Las Christmas (2 page)

Aurora Levins Morales

Aurora Levins Morales spent her childhood in Maricao, Puerto Rico. She is
coauthor, with her mother, Rosario Morales,
of
Getting Home Alive
(Firebrand
Books), a collection of autobiographical poetry and prose. Her work has been
published in
Ms.
magazine,
The American Voice,
and many anthologies. Her
most recent books are a collection of essays,
Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity
(South End Press,
1998
) and
Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriqueños
(Beacon,
1998
),
a prose-poetry retelling of Puerto Rican history through the lives of women. She
teaches Puerto Rican history at the University of California, Berkeley, and
women's studies at the University of Minnesota, and has homes in both states.

DULCE DE NARANJA

IN PUERTO RICO, Las Navidades is a season, not a single day. Early in December, with the hurricane season safely over, the thick autumn rains withdraw and sun pours down on the island uninterrupted. This will be a problem by March, when the reservoirs empty, and the shores of Lake Luchetti show wider and wider rings of red mud, until the lake bottom curls up into little pancakes of baked clay and the skeletons of long-drowned houses are revealed. Then, people wait anxiously for rain, pray that the sweet, white coffee blossoms of April don't wither on the branch. But during Navidades, the sun shines on branches heavily laden with hard, green berries starting to ripen and turn red. Oranges glow on the trees,
aguinaldos
start to dominate the airwaves of Radio Café, and women start grating yuca and plantain for
pasteles,
and feeling up the pigs and chickens, calculating the best moment for the slaughter.

It was 1962 or maybe 1965. Any of those years. Barrio Indiera Baja of Maricao and Barrio Rubias of Yauco are among the most remote inhabited places on the island, straddling the crest of the Cordillera Central among the mildewed ruins of old coffee plantations, houses, and sheds left empty when the tides of international commerce withdrew. A century ago, Yauco and Maricao fought bitterly to annex this prime coffee-growing land at a time when Puerto Rican coffee was the best in the world. But Brazil flooded the market with cheaper, faster-growing varieties. There were hurricanes and invasions and the coffee region slid into decline.

In the 1960s of my childhood most people in Indiera still worked in coffee, but everyone was on food stamps except the handful of
hacendados
and young people who kept leaving for town jobs or for New York and Connecticut.

Those were the years of modernization. Something was always being built or inaugurated—dams, bridges, new roads, shopping centers, and acres of housing developments. Helicopters crossed the mountains installing electrical poles in places too inaccessible for trucks (while keeping an eye out for illegal rum stills). During my entire childhood the
acueducto,
the promise of running water, inched its way toward us with much fanfare and very little result. When the pipes were finally in place, the engineers discovered that there was rarely enough pressure to drive the water up the steep slopes north of the reservoir. About once a month the faucets, left open all the time, started to sputter. Someone called out “
¡Acueduuuuucto!
” and everyone ran to fill their buckets before the pipes went dry again.

Navidades was the season for extravagance in the midst of hardship. Food was saved up and then lavishly spread on the table. New clothing was bought in town or made up by a neighbor, and furniture was brought home, to be paid off in installments once the harvest was in.

One of those years, Doña Gina's husband bought her an indoor stove with an oven, and all the neighbors turned out to see. They were going to roast the pig indoors! Not a whole pig, of course, but I was there watching when Don Lencho slashed the shaved skin and rubbed the wounds with handfuls of mashed garlic and fresh oregano,
achiote
oil and vinegar, black pepper and salt. Doña Gina was making
arroz con dulce,
tray after tray of cinnamon-scented rice pudding with coconut. The smells kept all the children circling around the kitchen like hungry sharks.

This was before every house big enough for a chair had sprouted a TV antenna. My brother and I went down to the Canabal house to watch occasional episodes of
Bonanza
dubbed into Spanish: I liked to watch the lips move out of sync with the voice that said, “
Vámonos,
Hoss!” And by 1966 there would be a TV in the seventh-grade classroom at Arturo Lluberas Junior High, down near Yauco, where the older girls would crowd in to watch
El Show del Mediodía.
But in Indiera and Rubias nobody was hooked on TV Christmas specials yet, so when the season began, people still tuned up their
cuatros
and guitars, took down the
güiros
and maracas and started going house to house looking for free drinks. So while Don Lencho kept opening the oven to baste the pig, Chago and Nestor and Papo played
aguinaldos
and
plenas
and Carmencita improvised lyrics back and forth with Papo, each trying to top the other in witty commentary, the guests hooting and clapping when one or the other scored a hit. No one talked much about Cheíto and Luis away in Vietnam, or Adita's fiancé running off with a pregnant high-school girl a week before the wedding or Don Toño coughing up blood all the time. “
Gracias a Dios,
” said Doña Gina, “
aquí estamos.
”

During Navidades the cars of city relatives started showing up parked in the road next to the red and green jeeps. My girlfriends had to stay close to home and wear starched dresses, and the boys looked unnaturally solemn in ironed white shirts, with their hair slicked down. Our relatives were mostly in New York, but sometimes a visitor came all that way, announced ahead of time by letter, or, now and then, adventurous enough to try finding our farm with just a smattering of Spanish and a piece of paper with our names.

