When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [84]
Finally, a swarthy man with thick black hair and a flat cap on his head stopped, got out of his taxi, and helped us load our stuff. He didn’t speak Spanish, none of us spoke English, and, it appeared, neither did he. But he gave us a toothy, happy smile, lifted Raymond into Mami’s lap, made sure our fingers and toes were inside the taxi before he closed the doors, then got in with a great deal of huffing and puffing, as his belly didn’t fit between the seat and the steering wheel. Tata and Don Julio sat in the front seat with the driver, who kept asking questions no one understood.
“He wants to know where we’re from,” Mami figured out, and we told him.
“Ah, Porto Reeco, yes, ees hot,” he said. “San Juan?”
“Yes, ” Mami said, the first time I’d ever heard her speak English.
The driver launched into a long speech peppered with familiar words like America and President Kennedy. Mami, Tata, and Don Julio nodded every once in a while, uh-huhed, and laughed whenever the taxi driver did. I wasn’t sure whether he had no idea that we didn’t understand him, or whether he didn’t care.
Rain had slicked the streets into shiny, reflective tunnels lined with skyscrapers whose tops disappeared into the mist. Lampposts shed uneven silver circles of light whose edges faded to gray. An empty trash can chained to a parking meter banged and rolled from side to side, and its lid, also chained, flipped and flapped in the wind like a kite on a short string. The taxi stopped at a red light under an overpass. A train roared by above us, its tiny square windows full of shapes.
“Look at her,” Tata laughed from the front seat, “Negi’s eyes are popping out of her head.”
“That’s because the streets are not paved with gold, like she thought,” Mami teased.
The taxi driver grinned. I pressed my face to the window, which was fogged all around except on the spot I’d rubbed so that I could look out.
It was late. Few windows on the tall buildings flanking us were lit. The stores were shuttered, blocked with crisscrossed grates knotted with chains and enormous padlocks. Empty buses glowed from within with eerie gray light, chugging slowly from one stop to the next, their drivers sleepy and bored.
Mami was wrong. I didn’t expect the streets of New York to be paved with gold, but I did expect them to be bright and cheerful, clean, lively. Instead, they were dark and forbidding, empty, hard.
We stopped in front of a brick building. Here, too, battered trash cans were chained to a black lamppost, only these were filled with garbage, some of which had spilled out and lay scattered in puddles of pulpy hash. The door to the building was painted black, and there was a hole where the knob should have been.
Mami had to wake up Edna and Raymond. Tata picked one up, and Mami the other. Don Julio helped the taxi driver get our stuff.
“This way,” Tata said.
We entered a hallway where a bare dim bulb shed faint blue light against green walls. Tata led us past many doors to the other end of the hall, where she pushed against another black door and led us into a cobblestoned courtyard with a tree in front of another, smaller building.
“Watch the puddles,” Tata said, too late. Cold water seeped into my right shoe, soaking my white cotton socks. We went in another door without a knob, into a smaller hallway with steps leading up to a landing.
Tata pushed the first door on our left with her foot. We entered a small room with a window giving onto the courtyard. As we came in, a tall man got up from a cot near the window and weaved toward us. His long hair was