When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [55]
Mami talked to Doña Andrea. She smiled and nodded her head and smiled again. When Doña Andrea handed her a pot full of chickpeas with pig’s feet, Mami didn’t want to accept it.
“Come on,” Doña Andrea said, “I cooked them for you. You don’t have the time to make them after work.”
“All right, but only if you let me make you some arroz con dulce one of these days.”
“Don’t worry about it. Enjoy it.” And she pressed the pot into Mami’s hands.
Chickpeas with pig’s feet and white rice was one of my favorite dishes. Mami put pumpkin in the chickpeas, and I munched into it, expecting it to be hard and chewy but discovered that it melted in my mouth. I gnawed on the meat around the pig’s feet and sucked the bones until the salty, slippery membrane slid out and swished around my tongue. As we ate, we threw the bones out the window, plink, into the water.
At dusk I could see the remains of other people’s suppers floating by the window, chicken and pork chop bones, lettuce leaves, breadcrumbs, sometimes noodles. On Fridays people ate fish or vegetables with no meat because of God.
When we first came to El Mangle, I wouldn’t drink, and I didn’t take a bath because I thought the water came from the lagoon. But one day Mami took me by the hand.
“Come,” she said. “See this pipe connected to our faucet? Watch. It stretches all the way down and turns here, under the pier. It never touches the water.” We walked to where our pier joined the dock with many other piers and curved bridges attached to it. Each pier had one or two houses at the end, their pilings thick and tall above the black water. “Do you still see the pipes?” They were sturdily attached by metal collars to the splintery boards of the dock. “Now we follow them down this way.” We followed the dock toward the shore, where the pipes, now joined by many others, disappeared under the cement sidewalks leading to San Juan. After that, I didn’t mind the water.
“At least,” Mami said, “we don’t have to walk for miles with pails full of water on our heads.”
Some evenings, Mami let me sit on Don Pedro’s boat, which was tied to a piling between our house and Doña Andrea’s. At first I was afraid of falling in the lagoon, but Don Pedro showed me that the boat was safe, as long as I didn’t move around in it too much. I pushed it along the dock until it floated behind the houses and there was nothing in front of me but black water, and in the distance, mountains. Smoke curled up from the shore on the other side of the lagoon. Gulls circled, dove down, then flew up again. The sun floated over the mountains, stained the blue sky red-orange, and flattened the lagoon until it looked like a mirror for the stars. The mountains became shadows as the sun dove behind them, and the lagoon shimmered silver and white. It was so still and quiet that I could hear the water swish against the sides of the boat and the pilings that held up El Mangle. I remembered all the times Papi and I sat on our steps, watching the sun go down. My throat felt tight and my eyes stung with tears. If I came back looking like I’d been crying, Mami would worry, and if I told her why, she’d be angry. It was better just to swallow the tightness in my throat and rub the hurt away. That way no one would ever know.
One day, Mami said I had been asked to do something very, very special. Not everyone could do it, and she wanted to know if I wanted to.
“What is it?”
Mami sat across from me. “Doña Cony had something sad happen. Her baby, her youngest son, died yesterday.”
“Oh.”
“Isn’t that sad?”
“Yes. It’s very sad. She must be really sad.”
“She is. Especially because when the baby died, his eyes didn’t close.”
“How come?”
“No one knows. But he can’t be buried like that.”
“Why not?”
“He just can’t.”
“What difference does it make, if he’s dead?