After the Hurricane(33)



She opens the first one again, the solemn baby, the man with her father’s nervous smile on his face, the pretty woman. She must have moved, perhaps it was a long exposure, for her face has a vagueness, like she is out of focus. But as Elena turns the pages, she realizes, that is just her face. Photo after photo, of the woman standing over faded farmland in a slim skirt, her hair rolled into small victory rolls, of the woman on her wedding day, in the dress Elena had seen downstairs, had her father kept his mother’s wedding dress, how had it survived? And her face is always the same, a little vague, like there is something missing.

Elena leans in, looking at the woman who must be her grandmother, a woman her father never talked about, ever, furious if she was brought up. A woman her mother once described, quietly, to Elena as insane, but only when Rosalind had been sure Santiago was out of the house. Esperanza Marin Vega. Elena knows her name, at least, that much had been acceptable to mention. Looking at her, Elena sees now what it is, what is off. No matter what, her eyes are somewhere else, seeing something out of frame, not looking at the viewer or her child or anyone around her. Some other place, somewhere only her burning eyes can see. For Esperanza’s eyes burn with the fire of angels, enflamed at something only she can see.

Elena pages through the albums, one after another. There are so many strangers in the pages, photos that when she gently removes them to look at them closer, to look at their backs, she sees her father’s Catholic schoolboy handwriting, beautiful and barely legible, informing her that this is Tía Goli, Tío Luis, Rowdy, Abuelo Isadoro, Teofilia la Bruja (the witch), Irena, Carmen, Roberto, and so many more names she has never heard, people that her father knows, is connected to, that she does not. As the photos grow closer, relatively, to the present, she sees her mother, friends of her parents from college, her mother’s parents. She sees photos from her father’s time in New Haven, Santiago standing next to another tan man, and she flips the photo over. Me and Diego, 1974. Diego, again. And if he knew him in law school, Rosalind must have, too. Pain flashes behind Elena’s vision, numbed a little by the rum.

Another one is of her parents with the tan man and a white man, someone she has seen in other photos from Santiago’s college days. Neil and Diego, 1976. There are other people in the photo, but her father has only noted those names. Who are these men? They occur more than almost anyone else, she notices, over and over again, from 1968 onward. And then they stop, in 1987, the year she was born. She can see her chubby baby face, her glowing mother, her proud father, but not these people, not anymore.

Why do I know nothing of the people who matter to my parents? she asks herself. She has never seen most of these photos in her entire life. Her father kept all of this tucked away, all these people in his life, in the back of a closet. She doesn’t know who most of them are, what any of this means to him, and if this is a way to find him, by looking through the past he has always, always barred to her.

The next morning, Elena is on the ferry to Bayamon as the morning light pours in, strongly, making her eyes smart. In the bag next to her are a large set of heavy books, slapping against each other on the bumping bruising ride, which is somehow rough despite the fact that the water around them is entirely flat, it is a bay, after all, shielded from the waves. The bag slides on the metal floor, and Elena clutches at it, compulsively. It is a new discovery, and heavy as it is, she is bringing it to Bayamon to see if her aunt can shed light on what she has found.

What Elena knows about her father’s past is this, and this only: Her grandparents moved from Puerto Rico, town, city, province, hamlet, unknown, not important. They got a divorce when her father was a child. Her grandfather remarried, and created her aunts and uncles. Her father was poor, and he went to college, and met Rosalind. Her grandmother died. Her grandfather and step-grandmother died. Nothing more, nothing less. She knows of no other family members, other than Santiago’s siblings, and she has no other stories. She knows nothing about her father personally between his birth and college, where he met Rosalind. She knows little about college or law school, and all from Rosalind’s perspective, never from his. She knows nothing about her grandmother at all. She knows what her grandfather told her about himself, that he loved pork and rice and beans, that he loved pool, that he loved the beach like she did. He died when she was fifteen, her step-grandmother soon after him, and her aunts and uncles tell stories of their childhoods, yes, but mostly what they talk about is their adult lives, and needs, the problems and the pains, money, always money, and how little of it there seems to be. She has never known if they, like her father, grow angry at the thought of being asked to excavate their histories. It was always clear to her that she should not ask.

But sitting on the ferry now, those should’s burn away from her. What does any of it matter now? What do his desires matter to her, now that they have left her with nothing? She has spent her life avoiding the truth of her father because he demanded it. Fuck his demands. He has left her with so little. She will find the rest, find what he has hidden. She owes him nothing now.

She is a historian, she reminds herself. She will not avoid the past because it is inconvenient. All pasts are inconvenient, for they contradict the present. But they also explain it. Elena, looking out into the blue bay, thinks about the fact that all her life, she has accepted what she has been given. But now, if she cannot have what she needs from her parents, either of them, it is time to ask someone else for it. What Santiago wanted doesn’t matter anymore. It is time for her to have what she wants.

Leah Franqui's Books