Chapter Nine
San Juan, Puerto Rico
1964
Priti’s mood was evident the moment Rafaela walked through the squeaky front gate on calle Américo Salas and clanged it behind her. Through the open windows at the front of the house, Rafa could hear the banging of cabinets. She paused silently and looked down at her saddle shoes against the broad red steps beneath her. She set her books down beside the front door and tiptoed over to the window, wrapping her fingers around the wrought-iron bars and hauling her weight up to peer through. In the dining room, the long, formal table was already set for dinner, but through the arched doorway at the back, Rafa could see into the kitchen, where Priti was stalking back and forth, muttering to herself. Rafaela lowered herself back to the ground and crept to the edge of the porch where she could lean over the low wall leading to the carport. Papamío’s car wasn’t there. She hopped over and sat on the edge of the wall with her feet dangling down. Maybe she could wait it out.
It wasn’t that Rafaela was afraid of Priti, exactly. She loved Priti like a second mother. But her moods, though rare, were formidable, and stirred in Rafaela some deep, uncomfortable, and confusing feelings of guilt.
When she was little, Rafaela had presumed that Candido’s father had died, and that was why he and his mother had to come live with them and work in their house. It was an arrangement she believed suited them all equally: Priti and Candido earned money and had a nice place to live, and Rafaela’s family had all the help they needed. But by the time she was seventeen, Rafaela knew enough to understand that Candido’s father was not dead at all, but neither was he married to Priti. And while Rafaela did not expend a lot of energy trying to imagine how such a predicament had befallen Priti, and she felt personally responsible for neither Priti’s misfortune nor her deliverance, she gleaned that most other well-to-do families in San Juan society would not have hired Priti. Still, Rafaela knew that, despite what other people might think, she was tremendously lucky to know Priti, to eat her food every day, to hear her humming in the kitchen, to stand each morning beneath the exacting scrutiny of Priti’s hairbrush and palm oil. Were Rafaela given to rumination of this sort, she would even have considered herself lucky to receive the back end of Priti’s spatula from time to time, for she knew that Priti’s insistence on good manners and moral rectitude—and her occasional, well-placed, and largely painless smacks—were designed to bring forth Rafaela’s better self. Priti was not given to unreasonable tempers; there was always a specific and justified cause.
So Rafaela had hoped to get the scoop from Papamío before she entered the house, but he wasn’t home, and she couldn’t sit out here all afternoon; she had homework to do, plus she was expecting a phone call from her friend Claudia at four o’clock. She heard another bang from the kitchen—a pot on the stove, perhaps—and winced lightly. Rafaela had spilled three drops of coffee on the ruffled white collar of her school pinafore that morning too. She always tried to keep her clothes clean not because of how much she disliked the stains herself, but because she knew their appearance created extra midweek work for Priti. She dreaded adding this problem to whatever was going on inside. Maybe she could sneak up to her room and change her clothes before Priti noticed? Maybe she could try soaking the pinafore herself, if she could figure out how Priti did it, which one of the mysterious bottles she tipped onto the fabric before placing it in a bucket of warm water to steep. Or maybe she could dig her other rumpled pinafore out from the bottom of her hamper and make it work until laundry day. Surely Rafaela could figure out how an iron worked.
“Hey!”
Rafaela looked up and shielded her eyes from the sun. Candido was above her on the second-floor balcony off her parents’ bedroom.
“You hiding from Mami?” he asked.
Rafaela pushed herself away from the wall. “That’s crazy,” she said. “I was just looking to see if Papamío was home.”
Her father often was here in his study when Rafaela got home from school in the afternoons. His work hours were relatively predictable, usually at the office in the mornings and early evenings, home by seven or so. He took an extended lunch hour most days to eat at home with Mamamía, and might work in his study for a few hours before returning to the office to wrap up the day.
“Benicio took him back to work an hour ago.”
Candido went to the public school only two blocks away. He left an hour after Rafaela did in the mornings, and got home before her in the afternoons, so in Rafaela’s experience, Candido was almost always home. He received excellent grades despite the fact that he never seemed to study, and always had ample time to help his mother around the house. He was holding a soiled rag in one hand and leaning on his elbows on the balustrade above. He tossed the rag down and it landed at Rafaela’s feet.
