Speak to Me of Home

Chapter Thirty

San Juan, Puerto Rico

1968

The first two years of the marriage were good. Well, okay, Rafaela is not one to exaggerate. The first two years of the marriage were fine once they made the necessary adjustments. As often happens, the couple’s lofty romantic anticipation in courtship was met by the natural development of domestic torpor in wedlock. Nothing to be alarmed about. But Rafaela, who’d spent most of her early life on a pedestal, found that her transition into married life had other challenges in addition to those ordinary ones.

What Rafaela had learned in Trinidad was that her childhood had been downright aristocratic. She still behaved like a member of an elite social class in the ways she walked, spoke, and held herself, yes, but also in her ideas. Rafaela didn’t realize she was a snob; she didn’t mean to be. But she’d found it difficult to make friends among the other secretaries in Chaguaramas. Even her cousin Clarisa, who had plenty of girlfriends on base and whom Rafaela loved, sometimes struck Rafaela as uncultured, coming as she did from Mayagüez, which Papamío referred to as the stink-end of the island, even though it was Mamamía’s hometown. But Rafaela also discovered, with tremendous indignation, that when she left Puerto Rico, people didn’t even seem to understand who she was , or what set her apart from other girls. They treated Rafaela as if she were common, as if she were a girl who’d grown up buttering her own toast, and she should butter theirs too, and then serve it to them with hot coffee. In Trinidad, Rafaela learned to swallow indignities. She learned how to endure working for a boss who sometimes called her pork chop. She discovered that she had no choice.

But that was behind her now, thank God. She was a wife, for better and for worse—she was Peter Brennan’s wife. And although that fact would never provide her with the same status she had once enjoyed as the daughter of Rafael Acuna y Torres, it was something. Peter was handsome and respectable and white, which Rafaela briefly mistook for being almost the same as being wealthy. So the great task of her adult life then, after spending her years first at the top and then somewhat closer to the bottom of the social order, would be for Rafaela to learn to inhabit the nuanced middle, to strip back the artificial layers of nonsense and expectation that had been heaped upon her through no fault of her own, and to discover who she was beneath the weight of her father’s indulgence and an arbitrary system of social caste. That was a lot for a new marriage to bear.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the US Navy was ubiquitous in San Juan, and there was plenty of work for civilians, so after Peter was discharged from active service in Trinidad, he used his connections to land a good job as a radio technician at Isla Grande Naval Air Station. The newlyweds found a little house in Santurce with a banyan tree in the backyard that was an easy walk to nightclubs, restaurants, Rafaela’s family, the beach. Peter could even walk to work, and Rafaela didn’t have to go with him. She didn’t have to spend her days typing or filing. She no longer had to hold her breath when her boss leaned over her desk after lunch, stinking of garlic and scotch. She was back home in Puerto Rico near her family, back in her own skin, her own language. She was happy.

In the spring, they took a honeymoon to Las Vegas, which was fun because of the sex and the gambling, but alarming because Rafaela could see that her husband loved this brazen, superficial place, and for the first time, she worried that Peter would get bored in a city as classic, Catholic, and colonial as her beloved San Juan. She tried not to think about it.

It wasn’t long before Peter began coming home without greeting her. Instead of coming to find her in the kitchen, he’d collapse on the couch in the living room or trek down the hall toward the bedroom, shedding his tie, his shoes, his belt. Sometimes he even dropped these items like a trail of breadcrumbs along the hallway, and left them where they fell until Rafaela picked them up and put them away. Once, she left them there overnight to see how long it would take before he cleaned up after himself. The next morning, he stepped over everything on his way to the kitchen for his morning coffee, which she had prepared for him along with a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon. Then he barked at her when he couldn’t find his shoes on the way out the door.

“They’re in the hallway,” she said.

“Well, what the hell are they doing there?” he said. “That’s not where they belong.”

“No,” she agreed. “It’s not.”

