bohío, like the tin-and- wooden houses off mountain roads and on the edges of roadside

towns deep in the island.

But we had a luxury the other houses on the road didn’t have.We had a bathroom, an unpainted room with a cement floor in the back of the house. We had a shower, a single spout rigged up with wires, where water fell either in trickles or in sudden bursts, spraying the entire bathroom.The water was river-warm, but felt prickly cold on my head and my bare back, where it hit like icy pellets. I would jump in, sticking in first my legs, then my arms, then my face.

My parents rented the house because it was midway between the municipal hospital where my father was in charge and the district hospital where he had his duty shifts in the emergency room. The house was broom-swept every day and mopped, and it had a fresh coat of blue paint and yellow window slats, and a front porch with white rails. We had lights and running water and a field in the back where we put up a hammock. My mother had never thought she would live in such a place, but she said, pretending, that the house was like a little casa de campo, and she put up curtains, hung her Mexican tapestry, and bought rocking chairs for the rickety front porch.

For my father, and because she really had no choice, she had agreed to leave San Juan. But she kept her job there, traveling every day to and from Fajardo in a public car, an hour each way in busy traf- fic, jammed in the car with strangers. Angeles and I were transferred from a private school in Hato Rey, where Angeles awed the teachers with her way with numbers, and I was studying poetry and plays and getting into arguments over Nasser and the Suez Canal, and enrolled in a parish school in Fajardo.

Children get used to everything, my mother would say, because she liked to believe that she could get used to anything. San Juan one day, Mexico the next, Fajardo now. Fajardo was different. It wasn’t Mexico, it wasn’t anywhere she wanted to talk about. It was my

father’s hometown, where he had had his women and his old friends from the centrales, where his younger brother ran the family drug- store. He was married to a woman my father jokingly called la neurasténica, a bleached blonde who never left the house, who had to be put away before I was old enough to remember her face.

We didn’t become part of the social life of the town, didn’t set down to stay, didn’t have children’s parties and piano lessons. We lived mostly as if we were not there, far from our new classmates (I cannot remember a single one of them) and from the life and friends we had in San Juan.

My playmates now were the children up and down our road, the boys and girls, Rosaritos, Juanitos, who stopped by our house and waved from the road and called out for me to come out and play. But they never came inside my house and I never went to theirs.

I’d run out every time they came by, making bets on who could throw pebbles farther into a field, putting all the muscle I could into the swing of my arm only to see my stone wobble and drop just twenty feet away. I played baseball with the boys, bare-handed, with a hard ball and a stick for a bat.We ran footraces, the boys barefoot, road pebbles and dust blowing in our faces, my knees buckling, my ankle twisting.

Angeles didn’t go out to toss rubber balls against the wall of an abandoned building, as I did when I got bored. She liked staying inside, dressing her dolls, talking to them as if they were children, and making costumes, sewing, cutting paper dolls, she could spend afternoons doing just that, sitting on the floor of the living room, alone with our brother at her side.

He was three then, maybe four, and rubbery and squeezable like her dolls, with eyes that pored over her face, that watched her as she cut through cloth and made her doll dresses. I could see then that he belonged to her, and she would take him by the hand and walk him

around the room, teaching him to dance.

I usually knew what she was thinking.We had no secrets, but there were times when I watched her being very quiet and I couldn’t read her face, but I knew it was something I wanted to know. I thought she knew everything. Some afternoons, she came out to play jacks with me and the girls of the road and she beat all of us every time, one by one, her hand faster than my eye (she learned from my mother), and she cheated at cards but was so sly I could never catch her.

How did you do that? I demanded, my hands clutched at my hips, wanting to know her trick, how did she do it? I looked down on her (I was then taller than she), threatening. She laughed, shrugged, and ran back to her dolls.

W

hen I turned eight, my parents gave me an encyclopedia.

They also gave me a doll and a pretty dress. They always gave us dolls and pretty dresses. I read the entire encyclopedia like a book straight through. I didn’t play with the new doll, but I put on the dress and pretended I was a ballerina, thin arms arched above my head, legs stretched taut, head tilted like I had seen at the ballet in San Juan.