by Iris Gomez
I had to go back in time.
Through the gauzy curtains of a hospital window, my autobiography reeled out with my grandfather holding the infant me against his white guayabera, the one with the rows of embroidery tacking and shiny nácar buttons down the front. I didn’t really remember that moment, though I had the leather frame photograph of him in that shirt. A little inventing was okay, anyway; Señora Rubio had explained that an autobiography fell somewhere between the stories of historical figures, with their many accomplishments meticulously chronicled, and the stories of poems and novels, which were truthful at heart.
One page devoted to each of my eight years in Cartagena, I wrote out my life; then I copied out the draft in elaborate penman-ship that made the flowery sentences look beautiful.
On Monday, Señora Rubio asked us to read our autobiographies aloud in Spanish class, and I discovered that everyone’s story, not just mine, had ended at the border. None of us could return to that time in our past when we’d left Cuba, Colombia, or Venezuela…. We’d all left tías and tíos or a grandfather behind in some patio scented by hibiscus and frangipani, where the mountains or the sea were never too far off. Away with everything had gone the smell of the fritos, the comfort of my own grandfather’s arms, the silver saltwater spray in my face, and the soft susurro of waves that lulled my whole childhood to sleep.
I’d written my autobiography with pure sentimiento, an excess of feeling that would have raised the English teacher’s eyebrows but earned me an A+ from Señora Rubio and a “Bellísimo” unfurling like a bright red flag of independence across my life.
Thankfully, Tío Lucho found my father work following the guava pastry visit.
My father’s new agricultural job was on some unincorporated land near Homestead. As usual, I called the Dade County Metro number to find out the bus schedules. Mami woke my father before dawn and prepared his breakfast and two lunches. He had to ride all the way to the outskirts of Miami and transfer to another bus, since the routes ran parallel and perpendicular across the county without a diagonal line in between. In Homestead, a van gathered up the workers and drove them to the fields.
My father worked every day that week, in between riding those tiresome buses back and forth. He got home late, ate, washed up, and went straight to bed. Though his weariness saddened me, I was grateful that it depleted his energy for fighting. Tomato picking seemed a much better fit for him than most other jobs he’d held. With all the bending, he wouldn’t be able to talk and get himself into trouble as he had at the tailor shop and the Hialeah job, and perhaps at the shoe factory. People weren’t as likely to discover his peculiarities and get him fired up.
When he forgot his lunch the following Saturday, Mami made me call the Jamaican crew leader about arrangements to bring it over and I got to see for myself that Homestead was exactly the sort of hardy pioneer land its name suggested. On the bus, Mami and I passed fields of plants glistening from the morning’s chemical sprays. Rows of tiny people knelt before the tall plants, as if in obedience. I thought about my father’s pride and his great desire to be strong. Was he out there on his knees now too?
The fields yielded to a desolate region with numerous canals, flanked by razor-edged swamp grass that, as I’d learned in school, trickled down from the Kissimmee River to the Atlantic. So much water had been irrigated and diverted to deep, unfenced canals, in fact, that our state’s scholastic essay topic that year was: “Why I Stay Away from Florida Waterways.”
Where the canals ended, the bus stopped too. Before us stretched a cloudless expanse without a house or anything remotely human in sight. After a while I began to wonder, where was the Tanaka Farms sign for us to meet the Jamaican crew leader’s van? Mami pushed me toward the driver. “Ask him where we are,” she instructed. “And find out how to get out.”
From him, I learned that this was the genuine Everglades: River of Grass, untamed by thirty years of post-war development, where Indians lived whose name no one could spell.
“Seminoles?” I asked him with curiosity.
“They ain’t Seminoles,” said the driver, staring out over his steering wheel. “They’re the alligator wrestlers. You know, the county fair? Mickosouuk—Miccosek.” He tried to sound it out, but the consonants were like alligator teeth waiting to snap. “Anyway, they’re the ones who own most of this land.” He gazed across the swamps. “Florida’s paradise.”
