Chapter Seven
San Juan, Puerto Rico
1953
When Rafaela was seven and Dolores nine, their friend Candido and his mother, Priti, lived with them in the big house on calle Américo Salas. That’s how both girls thought of it—not that their housekeeper, Priti, lived there with her son, but that their friend Candido lived there with his mother, in the downstairs bedroom of the house where she happened to cook and clean. There were four larger, empty bedrooms upstairs, but it didn’t occur to the sisters to wonder why their friend and his mother shared the small, spare room beside the kitchen when there were so many better ones to choose from upstairs. Their upbringing did not encourage that manner of question.
Priti was always up first, dressed, and humming around the kitchen, brewing coffee, sizzling eggs, popping toast, no matter how early Rafaela came down. Priti dipped and twirled around her frying pan, and if Rafa came into the kitchen without her dressing gown, Priti would swipe at her backside with the spatula.
“Where are your slippers?” she’d say. “You’ll catch a foot fungus!”
Rafaela would laugh and screw up her nose, thoughts of mushrooms sprouting between her toes. Even though Candido was the same age as Rafaela, he never came out of their little room in his pajamas, never ever walked barefoot on the cool tile floor. He helped his mother polish the railings by the steps, dust Papamío’s jade chess set, burnish the bone-inlaid wood of Mamamía’s vanity with lemon oil. Rafaela liked the way it smelled in there when Candido was done polishing. Once, she asked if she could try, and Candido nodded silently, passing her the bottle and rag, but she spent more time smelling it than wiping it around. She left a thick smear of fingerprints behind, so he had to do it a second time when she’d finished, but he didn’t seem to mind, or if he did, she didn’t notice.
Both children knew, without understanding why they knew, that no one should ever catch Rafaela with the rag and polish. In fact, no one should observe the mutual fondness between them at all, despite the fact that they were secretly best friends. So Rafaela was quick to cover her teeth and concentrate elsewhere when any of the adults were nearby. Still, sometimes she hid behind the potted palm in the corner of Papamío’s study so she could watch Candido open wide the double doors to the courtyard and sweep the gathered dust outside, a grace in his movements, an elegance in the flex of his arm as he reached to unlatch the top lock. Sometimes she admired the way his honey-colored hair curled just so behind his ears. Even when they were little, she had noticed the smoothness of his skin and the deep green of his eyes, the same color as the crown of a perfectly ripe pineapple. She felt it was a pleasure just to look at him, to stare at him, and whenever she could do so unobserved, she did. Dolores caught them together in the pantry once, squatting on the checkerboard floor, chins resting on knees, playing with a spinning top. Candido could make that top go for a full three and a half minutes with one spin. He was teaching her the technique, how to whip the cord for maximum torque, but Dolores pulled Rafaela out by the ear, didn’t let go until she’d dragged her little sister upstairs to her bedroom.
“Oh my God, if Papamío saw you with that boy!” Lola said.
Rafaela rubbed her ear. “We were only playing,” she pouted. “He’s nice.”
“He’s very nice,” her sister agreed. “And that’s why you have to leave him alone. You’ll get him in trouble.”
“Look what you did to my ear!” Rafa pulled back her hair to examine the damage in the mirror, but the pink was already fading, and with it, her irritation.
On Nochebuena that year, Rafaela and Dolores had to stay home while Mamamía and Papamío went to dinner with the governor’s family at La Fortaleza. Rafaela had never been inside the governor’s palace herself, but it made her giddy to think of her parents being ushered inside, past the tourists who gathered to take pictures by the front gate. Such was Rafaela’s despair at being left behind on the evening of such a glamorous event that she didn’t know how she’d survive it. She and her sister sat together on their mother’s bed while she got ready. Mamamía’s black hair was bundled and coiled and looped dramatically all over her head, and then fixed in place with golden combs. Her dress was made of emerald-green brocade, and her matching gloves came up to just beneath her elbow. Mascara black, lipstick red, shoes golden to match the combs stuck through her piled hair. When Mamamía smiled, she was radiant like the sun. Rafaela ached just from looking at her. Jewels dangled from her mother’s ears and reminded Rafaela of heavy fruit straining the limbs of a mango tree. Lola was stretched out on her tummy reading Pérez y Martina for the thousandth time, and Rafaela sat beside her with her legs crossed, her mother’s latest issue of Vogue spread open across her lap. Mamamía was just as pretty as any of these blond ladies in the magazine. Prettier , Rafaela thought, as she flipped idly through the pages.
“When will we get invited to the governor’s house?” Rafaela asked.
