Taína Page 15

  This was very, very unlikely, I thought. It had happened so long ago, those mothers must be dust. The decade of the Capeman had died, too. Most people who were grown adults from that time had left to the stars. But he held on that this was not the case. If he was still walking the earth, these women were, too.

  “Sal, the chances of you running into one of them are like, zero.”

  “No, papo.” He shook his head really fast. “The mothers are here. Right now. Somewhere sleeping.” His eyes scanned the newly renovated tenements and town houses now worth millions that stood across from us. “And if I run into them, what would I tell her? How could I explain that I took their sons away? You know, papo?”

  It was more than the daylight shaming him. It was about him facing a dead past in real people. Even if one of those mothers were alive and by chance he’d run into one of them, she’d never recognize him or he her. But Salvador believed in his heart that this encounter was sure to happen. In his head existed living ghosts.

  “We could go to those boys’ graves, at night,” I said.

  “What for?” He took his eyes off the precinct and placed them on me.

  “To say you’re sorry.”

  And his face swelled up. Even at night I could see the pools in his eyes starting to fill up. Salvador never made noise when he cried. He didn’t even sniffle, he just wept silent tears that clogged in his crow’s-feet. They sat there stuck on his wrinkled face like crusty memories.

  “That’s for the living. Visiting graves is for the living, papo. I can’t say sorry to the dead.” His voice not cracking, just tears. And then slowly he walked up the stairs of the precinct and opened the door.

  “Exactly,” I said. “It’s to make you feel better. You’re still alive. It’s for you.”

  “Me? That’s not important, those boys are. And it’s too late.”

  I thought he was going to go inside, but he closed the door.

  “They brought me out in cuffs,” he said, walking back down the stairs, wiping his tears but not his sadness. “There were a lot of people outside, television, camera crews, lights, reporters. All blocking the way to the cop car that was going to take me to the Tombs.” And he showed me where the television crews had lined the sidewalk. Then he stopped just right at the edge of the curb. “This reporter shoved a microphone in my face. I had seen him before, he wore glasses, from Channel Four, named Gabe Pressman, and he was the one who asked me, ‘How do you think your mother feels right now?’ ” And his eyes continued drooling, but he could talk without choking up. “That’s when I said it.” Like the daylight, it shamed him. “That’s when I said that thing, you know, papo, the thing, those words. I was a kid. I saw all those lights and they made me feel big and bad. Like a movie star. I was a kid. So I said it, but I was just a kid. They called me the Capeman, but I was a kid. So I said it, I said, ‘I don’t care if I burn. My mother can watch.’ ”

  “It’s all right, Sal,” I said, though I could never really know what it must be like to live in his shoes. To understand his guilt for things he could not take back. There was nothing he could do or say. His life was the moral. Salvador was stuck with that life, and whether others learned from it or not, whether he had been forgiven or not, there was no reset button. A life with no rehearsal. The actor goes onstage cold and with no script.

  “I never meant to say that about my mother, papo.”

  “I know, Sal.”

  “You know, she died while I was in that place.” He meant prison, I knew. “So I never got a chance to say to Mom that I was sorry.”

  It was cruel arithmetic, like that guy from Greek myths who rolls the rock up a hill only to have it come tumbling down again. Sal was that guy. Sal was Sisyphus. He didn’t complain or say it was unfair, he just took it. Though it hurt him, made him sad and shameful, he accepted that he had done terrible things and felt it was only just he should suffer. He made suffering his thing. He played and replayed that night’s events in his mind endless times, and each time he was the killer.

  “All I would ask is to start again.” But this time he didn’t finish the sentence. His shoulders slumped and his old gangly arms drooped to his side. Sal’s long, thin frame hung lifeless, the way his costume did in his apartment. I tried to place my arm around el Vejigante, but I couldn’t reach his shoulder. He was too tall, so I planted my hand flat on his back and patted the crying old man.

  “It’s all right, Sal.” I patted the old man like I was burping a baby. “It’s all right. It’s all right, man. It’s all right.”

