The Accidental Native

by J. L. Torres

  If I were to meet Julia, not as her reclaimed son but a stranger, I’d say she wasn’t a religious person. But I’d be wrong. Perhaps not religious, but as I recalled her at Rita’s funeral, and as I walked beside her during this procession, my birth mother’s face was lost in spiritual contemplation. I knew that this woman had been through trials from which only faith in something could have delivered her. When I saw her in this light, she always seemed sad and alone.

  When they reached the other replica of the saint in Las Carreras, those carrying the statue lowered the platform three times, as if he were bowing. This gesture done, they made a circular pass of the replica and returned to the town. Because this was the women’s procession, the women followed immediately after the statue of St. James; they were followed by the various carnivalesque characters, showing more decorum than the previous evening. Behind them was an SUV waving the red and yellow flag of Santiago and the tri-colored flag of the town.

  A disorganized mass of people marched behind the official procession, with only one thing in common: the direction toward the town square. Some marchers stood out, like the older man who had strapped around his shoulders a bouncing paper maché horse. The caballeros on beautiful horses, clip-clopping on the asphalt and flamboyant cross-dressed locas with huge umbrellas and bouncing derrieres. Then came a wave of masks, brilliant and bold, in the afternoon sun. Who’s behind each mask, I wondered. How must it feel, for one day, to lose yourself in anonymity, to be free to play the trickster?

  As the motley congregation approached the town, they grew brasher and livelier. When they arrived, the chanting grew to a high pitch. The religious songs gave way to clapping and strong syncopated rhythms, and the music swelled with the setting of the sun. Around the festival area, everywhere we strolled, clusters of drummers slapped and banged congas, inviting anyone, challenging them, to dance. At one such grouping, seven men lined up behind congas. They had been playing for a while, their tight polos and tees drenched in sweat. Spectators took turns jumping in to battle the drums. Mesmerized, I observed the dancers’ moves, the interplay between dancer and drummers. I didn’t know much about the music, but you could tell these drummers had experience, their love for the drumming undeniable. They had drawn a substantial crowd of enthusiasts.

  An older man, who had been dancing, tipped his baseball cap and bowed to applause and cheers, and, in a flash, I saw Julia, my mother, barefoot in the middle of the circle. My mouth dropped. She gyrated her hips as she approached the drums, bowed her head and then tapped it in reverence and respect to the drums. Easily, she was the whitest person dancing that day. I bent my head down, covered my face with my hand and looked at her through my fingers. She’s going to make a fool of herself, I thought. Be booed or insulted away in mockery. But she shook her hips like a natural. With folded wrists on her hips in a sassy gesture, she shuffled her butt backwards, bounced on her feet quickly to the relentless beat of the drums. She bent and shook shoulders toward the lead conguero, shaking her breasts over his drum.

  He stood up and took off his shirt, presenting a buffed chest and shoulders, biceps and forearms chiseled by years of drumming. Onlookers cheered and laughed as he fastened a bandana around his head. He cracked his fingers, swiveled his neck. Julia rolled her head back in laughter, while rolling her hips. And as I shook my head in amazement, she signaled the drummer back to work with a finger. They battled for a few minutes. Drummer rocking hard riffs, my mother keeping up. She tossed her head back, the lustrous hair wild and free, and after a frenzied onslaught of the congas, she burst out laughing and fanned herself as to say, “I surrender.” And she stopped, to rousing applause and cheers, bowing several times to the conguero, who stood up and slapped her a high five. While she was dancing, an elderly woman wearing a visor had leaned over to me and yelled in Spanish over the music, “Hey, your mom can really dance!”

  As Julia returned to my side, fanning herself, perspiring, she wore a wide, almost panting grin on her face.

  I looked at her, puzzled.

  “What?” she asked, laughing.

  “I didn’t know you could dance bomba,” I said, finally.

  She took a napkin the older woman offered her to wipe her sweat. My comment made her grin disappear.