“O Romeo.” He threw one arm up and across his forehead. “I hath dropped mine handkerchief.”
“Weirdo.” Rafaela laughed, and bent down to pick it up. She could feel Candido watching her from above, and she wondered what he saw as she leaned down, straightened herself back up. She put one hand on her slender waist. “I hath retrieved thy unclean doily, Juliet!” She pinched the dirty rag between two fingers.
“Bring it up!” he said.
She stepped away from the wall, but then paused and looked up at him again. “What’s up with Priti?” she asked.
An unfamiliar flame briefly darkened Candido’s face, but as Rafaela watched, he doused it. “Come up,” he said.
That’s how it happened then, that unbeknownst to Papamío, Candido saved him from being the one to break the news to Rafaela that everything in their life had changed in a single day. Candido hadn’t planned to tell her, but neither did he feel that he was overstepping by so doing. She was his oldest friend, and wasn’t it his trouble too? They would share the burden between them.
Often, in times of crisis, it feels impossible to assess the extent of the damage from within the moment, and it’s only in hindsight that one is able to determine the true measure of the destruction. Such was not the case with the downfall of the Acuna y Daubón family on November 8, 1964. Their collapse was instant and absolute, and though it took Rafaela and Dolores some time to understand how and why it was all happening, they understood the following immediately.
Some money had disappeared. A vast sum of money, gone, under Papamío’s watch, so Papamío lost his job as municipal treasurer of the city of San Juan, effective immediately. There were no answers to the questions of why or how or where the money had gone, but the scarcity of facts did not stop the people, the press, the neighbors from conjecturing.
There was a suggestion of impropriety. Accusations but no evidence of wrongdoing, gambling, embezzlement, fraud. In his statement to the press, the governor was tepid in his defense of Papamío, insisting that he’d always known Don Rafael Acuna y Torres to be a man of good character, but confessing with some measure of implication that he could not, in fact, explain where the missing money had gone.
“Whether it was a series of bad investments or simple mismanagement or something more nefarious than that is rather beside the point,” the governor said at that evening’s press conference, amid the snapping and flashing of cameras. “The money is gone, and so, too, must go the man responsible for keeping this city financially stable and viable. Rest assured we will get the budget back on track and we will implement safeguards to ensure nothing like this ever happens again.”
Everyone in San Juan understood how important it was for the Partido Popular government to respond swifty and decisively to any potential scandal. It had been only a dozen years since the United States had (ostensibly) ended colonial rule on the island, granting the people of Puerto Rico the right to elect their own governor. But Puerto Ricans remained United States citizens who had no representation in congress and could not vote for president. They remained second-class citizens who, according to the Supreme Court, “belonged to but were not part of the United States,” and as such, the political scene in San Juan was boisterous and fraught. Opinions were strong and loud and varied. People wanted statehood or independence or to maintain their relatively new status as a US commonwealth and a territory of the United States. Some felt that the adjustment in status to commonwealth was nothing more than an illusion, that Puerto Rico was still a de facto colony. In any case, there was very little overlap among the various opinions, and this question of sovereignty for Puerto Rico would remain the primary political concern for decades to come. But in 1964, the citizenry did not know that yet. They knew only that they intended to prove, to themselves and the world, that they had the capacity and inalienable right to self-governance. There was no room for the tolerance of corruption, or at least no room for its plain visibility.
Papamío had to go. His family would move out of the seven-bedroom house where they lived on calle Américo Salas so the new city treasurer and his family could move in. They would sell the yellow Roadmaster too. And of course, all of this meant that Papamío could no longer afford to pay Benicio or Priti. Candido and his mother would have to leave, they would all have to leave.
Finally, even if the abrupt change in their social status hadn’t guaranteed Rafaela’s and Dolores’s urgent expulsion from Las Madres, Papamío could no longer afford to pay the fees at the finest school in Puerto Rico and perhaps all of the Caribbean. The girls’ elite education was over.
