When I Was Puerto Rican: List 4

She finished the equation with a great flourish of taps and scratches on the blackboard and looked at me, a triumphant look on her face.

When he lived with us, Papi sometimes helped me with homework, and when he saw how good I was with maps, he said I would grow up to be a cartographer.

I sat down to write the stupid composition using her ten stupid words. I would use all of them, just because she thought I couldn’t. Incandescent and Caramelize must go together somehow.

I walked to and from school alone, unable to befriend the sassy girls with budding figures or the boys who leaned against fences and lampposts to hiss and leer.

Over the din, we heard men laughing, yelling obscenities.

Mornings, on our way to school, we hopped over curdled puddles of vomit and fetid urine stains on the dirt.

She scooped Raymond onto her lap, with effort because he was already five years old, tall and gangly.

“I’ll find a specialist...someone who knows what he’s doing...not like those charlatans in white coats that call themselves doctors.”

She handed me a bowl into which the pig’s guts spilled like syrup, quivering pink, blue, and yellow, warm and musky, alive, hard to imagine as solid, piquant, brown sausages.

She was tall and gaunt, with huge black watery eyes and a timid manner that told me she would remain jamona the rest of her life.

“Mamita and Papito spoil her just because she’s the youngest.” It seemed strange that Gladys should call her parents by the diminutive, which was usually reserved for small children.

From what I could see, they lived dull, inhibited lives.

But they lived them with a fervor that was frightening.

Our family never went to church, and I worried that people who did were infallible and we were wrong in our willful resistance to religious guidance.

On either side of the narrow center aisle there were more refrigerated cases for ice cream and sodas, and the walls of the store were dappled with candy in shiny cellophane wrappers clipped to metal skeletons.

I didn’t care if they all thought I was a spoiled, disrespectful, impertinent brat.

Men and women who until that day had been sedate citizens—a solemn storekeeper, the unsmiling man who delivered the mail, the stern school crossing guard, the methodical newspaper vendor—stood up in rapture, ran to the front of the room, knelt in front of Don Joaquín, grabbed for his hand, waved their arms about in jerky motions.

Don Joaquín’s voice rose in timbre and pitch, until he seemed to disappear and only his words remained, reverberating against the cement walls, piercing the assembled into delirious convulsions and ecstatic trances.

Don Joaquín’s voice rose in timbre and pitch, until he seemed to disappear and only his words remained, reverberating against the cement walls, piercing the assembled into delirious convulsions and ecstatic trances.

I wanted to wail, to wave my arms in exuberance, to give myself up right then and there to the unexplainable force that overpowered the others in the room.

But my fear was too great, my conscience too precocious to allow me to relinquish control of my well-guarded soul.

I held on to Papi’s hand as to a lifeline, not trusting my knocking knees to hold me up. But Don Luis’s warm smile soon melted my fear into awe at finding myself in his house, away from the unpleasant implications of a student face-to-face with the school principal.

We shared the joy of being in this room, in the home of an artist, a person whose life was gracious and carefree, whose furnishings and decorations were as impractical as ours were utilitarian.

His eyes were wide, his skin mottled pink and white, his mouth invisible behind his mustache.

Shame rose from the ground and wrapped me in a hot, turbulent funnel that I wished would lift me out of this room, away from my school principal’s startled blue eyes and quivering, elegant fingers.

“He’s in Heaven, with Papa Dios,” Abuela said behind me, startling me out of the brooding sorrow that pressed against my chest.

I took the emptiness of Abuelo’s room inside myself, the cold, stippled walls desolate and hard.

I took the emptiness of Abuelo’s room inside myself, the cold, stippled walls desolate and hard.

He got to travel to New York, a place Mami spoke of with reverence.

It wasn’t that when Mami was gone we misbehaved more. It was simply that I couldn’t muster her authority, couldn’t manage to keep my sisters and brother in line with her strict rules of behavior.

She lived next to her mother, my abuela, whose every other word had God in it, was sister to my father, who wrote poems, and to Tío Vidal, who recited poetry as he clipped men’s hair in his barbershop. But Titi Generosa wasn’t inclined toward elegant speech, nor toward euphemisms.

The other thing we liked about Titi Generosa was that even though she was a mother herself, she believed everything we told her, no matter how farfetched.

Héctor, who had a gift for talking people into doing things they weren’t sure they wanted to do, ingratiated himself with the candy store owner down the street and spent most of his day “helping” the owner and himself.

Affable, placid Alicia whiled away her days in bed, playing with dolls in tents constructed from Mami’s sheets.

I heard them whisper at the impropriety of my roving about unaccompanied, but I didn’t care.

I heard them whisper at the impropriety of my roving about unaccompanied, but I didn’t care.

The freedom I had gained from Titi Generosa’s ingenuousness was usually given only to boys, and it set me apart from any friends I might have had at the time, whose mothers were as cautious as mine.

Occasionally, Angie joined us, but most of the time she remained sequestered in her pink room, listening to the music we were forbidden in the rest of the house.

Fingers burning, I stripped the hot skin off potatoes in silence, swallowing hurt and resentment with the same outward resignation that Gladys manifested.

But although it seemed that Gladys had simply accepted her lot with meekness, I seethed, playing Titi Avena’s dirtiest words inside my head as I dropped potato after potato into the bowl where they would be mashed.