  As she patted herself, she turned to me seriously and said, “There’s much you don’t know about me, m’ijo.”

  Later that night, back at the condo, we sat out on the balcony, sated from another fine seafood meal, enjoying a bottle of chardonnay and the salty breeze coming in from the sea. She had bought me a vejigante mask. At one point, I put it on to be silly. With the mask on, I played reporter, asked her questions about her “brilliant performance,” holding my wine glass like a mike. She giggled, and played along.

  “I took dance classes at U Penn while at law school,” she said. Her interest in folkloric Puerto Rican dance developed there.

  “You said there’s much your son doesn’t know about you. Can you elaborate?”

  She looked down sadly, took a sip of wine. I peeled off the mask, looking into her eyes now watering up.

  “Maybe some things are better left unsaid,” she said, shrugging.

  “Oh,” I said, surprised. “I didn’t mean for you to get into that.” It was true. I hardly thought about that past anymore. Perhaps I wanted to forget it, too. Make it seem like it never happened. What did it matter, anyway? My mother and I were here today, enjoying our lives together.

  With two fat tears streaming down her cheeks, she looked back at me, straight on. “No, no. You deserve to know.”

  With the bottom of her palms she wiped the tears, sat back on the lounge chair and exhaled sharply, so deeply I thought she wouldn’t have any air left in her lungs. Resting her head at an angle, she gazed out into the horizon of the night sea for what seemed eternity, as if trying to find in the black distance the thread of her story.

  “Your father and I …” she began. “We had this passion that at times scared me. I was young and immature.” She continued shaking her head. “Juanma, he was twenty-eight, and probably even more immature. And, as liberal as he made himself out to be, he was, al fin, a Puerto Rican man. I became pregnant with you, and we both decided to get married, start a family, despite our career plans.

  “I was so scared. I was finishing my first year of law school at UPR, one of a handful of women. My parents had such hopes for me. I had these ambitious dreams. I never hesitated to have you.” She looked at me. “But I was frightened that I would fail at being a mother as well as law student. I started having doubts about your father. Were we really in love, or was it a silly romantic notion to cover up the passion at the heart of our relationship?

  “I was struggling with classes, with your father who had his own pressures working on his doctoral dissertation, with the attitudes of classmates and professors not accustomed to seeing a pregnant woman in the law school. My days were consumed with anger and resentment toward their stupidity. Your father and I would have monumental fights, dragging into the night. I was always tired, worried if I was eating enough, worried if all this tension could affect you in some way. Worried in the many ways a woman in her first pregnancy fears about what can happen.

  “Then, you were born. Both Juanma and I were so happy that day. It seemed that all our troubles had disappeared. You were such a beautiful baby, with those big eyes, such a pleasure to hold. Your father was so tender then. He came with flowers and balloons and all types of things to make me feel comfortable and happy. But after that day, I grew more irritable, lashing at your father for any little thing. I couldn’t sleep and was unable to focus. I’d say I felt like I was in a cloud, numb, but deep down I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t care about anything. I kept thinking, how could I feel this way when I was just blessed with such a beautiful, healthy baby? And I started hating myself for feeling nothing.”

  She started sobbing.

  “You just had the baby blues,” I said, holding her hand.

  S
he gave me a sad nod, biting her lip. Her eyes, all around the sockets, wet with tears.

  “But we didn’t know that. We were so ignorant,” she said, her mouth and face twisted with self-hate and anger.

  “You kept crying and crying,” she said, exploding into heaving sobs. “I couldn’t find a way to make you stop. Maybe you were colicky, who knows. I put you down in the crib, still crying, all red. Crying, screaming, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know. You crying and crying and crying, and me pacing the room, pulling my hair. Yelling at you, ‘Be quiet, please!’ I just wanted you to stop crying, to stop, I was so tired, I wanted sleep, just a few hours of rest, and your father … he … he … found me with the pillow in my hands, standing over the crib.”