Dolores marked her place with her finger and looked up from the page. Mamamía turned on her vanity stool to look at her girls. In the mirror behind her, Rafaela admired how the back of her mother’s green dress scooped low to emphasize the delicate brown wings of her shoulder blades.
“Only the older children come,” Mamamía said, bending to adjust the strap of her shoe.
“But we’re older,” Rafa said.
“Speak for yourself, I’m still a baby,” Lola said, returning her attention to the book.
Mamamía stood up and walked over to the bed, where she settled her weight between them. “I think the youngest ones there will be twelve or thirteen.” She smiled. “A few years yet, for you two.”
Rafaela groaned and flopped onto her back. “I’ll never be able to wait that long!”
Mamamía flipped the magazine closed before hauling Rafaela onto her lap. “I’ll tell you a secret,” she said.
Rafaela reached up to touch the dangles hanging from her mother’s ear. “What?” she whispered.
Lola pretended to keep reading beside them, but Rafaela could feel a shift in her posture and knew her sister was listening too.
“These fancy dinners?” Mamamía said, stroking the soft skin beneath Rafaela’s chin with the fingers of her satin glove. She leaned her face in so close that their noses were touching. “ Dreadfully boring.”
“What?” Rafaela was aghast. “No!”
“I knew it!” Lola slapped the book closed and sat up on her knees.
“So boring,” Mamamía confirmed, crossing her eyes.
“But what about all the dresses and the fashion?” Rafaela asked.
Mamamía thought about it, nodding her head this way and that. “Sometimes the ladies are beautiful, sometimes they’re smart and interesting,” she said. Rafaela tipped herself back in her mother’s arms like a baby, and Mamamía caught her in the crook of her elbow, swinging her legs up over the other arm. “But the most beautiful ladies, the smartest and most interesting ladies live right here in this house!” She reached back and squeezed Dolores’s ticklish knee with one hand. Lola squealed. Reclining in her mother’s arms, little Rafa was unconvinced.
“What about the food?”
“Who’s a better cook than Priti?”
This was a valid point.
“The music?”
Mamamía sighed, tipping Rafa back up to a sitting position. She stood out from beneath her daughter’s weight, and Rafaela slid off, landing on her feet.
“Well, the boleros and guarachas are magical,” Mamamía admitted. “And your father is a marvelous dancer.”
“Will there be an orchestra?” Lola was unable to hide her curiosity any longer.
“Of course,” Mamamía said. “Maybe Rafael Hernández and his band.”
“Wow!” Lola was sufficiently dazzled, and both she and Rafa began to sing their favorite Rafael Hernández song, which, they all agreed, was the real national anthem even if it wasn’t the official choice Governor Munoz Marín had signed into law just last year. Yo se lo que son los encantos de mi Borinquen hermosa, por eso la quiero yo tanto, por siempre la llamaré ?PRECIOOOOOOSAAAAA! Rafaela clutched her heart, and Lola threw her head back to better belt out the lyrics.
“Ay, my little chorus of angels!” Mamamía laughed. “See? How much I would rather be home with you, practicing our aguinaldos and getting ready for the parrandas!”
Mamamía shimmied her hips. The parrandas were one of Mamamía’s favorite Christmas traditions. Even in San Juan, she always said the parrandas reminded her of growing up in Mayagüez, when the carolers would go from door to door all through the town and surrounding campo, singing and dancing and playing instruments both crafted and improvised, clapping their hands, shaking their skirts, sharing pitorro and coquito and food. Everyone was rich in the parrandas, never mind who had money and who didn’t. It was a spirited swell of community gathering joy and commotion as it rolled through the streets from one house to the next and the next. For all their glamour, the festivities at La Fortaleza paled in comparison to the liveliness of the parrandas.
“Anyway, I’m sure it will be fun.” Mamamía convinced neither herself nor her daughters.
She tucked a tube of red lipstick into a tiny mirrored box and stowed it in her handbag.
“How do I look?” She checked her reflection in the mirror.
“So beautiful, Mami!” Lola said.
“The prettiest lady who ever lived,” Rafaela said with absolute sincerity.
Mamamía smiled at them both, and delivered their hugs carefully, so as not to smudge her makeup or wrinkle her dress. She wasn’t a naturally fussy woman, but when she attended these events, her physical appearance was of utmost importance. She strived to look immaculate, to leave no opening for the suggestion she was slovenly. To her daughters, she would not yet mention the subtle resentment of the other wives, the backhanded compliments about her sophistication and comportment, the straying hands and breath of their men. She couldn’t begin to explain the verbal gymnastics some of these women performed in order to arrive at the point: the lineal purity of their Spanish ancestral blood. A purity, they implied, Papamío himself had enjoyed until he’d chosen to dilute the line of his progeny by marrying una jíbara morena, even though Mamamía would’ve described herself as parda clara, had anyone bothered to ask. (Of course, people seldom did ask directly, and no one had asked recently, not since the census taker two years prior, who listened politely as Mamamía explained how absurd it was, trying to distill the question of race to just two or three options when anyone in Puerto Rico could see that race was a spectrum with at least a few dozen distinct and beautiful designations. The man had nodded and sipped from his teacup, and then ignored Mamamía’s assertions, recording his own assessment, mulata , on the clipboard in front of him.)