  Verse 13

  I ENTERED MY project building. The elevator door opened to Mario waiting. He quickly put me in a headlock. He dragged me inside the elevator. He punched me in the face, then punched the last floor on the elevator and dragged me to the roof. The night sky was beautiful. Freshly washed laundry was drying on clotheslines not far from our project building. The white sheets swirled in the wind, and the New York skyline glowed in all its glory.

  “If I remember right, you and that cripple used to only wear Skechers, now I see you wear Nikes,” Mario said after throwing me on the asphalt.

  “Listen, Mario, we can talk. Okay? We can find a way to work this out,” I said, hoping he was not crazy enough to throw me over the roof like cops would do to Puerto Ricans back in the day. Maybe even still today.

  He punched my face.

  I got back up.

  “Mario, can we talk?” I thought about what Taína had told me. I tried to see him in a different light. Maybe he was just putting on a show for his boys and was really not that bad of a guy. I myself had been guilty of that, too. I had lied in front of my friends and had done things that I was not proud of to look cool in their eyes.

  “Listen, Mario, I have an idea—”

  Mario punched me in the stomach.

  I was back on the ground.

  “I took your friend’s arm, but, okay, but he got that shit back. Now tell me, what’s your hustle?”

  I looked up at Mario, and for the life of me I could not see the guy who brought Taína cannoli. The guy she told was sweet to her was nowhere on that roof. He grabbed me by my shirt and lifted me up from the ground with no problem.

  “You always got money. What’s your hustle?”

  He let go of my shirt so I could tell him. “How the fuck you get the money?” he shouted.

  I was on top of a roof, high in the sky, closer to God. But I knew God was not going to come save me.

  “What’s your hustle, psycho, and don’t tell me it’s an ancient Chinese secret,” he spat.

  “Mario, why you gotta be like this?” I said in pain. “Taína told me you brought her pastries—”

  I got decked on the side of my face.

  “Wha?”

  “You were nice to her?” I coughed.

  “Bitch is lying!” he yelled. “I never brought her cannoli.”

  “See! I never said they were cannoli! So how you kno—”

  I got decked again.

  I flung my body headfirst toward Mario to maybe bring him down, but he just tossed me aside like a wafer. I landed on my back. I could see the moon was full. There was a dark blue cloud in the shape of a bird.

  “Fuck that bitch. She was all big tits and nothing else.” And I wished Taína were here so she could see him the way I saw him. Still, I tried to reason with him and decided not to fight anymore.

  “Okay,” I said, “but you have to work with us. I’ll cut you in, okay?”

  “Work? Whachoo mean work? You work. If your thing is work, I’ll just tax you.”

  He slapped my face and then dared me to fight back.

  I did not move.

  He waited. He was angrier than I was because I was not saying anything.

  “I’m taxing you. One hundred a month.”

  I couldn’t help myself
and cursed at him. Bad move. He punched me in the gut. As I doubled over in pain, he dug inside my jeans and robbed me. He counted the bills and liked what he saw. “Inflation,” he said, happy with the money, “two hundred a month.”

  I stayed quiet more out of pain. “This is back pay,” he said, showing me my own bills that were now his. “First payment is next month. Or this time I’m not taking BD’s arm but yours.”

  Mario talked and threatened like the worst of what Pleasant Avenue was when it was still called Little Italy, past mobsters who swindled those who couldn’t go to the cops. Those like me who were swindling someone else. I thought about Mario and me being infected with the same brutal violence of our neighborhood, but I was in too much pain to try to come to an understanding of it.

  Mario split.

  I was happy to see him go. My stomach felt like I had eaten rocks. I sat on the tar roof fourteen floors up and wished I could jump to the tenement that loomed ahead. Land by the clotheslines and unhook a clean white sheet to wrap myself with. Shivering with humiliation, I watched the New York skyline. I thought New York City was choking itself to death. Too many ugly, cheap skyscrapers were being built, and the skyline was now a mess of cluttered rectangles. Beauties like the Chrysler building needed their own space, their own stage to shine. Instead it was being squeezed, smothered, and smashed by the other shit skyscrapers. You could no longer make out the gargoyles. The world’s greatest skyline had been crushed into a bunch of tightly compressed shit boxes.