  She shoved her face into her hands with a howl that I’m sure the neighbors and the people at the beach must have heard. She wouldn’t meet my eyes, kept crying into her hands, the tears rolling off her hands. I bent over her on the chair, put my good arm around her, and she wailed into my chest. She slipped to her knees.

  “Forgive me, René, por favor, perdóname, hijo.” She repeated this in a groaning voice as she embraced my legs with such intensity that I started to cry.

  Over coffee, she told me how my father freaked when he saw her gripping that pillow over my crying body. He seized the pillow and pushed her to the floor, yelling at her.

  “His eyes said it all,” she said. “In a flash, they switched from shock, anger, contempt, disgust, to fear and sadness.”

  She shook her head, her eyes shut.

  “‘What kind of mother does that?’ he kept screaming. If he had only looked into my eyes, my heart, he would have known I was not well. But, in his mind, he was being the good father, protecting you.

  “‘You’re not fit to be a mother for my son,’ he yelled. He grabbed you in his arms, cradling you as you continued crying, and ran downstairs, and drove to his mother’s. I ran after him, pleading with him, screaming and beating on the closed door like the mad woman I had become.

  “That was the last time I saw you until that day at the cemetery.

  “Juanma cancelled the wedding plans. While I was walking in a daze, trying to understand what was happening to me, his family’s lawyers pushed the papers on me and made me sign over custody of you to Juanma. My parents advised me against it, and to this day they can’t believe I did it, but I did it because I believed I was an unfit mother, that there was something flawed with my maternal instincts. What kind of mother tries to suffocate her baby for crying? Who does that? At the signing, your father told me to forget you, to never contact you or him ever again. I nodded yes and walked away.

  “I withdrew from UPR law school. With the help of some professors, I transferred to U Penn Law, and while there, I learned that your father had married Magda, and she had become your adopted mother. That night I walked the streets of Philadelphia feeling such an engulfing emptiness that I thought I’d disappear into oblivion. I passed a dance studio, which was at street level, and wandered in just to sit down. It was African dance, and the beat was inviting.

  “The instructor, a black woman with wavy hair, must have seen my sad face. Instead of throwing me out, she shouted from the front, ‘Come join us.’

  “And, I did. I danced, stomping my feet on those mats like I wanted to smash through the floor and reach a part of me gone forever. I kept dancing through that semester, that year and afterward. I danced until my muscles ached and knew I was alive. I danced to forget. I danced and danced. Always remembering, in my heart, what Beverly, our instructor, would tell us: ‘When the music changes, ladies, so does the dance.’”

  Thirty

  * * *

  Lolita Lebrón departed the island she loved and defended so fiercely on an early August morning. My mother was devastated. She kept shaking her head, repeating she could not believe it. Lebrón was ninety, yet my mother and others found it difficult to accept that her days on earth had run out.

  “How does one replace an icon, an everyday inspiration?” she asked me.

  “You can’t,” I answered.

  The organizers of her funeral asked my mother to deliver one of many eulogies, which she felt honored to do, but not without some trepidation.

  “I’ll start crying halfway through it, I know it,” she said, shaking her head, tears already rolling down her cheeks. “She was my mentor, my strength, like another mother to me.”

  At the Ateneo Puertorriqueño, my mother gave one of the most stirring eulogies among many. She had to stop a few times, to catch her breath, to fight back the tears, but her words were personal, full of love and respect for a woman who, as my mother said, had received deserved praise for her commitment and courage from Puerto Ricans of all political stripes.

  Crowded among the many packed into the building, I could see Lebrón in her polished wooden coffin, her beautiful white hair covered by a lace shawl, her corpse surrounded in pink fabric.

  My mother finished her remarks with “Viva Lolita Lebrón” and “Viva Puerto Rico Libre.”

  Those phrases would echo throughout the day, along with the constant chant of “Se siente, se siente, Lolita está presente,” meaning “We feel it, we feel it, Lolita is present.” The phrase was intended to mean something deeper, that Lebrón’s spirit, her dedication to the movement for independence, was still alive.

