When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [67]
“No picking your nose. No sucking your thumb. No speaking unless spoken to.” She pulled up Delsa’s socks and buckled Alicia’s shoes. “No pushing or shoving each other. Say ‘with your permission’ and ‘muchas gracias’ and ‘you’re very welcome.’ ” She pulled up Hector’s pants and tucked in his shirt. “If you need to use the bathroom, aim so you don’t make a mess, and wash your hands afterwards.”
She didn’t really need to go through all the rules on behavior. They were engraved on our brains from constant repetition and the painful results of not following them to the letter. But Mami was not one to take chances with our natural high spirits and tendency to ignore what she told us the minute she turned her back.
“Doña Susana will be there watching you,” Mami warned, unnecessarily, since we expected another pair of eyes as stern and unforgiving as hers to watch our every move when she wasn’t around. “Now go along to church.”
The Iglesia San Juan Bautista de Paz y Misericordia was up the street from our house. It had once been a private home, but its owner went off to train as a minister, and when he came back he held services in his living room. Before long, the congregation had grown so large that he moved elsewhere and refurnished the house with rows of wooden pews and a tiled fountain in the place once occupied by the family’s television set.
“¡Ay, qué lindos!” Doña Susana exclaimed when we paraded into the churchyard. She tugged on the sleeve of a thin young woman. “Sister Dolores, these are the children I was telling you about.”
Sister Dolores led us to the rear of the house, where she segregated us by age into small groups led by bespectacled young men and well-scrubbed young women.
“You,” she said to me, “are old enough to sit with the congregation.” I joined the older children in the back of the church just as the service began.
In contrast to Abuela’s opulent church, this iglesia was plain, with nothing to divert attention from the service. The white walls were unadorned; the fountain looked like a tile bathtub. The preacher, Don Joaquin, was slight, with child-size hands, delicate shoulders, and a thin neck trapped inside the collar of a starched shirt.
“Sisters and Brothers,” he began in a voice so deep I looked around to see where it came from. But Don Joaquin stood alone in front of his congregation.
In less time than it took me to say the Lord’s Prayer, he had worked himself into a frenzy that sent the congregation to its feet, moaning their repentance and the ecstasy of redemption.
Don Joaquin called on sinners to cast off evil and come to Jesus. Men and women who until that day had been sedate citizens—a solemn storekeeper, the unsmiling man who delivered the mail, the stern school crossing guard, the methodical newspaper vendor—stood up in rapture, ran to the front of the room, knelt in front of Don Joaquin, grabbed for his hand, waved their arms about in jerky motions. Tears streamed down their cheeks, their voices charged with sobs, choked laughter, unfinished prayers, joyous gratitude. These proper folk, who had always maintained an appearance of peaceful reserve, now rolled in the aisles with abandon. Don Joaquín’s voice rose in timbre and pitch, until he seemed to disappear and only his words remained, reverberating against the cement walls, piercing the assembled into delirious convulsions and ecstatic trances.
Every hair on my body stood on end as I witnessed these transformations. A bristling sweat seeped into my clothes, dribbled behind my ears. I wanted to wail, to wave my arms in exuberance, to give myself up right then and there to the un-explainable force that overpowered the others in the room.
But my fear was too great, my conscience too precocious to allow me to relinquish control of my well-guarded soul. I was alone, isolated in a bubble of resistance, watching this surreal