An Island Like You Read online

  To my family here

  and on the Island

  “The Truth must baffle gradually

  Or every man be blind —”

  — from Emily Dickinson’s

  Poem Number 1129

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Day in the Barrio

  Bad Influence

  Arturo’s Flight

  Beauty Lessons

  Catch the Moon

  An Hour with Abuelo

  The One Who Watches

  Matoa’s Mirror

  Don José of La Mancha

  Abuela Invents the Zero

  A Job for Valentín

  Home to El Building

  White Balloons

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also Available

  Copyright

  You ride it out on a wave of sound

  pouring from the cinder-block jukebox of El Building,

  with stereos blasting salsas from open windows,

  where men in phosphorescent white T-shirts

  hang over the sills, tossing piropos

  down to the girls going somewhere in a hurry,

  fanning the sidewalk heat with their swinging skirts,

  crossing single file over the treacherous bridge

  of a wino’s legs at his daily post.

  And Cheo, the bodega man, sweeps the steps

  to his store and tells the doubting woman

  with hands on her hips that green bananas

  are hard to get. Everyone knows he skims.

  Still, Cheo’s is the best place for fresh codfish,

  plantains, and gossip.

  At day’s end,

  you scale the seven flights to an oasis on the roof,

  high above the city noise, where you can think

  to the rhythms of your own band. Discordant notes rise

  with the traffic at five, mellow to a bolero at sundown.

  Keeping company with the pigeons, you watch the people below,

  flowing in currents on the street where you live,

  each one alone in a crowd,

  each one an island like you.

  — Judith Ortiz Cofer

  When I was sent to spend the summer at my grandparents’ house in Puerto Rico, I knew it was going to be strange, I just didn’t know how strange. My parents insisted that I was going to go either to a Catholic girls’ retreat or to my mother’s folks on the island. Some choice. It was either breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the Sisters of Charity in a convent somewhere in the woods — far from beautiful downtown Paterson, New Jersey, where I really wanted to spend my summer — or arroz y habichuelas with the old people in the countryside of my parents’ Island.

  * * *

  My whole life, I had seen my grandparents only once a year when we went down for a two-week vacation, and frankly, I spent all my time at the beach with my cousins and let the adults sit around drinking their hot café con leche and sweating, gossiping about people I didn’t know. This time there would be no cousins to hang around with — vacation time for the rest of the family was almost three months away. It was going to be a long hot summer.

  Did I say hot? When I stepped off that airplane in San Juan, it was like I had opened an oven door. I was immediately drenched in sweat, and felt like I was breathing water. To make matters worse, there were Papá Juan, Mamá Ana, and about a dozen other people waiting to hug me and ask me a million questions in Spanish — not my best language. The others were vecinos, neighbors who had nothing better to do than come to the airport to pick me up in a caravan of cars. My friends from Central High would have died laughing if they had seen the women with their fans going back and forth across their shiny faces fighting over who was going to take my bags, and who was going to sit next to whom in the cars for the fifteen-minute drive home. Someone put a chubby brown baby on my lap, and even though I tried to ignore her, she curled up around me like a koala bear and went to sleep. I felt her little chest going up and down and I made my breath match hers. I sat in the back of Papá Juan’s un-air-conditioned subcompact in between Doña This and Doña That, practicing Zen. I had been reading about it in a magazine on the airplane, about how to lower your blood pressure by concentrating on your breathing, so I decided to give it a try. My grandmother turned around with a worried look on her face and said, “Rita, do you have asthma? Your mother didn’t tell me.”

  Before I could say anything, everybody in the car started talking at once, telling asthma stories. I continued to take deep breaths, but it didn’t help. By the time we got to Mamá Ana’s house, I had a pounding headache. I excused myself from my welcoming committee, handed the damp baby (she was really cute) over to her grandmother, and went to lie down in the room where Papá Juan had put my bags.

