When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [60]
Once he found us living afloat the black lagoon, Papi wooed Mami back, and we moved to one of Santurce’s busiest avenues. The building had once been a private house, but the new owner had divided it in half to make a two-room apartment in the back and a bar facing the street. He had placed a jukebox in one corner of the front room and a tall formica counter along the side wall. A pool table, lit from above by a single yellow bulb, seemed to float over the sticky tile floor between the music and the liquor.
“You are never to go into the bar,” Mami told us on our first day, “and don’t ever talk to anyone going in or out of there. When you go to school, follow the route we’ve walked, and don’t stop anywhere in between.”
My new school was a few blocks down the congested avenue, through a gate into a cracked cement yard ringed with hurricane fencing. I walked to and from school alone, unable to befriend the sassy girls with budding figures or the boys who leaned against fences and lampposts to hiss and leer.
“If a boy says something to you,” Mami warned, “just ignore him. He’ll find someone else to bother.” But boys paid no attention to my scrawny legs and flat torso. If they took notice of me at all, it was to comment on how fast I walked.
“What are you running away from?” they’d call out as I whizzed past, books tight against my chest, eyes focused on the spot in front of my feet.
At home we grouped into a tight knot, two adults and seven children inside two rooms. The wall dividing our side of the house from the bar was made from shiny sheets of fake wood panelling, but the rest of the walls were rough, splintery boards painted pale green. The front room was just big enough for a table and two chairs, and Hector and Raymond’s fold-out cot. The girls’ beds were along the walls of the back room. Mami and Papi’s bed was against the panelled wall, a curtain separating it from our side of the room.
Our nights were punctuated by the deafening percussion of drunken ballads, clashing billiards, clinking glasses, and nightly brawls.
“I can’t sleep, Mami,” one of us would complain, and Mami would find cotton to stuff our ears.
“Try this,” she said, knowing it wouldn’t help. Nothing helped. Over the din, we heard men laughing, yelling obscenities.
“You are not to repeat those bad words, or you’ll get a mouth full of hot peppers,” she’d scold.
Sometimes a woman’s voice broke through, and then the men shouted louder, glass shattered violently, and the songs on the jukebox went from boleros about betrayal to guarachas and merengues about the good life.
“Those are not good women. Decent women don’t go into such places,” Mami explained, a scared look on her face.
We slept with windows and doors bolted. At night, the bar’s customers, in search of a bathroom, found their way to the rear of the building, where they peed against our walls or retched under the tree. Mornings, on our way to school, we hopped over curdled puddles of vomit and fetid urine stains on the dirt.
“At least,” Mami said, “we have electricity and running water. We didn’t have that in Macún.”
Raymond’s foot was still raw and blistered from his accident almost a year earlier. Sometimes, with no warning, he’d develop a high fever, and pus formed in angry bubbles along the scars left by many operations. Mami would rush him to a clinic, where the wound was once again scraped and dressed in bandages. After many such visits the doctors finally told her that it might be best if Raymond’s foot were amputated.
“Are they crazy?” Mami complained to Papi that night.
“They can’t figure out how to cure him, so they just give up.”
“They know what they’re doing, Monin.”
“Whose side are you on, anyway?” She scooped Raymond onto her lap, with effort because he was already five years old, tall and gangly. “Just because everyone has given up on him doesn’t mean I’m going to.” She cradled him and rocked him back and forth until even I could feel her warmth, her yielding softness.