When I Was Puerto Rican (9 page)

At the cemetery, El Cura said a few words, and then the coffin was lowered, as Juanita’s mother and aunts wailed about what a good man he was and how he didn’t deserve to die. They shovelled dirt on top of the box, red moist earth not unlike the dirt I used for making mud people, and I wondered what would happen to him under there, with all that weight on him. I thought about this as we walked back to Macún behind Don Berto’s daughters, who were overcome with an attack of
los nervios,
so that their sons ended up half carrying them, half dragging them home.

Papi was to lead the novenas for Don Berto. After dinner he washed and put on a clean white shirt, pulled a rosary and a Bible from his dresser, and started out the door.

“Do you want to come?” he asked me.

“¡
Sí
! I would! ¡
Sí
!”

“Only if you bring a long-sleeve shirt,” Mami said. “I don’t want you sick from the night air.”

We walked on the pebbled road as the sun set behind the mountains. Toads hopped out of our way, their dark brown bodies bottom heavy. The air smelled green, the scents of peppermint, rosemary, and verbena wafting up from the ground like fog.

“Papi, what’s a soul?”

“The soul is that part of us that never dies.”

“What do you mean?”

“When people die, it’s just the body that dies. The soul goes up to the sky.”

“I know. Mami told me that already.”

He laughed. “Okay, so what more do you want to know?”

“What does the soul do?”

“It goes to live with Papa Dios in Paradise.”

“When people are alive ... what does the soul do?”

He stopped and stared at the tip of his work shoes. “Let’s see, what does it do?” He massaged his forehead as if that would make the answer come out quicker. “Well, it is the soul of a person that writes poetry.”

“How?”

He pinched his lower lip with his thumb and index finger, and pulled it back and forth in small tugs. He dropped his hand and took mine in his then began walking again.

“The soul lives inside a person when he’s alive. It’s the part of a person that feels. A poet’s soul feels more than regular people’s souls. And that’s what makes him write poetry.”

Clouds had formed above the mountains in streaks, like clumps of dough that had been stretched too thin.

“What does the soul look like?”

He let out a breath. “Well, it looks like the person.”

“So my soul looks like me and your soul looks like you?”

“Right!” He sounded relieved.

“And it lives inside our bodies?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Does it ever come out?”

“When we die ...”

“But when we’re alive ... does it ever come out?”

“No, I don’t think so.” The doubt in his voice let me know that I knew something he didn’t, because my soul travelled all the time, and it appeared that his never did. Now I knew what happened to me when I walked beside myself. It was my soul wandering.

The sun dipped behind the mountains, leaving flecks of orange, pink, and turquoise. In the foreground, the landscape had become flat, without shadow, distanceless.

“Papi, what happens to the body when it’s buried?”

“It decomposes,” he said. “It becomes dust.”

We were joined by a group of mourners on their way to the Marin house. They wished us all a good evening, and the rest of the way we walked in dreadful silence.

Papi settled into his place in front of the house, next to an altar with a picture of Don Berto holding his machete. I wondered if his soul had already gone to live with Papa Dios, or if he was floating around watching to see if his daughters and sons were paying him the proper respect now that his body was rotting under the ground. I tried to send my soul up, to meet him halfway between heaven and earth, but I couldn’t get out, held by the fear that if he saw my soul he might try to take it with him.

“Someone is coming to take your lap, freckles,” Doña Lola cuddled Alicia. We sat in her kitchen, sipping coffee from blue enamel tin cups. Mami had told me to take the baby when I brought a bag of pigeon peas to Doña Lola, who would give us coffee in return. She grew it in the crags that rose behind her kitchen, up the hill from the latrine. I had helped her pick the red, swollen fruit, and she had roasted them in a giant frying pan on her
fogón
then laid the blackened beans out to cool before storing them in an odd assortment of cans and jars.

“Papi said by the time the new baby is born we will have electricity.”

“Ah, yes,” Doña Lola sighed, “electricity. Pretty soon they’ll bring water, too, and then they’ll pave the road and bring cars, buses maybe. Ah, yes.”

“Buses, Doña Lola?”

“Trucks and buses. And then the
Americanos
will come looking for
artesanías.”
She spit into the yard and chuckled as if remembering a private joke. “Those
Americanos
are really something....”

