After the Hurricane(109)
It is almost an afterthought, hearing this. Because Elena already knows everything Santiago has left her, although there is so much about him she will never know. Because the house is hers, a piece of history, an anchor, a home, on the first Spanish colony in the Americas, the island the farthest east in the Greater Antilles, the gateway to the New World. Hers. Completely, now and always.
Twenty-One
Esperanza had hoped that they would not let her board the plane because she was pregnant, that something would stop all this, save her from having to cross the ocean and live far from the island, from everything she knew and cared about, but instead the flight attendant just congratulated her husband and wished them the best. She was only three months pregnant, barely showing, but she cradled her stomach as the plane, the first she had ever taken, prepared to fly. The terrifying speed of the great metal thing charging down the runway, the moment it lifted off the tarmac, the world falling away from her as she went up and up into the air, was horrible. Her husband, the man who had coaxed her into marrying him and was now demanding that she move to a city that everyone in her family said was cold and sad and strange, was delighted.
“Isn’t this amazing?” he asked her. “In the old days people spent their lives on ships, taking months and months to get anywhere. Now we can fly!” Esperanza closed her eyes, and didn’t open them again until they landed.
New York was a wonderland to Santiago, and a nightmare to Esperanza. They moved into an apartment next to her mother, who was on her fourth and final husband, Isadoro. Santiago loved the city, its millions of people, its flashing lights and constant change. Esperanza found it frightening, overwhelming, dirty, and, as the child swelled inside her, harder and harder to navigate. She prayed constantly, both at home and in the nearby church Teofila had found, where the priest, thankfully, spoke Spanish. Esperanza had learned a little English, all Puerto Rican schoolchildren had to, but she had never had to use it before. While Santiago was much better at it, having worked with the postal service, which had required him to have better English than many, she struggled constantly. She was embarrassed every time she went grocery shopping when she had to ask for something, and she often simply agreed to whatever she was asked or bought things she didn’t know what to do with, which caused her husband to scream at her come dinnertime, setting off a new round of tears.
She did piecework for an embroidery factory, something she could do even from home, which was good because being with all the other workers, unable to communicate with many of them, made her feel alienated and small. In her neighborhood, at least, there were many Puerto Ricans, so many that she could divide apartments by what area of the island they were from. Old arguments and prejudices had traveled with them, and swelled through the absence of foreign blood. Her neighbors argued about whose grandmother had stolen whose chicken fifty years before back in their seaside village. Lopezes refused to speak to Riveras and Barrios, because they knew what they had done. Thousands of new people came every year, carrying the same things with them, grateful for the bodegas on every corner, the piraguas stands in the summers peddling shaved ice, the neighbors whose nuanced grudges and tips on where to get cheap rice, decent peppers, and good cuts of pork reminded them of home. She thanked God each Sunday for each new fellow Puerto Rican who entered the bustling city, each of them making it a little bit easier for her, a little more like home.
She and Santiago thought that the fall in New York was the coldest anything could possibly be, but when the winter came they knew the world must be ending. Teofila, by now an expert in winter, having moved to the city two years earlier, helped them with coats and sweaters but they found the whole idea of layering clothing upon clothing to be impossibly strange, and it was difficult to fit the hand-me-down clothing over Esperanza’s growing stomach. They clung to each other at night, not out of affection, for that had quickly left their relationship, but to stay warm. She had always thought hell, a subject she reflected on for hours and hours, was a hot place. But it was cold, obviously, this was clear now, because the winter was torture. She did not know how she had sinned, but she apologized for it on her knees, begging God not to end the world and bring on the Day of Judgment just because of her transgressions. He did not listen, instead sending snow through the air to punish her further.
She did not think they would survive the endless days of cold, but eventually, her prayers were answered, and it became warm again, little by little, and nothing like the island’s glorious sticky heat, but better and better. On the first truly warm day of spring, as Esperanza stood in front of her apartment building, her aching ankles demanding that she sit back down again, she basked in the sunshine, trying to absorb it, letting it warm her, and for a moment she could pretend she was home, her real home, not this horrible city where everyone was mean and everything was expensive and the demons of her imagination seemed all around her, waiting to eat her up. She smiled, imagining being back in San Sebastián, smelling the earth and fields and sweet sugar in the air, and as she did, her water broke.
Santiago Vega Jr. was born ten hours later, early in the morning, as his mother, exhausted, her body shaking with pain, let out one final push, while her husband slept, comfortably, in their bed, having asked the hospital to call the bar under their apartment when it was all over. Teofila, her mother, sat beside her, urging her to bring her child into the world, holding the child she’d given birth to a year before, her fifth, Samuel, who everyone would call Rowdy.