We’re back at boarding school now. We like it here. Milagro and I volunteer to feed the horses in the stables, and then we ride them through the woods and the lemon groves, the horses all buckteeth and happy.
Ivanito is at boarding school, too. His teachers say he’s very intelligent but maladjusted, that he cries every night and disturbs the other boys’ sleep. Ivanito feels guilty about visiting Papi. He fears that Mamá may find out and then he’ll never be able to go home. But we tell him that nobody but us knows what happened, and swore him to lifelong secrecy. The three of us pricked our fingers and mingled our blood to make certain.
What my brother doesn’t realize yet is that nothing Mamá does has anything to do with him, or with Abuela Celia, or with any of us.
Enough Attitude
(1975)
Lourdes Puente is walking her beat. It’s a five-block square of Brooklyn with brownstones and linden trees, considered safe as neighborhoods go on this side of Atlantic Avenue. Lourdes is an auxiliary policewoman, the first in her precinct. She scored one hundred on her written test by answering “c” to the multiple-choice questions she wasn’t sure of or didn’t understand. Captain Cacciola congratulated her personally. He wanted to make sure she was tough enough on crime. Lourdes said she believed drug dealers should die in the electric chair. This pleased the captain, and she was sent on patrol Tuesday and Thursday nights between seven and ten.
Lourdes enjoys patrolling the streets in her thick-soled black shoes. These shoes, it seems to her, are a kind of equalizer. She can run in them if she has to, jump curbs, traverse the buckled, faulted sidewalks of Brooklyn without twisting an ankle. These shoes are power. If women wore shoes like these, she thinks, they wouldn’t worry so much about more abstract equalities. They would join the army reserve or the auxiliary police like her, and protect what was theirs. In Cuba nobody was prepared for the Communists and look what happened. Now her mother guards their beach with binoculars and a pistol against Yankees. If only Lourdes had had a gun when she needed it.
It’s Thursday, just after nine. There’s a full moon out. It hangs fat and waxy in the sky, creased with shadows.
“Every loony in New York comes out of the woodwork on nights like this,” the regular beat cop had warned her.
But so far everything’s been quiet. It’s too cold for loiterers. Lourdes suddenly remembers how her daughter had ridiculed Armstrong’s first words on the moon. “He had months to think up something and that’s all he could say?” Pilar was only ten years old and already mocking everything. Lourdes slapped her for being disrespectful, but it made no difference to her daughter. Pilar was immune to threats. She placed no value on normal things so it was impossible to punish her. Even now, Pilar is not afraid of pain or of losing anything. It’s this indifference that is most maddening.
The last of the Jews have moved out of the neighborhood. Only the Kellners are left. The others are on Long Island or in Westchester or Florida, depending on their ages and their bank accounts. Pilar thinks Lourdes is bigoted, but what does her daughter know of life? Equality is just another one of her abstractions. “I don’t make up the statistics,” she tells Pilar. “I don’t color the faces down at the precinct.” Black faces, Puerto Rican faces. Once in a while a stray Irish or Italian face looking scared. Lourdes prefers to confront reality—the brownstones converted to tenements in a matter of months, the garbage in the streets, the jaundice-eyed men staring vacantly from the stoops. Even Pilar couldn’t denounce her for being a hypocrite.
Lourdes feels the solid ground beneath her solid black shoes as she walks. She breathes in the wintry air, which stings her lungs. It seems to her as if the air were made of crystal filaments, scraping and cleaning her inside. She decides she has no patience for dreamers, for people who live between black and white.
Lourdes slides her hand up and down her wooden nightstick. It’s the only weapon the police department will issue her. That and handcuffs. Lourdes has used the stick only once in her two months of patrolling, to break up a fight between a Puerto Rican kid and three Italians down at the playground. Lourdes knows the Puerto Rican’s mother. She’s the one who worked at the bakery for an afternoon. Lourdes caught her pocketing fifty cents from the sale of two crullers, and threw her out. No wonder her son is a delinquent. He sells plastic bags of marijuana behind the liquor store.
