When I Was Puerto Rican (8 page)

“Look, Negi,” Mami said one day. “Take a look at what I found!”

She was gutting a chicken. It looked naked without its feathers, which she’d yanked off in between dips into boiling water. Inside the bloody entrails were globes that quivered as she lifted them out.

“What are they?”

“Eggs that haven’t been laid yet. See? No shell.”

They looked like soft marbles, pink shooters striated with red, inside of which an orange/yellow liquid gleamed and threatened to ooze out if the outer membrane broke.

“They’re delicious in soup,” Mami said, and I believed her, because Mami never lied about food.

That night she served
asopao
with a solid dark ball floating on top of each of our bowls. I bit into the firm center with my front teeth. It tasted like hard-boiled egg yolks mixed with liver. It coated the inside of my mouth with a dry, sticky paste, and the smell of feathers rose from the back of my throat into my nose. I had to scrape my teeth with my tongue several times before the flavor dissipated into the familiar bittersweet oregano and garlic. Mami watched me eat and smiled at me with her eyes. I smiled back. It was delicious, just like she said.

“If you close your eyes while they’re crossed, they’ll stay like that!”

Juanita Marín was distraught. She stared at me, her eyes wide. She had long lashes that curled up to her eyebrows, which now formed a single wiggly line from one temple to the other.

I shut my eyes, trying to keep them crossed. She held her breath. I rolled my eyes around my lids and pictured her staring at me in wonder. Then I opened my eyes, still crossed. Two Juanita Marins gasped and brought up four hands to two mouths with gaps where teeth should have been. I uncrossed my eyes and burst out laughing. Her relief changed to anger, and she bopped me with her fist. That made me laugh harder, and she, in spite of herself, laughed with me.

Juanita was my best friend in Macún. She lived down the road from us, past Doña Lola’s house, almost at the funnel end of the
barrio.
Every day we walked home from school together, chatting about what we were going to be when we grew up, and whose father could saw the most wood in the least amount of time. I had an advantage over Juanita. I had lived in Santurce, and I could tell her about things like electric light bulbs and shower nozzles. But Juanita, who had lived in Macún all her life, could tell me about the secret places in the
barrio
that even our mothers didn’t know about. Places like the caves at the narrow end, and the breaks in Lalao’s fence, and the shortcuts through the woods that led to the next
barrio
where all sorts of
pocavergüenzas
took place. A
pocavergüenza
was something you should be ashamed of but weren’t.

It was in Jurutungo that all the women who seduced all the men in Macún lived. At least, that’s the way it seemed to us, because every time we heard our mothers, or our mothers’ friends complaining about their husbands’
pocavergüenzas,
they had happened in Jurutungo. It was there that their
sinvergüenza
husbands went when they’d just been paid and wanted to get drunk. It was there that their teenage sons disappeared when they reached a certain age and couldn’t be controlled any longer. It was to Jurutungo that women who’d had a bad life retreated with bastard children. Juanita and I never wanted to go there. But we often staked out the secret path, hoping someday to catch someone in the act of sneaking into that ill-reputed
barrio.

Don Berto, Juanita’s grandfather, lived in a shed behind Juanita’s house, and every time I saw him he was sitting on its front steps sharpening his machete. His skin was so black and wrinkled that it seemed to absorb light into its crevices, to be let out again in the most glorious smile I’d ever seen on anyone with no teeth. I was fascinated by his pink gums, the tongue spotted with white, the lips almost the same color as the rest of his skin. His gnarly hands stuck out of his shirt like gigantic hairless tarantulas, always moving, always searching for someplace to land. His palms, as pink as his gums, were calloused, and his fingertips were stained with age and soil.

We would sit at his feet listening to his
jíbaro
tales of phantasms, talking animals, and enchanted guava trees. While he spoke, he ran the tip of his machete back and forth, back and forth, over a stone, and we knew that if any of the creatures he talked about came to life, he would take care of it with one well-placed
machetazo.

One morning, while I snapped on my uniform, Mami told me not to wait for Juanita because she wouldn’t be coming to school.

“Why not?”

“Don Berto died last night, may he rest in peace.”

“How do you know?” I was astonished at the way news travelled in the
barrio.
No neighbors ever appeared at the door to bring us up-to-date. It was as if whatever happened in the barrio was conveyed in the breeze to be picked up by whom-ever was alert enough.

“Never mind how I know! Hurry up and get ready or you’ll be late for school.”

