Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 425

 

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "When I Was Puerto Rican: A Memoir," by Esmeralda Santiago.

“Take these boards and lay them on the pile for the cooking fire,” Papi said. “Careful with the splinters.” 

I walked a broad circle around Mami, who looked up from her vegetable chopping whenever I went by. When I passed carrying a wide board, Mami asked to see it. Black bugs, like ants, but bigger and blacker, crawled over it in a frenzy. 

“Termites!” she gasped. 

I was covered with them. They swarmed inside my shirt and panties, into my hair, under my arms. Until Mami saw them, I hadn’t felt them sting. But they bit ridges into my skin that itched and hurt at the same time. Mami ran me to the washtub and dunked me among my father’s soaking shirts. 

“Pablo!” she called, “Oh, my God! Look at her. She’s being eaten alive!” 

I screamed, imagining my skin disappearing in chunks into the invisible mouths of hundreds of tiny black specks creeping into parts of my body I couldn’t even reach. Mami pulled off my clothes and threw them on the ground. The soap in the washtub burned my skin, and Mami scrubbed me so hard her fingernails dug angry furrows into my arms and legs. She turned me around to wash my back and I almost fell out of the tub. 

“Be still,” she said. “I have to get them all.” 

She pushed and shoved and turned me so fast I didn’t know what to do with my body, so I flailed, seeming to resist, while in fact I wanted nothing more than to be rid of the creepy crawling things that covered me. Mami wrapped me in a towel and lifted me out of the tub with a groan. Hundreds of black bugs floated between the bubbles. 

She carried me to the house pressed against her bosom, fragrant of curdled milk. Delsa and Norma ran after us, but Papi scooped them up, one on each arm, and carried them to the rope swing. Mami balanced on the floorboards to her bed, lay me beside her, held me tight, kissed my forehead, my eyes, and murmured, “It’s all right. It’s over. It’s all right.” 

I wrapped my legs around her and buried my face under her chin. It felt good to have Mami so close, so warm, swathed by her softness, her smell of wood smoke and oregano. She rubbed circles on my back and caressed the hair from my face. She kissed me, brushed my tears with her fingertips, and dried my nose with the towel, or the hem of her dress. 

“You see,” she murmured, “what happens when you don’t do as I say?” 

I turned away from her and curled into a tight ball of shame. Mami rolled off the bed and went outside. I lay on her pillow, whimpering, wondering how the termites knew I’d disobeyed my mother.

Men, I was learning, were sinvergüenzas, which meant they had no shame and indulged in behavior that never failed to surprise women but caused them much suffering. Chief among the sins of men was the other woman, who was always a puta, a whore. My image of these women was fuzzy, since there were none in Macún, where all the females were wives or young girls who would one day be wives. Putas, I guessed, lived in luxury in the city on the money that sinvergüenza husbands did not bring home to their long-suffering wives and barefoot children. Putas wore lots of perfume, jewelry, dresses cut low to show off their breasts, high heels to pump up their calves, and hair spray. All this was paid for with money that should have gone into repairing the roof or replacing the dry palm fronds enclosing the latrine with corrugated steel sheets. I wanted to see a puta close up, to understand the power she held over men, to understand the sweet-smelling spell she wove around the husbands, brothers, and sons of the women whose voices cracked with pain, defeat, and simmering anger.

Children fought in school in a way unknown to me at home. Delsa, Norma, and I often tied ourselves into punching, biting, kicking knots that only Mami with her switch was able to untangle. But fighting with other kids was different. When I fought with my sisters, I knew what was at stake, a prized marble, a ripe mango just fallen off the tree, a chance to be the first to color in the Sunday comics from Papi’s newspaper. But in school the fights were about something else entirely. 

If you looked at someone the wrong way they might beat you up. If you were too eager to answer the teacher’s questions you might get beat up. If you rubbed shoulders with the wrong kids you would get beat up. If you mentioned someone’s mother at the wrong time or in a certain tone of voice, you would definitely get beat up. Any number of subtle transgressions, from not saying hello when someone greeted you to saying hello to the wrong person, meant a beating. When I explained to Mami why I came home with a torn uniform and bruises, she made it clear that I was forbidden to fight in school. This made no sense to me at all. Not that Mami encouraged our fights at home, but she never said, “Don’t fight with your sisters.” Her injunctions were always about not punching them too hard. So I had to learn how to avoid the unavoidable, and when I couldn’t, I stripped to my underwear in the school yard to defend myself from kids whose mothers didn’t mind if their uniforms got dirty.

I determined not to cry, because if she asked me, I didn’t want to tell Abuela why. But the pressure was too much, and as the tears came, I looked around for something with which to hurt myself so that when Abuela asked, I could show her a reason for the tears. I put my hand in the doorjamb and slammed the door shut.

The baby was thirty days old, and we had to be careful about infections, foul breezes, and the evil eye. Mami had strung a nugget of coral and an onyx bead on a safety pin and attached it to Raymond’s baby shirt at birth. It was the same charm she had used on all of us, kept in a little box among her thimbles and needles between babies, to be brought out and pinned to the tiny cotton shirts, supposedly for the first forty days and forty nights of our lives. She claimed she didn’t believe “any of that stuff,” but each time, the charm stayed on long after it was supposed to.

