When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [81]
I crouched against the wall and watched them injure each other without touching each other, hurling words that had the same effect as acid on metal. Each word diminished them, flattened them against the night until they were puppets, pointing fingers in each other’s faces. Their voices extinguished night sounds, and darkness swallowed everything but these two people I loved, the overhead light a dim spotlight that disfigured their features into grimaces. One by one Delsa, Norma, Hector, Alicia, Edna, and Raymond came out on the porch, their eyes round as guavas, tears glistening the tips of their lashes. In their passion Mami and Papi had forgotten about us. They were real only to one another. We huddled in a corner, afraid that if we left them, they might eat each other.
August marked the beginning of hurricane season. Thunder and lightning broke overhead, while in our house, a dreadful calm settled like clear water in a tainted pool. Mami prepared for our trip with the steady resolve of someone who never looks back. She bought suitcases and filled them with our good clothes, allowing us to wear only the faded dresses and shirts that we would leave behind like butterflies a cocoon. Edna, Raymond, and I were to go with her. Delsa, Norma, Hector, and Alicia would stay with Papi until Mami could save enough money for their airfare.
“Does this mean you’re divorcing Papi?” I asked.
“We were never married,” she answered. “We can’t get divorced.”
“Why doesn’t he marry you?”
“He says he doesn’t love me anymore.”
“Do you love him?”
“It doesn’t matter....”
She was a stone packed inside a shell that wouldn’t crack. Papi was numb, detached even from himself, his voice flat, his step so light it was difficult to know he was there at all. We tiptoed around them and saved our voices for play far from the house, where even our laughter was received by Mami and Papi with a stare, a quizzical look, a warning glance.
“Your father is a good man,” Mami told me. “Don’t you ever think otherwise.”
It didn’t seem possible that he was a good man when he wasn’t fighting for her or for us. He was letting us go to New York as if it no longer mattered where we were, as if the many leavings and reconciliations had exhausted him, had burned out whatever spark had made him search for us in swamps and fetid lagoons.
“No, I’ll never go there,” he said when I asked, and a wound opened in my heart that I was certain would never heal. He brought me magazines with pictures of Fabian and Bobby Rydell and encouraged me to accept what was coming with no questions, no backward glances. As if these teenage idols could ever take the place he was so willingly giving up. I tacked the pinup photos on my wall next to Don Luis Lloréns Torres, whose poems had inspired me to love my country, its jíbaros, and the wild natural beauty that could be found even in the foul air of El Mangle.
When the day finally came, he drove us to the airport, the radio tuned to the American radio station, where Brenda Lee sang her regrets. He hummed along with her, his eyes focused on the road, the rest of us silent as fog. At the airport he unloaded our bags, helped us verify our tickets. I kept expecting him to change his mind, to get down on his knees and beg Mami not to leave. But he didn’t. When it was time to go, he kissed us good-bye, held us for a long time. I grasped his neck and pressed myself against his chest, smelled the minty fragrance of his aftershave, tickled my fingers through his kinky hair. Behind him Mami gathered Edna and Raymond, her eyes focused on the door to the tarmac, her mouth set in a solid line. I didn’t want to give up either one of them. But it felt as if I were losing them both. Papi pushed me away, kissed both of my cheeks, and brushed the hair from my eyes.
“Write to me,” he said. “Don’t forget.”
Edna, Raymond, and I followed Mami outside the terminal, down the strip to the waiting plane, gray and cold in the dusk. I looked behind me at Papi, his face inscrutable, at Delsa, Norma,