  Of course, there was no AC. The window was thrown wide open, and right outside, perched on a fence separating our house from the neighbors’ by about six inches, there was a red rooster. When I looked at him, he started screeching at the top of his lungs. I closed the window, but I could still hear him crowing; then someone turned on a radio, loud. I put a pillow over my head and decided to commit suicide by sweating to death. I must have dozed off, because when I opened my eyes, I saw my grandfather sitting on a chair outside my window, which had been opened again. He was stroking the rooster’s feathers and seemed to be whispering something in his ear. He finally noticed me sitting in a daze on the edge of my four-poster bed, which was about ten feet off the ground.

  “You were dreaming about your boyfriend,” he said to me. “It was not a pleasant dream. No, I don’t think it was muy bueno.”

  Great. My mother hadn’t told me that her father had gone senile. But I had been dreaming about Johnny Ruiz, one of the reasons I had been sent away for the summer. Just a coincidence, I decided. But what about privacy? Had I or had I not closed the window in my room?

  “Papá,” I said assertively, “I think we need to talk.”

  “There is no need to talk when you can see into people’s hearts,” he said, setting the rooster on my window ledge. “This is Ramón. He is a good rooster and makes the hens happy and productive, but Ramón has a little problem that you will soon notice. He cannot tell time very accurately. To him, day is night and night is day. It is all the same to him, and when the spirit moves him, he sings. This is not a bad thing in itself, entiendes? But it sometimes annoys people. Entonces, I have to come and calm him down.”

  I could not believe what I was hearing. It was like I was in a Star Trek rerun where reality is being controlled by an alien, and you don’t know why weird things are happening all around you until the end of the show.

  Ramón jumped into my room and up on my bed, where he spread his wings and crowed like a madman.

  “He is welcoming you to Puerto Rico,” my grandfather said. I decided to go sit in the living room.

  “I have prepared you a special tea for your asthma.” Mamá Ana came in carrying a cup of some foul-smelling green stuff.

  “I don’t have asthma,” I tried to explain. But she had already set the cup in my hands and was on her way to the TV.

  “My telenovela comes on at this hour,” she announced.

  Mamá Ana turned the volume way up as the theme music came on, with violins wailing like cats mating. I had always suspected that all my Puerto Rican relatives were a little bit deaf. She sat in a rocking chair right next to the sofa where I was lying down. I was still feeling like a wet noodle from the heat.

  “Drink your guarapo while it’s still hot,” she insisted, her eyes glued to the TV screen, where a girl was crying about something.

  “Pobrecita,” my grandmother said sadly, “her miserable husband left her without a penny
, and she’s got three little children and one on the way.”

  “Oh, God,” I groaned. It was really going to be The Twilight Zone around here. Neither one of the old guys could tell the difference between fantasy and reality — Papá with his dream-reading and Mamá with her telenovelas. I had to call my mother and tell her that I had changed my mind about the convent.

  I was going to have to locate a telephone first, though — AT&T had not yet sold my grandparents on the concept of high-tech communications. Letters were still good enough for them, and a telegram when someone died. The nearest phone was at the house of a neighbor, a nice fat woman who watched you while you talked. I had tried calling a friend last summer from her house. There had been a conversation going on in the same room where I was using the phone, a running commentary on what I was saying in English as understood by her granddaughter. They had both thought that eavesdropping on me was a good way to practice their English. My mother had explained that it was not malicious. It was just that people on the Island did not see as much need for privacy as people who lived on the mainland. “Puerto Ricans are friendlier. Keeping secrets among friends is considered offensive,” she had told me.

  My grandmother explained the suffering woman’s problems in the telenovela. She’d had to get married because the man she loved was a villain who had forced her to prove her love for him. “Tú sabes como. You know how.” Then he had kept her practically a prisoner, isolated from her own familia. Ay, bendito, my grandmother exclaimed as the evil husband came home and started demanding food on the table and a fresh suit of clothes. He was going out, he said, with los muchachos. Pero no. My grandmother knew better than that. He had another woman. She was sure of it. She spoke to the crying woman on the TV: “Mira,” she advised her, “open your eyes and see what is going on. For the sake of your children. Leave this man. Go back home to your mamá. She’s a good woman, although you have hurt her, and she is ill. Perhaps with cancer. But she will take you and the children back.”

