The Noise of Infinite Longing Read Online Free PDF

recliner by the porch table, sipping black coffee, her lips pursed, barely touching the cup. She had a government job, in the Treasury Department, in an office where she kept the books. Every day she wore her work uniform, the same round-collared, buttoned-up-to-the-neck pink cotton blouse and dark blue skirt that covered her knees. Her face was heavily caked, a chalky pink blush that she put on like a mask, stopping just below the hairline, leaving an odd thin line of white skin showing between her forehead and her hair. I was fascinated by that line, that bare space, I wanted to touch it.
    Seven days a week she rose at dawn and went to Mass, walking the mile to the nearest church in a black mantilla. She rarely missed a day. The Church and baseball were her passions, the only ones I ever knew about.
    Every now and then, grandmother let me go see Nana in her one- room flat in the building next door that was owned by another of my grandmother’s sisters, Isabel, the rich sister, who had married sugar money. Nana had a half refrigerator with a bottle of milk and almost nothing else in it, and she had a bedside table where she kept her prayer book and a rosary of worn black beads. There was little else in that narrow room with the shuttered window, a single bed, a radio. On those evenings that she and I spent together, we didn’t talk very much.We listened to the ball game, shouting and jumping with every strike and every score, her ear pressed to the radio, her fingers squeezing a handkerchief.
    For a time, Tití Angela Luisa lived in the spare room in grand-

    mother’s house, where she made our party dresses, just as she had made mother’s gowns. She worked on my grandmother’s old Singer sewing machine, her long foot hard on the pedal, her hands guiding the cloth—silk, crinoline, satin—under the machine’s needle, tat- tat-tat, a whirr filling the house.
    But first, Tití, the name we always called her, lay down the crin- kling dress patterns that she had bought at a store. She placed them on the floor and laid the fabric she had ironed over each paper pat- tern. Leaning on her knees, she trimmed and folded the cloth, her lips clamped around straight pins. Later, when the gown was sewn, by her hand and her machine, she selected from plastic bags she kept in her sewing box the sequins and the beads, glassy, slippery pieces. She squinted as she threaded the needle through holes that were invisible to me. She sewed each bead by hand.
    When I was three, she dressed me like a ballerina, complete with dancing slippers and a glittery crown on my light brown curls. All through our childhood, she made pinafores and piano recital gowns for Angeles and me, and on our birthdays, she made the dresses and baked the cakes and mixed the icing, squeezing the icing through a cloth funnel, writing our names in pinks and yellows.
    Sometimes, like magic, a long white dress would appear, a grown-up dress with a scooped neck and a big flowing floor-length skirt.That was the dress she made for me for my first debut, when I was seven, at a children’s ball at the Caribe Hilton. She pulled my long, wavy hair away from my face and took the sides of my head into her hands. She creamed blush on my cheeks and outlined the rim of my lips with her black makeup pencil, eventually painting my small lips bright red. Just above my upper lip, she painted on a tiny black beauty mark. There I was, in the great lobby of the Caribe Hilton, with a flower in my hair, and a long lavender lily in one hand, lean- ing over a water fountain, looking ten years older.

    Every morning she left for her newspaper job, driving off in her secondhand Volkswagen, pushing the gas pedal as hard as she pushed the pedal on the sewing machine. She was too tall for the car. She was bony, thin and angular, and, to me, quite glamorous with her loose blondish hair and her head scarves. In her late twenties, she was old for a single woman of that time, but she was different in