Fighting Naked

FIGHTING NAKED
Enamorado hasta de un palo de escoba.
 He falls in love even with broomsticks.

My parents probably argued before Hector was born. Mami was not one to hold her tongue when she was treated unfairly. And while Papi was easygoing and cheerful most of the time, his voice had been known to rise every so often, sending my sisters and me scurrying for cover behind the annatto bushes or under the bed. But the year that Hector was born their fights grew more frequent and sputtered into our lives like water on a hot skillet. “Where’s my yellow shirt?” Papi asked one Sunday morning as he rummaged through the clothes rack he’d put up near the bed. “I haven’t ironed it yet.” Mami rocked on her chair, nursing Hector. “Where are you going?” “Into town for some things.” Papi kept his back to her as he tucked a blue shirt into his pants. “What things?” “Plans for the new job.” He shook cologne into his hands and slapped it around his face and behind his ears. “When will you be back?” Papi sighed loud and deep. “Monin, don’t start with me.” “Start what? I asked you a simple question.” She levelled her eyes and set her lips into a straight line. “I don’t know when I’ll be back. I’ll stop in to see Mamá, so I’ll probably have dinner there.” “Fine.” She got up from her chair and walked out of the house, Hector attached to her breast. Papi brushed his leather shoes and stuffed them inside a plaid zippered duffel bag. He put on canvas loafers that had once been white but had yellowed with the dirt of the road. He unhooked his straw hat from the nail by the door and left without kissing us good-bye. I went looking for Mami behind the house. She sat on a stump under the breadfruit tree, her back to me. Her shoulders bobbed up and down, and she whimpered quietly, every so often wiping her face with the edge of Hector’s baby blanket. I walked to her, tears stinging the rims of my eyes. She turned around with an angry face. “Leave me alone! Get away from me.” I froze. She seemed so far away, yet I sensed the heat from her body, smelled the rosemary oil she rubbed on her hair. I didn’t want to leave her but was afraid to come closer, so I leaned against a mango tree and stared at my toes against the moriviví weed. Every so often she looked over her shoulder, and I turned my eyes to the front yard, where Delsa and Norma chased one another, a cloud of dust painting their legs up to their droopy panties. “Here,” Mami stood over me, holding a drowsy Hector, “put him to bed while I heat you kids some lunch.” Her face was swollen, her lashes clumped into spikes. I slung Hector over my shoulder, his baby body yielding onto mine. Mami raked her fingers through my hair with a sad smile then walked away, the hem of her dress swinging in rhythm to her rounded hips.
 Papi didn’t come home for days. Then one night he appeared, kissed us hello, put on his work clothes, and began hammering on the walls. When he’d finished, he washed his hands and face at the barrel near the back door, sat at the table, and waited for Mami to serve him supper. She banged a plateful of rice and beans in front of him, a fork, a glass of water. He didn’t look at her; she didn’t look at him. While he ate, Mami told us to get ready for bed, and Delsa, Norma, and I scrambled into our hammocks. She nursed Hector and put him to sleep. Papi’s newspaper rustled, but I didn’t dare poke my head out. I drifted into a dream in which I climbed a tall tree whose lower branches disappeared the moment I scaled the higher ones. The ground moved farther and farther away, and the top of the tree stretched into the clouds, which were pink. I woke up sweating, my arms stretched over my head and gripping the rope of my hammock. The quinqué’s flame threw orange shadows onto the curtain stretched across the room. Mami and Papi lay in bed talking. “You haven’t given me money for this week’s groceries.” The bed creaked as Papi turned away from Mami. “I had to buy materials. And one of the men that works with me had an emergency. I gave him an advance.” “An advance?!” Mami had a way of making a statement with a question. From my hammock on the other side of the curtain I envisioned her face: eyes round, pupils large, her eyebrows arched to the hairline. Her lips would be half open, as if she’d been interrupted in the middle of an important word. When I saw this expression on her face and heard that tone of voice, I knew that whatever I’d said was so far from