When I Was Puerto Rican (2 page)

“It felt like it was going right into my brain,” she muttered with an embarrassed smile.

Delsa and Norma toddled through the underbrush. “Mami, come see what I found,” Delsa called.

A hen had scratched out a hollow and carpeted its walls and floor with dry grass. She had laid four eggs, smaller and not as white as the ones our neighbor Doña Lola gave us from time to time.

“Can we eat them?” Delsa asked.

“No.”

“But if we leave them here a snake will get them,” I said, imagining a serpent swallowing each egg whole. Mami shuddered and rubbed her arms where tiny bumps had formed making the fine hairs stand straight up. She gave me a look, half puzzled, half angry, and drew us to her side.

“All right, let’s get our sticks together and bring them to the kitchen.” As she picked hers up, she looked carefully around.

“One, two, three, four,” she chanted. “One, two, three, four.”

We marched single file into our yard, where Papi stacked floorboards.

“Come look,” he said.

The dirt was orange, striped in places where crumbs had slipped through the cracks when Mami swept. Papi had left a few boards down the center of the room and around his and Mami’s bed, to stand on until the ground was swept and flattened. Mami was afraid to come into the house. There were small holes in the dirt, holes where snakes and scorpions hid. She turned around swiftly and threw herself off balance so that she skipped toward the kitchen shed.

“Let’s go make supper!” She singsang to make it sound like fun. Delsa and Norma followed her skirt, but I stared at the dirt, where squiggly lines stretched from one wall to the other. Mami waited for me.

“Negi, come help in the kitchen.”

I pretended not to hear but felt her eyes bore holes in the back of my head. Papi stepped between us.

“Let her stay. I can use the help.”

I peered between his legs and saw her squint and pucker her lips as if she were about to spit. He chuckled, “Heh, heh,” and she whirled toward the kitchen shed, where the fire in the
fogón
was almost out.

“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.

We children slept in hammocks strung across the room, tied to the beams in sturdy knots that were done and undone daily. A curtain separated our side of the room from the end where my parents slept in a four-poster bed veiled with mosquito netting. On the days he worked, Papi left the house before dawn and sometimes joked that he woke the roosters to sing the
barrio
awake. We wouldn’t see him again until dusk, dragging down the dirt road, his wooden toolbox pulling on his arm, making his body list sideways. When he didn’t work, he and Mami rustled behind the flowered curtain, creaked the springs under their mattress, their voices a murmur that I strained to hear but couldn’t.

I was an early riser but was not allowed out until the sun shot in through the crack near Mami’s sewing machine and swept a glistening stripe of gold across the dirt floor.

The next morning, I turned out of the hammock and ran outside as soon as the sun streaked in. Mami and Papi sat by the kitchen shed sipping coffee. My arms and belly were pimpled with red dots. The night before, Mami had bathed me in
alcoholado,
which soothed my skin and cooled the hot itch.

“Ay
bendito,”
Mami said, “here’s our spotty early riser. Come here, let me look.” She turned me around, rubbing the spots. “Are you itchy?”

“No, it doesn’t itch at all.”

“Stay out of the sun today so the spots don’t scar.”

Papi hummed along with the battery-operated radio. He never went anywhere without it. When he worked around the house, he propped it on a rock, or the nearest fence post, and tuned it to his favorite station, which played romantic ballads,
chachachás,
and a reading of the news every half hour. He delighted in stories from faraway places like Russia, Madagascar, and Istanbul. Whenever the newscaster mentioned a country with a particularly musical name, he’d repeat it or make a rhyme of it.
“Pakistán. Sacristán. ¿Dónde están?”
he sang as he mixed cement or hammered nails, his voice echoing against the walls.

