When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [96]
“I saw an angel last night,” he told Mami.
“Don’t talk such nonsense,” Mami said, but she gave me a fearful look.
“It was dressed in white and floated inside a ball of light.”
“It was a nurse, probably.”
When we came home, Mami cried when she told Tata about Francisco’s vision.
A few days later he was released from the hospital to his parents’ house. The next day he was dead. Tata said they fed him peanuts, which killed him.
Mami cried for days. Tata took care of her, cooked special treats, and took Franky to bed with her so that Mami could rest.
Mami was in mourning for over a year, and for that whole time she kept white novena candles lit on her dresser, their flame throwing ghostly shapes on the ceiling, where we all could see them.
I had corresponded with Papi for the first few weeks after our arrival in Brooklyn. I described our apartments, la marketa, the Jewish people, the Italian girls, and the books I was reading. He wrote back with remembrances from Abuela and newspaper clippings. But when my sisters and brother came, they brought stories with them that he hadn’t included in his letters.
Papi, Delsa said, had married shortly after Mami left with me, Edna, and Raymond. He had scattered Delsa, Norma, Hector, and Alicia among relatives, hadn’t visited them regularly, and hadn’t seemed to care what happened to them. He had, in fact, seemed relieved to be rid of them so that he could start his new life, just as we were starting ours.
I asked Mami about this. She said that yes, Papi had another wife, and there was no chance we would ever live with him again. I wrote him a letter asking why he hadn’t told me, and I told him that from now on he was as good as dead to me. He wrote to Mami accusing her of turning his children against him. Mami yelled at me for lying to Papi about what she said about him. It was all mixed up. Mami blamed me. Papi blamed Mami. I blamed Papi. But none of us said we were sorry.
Still Mami insisted that we keep in touch with him.
“You must never forget your father,” she reminded us at Christmas, Father’s Day, and his birthday. “You’re his flesh and blood, and even if he has another family now, he still loves you.”
We didn’t believe her. Grudgingly, we sent him cards on special days, copied out our best compositions, stayed in touch, knowing it was all show. Because in Brooklyn, after Francisco’s death, Mami became, even more than before, both mother and father to us. We could count on her in a way we had never been able to count on Papi, Tata, or Francisco, who had made everyone happy for such a short time before dying and becoming a ghost that haunted us all for the rest of our lives.
Mornings, Mami left the house while it was still dark for the subway ride into Manhattan. She dressed “for work” in clothes that she changed out of the minute she came home, so that they wouldn’t get stained with oil, achiote, or tomato sauce. She began as a thread cutter, even though in Puerto Rico she had been a machine operator.
“Here you have to prove yourself all over again,” she said. She tried hard, which impressed her supervisors, and was moved up quickly to the stitching work she loved.
She bought a special pair of scissors for work. When she walked across the projects on her way home from the subway, she put them in her pocket and held them tight until she was safely inside the house. She then wiped the sweat off them and put them in a special quilted case she had made.
We joked about her handbag, which we worried was an inducement for muggers, since it was big and bulging. In it she carried our birth certificates, immunization records, and school papers. She also kept a small notebook in which she wrote the hours she worked, so that el bosso wouldn’t cheat her on payday. She kept her makeup (pressed powder, eyebrow pencil, rouge, and lipstick)