I scrambled out, irritated, wondering why parents never answered questions but seemed to have all the answers. In school many of my classmates’ seats were empty, and the teacher explained that Don Berto had died, and the children who were not there were his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and that we must be extra nice to them when they returned because it was a very sad thing to lose a grandparent. She also said that she hoped we had all been nice to Don Berto when he was alive, because now we would never get another chance. I tried to remember if I’d ever been rude to him, or if I’d ever been in some small way disrespectful to Don Berto, but, to my relief, I couldn’t come up with anything.

While I was in school, Mami was at the Marin house getting it ready for the
velorio.
Most of the
barrio’s
women had put in some time dusting, washing the floors and walls, sprinkling
agua florida
all over, positioning wreaths, bathing Don Berto and laying him out in his box. By that night, when we came to the wake, the house looked festive, decorated with flowers and candles.

Don Berto was in the middle of the living room, dressed in a clean white shirt buttoned all the way up. His eyes were closed, and his hands, which I’d never seen without his machete, were clasped on his chest with a rosary wrapped around them so that the large cross covered his fingers. A mosquito net hung around the coffin, and every time a new person came to see him, someone would have to lift netting away. Chairs were set up along the walls of the house, and into the yard, and people from the neighborhood, and some I’d never seen before, sat quietly sipping coffee or talking in whispers. When Papi came in, people said hello to him and pulled their chairs closer to Don Berto. Juanita’s mother brought a chair up for Papi, and he sat down, took a Bible that had been holding down the mosquito net, opened it, and pulled a rosary from his pocket, which he fingered in silence as the rest of the people bowed their heads and did the same thing.

“Let us pray,” Papi said in a dramatic voice, and he began mumbling words that I couldn’t understand, and the people repeated the same pattern of sounds, and each time they finished a prayer they’d say, “Amen” and click their rosary beads, but Papi would start over again, and they’d follow, mumbling and clicking their beads. This went on for a long time, so that even though I didn’t want to, I fell asleep, and next thing, a rooster was crowing and I woke up next to Delsa.

“Don’t put on your uniform because you’re not going to school today,” Mami said as I came out to the kitchen, rubbing my eyes and scratching myself.

“Why not?”

“You and Juanita are going to lead the procession to the cemetery.”

“Why
^?
”

Mami gave me an exasperated look. “Just do as I tell you and don’t talk back.”

Hector toddled out, stepped out of his diaper, and aimed his pee in a wide arc toward the chickens pecking at worms near the acerola tree. He grinned toward us happily, and Mami and I had to giggle.

Mami starched and ironed my best dress, which was white with blue flowers on the collar. We walked to the Marin house right after breakfast. Juanita wore a white dress too, with pale pink flowers along the hem. The rest of her family was dressed in black or gray, their hair neatly combed, the boys’ heads shimmering with brilliantine. Juanita and I were given a heavy wreath to carry. It was held together with wires, two of which had been twisted into handles at either side. Juanita’s mother wrapped handkerchiefs around the sharp ends so that our hands wouldn’t get scratched.

We walked in the hot dust from Juanita’s place to the mouth of the barrio. Black-clad people came out of the houses along the way to join the procession in back of us, many of them carrying homemade wreaths tied with purple ribbons. At the highway, traffic was stopped so that the procession could move into the middle of the road. As we passed, men took off their hats and bowed their heads and women crossed themselves.

It was a long walk to the cemetery. Behind us, Don Berto’s sons carried the coffin on their shoulders and didn’t set it down all the way there. The world was still, except for the shuffling footsteps of mourners, the hum of prayers, the click-clack of rosaries. The wreath we carried weighed on us, pulled on our skinny arms, strained our shoulders. But it would have been disrespectful to complain, or to let the ribbon with Don Berto’s name drag on the ground. Every so often Juanita looked at me with sad eyes. I’d never lost a loved one, so I took on her grief as if it were mine, tried it on to see if I could feel anything for the old man who had made me so happy with his tales and the hypnotizing movement of his machete across the stone. An echoing hollowness pressed against my ribs and threatened to escape like air from a balloon. I felt light-headed, empty, and I held on to the wreath so that it would anchor me to the ground, so that I could not fly up into the sky, above the trees, into the clouds where Don Berto’s soul waited, machete in hand. He had become a ghost, a creature that could haunt my nights and see my every move, like the phantasms he told us about when we sat at his feet, listening to his stories.