The Noise of Infinite Longing (34 page)

Later that evening, Angeles comes out of the airport terminal, past the sliding doors, pulling her roller suitcase. She stops immedi- ately to light a cigarette, and I’m at her side in a second. I can always spot her, no matter how crowded the airport. I can tell her apart from the crowd by the way she walks, slowly, as if she had all the time in the world. She is wearing her worn sandals, baggy pants, and has not a speck of makeup on her face. Her hair is hand-combed off her forehead, a cap of bright gray. She is embracing all of us and try- ing to smoke at the same time.

Seeing her, holding her, I think of some lines she had sent me, like so many she has sent me through the years, passages, stray lines from books, from poems, lines she can recite from memory.

“Eligió el fracaso, la negación de si mismo, de su arte, como ven- ganza pasiva contra el mundo, sin perder por ello el humor, la ele- gancia, el aire de gran señora... .” She chose failure, denying herself, denying her art, as passive vengeance against the world, without ever losing the wit, the elegance, the air of a great woman....

T

he night would go on forever, a family party. More than a dozen of us filed into Jacobo’s penthouse; the bottles of wine

were uncorked, the beer chilled. Family reunions being what they are, this one had its awkward silences, too much food, too much wine, everyone talking, the funeral plans discussed, father’s death in the night, his body finally giving up. Amaury had glazed eyes. He had a picture of father in a frame, when father was in the army. Amaury said he carried it with him everywhere. He took one of mother with him, too. He was getting drunk, holding court, jumbling his jokes. Tamara, his wife now for almost fifteen years, sank into the sofa by his side, patting him on his leg, there, quiet down.

I

want to go hear Carli, he was saying, asking us to go with him, to Carli’s club in Old San Juan. Carli was one of the guys in the

old band, in The Living End. It’s too late, someone said, the funeral is tomorrow. He grabbed another drink, and began talking about father, half sentences, nothing coherent. Olga, Sara, and Carmen looked at one another as if saying, There he goes. Jacobo tried to interrupt, to change the subject, but Amaury was not stopping for anyone. He was crying, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. You didn’t love father, he cried out, no one but me cared about him. I can’t stand this, I thought. Time to go, I whispered to Angeles,

yanking her shirt. No, she shook her head. She wanted to comfort him, to shut him up. She could always outlast him, could outlast just about everybody, but I insisted. I wasn’t going to sit there and let him wreck all of us. Sara, Carmen, and Olga were already out the door, and I dragged Angeles with me.

T

he funeral service was in Gurabo, the last place on earth I wanted to see, but this was father’s final moment, what he had wanted, and we had no choice. Gurabo had sprawled like every other town in the island, but it was still ugly.The plaza seemed smaller, and the houses around it had been replastered and cut up and built up and converted into five-and-dimes, travel agencies, lawyers’ offices. My father’s old dairy farm on the outskirts was now a subdivision named after him. He had sold it lot by lot, but kept the house on the hill, which was no longer a simple blue cinder-block home. It wasn’t blue anymore, and it had been expanded to two floors, and iron grilles had been put on the windows to keep burglars out. He had lived there the last forty years of his life; it was his last home, where

he had hung his hammock.

Our house, the house with the terraces, the house in front of the plaza, the last house where our parents and the six of us had lived together, had been turned into a funeral home, painted a gaudy pink, the tin roof replaced with a flat top, the words
Funeraria de Gurabo
chiseled above the second floor.

The memorial service for him was there, in that house. Incredi- ble, I said to Angeles, father is having his memorial service in the house where we lived. We looked at it from the street, looked at it from all sides. The front porch had no French doors, and my bed- room had no balcony. Men in shirtsleeves and straw hats sat on chairs on the porch, passing the time of day.