I mulled that over while recalling Mr. Lanham’s talk about the cimarrones and walked back to confer with Mami about whether to transfer buses or ride to downtown. Either way, we would be too late for any lunch break. She shook her head, infuriated with herself for failing my father. I tried to distract her with tidbits the driver had shared about the Everglades, but she glanced dismissively at the surroundings and said, “This is no paradise, Gabriela. This is a jungle.”
Her view was one shared by other members of my family, as well as most Latinos I knew—the vast plain, a reminder of centuries of cane cutting and campesino misery. It made sense to me that the only people who stayed here were those clever Miccosukee, who seemed to have managed fine and dandy for nearly two hundred years. They remained invisible to everyone else, true to their cimarrón roots, except when invited to wrestle alligators at the Dade County Youth Fair.
As the bus neared downtown, Mami perked up. “¡Gracias a Dios!” she proclaimed when the driver turned the corner toward the dilapidated McCrory’s Department Store. We’d reached civilization!
Her anti-nature prejudice, though, was nothing compared to her distress over my father’s presence in the ranks of the humilde—the humble people of the world. Or maybe it was the humiliated people? I wondered when she lamented tragically to me after we’d gotten home, “Your father shouldn’t have to do this kind of work.”
At the end of the week, along with his pay, my father brought home a huge bag of tomatoes that bloomed so red it was hard to believe they’d grown out of the sun-beaten Florida dirt.
But then the picking stopped.
[ SEVEN ]
TWO DAYS AFTER his agricultural job ended, my father entered the kitchen, tossed the Seminole Sentinel into the garbage, and swore off that “¡condenado periódico!” for good.
One look at my mother’s face, her mouth gaping open, squelched the sudden relief I felt over my liberation from Sentinel duty. As my father turned and reentered his dark chamber, Mami managed to choke out a “¿Cómo?” and followed him in. Moments later, I heard her low-voiced attempts to reason dispassionately about the importance of continuing ordinary job searches, but my father remained impassive. In my mind’s eye, I pictured a mad medieval king with his arms crossed as his advisers counseled against war with the enemy.
I was only too glad to flee that gloomy castle for the silver steed of a van that arrived to transport me to a Junior Achievement meeting. A program teacher had paid us a visit earlier, during which my father smiled broadly and, upon hearing the student interpreter translate “the spirit of entrepreneurship” as “responsibility,” decreed that I could participate.
At the peculiar meeting, poster boards were filled with lists of businesses’ missions and the Ingredients of Success. It reeked of my father’s fantastic moneymaking schemes and I glanced around at my fellow Achievers, Latino faces doubtful like mine. We were then divided into teams to create fictional companies and list their Key Marketing Strategies, with the program leaders promising that over time we would add to the Life of Our Company. Aside from feeling like a minor character in a chapter of a very boring book, I took one lesson home from that session: Moneymaking consisted of cold psychology, i.e., convincing people to buy whatever you had to sell whether or not they needed it. I had plenty of proof that such psychology didn’t work in everyday life, since my father, who had only his labor to sell, had been hugely unsuccessful in finding buyers through the standard marketing methods or via his hopeless magazines. I tried to stifle a rebel voice whispering inside me that maybe my father had nothing worth sel
ling to anyone anymore.
In response to my father’s unorthodox new business plan, Mami began to secretly sell Avon products. She was gone for hours the next day while I pretended to listen to his pseudo-scientific lectures and anxiously contemplated how I would extricate myself to dress for the Cuban fund-raising party Mami had given me the okay to attend—Alina’s mother had allowed Alina two invitees, Lydia and me.
