After the Hurricane(71)
“Neil,” he says, simply. And Elena wants to weep, because she does not know who that is, either.
Thirteen
Having Neil as an ally, rather than as an annoyance, changed everything about Stanford for Santiago. He had never had such a close friendship with anyone. California still seemed empty compared to New York, the college campus a huge space barely populated by students. But his life was suddenly filled to the brim with things, with classes, with events, with a friend.
Neil, it turned out, had the best of all strategies for dealing with the many hurdles Santiago did not know how to face. He refused to feel inferior to anyone. The only person who Neil was truly affected by, in their opinion of him, was his father, and after that first college break, Neil realized quickly that his father would do his duty by his son financially, but that they would have no other contact, and they never did again. Neil spent every break after that first year on campus with Santiago, or with his mother in Cape Cod, where he watched her drown her own sorrows about his sexuality, and the affair his father had had years ago, in gin. Eventually his mother reconciled herself to Neil’s “lifestyle,” as she called it. His father didn’t even attend Neil’s funeral, years later, and Santiago knew he was right not to expect anything from parents.
Neil resisted both intimidation and condescension by simply not being interested in them as concepts. No one could awe him, not professors, not fellow students, not visiting lecturers whose accomplishments had won Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. He was not disrespectful in any way, but neither was he servile. He shook everyone’s hand, men and women, looked everyone in the eye. He listened to other people patiently, carefully, and never let his response waver with insecurity. For such a nervous person, Neil was a steady talker, and Santiago observed him carefully, watching how he never expressed a shred of doubt that he did not deserve to be wherever he happened to be at the time, from dives in the Mission where they were surrounded by Mexican immigrants cursing so inventively even Santiago sometimes didn’t know what they were saying, to seminars where they were surrounded by the children of some of the richest people in America. If Neil didn’t know the reference he asked about it, in a tone that made it clear he was not less than anyone else for not knowing it. He wrote it down carefully, and just like Santiago did, sought it out later, to understand at least a piece of it. But he didn’t, as Santiago did, duck his head, ashamed, when he had to ask.
He gave Santiago a crash course in literary theory and brief introductions to many of the political figures and philosophies Santiago was trying desperately to grasp. Unlike his textbooks, which had assumed a certain background knowledge in the subject, Neil found out what Santiago knew and didn’t before explaining anything, over disgusting lunches in the cafeteria or walking around the campus. He could spot holes in his friend’s knowledge and help Santiago fill them, rather than making them feel insurmountable. Because of Neil, and his own hard work, Santiago managed to scrape by his second semester of college with a few C’s and mostly B’s, not quite the triumph he had imagined, but far and away better than he could have hoped for, and it was just good enough to keep his scholarship intact.
After a summer working in New York, he returned to Stanford, eager to shake New York off his skin. It had begun to feel claustrophobic to him; he was learning to love open spaces. Neil had had sex with another man for the first time that summer, a fact that he had told Santiago over the phone but recounted in greater detail when they were physically back in the same place and didn’t have to waste dimes on the conversation. Emboldened by his sexual summer, Neil decided they should join more clubs, perhaps make friends other than each other, while acknowledging, of course, that they would remain each other’s best friend in the most masculine way possible.
Santiago had no problem with this. School had become, not easier, exactly, but he knew how to do it, knew how to study, knew how to rise to the college standard. And he was enjoying it, as the classes became more complex, more focused, more specific. He loved learning about Latin America. It was like when he had been a kid and he had heard Puerto Rico mentioned in West Side Story. There was a thrill of being recognized, of being seen. And besides, it was fascinating, the way Spain had torn through the New World, the way European wars and later American intrigues had found theaters to play out their conflicts, in Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba. His classes were very pro–United States, of course, but he didn’t know that then, when for the first time he was reading about people with names like the ones he’d grown up with, people like him, in some small way. The first time the history of his own world seemed significant.
He took Spanish classes to change his accent, make it purer, less specific to the lazy drawl of the island. He and Neil joined the debate team, attended parties, met girls and boys. Santiago became popular, in a way he had never anticipated, couldn’t have known. His skinny body had started to develop more muscles, more bulk, and his skin had cleared in the California sun, and suddenly what had made him different, other, now made him cool. Stanford was filled with newly liberal girls looking to liberate their bodies and upset their parents through flings with men of color, and Santiago was more than happy to oblige. He lost his own virginity not six months after Neil did, to the twanging thwacking chords of Jimi Hendrix’s “I Don’t Live Today” on the radio. He developed confidence in his classes, participating actively, challenging his fellow students, dropping his own references and recognizing the looks on their faces, the confusion they covered quickly to hide their ignorance.