“Hey, no toque!” the curator of the museum said, joking. Nazario quickly turned around. The two men embraced as if they had known each other for years. The owner was a kind man in his fifties. When Nazario introduced me, he proudly declared, “See, Chino, there’s two museums in Spanish Harlem.”
“Your daughter,” Nazario asked him out of the blue, “did she get in?”
“Sí, sí.” They embraced again. They kept talking about the man’s daughter, who would soon start med school. The man was thanking Nazario and telling him to thank Bodega for him. Nazario said he would do just that and then told the man he had to go. I shook the man’s hand again and followed Nazario. The salsa museum was free, but upon exiting, Nazario put a twenty in the donation box. I had only three dollars and wished I could give more.
“I’ll walk you home now,” Nazario said, looking straight ahead.
“Sounds good,” I said. Somehow that experience had made me like him. A little bit. I still wanted Nazario to go away but I knew he wouldn’t, not just yet. I knew he hadn’t taken me to the museum just because he’d wanted to show it to me. He’d wanted me to see something else. For me to understand something that escaped me. I tried to think, but I couldn’t see what it was. The music of our people? No. Bygone times? Then it hit me. It was the man’s daughter.
“The girl who got into med school,” I asked Nazario, “she’s in Bodega’s program?”
“That’s right. I was hoping she was around. I wanted her to talk to you.”
“About what?” I asked, because I was just catching on that with Nazario and Bodega you had to see the big picture. Their minds were not nineteen-inch screens but those of the big drive-in movies. They were so ahead in their visions and dreams that they left you behind, with your mouth open, trying to piece it all together.
“Don’t you see what we’re trying to do?” he said, and this time it was me who stopped walking. I wanted to hear it. “Willie likes financing Latinos who are going to college to study law, medicine, education, business, political science, anything useful. He plans on building a professional class, slated to become his movers and shakers of the future.”
I wanted to tell him it was crazy. But then I thought, why not? Why not us? Others have dreams, why not us? It was from that moment on that I realized all these hopes were bigger than me, more important than any one person. If these dreams of theirs would take off, El Barrio would burn like a roman candle, bright and proud for decades. If Spanish Harlem moved up, we would all move up with it.
“Willie plans on building a professional class. One born and bred in Spanish Harlem.” So now I knew why he was renovating all those buildings. He planned on housing his people there. “But it goes deeper than that, Julio. It’s about upward mobility. It’s about education and making yourself better. It’s about sacrifice.” We started to walk again. He would lecture like he always did, steely but committed. “If someone is a janitor, that’s noble, it’s a respectable job. But they should make sure their kids grow up to own a cleaning business.” It was really an old idea, but never before had I thought that it was possible. With Nazario leading the fight for political, social, and economic power, anything was possible. It was going to be fought by intellect and cunning. Bodega and Nazario had seen what guns could do. They knew you could not attack the Anglo like that. You had to play by his rules and, like him, steal by signing the right papers. Nazario would lead, leaving Bodega to take all the hits, absorb the stigma, because of what he was. It would be Bodega and the likes of Sapo who would have the skeletons in the closet, all so Nazario could help create new hope for the neighborhood.
“This neighborhood will be lost unless we make it ours. Look at Loisaida, that’s gone,” Nazario said. “All those white yuppies want to live in Manhattan, and they think Spanish Harlem is next for the taking. When they start moving in, we won’t be able to compete when it comes to rents, and we’ll be left out in the cold. But if we build a strong professional class and accumulate property, we can counter that effect.” We were two blocks away from my building. I could see what Nazario was really after. “This is not the sixties. The government isn’t pouring any money in here anymore. It’ll take some time. But one day we might be strong enough, with enough political clout”—and he pointed at the Johnson Houses—“to knock those projects down.” Then he smiled at me as if he had just seen the sunrise for the first time in his life. “And we’ll free our island, without bloodshed.”