Like being drawn by an invisible rope, we walked up to it and went in. I was the last to enter, Angeles the first. The living room, where my mother had had her piano, where she had her glass-topped coffee table, had been opened up, the arched wall that had separated the living room from the dining room torn down, the stairway short- ened, or so it seemed to me. Sara, Carmen, and Olga stayed at my side, sitting on a sofa, the only one in the reception area.Amaury and Angeles went about greeting the townspeople who filed in, old peo- ple mostly, people none of us knew or could remember. I looked for familiar faces, my father’s nieces and nephews. His brother, the only one still alive, was ill; his sisters lived in Florida. None came. I did- n’t move off the sofa, sitting close to Tití, who was now frail, her memory fading, but who was still the most elegant of all of us in a silk gray suit.

This is awful, having this in this house, she murmured in my ear while smiling at everyone.Who are these people?They were ambling in, lining up on a bench against a wall, peering at us, at the six of us. Who is the architect? one asked.Who is the journalist?

Angeles worked the room, occasionally glancing over at me and rolling her eyes, playing mother’s role perfectly.

At last, we were called into a room near the reception area. The room had no windows. This used to be the carport, where father parked his Pontiac. A worn lavender shag carpet covered the floor and foldout chairs had been placed in rows. We walked up the aisle and took our places in the first row. My father’s ashes had been placed in a plain white box set in the middle of a table covered with a white cloth. There were no flowers.

We stood looking at the table, Angeles, Amaury, and I in front; Sara, Carmen, and Olga behind us. I wondered, What’s upstairs, where my bedroom and my balcony used to be? I imagined embalmed bodies.The service seemed interminable.

It was mid-afternoon when we gathered in the yard of father’s house, the one on the hill. Amaury was carrying the box with the ashes. We fell into place in clusters. Carmen, Olga, and Sara waited close together, arms around one another. Angeles and I stood to the side, arms behind our backs. Amaury held the box in the crook of his arm, opened the lid, and took a handful of ashes and sprayed them on the ground. It took more time than I had expected to empty the box. The last fistful hung in the breeze and then scattered. Amaury held the box with both his hands, close to his chest.

W

e made the rounds in the next few days.The house on Pérez Galdós, my grandmother’s house, had decayed with time and weather. Water marks ran down from the gutters and the coats of paint had faded, bleached by rain and sun.The garden had been paved over and the flower-bordered path to the front porch had been widened and turned into a carport. The living room windows, once wooden slats that you cranked open, had been replaced with ordi-

nary glass windows protected by iron bars.

I had loved my life there, running across the street to see my girl- friend Julia, listening to my grandmother barter with the street vendors, keeping her company at the dining table in that room with the gaudy flowery window trims, dunking chunks of bread in her coffee. I could still see her in the kitchen, the door to the yard open, letting in the gusts that came after the afternoon showers.

Can you ever return to Puerto Rico? Angeles asked me that night. It was our last evening together, and we were drinking Medalla beer on the balcony of our room at the Hilton.The sun was fading, the sea turning dark.

I don’t know, I said.You are lucky, you have La Giraldilla, a home

you love, a place that is you, yours. I don’t have that.You are leaving tomorrow morning, and you are dying to get home, it’s something you miss. It’s your cave, your refuge. I don’t feel that, I don’t know that I will ever feel that anywhere.

The next morning she was packed at dawn, and I walked her down to the hotel lobby. I promise I’ll come see you in Tegucigalpa, I said, a promise I made every year. Everyone says La Giraldilla is like a dream, so beautiful, so peaceful, your garden, the birds, all those flowers you have around you.

She loved it there, I knew, but not because it was una maravilla. No, it was because it was more than she had ever expected in life.

I

know that for some of us who left it, the island is a remote place, a long-lost home we will probably not see again. But for others of us who left it, this is a place of dreams still, where we return time and again. We are caught somehow in whatever it is to be Latin American and puertorriqueña, the quickening of the pulse at the sight of the Caribbean, the exhilaration that comes for no rea- son at all, maybe it’s just the taste of the heat, the way it feels on your skin. And the longing that comes by surprise, one evening in a coun- try halfway around the world, or one day standing on a street in New York and hearing a sound out of nowhere, words in Spanish, lines of

a song long forgotten. It’s that, the sudden longing.

