The Noise of Infinite Longing (16 page)

In those days, when she was known even to strangers by her given name, Angela Luisa, she and Jacobo were adornments in any room,

movie characters, like Nick and Nora. Tití had the quick wit, a sar- casm that came couched in a girlish voice, and he had his lean, craggy looks, his years as a political journalist, the books he had written . . . and his reputation with women. I see her always in pedal pushers and pastel-colored silk blouses, in sunglasses and billowing scarves, and I see Jacobo in a dinner jacket, bow tie unclipped, cigarette in one hand, a glass of whiskey in the other, his dark hair ruffled, his face creviced, creased.

Jacobo died that year, in 1955. In the months before his death, his hands trembled uncontrollably, his fingers yellowed by cigarette stains, and his eyes sunken in dark purple sockets. The day he died, after days in a coma in the hospital, nights when Tití did not sleep at all, lying exhausted in a chair by his bed, no longer hearing the steady drip of the plastic IV bag or the rumble of his breath, they brought her home.

Angeles and I were standing on grandmother’s porch. My mother was with Tití, and my father was there, and José Luis and grand- mother. Somebody was holding Tití up, almost carrying her along. She had lost weight in those last weeks, and her face had no air in it, no color. Angeles and I were not allowed to go to his funeral. We were too young. It was a big affair, they said later, with hundreds of people and flowers and eulogies.

Tití was thirty-four years old.

Jacobo left the mess of his life to her. He had a former wife, grown children, his money scattered. She had his books, and his plaques on a wall. She had their three-year-old son. Her life at the newspaper, he had left her that, too. It could be said that he had made her, created her, and as diffident as she was in public, she would give him all the credit.

After the funeral, she took a leave from the newspaper. She stayed in their apartment sorting out death from life. She woke up and took

her Equanil. She went to bed at ten with her glass of Ovaltine.When she came out of seclusion, a seclusion that did not exclude us and a parade of friends coming and going, bringing casseroles and flowers, she went back to work, to her newspaper office in Old San Juan, with the dirt-streaked windows and a view of San Juan Bay and her clanking Remington typewriter, and her morning breaks at the cof- fee shop at the Plaza San José, having churros and hot chocolate.

Our days on Pérez Galdós flowed with the ease that my grand- mother seemed to make of everything. She woke us on school days, a slight knock on our door. Breakfast was ready, our clothes were laid out on a bed, and when the school bus came, she waited on the side- walk in her housedress, her thick stockings rolled up and held by rubber bands at the top of her skinny calves. She stood there until we were out of sight. We were no longer five and six years old—we were ten and eleven—but to her we had not grown a day.

Some days she didn’t leave the house, spent hours chattering with neighbors, arguing with the maid in the backyard (grandmother was as particular as my mother about housekeeping, the laundry, the dust on the furniture). She pruned her small garden and listened to the radio whenever my uncle’s show was on.

Grandmother was in her mid-sixties then, she had few friends from her past, and her circle was getting smaller, dying. But she had her sisters and her children and her grandchildren. Shh, José Luis is on the air, she would say to me every time, moving closer to the radio, turning the knobs. She clipped the articles he wrote and the pictures of him that appeared in the papers. He was her favorite, my mother would say, shaking her head, saying nothing else, only raising her eyebrows. I was too young to know. José Luis had been a heart- break to his parents, had dropped out of university and had married a woman who didn’t come from their class.Their marriage had been such an affront to the family that none of them showed up at the

wedding. But that had been years ago, and now she was welcomed in the family, and no one talked about that, not in front of us, no more than they talked about my uncle’s drinking. But I found out.

One day I was walking down Eleanor Roosevelt, and I heard a voice, his voice, call out my name. I looked into a dark doorway. He was seated in a bar, his hat squashed down over his forehead, his face hardly visible in the dark of the tavern. I walked up to him, and he put his arms around me. It was the middle of the afternoon, and he was drunk, weaving on the stool. I moved free from his arms and he made a coin appear out of nowhere, from behind his ear, and put it in my palm. I clutched it and walked away. I didn’t tell grandmother, I didn’t tell anyone.

