When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [4]
On the radio, the newscaster talked about submarines, torpedoes, and a place called Korea, where Puerto Rican men went to die. His voice faded as Papi carried him into the house just as Delsa and Norma came out for their oatmeal.
Delsa’s black curly hair framed a heart-shaped face with tiny pouty lips and round eyes thick with lashes. Mami called her Muñequita, Little Doll. Norma’s hair was the color of clay, her yellow eyes slanted at the corners, and her skin glowed the same color as the inside of a yam. Mami called her La Colorá, the red girl. I thought I had no nickname until she told me my name wasn’t Negi but Esmeralda.
“You’re named after your father’s sister, who is also your godmother. You know her as Titi Merín.”
“Why does everyone call me Negi?”
“Because when you were little you were so black, my mother said you were a negrita. And we all called you Negrita, and it got shortened to Negi.”
Delsa was darker than I was, nutty brown, but not as sun ripened as Papi. Norma was lighter, rust colored, and not as pale as Mami, whose skin was pink. Norma’s yellow eyes with black pupils looked like sunflowers. Delsa had black eyes. I’d never seen my eyes, because the only mirror in the house was hung up too high for me to reach. I touched my hair, which was not curly like Delsa’s, nor pasita, raisined, like Papi’s. Mami cut it short whenever it grew into my eyes, but I’d seen dark brown wisps by my cheeks and near my temples.
“So Negi means I’m black?”
“It’s a sweet name because we love you, Negrita.” She hugged and kissed me.
“Does anyone call Titi Merin Esmeralda?”
“Oh, sure. People who don’t know her well—the government, her boss. We all have our official names, and then our nicknames, which are like secrets that only the people who love us use.”
“How come you don’t have a nickname?”
“I do. Everyone calls me Monin. That’s my nickname.”
“What’s your real name?”
“Ramona.”
“Papi doesn’t have a nickname.”
“Yes he does. Some people call him Pablito.”
It seemed too complicated, as if each one of us were really two people, one who was loved and the official one who, I assumed, was not.
The day he was to put in the new floor, Papi dragged our belongings out to the yard. Mami’s sewing machine, the bed, her rocking chair, the small dresser where Papi kept his special things, baked in the sun, their worn surfaces scarred, their joints loose and creaky. A stack of new floorboards was suspended between cinder blocks near the door. Mami asked me and Delsa to find small stones to plug the holes in the dirt inside the house, so that snakes and scorpions wouldn’t get out and bite us.
“Let’s go see if the hen laid more eggs!” Delsa whispered.
We sneaked around the house to the path behind the latrine. On the way we picked up a few pebbles, just in case Mami asked what we were doing. A brown hen sat on the nest, her wings fluffed around the eggs. As we came near, she clucked softly.
“We’d better not come too close, or she’ll beak us,” I whispered.
The hen watched us, cackling nervously, and when we walked around the bush, her beady eyes followed us.
“If we keep walking around her,” Delsa said, “we’ll make her dizzy.”
We circled the bush. The hen turned her head all the way around, as if her neck were not attached to her body. Delsa looked at me with a wicked grin, and without a word, we looped around the bush again then switched and went in the opposite direction. Possessive of her eggs, the hen kept her eyes fixed on us, no matter how fast we moved. We broke into a run. Her scared twitterings rose in pitch and had a human quality, like Mami’s words when she swore we were driving her crazy. The hen’s reproachful eyes followed us as we ran around the bush, her body aflutter, her head whirling on her body until it seemed that she would screw herself into the