When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [21]
“Someone is coming to take your lap, freckles,” Doña Lola cuddled Alicia. We sat in her kitchen, sipping coffee from blue enamel tin cups. Mami had told me to take the baby when I brought a bag of pigeon peas to Doña Lola, who would give us coffee in return. She grew it in the crags that rose behind her kitchen, up the hill from the latrine. I had helped her pick the red, swollen fruit, and she had roasted them in a giant frying pan on her fogón then laid the blackened beans out to cool before storing them in an odd assortment of cans and jars.
“Papi said by the time the new baby is born we will have electricity.”
“Ah, yes,” Doña Lola sighed, “electricity. Pretty soon they’ll bring water, too, and then they’ll pave the road and bring cars, buses maybe. Ah, yes.”
“Buses, Doña Lola?”
“Trucks and buses. And then the Americanos will come looking for artesanías.” She spit into the yard and chuckled as if remembering a private joke. “Those Americanos are really something....”
“Do you know any?”
“Oh, I’ve known a few. Yes. A few. You know, it’s an Americano that owns the finca back there.”
“Lalao’s finca?”
“Bah! A otro perro con ese hueso. That finca doesn’t belong to Lalao. That man doesn’t own the hole to lay his corpse in.”
“But everyone says ...”
“Del dicho al hecho hay un gran trecho.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means there’s a long way between what people say and what is. That finca belongs to Rockefela.”
“Who’s he?”
“An Americano from the Nueva Yores. He’s going to build a hotel back there.” The finca stretched across the road to the horizon, the tall grass broken now and then by groves of lemon, orange, and grapefruit trees, herds of cattle, and, in the distance, a line of coconut palms.
“What will they do with all those cows?”
Doña Lola guffawed. “You’re worried about the cows? What about us?”
“Well, we don’t live on the finca ...”
“Do you think they will let us stay here if they build a hotel?”
“Why not?”
“Yo conozco al buey que fajayala víbora que pica.” She swallowed the last drop of coffee and got up from her stool brusquely, startling Alicia, who reached her arms out to me and clung to my neck the minute she was close enough.
I loved Doña Lola’s refranes, the sayings she came up with in conversation that were sometimes as mysterious as the things Papi kept in his special dresser. “I know the bull that charges and the serpent that stings” could only mean that she distrusted Americans, and that this mistrust had come from experience.
But in the time I’d lived in Macún I’d never seen an American, nor had I ever heard mention of a Rockefela, nor plans for a hotel in what everyone called Lalao’s finca.
When I came home, Alicia on my hip, a can of freshly roasted coffee in my hand, Mami was peeling ñame and yautía tubers for that night’s supper.
“Mami, is it true that they’re going to build a hotel on Lalao’s finca?”
“That will be the day!”
“Doña Lola said they’ll make us all move.”
“They’ve been talking about bringing electricity here since before you were born. And the rumor about a hotel in Lalao’s finca is older than the hopes of the poor. Your granddaughters will be señorita before anything like that happens around here.”
I was relieved we wouldn’t have to move and helped Mami peel the sweet potatoes.
“Where are los Nueva Yores?” I asked later as I tore the fish bones out of the soaking salted codfish.
“That’s where Tata lives.” Tata was my mother’s mother, who had left Puerto Rico while I was still a toddler. Every so often Mami received a letter from her with a money order, or a package with the clothes my cousins in the United States had outgrown. “It’s really called Nueva Yor, but it’s so big and spread out people sometimes call it los Nueva Yores.”
“Have you ever been there?”
“No, I haven’t.... Maybe someday ... ,” she mused as she set a pot of water to boil on the fire. “Maybe.”
“¡Ay! Ay Dios Mío Santo, ayúdame. ¡Ay!” Mami was having another baby.