After the Hurricane(28)
“Tell me about the last time you saw him, Gloria,” Elena asks, watching the chef work. Gloria rinses the rice, so much rice, which she will cook to accompany all of the meals she will dish out today.
“I’m doing chicken curry today,” Gloria announces, instead of responding to Elena. “Pork chops, fried, and a steak with onions. What you want?”
“The chicken, please. Do you have plantains?” Gloria smiles. She serves her customers sweet bananas, fried—dulces—but Elena has never liked those. She likes tostones, crisp, a dull marigold color, with salt clinging to them.
“For you I’ll make. Sit. Let me remember.” Elena sits as Gloria pulls out raw chicken and carefully cuts it up, attacking the joints, then making small cuts in the thighs, drumsticks, breast, just along the surface of the meat. Elena watches her knife slide easily into the dead pink flesh. Each piece, as she finishes it, she throws into a bowl, the sound of flesh hitting metal and more flesh a thwack thwack in the empty place. For as long as Elena has known Gloria she has never had any help, never another chef. How long can she do this, Elena wonders, and doesn’t it exhaust her, to stand, bent over a dead bird, and slice its surface time and again?
“Makes it more tender. Let’s the curry in,” Gloria explains. Elena nods. Cutting things open lets the outside in. It makes sense. “I saw him on a Tuesday. No, Monday. That’s when this place is closed, so I was sitting outside, resting.” Gloria acts as a de facto mayor of the block-cumneighborhood watch. More than once, in the past, she told Elena stories of scaring off young graffiti artists about to deface nearby walls, directing clueless German tourists back to their cruise ships, and chatting with celebrities shooting movies in San Juan’s picturesque streets.
“How long ago?” Elena asks, taking out a notebook. She should be recording this, her father’s movements, Gloria’s curry recipe, everything. She has not been to the island in years, who knows when she will come back again after she finds her father, if she finds her father, if the house is hers or will never be hers. She should record it all. It is living history.
“Three weeks. What’s today, Saturday? Three weeks and five days. I call your mama on Monday because I think, I don’t see Santiago all this time, that’s not normal. Even after the storm I see him every other day, every three days, like that.” Gloria reaches up to grab a large plastic container labeled Jamaican Curry Powder: For Goat and Other Meat. Elena stands to help her, but Gloria has her own system, hopping gently to grab the yellow spice mix, and landing gently back on the tiled floor, slippery with cooking oil. Gloria doesn’t even waver, her balance is kitchen adjusted. Watching her here, Elena sees an artist at work, a jewel in its setting. Gloria fits in her kitchen, moving through it gracefully, perfectly. Rosalind is a ceramic artist, and she is like this in her own studio, assured, aware, unself-conscious. Elena feels that if you can see people in the place they know the best, feel the best, it is like seeing a part of them, the line between person and space blurry. What in my life is like that, she wonders, the office? She knows this is not true. My apartment? This is not true either. If she never finds a place like this, will she be a whole and happy person? Are you either of those things now?
Where is my father those things? Has he ever been either? a new, sad voice in her head asks her mournfully.
“That Monday when I seen him, he was not, eh, he had started early.” Gloria is coating the chicken in curry powder, shaking her head slightly, delicate in her description.
“He was drunk,” Elena says, flatly. Gloria looks up at Elena, and nods, shrugging. This doesn’t affect Gloria, she doesn’t see the problem, but why should she? It’s not her problem.
“He stopped over here. He wanted pork chops, but I closed on Monday, so he told me he was going to Mallorca.” Here Gloria snorts, dismissing, with the honk of her nasal passages, Cafetería Mallorca, one of her rival lunch options, near the Plaza de la Barandilla.
“Did he say anything else?” Elena asks, feeling a rising sense of panic. If this was all the information there was, well . . . but she couldn’t think like this, she had told herself she couldn’t.
“He say he missing his mother,” Gloria says, drizzling oil over the chicken and setting it aside. She picks up two large Spanish onions and begins cleaning them, preparing to dice them. “He wants to visit her. He think she lonely. I tell him he should. My mama been dead nineteen years.” Here Gloria wipes away a tear as she dices, and Elena does not know, is it the sadness or the onions, should she say she is sorry or pretend she didn’t see?
“Damn onions,” Gloria says. “Sometimes you get one that attack your face, you know?” Elena laughs, the sound a nervous eruption more than true humor. “He say he might go visit her. I ask him where she be.” Gloria soldiers on with the onions, tears running down her face. “He tell me she move back from her hometown. Nice life. I gonna do that someday.”
“The neighborhood will revolt,” Elena says, lightly, as her mind races. Her father’s mother is dead. She died when Elena was a baby. That was what Elena thought, had always heard. Would her father have lied about this, keep his mother a secret somewhere? Or has his mind corroded this much, imagining his mother is still alive, that she had moved back here instead of what Elena has thought was true, that her body was returned to the island after her passing. Could his brain have already degraded that much? He had been at the top of his class at Yale Law School. A prodigy, a brilliant man. If not for the sin of being Puerto Rican in the eighties, he would have gone into politics. As it was, his victories for his clients had been what allowed him to retire early, allowed him to come down here, while still paying Rosalind alimony. Elena has always thought her father is the smartest person she has ever met. Now she wonders, Is his mind going, or has he lied to me all my life? Which would be better?