Juan felt unwelcome at first. He had arrived from the island recently, while most of the men there had spent fifteen or twenty years scuttling under the skyscrapers, struggling not to perish in the freezing winds that wrapped their thin flannel overcoats around their bodies like paper envelopes. Soon he found them friendly enough, however. Puerto Ricans were as close as ticks; they stuck together like dandruff, and left their doors open to friends in need. Juan was strong, and he was always ready to help out—he carried furniture in and out of tenements, pulled vegetable carts when the horses got sick, carried the ill to the hospital in his arms when the ambulance didn’t arrive.
In Harlem, sometimes three families shared the same room, together with rats and cockroaches. They survived thanks to ron pitorro—a strong, amber rum distilled in bathtubs—and la bolita, the illegal lottery everyone was always dreaming about. La bolita gave people hope, and soon Juan became a bolitero and had a profitable business going. When people dreamed about spiders, scorpions, or beetles, they ran to Juan, who interpreted what their dreams meant and sold them a number.
It was because of la bolita and its consequences that Juan eventually returned to the island. Marta Gómez was a beautiful tabaquera, and one day she went to hear Juan reading Les Miserables. He had been named official reader because he was very tall and could be heard more clearly than his co-workers above the crowd. Juan had a university education and he loved novels; he would explain their meaning to the tabaqueros. Novels were very similar to dreams. In both, you escaped menaces unscathed and often found solutions to your problems.
Marta asked Juan to tell her the meaning of a dream she had had: A chicken was pecking away at a handful of corn in the yard of her old family house in Naranjito, near the mountains of Barranquitas, and she laid two eggs. A cat appeared out of nowhere and pounced on her. The chicken started cackling like mad, but couldn’t get rid of the miniature tiger. Soon the chicken was too weak to run and collapsed under the paws of the cat, who then proceeded to suck the eggs dry.
Juan looked at Marta, who was chubby and rosy-cheeked, with pale white skin the color of jasmine in moonlight, and he fell in love with her. “There is a man stalking you; you must be careful and not go out alone. Meanwhile, play the double zero, since the chicken laid two eggs. If la bolita hits your number and you win, I’ll help you protect the money and nobody will steal it.” Marta did as Juan said, and when la bolita hit the double zero and she won ten thousand dollars, she immediately put it in the bank under Juan’s name, without telling her parents or anyone else about it.
Marta’s family came from the mountains and tried to pass for Spanish. If you were from Naranjito or Barranquitas, towns high in the cordillera which shone like hives of glowworms at night, your eyes might be blue and your hair honey-colored, and this made a huge difference when you were looking for a job in New York. But if you came from the coast, there was a good chance that you looked like Juan’s mother, Altagracia, and it was more difficult to find work.
Juan didn’t mind being called a spic, and he never denied his origins. But he believed that if he asked Marta to marry him, she would think he was doing it because of the ten thousand dollars she had put under his name in the bank. Months passed and he didn’t dare confess his love. Finally, one day the owner of a placita in East Harlem that sold fresh vegetables and fruit went to see Marta’s father and asked for her hand. The father was elated—Don Gúzman owned his own business and his daughter would lack for nothing, and he immediately said yes. But when Marta found out about it, she ran to where Juan was carefully ripping the veins out of a tobacco leaf and said, “If you don’t marry me right now, I’ll throw myself from the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn.”
Juan was impressed, and they immediately went to see a judge on Second Avenue and Thirtieth Street, who married them in their tobacco workers’ overalls. That evening, however, when they went to see Don Roberto, Marta’s father, to tell him the good news, he went berserk. “But this man is tar black! Have you gone crazy? No one in our family has a drop of bad blood in them. Blacks are lazy, filthy descendants of sugar-cutting slaves. Our people are from the mountains; we’re civilized, hard workers. Go to the judge this minute and have him annul the marriage.”
But Marta was strong-willed, and she withstood the assault. Her father was in the kitchen serving himself a ron palo viejo, and she told him, her hands on her hips, “We’re from New York now, Father; there are no mountains and no sugar coast here, and it’s cold as hell. The color of our skin doesn’t keep us any warmer than Juan’s. I’m his wife now and that’s that.” Marta’s father was peeling a lemon at that moment to put in his drink, and he began to hurl insults at her, calling her a whore, headstrong as a mule—didn’t she understand she was throwing her life down the drain? Marta tried to calm him and Juan put his arms around her to protect her, but it was too late. Don Roberto suddenly turned around to face his daughter and plunged the knife deep into her ribs.
