The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize (46 page)

“Perhaps, aided by your natural beauty, these will help,” he said and waited to see if she told her husband. She did not. If she had, he might have reconsidered his resolve to rid his heart of the last vestiges of a Puerto Rican inclination toward sympathy. On hearing of an enemy's downfall, most reacted with
bendito
, poor thing.

On subsequent visits she offered him a whiff of the perfume lingering from her bath and listened to his Simple Simon tales. Then she found excuses to see him for headaches, indigestion, and broken fingernails, laughed that her husband Pepe might be Juan Bobo, and did not withdraw her hand. Squashing any idea of hope that she might be sincere, he hardened himself against feeling sorry for her.

In time he felt confident enough to recite erotic poems and declare his passion until he believed her to be so impressed that he could safely graduate to greater intimacies.

When she began to avoid him, her growing abdomen and her new formality told him what to expect.

“Señor Doctor, your services are not needed. The town midwife will attend to the birth of my husband's child, not you.”

Rodríguez found that the old farmer proved not so stupid after all. Pepe did not accept the possibility that he had moorish blood to explain the brown infant whose hair, unlike the dead straight hair of his parents, turned wiry after his third month.

“I'm from León,” Pepe said, as if that explained everything. “We killed all the Moors. Watch out for yourself, Moor.” Old Pepe shook his rake at Rodríguez and added, “Watch out you're not skewered on a night as dark as your soul and your testicles fed to my pigs.”

That incident alone did not chase Rodríguez from Spain, but news from Puerto Rico did. He heard about a growing movement advocating autonomy from Spain and learned of both the establishment of the Puerto Rican Autonomy Party, begun by Román Baldorioty de Castro's “Autonomy Credo,” and of a secret organization called The Old Man's Tower, which was to give economic preference to creoles by boycotting Spanish-owned businesses. Given the political upheaval occurring in Spain between monarchists and nonmonarchists, he believed in the possibility that Puerto Rico might be freed. Patriotism surfaced in him with the idea that his grand purpose in life ordained his return to the island to take part in the struggle against Spanish colonial rule, and he quickly made plans to return home at once.

Time abroad had dulled his memory of his homeland's tropical beauty. Shortly before his ship sighted land, the air changed. Breezes carried the scent of mangoes, rose apples, and guava. Pineapples mixed with coconut oils and acerola, wet earth with tuberose to form a unique aura, the unmistakable bouquet of Puerto Rico: hot, sweet, and sad. Through flared nostrils and open mouth, he took deep gulping breaths of the scent as if he had been drowning.

His eyes watered at the sight of giant coconut palms towering near white sand beaches bathed by a multicolored Caribbean Sea. Brilliantly hued royal poincianas,
flamboyán
, along with poinsettias, decorated the countryside.
Cucubanos
, large relatives of the common firefly, lit up bread-fruit trees,
guanábanas
, papayas, and sea grapes.

At home, Rodríguez also became reacquainted with ignorance. Illiterate because of the lack of schools, or the necessity to work at a very young age, few among the lower class could read, write, or even reason logically whereas the well-off still lived regally, traveled, and produced a generation of lawyers and journalists, poets and painters. Lack of sanitation, proper housing, and nourishment resulted in short, painful life spans. He felt newly offended at a rigid class system where only appointees of the Spanish court reigned supreme over politics and the economy, perpetuating the unlivable conditions.

He considered Luis Muñoz Rivera, white descendant of Spaniards and leader of the autonomists, totally incompetent, a man who ran his politics on the self-interest of safeguarding his own class power while maintaining the illusion that he was really striving for independence on the sly.

To Rodríguez, the problem remained numbers, education, and cowardice, and he thought about the child in Spain. If he had many children in many different parts of the island and educated them, they could make a difference.

As the legal, light-skinned offspring of white parents, the Church could not include the names of those children in the secret documents they kept to record all of mixed heritage, denying them opportunities. Startled, he remembered Mercedes' fortune-telling and began to make himself available to his “little mothers.”