On one previous occasion at La Fortaleza, a lady who considered herself genteel to a fault had lightly touched Mamamía’s elbow, and nodded to her feet, remarking on the height and beauty of Mamamía’s heels.
“Was it difficult,” she asked then, “to become accustomed to wearing shoes?”
Mamamía had taken an extra beat to chew and swallow her canapé before answering. In the right mood, she enjoyed inflaming this manner of ignorance.
“The shoes weren’t much bother,” she replied, turning one leg in and lifting the heel to admire her own foot. She dropped her voice and added, “But I don’t suppose I’ll ever adapt to imprisoning my magnificent breasts in this damned brassiere!”
Mamamía briefly appreciated the woman’s scandalized expression before turning to deposit her empty champagne flute on the tray of a pass- ing waiter. She took a solemn pleasure in meeting these women in the ugliest corners of their conceit, but she was determined to protect her daughters from having to do the same. When it was their turn to stand in these gowns, in these ballrooms, suffering these excruciating conversations, Dolores and Rafaela would face some potentially reduced version of this ignorance, Mamamía knew, because her daughters had the half entitlement of their father’s pedigree to bolster them. Mamamía would arm them with impeccable manners, with an outstanding education, and with the beauty that was their birthright. Her daughters, she determined, would own these rooms. But not before they had to.
Although young Dolores and Rafaela knew nothing of this social blood sport, knew only the scent of their mother’s gardenia perfume, the elegance of her posture, the smile she aimed at Papamío when he proffered his arm, they could feel Mamamía’s absolute sincerity when she said she’d rather stay home with them. They knew it to be true. They kissed her powdered cheek at the door and then scrambled up onto the balcony to watch Benicio pull the yellow 1949 Buick Roadmaster out of its arched carport. Benicio got out of the car in his guayabera and walked around to the other side to open the door for Mamamía and Papamío. In the driveway, all three grown-ups turned their faces up to the girls standing above.
“We’ll be back in time for the parrandas!” Mamamía said. “And if you eat your dinner, Priti has a little surprise for you after.”
Lola bounced on her toes, and Rafa tried to guess what it might be. Perhaps mallorcas from La Bombonera—swoon!
After dinner, Priti let all three of them—Lola, Rafa, and Candido—have two servings each of her homemade tembleque, which was cold and perfectly set, and which she always garnished with a few shavings of fresh, raw coconut and just the right amount of cinnamon. Then in the living room, she carefully opened the lid on Papamío’s record player and slid a 45 out of its sleeve and onto the center post where, with a small crackle, it began to turn. Candido slicked his hair back, tucked one arm behind his waist, and bowed deeply in front of Rafaela, who giggled on the couch.
“Senorita,” Candido said in his deepest, most formal voice. “Will you do me the honor of granting me this dance?”
Priti laughed and Lola rolled her eyes, but Rafaela stood up and tucked her fingers into Candido’s waiting hand. His fingers were warm and dry. She curtseyed, and then pitched her voice up three octaves to a ridiculous falsetto, and answered through her nose.
“The honor is all mine, kind sir!”
They all laughed, but that sound disappeared beneath the rhythms of “El Cumbanchero,” and even Lola couldn’t sit still. They all danced, didn’t stop dancing, even when the song ended and Priti had to start it again and again. Rafaela could feel the heat of her own skin like an answer to the air around her. They danced until the room spun beneath them.
Twelve days later, on Three Kings Day, Rafaela awoke to discover that the magi had left her a flute, a new kite in the shape of a hawk, and most exciting of all, a heavy golden brush and hand-mirror set with trails of stars all along their pearl-studded handles. They were as beautiful as Mamamía’s, and very grown-up. Rafaela put on her favorite dress and took the hand mirror out to the balcony to admire herself in the sunshine. Whenever a young girl passed by on the street below, Rafaela angled the mirror to direct a sunspark into the girl’s face so the girl was forced to look up and see Rafaela standing on that balcony like some tropical Juliet, dark-eyed and luminous with her resplendent new mirror.
