The Noise of Infinite Longing Read Online Free PDF Page B

other ways. She was a woman who traveled abroad alone, who was the hostess or the guest at the interminable lunches, interminably pho- tographed, at the Club Cívico de Damas (she was the one without a hat), a woman whose name was the byline of a weekly column in the newspaper.
    It seemed to us that she would never marry, and in her striking solitariness, she was someone who belonged alone.
    But she did marry. She married late but quite romantically, to a journalist, a man almost thirty years older than she, who was quite debonair and bohemian. All her friends said he was a charming sto- ryteller and he had written books against the death penalty and against American control of the island. These were books people called important, and he seemed to know everything and everyone. Jacobo andTití first lived in an apartment house in another neigh- borhood.The apartment was tiny—the refrigerator was in the stair- well, the bathroom had no tub, only a shower stall. But it was like a dollhouse to me.When Angeles and I visited, she made us hot choco- late and let us play canasta with them until bedtime. For a long time, for many of the years of my childhood, Tití took Angeles and me everywhere, to the movies, to restaurants, to the drive-in. She took me to my first European movie, La Strada, and tried to explain a plot that made little sense to me but seemed very sad. I still see Giulietta Masina in her clown face. The first time I had Chinese food, at a large, bright restaurant on Franklin Delano Roosevelt Avenue, the sort of restaurant where the waiters bowed when she came in and

    stood at attention near her table (she feigned modesty but clearly expected the beer to be poured just so and the cook to make what- ever changes she wished), she taught me to use chopsticks.The first time I saw a newspaper coming off the presses, I was with her. That was at the old building of El Imparcial, a blood-and-guts tabloid where she began her career as a society columnist, chronicling births and debuts and weddings.
    We were standing in a corridor, at a wall of glass through which we could see the presses churning below. Huge, noisy machines occupied the entire basement. She had to shout so I could hear her.
    Mira, mira, she shouted—look, look.
    My face was touching the glass. The machines roared and news- papers rolled off cylinders, piling one on top of another. She took me by the hand, and we ran down the stairs to the press room. She shouted to a pressman, and he handed her a newspaper, and she gave it to me. It was warm, like freshly pressed clothes, and it smelled like nothing I had ever known.
    Some years later she was on a television quiz show modeled after What’s My Line? With that and her Sunday column, which she had moved to another newspaper, El Mundo, then the island’s largest, she became something of a celebrity. She took me to the television stu- dios of Telemundo, where I was seated in a guest room behind the cameras and watched the show.
    The studio was air-conditioned, freezing, and the cameras blocked my view of her face. But I could hear her voice, higher pitched when she was on the air. She was funny, I could tell. When she made a comment, the audience laughed all around me. After the show, people crowded around her, asking for her autograph. I stood beside her, watching her, and watching the people who treated her as if they knew her personally: Angela Luisa, Angela Luisa. I wanted

    to be her. Craning my neck, I studied how she made her signature, the rounded A and the curly L, the sharp T, and the flourish in the g ’s. But after years of giving autographs and signing her name to her col- umn, she no longer had to use her last name. Angela Luisa was enough.
    The ballet, the theater, the newspaper, her world was mine, and I thought that if I grew up to be like her, I, too, would have front- row seats at the theater and fine dinners at elegant restaurants with movie stars, and newspapers hot off the presses every