I eventually managed to remove myself from my father’s clutches to go shower and change into a party dress that still fit. Shortly afterward one of our neighbors, an elderly fisherman named Nicky who’d often brought over extra fish, stopped by unexpectedly. When Pablo complained to him of an earache, Nicky offered to cure him the way they used to do it in the Old Country, and I went with them to the yard to watch. While Nicky was in the process of lighting a newspaper funnel in Pablo’s ear to smoke the pain out, Mami came home and greeted him appreciatively. But then my father, who’d evidently been observing from his window, came out shrieking like a lunatic. “ ¡Imbécil! ” he cried at the old man and furiously whacked the funnel out of Nicky’s hand. Stunned by my father’s reaction, Nicky backed off, sputtering some explanation in hysterical Italian. My own hysterical heart began to beat Oh God! Oh God! as my mother feebly dropped her Avon packages and begged my father to restrain himself. But he merely kept yelling in vulgar Spanish and raised a threatening arm—and the poor, terrified neighbor fled.
The instant he took off, I leapt to my senses. “Papi?” I squeaked bravely between threats.
Jaw clenched, he looked at me.
“Wouldn’t you like me to finish your work now? I’m all done studying.” Nervously I held my hands out in humble supplication.
My father nodded in surprise. “Pues, sí,” he agreed happily, straightening his shoulders and marching officiously toward the house, while Mami seized the opportunity to gather up her illicit Avon packages. I followed my father but hesitated at the back door. “I’ll, um, be right in, Papi,” I stammered. “I just have to tell Mami something.” When I shut the door to turn around, my gaze fell on the tips of my patent leather shoes: black mirrors, empty as the hours ahead of me. With a sigh, I shook off disappointment and went to rouse Mami into action. “ Do something!” I urged her. “Didn’t you see Papi hit that man’s hand? We have to keep him away from people!”
“No seas exagerada, Gabriela,” she retorted, scowling. “Your father was trying to look out for your brother’s welfare.”
“What if Nicky reports Papi to the police like that lady?” I tossed back furiously. “Don’t you think about that stuff?”
She glanced apprehensively toward the neighbor’s house and back at me, her face registering surprise at the regalia I’d donned for my now defunct party. “All right,” she said wearily, handing me the Avon bags. “I’ll go over and apologize.”
Back in the house, I changed into regular clothes, called Lydia and Alina, and fended off self-pity while feeling as wilted as a Saturday night wallflower. With my father’s illogically constructed paragraphs before me, I worked stoically until dark arrived.
There was a method to this madness, I assured myself. Suborning my father’s oddball writing was the only way, short of a real job, to keep him out of trouble until El Chino dismissed that criminal case and we could all be free.
The lone festive moment of my night came when Nicky’s wife, Pia, brought over a plate of warm, powdered sugar cookies—like a sign that Someone had forgiven my father his trespasses.
Someone’s tolerance waned by the following weekend, though. As my brothers and I stocked groceries Mami had left for us to put away, the high cabinet my father had once nailed into the wall for extra storage suddenly shifted slightly. Instinctively, I stepped back. Then, with a great shudder, the entire cabinet succumbed to the great weight inside and tumbled toward us. I let out a wild shriek and jumped sideways as the cabinet came crashing to the floor with all its contents.
“Holy cow!” cried Manolo, open-mouthed. Shattered oil and syrup jars, crushed spice packages, and rice were strewn everywhere.
My father raced in. When he saw the wreckage, his face went red-hot. “¿Están locos?” he screamed. But he was the one who looked crazy as he rushed toward Manolo and Pablo across the cans rolling in oil under his feet. My brothers tore out of there, and I ran too, uncertain where my father’s furious arms would land. Into the bathroom I fled, trembling all the while, and shrewdly locked the door behind me. From there, I listened to him scream his head off and pound whoever he’d managed to seize. For the first time in my life, I feared that he could actually kill a person.
When things quieted, and my father seemed to have retreated, I slipped out, tiptoeing into the kitchen and surveying the disaster. Gingerly, I navigated a path toward the back door and looked around outside for my brothers.
There they were—in Johnny’s front yard. I ran over.
Manolo’s face had a throbbing pink welt. “Feel this,” he said, gesturing to his skull.