ROUND 3
The Fish of Loisaida
I WAS happy when Nazario and I reached my building and even happier when he shook my hand, indicating he was ready to leave.
“Put on your best suit and wait for Willie, okay, Julio?” Nazario said as we stood in front of the entrance. “And I still want to talk. Maybe even meet you in the library.” He shook my hand again and crossed the street. I stared at his back as he walked away. A tall gray suit, walking with pride and confidence all around El Barrio. A suit that could stand out and yet blend in with the neighborhood. He was like no one I had ever met. Even Bodega with his street smarts and cunning lacked what Nazario had. The presence that tells the people this man can lead. He was what we all wanted to be like, the Latin professional whom the Anglos feared because he was just as treacherous, just as devious, and he understood power. This was not some docile Latino you could push around. You knew he held aces up his sleeve. The neighborhood might not have trusted Nazario completely, maybe even been a bit afraid of him, but people were more than grateful that he was on their side.
I went inside the building and was a bit nervous about the whole Vera-meeting-Bodega thing, but then again I was also glad it would finally be over. Besides, it beat working, any day.
When the elevator reached my floor and I stepped out, there was Bodega in the hallway. He was dressed in a white suit, looking as immaculate and pure as if he had made an offering to Santa Clara to wear white for her, just for her. But his eyes were bloodshot and he was pacing like a man whose wife is in labor.
“Man, I’m glad yo’r here. Where you been?” He rushed toward me, his face a knot of worry. “You don’t think I look too, you know, like I’m tryin’ too hard to look fine?” he asked.
“Nah, you look good.” We walked inside. Then he looked at me and began to curse.
“Coño! Coño, I should have brought a suit for you.”
“Hey, I have suits, all right?” I said, a bit insulted. “I came here to change. Your lawyer hit man, Nazario, sprung me out of work and gave me no choice.”
“But you do have a good suit? Man, I should’ve had Nazario get you one.” He kept sucking his teeth and saying, coño, coño.
“I told you I have good suits, cotton ones,” I said, but he began to complain.
“No, no, no, you’ll throw her off. See, feel this, feel this.” It felt like silk; it was silk.
“Nice.” I shrugged.
“See, how’s that gonna look, you in cotton and me in silk? She’ll think I’m cheap. That I can’t buy you, her niece’s husband, a suit like mine or worse, that I don’t have enough—”
“Relax! Look, you say Vera loves you, right? Not me, right? I can go in shorts and it won’t matter.” He calmed down a bit, and I went to the bedroom to change. He asked if he could get a drink of water.
“You own the building,” I called out. But as I heard the water faucet I had an image, clear as day, of Sapo killing Salazar. I figured that now was a bad time to ask about it. I figured that if Bodega was right and Vera was still in love with him, nothing could ruin his day, so today would be a good time to ask him anything—but if he was wrong about Vera I was going to save the asking for another day. Then I smelled something.
“Wan’ a toke?”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, bro. You’re gonna go see someone you haven’t seen in more than twenty years and you’re gonna smoke a joint before you see her?”
“I’m nervous, what the fuck you want me to do?”
“Relax,
all right? And you should put that out because the smell stays in your clothes.” Bodega promptly threw the joint on the floor and killed it with his shiny shoe.
I went to the bathroom and combed my hair. When I came out Bodega was looking out the window. He was staring absently, as if he was seeing beyond what was there, as if he was back in some other place and time.
I shook him a little bit. He smiled, a bit embarrassed, as if he had been thinking about something sentimental, something weak. Something your friends might make fun of at your expense.
“Ready to go?” He cleared his throat and wiped his eye.
“Yeah, let’s go,” I said, making believe I had no idea what was in his head.
Outside it was a clear and warm day, one of those days that makes you happy you woke up early and hadn’t wasted the morning with sleep and weren’t going to kill the day with work. Walking with Bodega toward P.S. 72 on 104th and Lexington was like walking with a ghost that only I could see. Unlike walking with Nazario, when everyone came up and greeted you, saw you in a different light because of the company, with Bodega it was as casual as if you were walking with groceries. Only one man stopped us, and it wasn’t because of Bodega.
