When I Was Puerto Rican (21 page)

We arrived at Doña Andrea’s house, and her husband helped us get our things in. She showed Mami into a back room with two beds, and we fell into them, so tired we didn’t even have dinner or look to see where we were.

EL MANGLE

De Guatemala a guata-peor

From Guatemala to guate-worse

T
he
barrio
floated on a black lagoon. Sewage drifted by in a surprising variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. It was easy to tell what people in El Mangle ate because pieces of food stuck to the turds that glided past. I watched out the window, wondering who each load belonged to, whether what came out from their insides gave a clue to what they looked like.

“Negi, what are you doing up so early?” Mami whispered.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I whispered back. My bladder was so full that I’d had to keep my legs crossed all the while I’d looked out the window. Seeing all that water hadn’t helped.

She groaned. “The bathroom is over here.” She led me through a curtain into the front room. There was a hammock stretched across one end and a couch lumpy with a sleeping body. We walked into another room, and Mami turned on an overhead bulb. The brightness made my eyes water, so that I could barely see the circle cut in the wood floor.

“It’s just like a latrine,” Mami said. “You squat and do your business. But be careful to keep your legs far apart so that you don’t fall in. Would you like me to go first and show you how it’s done?”

I nodded. Mami squatted, her back to me. She looked over her shoulder.

“Be very careful when you aim, so that you don’t pee all over the floor.”

She got up and pulled up her panties.

“Now you.”

I stood over the hole and spread my legs as far as I could. Below, water flowed to the left, faster than it did by the bedroom window. I felt dizzy. Cold air came up between my legs, and I jumped back and bumped into Mami.

“What’s the matter?”

“I ... I felt something.”

“There’s nothing there. Don’t be such a
jibara.”

She shoved me gently towards the hole. “Are you going to pee or not?”

My bladder was bursting. “The hole is too big.”

Tears burned the back of my eyes, but if I cried she’d get mad at me.

“We can’t change the size of the hole.”

“Don’t they have an
escupidera,
like we do at home?”

“No.” She held my shoulders. “I’ll hold on to you until you get used to it.”

“Okay.” I stood over the hole again, trying not to look down. A tickle of cold air sent goose bumps up the small of my back. I pulled my panties down to my knees and had to step away from the hole because they got in my way when I tried to squat.

“Now what?”

“I can’t squat with my panties on. The hole’s too wide.”

“Take them off,” she said, pulling them down for me.

Someone down there can look up through the hole and see my private parts, I thought. There is someone down there. A dead person is in that water waiting for me to squat so that it can claw me in and drown me in turds and pee. There are eyes looking up from that black pool, seeing parts of me that even I can’t see.

“Just hold on to me,” Mami whispered. “Don’t be scared.”

I squatted slowly, holding on to Mami’s hands so that if the dead reached up for me, she could pull me back. I looked down to aim and saw something waving in the water. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I screamed, jumped back again, and crashed against Mami.

“What’s the matter!”

Doña Andrea stood at the door, her hair in curlers.

“She’s afraid of the bathroom,” Mami said, holding on to me.

“Do you think something’s going to float up and take you?”

She laughed. Mami laughed. I leaned against the wall, unable to stop crying. I wished Doña Andrea would leave. But she and Mami stood there laughing like it was the funniest thing in the world. My face burned.

“Stop laughing at me!” I screamed. I punched Mami in the belly, and she gasped. She clasped my hands in hers and held me against the wall.

“Stop that,” she growled. Her hands were firm around my wrists, hurting me. I squirmed, trying to get away.

“Ah, she’s got a temper,” Doña Andrea snorted.

I wished she’d shut up. Mami pushed me toward the hole.

“Now get over there and do what you have to do before I get mad.”

I’d embarrassed her in front of Doña Andrea, but I didn’t care. They shouldn’t have laughed. The water under the hole ran blacker and swifter, and there was no way I was going to squat. No way.

“Fine,” Mami said, letting go of me. “If you refuse to use the bathroom, then you’ll just have to hold it in the rest of the day, because there’s no other place to do it.”

No I didn’t. I didn’t have to hold it in. I didn’t.

She walked to the door. Doña Andrea nodded her approval. Mami looked back at me, not sure if she should leave. She seemed to be at the other end of the world, with Doña Andrea behind her, small as a cockroach, holding the door open. Mami took one step out, but before she could leave, hot urine trickled down my legs into a pool on the floor.