  “Ohhh,” I moaned.

  “Sit up and drink your tea, Rita. If you’re not better by tomorrow, I’ll have to take you to my comadre. She makes the best herbal laxatives on the island. People come from all over to buy them — because what ails most people is a clogged system. You clean it out like a pipe, entiendes? You flush it out and then you feel good again.”

  “I’m going to bed,” I announced, even though it was only nine — hours before my usual bedtime. I could hear Ramón crowing from the direction of my bedroom.

  “It’s a good idea to get some rest tonight, hija. Tomorrow Juan has to do a job out by the beach, a woman whose daughter won’t eat or get out of bed. They think it is a spiritual matter. You and I will go with him. I have a craving for crab meat, and we can pick some up.”

  “Pick some up?”

  “Sí, when the crabs crawl out of their holes and into our traps. We’ll take some pots and boil them on the beach. They’ll be sabrosos.”

  “I’m going to bed now,” I repeated like a zombie. I took a running start from the door and jumped on the bed with all my clothes on. Outside my window, Ramón crowed; the neighbor woman called out, “Ana, Ana, do you think she’ll leave him?” while my grandmother yelled back, “No. Pienso que no. She’s a fool for love, that one is.”

  I shut my eyes and tried to fly back to my room at home. When I had my own telephone, I could sometimes sneak a call to Johnny late at night. He had basketball practice every afternoon, so we couldn’t talk earlier. I was desperate to be with him. He was on the varsity team at Eastside High and a very popular guy. That’s how we met: at a game. I had gone with my friend Meli from Central because her boyfriend played for Eastside, too. He was an Anglo, though. Actually, he was Italian but looked Puerto Rican. Neither of the guys was exactly into meeting parents, and our folks didn’t let us go out with anybody whose total ancestry they didn’t know, so Meli and I had to sneak out and meet them after games.

  Dating is not a concept adults in our barrio really “get.” It’s supposed to be that a girl meets a guy from the neighborhood, and their parents went to school together, and everybody knows everybody’s business. But Meli and I were doing all right until Joey and Johnny asked us to spend the night in Joey’s house. The Molieris had gone out of town and we would have the place to ourselves. Meli and I talked about it constantly for days, until we came up with a plan. It was risky, but we thought we could get away with it. We each said we were spending the night at the other’s house. We’d done it a lot of times before, and our mothers never checked on us. They just told us to call if anything went wrong. Well, it turned out Meli’s mom got a case of heartburn that she thought was a heart attack, and her husband called our house. She almost did have one for real when she found out Meli wasn’t there. They called the cops, and woke up everybody they thought we knew. When Meli’s little sister cracked under pressure and mentioned Joey Molieri, all four of them drove over to West Paterson at 2:00 A.M. and pounded on the door like crazy people. The guys thought it was a drug bust. But I knew, and when I looked at Meli and saw the look of terror on her face, I knew she knew what we were in for.

  We were put under house arrest after that, not even allowed to make phone calls, which I think is against the law. Anyway, it was a mess. That’s when I was given the two choices for my summer. And naturally I picked the winner — spending three months with two batty old people and one demented rooster.

  The worst part is that I didn’t deserve it. My mother interrogated me about what had happened between me and that boy, as she called him. Nothing. I admit that I was thinking about it. Johnny had told me that he liked me and wanted to take me out, but he usually dated older girls and he expected them to have sex with him. Apparently, he and Joey had practiced their speeches together, because Meli and I compared notes in the bathroom at one point, and she had heard the same thing from him.