  Verse 1

  PETA PONCE WAS born a stranger in her body. Her head was too big for her stocky torso. Her arms were uneven, as if the hunchback she carried was where the rest of her right arm had been left behind. She was a black-as-tar woman who as a child had known nothing but sadness. Her parents feared that their future children would be born like her, too, and so they hated their firstborn. In the village of Cabo Rojo, like its red salt mines, Peta Ponce was put to work. She dusted, swept, cut, iron, cooked, folded, and served, and not once did she hold on to bitterness.

  One day the doctors arrived in Cabo Rojo, the way they were showing up in many villages, with their black bags and government-issued vans. These doctors were hired, sent by the government not to educate, or to heal, but to see which of the women in that particular village were unfit, feebleminded, or “promiscuous” in their eyes. When they caught sight of Peta Ponce, Salvador told me, they saw not a young girl but a thing that they were going to make sure would be the last of its kind. The doctors assured Peta Ponce’s parents that this was beneficial for her “appendix,” which needed to be removed, but in fact her appendix was healthy. They gave the parents and Peta Ponce no information, no options, and no choice. Her parents accepted what the doctors were saying as if it came from the mouth of God. All of the people in Cabo Rojo believed these doctors. They did not know that these doctors often made medical records appear as if the sterilization were necessary for the health of the young girls. The peasant population of Cabo Rojo did not understand, Salvador told me, that for the United States, Puerto Rico was a source of cheap labor, high profit, and tax-free business and a testing area for population control. Even the Pill was first tested there. Everyone was in on it. Everyone was on the take. The doctors were paid by the Puerto Rican government, which in turn was reimbursed by the United States. The church got its hush money, and the colonization of wombs went into effect for decades.

  Salvador told me that many were in the dark. These doctors arrived in a village of farmers, of peasants, of poor folks and cured some people while sterilizing women. And no one questioned anything. But everyone felt a sad silence once the doctors were gone.

  It was then, Salvador told me, when Peta Ponce realized that in order to fight this she would have to learn how to talk with the dead.

  Peta Ponce left Cabo Rojo. She wandered from village to village, sleeping in churches, beauty salons, markets, huts, riverbeds, fields, anyplace where that particular town’s espiritistas, santeros, eccentrics, and mystics were willing to see her, talk to her, share what they knew about the dead. She wandered all over the island picking up bits and pieces of folklore, superstition, chisme, every bit of our Taíno roots, African roots, Catholic mysticism, from espiritismo to Mesa Blanca, to Palo Monte, to Regla Lukumi. Peta Ponce absorbed it all. Village mystic elders never failed to see a light following her.

  One night, in Guayama, the village of Los Brujos, Peta Ponce, in her sweaty old clothes that reeked of rice and rum, was taken to the riverbanks. In those violent shallow waters Peta Ponce was baptized an espiritista by older mystics to whom, Salvador said, the spirits had whispered that this young woman had been born with a gift to make people see a “Thou” where they once saw an “it.” Peta Ponce knew all the palm trees, the plants, the hills, the swamps, the coquís, the cemeteries, the heat, the rivers, the ravines, the rocks, the iguanas, the snakes and pastures of dirt, the cats who roamed El Morro at night, the entire island spoke to her in this language where reality and imagination, waking and dreaming, could switch places. And somehow Peta Ponce had always known these things, like children who knew their prayers but could not remember from whom they had learned them.

  One night, by a lonely riverbank, Sal told me, during a baptismal ceremony a scream was heard. It started out low and slow and it seemed to bubble right out of the mud, higher and angrier. It was a hateful scream that formed words that were not human. They were shrieks that held meaning only in some other realm. The screaming woman was being held down tightly by three other women who grappled with her in the mud. The three espiritistas could not calm the screaming woman. Until Peta Ponce arrived. She ordered the three women to let the screaming woman go. When the muddied woman looked up at Peta Ponce, she quieted down, as if Peta Ponce were the only person who could understand her language. The muddied woman’s eyes began to focus little by little, as if she were returning from a great distance and discovering the world all over again. Trembling, the woman clutched Peta Ponce’s ragged gown and begged her not to let her die again. And, Salvador said, Peta Ponce whispered to the woman that with the help of the dead she would change the definitions, the meanings, of her sorrows.

