The Noise of Infinite Longing (7 page)

She was María Luisa Torregrosa, a name she said like a melody, like a declaration.

At that time, when most women were little more than the prop- erty of their fathers or husbands, women in Puerto Rico, and in much of Latin America, usually professional women and society women, didn’t surrender their maiden names, their family names, when they married. They simply appended their husband’s surname

to their own. But on the diplomas and awards framed in my mother’s office, and in the books where she was cited among other female lawyers in America, her name stood alone, without my father’s sur- name, and when she signed her name to the thousands of papers and documents that she would sign as a lawyer, she never used his name. Maybe in doing this, I thought years later, she tried to withhold something of herself from him.

On the day of my baptism, my family—grandmothers, aunts, cousins, uncles, and my grandfather Angel, just before his death— posed for a picture in their suits and summery dresses at the bottom of the steps of the church. My parents were placed apart, like book- ends. He was hatless, looking gaunt and distracted in his starched army khakis, holding me in his arms, and she was in a black lace man- tilla, her eyes brooding into the camera.

In the first years of their marriage my parents had no home of their own. He was in the army; she had a law clerk’s job. We lived with my mother’s parents. After my grandfather Angel died, we moved with my grandmother from the flat near the university to an old house in El Vedado, a neighborhood of leafy streets and Mediterranean-style houses with red-tiled roofs and casement windows, big banyan and flamboyán trees. The streets abutted the busy avenues of Hato Rey, a crowded district of middle-class homes, stores and markets, gas stations, food stands, and wood- and-tin houses with open sewers.

In the late forties, the movement of people from the sugarcane fields and the coffee hills had already started, and San Juan, always a densely populated capital, was expanding. Slums sprouted on the edges of middle-class and upper-middle-class residential districts, and new low-cost subdivisions of modest, square-shaped cement houses were being built by the government wherever there was open land.

The island’s transformation began in those years. Sugar, coffee, and tobacco farms began to fold, leaving the field hands with noth- ing. Factories began to take the place of farms—small textile facto- ries where the luckiest earned their wages in stifling rooms, sewing cloth and leather on rustic machines and by hand. When the island gained a measure of independence, when it became a common- wealth of the United States in 1952, the changes accelerated. Bigger factories went up, more skilled labor was needed, and the poor flooded the cities, without jobs, without a trade. With that flow of people came a profound social and cultural change.

Tens of thousands of half-literate jíbaros, people from the slums and fields and towns, left the island for New York and cities farther west to find work, traveling more than fifteen hundred miles north with the dream—a steady daily stream of people who, like all immi- grants before them, congregated naturally with their own in a strange land, creating new barrios, living in the tenements once filled with Italian and Jewish and Irish immigrants. The island was now spreading, spilling outward, eventually giving NewYork the fla- vor of the mountains of Puerto Rico, the rhythms of the plena, the Spanglish of a people with a broken language, and a broken home.

No one in my family left the island seeking their fortune. They left to study abroad, to get degrees from Harvard and Columbia, to live the bohemian life, and to tour the great cities of Europe, to visit the Louvre and the Prado Museums, to put on the layer of culture that came with traveling, with seeing the world.

Before I was three, my mother was showing me pictures in the
National Geographic,
places she wanted me to know as well as she knew them, even though she had never seen them. She and my grandmother also talked about the opera and theater in Madrid and Paris, and Sarah Bernhardt became a name as familiar to me as the name of the governor of Puerto Rico, my grandmother’s cousin,

who had spent years writing poetry in Greenwich Village before becoming a politician.

But it didn’t occur to us that life would be better somewhere else (maybe in Madrid or Barcelona, mother used to say), and we pitied the poor families carrying their paper bags stuffed with their meager belongings—and their chickens and plátanos—that crowded the air- port terminal for the flights to NewYork.

My family lived in a society so small that we knew no one who left, except for the maids who believed the Bronx was paved with gold. A few of my mother’s friends and my father’s sisters married Americans they had met during the war, men posted to the island’s military bases, who went on to live in places like Pasadena and Coral Gables. But we didn’t need to escape. We were not rich, yet we seemed to be on an island where more than seventy percent of the people were poor. We could move from house to house, hire ser- vants, and attend private schools. And in that atmosphere of com- fort, the island seemed idyllic to me, the island being in reality my parents, my family, what we know as children.

