When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [13]
We shared a bathroom with another family. It was a square cement building with a shower at one end and a hole on the floor so the water could drain into the open sewer. During the day, the bathroom was our playhouse, until the men came home from work and reclaimed it, filling the air with the humid scent of Palmolive soap.
I’d been taken out of first grade in the middle of the week during my first semester and, within a day, was in school in Santurce. My new school, made of concrete blocks, was much larger than the one in Macún and had a playground with swings, a slide, and a metal seesaw that was usually too hot to sit on, because the sun fell on it all day long.
“The city is different,” Mami told us on our first day. “There are many mischievous people, so you have to be careful where you go and who you talk to.” When I walked to school, Mami instructed, I was not to look at or talk to anyone all the way there and back. But there were too many things to see in Santurce. I learned to walk down those rich streets, eyes humbly cast down, with no sense of what lay ten feet in front of me, but with an exquisite awareness of what was on either side.
The way to school took me over muddy sidewalks strewn with garbage, across narrow streets teeming with traffic, people, and stray dogs, and past bars with open doorways and loud jukeboxes that always played boleros about liquor and women. A stand offered for sale fruits and vegetables that in Macún I’d been able to pick off the trees. Bright dresses and guayaberas in front of a dry-goods store swayed in the breeze like ghosts in daylight. An austere Evangelical church rose next to a botánica where one could buy plaster saints, African idols, herbs, candles, potions for finding love and driving away unwanted influences, and protections against the evil eye and ailments of mind or body. In between the buildings, hiding in the shadows of alleys leading to the barrios, there were stands for passion-fruit juice and pineapple ices. Carts carried coconut candy, sticks of sugarcane, molasses toffee, and dried papaya slices. And on every corner there were piraguas in white paper cones, gleaming pyramids of ice into which the piragüero dripped bright-colored syrup.
I was fascinated by the dark doorways of private homes crushed between shops and restaurants. They were barred with ornate wrought iron fences and gates, and inside, women in flowered shifts dusted plastic covered furniture or sat on shaded balconies looking out over the commotion below.
Sometimes, if I walked fast, I caught a glimpse of the Catholic schoolchildren lined up in twos, being led into the chapel by black-clad nuns whose faces were milky white and waxy. The students wore navy blue uniforms with pale blue shirts, navy knee socks, and blue loafers. Their hair was neatly combed, and they looked cleaner than anyone I’d ever seen. I envied them the order of their lives, the precision with which they marched with no prodding and no harsh glances, the mysterious black figures beside them like veiled anchors. I wondered what their lives were like, how many sisters and brothers they had, if they slept in their own beds or had to share, if they ate rice and beans and salted codfish with onions. I knew they were different, or rather, I was different. Already I’d been singled out in school for my wildness, my loud voice,.and large gestures better suited to the expansive countryside but out of place in concrete rooms where every sound was magnified and bounced off walls for a long time after I’d finished speaking.
“What a jíbara,” children jeered when I recited a poem in the dialect of Doña Lola.
“What a jíbara,” when I didn’t know how to use the pencil sharpener screwed to the wall of the schoolroom.
“What a jíbara,” when Christmas came around and I’d never heard of Santa Claus.
“What a jíbara ... What a jíbara ... What a jíbara.”
In Santurce I had become what I wasn’t in Macún. In Santurce a jíbara was something no one wanted to be. I walked to and from school beside myself, watching the jíbara girl with