  Like those doctors before, Peta Ponce went from village to village. Her monstrous presence was frightening to the men, but the women would seek her like iron fillings to a magnet. Women who had prayed to all the gods their mothers had known. Women who had prayed to all the saints they had inherited from their grandmothers. Women who had prayed all their lives but had received no peace, these women sought Peta Ponce. She could capture their feelings of regret, of shame, of being coerced, of abuse, and turn the definitions of these terrible emotions into something else. She could fold, twist, and turn experiences around so far back that what had happened was seen in a completely different light. The words that described these terrible emotions held new definitions. It was the spirits who lent her the power to interweave, to curl, twirl, and ripple emotions so that the soul could find its way back to happiness.

  To Peta Ponce, there existed an invisible foundation. It was this unseen plane that held up the material one. The material world was not just ours; we shared it with the dead. The dead were all around us, leaping from material to spiritual. Malice was not what the spirits were after, but rather finding a balance in having to share the material world with the living. They existed in a constant fluidity of sadness for no longer being flesh and blood and also of gratitude for still existing in some other state. Peta Ponce believed that there existed only one plane where the dead could never go. And that was where God lived. And that not even the dead had seen God’s face, for God did not dwell with the dead. The dead stayed here on earth and wandered the planet, living among us. The dead were here to guide us, to help us understand that everything is just a matter of turns. When it’s your turn to leave the material world, the dead would be there to help you in this new phase of life. Because just as there were people waiting for yo
u when you were born, Peta Ponce preached, there would be people waiting for you when you passed.

  Much later, Peta Ponce founded a school, a little house of her own, La Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales de la Encarnación. And broken women came, some stayed, some left, but their stories were all the same. Women who had been lied to, coerced, misinformed, or forced into la operación. Women who were forced to lose children in order to work, or women who were abused, beaten in any way, they all needed Peta Ponce to reverse the definitions of their sadness.

  Peta Ponce’s name quickly made its way to the mainland. La operación was happening there, too, from the South Bronx, the Lower East Side, Bushwick, Spanish Harlem, Chicago, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Hartford, Boston: everywhere there was a woman peddling at a sweatshop, a factory, a cash register, or while mopping some office, it was happening. The bosses wanted the women making them money, not making children. As a whole, the United States did not want Puerto Rican women reproducing. It was not birth control but population control. The choice was left not to the women but to the state. Poor child-bearing women were the culprits of poverty. The more children they birthed, the more poverty would grow, the more easily vulnerable Puerto Rico would be to communist ideals.

  When Sal told me all this, I was in awe and full of fear in meeting Peta Ponce.

  * * *

  —

  PETA PONCE ARRIVED at Taína’s house dressed all in white. Her hair was tightly tucked inside a bandanna, where a carnation stuck out like a white ear. She carried her short, uneven body hard. Her steps were heavy, as if she wanted to break the floors underneath her. She combed Taína’s apartment, smelling every corner like a new puppy. Peta Ponce dug her fingernails over the walls, too, as if she needed to leave scratches behind. Her appearance and actions did scare me, as I felt relieved that she had finally arrived.

  The kitchen table was covered with a white mantle, white flowers, and white candles. Puerto Rican plates were spread out, some had been eaten from, as Doña Flores had granted the espiritista and Taína a feast, while some plates lay untouched for the spirits. In the living room Taína sat scared. She was wearing a long, beautiful white dress. Her hair was loose, neatly draping down her shoulders. Newly done eyelashes framed her hazel eyes, and her nervous lips were a soft red. Taína’s stomach was a globe. It was only a matter of days before she’d give birth. I had never seen Taína look this beautiful and so familiar. When Taína saw that I was there, she exhaled and smiled slightly but did not move. Taína was clearly afraid of Peta Ponce, because she didn’t utter a single curse.