“Qué pasa. My name is Ebarito, I saw you with Mr. Nazario this morning,” he said to me. “Si me haces el favor de decirle gracias por el seguro que me dió. I want you to know that you are welcome at my social club anytime.”
I thanked him.
“And tell Mr. Nazario I owe Willie Bodega.” Bodega quickly motioned to me not to say a word. Not to introduce him as Willie Bodega. Ebarito shook my hand, then Bodega’s. I gave Ebarito my name and introduced Bodega as Jose Tapia. Ebarito said that my friend Jose was also welcome to drop by his social club. Then he complimented us on our suits, told us we looked like la aristocracia puertorriqueña. Bodega found this funny and asked Ebarito for his name again. Bodega made a mental note of it. He was going to reward Ebarito in the near future, I could tell. We kept walking.
“I know what you’re thinkin’,” Bodega said, “but if you see God he won’t seem that powerful anymore.” He then licked his lips as he had been doing all morning, shoved his hands in his pockets, and then took them out again. He walked fast and I had to tell him again and again to calm down.
P.S. 72 loomed just ahead, the American flag on its roof wagging in the blue sky. A pompous pigeon, his arrogant chest stuck out like a banker’s, sat on top of the flagpole. Then Bodega turned around and said “I’m going back.” He said that this was all bullshit and that he had a neighborhood to run and had to create a new future. That he was sorry for putting me through all this bullshit.
“No way, man!” I went after him as he was practically running away from the school. “No, bro, stop!” I caught up to him and held him by the arm. He gave little resistance. He took out a cigarette.
“You’ve been waiting a long time for this, bro. If anything, at least let’s go and meet Vera so you can show her what a mistake she made.”
He lit his cigarette and took only one drag before he ground it out.
“Nah, bro, eso no se queda así. She made a mistake and she has to know it.” He took out another cigarette.
“At least that way you’ll get something out of this, bro, b’cause she married that guy for his money.”
He lit up and took one drag. Then another. “Thass right. You’re right, Chino.” He looked at me with bravado, took a third drag, put out the cigarette. “You’re right. Let’s go see this bitch and show her what a fucken mistake she made. That bitch! That fucken, fucken bitch. Why’d she leave in the first place? She never wanted him, she always wanted me. And now she can’t have me. Now she’ll fly back to Miami and cry as if the plane was going down.”
“Thass right, bro. You’re goin’ to walk right in there and show her that you had vision.” He nodded rapidly.
We started walking toward the school again, like sour-grapes drunks. Bodega was ripping away at Vera, then at women in general, then at Vera’s mother, then he was ripping Vera again.
I pretended to agree with everything as if this was new and enlightening.
“I hear you, I hear you.”
“Cuz there ain’t no difference between a whore who sleeps for money and one that marries for it! Shit!” He then went on about something else, something that only makes sense when you are afraid of death or desperately in love and will say anything to alleviate the terror.
“I hear you, bro.”
We got to the school and the guard told us to go to the general office and get visitors’ passes. We asked for directions to the auditorium, and when we got there the assembly had already started. The place was full of children and flowers. Kids whispered to one another, fidgeting in those uncomfortable auditorium chairs, kicking the chairs in front of them and rocking back and forth. Up on the small stage, the guests were sitting on yellow school chairs, waiting for their moment to speak. One was a tall woman in a blue dress who could easily have been Blanca twenty years older. I looked at Bodega. His gaze was fixed on her with an intensity that indicated nothing else mattered or existed. If I’d wanted to pick his wallet, I could have. He stared at her as if he was reeling back years, each year a ton of hate mixed with a love that never had had an opportunity to reenter the atmosphere and burn itself out. It was as if Bodega had hit rewind on an ugly romantic scene that should have been shot differently, a scene that, after all these years, after he had played it in his head every day, he was now going to shoot with the ending he had always wanted.