When Juan finished his story, there were tears in his eyes. Until the end of his days he cried whenever he spoke of Marta, and I respected the memory of his beloved.
Once back on the island, Juan established contact with his socialist friends, and it was then that he met Diamantino Márquez at one of their meetings. Diamantino was just a kid with a chip on his shoulder then. “I never would have guessed that one day he’d have the guts to defy Adolfo Bracale, the famous theater agent. But the kid was tough, and he stood up to Bracale. He wasn’t just a reporter scribbling verses as his godfather had said.” When he got back from the States he had published several articles in the press denouncing the producer’s corrupt dealings, in which famous stars came to the island with hoodlums like Molinari escorting them to extort bigger payments from the theater owners. After the tragedy at Teatro Tapia, Bracale served several months in prison. He was finally set free by the sugar entrepreneurs who had put up the money for his business ventures in the first place.
Diamantino wanted to make his own place in the sun, not in the shadow of his famous father. That was why he defended political independence so fiercely. Everything he did, his poetry and his journalism—he always wrote about patriotic themes in El Diario—even his violin playing—he often played danzas which he had arranged himself from the original piano versions—were ways of reaffirming his political ideals vis-à-vis Don Eduardo Márquez, who was always compromising.
Juan knew all this, and he agreed with me that that was why Diamantino became a friend of Los Tiznados, the suicide riders who hid in the hills. “Our island is so small it can hold no secrets, Masha,” Juan told me, “and many people saw Diamantino ride with them, but they kept it from Don Eduardo. Los Tiznados remind me of my tobacco-worker friends at El Morito, the cigar factory in New York—only their faces are blackened with sugarcane soot rather than tobacco grime. They are willing to die for political independence, but I don’t agree with them. What do they want political independence for? So hacendados like Don Pedro can exploit us all the more?
“The important thing is to be independent from poverty, Masha, to empower the working class! It’s better to have ‘La Internacional’ as our national anthem instead of ‘La Borinquena,’ Morel Campos’s aristocratic danza. I can just see it—Don Pedro as president of the republic, whip in hand, making ninety percent of our population, black and white, plow his fields like oxen, after making sure that we remain illiterate. By that time, Diamantino and Los Tiznados will be mercilessly wiped out, because that’s what happens to idealists in a republic.
“I’m a warrior—a strike to me is like a war,” Juan said. “And in every war there are bound to be casualties. I know that Los Tiznados won’t stop at anything, that they are willing to kill for what they believe, and I don’t have a problem with that. But I don’t believe in wasting bullets, and one should only shoot for the right reasons.”
35
WHEN JUAN HAD READ Dandré’s ad in the paper for a shoemaker to repair the dancers’ slippers, he had been curious about t
he company. He was a great admirer of Russia and knew quite a bit about it from the tabaqueros’ readings at El Morito, so he went to the Hotel Malatrassi and answered the ad. Then Dandré left for the States and Diamantino Márquez joined Madame’s troupe. Juan was full of enthusiasm; he knew who Diamantino was and admired the young man.
We met almost the same day Juan joined the troupe. He had never seen a woman who was as big as a man before, and there was a down-to-earth frankness about me that appealed to him. I always say what I think; I have no hair on my tongue. People may not like me, but they know what they’re getting. Because of my awkwardness I was never given important roles onstage, but it never made me resentful. Like the proverbial goose girl, I went about solving everybody’s problems, distributing clean towels, bringing trays with food or pitchers with juice or cold water to the other dancers, putting salve on the girls’ bunions, or heating water for their aching feet. And I had one quality which surpassed all the others: my loyalty. I would have done anything for my mistress. Juan realized he needed someone like me by his side, someone who could be his faithful partner in business and in life.