Doña Andrea poured cornflakes into blue plastic bowls. At home, we never had cereal in the middle of the day, but she was taking care of us while Mami went looking for work, and she didn’t know the rules.

“You know, if you hit your mother, when you die they won’t be able to bury you.”

The air was sucked out of me. Delsa’s eyes opened wide, and her mouth fell open.

“Why? Why can’t they?” I croaked.

“Because,” she sprinkled a spoonful of sugar into the bowl, “if you hit your mother, when you die, your arm sticks out in front of you, like this, and it stays like that, so you can’t fit in your coffin.”

“Can’t they push it down?”

“No. If they try, it springs right up.”

“Maybe they can tie it down, with a rope or something.”

She gave me a funny look. Delsa and Norma giggled.

“These are things God does to bad little children. You can’t do anything about them.” She slammed a bowl of cornflakes in front of me.

“She’s wrong. All they have to do is tie the arm down,” I whispered to Delsa and Norma. “And if that doesn’t work, they build a coffin that’s tall and wide enough so that the arm fits.”

“Stop with the whispering and giggling,” Doña Andrea snapped.

She poured canned milk over the cereal. I hated the flavor of canned milk, but Mami had told us that when somebody gives you something to eat, you eat it, even if you throw it up later.

Doña Andrea was short and round and had a wart on her cheek. Her hair was stringy, and she was missing a few teeth. Raymond was afraid of her, and Hector said she looked like a witch. I had to spank them both for being disrespectful.

Her house floated at the end of a narrow pier with one other house. Between them a rowboat floated in the black water, held by a rope knotted around a rusty hook. Doña Andrea made us stay inside all day because there was no place to play outside.

“I don’t want one of you falling into the lagoon,” she said, and I shuddered at the thought of touching that dirty water.

Being cooped up inside all day was boring. In Macún, we could run and climb trees and jump from rock mountains. But in El Mangle, we couldn’t do anything. There wasn’t even schoolwork because Mami wouldn’t sign us up for school until she found a job.

Mami wanted to rent the house next to Doña Andrea. Then we would have our own kitchen, our own rooms, and she would bring our furniture from Macún.

“Mami, when is Papi coming to see us?” I asked one day as she sat on the steps of our future house, rubbing her feet.

“I don’t know,” she said in a sharp voice and looked away.

It occurred to me then that she hadn’t told him where we were.

Papi wouldn’t live in such a place because he couldn’t stand strong smells. They made his mouth water, which made him spit. So at home in Macún our latrine was far from the house.

But in El Mangle, we couldn’t get away from the stench. The air smelled like the brewery, and the water like human waste. Food didn’t taste good. The smell lived inside us, and even though Mami used a lot of garlic and oregano when she cooked, it didn’t help. I could still taste shit when I ate.

The school was made of stone. Mami said the floors were marble, which was why they were so shiny. The uniform was an ugly mustard shirt with a chocolate-colored skirt and brown shoes. Unlike every other teacher I’d ever had, my new teacher, Sra. Leona, insisted on Spanish and refused to answer when we said “Mrs.”

“It is a bastardization of our language,” she said, “which in Puerto Rico is Spanish.”

I didn’t like her. She was always angry, and she was mean. Once she hit a boy with a ruler because he laughed when she dropped a map. He wasn’t the only one to laugh, but she picked on him.

When I came to school in the middle of the year, my class was studying fractions. In Macún, we hadn’t got to fractions, so I was lost and had a hard time following what Sra. Leona wrote on the board. I read the pages in my math book that other kids had read weeks earlier, but nothing made any sense. Mami couldn’t help me. She said she had never studied fractions when she was in school.

Sra. Leona wrote some fractions on the board and called on the boy behind me to solve the first one. She didn’t just expect you to solve it, you were supposed to explain how to do it as you went along. I was cold and sweaty at the same time. The boy mentioned integers. I didn’t know what they were. He wrote a bunch of numbers on the board, and Sra. Leona smiled at him as he returned to his seat.

“Esmeralda, come up and solve the next one.”

I knew she was going to call on me. I just knew it. The prob lem was ⅔ +
=

I walked as slowly as I could to the blackboard, looking hard at the numbers. I tried to solve the problem in my head, so that by the time I got to the blackboard, it would be figured out and I wouldn’t make a fool of myself. ⅔. That means if there are supposed to be three bananas you have only two of the three. Okay. Four-sixths means if there are supposed to be six guavas you have only four. All right. Wait a second. How many bananas? Two. Right. And four guavas. What does that make? I don’t think the fruit trick works with this.