When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [46]
I stared at him writhing, his tongue flicking in and out of his mouth, foamy spit at the corners, his eyes rolling in his head, his hands moving faster and faster. “Men are such pigs!” The words flashed into my head like the headline on a newspaper, only I heard it too, in the voices of Mami and Doña Lola, Gloria and Doña Ana, Abuela, bolero singers, radio soap opera actresses, and my own shrill scream into Tato’s face.
“¡Cochino!” Pig! His eyes popped open, and his mouth dropped into a grimace that became a lewd, ugly, humiliating smile. He tried to grab between my legs, and, enraged, I drew back my foot and kicked as hard as I could so that it seemed that I lifted him on my shin before he crumpled to the ground, hands between his legs, no longer rubbing but holding fast to what I was afraid had come loose.
Mami and Doña Lola came running. Between sobs, Tato told them I had kicked him for no reason at all, and Mami dragged me home, her fingers pinching my bony arm.
I screamed, trying to explain what Tato had tried to do. But Mami wouldn’t listen. I pulled loose and ran, and she chased me into our yard and through the house. On the way out the kitchen door, she grabbed a frying pan and thwacked my head. She tied my wrists together in one of her strong hands, and beat me, again and again, raising welts on my arms, my back, the back of my head, my forehead, behind my ear. My sisters and brothers came out from wherever they’d been playing, even Raymond who had just learned to walk, and they watched as Mami lifted the pan over her head and let it fall on the ball I had become, hanging from her hand like an unripe fruit on an unbending tree.
“Don’t you ever, ever do that again,” she growled, and I wasn’t sure if she meant kicking a boy between his legs or letting him see my private parts. Because it seemed to me she knew what Tato and I did behind the latrine while she and Doña Lola talked about their lives. She knew, and she was waiting for me to do something worse than what I could imagine so that she could do something far worse than what I would expect. I let my body go limp to take her abuse, and part of me left my body and stood beside my sisters and brothers, their eyes round, tear filled, frightened, their fingers interlaced into each other’s, their skinny bodies jerking with every hit I took.
Gloria came back to live in a neat wood house in the middle of a coconut grove behind her mother’s property. Her marido was from a nearby barrio and worked for the electric company.
“Maybe now,” Mami joked, “we’ll get light back in Macún.”
As soon as Gloria returned, Mami unfolded her work clothes, washed her hair, and polished her shoes. But instead of Gloria coming to our house every morning, we now went to her shady house under the palms.
One day she handed me a small paper bag, tightly packed with something soft. “Throw this into the latrine, would you please?”
“What is it?”
“Nothing that concerns you.”
“Then why should I throw it out?”
“Are you this mouthy all the time or just with me?”
“All the time.”
“I figured. Take the thing out and I’ll tell you about it when you come back.”
I was tempted to open the bag and look inside, but she kept her eye on me as she changed Raymond’s diaper. When I looked down the hole of the latrine I noticed a couple of little bags like the one I held floating on the dark smelly waste at the bottom.
“Okay, I threw it out.” She put Raymond and Edna down for their afternoon siesta. The air was light, breezy, aromatic of guavas, which grew in tall bushes along the side of her house. “What was inside the bag?”
“A Kotex.”
“What’s that?”
She poured water into a bowl and salted it generously. “How old are you?”
“Ten.”
She grabbed two green plantains from a high shelf and brought them to the table. “And Doña Monin hasn’t told you about being a señorita?”
“She told me I should stop playing with boys because I’m almost señorita, and that I should keep my legs closed