On a regular day, the two resident seventeen-year-olds, Rafaela and Candido, would never have found themselves alone on the second floor of the house, and if they did happen to find themselves in that unsuitable situation by chance, one or both of them would rectify it by returning to the ground floor immediately. But on a regular day, Mamamía also would not have closed the thick curtains in her dressing room, taken a headache powder, and lain down on the chaise longue with her door closed at three o’clock in the afternoon. On a regular day, Priti would not be slamming pans around in the kitchen cupboards, cooking away her rage to make room for the sorrow that would come in its stead. This was not a regular day. So there was no one to notice the two teenagers sitting side by side on the small couch at the end of Mamamía’s and Papamío’s bed, their knees touching, their faces close.
“But where will you go?” Rafaela asked. She hadn’t yet arrived at the neighboring question: Where would she go?
Candido leaned down on his elbows and shrugged. “Maybe I’ll go find my pops. Nueva York.”
Rafaela shuddered.
Unlike Rafaela, Candido had never been off the island. He had no real knowledge of blustery, hardscrabble New York, and he probably harbored some romantic notions about it, the same way everyone did until they went there and saw it for themselves. The gray buildings, the gray streets, the gray skies, the gray faces of the people whose color bled from them in that cold, discordant place. Rafaela had been there twice, once in 1951 when she was so young she had only two memories of the visit: disembarking from the ship in the port of New York perched on Mamamía’s hip, craning her little neck at the terrifying height of the buildings, and clinging so hard to her mother that she’d accidentally sunk a fingernail into Mamamía’s breast. Mamamía had yelped, and then felt chagrined when the woman in front of her turned to look. Her second memory was ethereal—only a dark sky, muffled by the silence of drifting snowflakes, little pinpoints of cold that turned to water the moment they touched her skin.
Rafaela had much more vivid memories of her second trip to New York just four years ago, in the spring of 1960. Papamío had been dispatched on business, so he brought the whole family with him. They stayed at the Plaza Hotel, which was elegant and luxurious and, despite the abruptness of the front desk staff and occasional bewildering scowls of the other patrons, felt something like home when they turned the key in the lock of their suite and closed the door behind them.
Rafaela and Dolores looked forward to the daily visits from their housekeeper, who was a Puerto Rican girl not much older than them, who made them laugh with stories of her adventures in the city while she changed their sheets, dusted their sconces, wiped down the sink in their bathroom. The two sisters sat cuddled up on the overstuffed armchair together, their eyes unselfconsciously following the housekeeper while she talked and worked, the familiar notes of her Spanish landing like colorful birds in the ivory-hued bedroom, unexpected and delightful.
“You two are like part of the furniture,” she told them one day, tickling their feet with her feather duster. If there was any resentment in the remark, the sisters had failed to detect it.
During the workdays when Papamío had his meetings, Mamamía took the girls shopping on Fifth Avenue, to morning mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and to a matinee showing of West Side Story at the Winter Garden Theatre, where the Puerto Rican characters were dangerous and electrifying and completely unlike anyone Rafaela had ever known.
But Rafaela’s most enduring memories of that trip were from the one afternoon her mother had shuffled them into a taxi and taken them to Spanish Harlem, where they trudged up four flights of steps into a garlic-scented apartment to visit Mamamía’s cousin and her five children, who all thundered in from school about halfway through their second cup of coffee. Rafaela and Dolores both felt conspicuous in their ribbons and starched, bright dresses. Their cousins swarmed around them, jostling them at the small table, elbowing for attention and peppering them with questions about their lives in San Juan.
What was their school like?
Did they have boyfriends?
Did they go to the beach every single day or only on weekends?
Did they have pizza in San Juan? Or had they tried the pizza in New York yet? What did they think?
Mamamía smiled at the interrogation and gracefully intervened. “Rafaela and Dolores are studying English at Las Madres, but they don’t get a lot of practice, so I’m not sure if they can keep up with all the questions!”
The cousins switched seamlessly to perfect, if accented, Spanish and started again.