I elbowed him hard.
“Which one’s Vera?” I knew but asked anyway. It had to be the woman he was staring at, the one waiting patiently, not showing any discomfort in the delay.
“The one with the blue dress. The one crossing her legs. Still has the legs, the legs never left her,” he answered, continuing to gaze at her.
And then from behind the curtains came a figure looking like he wasn’t just sorry he was late but also as if he hadn’t done his homework. Nazario sat down and took his place among the guests.
That’s when it hit me. All this time, I had been set up.
It had been Bodega who had donated the money to Vera’s old school so they could call her up from Miami and invite her as their guest. I’m not sure he even knew they were going to name the auditorium after her but it didn’t matter because it got him the results he wanted. Nazario had probably handled all the paperwork and concealed where the money really came from. Nazario must have made some sort of dizzy razzmatazz nonsense about the donation being an anonymous gift but I’m sure he gave the school enough information to know it was Vera. Or maybe Nazario just skipped all that shit and went straight to the superintendent of District 4 with an offer he couldn’t refuse. One thing was sure, I was there for one reason and one reason only, so Bodega could have one of Vera’s relatives there next to him. Bodega probably had no clue how to reach Blanca or Negra and so he reached me. He reached me and he could now pass himself off as family.
The fact was that Bodega could have easily found Vera. He could have gotten Nazario to hire the best private investigator in the city and traced her all the way to Florida. But then what? Blood was thicker than water and that’s what he wanted, blood. Family is family for Latinos: a cousin, no matter if it’s third or fourth or seventh, is still a cousin, and nothing can cut that—regardless of how far away the family member is; he or she is part of that family. With me and Blanca he had an ace in the hole. He had helped himself and along the way had also helped Vera’s family by giving her pregnant niece and her husband a nice apartment. And I had walked right into it.
At that moment I didn’t like him. He used people and used his money to move them by remote control. He had used Blanca without Blanca even knowing it and I had been the one that had gotten us involved in all this. I was going to go home and tell her everything that I knew—except for the stuff about Sapo, because I knew Blanca would want me to go to the police.
Of course, once Blanca k
new who owned the building, and how he got the money to buy and fix it up, she’d want to move out. I didn’t want to move. It was the best living situation we had ever had and it was more than affordable, it was downright cheap. Besides, the baby was due to arrive by late summer and we needed that extra space, that extra room. Also, regardless of Bodega’s activities, he was fixing up the neighborhood. For the first time in my life I had seen scaffolding all over Spanish Harlem. In almost every part of the neighborhood, some building was being renovated. And he was creating this professional class of his. Paying people’s tuition in hopes of building a better future. No, I thought, with Bodega all you could hope for is that the good would outweigh the bad. I decided not to tell Blanca and just leave Bodega stranded in a school auditorium.
So as Bodega and I were standing against the back of P.S. 72’s auditorium, I pointed at Vera.
“Well, there she is. That’s her, right? So I did my part. I’m out.” I opened the large door of the auditorium and walked into the hallway. Bodega broke away from wherever he was at in his mind, peeled his eyes off Vera, and chased after me.
“Where you going?” He sounded surprised, as if I had agreed beforehand to stay. As if my staying was part of the deal.
“Hey, man, you said for me to find Vera, and I did. She’s right there and now I’m gone and we’re even, right? I’m your tenant, you’ll have my rent on time, and thass it.” I began to walk away. Bodega followed me.
“Chino, you can’t leave. You have to be there with me, bro. Come on, don’t be like that.” I was taken back to the time when I first met Bodega. When he had talked all that tough stuff and I had turned him down, his face had collapsed. This was the same face. Just like that first time, Bodega needed something from me and didn’t know how to ask.
“Nah, I got you what you wanted. If you want me to stay with you,” I said, “you got to level with me.”
Bodega Dreams Page 12