Early each morning the radio brought us a program called “The Day Breaker’s Club,” which played the traditional music and poetry of the Puerto Rican country dweller, the
jíbaro.
Although the songs and poems chronicled a life of struggle and hardship, their message was that
jíbaros
were rewarded by a life of independence and contemplation, a closeness to nature coupled with a respect for its intractability, and a deeply rooted and proud nationalism. I wanted to be a
jíbara
more than anything in the world, but Mami said I couldn’t because I was born in the city, where
jíbaros
were mocked for their unsophisticated customs and peculiar dialect.

“Don’t be a
jíbara,”
she scolded, rapping her knuckles on my skull, as if to waken the intelligence she said was there.

I ducked away, my scalp smarting, and scrambled into the oregano bushes. In the fragrant shade, I fretted. If we were not
jíbaros,
why did we live like them? Our house, a box squatting on low stilts, was shaped like a
bohío,
the kind of house
jí
baros lived in. Our favorite program, “The Day Breaker’s Club,” played the traditional music of rural Puerto Rico and gave information about crops, husbandry, and the weather. Our neighbor Doña Lola was a
jíbara,
although Mami had warned us never to call her that. Poems and stories about the hardships and joys of the Puerto Rican
jíbaro
were required reading at every grade level in school. My own grandparents, whom I was to respect as well as love, were said to be
jíbaros.
But I couldn’t be one, nor was I to call anyone a
jíbaro,
lest they be offended. Even at the tender age when I didn’t yet know my real name, I was puzzled by the hypocrisy of celebrating a people everyone looked down on. But there was no arguing with Mami, who, in those days, was always right.

On the radio, the newscaster talked about submarines, torpedoes, and a place called Korea, where Puerto Rican men went to die. His voice faded as Papi carried him into the house just as Delsa and Norma came out for their oatmeal.

Delsa’s black curly hair framed a heart-shaped face with tiny pouty lips and round eyes thick with lashes. Mami called her
Muñequita,
Little Doll. Norma’s hair was the color of clay, her yellow eyes slanted at the corners, and her skin glowed the same color as the inside of a yam. Mami called her
La Colorá,
the red girl. I thought I had no nickname until she told me my name wasn’t Negi but Esmeralda.

“You’re named after your father’s sister, who is also your godmother. You know her as Titi Merín.”

“Why does everyone call me Negi?”

“Because when you were little you were so black, my mother said you were a
negrita.
And we all called you
Negrita,
and it got shortened to Negi.”

Delsa was darker than I was, nutty brown, but not as sun ripened as Papi. Norma was lighter, rust colored, and not as pale as Mami, whose skin was pink. Norma’s yellow eyes with black pupils looked like sunflowers. Delsa had black eyes. I’d never seen my eyes, because the only mirror in the house was hung up too high for me to reach. I touched my hair, which was not curly like Delsa’s, nor
pasita,
raisined, like Papi’s. Mami cut it short whenever it grew into my eyes, but I’d seen dark brown wisps by my cheeks and near my temples.

“So Negi means I’m black?”

“It’s a sweet name because we love you,
Negrita.”
She hugged and kissed me.

“Does anyone call Titi Merin Esmeralda?”

“Oh, sure. People who don’t know her well—the government, her boss. We all have our official names, and then our nicknames, which are like secrets that only the people who love us use.”

“How come you don’t have a nickname?”

“I do. Everyone calls me Monin. That’s my nickname.”

“What’s your real name?”

“Ramona.”

“Papi doesn’t have a nickname.”

“Yes he does. Some people call him Pablito.”

It seemed too complicated, as if each one of us were really two people, one who was loved and the official one who, I assumed, was not.

The day he was to put in the new floor, Papi dragged our belongings out to the yard. Mami’s sewing machine, the bed, her rocking chair, the small dresser where Papi kept his special things, baked in the sun, their worn surfaces scarred, their joints loose and creaky. A stack of new floorboards was suspended between cinder blocks near the door. Mami asked me and Delsa to find small stones to plug the holes in the dirt inside the house, so that snakes and scorpions wouldn’t get out and bite us.