Lourdes’s son would have been about the same age as the Navarro boy. Her son would have been different. He wouldn’t have talked back to her or taken drugs or drunk beer from paper bags like the other teenagers. Her son would have helped her in the bakery without complaint. He would have come to her for guidance, pressed her hand to his cheek, told her he loved her. Lourdes would have talked to her son the way Rufino talks to Pilar, for companionship. Lourdes suffers with this knowledge.
Down the street, the trees are imprisoned equidistantly in square plots of dirt. Everything else is concrete. Lourdes remembers reading somewhere about how Dutch elm disease wiped out the entire species on the East Coast except for a lone tree in Manhattan surrounded by concrete. Is this, she wonders, how we’ll all survive?
It became clear to Lourdes shortly after she and Rufino moved to New York that he would never adapt. Something came unhinged in his brain that would make him incapable of working in a conventional way. There was a part of him that could never leave the finca or the comfort of its cycles, and this diminished him for any other life. He could not be transplanted. So Lourdes got a job. Cuban women of a certain age and a certain class consider working outside the home to be beneath them. But Lourdes never believed that.
While it was true that she had grown accustomed to the privileges that came with marrying into the Puente family, Lourdes never accepted the life designated for its women. Even now, stripped of their opulence, crowded into two-bedroom apartments in Hialeah and Little Havana, the Puente women clung to their rituals as they did their engraved silverware, succumbing to a cloying nostalgia. Doña Zaida, once a formidable matriarch who ruled her eight sons by a resolute jealousy, spent long afternoons watching novelas on television and perfuming her thickening wrists.
Lourdes knew she could never be this kind of woman. After her honeymoon, she got right to work on the Puente ranch. She reviewed the ledgers, fired the cheating accountant, and took over the books herself. She redecorated the musty, coffer-ceilinged mansion with watercolor landscapes, reupholstered the sofas with rustic fabrics, and discarded the cretonne drapes in favor of sliding glass doors that invited the morning light. Out went the ornate bric-a-brac, the austere furniture carved with the family crest. Lourdes refilled the mosaic-lined fountain with sweet water and built an aviary in the garden, stocking it with toucans and cockatoos, parrots, a macaw, and canaries that sang in high octaves. Sometimes at night, she could hear the cries of the quail doves and solitaires interspersed with the songs from the aviary.
When a disgruntled servant informed Doña Zaida about the changes in her country house, she descended on the ranch in a fury and restored the villa to its former state. Lourdes, who defiantly rebuilt the aviary and restocked it with birds, never spoke to her mother-in-law again.
*
Lourdes misses the birds she had in Cuba. She thinks of joining a bird-watching society, but who would take care of the bakery in her absence? Pilar is unreliable and Rufino can’t tell a Danish from a donut. It’s a shame, too, because all Lourdes ever sees in Brooklyn is dull little wrens or those filthy pigeons. Rufino has taken to raising pigeons in wire-mesh cages in their backyard the way he saw Marlon Brando do in On the Waterfront. He prints messages on bits of paper, slips them through metal rings on the pigeons’ legs, then kisses each bird on the head for good luck and lets it loose with a whoop. Lourdes doesn’t know or care what her husband is writing, or to whom. By now, she accepts him the way she accepts the weather. What else can she do?
Rufino has stopped confiding in her. She hears secondhand snippets about his projects from Pilar, and knows he’s trying to devel
op a super carburetor, one that will get two hundred miles to the gallon. Lourdes knows, too, that her husband is still brooding about artificial intelligence. She is not sure what this means although Rufino explained to her once that it would do for the brain what the telephone did for the human voice, take it farther and faster than it could go unassisted. Lourdes cannot understand why this is so difficult. She remembers seeing robots at the World’s Fair ten years ago. She and Rufino and Pilar ate in a restaurant observatory shaped like a spaceship. The food was terrible. The view was of Queens.
These days, Lourdes recognizes her husband’s face, his thinning reddish hair, and the crepey pouches under his eyes, but he is a stranger to her. She looks at him the way she might look at a photograph of her hands, unfamiliar upon close inspection.
