When I Was Puerto Rican (5 page)

Margie and “that woman’s” disappearance from Puerto Rico didn’t mark the end of my parents’ fights. They were locked in a litany choked with
should have’s, ought to’s,
and
why didn’t you’s.
Their arguments accomplished nothing, as far as I could see, except to make everyone miserable. After they fought, Mami was sullen and irritable, and Papi disappeared into himself like a snail into a shell. We children tiptoed around them or else played in the farthest reaches of the yard, our voices dulled lest they incite our parents. To make things more confusing, it was clear that there were moments of tenderness between them. Sometimes I came upon them standing close, arms encircling waists, heads close, as if they shared secrets that transcended the hurt and resentments, the name-calling and deceit.

Almost as soon as Hector started to gum on mashed-up yucca and boiled sweet plantain, Mami’s features softened, her body filled out, and her belly rounded into a soft mound that got in her way whenever she tried to lift one of us into the tub for one of our baths.

I couldn’t figure out when or how Papi asked Mami to forgive him and what he did so that she would. But it was clear to me, from their arguments, the conversations I’d overheard between Mami and her female relatives and friends, and from boleros on the radio, that Papi, being a man, was always to blame for whatever unhappiness existed in our house.

Men, I was learning, were
sinvergüenzas,
which meant they had no shame and indulged in behavior that never failed to surprise women but caused them much suffering. Chief among the sins of men was the other woman, who was always a
puta,
a whore. My image of these women was fuzzy, since there were none in Macún, where all the females were wives or young girls who would one day be wives.
Putas,
I guessed, lived in luxury in the city on the money that
sinvergüenza
husbands did not bring home to their long-suffering wives and barefoot children.
Putas
wore lots of perfume, jewelry, dresses cut low to show off their breasts, high heels to pump up their calves, and hair spray. All this was paid for with money that should have gone into repairing the roof or replacing the dry palm fronds enclosing the latrine with corrugated steel sheets. I wanted to see a
puta
close up, to understand the power she held over men, to understand the sweet-smelling spell she wove around the husbands, brothers, and sons of the women whose voices cracked with pain, defeat, and simmering anger.

I started school in the middle of hurricane season, and the world grew suddenly bigger, a vast place of other adults and children whose lives were similar, but whose shadings I couldn’t really explore out of respect and
dignidad.
Dignidad was something you conferred on other people, and they, in turn, gave back to you. It meant you never swore at people, never showed anger in front of strangers, never stared, never stood too close to people you’d just met, never addressed people by the familiar
tú
until they gave you permission. It meant adults had to be referred to as Don so-and-so, and Doña so-and-so, except for teachers, who you should call Mister or Missis so-and-so. It meant, if you were a child, you did not speak until spoken to, did not look an adult in the eye, did not raise your voice nor enter or leave a room without permission. It meant adults were always right, especially if they were old. It meant men could look at women any way they liked but women could never look at men directly, only in sidelong glances, unless they were
putas,
in which case they could do what they pleased since people would talk about them anyway. It meant you didn’t gossip, tattle, or tease. It meant men could say things to women as they walked down the street, but women couldn’t say anything to men, not even to tell them to go jump in the harbor and leave them alone.

All these rules entered our household the minute I was allowed to leave home for the long walk to and from school. It wasn’t that I hadn’t heard them before. Mami and Papi had passed on to me what they knew of
buenos modales,
good manners.

But these rules had little to do with the way we lived at home. In our family we fought with vigor, adults as well as children, even though we knew we weren’t supposed to. We yelled across the room at one another, came in and out of our one room house without saying “excuse me” and “may I come in,” or even knocking. Mami and Papi were
tú,
so were our grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. We children spoke whenever we felt like it, interrupted our parents all the time, and argued with them until Mami finally reminded us that we had stepped over the line of what was considered respectful behavior toward parents.

