When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [41]
“Take Raymond. Make sure no drafts get to him.”
The baby was thirty days old, and we had to be careful about infections, foul breezes, and the evil eye. Mami had strung a nugget of coral and an onyx bead on a safety pin and attached it to Raymond’s baby shirt at birth. It was the same charm she had used on all of us, kept in a little box among her thimbles and needles between babies, to be brought out and pinned to the tiny cotton shirts, supposedly for the first forty days and forty nights of our lives. She claimed she didn’t believe “any of that stuff,” but each time, the charm stayed on long after it was supposed to.
We trudged single file along the path connecting our yard with Doña Ana’s. Her sons had nailed plywood sheets to the windows and along the front of her house, so that the only way in was the back door leading to the latrine, barn, and pigsty. These structures had also been reinforced with plywood, and debarked tree limbs buttressed every wall. As we passed from the barn, we heard the muffled and frightened moo of the cow, the frantic squealing of pigs, and the rustle and cackle of hens and roosters.
Inside the house, every crack and chink had been plugged with rags to keep the wind out. Mattresses were stacked, bunches of green bananas hung from the rafters, the gash where the machete had cut dripped white sticky ooze onto the floor. The room was shadowy, lit with quinqués and fat candles, steamy with the fragrance of garlic and onions. Several old hens had been sacrificed and everyone contributed something to the communal meal that would be cooked on our kerosene stove, spiced with Doña Lola’s fresh oregano, and shared by the four families who would pass the hurricane in Doña Ana’s one-room cement house.
Papi and Mami brought in bundles of food, clothes, blankets, and baby diapers. Papi put his battery-operated radio on a shelf and kept it tuned the whole time the hurricane blew, even though all we heard was static. Although Doña Ana’s house was no bigger than ours, its sturdy concrete walls and roof made it safe and cozy. The warmth of the thirty or so people inside, the familiar aroma of spices and good cooking, and the hushed play of children was extraordinarily comforting, the way wakes were, or weddings or baptisms.
The men set up a domino table and took turns playing, the losers giving up their chairs to the ones waiting their turn. The women cut up chickens, peeled plantains, cubed potatoes, made sofrito, washed dishes, brewed coffee, and tended babies. The muchachas huddled in a giggly group between the plantains and the mattresses, while the muchachos crouched against the wall opposite, pretending to play cards. We kids played among ourselves or circulated among the various groups, observing the domino game, snatching boiled chicken hearts or livers, carrying mysterious messages from the older boys to the older girls.
Every so often a thump quieted everyone, and arguments erupted about which tree had fallen in which direction. The cows and pigs couldn’t be heard above the roar of the wind, the thunder, the crashing zinc sheets from less sturdy roofs, and the flying outhouses lifted in one piece by the wind and swept from one end of the barrio to the other.
After we had our asopao with plantain dumplings, we curled against one another on the mattresses and slept, lulled by the crackling radio inside and the steady gusts of the hurricane outside.
We heard the ominous quiet of the hurricane’s eye as it passed over us. Papi and Dima, Doña Ana’s son, pried the door open a crack. It was raining lightly, gray misty drops like steam. The men stepped outside one at a time, looked around, up to the sky, down to the soaked ground that turned into muddy pools wherever their feet had sunk. The women clustered