Each of us sees our past differently. How could we not? Each of us has her own story, her own chronicle of those days. Each of us composes pictures of what it was and pretties them up or makes them wretched. Each of us moves in the circles that we create to sus- tain us and re-create over again, but for all of us, the six of us, my sisters and brother and myself, life began here, on this island, and

that defines us, that
c
ompletes
us.

T

he last time my mother was here on the island, she sent me a postcard of an old plaza, El Parterre in Aguadilla, where she remembered playing as a little girl. She looked for the house where she had lived as a child, not far from the plaza on the postcard, and found it. It looked no different to her than it had looked when she was growing up, as if the seventy years that had passed had barely touched it. And she found her grandparents’ house, this one nearly in ruins, and she remembered the laughter that had been in it so many years ago. She drove through the island, reliving her life, col- lecting memories, trying to recapture what had been lost under the

surface of change and years.

For a long time, for most of the thirty years she lived in Texas, she dreamed of going back to Puerto Rico to live. She had the islanders’ blood, she felt the pull of the sea that haunts the people of the tropics, the nostalgia on certain days, in specific moments, for the salt smell of rain on warm earth. She wanted a simple house on a hill near the town of her youth, and she talked about the flashing sparkle of the fireflies that light the fields at night and the singsong of the coquís at dusk. But mostly she saw the colors, the scarlet of the blooms of flamboyán trees, the canary yellow of the hibiscus, the transparent turquoise of the Caribbean.

She had kept returning nearly every year, but the plans to go back to stay, to live out her last years on the island, becoming what she had been when she was young and living the life she had lived then, began to lose their radiance, and the pictures in her mind began to lose their color, like the old photographs she annotated and pasted in her albums. The dream was leaving her, but even in those last years her eyes would light up when she remembered Puerto Rico, and her illusions. Her voice would break with longing, as if she were living

her life there all over again.

Her death came just six months after her last trip.

I can only believe, because she didn’t say, that she had imagined herself where the air was light and the sky sheer, looking out to the sea, this same sea I’m looking at now, from this spot in the sand where, when I was a child, she watched me run into the waves.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

B

ooks are born slowly, the date of birth really unknowable.This book has been with me in different forms, and in no form at

all, for more years than I can possibly remember. But I do know that it would not be here at all without the vision and guidance of my edi- tor, Henry Ferris, who understood what I was trying to do even before I did. He and his colleagues at William Morrow and at Rayo have given this book a wonderful home.

A writer labors in obscurity or fame, whichever luck brings, for all her life. I have been fortunate in many ways, but no gift has been more important to me than Kathy Robbins, my literary agent and great friend.Through more than a decade as my rock—adviser, con- fidante, but more than anything, as my most loyal champion—Kathy has never faltered. She pulls me back when I get too close to the brink; she pushes forward when I am afraid. Everything I write in some way has her imprint. I owe this book to her. The crew at the Robbins Office, taking its lead from her, has been unfailingly gra- cious, efficient, and comforting. Each of them—John, Sarah, Sandy, David, and many others—has over the years jumped to my rescue in matters large and small.

Friends come and go. But all have offered support when I needed it. Most especially I want to thank Tim Weiner and Cather- ine Manegold.

Chapter Title

Finally, my family. Their trust in me to tell this story sustained me. They answered my questions and generously shared their expe- riences without ever questioning my right to write this book my own way, through my particular prism. Without them I could not go on. They are everything to me.

LUISITA LÓPEZ TORREGROSA
is an editor at the
New York Times.
Her articles have appeared in the
Times, Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveler,
and
Vogue.
She lives in New York City.

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THE NOISE OF INFINITE LONGING. Copyright © 2004 by Luisita López Torregrosa.
A
ll rights reserved under International and