When I Was Puerto Rican (22 page)

The chalk was dry and powdery. Sra. Leona stared at me through thick glasses that made her eyes bulge. Two parts of three plus four parts of six. Can it be six parts of nine? I don’t think so because six parts of nine is smaller than two parts of three. That wasn’t working, so I tried a new tactic. If you cut an orange into three pieces the slices are bigger than if you cut it into nine pieces. If you cut it into six pieces the slices are bigger than if you cut it in nine but smaller than if you cut it in three. So what does that make?

“Esmeralda, do you need help?”

Someone behind me giggled. Sra. Leona shushed him.

“No, Sra. Leona, I’m just thinking.”

“Think a little faster, would you please? We don’t have all day.”

Six oranges. No, one orange, six pieces. Three bananas. Four guavas. No, two bananas.

“Didn’t you learn fractions in that school for
jíbaros
you came from?”

The kids laughed. Sra. Leona smiled. Her teeth were small. I was so cold, my knees shook.

“We were just beginning ...”

“I see. Those country schools are always so far behind. That’s why we have so many ignorant
jíbaros
...”

“I’m not ignorant.” She grabbed the chalk from my hand and wrote some numbers on the board. I stepped toward my seat.

“No, young lady. You stand right there and watch, so you can learn.”

My classmates laughed. Someone threw a spitball. In the back of the room three boys sang a
jíbaro
song about coming from the mountains to the city. Sra. Leona turned around and stared at them through her thick glasses and they quieted down, but the minute she turned her back they started again, in a softer voice.

She talked about converting this to that and adding this, and integers, but I didn’t hear her. I left my body standing in front of her, suffering spitballs and whispered insults. I sent the part of me that could fly outside the window to the
flamboyán
tree in the yard.

The orange flowers covered me as I sat in their midst. They smelled bitter, like the white sticky ooze that dribbled out from cut stems. From the tree I watched Sra. Leona writing on the board, and me standing nearby, head lowered, eyes focused on the shiny floor. 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.

“And that’s how you do it, all right?”

I came back inside. “All right.”

“You can return to your seat now,” she said, and I walked back as fast as I could, my shoes making a flat sound on the cold marble.

The walk home from school was long. No one walked with me. I didn’t want anyone to know where I lived. I walked past a bar, a grocery store, a doctor’s office, past a
botánica,
its window plastered with pictures of a blonde Virgin Mary, a bloody Jesus Christ, and a tree with a thick trunk and branches stretching out from it like an umbrella. “The Tree of Life” it was called.

Cement houses with wrought iron porch railings and flowery gardens were clustered behind the businesses. From inside one of the houses, a dog barked as I approached and passed. Inside another, birds chirped a song unlike anything I’d ever heard from birds in the trees of Macún. I wished we lived in one of those houses, with their large rooms and lamps instead of bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

Girls from my school walked in groups ahead of me, and one by one they went into these nice homes where mothers, dressed in simple skirts and blouses, with hair neatly combed, no paint on their faces, waited by the door and closed it lovingly after their daughters. Once one of them smiled at me, and I was so grateful I wanted to run into her arms and be swallowed by the ruffles on her blouse. Another gave me a dirty look, as if I had no right to walk on her neat street.

At my door, no one was waiting. Mami was working. Doña Andrea gave me a cup of milk with coffee and a chunk of bread with butter, and then I had to watch my sisters and brothers until Mami came home.

Even though we could walk to school on our own, we were still not allowed to play outside the house. I did my schoolwork and helped my sisters with theirs. I waited for Mami. I drew pictures of butterflies and flowers, trees on grassy hills, hummingbirds kissing hibiscus blossoms, all the things that didn’t exist in El Mangle. I pasted my pictures on the wall near the cot Delsa and I shared. She liked looking at them too.

Mami talked to Doña Andrea. She smiled and nodded her head and smiled again. When Doña Andrea handed her a pot full of chickpeas with pig’s feet, Mami didn’t want to accept it.

