When I Was Puerto Rican (10 page)

“Quickly! Keep your panties on, girls, just take off your shirts. Hurry!” She helped us undress one by one while we laughed and asked her why. She didn’t answer just giggled and took our clothes and stacked them on her rocking chair. She carried Edna, who was a few days old, to the threshold, and let a few sprinkles of rain dot her forehead, and rubbed them over the baby’s face and shoulders before returning her to her cradle.

“Come. Follow me.” She ran and stood in the middle of the yard smiling. The black clouds raced across the valley, but where she was standing, it was still bright. Light rain fell like dew on her, moistening her dress against her shoulders, her rounded belly, her hips. She raised her head to the sky and let the rain fall on her face, and she pushed the drops into her hair, down her neck, into the crevice between her breasts. We clustered on the threshold.

“What’s she doing?” Delsa whispered.

“She’s taking a bath,” Norma answered, her yellow eyes enormous.

“What are you waiting for?” Mami sang to us from the yard.

“But it’s raining, Mami,” Delsa said, sticking her hand out as if to prove her point.

“Yes,” Mami said. “It’s the first rain in May. It’s good luck to get wet by the first May rain.”

She took Delsa’s hand, and Héctor’s; he was holding on to the door frame as if glued there. 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. Rain fell in thick drops now, exploding craters in the dry earth, banging against the zinc walls.

We held hands because it seemed the right thing to do, circled around as the ground became mud and the rain fell harder, cascading down our faces, into our mouths. We circled and sang a school yard rhyme:

¡Que llueva, que llueva!
La Virgen en la cueva,
los pajaritos cantan,
la Virgen se levanta.
¡Que llueva, que llueva!

Let it rain, let it rain!
The Virgin in the cave.
Birds sing,
The Virgin rises.
Let it rain, let it rain!

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. She rubbed the water into our scalps, behind our ears, under our arms, then sent us to chase one another in the slippery mud. We squished our toes and fingers into it, rubbed it on our arms, our bellies, behind our knees, then let the rain wash it off in long streams of red and orange that dribbled back into the soft earth. We squealed and laughed and sang silly rhymes, until the first bolt of lighting broke open the clouds, and thunder sent us all scampering inside, shivering, to be dried off by a laughing Mami, her eyes bright, her face flushed.

For the rest of the month, the rains came, heavy, angry downpours called
vaguadas
that soaked into the ground, turning our yard into a slippery, muddy swamp. Thunder and lightning seemed to strike just over our heads, the sound magnified by the metal roof and walls. The low-slung clouds threw the valley into twilight, and we had to keep the
quinqués
lit all day so we could find our way in the shuttered house.

Papi couldn’t leave for work if the rains started early, and he passed the time reading magazines he retrieved from his special dresser. If the rains began after he’d left for work, however, we wouldn’t see him for days. Mami didn’t seem as bothered by his absence and fed us soups, or creamy rice with milk, or hot
sancochos
made up of whatever leftovers she could fit into the pot. When she wasn’t feeding us, she sewed, if she had fabric, or polished the bedstead and Papi’s dresser, or mended whatever was worn, ripped, or needed patching.

We slept long hours, the rain drumming against the walls, the angry rolls of thunder galloping over our zinc roof. We collected rain in barrels that filled up, topped off, overspilled, and still the
vaguadas
came like a once-welcome guest that couldn’t stay away, eroding the ground into deep furrows that the summer sun burned into long, dry scars, deep wounds that never healed.

THE AMERKAN INVASION OF MACÚN

Lo que no mata, engorda.

What doesn’t kill you, makes you fat.

P
lito,
chicken
Gallina,
hen
Lápiz,
pencil
y Pluma,
pen
.
Ventana,
window
Puerta,
door
Maestra,
teacher
y Piso,
floor.

Miss Jiménez stood in front of the class as we sang and, with her ruler, pointed at the chicks scratching the dirt outside the classroom, at the hen leading them, at the pencil on Juanita’s desk, at the pen on her own desk, at the window that looked out into the playground, at the door leading to the yard, at herself, and at the shiny tile floor. We sang along, pointing as she did with our sharpened pencils, rubber end out.

“¡
Muy bien
!” She pulled down the map rolled into a tube at the front of the room. In English she told us, “Now gwee estody about de Jun-ited Estates gee-o-graphee.”

It was the daily English class. Miss Jiménez, the second- and third-grade teacher, was new to the school in Macún. She looked like a grown-up doll, with high rounded cheekbones, a freckled
café con leche
complexion, black lashes, black curly hair pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck, and the prettiest legs in the whole
barrio.
Doña Ana said Miss Jiménez had the most beautiful legs she’d ever seen, and the next day, while Miss Jiménez wrote the multiplication table on the blackboard, I stared at them.

She wore skirts to just below the knees, but from there down, her legs were shaped like chicken drumsticks, rounded and full at the top, narrow at the bottom. She had long straight hair on her legs, which everyone said made them even prettier, and small feet encased in plain brown shoes with a low square heel. That night I wished on a star that someday my scrawny legs would fill out into that lovely shape and that the hair on them would be as long and straight and black.