They glared at each other across the living room until he left, slamming the door behind him. Rafaela closed her eyes and called to mind how disgusted she’d felt every morning in Trinidad when her boss inevitably handed over her first round of memos stuck together with a glob of jelly from his breakfast doughnut. Who knew what Peter had to endure in his new job now that he was a civilian again? She wished he would tell her. But until he was ready, she’d have to be patient with him.

As their domestic routine hardened and set, they seldom went dancing or out to eat anymore. Peter wanted to save money for a car, which Rafaela thought was ridiculous since they could walk wherever they wanted to go. He began to relentlessly criticize her cooking, her housekeeping. And she knew he had a point—she was not great at these things. But when was she supposed to have learned these skills? And why would she even want to?

“It’s not Peter,” Rafaela said to Lola whenever they discussed it. “He’s not the worst husband.”

“So what’s the problem then?” Lola asked.

“I think”—Rafaela shook her head—“I just don’t like being a wife.”

She did not say, although the demoralizing thought occurred to her with some frequency, that she was also sure she wasn’t turning out to be the wife Peter thought he was getting. She felt like a disappointment to him. He had chosen her because she was beautiful and smart and charming, and because he felt lucky. She’d been a hot commodity on the naval base, despite her comedown, and she had refused all suitors until Peter. In hindsight, Rafaela realized that he hadn’t piqued her interest because there was anything particularly special about him, but because he treated her with basic decency and kindness. He was different in just that way: he treated her like a person. (And, yes, he was good-looking.) This was, Rafaela realized far too late, not enough to build a marriage on.

She withheld these poisonous thoughts from her sister only because she mostly withheld them from herself as well. They were treachery. And they were folly. It was too late for these realizations. Rafaela had to make the best of it.

“It will be okay,” she said to Lola. “I’ll get used to it.”

Lola sighed and gripped Rafaela’s hands, and then she held Rafaela tightly in her arms until there was a loosening, a softening between them. In her sister’s arms, Rafaela felt like she could wake up and try again the next day.

When Peter was at work, Rafaela was able to walk to her parents’ apartment, where she drank coffee and read magazines with Mamamía, or helped Papamío with the pots of herbs and tomatoes he grew in the courtyard of the building where they now lived. Her parents had adjusted remarkably well to their new circumstances. Papamío had cleared his name and gotten a good job with a private accounting firm. Mamamía had her own income now, too, a flourishing business she was careful not to let overshadow the new pleasure she found in being a homemaker, a pleasure she hoped Rafaela might soon discover as well. At home, her mother wore diamond earrings and high heels when she was frying eggs, and her beauty was in no way diminished in the modest apartment. In fact, it seemed even more vivid, more remarkable now that it was removed from opulence and set apart by itself. Mamamía and Papamío were as happy as they’d ever been in the big house on calle Américo Salas. Her father’s smile was quicker and more mischievous than in previous years. Rafaela took their example and did not complain, but Mamamía saw everything. She touched Rafaela under the chin as they sat together at the kitchen table with their coffees.

“It will be okay, you’ll see,” she said. “Once you have a baby, everything settles. Everything changes.”

Rafaela sighed deeply.

“You’ll see,” her mother said again. “Love grows. It doesn’t have to be fireworks all from the beginning. It can be steadfast. You will fall in love with him again one night when he kills a spider on the bathroom wall. And then again one day when he tells you a funny story about someone you both dislike. And then you’ll fall in love with him all over again when you have a baby, and you see how he becomes a father. Every time he’s patient with you, you’ll fall in love.”

Rafaela pinned her hopes to that idea. A baby would fill her days with affection and purpose, but would also unite them. A baby would bridge the gap she’d discovered in her marriage, would make their family whole by bringing one side into concert with the other.

