The Noise of Infinite Longing (17 page)

Angeles and I learned about it the next day, at grandmother’s. My father arrived alone, looking drained, his eyes bloodshot. It’s your mother, he said, embracing us desperately. She had an accident, she’s in the hospital. Grandmother covered her mouth, stifling a cry, and held us to her skirt, putting her hands on our heads. Father sat down. He had pindrops of blood on his shirt. I had never seen him so pale, so worried, his voice a mumble. He choked back tears.

I wasn’t there when it happened, he said. She could’ve died.

But mother was alive, the unborn baby was alive, and that was the end of our year at Pérez Galdós. Angeles and I went back to Gurabo after mother left the hospital, and every night in that last month of her pregnancy, my father stayed home at her side, keeping a vigil. In June, she gave birth to a daughter, Olga, their sixth child, their last.

A

fter our school year with my grandmother and my afternoons with Julia and those starstruck fantasies, I spent the summer in

my bedroom, going one by one through my mother’s bookshelves, reading poems, novels, plays, García Lorca, Rubén Darío, Oscar Wilde, Tagore, books with cracked spines, their pages loosened and crackling with age. She had books she had never opened, their pages still stitched together. There were a few shelves of books she had boxed over and over and carried from one move to another, books from her university days—Cervantes, Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno y Jugo, collections she had inherited, or books she had bought second- hand. Some of the passages were marked-up, underlined with a foun- tain pen, and some of the words in the poems seemed familiar to me, because I had heard my mother say them.

“El dueño fuí de mi jardín de sueño / lleno de rosas y de cisnes vagos . . .”

I thought I understood them all, but I hardly understood any of them. I turned the pages, reading passages she had underlined, say- ing them under my breath. I could see myself standing by a piano, an elbow reclining on the edge of the lid, my wrist turning, my hand unfolding, fingers playing notes in the air, like my mother. I dreamed the words, saw their shape, listened to the way they moved.

I heard the words in my mother’s voice, the chords she struck, the shape of her mouth, her moist eyes, her fluttering eyelashes.

“Verde, que te quiero verde.”

She would take the five words, her body poured into them, her voice a tremor, and Lorca’s words would fall from her mouth, slowly, petals on water.

I started to stay up late, keeping the night-light on long after mother had sent us to bed, punctually at eight o’clock. Under the

mosquito net, with the tiny cup of light the lamp shed on my pillow, I read page after page, until Angeles, who couldn’t sleep with any light on, threatened to call mother.

The light off, I would lie awake, eyes closed, waiting for morning and the next page. I could hear Angeles’s breathing. She was sound asleep.The stories I read became the life inside me, separate from the one of that summer, separate from my family, from my friends, from the afternoons with the boys in the plaza, and the Saturday matinees.

You live in the clouds, my father said often.

I knew what he meant. When he called out for me, I went to his side, and he ruffled my hair and rubbed my back, but my mind wasn’t with him. I stared into a distance that was invisible to him. I was wan- dering in my head, in a world he could not enter.

On the evenings when he came home early, we had dinner together. We sat around him, eyes on him, giving him the attention he expected from each of us. Angeles and I sat side by side; Amaury, eight years old, a rather timid boy, sat across from us. The three young ones were in bed already, in their room—they would not have these memories. Angeles and I didn’t speak until our parents spoke to us, but sometimes the three of us, being children still, would start talking at once.When he was feeling expansive, my father cracked a few jokes he had heard somewhere (he told jokes badly, but we laughed), and he let us do whatever we wanted, go to a movie, go to the plaza, stay up watching TV. He was easier then than my mother. Dinner was not a drawn-out affair. My father asked about school without listening to the answer, since the answer—we like it, we got good grades—was usually the same.Whatever we had to say got lost at that table. Once, when he was toasting their anniversary, making a solemn occasion of it, I interrupted, trying to say something funny, smirking. He stopped and glared at me and sent me to my room. So we knew to gauge the mood, the tone, to laugh only when he did.

