When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [75]
The plantains are ripe, fried until just right.
The coffee steams hot like Vesuvius.
The milk pasteurized, sugar del país,
So you know it’s sweet.
Come see for yourself.
Give your mouth a treat.
The business didn’t last very long. The truck was expensive to maintain, bandits tried to mug him a few times, and he didn’t have the heart to say no to men who bought on credit then never paid him back. The truck was returned to wherever it had come from, and Papi went back to his work fixing other people’s houses.
Love made people do crazy things. Husbands shot wives in fits of passion then turned the gun on themselves and splattered their brains all over the walls. The newspapers printed photographs of dismembered bodies, bloody sheets, rooms in which all the furniture had been upended and strewn as if by a hurricane: SCENE OF THE CRIME, the headlines read.
On the radio, love was different. Men with rich voices, who were always tall and dark, won the hearts of young women who were always petite and innocent. Even if poor, the men were decent, worthy of respect, accomplished in the manly arts of riding and pistol shooting, but not reckless with either animals or firearms. The women suffered. Frequently they were orphaned, brought up by nuns or stepmothers who made them do all the housework. In spite of this, they were cheerful and optimistic, never doubting that if they were pure of heart, life would eventually get better.
I rushed home from school every day to sit by the radio for hours listening to the romantic tales of women with names like Mariana and Sofia, and men such as Armando and Ricardo. The more convoluted the story lines, the more I liked them, and I imagined that all the long-suffering heroines looked like me, or rather, that I looked like them. At night I played out the fantasies, seeing myself race across a flower-strewn field, hair blowing wild, arms outstretched toward the waiting arms of a tall, dark Armando or Ricardo who kissed me passionately in a frenzy of violins. I always fell asleep just as Armando or Ricardo touched my lips, and mornings, I woke to the same embrace, and a warm feeling between my legs that I savored until it faded like morning mist.
According to the soap operas, someday I would fall in love at first sight, but my love and I would suffer before we could be happy. There would be illnesses, from which I would recover just at the point of death. There would be evil women who would lie, cheat, and try to maim me just to get their claws into my sweetheart. There would be wars and earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, epidemics, which I would survive by nursing those less fortunate, only to discover my beloved among the dying and revive him with the power of my brown eyes. All this I dreamed during those restless nights in my own room.
At the same time, Mami and Papi battled each other, intruding into my fantasies with their real-life love-hate relationship. Even though they’d lived together for fourteen years, they weren’t married, but it hadn’t been an issue in our lives until Mami returned from New York. All of a sudden, it seemed important to her that she and Papi be legal. They fought about it constantly. One minute they were just like any other couple, doing things together, playing with us kids, boasting about our virtues to the neighbors. The next they called each other names, spewed out ugly lists of offenses on both sides, with the recurrent theme of Mami’s uncertain status as a common-law wife.
I disappeared into my room the minute the air tensed and wrapped myself in a thin sheet that didn’t silence their insults but made me invisible to the hate that clouded their eyes. I called up the images of Armando or Ricardo, and with Papi and Mami’s shrill fights as background, I imagined a man and woman touching one another gently, discovering beauty in a stubbled cheek or a curl of hair, whispering adoring words into each other’s ear, warming one another’s bodies with love.
Johannes Vélez noticed me, even though Maritza Ortiz said