the truth, there was no use trying to argue with her. Even if what I said was true, that tone of voice told me she didn’t believe me, and I’d better come up with a more convincing story. Papi either couldn’t think of another story or was too tired to try, because he didn’t say anything. I could have told him that was a mistake. “You gave him an advance?! An advance??” Her voice had gone from its “I don’t believe you” tone to its “How dare you lie to me” sound. “Monin,” the bed creaked as Papi turned to her. “Can we talk about this in the morning? I need to sleep.” His voice was calm. When Mami was angry, she argued in a loud voice that reached higher pitches the more nervous she became. When Papi argued, he put all his energy into holding himself erect, maintaining a steady calm that was chilling to us children but had the opposite effect on Mami. “No, we can’t talk about this in the morning. You leave before the sun comes up, and you don’t show up until all hours, your clothes stinking like that p##a.” Even when she was very angry, Mami rarely swore or used vulgar language. Papi knew this. It was a clue to how upset she was. He calmly got up and walked to the curtain separating our rooms. I ducked my head back inside my hammock. “Monin, stop it. You’ll wake the children.” “Now you’re worried about the children. Why is it that you don’t even think about them when it’s less convenient. When you’re partying with your women and your barroom buddies.” The bedsprings creaked violently as she got up. “Do those hijas de la gran p##a know you have children in this Godforgotten hellhole? Do they know your children go barefoot and hungry while you spend the misery you earn on them?” “Monin!” “Don’t think just because I’m stuck in this jungle all day long I don’t know what’s going on. I’m not stupid.” Hector woke up with a wail. Papi raised the flame on the lamp while Mami reached into Hector’s hanging cradle and lifted him out. Delsa and Norma whimpered from their side of the room. I didn’t have to pretend to sleep anymore, so I sat up and watched their silhouettes through the curtain. Mami changed Hector’s diaper with such rough movements, I worried she’d stick a pin into him. Papi stood at the window, looking at where a view would have been if the window were open. “Look, I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but I don’t want to hear it anymore.” He dressed. Mami lifted Hector to her shoulder and paced, bouncing him up and down to get him to go to sleep. “You don’t come home until after dark ... if you come home at all. And weekends, instead of working on this hovel you call a house, you take off with one excuse or another. You have no shame! I’m sick of it.” “Well, I’m sick of it too! Do you think I like hearing you complain all the time? Or that I want to hear about how much you hate it here, and how much better life was in San Juan, and how backward Macún is? I’m sick of it! I’m sick of you!” He stomped out, probably just to give Mami time to cool off, which was his way of fighting her. But I thought he was leaving us. “Papi!! Don’t go. Please, Papi, stay!” I shrieked. When they heard me, Delsa and Norma joined in, and Hector, who was almost asleep in spite of my mother’s yelling near his ear, screeched. “See what you’ve done!” Mami hollered into the dark yard. “Some father you are, running off on your own children!” She threw Hector into his cradle and tore Papi’s clothes off their hangers by the bed. “Sick of me? Well, I’m sick of you too.” She tossed his clothes out the door, grabbed a pitcher of water from the table, and splashed it on them. Then she bolted the door, took Hector out of his cradle, and sat on her rocking chair, nursing him. Tears streamed down her cheeks into the grooves at the corners of her lips. “You kids shut up and go back to sleep,” she yelled. None of us dared get out of our hammocks. We hunkered into them, stifling our sobs. For a long time I listened for Papi. For his voice asking Mami to forgive him, or for his footsteps outside the house. But I fell asleep to the sound of Mami’s rocking chair creaking, and her sobs, soft and low like the miaow of a kitten. The next morning Papi’s clothes were scattered in the front yard. They were damp, stained with the muddy tracks of toads and iguanas. As she waited for the coffee water to boil, Mami picked them up and took them to the tub under the avocado tree. That afternoon, when Papi came home, they’d all been washed.