What Rafaela remembered most from that day, from the entire trip, was how comfortable Mamamía appeared to be in that unfamiliar place. The way the redolence and ruckus of that tight apartment seemed to dissipate around her. Her smile never strained, her posture was that of a woman entirely at ease, one elbow slung up on the table in a manner Rafaela had never observed in her mother before. She was almost a different person inhabiting Mamamía’s body. She leaned her forehead close to her cousin’s and did not stop talking or laughing until the brick wall opposite the room’s one small window seeped from red, to dark brown, to purple, indicating that Papamío would be back from his meetings soon. He’d expect to find his three girls at home in the Plaza. Mamamía embraced her cousin for a long time before they bundled back into the narrow stairwell and down to the street to find a taxicab.
On the gold brocade couch at the foot of the bed in her parents’ opulent bedroom, Rafaela tried to imagine her friend Candido in that faraway place. She tried to imagine his tongue slowing and loosening, finding the lethargy of English. Candido eating pepperoni pizza. Mounting endless flights of stairs into a noisy apartment. Sirens, neon, sky-high pavements that crowded out the sun. The lively clamor of Spanish Harlem. Rafaela’s memories of New York were all blaring noises, sharp edges, hard surfaces. She couldn’t make room in that landscape for the softness of Candido. The softness of his voice, his eyes, his skin, his laughter, his mouth. New York would obliterate him, she thought.
“I guess if there’s ever a time to do it, this might be my last chance,” he said. And then he wrapped his cool hand around the back of Rafaela’s neck beneath the tumble of her curls, and without closing his eyes, he kissed her.
When he drew back, she was afraid she would cry and he’d mistake her tears for regret. So she kept her eyes on their entwined hands instead, and she lowered her voice to match his softness.
“Don’t go to New York,” she said.
Later that same evening as Mamamía returned from an unknown errand, the next-door neighbor, a dowdy, needling woman, cast a sidelong glance at Mamamía from her porch, and declared loudly her observation that Papamío had long demonstrated a rather acute shortcoming in terms of his ability to make sound decisions. Priti, who had spent years cultivating an uneasy self-restraint, overheard the remark through the kitchen window and, realizing that her employment with Mamamía was at an end and she was no longer required to silence herself in the face of ignorance, dried her hands, untied her apron, and draped it over the edge of the sink before going to the front door and opening it. Priti met Mamamía coming in, and stood aside for her employer before going out to the porch railing with her arms crossed.
“Oye,” Priti called to where the neighbor sat in her rocking chair with her fan and her glass of lemonade. Just being addressed this way would be enough to shock the neighbor into reticence, but Priti, who had waited a long time to say her piece, would say it fully. She would say it without raising her voice, too, she decided, because she would not concede that potential distraction, would not provide an excuse for the woman to misinterpret her as a kook. So Priti walked down the steps and crossed the driveway, past Benicio, who was polishing the back bumper of the Roadmaster with a clean rag, and she didn’t stop until she was on the neighbor’s porch, in front of the no-longer-rocking chair.
Priti unfolded her arms and held her hands together behind her back. She spoke quietly and urgently. She said, “It has been a long number of years you’ve been under the misapprehension that you’re somehow above Dona María Teresa. And why? Because of that limp yellow hair? Because God played a joke on you, giving you that pink skin that burns if you walk outside uncovered? Because your rich, bloodless family inbred with all the other European families on this island instead of invigorating your prospects with a little sangre fuerte local?”
The neighbor’s lemonade trembled in its glass, and the fan hung still in the air.
“I have held my tongue these long years while you made your backhanded compliments. But, gazmona, I tell you now, those bitter insults only drew attention to your envy.” Priti raised a hand and pointed back across the driveway, toward the door where Mamamía was still standing just inside, biting her knuckle in amazement. “It is my pleasure to inform you,” Priti said, “now that I am finally free to say it, that the woman in there has more grace and elegance in the mole on her backside than your whole family and your pig-looking kids could muster in a generation.”
The neighbor’s eyes and mouth were wide-open circles, but there was no verbal response beyond a gasp, so Priti turned to go, shaking her head and muttering as she walked away.