In the meantime, such was Peter’s dismay about Rafaela’s domestic failures that she began to wonder if he’d gotten married not so much to find a companion and life partner, but more because he needed someone to do his cooking and cleaning. In her darker moods, she remembered how many of the housekeepers and cooks in Trinidad had been from Puerto Rico, and she wondered if her husband had mistaken her. He certainly seemed surprised by her lack of domestic skill and interest, and his impatience was palpable. He complained every single night across the dinner table, even on those rare occasions when Rafaela herself thought her effort had turned out rather well. He washed her dinners down with extra beer, and then groped for her in the dark at night. Eventually, she began to lose interest in that too. But afterward, when Peter slept against her skin in the lamplight, she traced a finger along his damp hairline and hoped their children would inherit the handsome arch of freckles along his forehead.

When Rafaela got pregnant with Benny, everything changed, just like Mamamía said it would. The night she told Peter the news, he stood up from the table, grabbed her by the hand, and pulled her out of her chair. He lifted her and spun her around just like the day he’d asked her to marry him and she, in a delighted sort of fugue state, had said yes. She laughed while they spun together in the kitchen, and then he caught himself midspin, and set her down gingerly beside the table. Her shoes were off, and the tiles were cool beneath her feet.

“Oh!” he said. “Oh, I probably shouldn’t spin you! We need to be careful.” And then he knelt down on the floor and took her hips in his hands and spoke into her belly. “Hello in there! I’m so happy you’re here!”

Rafaela had never loved Peter more than she did that night, not even on their wedding day. Love grew, her mother was right. They both had tears in their eyes when he stood up and kissed her. And then he did a thing he had never done before in their marriage. He swept their two plates up from the table himself, and he dumped them in the sink.

“Let’s go for ice cream,” he said.

Rafaela failed to note the flaw in her current condition, however, which was that it would end in nine months. As long as she was the oven to their bun, Peter’s patience and pampering were limitless. He stifled his complaints about her cooking as best he could, and after dinner most nights, he insisted that she lie on the couch with a book while he did the dishes. He kissed her and complimented her, and put his own shoes in the closet. He asked at least three times a day how she was feeling. She was feeling wonderful.

And she continued to feel wonderful after Benny was born, their perfect boy. Look what she had done! She had made this splendid child for them both to love! This was her most important contribution to their family, to their life together, this! Who cared about underseasoned skirt steak and overdressed salad? Who cared if she made the bed before nine in the morning on a Saturday?

The first few weeks were bliss. Rafaela spent most of her time staring at Benny’s fluttering eyelids and puckering lips while Lola and Mamamía took turns cooking and helping out around the house. Peter was happy because the food was better, the house was cleaner, and he had a son! A perfect little boy. The little family developed a new rhythm. Rafaela got back on her tired but capable feet, and her sister and mother returned mostly to their own lives.

Benny seldom cried, and when he did, Rafa delighted in providing whatever comfort he needed, the bottle or the swaddle or to wrap his tiny fingers around her pinky and stare into her eyes. She always knew what he needed. Rafaela didn’t even mind the cloth diapers, not even the disgusting ones. That odor was made by her very own baby, after all, so Rafaela honored the stink. Still, she wore rubber gloves when she ventured into the backyard with the hose to scrape the diapers clean before they made their way into the washing machine. She wasn’t an animal. It turned out that her temperament was naturally suited to motherhood. Rafaela had always expected as much, but she was pleased to have that suspicion confirmed.

And so Benny became the sun, while Peter and Rafaela remained lowly planets in his orbit. Benny received the breadth of his father’s attention, which pleased Rafaela, even when Peter fell into the habit of greeting her with only a dry peck on the forehead. Still, her husband’s face transformed when he came in from work and dumped his briefcase and shoes by the door.

“Hey, kiddo!” He beamed, tossing his tie onto the discard pile, and swooping in to lift Benny out of her arms.

Rafaela’s position in Peter’s affections quickly retreated to its pre-pregnancy starting point, but it felt worse now, because for nine months, she’d experienced the warmth of his attentive care. Its withdrawal left a chill she hadn’t noticed before, but she tried her best to ignore it. She was a mother now. She didn’t have time to indulge such nonsense.