Miss Jiménez came to Macún at the same time as the community center. She told us that starting the following week, we were all to go to the
centro comunal
before school to get breakfast, provided by the Estado Libre Asociado, or Free Associated State, which was the official name for Puerto Rico in the Estados Unidos, or in English, the Jun-ited Estates of America. Our parents, Miss Jiménez told us, should come to a meeting that Saturday, where experts from San Juan and the Jun-ited Estates would teach our mothers all about proper nutrition and hygiene, so that we would grow up as tall and strong as Dick, Jane, and Sally, the
Americanitos
in our primers.

“And Mami,” I said as I sipped my afternoon
café con leche,
“Miss Jiménez said the experts will give us free food and toothbrushes and things ... and we can get breakfast every day except Sunday ...”

“Calm down,” she told me. “We’ll go, don’t worry.”

On Saturday morning the yard in front of the
centro comunal
filled with parents and their children. You could tell the experts from San Juan from the ones that came from the Jun-ited Estates because the
Americanos
wore ties with their white shirts and tugged at their collars and wiped their foreheads with crumpled handkerchiefs. They hadn’t planned for children, and the men from San Juan convinced a few older girls to watch the little ones outside so that the meeting could proceed with the least amount of disruption. Small children refused to leave their mothers’ sides and screeched the minute one of the white-shirted men came near them. Some women sat on the folding chairs at the rear of the room nursing, a cloth draped over their baby’s face so that the experts would not be upset at the sight of a bare breast. There were no fathers. Most of them worked seven days a week, and anyway, children and food were woman’s work.

“Negi, take the kids outside and keep them busy until this is over.”

“But Mami ...”

“Do as I say.”

She pressed her way to a chair in the middle of the room and sat facing the experts. I hoisted Edna on my shoulder and grabbed Alicia’s hand. Delsa pushed Norma out in front of her. They ran into the yard and within minutes had blended into a group of children their age. Hector found a boy to chase him around a tree, and Alicia crawled to a sand puddle where she and other toddlers smeared one another with the fine red dirt. I sat at the door, Edna on my lap, and tried to keep one eye on my sisters and brother and another on what went on inside.

The experts had colorful charts on portable easels. They introduced each other to the group, thanked the Estado Libre Asociado for the privilege of being there, and then took turns speaking. The first expert opened a large suitcase. Inside there was a huge set of teeth with pink gums.

“Ay Dios Santo, qué cosa tan fea,”
said a woman as she crossed herself. The mothers laughed and mumbled among themselves that yes, it was ugly. The expert stretched his lips into a smile and pulled a large toothbrush from under the table. He used ornate Spanish words that we assumed were scientific talk for teeth, gums, and tongue. With his giant brush, he polished each tooth on the model, pointing out the proper path of the bristles on the teeth.

“If I have to spend that much time on my teeth,” a woman whispered loud enough for everyone to hear, “I won’t get anything done around the house.” The room buzzed with giggles, and the expert again spread his lips, took a breath, and continued his demonstration.

“At the conclusion of the meeting,” he said, “you will each receive a toothbrush and a tube of paste for every member of your family.”

“¿
Hasta pa’ los mellaos?”
a woman in the back of the room asked, and everyone laughed.

“If they have no teeth, it’s too late for them, isn’t it,” the expert said through his own clenched teeth. The mothers shrieked with laughter, and the expert sat down so that an
Americano
with red hair and thick glasses could tell us about food.

He wiped his forehead and upper lip as he pulled up the cloth covering one of the easels to reveal a colorful chart of the major food groups.

“La buena
nutrition is
muy importante para los niños.”

In heavily accented, hard to understand Castilian Spanish he described the necessity of eating portions of each of the foods on his chart every day. There were carrots and broccoli, iceberg lettuce, apples, pears, and peaches. The bread was sliced into a perfect square, unlike the long loaves Papi brought home from a bakery in San Juan, or the round
pan de manteca
Mami bought at Vitin’s store. There was no rice on the chart, no beans, no salted codfish. There were big white eggs, not at all like the small round ones our hens gave us. There was a tall glass of milk, but no coffee. There were wedges of yellow cheese, but no balls of cheese like the white
queso del país
wrapped in banana leaves sold in bakeries all over Puerto Rico. There were bananas but no plantains, potatoes but no
batatas,
cereal flakes but no oatmeal, bacon but no sausages.

“But,
señor,”
said Doña Lola from the back of the room,

“none of the fruits or vegetables on your chart grow in Puerto Rico.”

“Then you must substitute our recommendations with your native foods.”

“Is an apple the same as a mango?” asked Cirila, whose yard was shaded by mango trees.

“
Sí
,” said the expert, “a mango can be substituted for an apple.”

“What about breadfruit?”

“I’m not sure ...” 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.

“Breadfruit,” he said, “would be equivalent to potatoes.”

“Even the ones with seeds?” asked Doña Lola, who roasted them on the coals of her
fogón.

“Well, I believe so,” he said, “but it is best not to make substitutions for the recommended foods. That would throw the whole thing off.”

He sat down and stared at the ceiling, his hands crossed under his belly as if he had to hold it up. The mothers asked each other where they could get carrots and broccoli, iceberg lettuce, apples, peaches, or pears.

“At the conclusion of the meeting,” the
Americano
said, “you will all receive a sack full of groceries with samples from the major food groups.” He flipped the chart closed and moved his chair near the window, amid the hum of women asking one another what he’d just said.