 The next day I stood on a stool while Mami pinned the hem on my school uniform. “Mami, why don’t you like Margie’s mother?” “Who?” “Provi, my sister Margie’s mother.” “Negi, I never want to hear you mention that woman’s name again, you hear me?” “But Mami ...” “I mean it.” “But Mami ...” “Stand still or I’m going to have an accident with these pins.” I stood still as a statue while she finished. Papi dipped his trowel into the cement mud in the wheelbarrow by his side and slapped the mud onto a foundation block. “Papi, are you going to bring Margie to see us?” “I don’t know.” He stacked another cinder block and scraped the ooze that came out the sides and bottom. “She can sleep with me.” “Negi!” Mami sat just inside the door of the house sewing. “Leave your father alone.” “I was just asking a question.” “Get away from there and go play with your sisters. Now!” Papi looked at Mami from the shadow of his straw hat. He tipped the brim up and pointed to the pyramid of cinder blocks by the front gate. “Can you bring me one of those?” I looked at Mami. She stared at Papi, not at me, her needle suspended above green fabric. “Can you try it?” Papi said softly. It was heavy and slipped from my fingers, almost crushing my toe. “Ave María, Pablo, don’t abuse her. She’s just a kid.” “I think she can do it,” he shot back at her. He turned the block so that I could hold it along the sides, where there was a place to grab onto. The rough edges scraped against my legs and belly. It was heavy and awkward, but I managed to carry it over next to the wheelbarrow and drop it. “Can I bring another one?” I asked, rubbing my hands against my teeshirt. They smarted from the weight and the grooves that the block had dug into my skin. “No, I can manage.” He carried two blocks stacked one atop the other, set them down carefully, then stood with hands on hips, his back arched, eyes closed, head thrown back so that his Adam’s apple bulged from his neck. “I can’t bring Margie to see you because she’s moved to Nueva York.” Mami took in a breath. “When?” He lifted his arms over his head, stretched up, and floated them slowly to his hips, where they stayed as if he were posing for a picture. Mami watched him for a while then took her sewing inside the house. “You didn’t say she was leaving,” I whined, and it seemed that Papi finally realized that all our talk about Margie was not just my natural curiosity but something more. He turned sad eyes on me, kneeled, and hugged me. As he grieved on my shoulder, I wanted nothing more than for Papi to go on losing people he loved so that he’d always turn to me, so that I alone could bring him comfort. Margie and “that woman’s” disappearance from Puerto Rico didn’t mark the end of my parents’ fights. They were locked in a litany choked with should have’s, ought to’s, and why didn’t you’s. Their arguments accomplished nothing, as far as I could see, except to make everyone miserable. After they fought, Mami was sullen and irritable, and Papi disappeared into himself like a snail into a shell. We children tiptoed around them or else played in the farthest reaches of the yard, our voices dulled lest they incite our parents. To make things more confusing, it was clear that there were moments of tenderness between them. Sometimes I came upon them standing close, arms encircling waists, heads close, as if they shared secrets that transcended the hurt and resentments, the name-calling and deceit.
Almost as soon as Hector started to gum on mashed-up yucca and boiled sweet plantain, Mami’s features softened, her body filled out, and her belly rounded into a soft mound that got in her way whenever she tried to lift one of us into the tub for one of our baths. I couldn’t figure out when or how Papi asked Mami to forgive him and what he did so that she would. But it was clear to me, from their arguments, the conversations I’d overheard between Mami and her female relatives and friends, and from boleros on the radio, that Papi, being a man, was always to blame for whatever unhappiness existed in our house. Men, I was learning, were sinvergüenzas, which meant they had no shame and indulged in behavior that never failed to surprise women but caused them much suffering. Chief among the sins of men was the other woman, who was always a p##a, a whore. My image of these women was fuzzy, since there were none in Macún, where all the females were wives or young girls who would one day be wives. P##as, I guessed, lived in luxury in the city on the money that sinvergüenza husbands did not bring home to their long-suffering wives and barefoot children. P##as wore lots of perfume, jewelry, dresses cut low to show off their breasts, high heels to pump up their calves, and hair spray. All this was paid for with money that should have gone into repairing the roof or replacing the dry palm fronds enclosing the latrine with corrugated steel sheets. I wanted to see a p##a close up, to understand the power she held over men, to understand the sweet-smelling spell she wove around the husbands, brothers, and sons of the women whose voices cracked with pain, defeat, and simmering anger.