One night, Rafaela forgot to turn the burner to low before she sat down to nurse Benny, and she accidentally scalded the beans. At the table, Peter took one bite and made a face like he was going to throw up. He swigged milk and closed his eyes, and made a huge show of swallowing the food before he launched into his typical litany of grievances about her cooking. She stood up from the table without saying a word, walked into the living room where Benny was lying happily in his bassinet, and picked him up expertly with one arm. She held him against her shoulder while she slipped her feet into her sandals, and then she deposited him into his stroller, which was already sitting next to the front door. Peter came out of the kitchen and stood watching while she wrestled to get the stroller through the door.

“What’s this?” Peter said.

“We’re going out for a walk,” Rafaela said, her voice full of the brightness it always contained when she spoke in front of Benny.

“Yeah, you’ll have to walk since we can’t afford a car in this city,” he said.

“We don’t need a car in this fantastic, pedestrian-friendly city!” This part of the argument was scripted, they’d had it many times. Rafa kept her eyes on Benny and her voice chipper while she launched the next part, which was new. “And you can cook your own goddamned dinner, I’m not your servant.”

The stroller was stuck in the doorway. What was wedged there, under the wheel? Rafaela bent down to find one of Peter’s shoes in the way.

“You got that right, if you were a servant, I’d have fired you by now,” Peter said from across the living room.

She turned to look at him standing there, still in his work trousers and socks, his sleeveless undershirt still white, pristine white, because she bleached it and laundered it along with all the others. She did this every week although no one had showed her how, and after she laundered them, she folded them neatly and put them back in her husband’s dresser drawer. Peter had never once said thank you for this. She was holding his shoe in her hand.

“What did you say?” she asked him.

He had the gall to repeat himself, although with slightly less conviction than the first time. “If you were a servant, I’d have fired you by now.”

She pulled back like Roberto Clemente and pegged that wing tip at her astonished husband with all the force she could muster. Peter barely had time to lift his hands in front of his face before it hit him there, on the forearm.

“And put your goddamned shoes away!”

She opened the door, pushed the stroller through, and left.

It was at Benny’s first birthday party, which they held in the little courtyard behind Mamamía and Papamío’s apartment building, that she first heard that Candido was home from New York. He had been to visit her parents. Papamío was out when he came by, but Mamamía had sat with him for two hours, laughing, telling old stories.

“He’s such a charming boy, so intelligent,” Mamamía said. And Rafaela wondered, for the first time, if their family’s misfortune had been good for her mother, if it had liberated her somehow, returned her to herself. She seemed more at ease now than she’d ever been when they were growing up. She spoke of Candido with naked affection where before, Rafaela was sure, there’d always been some measure of heedfulness. “He’s grown so broad and tall!” Mamamía said. “You wouldn’t believe it!”

Rafaela concentrated all her energy on making sure her face betrayed no emotion in response to this news or the way her mother delivered it.

“What about Priti? Is she coming back too?” Papamío asked, and Rafaela found that she was equally relieved by the change of subject and annoyed that the topic of Candido (and his broadened shoulders) had been so fleeting.

“No, she’s staying in Miami,” Mamamía said. “She loves it there.”

“I heard she’s getting married!” Lola said.

“Our Priti, getting married!” Papamío said with delight. He clapped his hands together. “Good for her, how wonderful.”

“Where did you hear that?” Rafaela asked, sipping from her lemonade.

Lola was holding Benny on her lap, and Benny was tugging ineffectually at Lola’s earring. Rafaela reached out to disentangle his chubby fingers from the hoop in her sister’s ear. She wagged one finger at Benny.

“No, no,” she said.

“No, no,” Benny repeated.

Rafaela returned her attention to Lola. “About Priti getting married, where did you hear that? I just talked to her at Christmas and she didn’t mention it.”

“Oh, it just happened a few weeks ago,” Lola said, readjusting her lopsided earring. “Candido told me.”

“You saw him too?” Rafaela heard the jealousy in her voice, and hoped no one else noticed.