I touched the bulging knuckle lump, shook my head in sympathy, and looked at Pablo.
“He didn’t get me,” Pablo offered.
“You guys better stay here until Mami comes home,” I advised.
I returned to the house, then forced myself to carry out a rapid clean up operation as quietly as possible to avoid rousing my father’s ire. A short while later, though, a hoarse voice behind me made me flinch. “¿Cómo puedo trabajar así?”
I froze up, immediately feeling on edge again, but when I ventured a quick peek, only the echo of his old pathetic self lingered as he stared at the floor.
How could he work indeed? Who was left out there to give someone like him a job?
I waited cautiously for a little longer, then bent down to extract a piece of glass from our long, sad river of oil.
My father’s temperamento spread: Colombia, New York, Miami—everywhere and everyone became a bewildering jumble of refineries and people who had stolen his money. It was hard to decipher the subjects of his ranting as I transcribed increasingly illogical letters that had replaced classified ad searches. I was relieved when the holiday recess arrived, if only for the extra time. Never had life seemed more difficult than that period between my father’s return from Massachusetts and our first Christmas in Miami. Enlisted to help with the expansion of Mami’s secret Avon business when she began sewing Communion dresses to sell at St. Stephen’s as well, I struggled valiantly to keep my father happy.
As people failed to answer his confusing letters, my father had become obsessed with the mail. Now either Mami or I had to make a mad rush to claim it before he did, so that he wouldn’t angrily destroy something important, like a legitimate letter from the government. Only holiday cards were safe for him, along with one genuine letter he received from his sister, my Tía Consuelo, who’d helped raise him in Colombia. Hers was the only letter that actually made him smile and converse instead of fly into a rage or a frenzy of further composition.
We didn’t have much of a Christmas that year. We attended the family party with not a single gift for Tía Rita, Tío Victor, or anyone else. The only noteworthy event was a worrisome conversation I overheard between Mami and Tía Rita about some mysterious debt my father owed to his former boss in Massachusetts.
At home later, I rifled forlornly through Gothic novels I’d long before finished reading and wondered vaguely if not returning a library book was a crime and whether you could be deported for it. Unhappily, I flipped through a familiar favorite, Dark Victory, and tried to suck a little more joy out of passages I’d read before, but the jumble of my father’s block printing superimposed itself across the book pages like a dark and hopeless code.
Lydia called near the end of the break to suggest that we go buy materials for our Home Economics projects. Everyone at her house, she reported as we headed toward the fabric store, had been busy fighting. She unleashed details of the latest melodrama: Her mother had locked Lydia’s two-timing father out of the house one
night, and he’d had to break in through the back door. “You should’ve heard what a lío he caused! My mother was about to call the cops,” Lydia exclaimed. “She told him he’d have more time to think about his family in jail!”
My eyes widened in dismay. “Lydia, that could get him deported.”
“Says who? Cubans don’t get deported.”
“What do you mean?”
“Politics,” she said authoritatively, entering the store.
“But what if—” I hesitated, “if the person assaulted someone?”
Lydia whipped her head around. “He doesn’t beat us, Gabi. He’s just a two-timer.”
“Oh, I know,” I mumbled embarrassedly, then rushed off to search for my dress pattern. I’d said more than I meant to, but it was hard to stay off home issues when chatting with Lydia.
After I’d located a recommended A-line pattern, I waited near the register for Lydia to join me with her selection—a sexy sundress pattern, plainly not on the recommended list, that she apparently intended to sew out of the bolt of canary eyelet she carried in her arms. Quite a contrast from the drab brown fabric my mother had procured for me from the uncles’ shop for free. At least Lydia would have something in the right color for our spring concert. The concert was supposed to be a big deal, and guidance staff had already started notifying us that girls were supposed to wear yellow.
“Very cute,” I commented succinctly to Lydia as I examined her wares, though I couldn’t help but picture her as a well-endowed middle-aged Cuban lady trying to squeeze into old baby clothes.