When I Was Puerto Rican: List 1

A ripe guava is yellow, although some varieties have a pink tinge.

The guava bushes grow close to the ground, their branches laden with green then yellow fruit that seem to ripen overnight.

But you have another and then another, enjoying the crunchy sounds, the acid taste, the gritty texture of the unripe center.

The floor was a patchwork of odd-shaped wooden slats that rose in the middle and dipped toward the front and back doors, where they butted against shiny, worn thresholds.

Her hair, choked at the nape with a rubber band, floated thick and black to her waist, and as she bent over to pick up sticks, it rained across her shoulders and down her arms, covering her face and tangling in the twigs she cradled.

The soap in the washtub burned my skin, and Mami scrubbed me so hard her fingernails dug angry furrows into my arms and legs.

She pushed and shoved and turned me so fast I didn’t know what to do with my body, so I flailed, seeming to resist, while in fact I wanted nothing more than to be rid of the creepy crawling things that covered me.

She carried me to the house pressed against her bosom, fragrant of curdled milk.

It felt good to have Mami so close, so warm, swathed by her softness, her smell of wood smoke and oregano.

On the days he worked, Papi left the house before dawn and sometimes joked that he woke the roosters to sing the barrio awake.

Although the songs and poems chronicled a life of struggle and hardship, their message was that jíbaros were rewarded by a life of independence and contemplation, a closeness to nature coupled with a respect for its intractability, and a deeply rooted and proud nationalism.

Although the songs and poems chronicled a life of struggle and hardship, their message was that jíbaros were rewarded by a life of independence and contemplation, a closeness to nature coupled with a respect for its intractability, and a deeply rooted and proud nationalism.

Our favorite program, “The Day Breaker’s Club,” played the traditional music of rural Puerto Rico and gave information about crops, husbandry, and the weather.

Even at the tender age when I didn’t yet know my real name, I was puzzled by the hypocrisy of celebrating a people everyone looked down on.

The hen’s reproachful eyes followed us as we ran around the bush, her body aflutter, her head whirling on her body until it seemed that she would screw herself into the ground.

Her eyebrows were scrunched together, the eyes under them as round and black and reproving as the hen’s, her lips stretched across her face so tight that all I could see was a dark line under her nose.

A bubble of rage built inside my chest and forced out a scream meant for Mami’s harshness and Papi’s indifference but directed at Delsa who was smaller.

Doña Zena dragged Delsa and Norma into her yard, while I straggled behind, fretting about what had just happened, jealous that, even though my lap had been stolen years ago by Delsa and then Norma, another baby was coming to separate me further from my mother, whose rages were not half so frightening as the worry that she would now be so busy with an infant as to totally forget me.

I crested the hill where Doña Zena’s house perched, commanding a view of the barrio.

Mornings like this inspired much of jíbaro poetry, and in my fear over Mami I called up the few verses I’d memorized and repeated them like a prayer as I sat on Doña Zena’s steps, my eyes riveted on the slow ribbon of smoke ascending from our fogón, my feet buried in lemongrass, dew chilling my toes.

“You don’t come home until after dark...if you come home at all. And weekends, instead of working on this hovel you call a house, you take off with one excuse or another. You have no shame! I’m sick of it.”

“You kids shut up and go back to sleep,” she yelled. None of us dared get out of our hammocks. We hunkered into them, stifling our sobs.

I imagined her voice to be musical, lilting, the way his was when he read poetry to us.

Papi dipped his trowel into the cement mud in the wheelbarrow by his side and slapped the mud onto a foundation block.

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.

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.

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 Héctor 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.

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.

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.

Dignidad was something you conferred on other people, and they, in turn, gave back to you.

In our family we fought with vigor, adults as well as children, even though we knew we weren’t supposed to.

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.

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.

Any number of subtle transgressions, from not saying hello when someone greeted you to saying hello to the wrong person, meant a beating.

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.

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.

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.

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.