The Noise of Infinite Longing (8 page)

We wandered away from our block, and in these walks with her, we crossed Londres and Liverpool and Hamburgo, a grid of streets whose names she said aloud, ah, Niza, Florencia, every name trans- porting her, and us with her, my first lesson in European geography. She liked to make conversation with the women in the mercado, heavy women hunched down with invisible burdens, with their impenetrable dark eyes and wide, slanted Indian faces, who would stare back at her silently, smile shyly, and giggle among themselves. I could tell they didn’t know what to say to this thin, pale young woman with the ribbon in her hair. In the mornings in the mercado, in her espadrilles and headband, with her children immaculately groomed, my mother seemed a foreigner, like the wives of diplo- mats, like the ladies who sent out their servants and came around in chauffeur-driven cars. But my mother walked and had no servants and checked off her grocery list and counted her coins, carrying home a bag full of the tomatoes that I would later eat whole, like

apples.

S

oon she had three children. A year after our arrival in Mexico, she was in her eighth month of pregnancy. She didn’t complain

about that either. But she wanted her baby to be born on the island; she wanted her mother with her. My father couldn’t go, but she took Angeles and me with her, and we made the long, sickening trip back to San Juan.

My brother was born, a boy just as my father had wished, and a couple of weeks later, we were boarding a plane again, leaving my grandmother and Tití Angela Luisa behind, leaving San Juan, flying into the now-familiar airports in Habana and Miami, waiting in hotels and terminals on the interminable trip just to get to Miami, which in early September was hot and wet like an equatorial island. We traveled by Greyhound to New Orleans and all the way to Mexico City. My mother, still frail, still swollen in her stomach and her breasts, carried my brother in one arm and held on to my sister and me, standing at the bus stop in her low-heeled flats, while the men loaded the luggage. Hollow-eyed and sleepless, she managed to find a hotel for the overnight stop in New Orleans, and then endured the exhausting damp heat of that late summer in a stifling, crowded bus on

the twenty-hour journey from New Orleans to Mexico City.

The bus moved slowly, overloaded with villagers and their bun- dles, just like we seemed to be ourselves. It whimpered up and down the narrow, broken-down roads of northern Mexico, rock and desert Mexico, as arid a land as I had ever seen.

But she was happy. She was bringing my father a boy, what he had wanted, what he had waited for impatiently when first one daughter, and then another, had been born, not the sons who would carry on his name. Now she had that boy, a boy named after him, Amaury.

T

he apartment in Mexico was not big enough for all five of us, but my father was on a scholarship, and was making no money.

We could not think of moving anywhere else. On our weekend drives

around the city, my mother pointed longingly at the Spanish-style houses with their grilled balconies and the haciendas in the stone- street colonias of San Angel and Coyoacán. She would exclaim, Imag- ine living there, living behind the thick walls, in houses with elaborate arches, with gardens of bougainvillea and cool palm-shaded verandas. My father was an old student, already in his early thirties, cram- ming to keep up with a class of much younger men at the Universi- dad Nacional Autónoma de México. At home in the evenings, and on weekends, he paced up and down our living room, from sofa to din- ing table, from armchair to front door, carrying two-pound text- books, their spines cracked, pages dog-eared. His fingers, which were blunt and lean, flipped through the pages, stopping to scrawl notes in the margins. He kept a human skeleton hanging off a hat- rack in their bedroom, and a skull on a desk near my brother’s crib. He carried them around the living room, the yellowish skull and the dangling skeleton, pointing at this bone, at that vertebra, speaking to himself. I learned to study from him, watching his furrowed fore-

head, his taut mouth, veined hands flaying the air.

Every weekday morning, he put on his fedora and light woolen jacket and was gone before we were up. My mother was in the kitchen making the thick black coffee she liked, reading the newspa- per. She had no maid, only the lavandera who came once a week to do the laundry up on the rooftop. Now my mother had three chil- dren to look after, and the toll began to show. She was so thin, her wrists like a child’s. But every day she cooked our meals and, like clockwork, bottle-fed my brother, mixing the powdery formula in the morning, keeping the bottles sterilized, warming them in boil- ing water, testing the temperature of the milk, pouring drops on the back of her wrist. While he slept, she cleaned the house, did the dishes, and did her nails.