Lourdes is herself only with her father. Even after his death, they understand each other perfectly, as they always have. Jorge del Pino doesn’t accompany Lourdes on her beat because he doesn’t want to interfere with her work. He is proud of his daughter, of her tough stance on law and order, identical to his own. It was he who encouraged Lourdes to join the auxiliary police so she’d be ready to fight the Communists when the time came. “Look how El Líder mobilizes the people to protect his causes,” Jorge del Pino told his daughter. “He uses the techniques of the Fascists. Everyone is armed and ready for combat at a moment’s notice. How will we ever win Cuba back if we ourselves are not prepared to fight?”
Pilar makes fun of Lourdes in her uniform, of the way she slaps the nightstick in her palm. “Who do you think you are, Kojak?” she says, laughing, and hands her mother a lollipop. This is just like her daughter, scornful and impudent. “I’m doing this to show you something, to teach you a lesson!” Lourdes screams, but Pilar ignores her.
Last Christmas, Pilar gave her a book of essays on Cuba called A Revolutionary Society. The cover showed cheerful, clean-cut children gathered in front of a portrait of Che Guevara. Lourdes was incensed.
“Will you read it?” Pilar asked her.
“I don’t have to read it to know what’s in it! Lies, poisonous Communist lies!” Che Guevara’s face had set a violence quivering within her like a loose wire.
“Suit yourself,” Pilar shot back.
Lourdes snatched the volume from under the Christmas tree, took it to the bathroom, filled the tub with scalding water, and dropped it in. Che Guevara’s face blanched and swelled like the dead girl Lourdes had seen wash up once on the beach at Santa Teresa del Mar with a note pinned to her breast. Nobody ever came to claim her. Lourdes fished Pilar’s book out of the tub with barbecue tongs and placed it on the porcelain platter she reserved for her roasted pork legs. Then she fastened a note to the cover with a safety pin. “Why don’t you move to Russia if you think it’s so great!” And she signed her name in full.
All this she left on Pilar’s bed. But it did not provoke her daughter. The next day, the platter was back in the cupboard and A Revolutionary Society was drying on the clothesline.
Lourdes’s walkie-talkie crackles as she works her way along the length of river that forms the western boundary of her territory. The night is so clear that the water reflects every stray angle of light. Without the disruptions of ships and noise, the river is a mirror. It reminds Lourdes of a photograph she saw once of the famous Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles with its endless ricocheting light.
At the edge of her vision, the darkness shifts. Her spine stiffens and her heart is audible deep inside her ears. She turns and squints but she cannot make out the figure, crouched and still, by the river. Lourdes grips her nightstick with one hand and pulls on her flashlight with the other. When she looks up again, the figure springs across the low fence and jumps into the river, shattering the light.
“Stop!” she shouts, running toward the spot as if chasing a part of herself. Lourdes turns her flashlight on the river, penetrating its rippled surface, then hoists herself over the fence. “Stop!” she shouts again at nothing at all. Lourdes pulls her walkie-talkie from its holster and screams too close to the speaker. She cannot remember what to say, the codes she had carefully memorized. A voice is talking to her now, calm and officious. “Tell us your location,” it says, “… your location.” But Lourdes jumps into the river instead. She hears the sirens wailing as the cold envelops her, numbing her face and her hands, her feet in their thick-soled shoes. The river smells of death.
Only one more fact is important. Lourdes lived and the Navarro boy died.
Pilar
(1976)
The family is hostile to the individual. This is what I’m thinking as Lou Reed says he has enough attitude to kill every person in New Jersey. I’m at a club in the Village with my boyfriend, Max. I figure I have enough attitude to kill a few people myself, only it never works on the right ones.
“I’m from Brooklyn, man!” Lou shouts and the crowd goes wild. I don’t cheer, though. I wouldn’t cheer either if Lou said, “Let’s hear it for Cuba.” Cuba. Planet Cuba. Where the hell is that?
Max’s real name is Octavio Schneider. He sings and plays bass and harmonica for the Manichaean Blues Band, a group he started back in San Antonio, where he’s from. They do Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters and lots of their own songs, mostly hard rock. Sometimes they do back-up for this crazy bluesman, the Reverend Billy Hines, who keeps his eyes shut when he sings. Max says that the reverend was a storefront preacher who played the Panhandle years ago and is attempting a comeback. Max himself had a modest hit in Texas with “Moonlight on Emma,” a song about an ex-girlfriend who dumped him and moved to Hollywood.