All the years away from my family, living in Mexico and Fajardo and Gurabo, and now, this year in Pérez Galdós, I was surrounded by them. My life was teeming with relatives, my mother’s, my father’s. Almost every day, grandmother’s younger sisters, Pepita and Isabelita, came by the house, big women with arms and laps I wanted to hold on to. Isabelita came in her black car. The driver helped her out of the backseat and carried the packages she brought with her. Gifts for Angeles and me, trinkets she had picked up in Italy, or in France, or at a department store in San Juan, little bottles of cologne, mantillas, dolls. Isabelita was the youngest of grandmother’s sisters, and she lived in a two-story house that had fountains, curv- ing staircases, and grilled balconies. Looked like a mansion to me. Her husband had owned sugar land, and they had cooks and chauf- feurs and they traveled to Europe and rented houses in Spain. Their three children, two boys and a girl, inherited the beauty of her face—blue eyes, chestnut hair—and grew up with tutors and bull- fight seasons in Madrid, boxes at the Milan opera, and fast cars. Going to her house was like going to a hotel.We played dress-up, put on makeup, went to the theater, slept late in the morning, and had

breakfast in bed.

Pepita lived down the street from Isabelita in a simple house like so many in the middle-class neighborhoods. She had none of the money Isabelita had but she had the same light laughter, as if she had not known a day of pain.Very blond, with bushy hair, and a face with laugh lines around the mouth, she used to say she had two bless- ings—a devout son who excelled in his studies and went off to Tem- ple to study medicine, and a brilliant daughter with a gift for the classics, who played the piano like a prodigy.

But her daughter, had been born a cripple and as she grew older she had violent spasms and seizures that slowly, over many years, shattered her mind. She lived closed off in a bedroom done all in pink with lace curtains and books stacked up on shelves and sprawled by her bed. Every time I saw her, I was scared. I didn’t know what to expect. On her good days, she remembered me and chattered about books and spoke easily. Angeles never seemed afraid of her. They played the piano together,Angeles keeping up the pace, and they gig- gled when they ran their fingers down the keyboard, ending with the usual flourish, hands open and out toward their audience.

But suddenly a convulsion could come over her, shaking her entire body, and her tongue would twist and her hands would jerk like lob- ster’s claws. She had a mad laughter, and when she laughed like that, like a wild animal, her face looked not beautiful, not womanly, but virginal, like the face of saints who die miserably when young and are portrayed in church in a godlike glow.

I saw less of my father’s family, but for a time on Pérez Galdós, my father’s mother, Josefina, lived there with her youngest son, Ernesto the veterinarian, a finicky bachelor in his twenties. My mother called her Doña Pepita. We called her abuela (there were so many Josefas, Josefinas, and Pepitas on both sides of our family, we had to invent

nicknames for all).Abuela was stocky and compact, not quite five feet tall, round-faced like my father, and double-chinned. She had been a widow for years and lived no place in particular, hopping from daugh- ter to daughter or son to son. In the summers she went to White Plains, NewYork, to stay with her daughter Sara, and to Saranac Lake for her tubercular lungs. Now she was staying with Ernesto in an apart- ment barely big enough for two, but she had a proper living room and a kitchen and she had a balcony looking out to the street.

At least once a week, Angeles and I went up to her apartment on our obligatory visits. After giving us wet kisses on our foreheads and listening to our recitation of our school days, she hoisted herself up from her chair and limped to the kitchen to bring out a tray with two glasses of juice and a tin of chocolates, candies, and cookies. Careful not to spill crumbs, with napkins on our laps,Angeles and I sat stiff and attentive like grown-ups.Angeles rushed to her side, helping to lift the tray, but abuela shooed her away, easing herself into her chair, her black dress falling down to her calves, her eyes watery behind bifocals, and her paper fan stirring the air around her. We were used to abuelita, who let us do anything we wanted. But abuela had rules, where to sit, how long to stay, when to be quiet, and when to speak, snapping at me every time I picked up a magazine while she was talking.

Even when seated, she held her cane. Her limp wasn’t so notice- able, but my father said she was in pain much of the time. I wanted to know that story, how she got the limp, but that was a question she would bristle at, too personal, too intimate.

