The Noise of Infinite Longing Read Online Free PDF Page A

from little cups, by the time Angeles and I woke up and got dressed. Mother left early for her job at the Justice Department, taking the bus to Old San Juan. Usually my father was away at the United States Army bar- racks, where he, a chemical engineer who knew nothing of war and was too old to go to the front, was serving his tour of duty shuffling papers at a desk job.
    All day long I had grandmother to myself.
    She was a tall woman, with a long narrow back slightly stooped by age, a deeply featured face with a hooked Roman nose, and the bluish freckled skin of someone who never sat in the sun. Her skin was wrinkled tight around the bones of her forearms, and her frame was fragile and flat, but her face, lean and creviced, with high cheek- bones, loosened when she laughed, a birdlike fluttering around her favorite visitors.
    On the days she went out, she wore her hairpiece. She kept it in a bottom drawer of her mahogany armoire, where her dresses were hung high, too high for me to reach. The closets in her house were for us, not for her. She would not put her things in a closet, a place without the wood scent that I could smell on her clothes. Her hair- piece was a thick round bun, like a crown, which she said had been made from her own hair. She let her long, fine hair fall down to the middle of her back. Then she would wrap it around the hairpiece with long hairpins and combs. She took great care. She powdered her face, she splashed on blush, and she wore a silk camisole over her bare, flattened, sagging breasts. In the flesh-colored stockings she always wore and her stacked-heeled black leather shoes (her feet were so big), with an heirloom brooch pinned to her blouse and her hair up in that soigné style, she looked head to foot like the matri- arch she was, even taller and stronger, with an air of command in her face.

    Almost every afternoon, around sundown, we had company, grandmother’s sisters and her cousins. She brought out glasses full of chilled tamarind juice, or cups of freshly made coffee, and a platter of white cheese and membrillo. Standing on the ledge of the porch, by the bank of daffodils and azaleas grandmother watered at day- break and at dusk, I spotted the visitors coming down the road and announced them to my grandmother.
    One day I saw a strange woman rounding the street corner, walk- ing in our direction in a hurry, appearing out of the rain like a mad ghost, dressed in black, the hem of her flapping dress touching the pavement. Her hair was a wild mass of wiry gray, her skin parchment white. She carried a leather-bound book of uncut pages, what turned out to be a collection of her poems.
    Her unexpected appearance was a big occasion. My grandmother reddened with excitement, taking down from the shelves of her glass-fronted china cabinet her porcelain espresso cups and saucers, the ones with the blue birds and blue mountains, waterfalls and rivers and tiny Chinese houses with concave roofs. Seeing my grand- mother so excited, I wanted to know who the woman was. Grand- mother turned to me, putting her long index finger to her lips, quieting me, and said that this wild woman who would flit in an out of our house over the years was her cousin, a poet. Clara Lair she called herself, her pen name.
    Grandmother held the book of Clara’s poetry on her lap, finger- ing the leather jacket. She called Clara una lumbrera, a brilliant woman, a light in the firmament, a word that brought images of suns to my mind. Clara didn’t stay long, ignored me as if I weren’t there, and then flew out, gone as suddenly as she had appeared.
    She’s a little mad, grandmother said to me later, smiling. Insanity runs in the family.

    Our other visitors were not quite so mad or quite so lumbreras.
    Mostly, they were my grandmother’s sisters.
    Nana was a spinster who so hated being touched by children that she squirmed and jerked back when I kissed her cheek. She sat stiffly, hands folded on her lap, in the wooden