When he started his amours in Puerto Rico he found most of the creole parents isolated and ignorant of history, easier to persuade than the old Spanish farmer, Pepe Soto, that no matter how fair skinned, few could argue positively that they had no Indian or black blood unless they were newly arrived from Europe.

Simple Simons!

In a country of people filled with deep-seated bias in favor of good looks, money, intelligence, and above all light skin, Rodríguez believed only those who fit that description had a chance at being accepted or voted into positions of leadership, and he wanted his children to be among those leaders. Remembering a lonely Betances abandoned by former compatriots after the mysterious death of Segundo Ruiz Belvis, Rodríguez decided not just one or two but many generals were needed for the fight. In order to break future generations of their genetic passivity, his task required that he create those generals and teach them to hate a yoke of any kind until that hatred boiled up in them like a bubbling tar pit.

Then what?
He weighed the consequences of violent revolution against the possibility of insidious infiltration and takeover. Without being able to choose between the two, he decided on a combination of both to ensure continuity of rebellion. “No matter,” he thought. “My sperm, my tar pit will know what to do.”

Over the years he rejected many of his children as leaders because he did not see the right combination. Two or three turned out good-looking, either with light skin, his hair, and negroid features, or very dark with straight hair, but in the illumination of his lantern showed the dull eyes of the mentally slow. He did not abandon those he considered his infantry. He visited them whenever possible to speak to them and leave gifts of money and food, but he accelerated his adventures, going so far as to initiate encounters with reluctant women to continue his quest for the leaders he wanted to produce.

Mike Padilla

First Prize: Short Story

They had been living legally in the United States for a year and a half when Antonio announced to his wife in no uncertain terms that they were going to learn English once and for all.

“We know less now than we did when we moved here,” he said, pacing the border of the frayed oval rope rug. “There's no way we're going to get ahead if we don't know the language.”

On the sofa Pilar thumbed through one of her Mexican movie magazines while
menudo
simmered in the kitchen. “And where am I going to find time to take a class?” she said. “I have this house to take care of and you to cook for and the neighbor's kids to watch in the afternoons.”

“Most of my customers are going to speak English,” he went on. “There's no way I can grow the business otherwise.”

“Fine.” She snapped her magazine shut. “Get me my own car so I don't have to walk half an hour to get groceries, and plan on cooking some of your own meals, and get the building manager to finally fix that washing machine. Then I'll take your class.”

She went into the kitchen and gave the
menudo
a forceful stir, took it off the stove and turned down the flame. At the table she laid out a bowl and spoon for each of them and a plate of olives from the Greek store downstairs. They sat down. Steam rose up between them, a gauzy curtain.

“There's one more thing,” Antonio said, tucking his napkin into his shirt. “If we're going to do this, we have to do it right. No more Mexican movies and Mexican radio and Mexican newspapers. Everything is going to have to be in English from now on.”

She ladled out the soup, shaking her head as if listening to a lunatic's ramblings.

“Pilar, look at the Pachecos. They've been here for five years and they still can't say anything. Why? Because they only talk Spanish around the house, they only have Mexican friends.”

“So now you want me to give up my friends, too? Maybe I could also bleach my hair and eyebrows. That way I'd look
and
sound like an American.”

Antonio cleared his throat. “In the long run, Pilar—”

“How is it you know what's best ‘in the long run'?”

“I want us to make progress.”

“Leaving Tijuana was supposed to be progress.”

“We had nothing in Tijuana.”

“We had our own house.”

“It was your parent's house.”

“At least it wasn't a moldy shoe-box, and at least we had more to eat than watered-down …”

“Pilar!” He pounded his fist on the table so his soup splattered. He did not wipe it up.

She pursed her lips. Dark lines radiated out from the corners of her mouth, her eyes. Then she threw her twisted napkin on the table and left the room.