My father’s brothers and sisters were big talkers, loud talkers, but they didn’t drag the past around with them. They rushed through things, through meals, through children, patting this one on the back, snapping at that one. These were not people to sit back on a rainy afternoon and tell stories, but, of course, they were—all

Puerto Ricans can sit back on rainy afternoons and tell stories.

I just wasn’t listening.

Every Friday that year, my parents drove up from Gurabo to take us back for the weekend. Seeing their car round the corner, Angeles and I ran out to the sidewalk, a little anxious, a little afraid. With them there was always a quarrel ending or one about to begin. But mother’s smile was a surprise, a relief, and climbing down from the car, she wrapped her arms around Angeles and me, holding us tight against her.

Sometimes they brought Amaury, Carmen, and Sara and stayed in San Juan for the weekend.We had Sundays at Ana Celia’s, my father’s oldest sister, in El Condado, where the rich lived in colonial-style houses partly hidden from the street behind high walls and big gar- dens. Ana Celia, stout and fleshy all over, big-breasted and boister- ous, who inherited her money when her first husband died, had her servants cooking all day, making paella, pasteles, and lechón asado. The cooks kept the kitchen doors closed, but before we had stepped up to the main door we could smell the cumin and the adobo, the smells of the island, of the fiestas and Christmas and NewYear’s.

They were always the same, those family visits.

Father and his brothers stood by the bar, and the women sat in a sort of circle in the sunroom, having their tall glasses of watered- down Cuba libres, talking about the children, who got good grades, who had a piano recital, who was graduating first in her class, while we banged on the piano, ran in and out of the house, splashing in the garden fountain. Usually someone drank too much—an uncle, my father—and arguments started. It was a scene I knew by memory, one of the women would break down in tears, her children would come to her side, downcast, embarrassed, and the party would dis- solve just as the sun was dropping into the Atlantic a few blocks away. The children were rounded up and kisses were thrown and

everyone picked up their bags
and got
into their cars.

T

he red-and-white school bus of the Sacred Heart arrived at our street around four. Every afternoon after school, I waited

for it.The bus brought Julia home. She was the girl who lived in the apartment building on the corner; she had short black hair and played the piano and read
Hamlet
out loud, wearing black tights and ballet slippers and a scabbard, like Laurence Olivier in the movie. She was a year or two older than I, and much taller, with broad shoulders and heavy legs and skin so pale you could see the furry hairs on her forearms. Almost every afternoon, we sat on her ter- race, a wraparound porch open to the rain and the streaks of the fading sun. I sat on the floor while she read aloud from her parents’ books, dialogues from plays by Calderón de la Barca, passages from
Don Quijote,
and Shakespeare’s sonnets. She danced to Ravel’s “Bolero” and to
Swan Lake,
lifting her arms in the air, going in cir- cles, and she taught me the difference between a Bach fugue and a Mozart symphony. She talked about books and characters as if they were alive, and the sun would fall away from the terrace, leaving it in shadow.

At the stroke of six, abuelita came out to the sidewalk and called out my name, but I paid no attention. Angeles was home already. She went out to play for a little while, she went to the swings, played with the kids up the street, hopscotch and rope, and bicycled around the horseshoe-shaped street. But she liked to stay with grandmother, listening to her stories, watching her cook, and sewing clothes (when abuelita died, Angeles asked for abuelita’s scissors—she still has them). I spent the afternoon with Julia, stayed until it was sundown and her parents came home and my grandmother was calling me again, clapping her hands, and then, only then, when I heard her hands clapping, did I run down Julia’s stairs.

We made plans, Julia and I. We wanted to go to school together the next year, after the summer away from each other, and she planned to become a ballet dancer and I would become an actress, just as I was in the seventh grade, a star in a comedy, my audience (my mother and Tití) on its feet, roses laid in my arms, kisses on my cheek.

The future at the age of eleven—no, I was now twelve—seemed so certain.

But one night in May, in the last days of the school year, my mother, who was eight months pregnant, stooped to the floor to squash a bug with her slipper, and suddenly she felt a thick liquid trickling down her thighs and then a gush. She was bleeding. My father could not be found, and she bled on the floor until the maids managed to lift her onto her bed. When they found my father, in a bar, he came running up the stairs and bundled her in his arms and drove her, flying madly in his car down the dark road, to the hospi- tal in San Juan.