Chapter Three

A City of Pyramids

A

fter the funeral, after the lunch at the church, we drove an hour away from Edgewood, to Sara’s house in Dallas. Her kitchen, a large all-white room dimly lighted in the sunset glow, a kitchen she kept immaculate, had the look of a war room, the wreckage of too many people, cold leftovers, empty beer bottles, overflowing ash-

trays. The dishes piled up in the sink.

Sara moved about, quiet as if in slippers, picking up after the rest of us, pushing her hair back off her tired face, with its bluish circles under her eyes. Angeles, Amaury, and I seemed glued to the kitchen chairs around the table, as if we would never get up. Olga was some- where in the house, tending to her boys. Carmen to the side of the table, not quite in the circle, her hands clasped in her lap, her eyes lowered, but she was listening.

She had on her makeup but looked drained, although she cer- tainly seemed more composed than the rest of us. She had on her earrings, her rings, her watch, gifts from her husband. She had on a short skirt that showed off her lean legs.

You look just like mother, I said to her, noticing her almond- shaped eyes, her fine cheekbones, her prim mouth. She smiled her tight faint smile, shaking her head. I don’t see it, she said. Well, mother when she was very young, I said, putting my arm around her. She pressed her lips, flattered but embarrassed. She had thin

lips, not at all like mother’s, but I was seeing mother in all of them, in all but me.

She was happiest in Mexico, I said suddenly, just to say something. This was ground we had covered over the years.We had endlessly dis- cussed every minute detail of our mother’s life, especially mother’s life with father, and the years when the first three of us were born.

The war had ended, Angeles was born, and my father left the army and his job in the sugar refineries. He had decided to become a doctor.With my mother’s help, he got a government scholarship to study medicine in Mexico. For the first time in his life, he had to imagine a place outside the island, a place where he knew no one. But because he lacked imagination, he lacked fear.

My mother, whose ambitions for him were even larger than his own, left the work she loved at the Justice Department, the life of fam- ily and friends, and the four of us—I was three years old, Angeles was two—traveled two thousand miles, over the Atlantic, over the Gulf of Mexico, in bouncing, slow propeller planes, stopping in Habana, in Miami, sick to our stomachs, light-headed, to Mexico City.

Mexico? Carmen asked softly, with a look of surprise. She never talked to us much about Mexico. I turned to her.Yes, Mexico, years before you were born.

Angeles shook her head.

I don’t remember anything about Mexico, Amaury interrupted. You were a baby then, I said.

Angeles was very quiet. She was staring into some vision only she could see. Dragged on her cigarette, mashed the butt into a saucer. I watched her. She didn’t look at me. She had changed into an old T- shirt and jeans. She had not slept well for days, had stayed up most of the night before the funeral with Amaury, had stayed in mother’s den, had helped him fold out the sofa bed and put on the sheets and covered him with a blanket.

Those were their best years, I repeated, she told me so herself once. She said, life was simple then.

Life was simple then, I thought, pushing away the image of her body in the ground, alone in a cemetery whose name I had already forgotten. Who could think of that? But it was all I kept thinking about, her body in a dark box. Sitting in Sara’s kitchen, at that moment, I wanted to think of Mexico, the smell of roasting corn and the thick smoke of coal fires, as if I were five years old again.

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Along the Paseo de la Reforma and the Avenida Chapultepec, sweep- ing boulevards bordered by trees and parks, great hotels and shops, the city opens up to the clouds, the streets broaden, and flower- strewn fountains spray the tepid tropical air. Immense paintings appear on the facades of buildings, murals telling the story of Mex- ico: doomed faces, a blood-soaked earth, peasants in loose spun- cotton shirts, barefoot or in huaráches, carrying sticks and shovels, raising the banner of the Virgen de Guadalupe.