Day after day, late in the afternoon, she changed into a dress, freshened up her makeup, put on red lipstick and perfume, and waited for my father to arrive from school. Oh, your father’s here, she exclaimed, smoothing down her dress, when she heard his foot- steps approaching the apartment.

She made occasions of his arrivals, rushing to the door to greet him, kissing him lightly on the mouth, preening as if they were courting. His entrance changed the air, a sudden loudness ripping the afternoon quiet. He had a voice that carried even when he whis- pered. He hugged me, he hugged Angeles, lifted Amaury up in the air, and demanded his beer. For him, she dropped everything.

Couples like them, classmates of my father’s and their wives, came by on weekends. On our old RCA turntable they played Artie Shaw and Cole Porter and the boleros of the islands. I sneaked out of my bedroom, in my pajamas, and my father would let me have sips of his beer, a bitter foam I licked off his glass. Then he would send me off to bed, but I crouched behind a chair, in a corner, and watched them dance to “Bésame Mucho” and “Night and Day,” my mother fragile but undulant, her breasts pressed against my father’s chest, and his body curved into hers.

There were times, when the night was long and the bottles of beer and rum had been emptied, when the sound of his voice silenced everyone. She knew his rages, knew that the slightest frown on her face, a crisp tone in her voice, or an opinion he didn’t like could make him explode. He would turn on her, demanding another drink, making fun of some remark she had made, mocking her, ridi- culing her knowledge. It could be anything—her cooking, her poetry, her piano-playing.

I heard his words and blamed his drinking, but when I became older I realized that those words, that anger, were there inside him

all the time and were simply loosened by the rum. Easy to know now, he was a man tormented by jealousy of my mother, by envy of her class, her family, things he lashed out at when he drank.

But then, when I was four years old, five, six, I didn’t understand his anger, didn’t understand how he could be the same man who held me lightly, comforting me when I had nightmares, who took me to the circus and bought me popcorn, who taught me to ride a bicycle and ruffled my hair when he came home every night.

The first time he struck one of us was at dinner, a day like any other.Angeles was so small, so shy then. She longed for his attention. Tugged at his pants wanting a kiss, and when he spoke down to her, she looked up at him smiling, adoringly. That day, she and I were seated at the dining table as usual, my parents on either end. Ange- les was not eating.

She is so thin, my mother complained, looking at him. Like hun- dreds of time before, she tried to force Angeles to eat, pushing a spoonful of rice into her mouth, but Angeles spit it out, sprayed it all over herself and the tablecloth. My mother tried again, her fingers pinching Angeles’s skinny arm, forcing another spoonful into her mouth. Shaking her head, Angeles started crying. My mother barely touched her own food, she ate so little herself, spearing the peas, pushing aside the rice, glancing at my father, those glances they had.

He screamed at my sister. Eat, eat! My sister cried louder.

He unbuckled his belt, a narrow black leather belt, and yanked it through the loops of his pants and laid it, doubled up, by his plate. The belt lay there like a twisted ribbon. My sister cried harder. I stopped eating. He clutched the buckle and wrapped the belt in his right fist and with his other hand he reached out to my sister and grabbed her by her wrist, his hand a clasp around a tiny bone. He lifted her off her chair in one quick movement and dragged her to our bedroom. I heard her cries, at first loud and then like muffled

whimpers, and the snapping sound of leather on flesh, a sound that became the single most frightening image in my nightmares. I held to the hem of the tablecloth, clutched it, trying not to cry, but cry- ing all the same.

Please stop him, I begged my mother.

His voice was a growl, louder with each stroke of the belt.

In this house you do as I say, in this house you do as I say, he repeated with each blow.

My mother did not stop him. She did not leave her chair, but a faraway, clouded look came over her as if she were not there at all.

I had expected her to stop him, to march into the bedroom and take his belt away from him, but she didn’t, not that time, not ever. This woman who had no fear, who spoke so fiercely to us, to her family, to her friends, who won arguments by sheer force of will, sat helpless, weak, afraid, and I saw that fear in her eyes, and I was terrified.