It was Priti who interrupted her amusement. “Come inside, you have to get changed,” she said, closing and fixing the tall shutters as she ushered Rafaela inside.
“What do you mean? This is what I’m wearing today,” Rafaela protested, gesturing to the fabulous dress.
But Priti had already crossed to the wardrobe and was rummaging deep on the bottom shelf. She emerged with Rafaela’s sole pair of Bermuda shorts.
“Here.” She turned and proffered them to Rafa. “These still fit?”
Rafaela winced. “No?”
“Try them.”
“I don’t—”
“Put them on!” Priti almost never raised her voice, not even with Candido.
Rafaela grabbed the shorts and quickly wriggled them up to her hips beneath her dress.
“There,” Priti said. “Perfect.” Then she whipped Rafaela around and dragged her long black curls into a ponytail while Rafa stood trying not to grouse. She saw Lola flit past in the hallway outside, also dressed strangely, in shorts, a T-shirt, and her old saddle shoes.
“What’s going on?” Rafaela asked, while Priti tugged at her hair.
“A surprise,” Priti said, tightening the ribbon around Rafa’s ponytail. “Come on.”
Rafa still had the dress on over the shorts, so she returned to her wardrobe and emerged with a short-sleeved blouse with a lace collar. It didn’t exactly match the shorts, but Rafaela hoped the lace would provide the elegance the shorts lacked. She buttoned it up, glanced disapprovingly in the mirror, and grabbed last year’s saddle shoes off the bottom shelf of the wardrobe.
Priti sat in the front seat beside Benicio just like she had last week when Benicio drove all seven of them to the Vanderbilt for their annual holiday lunch. Rafaela had perched on Papamío’s lap that day, and Candido had squeezed in between Benicio and his mother in front. When they got home later that afternoon, Benicio had presented Papamío with a jug of pitorro, and all four grown-ups disappeared into Papamío’s study to have a festive afternoon drink that lasted until the sun went down and Priti had to make sandwiches for dinner.
But today it was just the five of them in the car, so there was plenty of room for the three kids to sprawl out across the back seat. Rafaela sat in the middle, behind the ashtray, but there was no worry about getting her shorts or shoes dirty with soot, because Benicio emptied that ashtray every single time Papamío got out of the car, and then he’d even wipe it out with a damp rag. Priti had a blue scarf tied over her hair and was wearing the new sunglasses Mamamía had given her for Christmas. Dressed like that and smiling the way she was, and looking so at home in the Roadmaster, Priti could’ve been mistaken for Mamamía’s younger sister. When they reached the bridge along calle Arecibo, the Roadmaster slowed to a crawl, and Priti leaned forward in her seat. Ahead of them, traffic wasn’t moving at all. Wherever they were going, it seemed like all of San Juan had decided to go there too. Benicio leaned out over the edge of the driver’s door, but there wasn’t much to see. Priti glanced at him.
“How far from here?” she asked.
“Half a mile maybe?”
She opened her door with a squawk.
“You going to walk with all three of them?” Benicio asked.
“If we wait, it’ll be all melted before we get there!”
Melted! This was a clue, for sure. Rafaela turned her head from her sister to her friend and back.
“Piraguas?” Lola asked.
“But why would all the piraguas melt?” Rafaela wondered, her mouth already watering as she considered the flavor options. Cherry, china, papaya.
Candido shrugged.
“Let’s go, no time to waste!” Priti said, yanking open the back door as well.
They were in the middle lane of the roadway, near the center of the bridge, but there was no danger as they piled out of the car, because none of the other cars were moving either. All around them, other kids were climbing out of other cars with other ladies.
“If I can get out of here, I’ll wait for you at that café on the bottom of avenida Miramar,” Benicio said. “The one with the yellow umbrellas.”
“Maybe two hours?” Priti said.
“Take your time—boss has me finished for the day after this. I’ll sit and have a coffee while I wait.”
Priti grinned and ushered them up onto the sidewalk like wayward ducklings to a pond.
“Where are we going?” Rafaela asked for the hundredth time.
Again, Priti’s only answer was to hurry ahead, all three kids tagging along behind her. A nearby woman holding a small boy by the hand smiled over at Priti.
“You have such beautiful children!” the lady said, and Rafaela could see how pleased Priti was to receive this kind of praise, the misapprehension that her son was here in the company of his two pretty sisters. It was a mistake that happened with some frequency because, with the exception of Candido’s green eyes (inherited from Priti), the three children all did look rather alike. As usual, Priti stood up a little taller and did not correct the assumption that these three little beauties all belonged to her. In a way, she thought, they did.
“Thank you!” Priti said. Then to the kids, “Come on, hurry!”