“We will not miss your ugly ass one little bit. God gave us one reprieve here, at least we’ll get away from this flock of turkeys.”
Mamamía was waiting for Priti just inside the door. They closed it behind them together with a quiet click, and then collapsed at the bottom of the staircase, where they recounted every word they could recall, and laughed until they cried.
So many things fell apart in the weeks that followed that it was impossible for Rafaela to place them in any sensible order in her mind. There was no hierarchy to her loss, it was just loss, upon loss, upon loss. A partial list of what she lost: friends, status, routine, home, security, the ability to sleep past sunrise, her sense of herself, her place in the world.
At Las Madres, Rafaela had been an excellent student, better liked by her teachers than her peers who, without testing the theory, presumed that Rafaela’s beauty and wealth made her arrogant. Rafaela hadn’t cared much, because the assumptions about her arrogance weren’t totally unwarranted, and luckily, that mild little ego of hers shielded her from noticing the worst of her peers’ judgment. If Lola and Candido had been her only friends, she’d have counted herself lucky enough, but she did have a few other friends besides them, and anyway, school wasn’t for making friends. It was for learning physics and calculus and French and English, and reading classic novels and writing persuasive political essays. Education at Las Madres was a portal, a preview of the complicated and fascinating life that awaited them.
In the first days following her expulsion, then, Rafaela tried to imagine that her early exit from school might mean only that the complicated and fascinating part of her life was beginning ahead of schedule. Everyone around her was in a plan-making scramble. There was tremendous activity at the house. Buyers, sellers, movers, men in ties with briefcases coming and going at all hours, men in uniforms with trucks and hand trucks, hauling things away. It felt like heady choreography, like a bad dream where everyone had learned the dance except for Rafaela. She stood still in the middle of the ballroom while the waltz of decomposition gained terrifying speed around her. Her arms hung loosely at her sides.
In Papamío’s study, she and Dolores sat on boxes that had been packed with books. The furniture was gone, all except for Papamío’s tufted leather desk chair. He looked strange and small sitting in it now with no desk in front of him, like a turtle without its shell. All these years in this house, and Rafaela never knew that chair had wheels. She’d never once sat in it herself. There were many things she hadn’t known, had never even wondered about. For example, she didn’t realize that Papamío, whose family had been extraordinarily wealthy some generations before, was almost bankrupt before he married Mamamía, whose own once-humble father had prospered in agriculture and real estate. Neither did Rafaela understand how much of her mother’s inheritance was gone now, how much of her family’s extravagant lifestyle had been financed in recent years by her father’s government position. And certainly no infinitesimal part of Rafaela’s brain could ever have dreamed that Mamamía was already at work developing the business plan (curating and renting out high-end fashion, positioning herself as the first one-stop luxury stylist in San Juan) that would eventually see them through the worst of this financial catastrophe. Even if Rafaela had known some or all of these things, that knowledge would have done little to mitigate her current disorientation. It was simply too much change, too fast.
Papamío’s voice echoed back to them from the empty, sun-stained walls.
“We can manage school until graduation, but you will have to go one at a time, and not to Las Madres,” Papamío was saying, the words only adding to her sense of turbulence. “Dolores will be first, obviously, as she’s in her final year already.”
The girls were holding hands.
“First to what?” Rafaela gave voice to her confusion.
“And what about Rafa?” Lola asked.
Rafaela squeezed her sister’s hand, but not in gratitude. Whatever Papamío had to say, Rafa didn’t want to make it any harder for him. He leaned forward in the chair and rolled himself closer to the boxes where the sisters were perched, side by side. He put a hand on Rafaela’s knee, on the linen of her skirt; his moustache twitched when he smiled, and for one horrifying moment, Rafaela thought he would cry.
“Rafa will have an adventure.” Papamío smiled thinly, and she nodded to encourage him. He cleared his throat. “We have secured a good job for you, Rafaela. For one year, just until Lola graduates, and then Lola will go to work while you come back and finish school.”
“Come back?” both girls asked at the same time.
“Where is she going, Pa? Where’s the job?” This was Lola. Rafaela couldn’t bring herself to ask.