Mostly, he and mother talked, argued, while we pretended not to hear, but noticing that she was barely eating.We were not allowed to leave the table before them. We had to sit, hands on laps, our eyes going back and forth from one to the other, seeing the look on my mother’s face when our father, finished with his meal, wiped his mouth, dropped his napkin on his plate, and pushed back his chair, hurrying out of the house.

He never said where he was going, and mother didn’t ask. Some nights he didn’t come home at all. But every night she waited up for him.

I didn’t go to school that year with Julia, we didn’t go back to grandmother’s. Mother wanted Angeles and me home with her, and in August we began school at the Notre Dame Academy in Caguas. American nuns ran the school; they were tomboyish and smooth- faced, with rimless spectacles and stiff black wimples pinned tight around their foreheads. In those flowing long habits, they seemed to flit from classroom to classroom, their rosaries tucked at their waist, their faces flushed. During recess the younger nuns hitched up their skirts to play ball, running the bases drawn in chalk on the concrete playground. They jumped rope, squealing and giggling like girls themselves. But there was nothing tender about them.They liked to think they ran the best school between San Juan and Ponce, and we were all expected to speak English in class, read textbooks in English (I soon knew more about the American Civil War than I knew about Puerto Rico’s fight for independence from Spain).We did the home- work in English and recited the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance.

I was in eighth grade at twelve the youngest student in my class. Angeles was a grade below me, but she was far ahead of her class in math and reading, in all subjects, and she was no longer a shy girl with pleading eyes. She had my mother’s swift tongue and my

father’s belligerence. We had arrived at that age when sisters hate each other, even Angeles and me.We fought constantly, over the bed- side light, over girlfriends and boyfriends, over things not spoken— scratching, punching, and clawing at each other.

Wish you were dead, I told Angeles a dozen times.

She usually won. She could stand more pain than I, and when it was over, she threatened to tell mother. It didn’t matter what it was that she was threatening to tell, the thought of mother’s fury was enough to stop me.

I believed Angeles told mother everything.

They were so much alike. They looked alike, the long, sweeping eyelashes and arched eyebrows, the same plum mouth, etched cheek- bones, black swimming eyes.Angeles had a deep, low voice, and other children made fun of her, mimicking the way she spoke. She had the voice of a woman and the knowing eyes.

With the years, her eyes would reflect the sorrow of all our secrets. But when she was just a girl, she seemed to absorb us all. She took care of Amaury, playing with him and telling him stories at night, the two of them giggling in his tiny room, and she happily took care of the little girls, running after them, feeding them, when the maids had a day off.

Angeles was always the first to know everything.

Now, at Notre Dame, our life was changing again, stretching away from our friends in Gurabo and from our summer days of bicy- cling and picnics at the farms of my father’s friends, when we played spin the bottle and a boy first kissed me. Soon we had other girl- friends, daughters of my mother’s friends in Caguas. We joined the clubs that they joined and invited the boys they invited, and we danced under the moonlight on rooftops strung with lights and ball- rooms decorated with paper lanterns and balloons.

We were no longer little girls in sailor blouses. By the time I

turned thirteen, toward the end of the seventh grade, I had been to seven schools and had lived in half a dozen houses.There was little of the child left in me.

We were becoming señoritas, in my mother’s image.

I already had a boyfriend, in the way we had boyfriends then, in that society of chaperones and virginal sex, when you became sweet- hearts by looking only, sideways glances in church, hearts drawn on the back of schoolbooks.

He was a freckle-faced altar boy, with light greenish-brown eyes that were as round as bulbs, with sleepy eyelids. His name was Roland, a name his mother took from a novella about princes in dun- geons. Limber and lean, he was lightning in skates, and that was the first thing I noticed about him.That, and the way he looked at me in church. I liked his liking me. He had lived in Gurabo all his fifteen years, but he had city manners, and mother liked that. He brought me corsages and boxes of candy that his mother bought at the drug- store, and I scandalously let him hold my hand in the dark heat of the movie matinee, his hand cold, bony. We grew up dancing together, his body bent to mine, his sweating temples against my cheek, his feet barely moving, he was such a clumsy dancer.