In school I volunteered to wipe down the blackboard, to sharpen pencils, to help distribute lined paper in which we could write our tortured alphabets with the mysterious tilde over the
n
to make
ñ
, the
ü
, the double consonants
ll
and
rr
with their strong sounds. I loved the neat rows of desks lined up one after the other, the pockmarked tops shiny in spots where the surface hadn’t blistered, the thrill when I raised my desktop to find a large box underneath in which I kept my primer, sheets of paper, and the pencil stubs I guarded as if they were the finest writing instruments.

I walked home from school full of importance in my green and yellow uniform. It was my most prized possession, the only thing in our house that belonged to me alone, because neither Delsa nor Norma were old enough to go to school.

But school was also where I compared my family to others in the
barrio.
I learned there were children whose fathers were drunks, whose mothers were “bad,” whose sisters had run away with travelling salesmen, whose brothers had landed in prison. I met children whose mothers walked the distance from their house to church on their knees in gratitude for prayers answered. Children whose fathers came home every day and played catch in the dusty front yard. Girls whose sisters taught them to embroider flowers on linen handkerchiefs. Boys whose brothers took them by the hand and helped them climb a tree. There were families in the
barrio
with running water inside their houses, electric bulbs shining down from every room, curtains on the windows, and printed linoleum on the floors.

Children fought in school in a way unknown to me at home. Delsa, Norma, and I often tied ourselves into punching, biting, kicking knots that only Mami with her switch was able to untangle. But fighting with other kids was different. When I fought with my sisters, I knew what was at stake, a prized marble, a ripe mango just fallen off the tree, a chance to be the first to color in the Sunday comics from Papi’s newspaper. But in school the fights were about something else entirely.

If you looked at someone the wrong way they might beat you up. If you were too eager to answer the teacher’s questions you might get beat up. If you rubbed shoulders with the wrong kids you would get beat up. If you mentioned someone’s mother at the wrong time or in a certain tone of voice, you would definitely get beat up. Any number of subtle transgressions, from not saying hello when someone greeted you to saying hello to the wrong person, meant a beating. When I explained to Mami why I came home with a torn uniform and bruises, she made it clear that I was forbidden to fight in school. This made no sense to me at all. Not that Mami encouraged our fights at home, but she never said, “Don’t fight with your sisters.” Her injunctions were always about not punching them too hard. So I had to learn how to avoid the unavoidable, and when I couldn’t, I stripped to my underwear in the school yard to defend myself from kids whose mothers didn’t mind if their uniforms got dirty.

Papi left one day and didn’t return that night. For the next three days he didn’t appear. Mami prepared dinner the first night and each night afterward left something for him, but the next morning she’d scrape it all out into the compost, a scowl on her face. We knew better than to ask where Papi was or when he might be coming back. There was no way for her to know, and it was just as well, because knowing would have added fuel to her rage, the brunt of which we children felt in her sullen silences, or increasingly, in her swiftness to spank and hit us with whatever was at hand for reasons that were often as mysterious to us as Papi’s whereabouts.

When I got home from school on the fourth day, Mami had bundled our belongings into pillowcases and a tattered suitcase with the handle missing, which she had shut with a tight rope wound into a loop at the top. With Hector on her hip, she led us up the road, dragging the suitcase with her free hand, while Delsa, Norma, and I struggled with the pillowcases full of clothes.

I didn’t know to say goodbye to our house and our
barrio,
nor to wave to the neighbors who looked out curiously as we wound our way to the main road. Delsa, Norma, and I knew not to whine or complain, not to huff too loudly against the strain of the cumbersome pillowcases, not to ask for water or mention food, not to need a bathroom, not to stop to rest or tie our shoelaces or brush the hair from our eyes. We followed Mami in the same bubble of silence in which she walked, her gaze forward, never looking back or sideways at the neighbors who poked one another in the ribs and smirked, who let their eyes fall to the ground and pretended not to see us rather than offer to help us on our way.

It seemed like a very long walk to the highway, and when we got there, we climbed into a
público
car as if this were any other day and we were any family on an excursion into the city. Only when the
público
was well on its way and we had lost sight of the entrance to Barrio Macún did Mami say what we all knew without asking.

“We’re moving to the city. Life will be better there.”

SOMEONE IS COMING TO TAKE YOUR LAP

Borrón y cuenta nueva.