Papamío rolled himself back a few inches. A buffer. He leaned his elbows on his knees.
“The job is in Trinidad.”
Lola gasped, and Rafaela could feel her sister crushing her fingers in her hand.
“On the Navy base there.”
Rafaela nodded. She smiled at Papamío, but she could feel her heart beating in all her extremities, a wobble in her peripheral vision, the edges of her known universe giving way.
“You can’t send Rafa to Trinidad!” Lola stood up abruptly, and they both looked up at her. Neither girl had ever spoken to Papamío that way before. Not even in their dreams or their nightmares. But these were unprecedented times, and all kinds of things were happening for the first time ever. Lola lowered her voice into sorrow. “Where will she live?”
Papamío blinked rapidly. “Mamamía has a niece there already. She lives in a civilian boarding house right on base, and there’s room for Rafaela.”
Rafa nodded again. “It’s good. That’s good,” she tried to convince herself. “What’s the job?”
Lola sat down again with a thump.
“It’s secretarial work. For the Navy.”
Rafa was still nodding. Her brain felt like rusty machinery. She was trying to engage the gears, trying to imagine herself in an office somewhere, but the chain wouldn’t budge. She didn’t even know what a secretary did. Papamío came to the rescue.
“To begin with, it’ll be very light administrative work,” he said. “You’ll answer the phone, you’ll type memos, you’ll do some filing.” Perhaps her terror was visible on her face because next he said, “Don’t worry, they will show you what to do. You’ll pick it up.”
Lola was holding her head in her hands, but now she sat up quickly, sparked into energy by the idea she’d just had.
“I will go!” she said. “I’m older, more experienced. Rafa is too young to leave home.” Lola did not say out loud that Rafaela would be disastrously bad at the job her father was describing, but the sentiment was plain enough on her face, and they were all thinking it anyway.
The sigh that escaped Papamío then appeared to physically pain him. “It’s already arranged for her,” he said.
“I’m sure we can change it!” Lola waved her hands between them like she was conducting a magic trick. Voilà!
“They need English-speaking personnel only, Lola,” Papamío said.
“I speak English!”
Papamío smiled at her sadly. “Rafa got top marks in English two years running. They were impressed by those grades, that’s why they agreed to hire her so young.”
“But they won’t know the difference if you send me!” Lola said. “I can be Rafaela for one year! Who will know?”
“No,” Rafa said.
They both turned to look at her.
Rafaela stood up and clasped her hands behind her back. She began to pace the empty length of the study while they watched her push a little harder on the rusty machinery in her mind, which finally sprang to action. There. She could see herself in a warm, bright office next to a window. Her hair tied back in a bun. A pencil skirt like Lois Lane, maybe some glasses. A glass of water on a coaster beside her clacking typewriter. She’d speak English and she’d say things like, “Yes, Captain Browning; right away, Captain Browning.” She’d reach for the phone when it rang, all business. She’d ask, “How may I direct your call?”
Lola sniffed on the box behind her, but Rafaela would not turn to look. Lola’s tears were known to be contagious.
“It will be fun, maybe,” she said, convincingly, she hoped. She could learn to take orders instead of giving them, right? She could learn to be humble, to hold her tongue. And she could be the one to save her family, to earn money and see them through.
Papamío reached into his breast pocket and flicked his handkerchief out of its little square. He handed it to Dolores, who honked into it.
“You will meet a lot of new people,” Papamío said. “Do you remember Clarisa? Mamamía’s niece? She’s only a year older than you.”
Rafa shook her head.
“She hasn’t been to San Juan since you girls were little.” He slapped his hands on his thighs and pushed himself to standing. “But you’ll be reacquainted in no time. It will be nice, you’ll have family there.”
Papamío walked toward her with his hands outstretched, and Rafaela stopped pacing so he could take her in his arms. He held her by both shoulders, blinked again, and looked briefly to the floor before locking eyes with her.
“Mija,” he said, and then two words she’d never heard from her father before, and hoped to never hear again for as long as she lived. “I’m sorry.”