After our performance at the Tapia, Juan heard about our impending trip to the interior of the island, and when Madame asked him if he would come (we would need our slippers repaired constantly, since we wouldn’t be able to buy new ones on the road) he decided to join us. It would give us the opportunity to get to know each other better, he said, and the adventure was enticing. He agreed to close his shoe-repair shop temporarily and join our troupe.
When we left for Arecibo, we were still just good friends. Then the ordeal of seeing Madame fall in love with Diamantino during our stay at Dos Ríos pushed me into despair. Madame made me take charge of the rehearsals of the Bacchanale because she wanted time to be by herself—or so she said. I had to go into town every day from Dos Ríos to supervise the dancers. I was merciless with them: jousting, disciplining, ordering them into obedience, supposedly so that they would grow professionally, but really because I had to take out my frustrations on someone. I was very successful; when it was time for the performance, the company was dancing better than ever—but I was miserable.
Then Diamantino and Madame disappeared during the opening night at the Teatro Oliver, and I almost went out of my mind. For a whole week I hardly slept or ate. Juan, fortunately, was still with us. When Don Pedro put me on the train and I returned to San Juan with the rest of the dancers, he accompanied us. I stayed at the Malatrassi with the girls, where the other members of the company were expecting us.
I decided to renew my visits to La Nueva Suela. Talking with Juan made me feel better, and I wanted to discuss with him what we should do now. The girls were restless and I was worried about them.
But when I came into the shop, Juan didn’t want to talk. He was sitting at his work stool in front of the lathe, and I remember he had a lady’s shoe on the block and was nailing down a new leather sole on it. He flashed a wide smile, put his arms around my waist, and made me sit on his lap. “I missed you like fresh meat misses salt, my duck,” he said. I laughed because I knew exactly what he meant. My adoptive father was poor and we didn’t have an icebox, either. Salt was a luxury, but it was the only way we could keep meat from spoiling when we managed to have some. “And I missed you more than the onion loves the skillet,” I answered.
Juan pulled me down and I felt a searing heat on the in-sides of my legs. Then he kissed me on the mouth, and my arms became two soft petals which curled about his neck of their own accord. Juan began to unbutton my blouse and soon had me naked on his lap. I straddled his body and everything became confused—the pain of pleasure and the pleasure of pain as he entered me. I was tumbling down a well which exited at the other end of the world, and never even looked back.
I didn’t love him, but I couldn’t live the rest of my life like dead coral, with brine washing in and out of my heart. To be the beloved, instead of the exhausted lover; to be the requited, instead of the forgiven—from then on, I lived in the shadow of my coming happiness, and looked forward to the day when I would no longer be alone.
My good luck didn’t last long, however. A few days later, I went back to the shoe-repair store and was surprised to discover there was nobody there. The store was locked and all the windows were shut; the sign above the door—a laced boot that reminded me of my grandmother in Ligovo, because she had a pair just like it—flapped forlornly in the wind. I sat on the sidewalk and waited for Juan all afternoon, but he didn’t come. I went back to the Malatrassi alone when it was almost dark. A week later, Juan was still missing.
36
“IN SAN JUAN I’D heard rumors about Los Tiznados being very active in the countryside, but I couldn’t be sure if they were true. However, when we arrived at Arecibo, the town was abuzz with news of the terrorists’ activities. Wherever we went, people were whispering about them. At first I didn’t pay much attention because I was too busy mending the dancers’ shoes. Madame had loaded me down with work and I had very little time to myself. Nonetheless, there were miles of sugar-white sand beaches near to the town where I took Masha for long walks as often as I could. I didn’t care about the ‘marvelous beauties of the landscape,’ as Masha kept saying. I kept scheming how to sweet-talk her into making love on the sand dunes, but I had no luck.
“After waiting for an anxious week to get the permits to the theater, the night when the company would perform the Bacchanale finally arrived. I was ordered by Madame to wait under the trapdoor with a straw rug to catch her as she fell. But someone made a mistake, and Diamantino fell through the trap also. Suddenly I found myself surrounded by masked men who elbowed me out of the way and took Madame and Diamantino prisoner. Then Los Tiznados forced me at gunpoint to go back to the theater and threatened that if I told on them, I would be dead. The whole thing was crazy, considering the island was occupied by military troops. But the rebels were mad to begin with. They were capable of assaulting a machine gun with a machete, so I did as I was told.