She glanced at Peter, who was on the other side of the courtyard with a group of young men playing horseshoes. He had a bottle of beer in one hand. It was remarkable to Rafaela, how attractive her husband was when seen from afar.

“I ran into him at church two weekends ago,” Lola said, which made Rafaela feel a little better. Less snubbed. “And he invited me to lunch,” which made Rafaela feel much worse. She couldn’t stop herself from frowning.

“I’m sure he’ll come visit you soon,” Mamamía said, because it was obvious to everyone at the little table how distressed Rafaela was, that she was the only one who’d been left out of Candido’s return. “He knows you’ve had your hands full with the baby.”

“He’ll be anxious to meet Peter too,” Lola said, draining her glass. “Anyone else want more lemonade?”

News of Candido was hard to come by because, apart from Rafaela’s family and his mother, they did not share any mutual friends. But Rafaela latched on to every piece of information her family tossed out. She remembered every slowly emerging detail: where he worked, where he lived, what he was studying in his night classes at UPR (civil engineering and business).

Without meaning to, and without even drawing this truth fully to her own attention, Rafaela began to widen the route she and Benny took on their afternoon walks to include a park near Candido’s apartment building. Then she added a morning walk to their routine because, she told herself, Benny was getting to an age where he was resisting the morning nap, and the walk helped make him sleepy. This late-morning route took them past Candido’s workplace. Rafaela walked so much, the soles of her shoes turned soft and scuffed, and when all those walks failed to produce the suppressed-desired result, she found additional reasons to visit that part of town. She made unnecessary dentist appointments, decided she needed a particular book that was only available from one bookseller in San Juan, discovered a dressmaker who stocked fabrics no one else had (for good reason, as it turned out). This went on for so long, that Rafaela was actually in danger of acknowledging her repressed hope by the time she finally ran into him.

Benny was a toddler, and Rafaela’s habit of wandering the city to wear him out was so ingrained by that point, that she sometimes failed to lift her eyes from her darling boy while they tromped the streets together, sometimes with Benny asleep in the stroller, other times with him wedged into the space between Rafaela’s outstretched arms, helping her push, his tiny fingers wrapped around the handle just inside hers, their pace slowed by half to allow for Benny’s tiny legs to keep up.

They were at Benny’s favorite playground in Chícaro, and she was pushing him on the swings when she saw Candido like an apparition, passing beyond the fence. She would have known him without looking up, would have known him just from the shadow he cast along the ground beside her feet, his shadow as familiar to her as her own, as her child’s. She hadn’t seen him in six years. And then it was all in slow motion. Benny’s delight as he arced through the air on his swing, all dimples and wheeling arms and kicking legs. Rafaela threw one arm up overhead, her voice slow, her pulse loud.

“Candido!” She called out his name.

He slowed. And her heart staggered.

When he turned, there was a moment on his face like a precipice. A choice. He might have clamped it shut. Sealed it off. He might have tipped his hat to her and made polite small talk across the fence, and then slipped away as quickly as possible. But instead, his face slid open to reveal his heart.

“Rafa,” he said. And he didn’t walk across the small space that separated them. He didn’t walk to the gate in the fence, swing it open, latch it carefully behind him, and then stroll casually across the mulch to where she stood. He jumped the fence and ran to her. And when he scooped her into his arms, and baby Benny’s dimples deepened with surprise, there was a moment when, to any unknowing passerby, the man lifting the woman beside the swings could have been her brother. Her long-lost cousin. It wasn’t immediately visible that sparks were shooting off beneath their clothes.

“Why didn’t you come see me?” she asked after he set her down, but before he let go of her hands. “You’ve been back all these months? You visited my parents three times, Lola twice.” She shook her head. Hurt.

He waited a moment before answering, before he pulled one hand away from her grip to shield his eyes from the sun, so he could lock his eyes on hers.

“You know why,” he said.