When she came back a few minutes later, she had her hair pulled back into a ponytail. “All right,” she said. “I'll sign us up for the class tomorrow. But don't expect more than baloney sandwiches for dinner and don't come griping to me when you find you don't have enough clean shirts for the week.”

Antonio's heart swelled with gratitude, but he kept his head lowered, his face somber. From the day they got married, he had asked more of her than it had been fair to expect. Trying to start his own scrap business while working at O'Connor's machine shop meant they hadn't spent a weekend together in six months, and it had been more than a year since they had returned to Tijuana to visit her parents. That night in bed, Antonio slipped his leg between hers. He wanted to make love to her, to show her how much he appreciated her. But she only moved to her edge of the bed with her arms wrapped tightly around a pillow.

In the morning, they rose and showered together without talking. She scrambled his eggs and
chorizo
in the kitchen, working the pan with violent motions, her lips clamped in a bitter smile. He chose to leave her alone. Women were entitled to periods of extreme anger and sadness, and he had learned it was best to indulge them. The inner workings of their hearts were intricate and fine—too delicate to be tampered with by clumsy men.

On Friday of that week, he came home from work to find Pilar chirping happily on the phone with her mother. She waved to Antonio, then got off the phone quickly to greet him with a kiss. He put his arms around her, buried his face in her hair. “Did something good happen to you today?” he said.

“Nothing in particular. Maybe it's just because today is the first day of spring. You know how nice weather affects me.”

But Antonio noticed something different about her that night as she started dinner. For a long time he couldn't pinpoint what it was. Not until he asked her if she needed help and she waved him away from the counter did he figure it out. Pilar was smiling in the kitchen. He had never noticed it before, but now he realized Pilar never smiled in the kitchen. She hated to cook, and normally grumbled and clattered and thrashed her way through preparing even the simplest meals. But today she was smiling, like someone on the cover of a homemaking magazine.

She smiled throughout dinner, too, then hummed through the clearing of plates. From the sofa in the living room he watched her carefully, the way she nearly danced to secret music in her head from counter to cupboard. It wasn't until later, when she stepped out to see her friend Monica but did not come back for nearly two hours, that Antonio's thoughts, like iron shavings to a magnet, adhered themselves to the possibility that Pilar was having an affair.

It had happened once before, while they were still living in Tijuana in a brown-faced cottage Pilar's parents had rented for them on the east side of town. Over the side-yard fence Antonio had seen Pilar walking toward the house with a delicate-jawed, sleek-haired young man who owned the grocery store down the street. Their shoulders brushed as they ambled along. What had ensued from Antonio's accusation was a single, unending night of tables pounded and doors slammed, faces contorted in rage and words honed to murderous pitch. Yes, she finally admitted, she had spent the day with him at the movies. But she had come from an active family of seven children, was not accustomed to spending her days alone, and anyway, if Antonio had taken her to the movies the weekend before as he had promised to in the first place … No, she said, there was nothing between them, he was just a boy, for God's sake. After hours of argument had exhausted them to the point of gray numbness, they at last sat across from each other in the haggard dawn, and came to an agreement: They would accelerate their plans to move to the United States. And in return, he would never again accuse her of something of which he had no proof.

“Why so serious today, Antonio?” Miguel said. He was standing on a crate at his lathe in the machine shop, being too short to reach it himself. “Problems with the wife, maybe?”

Antonio smiled, but concentrated on his lathe, fitting the shaft into the chuck.

“You should have seen the one I had last night,” Miguel said, loud enough for everyone in the warehouse to hear.

“How does anyone so short and pudgy get so many women?” Gómez, one of the other workers, shouted.

“And with dragon breath on top of it,” someone else said.

“I have what women want,” Miguel said. He held a nine-inch length of shaft up over his head and shook it. There was a burst of laughter. Someone threw a turning at him, but he deflected it with his arm. “And you know what the best thing about her was? She was married. Married women in unhappy relationships are always the wildest.”