When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [29]
“They don’t look like eggs.”
Ignacio Sepúlveda poked his tray into my ribs. “You’re holding up the line!”
“They’re huevos Americanos,” said the next server, whose job it was to spear two brown sausages with a fork and slip them onto the plate. “They’re powdered, so all we do is add water and fry them.” She arranged my sausages to flank the eggs. “And here are some salchichas Americanas, so you can put some meat on those bones.” She laughed, and I gave her a dirty look. That only made her laugh harder.
The next server slapped margarine on two bread squares, which he laid like a pyramid over the eggs. Next, a girl not much older than the kids behind us poured canned juice into a bottom-heavy glass, which she put on our trays so carelessly it splashed out and made watery orange puddles that ran to the corners of our trays.
We sat on long benches attached to plastic tables, Juanita and I across from one another.
“This is great!” she chirruped in her reedy voice, lips wet with anticipation. Her black eyes took in the colors of our American breakfast: maroon tray, blue plate, yellow eggs, brown sausages, milky white bread with a thin beige crust, the hueless shimmer of margarine, orange juice, pastel green paper napkin, silvery spoon. “Wow!” she oohed again.
I rearranged the food so that none of it touched and dipped my spoon into the gelatinous hill, which was firmer than I expected. It was warm and gave off that peculiar odor I’d smelled coming in. It tasted like the cardboard covers of our primers, salty, dry, fibrous, but not as satisfyingly chewy. If these were once eggs, it had been a long time since they’d been inside a hen. I nicked the tip of the sausage with the spoon and tongued it around before crushing it between my teeth. Its grease-bathed pepperiness had a strong bitter aftertaste like anise, but not sweet. The bread formed moist balls inside my mouth, no matter how much I chewed it. The juice might have had oranges in it once, but only a faint citrus smell remained.
I was glad the food wasn’t tasty and played it around the blue plate, creating yellow mountains through which shimmering rivers of grease flowed, their edges green, the rolled up balls of white bread perfect stones along strips of brown earth studded with tiny black flecks, ants perhaps, or, better yet, microscopic people.
Are ju slippin? Are ju slippin?
Bruder John, Bruder John.
Mornin bel sar rin ging.
Mornin bel sar rin ging.
Deen deen don. Deen deen don.
Miss Jiménez liked to teach us English through song, and we learned all our songs phonetically, having no idea of what the words meant. She tried to teach us “America the Beautiful” but had to give up when we stumbled on “for spacious skies” (4 espé chosk ;Ay!) and “amber waves of grain” (am burr gueys oh gren).
At the same time she taught us the Puerto Rican national anthem, which said Borinquén was the daughter of the ocean and the sun. I liked thinking of our island as a woman whose body was a garden of flowers, whose feet were caressed by waves, a land whose sky was never cloudy. I especially liked the part when Christopher Columbus lands on her shores and sighs: “¡Ay! This is the beautiful land I’ve been searching for!”
But my favorite patriotic song was “En mi viejo San Juan,” in which a poet says good-bye to Old San Juan and calls Puerto Rico a “sea goddess, queen of the coconut groves.”
“Papi ...” He was on his knees, smoothing the cement floor of the new kitchen he was attaching to the house.
“Si....” He put his trowel down and squeezed his waist as he stretched his back. I squatted against the wall near him.
“Where was Noel Estrada going when he was saying goodbye to Old San Juan?”
Papi reached over and turned the radio down. “I think he was sailing from San Juan Harbor to New York.”
“It’s such a sad song, don’t you think?”
“At the end he says he’ll come back someday.”
“Did he?”
“The last verse says he’s old and hasn’t been able to return.”
“That makes it even sadder.”
“Why?”
“Because he says he’s coming back to be happy. Doesn’t