The next Friday afternoon, Rafaela told Mamamía she had a luncheon in Bayamón, and that she wouldn’t be back until evening. This was a lie, and it caused Rafaela a great deal of discomfort in her soul to tell it. She wasn’t in the habit of duplicity. But Mamamía was delighted to take Benny for the day, and in fact, she would enjoy watching her grandson so much, that she would thereafter offer to make it a standing date. Why not leave him with her every Friday afternoon or evening? Perhaps she and Peter could spend the extra time reconnecting. They could go to the pictures or out for dinner in El Viejo San Juan, or for a walk around the lagoon when he got home from work. These were all good ideas for engendering romance, Rafaela thought. She would take them under advisement.

Then at three o’clock, Rafaela went back to that same park, where she had learned Candido passed on foot every afternoon around three thirty, in between work and his night classes at the university. Friday was the only evening he didn’t have classes, so he would go home and grill himself a steak, and then he might head for the beach in Condado or out to play dominoes and drink a beer with some friends, or he might go out dancing with a young woman, a possibility that made Rafaela’s heart throb with sourness.

When she arrived at the park, she sat on a bench facing the sidewalk where he would soon pass. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, and while she waited, she replayed the worst fight of their lives, worse than the time when they were seven and she teased him for the way he pronounced the word puerta with an L so that it sounded like puelta . Even worse than when they were thirteen and he failed to suppress his reaction to her extremely regrettable haircut. The worst one had been just two and a half years ago, when she’d called him at work in New York to announce her engagement to Peter.

“Why would you call me at work to tell me this?” Candido had asked.

She’d wanted to tell him herself. She didn’t want him to read it in a letter or hear the news from Priti.

“You don’t have a phone in your apartment,” she said, which he took as a socioeconomic critique of his lifestyle, when all she’d meant was that she could only get ahold of him by phone at the hotel.

“Well, congratulations,” he said that day before they hung up. “Sounds like he’s everything you’ve been looking for.” And though there’d been no identifiable sarcasm in his voice, Rafaela had received his regards like mockery.

They hadn’t raised their voices or slung insults at each other or chased and slapped each other like when they were children. But something had turned that day, in that moderate exchange, and she feared the sourness remained between them until now, until last week. Rafaela didn’t know if she’d ever be able to correct it. But then she saw him.

She didn’t ask herself what she intended to do. She didn’t make any plans or consider any ramifications. She simply put herself in his path because she could think of no other way to ease the suffering that had grown in her heart since his return. His brief presence would alleviate that agony. She thought no further than that until she was standing in his bedroom, unzipping the back of her dress, pushing the sleeves down over her shoulders, letting the soft fabric fall past the bones of her wrists and land at her feet. Candido sat in front of her with his face like a mirror, splintered with love and anguish and guilt and desire. When she stepped out of her dress and moved toward him, he said what she had always known.

“I’ve loved you since we were babies.”

Rafaela would never accept the word affair , not during the time when it happened, nor in the years following whenever she thought back to it, which she would do with some frequency despite her efforts to avoid reminiscing. Her love for Candido would be so abiding and guiltless that the word affair would feel meaningless with its histrionics and moderation and suggestion of turpitude. Candido would remain pure, in her heart and mind, and Rafaela would experience no remorse whatsoever about the adultery, not even when she slid into the pew beside her husband on Sunday mornings, and got down on her knees to beseech God for an end to her torment.

It would take seven years before her deliverance would fall from the lips of her husband. “We’re moving back to St. Louis, Rafaela,” Peter said as she stood at the kitchen sink in their little house in Santurce one hot summer evening. “I can’t take it here anymore. I’m done.”

And she would wonder if he knew, if the move was his attempt to rescue her from herself, to salvage their sinking marriage.

They would argue. She would cry. And they would go.

She saw Candido one last time before they flew. She pressed her forehead into his, felt desperation in the way his hand encircled her wrist.

“I have to be with my family,” she said.

“I’m your family.”

“Candido, my children.” She kissed his cheekbone and tasted salt.