When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [7]
Papi brushed his leather shoes and stuffed them inside a plaid zippered duffel bag. He put on canvas loafers that had once been white but had yellowed with the dirt of the road. He unhooked his straw hat from the nail by the door and left without kissing us good-bye.
I went looking for Mami behind the house. She sat on a stump under the breadfruit tree, her back to me. Her shoulders bobbed up and down, and she whimpered quietly, every so often wiping her face with the edge of Hector’s baby blanket. I walked to her, tears stinging the rims of my eyes. She turned around with an angry face.
“Leave me alone! Get away from me.”
I froze. She seemed so far away, yet I sensed the heat from her body, smelled the rosemary oil she rubbed on her hair. I didn’t want to leave her but was afraid to come closer, so I leaned against a mango tree and stared at my toes against the moriviví weed. Every so often she looked over her shoulder, and I turned my eyes to the front yard, where Delsa and Norma chased one another, a cloud of dust painting their legs up to their droopy panties.
“Here,” Mami stood over me, holding a drowsy Hector, “put him to bed while I heat you kids some lunch.”
Her face was swollen, her lashes clumped into spikes. I slung Hector over my shoulder, his baby body yielding onto mine. Mami raked her fingers through my hair with a sad smile then walked away, the hem of her dress swinging in rhythm to her rounded hips.
Papi didn’t come home for days. Then one night he appeared, kissed us hello, put on his work clothes, and began hammering on the walls. When he’d finished, he washed his hands and face at the barrel near the back door, sat at the table, and waited for Mami to serve him supper. She banged a plateful of rice and beans in front of him, a fork, a glass of water. He didn’t look at her; she didn’t look at him. While he ate, Mami told us to get ready for bed, and Delsa, Norma, and I scrambled into our hammocks. She nursed Hector and put him to sleep. Papi’s newspaper rustled, but I didn’t dare poke my head out.
I drifted into a dream in which I climbed a tall tree whose lower branches disappeared the moment I scaled the higher ones. The ground moved farther and farther away, and the top of the tree stretched into the clouds, which were pink. I woke up sweating, my arms stretched over my head and gripping the rope of my hammock. The quinqué’s flame threw orange shadows onto the curtain stretched across the room.
Mami and Papi lay in bed talking.
“You haven’t given me money for this week’s groceries.”
The bed creaked as Papi turned away from Mami. “I had to buy materials. And one of the men that works with me had an emergency. I gave him an advance.”
“An advance?!”
Mami had a way of making a statement with a question. From my hammock on the other side of the curtain I envisioned her face: eyes round, pupils large, her eyebrows arched to the hairline. Her lips would be half open, as if she’d been interrupted in the middle of an important word. When I saw this expression on her face and heard that tone of voice, I knew that whatever I’d said was so far from the truth, there was no use trying to argue with her. Even if what I said was true, that tone of voice told me she didn’t believe me, and I’d better come up with a more convincing story. Papi either couldn’t think of another story or was too tired to try, because he didn’t say anything. I could have told him that was a mistake.
“You gave him an advance?! An advance??”
Her voice had gone from its “I don’t believe you” tone to its “How dare you lie to me” sound.
“Monin,” the bed creaked as Papi turned to her. “Can we talk about this in the morning? I need to sleep.”
His voice was calm. When Mami was angry, she argued in a loud voice that reached higher pitches the more nervous she became. When Papi argued, he put all his energy into holding himself erect, maintaining a steady calm that was chilling to us children but had the opposite effect on Mami.
“No, we can’t talk about this in the morning. You leave before the