I met Max at a downtown basement club a few months ago. He came over and started speaking to me in Spanish (his mother is Mexican) as if he’d known me for years. I liked him right away. When I brought him around to meet my parents, Mom took one look at his beaded headband and the braid down his back and said, “Sácalo de aquí.” When I told her that Max spoke Spanish, she simply repeated what she said in English: “Take him away.”
Dad was cool, though. “What does your band’s name mean?” he asked Max.
“The Manichaeans, see, were followers of this Persian guy who lived in the third century. They believed that hedonism was the only way to get rid of their sins.”
“Hedonism?”
“Yeah, the Manichaeans liked to party. They had orgies and drank a lot. They got wiped out by other Christians, though.”
“Too bad,” my father said sympathetically.
Later, Dad looked up the Manichaeans in the encyclopedia and discovered that, contrary to what Max claimed, the Manichaeans believed that the world and all matter were created by nefarious forces, and that the only way to battle them was through asceticism and a pure life. When I told Max about this, he just shrugged and said, “Well, I guess that’s okay, too.” Max is a tolerant kind of guy.
I just love the way Lou Reed’s concerts feel—expectant, uncertain. You never know what he’s going to do next. Lou has about twenty-five personalities. I like him because he sings about people no one else sings about—drug addicts, transvestites, the down-and-out. Lou jokes about his alter egos discussing problems at night. I feel like a new me sprouts and dies every day.
I play Lou and Iggy Pop and this new band the Ramones whenever I paint. I love their energy, their violence, their incredible grinding guitars. It’s like an artistic form of assault. I try to translate what I hear into colors and volumes and lines that confront people, that say, “Hey, we’re here too and what we think matters!” or more often just “Fuck you!” Max is not as crazy about the Ramones as I am. I think he’s more of a traditionalist. He has a tough time being rude, even to people who deserve it. Not me. If I don’t like someone, I show it. It’s the one thing I have in common with my mother.
*
Neither of my parents is very musical. Their entire record collection consists of Perry Como’s Greatest Hits, two Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass albums, and Alvin and the Chipmunks Sing Their Favorite Christmas C
arols, which they bought for me when I was a kid. Recently, Mom picked up a Jim Nabors album of patriotic songs in honor of the bicentennial. I mean, after Vietnam and Watergate, who the hell wants to hear “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”?
I used to like the Fourth of July okay because of the fireworks. I’d go down by the East River and watch them flare up from the tugboats. The girandoles looked like fiery lace in the sky. But this bicentennial crap is making me crazy. Mom has talked about nothing else for months. She bought a second bakery and plans to sell tricolor cupcakes and Uncle Sam marzipan. Apple pies, too. She’s convinced she can fight Communism from behind her bakery counter.
Last year she joined the local auxiliary police out of some misplaced sense of civic duty. My mother—all four feet eleven and a half inches and 217 pounds of her—patrols the streets of Brooklyn at night in a skintight uniform, clanging with enough antiriot gear to quash another Attica. She practices twirling her nightstick in front of the mirror, then smacks it against her palm, steadily, menacingly, like she’s seen cops do on television. Mom’s upset because the police department won’t issue her a gun. Right. She gets a gun and I move out of state fast.
There’s other stuff happening with her. For starters, she’s been talking with Abuelo Jorge since he died. He gives her business advice and tells her who’s stealing from her at the bakery. Mom says that Abuelo spies on me and reports back to her. Like what is this? The ghost patrol? Mom is afraid that I’m having sex with Max (which I’m not) and this is her way of trying to keep me in line.
Max likes Mom, though. He says she suffers from an “imperious disposition.”
“You mean she’s a frustrated tyrant?” I ask him.
“More like a bitch goddess,” he explains.
Max’s parents split up before he was born and his mother cleans motel rooms for minimum wage. I guess Mom must seem exotic by comparison.
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