After the Hurricane(93)
“What is, mija?” Teofila asked, her tone sugary and kind. She was making it clear that she loved Irena, to spite Carmen, but Irena, focused on her goal, did not bask in her mother’s sporadic attention.
“My altar,” Irena said, like they’d been talking about it the whole time. “I’m using herbs and offerings to cleanse Esperanza’s ache. It’s going to help with her illness. She’s been in the hospital for a long long time, so this should help.”
Irena’s declaration that she was practicing black magic was met with complete unsurprised silence. Carmen’s defiant pout had become a look of pity, aimed at Santiago, while Roberto’s smirk had widened.
Santiago wondered when Teofila would explode. She hated magic, called it the devil’s work, spat at Santeria shops and crossed the street when she passed them. Her mother had believed in the old ways, but for Teofila there was no way but Christ, and she would beat the opinion out of anyone who believed otherwise.
Everyone looked at her, waiting for the eruption. But she just looked tired, and closed her eyes, rubbing her forehead. She looked defeated. Santiago had no sympathy for her, would never remember her as anything but a horrible woman, but in that moment he looked at her face and saw his own future, the way his mother would weigh him down, the way he, like Teofila, would carry the weight of her forever.
“Can you pray for Carmen? She’s like the village donkey, some ride is bound to break her,” Roberto said, breaking the moment with his crude cruelty.
It was his mouth that would get him killed. By 1975 he was in prison serving a five-year sentence on a charge of manslaughter for blowing a man’s face off with a shotgun. The man, a member of a rival gang, made a comment during a drug deal that Roberto was awful fat for such a little guy, and Roberto found out where he lived, followed him, knocked on his window as he was parking, and shot him, point-blank, splattering his brains all over his car, in full view of the man’s wife and young child. He served three of the five years of his sentence before starting a prison riot by calling a large Dominican man who had strangled his own father to death pussy for liking beans more than meat. That man responded by strangling Roberto, too, stopping that mouth forever, doubling his own sentence from life to life plus life, infinity.
Teofila smacked her son on the back of his head.
“Fuck you, Robbie,” Carmen said, without heat. She didn’t like Roberto, few did, but she rarely let him anger her.
“I’d have to get in line,” Roberto said, eager to get a response. Carmen just rolled her eyes, stood, and smashed the plate holding the rest of the flan on the ground, and then stalked off to her room, leaving it for them to clean up. Teofila sat, stone-faced, as the rest of the family cleared the table.
As dinners with his family went, Santiago reflected, this one ranked among the more positive he had experienced.
On his way out the door, Isadoro hugged him, warmly. Santiago felt tears gathering in his eyes. His own father hugged him when he came to Puerto Rico, but it was tentative, almost squeamish, as if he didn’t know how. It was nothing like the way he hugged his new children, his new family. His mother, in her last visit, could not bear to be touched, she told him that her skin was paper, and he would crumple her. When was the last time he had had physical contact with anyone?
Isadoro stepped back and reached into his pocket, pulling out a wad of bills. Junior blushed, but took it, smiling gratefully.
“Bless you, son,” Isadoro said, and Santiago wished he believed in God, like Isadoro did, even like Teofila did. He wished he believed in magic and Santeria, like Irena did, or in his dick, the way Roberto did, or in love, like Carmen did, or in cartoons, like Hermando did. But all he believed in was himself, his own ability to keep going, to face the cold of the night and the cold of the world, and walk on.
Sixteen
The road from Ponce, nestled into the coast, to San Sebastián, a little town in the interior of the northwest of the island, takes Elena from the dry forest, still rich with trees and dotted with cacti, to the wetter, slightly cooler mountains, jutting up in lush vine-curled little green bumps. Elena has read that this is what earned the municipality its nickname, El Pepino, that the settlers believed the hills and mountains looked like cucumbers. To her, they just look like mountains, and she wonders at the whimsy of these Spanish colonialists.
She had thought that this area would look different, that somehow it would be like going back in time, the way her aunt had talked about it. But really, it looks just like the rest of the island, peppered with branded fast-food outposts and car dealerships and strips of shops.
The island is far from overpopulated. She never remembers seeing it crowded, and she knows, from the news, that people are fleeing now, packing up their things and moving to Florida. Soon these places will have even fewer people, which doesn’t seem possible, she sees no one. It is such a stark difference from New York that she cannot believe it, sometimes, how few people there are, how empty the roads seem, unless she hits traffic, how isolated the houses. She passes fields of cows and the occasional single horse, grazing placidly under the gaze of the sun. She passes chickens, molting chicks following hens in bobbing lines, showy roosters puffing their neck feathers. She passes seas of greenery and flowers, and cement houses and beauty salons and roadside restaurants and signs telling her to sign up with Claro for internet services and reminding her that Coca-Cola is pa’todo, the adds mimicking the Puerto Rican habit of cutting the r and the a off para.