  I did not share that optimism. I looked around and could not help thinking the movement was literally aging, dying even. My mother, and others like her, represented the type of undying sacrifice and commitment necessary for its success, but they were in short supply. As my mother gave her eulogy, my heart filled with pride for her, a woman who understood love and sacrifice firsthand. Through my mother I had learned to respect and understand Lolita Lebrón, to appreciate the leadership qualities of Puerto Rican women in the vanguard. Exceptional women, extraordinary individuals. But even with this type of leadership, the masses languished under a boulder of inertia and indifference.

  So it was that as I walked with my mother and hundreds of others along with Lebrón’s casket, toward the cemetery, listening to the militant version of “La Borinqueña,” I sensed yet another nail in the coffin of the independence movement, and that along with Lebrón’s corpse, the issue was again being buried.

  After the funeral, Mom and I found ourselves lunching at Amadeus. Not very hungry, we picked at our food. The conversation naturally turned to the future of Puerto Rico.

  “Love for your family or love for your cultural heritage,” I told her, referring to the status issue, “for some it always comes down to one choice.”

  I looked at her, as she shook her head. “Sacrifice and hard work. That’s what’s needed, and it’s missing.”

  During a pause in our conversation, I blurted out: “I really don’t care which side wins.”

  Before she would have been outraged. But perhaps my mother was tired of fighting, of this polemic, or the sadness in her heart had punctured her combative spirit. Maybe she had mellowed. She looked at me, waiting for the necessary explanation.

  I smiled and shrugged. “I can live with statehood or independence. Anything but this mess we have now.”

  “The worst of two worlds,” she joked, laughing softly. “We agree there, m’ijo.”

  She bounced her cigarette lighter on the table. “The U.S. keeps saying, ‘It’s up to the Puerto Rican people.’ What a cop out,” she said, disgusted.

  She set her fork down, leaving her dessert half unfinished. After running her tongue over her front teeth, she threw herself back on the chair as she reached for a cigarette. She made a sign for the check.

  “The U.S. needs to play parent and give the island some tough love.”

  We both had decided to attend El Grito this year. This time around, the trip to Lares was filled with grief and sadness, not only because Lolita would not be there in body, although for so many her spirit lived on, but because the future looked so grim. It was much harder for my mother. This time, I
was accompanying her because I wanted to go along, but my heart, if not my mind, wasn’t really into it.

  Marisol was back home fussing over the marriage preparations, and it was supposed to be a small wedding. Teaching at Bayamón required her moving back to her condo for an easier commute. I stayed in the Baná house a good portion of the time but spent weekends with her in San Juan. We planned to live in San Juan when we married, renting out the house in Baná. I worried about her health and if the current stress could affect it. Her last checkup was good, and for that we were thankful.

  That move fit my plans to resign from the college after my yearly contract was over. I didn’t want to confront Rector Vigo, still upset and feeling betrayed by my “dabbling in politics.” I had decided to work as a paralegal in my mother’s firm, with an eye toward getting my law degree. The news made her very happy. I loved teaching and the students, but not the university. I told my mother I wanted to focus on environmental law, which she embraced and supported.

  “You’ll get hands-on experience with the Baná case,” she promised.

  I was working part-time on the case, which was proceeding well. Rumors circulated about a settlement. Several times during the semester, Micco tried to change my mind about leaving, telling me I was a natural teacher. But changing the island needed finding the surest ways to achieve change. Even Foley agreed with me on that. On one of those rare moments when he was on campus, I met up with him.

  “You’ll make a helluva litigator,” he said, and then with a strange smile told me he was taking an offer for early retirement, heading back home to Chicago. “Back to the dogs and wife, in that order,” he said. He didn’t get into details, and I didn’t ask. He held out his hand to shake. I thought about everything he had done to undermine our efforts. That he was perhaps responsible for something sinister still rifling through my trash can and lurking in the shadows. Who knows what else he had done in all those years living in Puerto Rico. But I shook his hand anyway. He was leaving—that was worth celebrating.