“Come on,” Doña Andrea said, “I cooked them for you. You don’t have the time to make them after work.”

“All right, but only if you let me make you some
arroz con
dulce one of these days.”

“Don’t worry about it. Enjoy it.” And she pressed the pot into Mami’s hands.

Chickpeas with pig’s feet and white rice was one of my favorite dishes. Mami put pumpkin in the chickpeas, and I munched into it, expecting it to be hard and chewy but discovered that it melted in my mouth. I gnawed on the meat around the pig’s feet and sucked the bones until the salty, slippery membrane slid out and swished around my tongue. As we ate, we threw the bones out the window, plink, into the water.

At dusk I could see the remains of other people’s suppers floating by the window, chicken and pork chop bones, lettuce leaves, breadcrumbs, sometimes noodles. On Fridays people ate fish or vegetables with no meat because of God.

When we first came to El Mangle, I wouldn’t drink, and I didn’t take a bath because I thought the water came from the lagoon. But one day Mami took me by the hand.

“Come,” she said. “See this pipe connected to our faucet? Watch. It stretches all the way down and turns here, under the pier. It never touches the water.” We walked to where our pier joined the dock with many other piers and curved bridges attached to it. Each pier had one or two houses at the end, their pilings thick and tall above the black water. “Do you still see the pipes?” They were sturdily attached by metal collars to the splintery boards of the dock. “Now we follow them down this way.” We followed the dock toward the shore, where the pipes, now joined by many others, disappeared under the cement sidewalks leading to San Juan. After that, I didn’t mind the water.

“At least,” Mami said, “we don’t have to walk for miles with pails full of water on our heads.”

Some evenings, Mami let me sit on Don Pedro’s boat, which was tied to a piling between our house and Doña Andrea’s. At first I was afraid of falling in the lagoon, but Don Pedro showed me that the boat was safe, as long as I didn’t move around in it too much. I pushed it along the dock until it floated behind the houses and there was nothing in front of me but black water, and in the distance, mountains. Smoke curled up from the shore on the other side of the lagoon. Gulls circled, dove down, then flew up again. The sun floated over the mountains, stained the blue sky red-orange, and flattened the lagoon until it looked like a mirror for the stars. The mountains became shadows as the sun dove behind them, and the lagoon shimmered silver and white. It was so still and quiet that I could hear the water swish against the sides of the boat and the pilings that held up El Mangle. I remembered all the times Papi and I sat on our steps, watching the sun go down. My throat felt tight and my eyes stung with tears. If I came back looking like I’d been crying, Mami would worry, and if I told her why, she’d be angry. It was better just to swallow the tightness in my throat and rub the hurt away. That way no one would ever know.

One day, Mami said I had been asked to do something very, very special. Not everyone could do it, and she wanted to know if I wanted to.

“What is it?”

Mami sat across from me. “Doña Cony had something sad happen. Her baby, her youngest son, died yesterday.”

“Oh.”

“Isn’t that sad?”

“Yes. It’s very sad. She must be really sad.”

“She is. Especially because when the baby died, his eyes didn’t close.”

“How come?”

“No one knows. But he can’t be buried like that.”

“Why not?”

“He just can’t.”

“What difference does it make, if he’s dead?”

Mami gave me a look. “He won’t go to Heaven.”

“Oh.”

She took a deep breath. “So Doña Cony asked me if you could close the baby’s eyes.”

“No way!”

“It will only take a minute. You’ll wear your white pique dress, and I’ll take you out for ice cream after.”

Something told me Mami had already said I would do it.

“Do I have to touch it?”

“Of course, but not for long. It only takes a minute.”

“What if when I touch it, it grabs me?”

“He’s dead. He can’t move.”

“But in all the stories the dead walk around and do things ...”

“That’s grown-up dead. This little baby couldn’t even walk yet. He’s going to be an angel. But only if someone closes his eyes.”

“Why?”

“Because his soul is trapped in his body. Once you close his eyes, it can fly up to Heaven.”