In the small Ford that my father drove, I stood on tiptoe on the floorboard in the back, clinging to the headrest of the front seat, with my face out the window, looking up at the murals and the giant billboards with magical pictures and words, words that had colors, shades, movement, music. I was teaching myself to read, and I began to invent stories that I kept to myself about gold treasures buried under the yellow parking strips painted on sidewalk curbs, heroic adventures in which I, much bigger in my imagination than I actually was, would dig up coins, jewels, gems, and leaping into the car, grab the wheel and somehow save my family from certain death.

All along, I was listening to my mother recount from memory the

history of Chapultepec, the fortress where the Emperors Maximil- ian and Carlota saw their end in the time of the conquest, the same fort where, centuries later, six young cadets jumped to their death defending the castle against the invading American army. Mother pointed at the monument, six very tall columns, honoring Los Niños Héroes, at the entrance to the park, where on Sundays we paddled boats among gray swans.

At the museums mother took us to, stories and paintings of the Mexican Revolution celebrated the tattered armies of Zapata and Pancho Villa, peasants in wide-brimmed charro hats and bandoliers, carrying the Mexican flag—white, red, and green, a flaying serpent in the beak of an eagle standing on a wreath of cactus—the flag limp, torn by bullets.

I memorized the names of the men in the murals—Hidalgo, Juárez, Montezuma, Cuauhtémoc—names that I saw etched on mar- ble and stone on the glorietas along the avenues that crisscrossed the city, monuments towering over the rumble of people and traffic that made Mexico a chaotic, mysterious puzzle to me.

It’s sinking, my mother told me when we stepped down at the entrance to the cathedral in the Zócalo. The cathedral, dark and musty like a tomb, rose beyond my eyes into the sky, its floor stones worn down by centuries of damp. Mexico was sinking inches every year (I tried to imagine it, to feel it falling) into the thin-air swamp on which it had been built, the Tenochtitlán of the Aztecs, the Ciu- dad de Mexico of Cortés and the Spanish conquistadors.

All that blood in that place.

W

e lived on Calle Génova, in la Zona Rosa, in a third-floor walk- up, a flat of three small rooms in an ornate stone-fronted colonial building where the laundry was hung up to dry on clothes-

lines on the rooftop. The building had an open atrium, and the flats in the upper floors were arrayed along a corridor that circled it. There was nothing special about the building, but it had a tiled courtyard, splashed with light in the dry winter months and flooded in the rainy summer season.

But we liked our apartment, with the plain wooden door marked No. 23. We could see the sky from our windows, could see on fog- less days the crown of the volcano Popocatepetl, almost always in mist, and we could run down the steps and the city was right there, at our doorstep.

Buses and cars constantly blew their horns, police sirens screeched, and vendors grilled ears of corn on smoky, burning coal, steamed handmade tortillas, and filled them with stringy shards of barbecued pork and chicken.

The mercados, the farmers’ markets, opened early in the day. Tents were raised on poles, and straw mats thrown on the ground. Broad-faced, brown-skinned women squatted on their haunches with their wares, unglazed clay pots for cooking and serving, hand- made sarapes, shawls, ponchos. There were tables with carved wooden figurines of theVirgen de Guadalupe and the baby Jesus, and straw baskets sagging with loads of dusty fruit and vegetables.

Flies hung over everything, sucking the coagulated blood off plucked chickens that were strung on hooks upside down, their necks broken with a hard twist of the hand.

My mother didn’t work. She didn’t have an office or a job. She didn’t have her diplomas on a wall. The neighbors didn’t know, or care, that she was María Luisa Torregrosa, la licenciada.

Nadie me conoce aquí, she would say, a lament. No one knows me here. She was a housewife, a young woman with children. She bathed us and dressed us, swept and mopped every day, and cooked dinner—we could hear her screams every time she burned herself at

the stove. But she didn’t complain that her hands had burns, that her nails kept breaking. She studied cookbooks, standing over the tiny kitchen counter, like she had once studied law books, and she did the shopping and dusted the furniture.

On Calle Génova, a two-lane road several blocks long between the Paseo de la Reforma and the Avenida Chapultepec, the farmers’ market sprawled from one side of the street to the other, and mother shopped there every morning, remarking to no one in particular about the crimson color of the carnations she loved or the smell of coffee beans or the tenderness of tomatoes.