“I accompanied Masha and the rest of the girls back to San Juan on the train. I was glad to be there: they were so distressed, they probably would have lost their way and gotten off at the wrong station. Masha sobbed disconsolately the whole trip; it took all my patience to take her mind off her beloved Madame. I bought her freshly squeezed guarapo, marrayo de coco, ajonjoli, pasta de batata—all the humble delicacies of the country—which I knew Masha liked because she had a sweet tooth. But nothing worked—passionate tears still rolled down her cheeks like breakers. The girls slumped on their seats and didn’t even look out the windows at the landscape. All they did was bad-mouth Madame and plan how they were going to get off the island. Several of them had met rich gentlemen in San Juan who had offered to be their mentors, and they were seriously considering them. The company would break up, but nobody cared.
“When we got to the Malatrassi I sent for Lyubovna and talked to her in the lobby. ‘Please take care of Masha,’ I said. ‘She’s suffering, but I’m sure her malady is curable. Fortunately, the heart is the only human organ that regenerates itself.’
“The next day Masha came to visit me at my shop. I was tired of being put off and couldn’t wait any longer. I had made up my mind to take the Russian fortress by storm, and that same afternoon Masha, the unapproachable Russian amazon, fell into my arms.
“Things were going well with us, and Masha came to see me every day at the shop; we were happier than a pair of footsies in comfortable brogues. Then something unexpected happened. Masha had just left for the Malatrassi after our rendezvous one evening. It was pouring, and I had given her my leather apron to protect herself on the way. I was about to put out the light and get into bed when I heard a knock at the door. I opened it and cringed with fear: Molinari was standing there, dressed in buzzard black and with a gun in his hand.
“‘Madame has sent for you’ was his cryptic message. ‘You’re to go with me to the mountains.’ I nodded silently and tiptoed around my room pi
cking up a few things. At the last minute I took a pair of toe shoes I had just finished lining and put them into my duffel bag. I didn’t say a word, afraid I’d whip up the storm even more.
“A pair of horses held by a masked man were waiting for us at the door. We got on them and set out immediately toward Arecibo, where we would turn left and begin our ascent of the mountains.
“Once we arrived at Otoao I was told I could go wherever I pleased, but that wasn’t very far because of the remoteness of the place—the settlement was nothing more than a handful of shacks nestled between jagged peaks. My horse was taken away from me, so even though I was told I could go where I wanted, I was still a prisoner. I walked about reconnoitering the place and saw several groups of men with machetes at the waist playing dice on the dirt floor; a foursome was playing dominoes on top of an empty crate. Huge boulders with strange inscriptions on them stood everywhere, so that the place had a mysterious look about it. They protruded from the ground like dolmens, with animal shapes and human faces carved on them that looked strangely alive as they stared out of the wet mist.
“I went looking for Madame and Diamantino, and as I didn’t find them, I asked one of the men who was sharpening his machete on a flint stone. He pointed out a hut at the edge of camp, and at that moment I saw Madame coming out the door. She looked haggard, with deep circles under her eyes, but she was smiling. Diamantino came out after her. They were far away from where I stood, but I could see them embrace. Then Diamantino got on his horse and he joined Bienvenido down the road. A river could be heard in the distance and I wandered over toward it. It ran between blue boulders and looked inviting; I took off my clothes and dove in behind a bend in the river, hidden by some tropical fern. The water was wonderful, cold and clear.
“That afternoon there was a showdown between Diamantino and Bienvenido after they got back from their reconnaissance mission. The two young men had been reining in their animosity, but they couldn’t control themselves any longer. They must have been arguing on the road about something, because as soon as they entered camp, they leapt off their horses and were at each other’s throats in seconds. ‘You’ve betrayed us miserably,’ Bienvenido spit at Diamantino. ‘You should have given us cover and you didn’t fire a shot. You’re still a Tiznado, whether you like it or not!’ (Later I learned there had been a skirmish at Cerro del Prieto, a mountain nearby, and Diamantino had hung back.) Diamantino’s answer was a punch in the gut. They kicked and twisted each other’s arms, tried to strangle each other and poke each other’s eyes out. The fight continued for what seemed like hours.
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