When I Was Puerto Rican: List 2

Whenever Mami was fed up with Macún, or with Papi, she ran away to Santurce, a suburb of San Juan, which, by the early fifties, had become as much a metropolis as the capital, though with little of its cachet.

An austere Evangelical church rose next to a botánica where one could buy plaster saints, African idols, herbs, candles, potions for finding love and driving away unwanted influences, and protections against the evil eye and ailments of mind or body.

An austere Evangelical church rose next to a botánica where one could buy plaster saints, African idols, herbs, candles, potions for finding love and driving away unwanted influences, and protections against the evil eye and ailments of mind or body.

They were barred with ornate wrought iron fences and gates, and inside, women in flowered shifts dusted plastic covered furniture or sat on shaded balconies looking out over the commotion below.

Already I’d been singled out in school for my wildness, my loud voice, and large gestures better suited to the expansive countryside but out of place in concrete rooms where every sound was magnified and bounced off walls for a long time after I’d finished speaking.

I let that girl walk home while I took in the sights of the city, the noise and colors, the music, the pungent smells of restaurants and car exhaust.

“What are those, Mami?” I asked one morning when the entire yard looked like a sea of yellow, rising and falling in bulbous waves.

“They’re pig’s guts,” she said without looking up from her darning.

I wanted to jump out of the truck and run, run down the hills dipping into sandy valleys in front of familiar houses bordered with passion fruit and morning glory. To climb the rocky hills at the peak of which our neighbors’ porches rose even higher, their balustrades festooned with potted plants, the zinc overhangs sparkling in the midday sun.

She was gutting a chicken. It looked naked without its feathers, which she’d yanked off in between dips into boiling water. Inside the bloody entrails were globes that quivered as she lifted them out.

“Eggs that haven’t been laid yet. See? No shell.”
They looked like soft marbles, pink shooters striated with red, inside of which an orange/yellow liquid gleamed and threatened to ooze out if the outer membrane broke.

I had to scrape my teeth with my tongue several times before the flavor dissipated into the familiar bittersweet oregano and garlic.

We would sit at his feet listening to his jíbaro tales of phantasms, talking animals, and enchanted guava trees.

It was as if whatever happened in the barrio was conveyed in the breeze to be picked up by whomever was alert enough.

His eyes were closed, and his hands, which I’d never seen without his machete, were clasped on his chest with a rosary wrapped around them so that the large cross covered his fingers.

In the foreground, the landscape had become flat, without shadow, distanceless.

She grew it in the crags that rose behind her kitchen, up the hill from the latrine.

Doña Lola guffawed. “You’re worried about the cows? What about us?”

She swallowed the last drop of coffee and got up from her stool brusquely, startling Alicia, who reached her arms out to me and clung to my neck the minute she was close enough.

When I came home, Alicia on my hip, a can of freshly roasted coffee in my hand, Mami was peeling ñame and yautía tubers for that night’s supper.

“No, I haven’t.... Maybe someday...,” she mused as she set a pot of water to boil on the fire.

Every so often one of them came out and grabbed hot water from a big caldron in the fogón or poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the embers.

Norma whimpered; Héctor’s eyes darted back and forth, and a solemn expression was on his usually smiling face.

She waltzed them to the yard then danced them around in circles. The rest of us stepped out gingerly, watching the black clouds crest the mountain and drop into the valley.

Mami let go our hands and ran under the roof overhang, where water fell in a thick stream. She gave us each a turn at being massaged by the torrent, which banged against our skinny bodies and bounced off in silver fans onto the ground.

The Americano looked at an expert from San Juan who stood up, pulled the front of his guayabera down over his ample stomach, and spoke in a voice as deep and resonant as a radio announcer’s.

“When children play outside,” the expert continued, “their hands pick up dirt, and with it, hundreds of microscopic parasites that enter their bodies through their mouths to live and thrive in their intestinal tract.”

Mami fed us broths, and in the evening, a bland, watery boiled rice that at least stuck to our bellies and calmed the roiling inside.

A brother of one of her friends had that disease; his arms and hands were twisted into his body, his legs splayed out at the knees, so that he walked as if he were about to kneel.

The yard in front of the centro comunal teemed with children.

She opened the double doors and we rushed ahead in a wave, goaded from behind by boys who crushed against us with their chests and knees.

The centro comunal had been decorated with posters. Dick and Jane, Sally and Spot, Mother and Father, the Mailman, the Milkman, and the Policeman smiled their way through tableau after tableau, their clean, healthy, primary-colored world flat and shadowless.

In a corner, the Puerto Rican seal, flanked by our flag and the Stars and Stripes, looked like a lamb on a platter.

“This is great!” she chirruped in her reedy voice, lips wet with anticipation.

Miss Jiménez liked to teach us English through song, and we learned all our songs phonetically, having no idea of what the words meant.

It had red dots on white puffy sleeves, a white bodice, a white skirt with a stripe of red dots at the hem, and two dotted heart-shaped pockets.

I found it difficult to form the capital E of my first name, with its top and bottom curlicues and uneven-size bulges that faced in what seemed like the wrong direction no matter how many times I wrote it.

Mami stood there watching, as I picked up the pencil, carefully tore a sheet from my notebook, and, in labored script, wrote, “Dear Tata, I hope when you receive this letter...”

A consoling warmth compensated for the milky smell, and the gritty, salty-sweet taste.

I remembered a word Mami used for food that made her gag. “It’s...repugnante!”
“I suppose you’d find it less repugnant to go hungry every morning!”