Many years later, on the day that would turn out to be the last time I saw her before her death, I reminded her of this. Why didn’t you stop him? I demanded an answer, I wanted an apology.Why had she not stopped him from hitting us, why had she not left him and taken us with her?

She was an old woman now, and she began to cry, defending her- self, and swore that she had no memory of any of it, none.

E

very morning my mother walked with me the two or three blocks to the Van Dyke Academy, a colonial-era Catholic con-

vent of gray stone spires and black iron gates. I was five, in first grade, a wisp with spindly legs and straight long hair tied back with a ribbon, a squint in my eyes, and already a furrowed brow. She left me at the gates, in the hands of nuns who wore those black habits and rimless thick spectacles that scare children. In my dark blue uniform

with a starched white collar, I carried my books in a canvas bag and sat in the back row, too timid to raise my hand even though I almost always knew the answers. I had a knack for absorbing everything I heard, and soon I was getting straight tens in all my subjects—geog- raphy, sociology, reading, arithmetic, languages—and my world became filled with books and far places.

School was the life outside my parents’ house. It was my world entirely.The first time I saw blood was there, when a boy in my class fell off a ledge in the courtyard and slashed his head, and I thought he was dead. The first time I had a crush was there, too, on a fair- haired boy my age and on his older sister, angelically blond and tall, who would come running to me, taking me in her arms, calling me her princess.

After school, after I did my homework, my mother let me go out to the apartment building’s courtyard. I put on my roller skates and swept around the patio. I was fearless on skates, could slide down the cement embankments at Chapultepec and jump over steps. On the smooth courtyard tiles, I rushed and twirled, forward and back- ward, and a girl who lived next door to our flat, a girl named Rebecca, who was the first real friend of my childhood, a dark- haired girl in a ponytail, held me tightly by the shoulders and danced with me like that.

On Sundays, almost every Sunday, my father took us to Chapul- tepec.The park was like a jungle and a country fair, and Angeles and I rode the donkeys and I roller-skated and climbed rope while my mother put my brother in the children’s swings, his fat little body convulsing with laughter. By the end of the afternoon, our faces were smeared with cotton candy, and my father, who didn’t leave our side, took us for one last ride on the carousel.

One Sunday, my father rented an old girl’s bicycle and lifted me to the seat. I was laughing, scared, but I wouldn’t let him see that. He

braced me with his arms, standing behind me, and suddenly he let me go free. The bike wove madly, and I screamed, laughing at the same time, and fell right on my side. He ran to me and lifted me again, straightened up the bike, and put me back on the seat. He didn’t give up. He let me go again, and I fell again, and again he picked me up. You’ve done fine, he said when I started crying.Try again. He got on the bike himself to show me how to control the handles, and he let me go, giving the bike a push. I didn’t fall again.

In our last year in Mexico, when he had a holiday from the uni- versity, we drove all the way to Acapulco, a two-day drive.

It was January, and the hotel was empty but for the five of us. Angeles and I ran wild up and down the empty terrace restaurant,

dancing to the band that played just for us.We had five days there, my mother keeping out of the sun under an umbrella, my father swim- ming against the current, his body flowing with the water. One day the three of us, my mother, my father, and I, were playing in the surf at Caleta, the roughest beach, jumping up and down with the waves, holding hands, when a big wave knocked us apart. My hand slipped from my father’s. Underwater, I saw my mother’s head scarf floating by, and I felt myself sinking. It seemed an eternity and the water felt heavy on me, pushing me down, but it had to have been only a mat- ter of seconds before my father’s hand grabbed my leg and lifted my body above the water, and I could breathe again.

Sometimes on those weekends, we spent a day in the canals of Xochimilco, in the pretty boats they had then, when the waters were clear and covered in petals and mariachis in their big hats and black garb, carrying violins and guitars, came by to sing, and peasant women in loose dresses of peacock colors made tortillas by hand, pounding and kneading the corn flour, twisting and stretching the dough, clapping it hard between their palms until the dough was round and wafer-thin. Afternoons passed by in the water, with music