“Don’t you ever, ever do that again,” she growled, and I wasn’t sure if she meant kicking a boy between his legs or letting him see my private parts. Because it seemed to me she knew what Tato and I did behind the latrine while she and Doña Lola talked about their lives. She knew, and she was waiting for me to do something worse than what I could imagine so that she could do something far worse than what I would expect. I let my body go limp to take her abuse, and part of me left my body and stood beside my sisters and brothers, their eyes round, tear filled, frightened, their fingers interlaced into each other’s, their skinny bodies jerking with every hit I took.

“Always iron the inside button and hole plackets first, then the inside and outside collar, then the cuffs.” We danced around the ironing board, with Mami guiding my hand, pressing down on the iron, and standing away for a minute to see me do as she’d taught. The steam rose from the shirt and filled my head with the clean fresh scent of sun-dried cotton, and bubbles of perspiration flushed along my hair line and dripped down my neck. But I pressed on, absorbed by the tiny squares in the weave, the straight, even stitches that held the seams in place, the way the armhole curved into the shoulder. 

“You’re doing a good job,” Mami murmured, a puzzled expression on her face. 

“This is fun,” I said, meaning it. 

“Fun!” she laughed. “Then from now on you do all the ironing around the house.” She said it with a smile, which meant she was teasing. And she never asked me to do it. But after that, whenever I wanted to feel close to Mami, I stacked wrinkled clothes into a basket, and, one by one, ironed them straight, savoring the afternoon when she taught me to do the one thing she most hated.

“I don’t like it when she goes away,” I cried into Abuela’s shoulder, the only place where I could express my loneliness, my fears. To have told Mami would have been wrong. She was overwhelmed by what she called “the sacrifices I have to endure for you kids,” and my love, expressed in demands, added a greater burden. I was keenly aware that she wasn’t my mother: I had to share her with Delsa, Norma, Hector, Alicia, Edna, and Raymond. But it seemed that somehow my share was smaller because I was the oldest, because I was casi señorita, because I ought to know better. 

I walked home from Abuela’s house feeling Mami’s absence as if she had already left. By the time I got home, I had wrapped myself in the blanket of responsibility she was about to drop on me. It felt heavy, too big for me, yet if I made the wrong move, I was afraid it would tear, exposing the slight, frightened child inside.

On the way to the bus, men stared, whistled, mumbled piropos. Eyes fixed straight ahead, she pretended to ignore the gallantries, but a couple of times her lips curled into a smile. I strolled next to her half proud, half afraid. I had heard men speaking compliments in the direction of women, but I’d never been aware of them going to my mother. Each man who did a double take or pledged to love her forever, to take her home with him, to give his life for her, took her away from me. She had become public property—no longer the mother of seven children, but a woman desired by many. I wanted to jump on those men and punch their faces in, to quiet the promises and the seductive looks, to chill the heat they gave off, palpable as the clothes I wore. During the entire bus ride home I was miserable, wrapped in a rage I couldn’t explain or think away. Mami chatted about New York, my cousins, movies, and tall apartment buildings. But I didn’t listen. I kept replaying the walk to the bus stop, her proud bearing, the men’s stares, their promises, and the nakedness her accessible beauty made me feel.

There were two kinds of Puerto Ricans in school: the newly arrived, like myself, and the ones born in Brooklyn of Puerto Rican parents. The two types didn’t mix. The Brooklyn Puerto Ricans spoke English, and often no Spanish at all. To them, Puerto Rico was the place where their grandparents lived, a place they visited on school and summer vacations, a place which they complained was backward and mosquito-ridden. Those of us for whom Puerto Rico was still a recent memory were also split into two groups: the ones who longed for the island and the ones who wanted to forget it as soon as possible. 

I felt disloyal for wanting to learn English, for liking pizza, for studying the girls with big hair and trying out their styles at home, locked in the bathroom where no one could watch. I practiced walking with the peculiar little hop of the morenas, but felt as if I were limping.

When she worked, Mami was happy. She complained about sitting at a machine for hours, or about the short coffee breaks, or about el bosso. But she was proud of the things she made. Often she brought home samples of the bras and girdles she worked on and showed us how she had used a double-needle machine, or how she had figured out that if you stitched the cup a certain way, it would fit better. But even though she was proud of her work, she didn’t want us to follow in her footsteps. 

“I’m not working this hard so that you kids can end up working in factories all your lives. You study, get good grades, and graduate from high school so that you can have a profession, not just a job.” 

She never asked to see our homework, but when we brought home report cards, she demanded that we read her the grades and then translate the teachers’ comments so that she would know exactly how we were doing in school. When the reports were good, she beamed as if she herself had earned the good marks. 

“That’s what you have to do in this country,” she’d say. “Anyone willing to work hard can get ahead.” 

We believed her and tried to please her as best we could.