 I started school in the middle of hurricane season, and the world grew suddenly bigger, a vast place of other adults and children whose lives were similar, but whose shadings I couldn’t really explore out of respect and dignidad. Dignidad was something you conferred on other people, and they, in turn, gave back to you. It meant you never swore at people, never showed anger in front of strangers, never stared, never stood too close to people you’d just met, never addressed people by the familiar tú until they gave you permission. It meant adults had to be referred to as Don so-and-so, and Doña so-and-so, except for teachers, who you should call Mister or Missis so-and-so. It meant, if you were a child, you did not speak until spoken to, did not look an adult in the eye, did not raise your voice nor enter or leave a room without permission. It meant adults were always right, especially if they were old. It meant men could look at women any way they liked but women could never look at men directly, only in sidelong glances, unless they were putas, in which case they could do what they pleased since people would talk about them anyway. It meant you didn’t gossip, tattle, or tease. It meant men could say things to women as they walked down the street, but women couldn’t say anything to men, not even to tell them to go jump in the harbor and leave them alone. All these rules entered our household the minute I was allowed to leave home for the long walk to and from school. It wasn’t that I hadn’t heard them before. Mami and Papi had passed on to me what they knew of buenos modales, good manners. But these rules had little to do with the way we lived at home. In our family we fought with vigor, adults as well as children, even though we knew we weren’t supposed to. We yelled across the room at one another, came in and out of our one room house without saying “excuse me” and “may I come in,” or even knocking. Mami and Papi were tú, so were our grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. We children spoke whenever we felt like it, interrupted our parents all the time, and argued with them until Mami finally reminded us that we had stepped over the line of what was considered respectful behavior toward parents. In school I volunteered to wipe down the blackboard, to sharpen pencils, to help distribute lined paper in which we could write our tortured alphabets with the mysterious tilde over the n to make ñ, the ü, the double consonants ll and rr with their strong sounds. I loved the neat rows of desks lined up one after the other, the pockmarked tops shiny in spots where the surface hadn’t blistered, the thrill when I raised my desktop to find a large box underneath in which I kept my primer, sheets of paper, and the pencil stubs I guarded as if they were the finest writing instruments. I walked home from school full of importance in my green and yellow uniform. It was my most prized possession, the only thing in our house that belonged to me alone, because neither Delsa nor Norma were old enough to go to school. But school was also where I compared my family to others in the barrio. I learned there were children whose fathers were drunks, whose mothers were “bad,” whose sisters had run away with travelling salesmen, whose brothers had landed in prison. I met children whose mothers walked the distance from their house to church on their knees in gratitude for prayers answered. Children whose fathers came home every day and played catch in the dusty front yard. Girls whose sisters taught them to embroider flowers on linen handkerchiefs. Boys whose brothers took them by the hand and helped them climb a tree. There were families in the barrio with running water inside their houses, electric bulbs shining down from every room, curtains on the windows, and printed linoleum on the floors. Children fought in school in a way unknown to me at home. Delsa, Norma, and I often tied ourselves into punching, biting, kicking knots that only Mami with her switch was able to untangle. But fighting with other kids was different. When I fought with my sisters, I knew what was at stake, a prized marble, a ripe mango just fallen off the tree, a chance to be the first to color in the Sunday comics from Papi’s newspaper. But in school the fights were about something else entirely. If you looked at someone the wrong way they might beat you up. If you were too eager to answer the teacher’s questions you might get beat up. If you rubbed shoulders with the wrong kids you would get beat up. If you mentioned someone’s mother at the wrong time or in a certain tone of voice, you would definitely get beat up. Any number of subtle transgressions, from not saying hello when someone greeted you to saying hello to the wrong person, meant a beating. When I explained to Mami why I came home with a torn uniform and bruises, she made it clear that I was forbidden to fight in school. This made no sense to me at all. Not that Mami encouraged our fights at home, but she never said, “Don’t fight with your sisters.” Her injunctions were always about not punching them too hard. So I had to learn how to avoid the unavoidable, and when I couldn’t, I stripped to my underwear in the school yard to defend myself from kids whose mothers didn’t mind if their uniforms got dirty. Papi left one day and didn’t return that night. For the next three days he didn’t appear. Mami prepared dinner the first night and each night afterward left something for him, but the next morning she’d scrape it all out into the compost, a scowl on her face. We knew better than to ask where Papi was or when he might be coming back. There was no way for her to know, and it was just as well, because knowing would have added fuel to her rage, the brunt of which we children felt in her sullen silences, or increasingly, in her swiftness to spank and hit us with whatever was at hand for reasons that were often as mysterious to us as Papi’s whereabouts. When I got home from school on the fourth day, Mami had bundled our belongings into pillowcases and a tattered suitcase with the handle missing, which she had shut with a tight rope wound into a loop at the top. With Hector on her hip, she led us up the road, dragging the suitcase with her free hand, while Delsa, Norma, and I struggled with the pillowcases full of clothes. I didn’t know to say goodbye to our house and our barrio, nor to wave to the neighbors who looked out curiously as we wound our way to the main road. Delsa, Norma, and I knew not to whine or complain, not to huff too loudly against the strain of the cumbersome pillowcases, not to ask for water or mention food, not to need a bathroom, not to stop to rest or tie our shoelaces or brush the hair from our eyes. We followed Mami in the same bubble of silence in which she walked, her gaze forward, never looking back or sideways at the neighbors who poked one another in the ribs and smirked, who let their eyes fall to the ground and pretended not to see us rather than offer to help us on our way. It seemed like a very long walk to the highway, and when we got there, we climbed into a público car as if this were any other day and we were any family on an excursion into the city. Only when the público was well on its way and we had lost sight of the entrance to Barrio Macún did Mami say what we all knew without asking. “We’re moving to the city. Life will be better there.”