  But our parents had descended on us while we were still discussing it. Would I do it? To have a boyfriend like Johnny Ruiz? He can go out with any girl, white, black, or Puerto Rican. But he says I’m mature for almost fifteen. After the mess, I snuck a call to him one night when my mother had forgotten to unplug the phone and lock it up like she’d been doing whenever she had to leave me alone in the apartment. Johnny said he thinks my parents are nuts, but he’s willing to give me another chance when I come back in the fall.

  “We’ll be getting up real early tomorrow.” My grandmother was at my door. Barged in without knocking, of course. “We’ll be up with the chickens, so we can catch the crabs when the sun brings them out. Está bien?” Then she came to sit on my bed, which took some doing, since it was almost as tall as she.

  * * *

  “I am glad that you are here, mi niña.” She grabbed my head and kissed me hard on my cheek. She smelled like coffee with boiled milk and sugar, which the natives drink by the gallon in spite of the heat. I was thinking that my grandmother didn’t remember that I was almost fifteen years old and I would have to remind her.

  But then she got serious and said to me, “I was your age when I met Juan. I married him a year later and started having babies. They’re scattered all over los Estados Unidos now. Did I ever tell you that I wanted to be a professional dancer? At your age I was winning contests and traveling with a mambo band. Do you dance, Rita? You should, sabes? It’s hard to be unhappy when your feet are moving to music.”

  I was more than a little surprised by what Mamá Ana said about wanting to be a dancer and marrying at fifteen, and wouldn’t have minded hearing more, but then Papá Juan came into my room too. I guessed it was going to be a party, so I sat up and turned on the light.

  “Where is my bottle of holy water, Ana?” he asked.

  “On the altar in our room, señor,” she replied, “where it always is.”

  Of course, I thought, the holy water was on the altar, where everybody keeps their holy water. I must have made a funny noise, because both of them turned their eyes to me, looking very concerne
d.

  “Is it that asthma again, Rita?” My grandmother felt my forehead. “I noticed you didn’t finish your tea. I’ll go make you some more as soon as I help your abuelo find his things for tomorrow.”

  “I’m not sick. Please. Just a little tired,” I said firmly, hoping to get my message across. But I had to know. “What is it he’s going to do tomorrow, exorcise demons out of somebody, or what?”

  They looked at each other then as if I was crazy.

  “You explain it to her, Ana,” he said. “I have to prepare myself for this trabajo.”

  My grandmother came back to the bed, climbed up on it, and began telling me how Papá was a medium, a spiritist. He had special gifts, facultades, which he had discovered as a young man, that allowed him to see into people’s hearts and minds through prayers and in dreams.

  “Does he sacrifice chickens and goats?” I had heard about these voodoo priests who went into trances and poured blood and feathers all over everybody in secret ceremonies. There was a black man from Haiti in our neighborhood who people said could even call back the dead and make them his zombie slaves. There was always a dare on to go to his door on some excuse and try to see what was in his basement apartment, but nobody I knew had ever done it. What had my own mother sent me into? I would probably be sent back to Paterson as one of the walking dead.

  “No, Dios mío, no!” Mamá Ana shouted, and crossed herself and kissed the cross on her neck chain. “Your grandfather works with God and His saints, not with Satan!”

  “Excuse me,” I said, thinking that I really should have been given an instruction manual before being sent here on my own.

  “Tomorrow you will see how Juan helps people. This muchacha that he has been summoned to work on has stopped eating. She does not want to speak to her mother, who is the one who called us. Your grandfather will see what is making her spirit sick.”

  “Why don’t they take her to a …” I didn’t know the word for shrink in Spanish, so I just said, “to a doctor for crazy people.”

  “Because not everyone who is sad or troubled is crazy. If it is their brain that is sick, that is one thing, but if it is their soul that is in pain — then Juan can sometimes help. He can contact the guides, that is, spirits who are concerned about the ailing person, and they can sometimes show him what needs to be done. ¿Entiendes?”