“Do you know any?”

“Oh, I’ve known a few. Yes. A few. You know, it’s an
Americano
that owns the
finca
back there.”

“Lalao’s
finca
?”

“Bah!
A otro perro con ese hueso.
That
finca
doesn’t belong to Lalao. That man doesn’t own the hole to lay his corpse in.”

“But everyone says ...”

“Del dicho al hecho hay un gran trecho.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means there’s a long way between what people say and what is. That
finca
belongs to Rockefela.”

“Who’s he?”

“An
Americano
from the
Nueva Yores.
He’s going to build a hotel back there.” The
finca
stretched across the road to the horizon, the tall grass broken now and then by groves of lemon, orange, and grapefruit trees, herds of cattle, and, in the distance, a line of coconut palms.

“What will they do with all those cows?”

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

“Well, we don’t live on the
finca ...”

“Do you think they will let us stay here if they build a hotel?”

“Why not?”

“Yo conozco al buey que fajayala víbora que pica.”
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.

I loved Doña Lola’s
refranes,
the sayings she came up with in conversation that were sometimes as mysterious as the things Papi kept in his special dresser. “I know the bull that charges and the serpent that stings” could only mean that she distrusted Americans, and that this mistrust had come from experience.

But in the time I’d lived in Macún I’d never seen an American, nor had I ever heard mention of a Rockefela, nor plans for a hotel in what everyone called Lalao’s
finca.

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

“Mami, is it true that they’re going to build a hotel on Lalao’s
finca?”

“That will be the day!”

“Doña Lola said they’ll make us all move.”

“They’ve been talking about bringing electricity here since before you were born. And the rumor about a hotel in Lalao’s
finca
is older than the hopes of the poor. Your granddaughters will be
señorita
before anything like that happens around here.”

I was relieved we wouldn’t have to move and helped Mami peel the sweet potatoes.

“Where are
los Nueva Yores?”
I asked later as I tore the fish bones out of the soaking salted codfish.

“That’s where Tata lives.” Tata was my mother’s mother, who had left Puerto Rico while I was still a toddler. Every so often Mami received a letter from her with a money order, or a package with the clothes my cousins in the United States had outgrown. “It’s really called
Nueva Yor
, but it’s so big and spread out people sometimes call it
los Nueva Yores.
”

“Have you ever been there?”

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

“¡
Ay
!
Ay Dios Mío Santo, ayúdame.
¡
Ay
!” Mami was having another baby. I was in charge of the younger kids, having been told to stay in the yard and out of the house until Doña Ana, our next-door neighbor, came to get us. Even from the far corner of the yard we heard Mami screaming, and Doña Lola and the midwife urging her. 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. They’d go back in and shut the door behind them, not allowing us even a peek into our mother’s pain.

At dusk Doña Ana and her daughter Gloria came to get us, and we walked through the path that connected our yards, Hector on my hip, Delsa carrying Alicia, Norma dragging a change of clothes for us bundled into a pillowcase, just in case we had to spend the night.

Mami’s screams got louder and more shrill as we walked away from the house, as if she could feel us leaving. Norma whimpered; Hector’s eyes darted back and forth, and a solemn expression was on his usually smiling face. Alicia happily sucked her thumb and pointed at everything we passed, chirping, “What’s that? What’s that?” Delsa tried to comfort everyone, or perhaps just herself. “Don’t worry,” she repeated over and over. “It’s just Mami having a baby, that’s all. It’s just a baby. Mami will be all right.” But none of us were comforted that easily, although by now we had learned not to make a fuss.

We ate Doña Ana’s rice and beans with stringy fried chicken and waited in the yard, huddled together. I told stories learned from Don Berto or made up some of my own, none so scary as to chase away sleep. The next morning we were herded back to our own yard, into our house, where Mami was propped up on pillows nursing our new baby sister, and Papi, in the kitchen, installed a kerosene cookstove.

“Everybody, take off your clothes!” It was the middle of the afternoon, the first week in May. The air had cooled in a matter of seconds. A whisper of rain was beginning through a sunny sky, distant black clouds not close enough to throw the valley into darkness. Mami ran from the window, her face glowing, to the basket of house clothes and slipped out of her flowered dress into a faded shift.