The neighbors grew their own
gandules
and plantain, but, except for a few vegetables, we didn't farm our land. My father drove to San Juan every week to teach at the university and did most of our shopping there, at the Pueblo supermarket on the way out of town. Sometimes all those overflowing bags of groceries weighed on my conscience, especially when I went to the store with my best friend, Tata, and waited while she asked Don Paco to put another meager pound of rice on their tab. My father was a biologist and a commuter. This was how we got our frozen blintzes and English muffins, fancy cookies and date-nut bread.

But during Navidades it seemed, for a little while, as if everyone had enough. My father brought home Spanish
turrón—
sticky white nougat full of almonds, wrapped in thin edible layers of papery white stuff. The best kind is the hard
turrón
you have to break with a hammer. Then there were all the gooey, intensely sweet fruit-pastes you ate with crumbly white cheese. The dense, red-brown
guayaba;
golden mango; sugar-crusted, pale brown
batata;
and dazzlingly white coconut. And my favorite,
dulce de naranja,
a tantalizing mix of bitter orange and sugar, the alternating tastes always startling on the tongue. We didn't eat pork, but my father cooked canned corned beef with raisins and onions and was the best Jewish
tostón
maker in the world.

Christmas trees were still a strange gringo custom for most of our neighbors, but each year we picked something to decorate, this household of transplanted New Yorkers—my Puerto Rican mother, my Jewish father, and the two, then three of us, “
americanitos
” growing up like wild
guayabas
on an overgrown and half-abandoned coffee farm. One year we cut a miniature grove of bamboo and folded dozens of tiny origami cranes in gold and silver paper to hang on the branches. Another year it was the tightly rolled, flame-red flowers of
señorita
with traditional, shiny Christmas balls glowing among the lush green foliage. Sometimes it was boughs of Australian pine hung with old ornaments we brought with us from New York in 1960, those pearly ones with the inverted cones carved into their sides like funnels of fluted, silver and gold light.

The only telephone was the one at the crossroads, which rarely worked, so other than my father's weekly trip to San Juan, the mail was our only link with the world outside the barrio. Every day during Las Navidades, when my brother and I would stop at the crossroads for the mail, there would be square envelopes in bright colors bringing Season's Greetings from faraway people we'd never met. But there were also packages. We had one serious sweet tooth on each side of the family. Every year my Jewish grandmother sent metal tins full of brightly wrapped toffee in iridescent paper that my brother and I saved for weeks. Every year my Puerto Rican grandfather sent boxes of Jordan almonds in sugary pastel colors and jumbo packages of Hershey's Kisses and Tootsie Rolls.

Of course this was also the season of rum, of careening jeeploads of festive people in constant motion up and down the narrow twisting roads of the mountains. You could hear the laughter and loud voices fade and blare as they wound in and out of the curves. All along the sides of the roads there were shrines—white crosses or painted rocks with artificial flowers and the dates of horrible accidents: head-on collisions when two jeeps held onto the crown of the road too long; places where drivers mistook the direction of the next dark curve and rammed into a tree or plummeted, arcing into the air and over the dizzying edge, to crash among the broken branches of citrus and
pomarrosa
and leaving a wake of destruction. Some of those ravines still held the rusted frames of old trucks and cars no one knew how to retrieve after the bodies were taken home for burial.

It was rum, the year my best friend's father died. Early Navidades, just coming into December, and parties already in full swing. Chiqui, Tata, Chinita, and I spent a lot of time out in the road, while inside, women in black dresses prayed, cleaned, and cooked. Every so often one of them would come out on the porch and call Tata or Chiqui, who were cousins, to get something from the store or go down the hill to the spring to fetch more buckets of water.

No one in Indiera was called by their real name. It was only in school, when the teacher took attendance, that you found out all those Tatas and Titas, Papos and Juniors were named Milagros and Carmen María, José Luis and Dionisio. The few names people used became soft and blurred in our mouths, in the country–Puerto Rican Spanish we inherited from Andalucian immigrants who had settled in those hills centuries ago and kept as far as they could from church and state alike. We mixed
yanqui
slang with the archaic accents of the sixteenth century, so that Ricardo became Hicaldo while Wilson turned into Güilsong. In the 1960s, every morning the radio still announced all the saints whose names could be given to children born that day, which is presumably how people ended up with names like Migdonio, Eduvigis, and Idelfonso.

Anyway, Tata's father was dying of alcoholism, his liver finally surrendering to forty or fifty years of heavy drinking and perhaps his heart collapsing under the weight of all the beatings and abuse he had dished out to his wife and fourteen children. Tata was his youngest child—ten, scrawny, fast on her feet. Her city nieces and nephews were older, but in the solemn days of waiting for death, she played her status for all it was worth, scolding them for laughing or playing, reminding them that she was their aunt, and must be respected. All day the women swept and washed and cooked and in the heat of the afternoon sat sipping coffee, talking softly on the porch.

In our classroom, where we also awaited news of the death, we were deep into the usual holiday rituals of public school. The girls cut out poinsettia flowers from red construction paper and the boys got to climb on chairs to help Meesee Torres hang garishly colored pictures of the Three Kings above the blackboard. We practiced singing “
Alegría, alegría, alegría,
” and during Spanish class we read stories of miraculous generosity and goodwill.

Late one Tuesday afternoon after school, we heard the wailing break out across the road, and the next day Meesee Torres made us all line up and walk up the hill to Tata's house to pay our respects. We filed into their living room, past the open coffin, and each of us placed a single flower in the vase Meesee had brought, then filed out again. What astonished me was how small Don Miguel looked, nested in white satin, just a little brown man without those bulging veins of rage at his temples and the heavy hands waiting to hit.