There was no thought in him that there could be anyone else but me, and he talked about going to the university and becoming a doc- tor and having many children. He saw it all very clearly, all straight lines. I saw nothing.

Our summers together, when I was twelve, thirteen, and four- teen, would soon pass to that part of my life that I was leaving before I knew I was leaving it. He was becoming smaller to me in those years when I was at Notre Dame. He was the boy I knew in Gurabo, a sweet comfort, a face too familiar. But there were other boys and bigger parties in Caguas, boys in jackets and ties who drank rum and Coke and moved their hips against mine and breathed words into my ear.

I felt their hot faces, their lips on my neck, their eyes on my breasts.

I must have been in ninth grade then, thirteen. Everyone in my class was suddenly bigger, older. Girls in full bloom. Boys with shaved faces and manly voices. I had had my hair cut.There were faint lines on my brow and the slightest deepening of the hollows below my eyes.

My body, small and light, had defined shape, curves. It fitted softly, flesh malleable, almost liquid, into a boy’s arms.

We knew what boys wanted, their eyes on our bosoms, their hands on our lower backs, pressing us against them. We hid our desire—never calling it that—beneath ruffles of crinoline and taffeta, feeling a flush on the neck. Romance came to us that way, furtively, with flowers, with the movements of the hips to the lim- bering guarachas and swooning boleros, in the books we read under covers, in the brush of hands and the flirtations of a single dance.

The secrecy of it, its false innocence, was a sweet seduction.

I kept the handkerchief with Roland’s initial under my pillow, I kept corsages other boys brought me, I pictured myself being lifted into an embrace and held softly like air, and I imagined the words that would be written for me, the words I would write.

I saw my mother’s languid face in emerald earrings, my father’s hand on her waist, the two of them going out on NewYear’s Eve, she in silver chiffon and lace, he in a black tuxedo. He smelled of shav- ing lotion and cologne, she of eau d’Arpège, and they danced until dawn, a little drunk, a little crazy, and she played the piano and recited lines of poetry to him.

“Cuerpo de mujer, blancas colinas, muslos blancos . . .”

Theirs was the romance I knew, opera and zarzuela, poetry and music, the bruised love in my mother’s eyes, the wretched mouth.

Looking at her, watching them, seeing the shards that they made of our lives, I renounced, not knowing it yet, their romance, the union they had made, the surrender of woman to man. I wanted only the illusion.

I

n those years my father was drinking more and more, coming home late, slamming doors, calling out to my mother, demanding his dinner, pounding the dining table with his fist, throwing his din-

ner against a wall.

Their fights were predictable.

Tienes telarañas en la cabeza, he shouted at her—you have cob- webs in your mind—laughing sometimes, and sometimes shouting. We saw in the morning the pain in her eyes. Of him we saw less and less. He was up and gone to his farm before we were up for school, and had closed his office for the day and left the house by the time my

mother, Angeles, and I returned from Caguas in the late afternoon.

But my mother waited for him day after day, sitting in that chair on the front porch, in her heels and her perfume. She didn’t eat with us; she simply sat there until she climbed the stairs to her room, changed into her nightgown, and wandered around the terraces, silent.

One night, in the middle of a fight, mother grabbed her car keys out of the ceramic bowl on the piano, ran out the front door, and drove away. She left in her robe, in the rain. My father was standing in the living room, the wind was blowing in, and mother was gone. We stood holding each other, Angeles, Amaury, and I. She was gone a day, two days. She was in San Juan with my grandmother. My father called her, went to see her, took my grandmother flowers, and cried in my mother’s arms.