They joined the growing crowd of other children, all dressed as strangely as they were, shorts, T-shirts, raggedy shoes. A lot of the boys wore their baseball uniforms with caps and striped tube socks. Priti stepped down off the sidewalk to pass a slower-moving family in front. They followed the crowd, but when they finally arrived, Rafaela still didn’t understand what they were doing there, in a crowded park on the eastern end of El Viejo San Juan.
There was a large knot of people in the center of the park, and all around this nucleus, Navy airmen stood back, handsome and smiling in their caps and reflective sunglasses. Candido understood before the girls did, and he broke away from his mother’s hand to run toward the center of the crowd. Rafaela tried to follow, but Lola was hanging back, cautious. Rafa tugged on her sister’s arm, but when Lola wouldn’t budge, Rafa broke free, too, and followed Candido into the crowd. There were elbows everywhere, and Rafa couldn’t see much, but she kept her head down and ducked between the swinging arms and bodies. There was screeching and squealing, too, and as she got deeper into the mass of the crowd, Rafaela realized it was all children. The mothers hung back around the perimeter, matching smiles and chatting with the uniformed men. The next thing she noticed was the crunch of something wet beneath the flat sole of her saddle shoe, like brittle gravel that popped beneath the weight of her steps.
“What is that?” she said out loud, stooping to touch the gray-white pebbles beneath her feet.
Cold. It was ice cold. Beside her, a boy in a Cangrejeros jersey was packing the white stuff into a ball. It crunched as he squeezed it together, dripping its icy water down his wrist. He saw her staring.
“It’s snow!”
Her mouth dropped open.
“How?”
This mantle of freezing slush beneath the hot blue sky could not have been more different from her one previous experience of snow, a hushed evening flurry during a family visit to New York. It had been magical, had delighted all of them. Even Papamío had turned a little waltz beneath the weightless sprinkles in front of their hotel on Fifth Avenue.
“Dona Fela flew it in from Vermont for Three Kings Day!”
Rafaela blinked as she tried to take the information in, but it made no sense, it was too grand a gesture for her imagination to hold. Later, on the way home, Benicio would buy them all piraguas, while Priti explained that the beloved mayor of the city, Dona Felisa Rincón de Gautier (who happened to be a personal friend of Mamamía’s) had organized the snow delivery as a Christmas gift for the children of San Juan. Much later still, decades hence, academics would re-examine this day, this immoderate offering, and declare it to be an act of psychological colonization. But that judgment would happen in some remote, alien future. Today, the piraguas would turn the children’s tongues red and blue and green with icy syrup while they spoke reverently of Dona Fela: her pearls, her immaculate braids and enormous sunglasses, her implausible generosity.
But before any of that, first, there was snow! A fleeting miracle, gritty with sand. Rafaela dropped into a squat and plunged her hands into the mess, sending a spike of cold up her arms. She found herself squealing like all the children around her, great peals of laughter while the boys pelted each other with their hand-packed snow nuggets, and the girls tried to skate across the surface on their slippery shoes. One kid lay flat on his back in the middle of everything, flapping his arms and legs wide, making shapes in the melting slop. When he stood up, his back was a wet shambles of sticky grass, his reddened skin dripping with the cold.
“Rafa!” She heard her name, and when she looked up, there was Candido standing beside an airman who was holding open a pristine bag of fresh snow. “Just for us, come here!”
She pushed through the small space between them, but by the time she got there, four other kids had already noticed the fresh bag, and they were all shoving in around Candido to be first to get their hot hands on the clean snow, like greedy piglets at their mother’s teats. Rafaela squirmed and pressed, but she couldn’t reach. Candido went up on his tiptoes then, stretched out across all the grabbing hands, and found hers above the fray. He pulled her across and folded her in front of him, between himself and the bag. He was no bigger than she was, but she felt the safety of him even then, the way he made his small body like a barrier around her. The way he folded her hand in his and then plunged their fingers together into the waiting snow.
Decades would swim by in an instant. Rafaela would live an expansive life. She’d know love and suffering and pleasure and wonder. She would experience many snowfalls. And then Lola would die, and Rafaela would find within herself a new capacity for despair. She’d hire a psychologist who’d teach her to relieve her grief-borne anxiety by instructing Rafaela to close her eyes and breathe deeply, to breathe into her happiest memories, to locate the feeling of those moments. When, in her life, had she felt safest and most cherished? Go there. Be there. Breathe.
Rafaela surprised herself by turning up here, over and over again. This simple city park in El Viejo San Juan. This bolt of feeling when Candido stood behind her, tangled their warm fingers together, and burrowed them into the cold.