When I Was Puerto Rican Read Online Free PDF Page B

only Mami with her switch was able to untangle. But fighting with other kids was different. When I fought with my sisters, I knew what was at stake, a prized marble, a ripe mango just fallen off the tree, a chance to be the first to color in the Sunday comics from Papi’s newspaper. But in school the fights were about something else entirely.
    If you looked at someone the wrong way they might beat you up. If you were too eager to answer the teacher’s questions you might get beat up. If you rubbed shoulders with the wrong kids you would get beat up. If you mentioned someone’s mother at the wrong time or in a certain tone of voice, you would definitely get beat up. Any number of subtle transgressions, from not saying hello when someone greeted you to saying hello to the wrong person, meant a beating. When I explained to Mami why I came home with a torn uniform and bruises, she made it clear that I was forbidden to fight in school. This made no sense to me at all. Not that Mami encouraged our fights at home, but she never said, “Don’t fight with your sisters.” Her injunctions were always about not punching them too hard. So I had to learn how to avoid the unavoidable, and when I couldn’t, I stripped to my underwear in the school yard to defend myself from kids whose mothers didn’t mind if their uniforms got dirty.
     
     
    Papi left one day and didn’t return that night. For the next three days he didn’t appear. Mami prepared dinner the first night and each night afterward left something for him, but the next morning she’d scrape it all out into the compost, a scowl on her face. We knew better than to ask where Papi was or when he might be coming back. There was no way for her to know, and it was just as well, because knowing would have added fuel to her rage, the brunt of which we children felt in her sullen silences, or increasingly, in her swiftness to spank and hit us with whatever was at hand for reasons that were often as mysterious to us as Papi’s whereabouts.
    When I got home from school on the fourth day, Mami had bundled our belongings into pillowcases and a tattered suitcase with the handle missing, which she had shut with a tight rope wound into a loop at the top. With Hector on her hip, she led us up the road, dragging the suitcase with her free hand, while Delsa, Norma, and I struggled with the pillowcases full of clothes.
    I didn’t know to say goodbye to our house and our barrio, nor to wave to the neighbors who looked out curiously as we wound our way to the main road. Delsa, Norma, and I knew not to whine or complain, not to huff too loudly against the strain of the cumbersome pillowcases, not to ask for water or mention food, not to need a bathroom, not to stop to rest or tie our shoelaces or brush the hair from our eyes. We followed Mami in the same bubble of silence in which she walked, her gaze forward, never looking back or sideways at the neighbors who poked one another in the ribs and smirked, who let their eyes fall to the ground and pretended not to see us rather than offer to help us on our way.
    It seemed like a very long walk to the highway, and when we got there, we climbed into a público car as if this were any other day and we were any family on an excursion into the city. Only when the público was well on its way and we had lost sight of the entrance to Barrio Macún did Mami say what we all knew without asking.
    “We’re moving to the city. Life will be better there.”

SOMEONE IS COMING TO TAKE YOUR LAP
    Borrón y cuenta nueva.

    Erase and start over.
     
    W henever Mami was fed up with Macún, or with Papi, she ran away to Santurce, a suburb of San Juan, which, by the early fifties, had become as much a metropolis as the capital, though with little of its cachet. It was a commercial center, with distinctly drawn neighborhoods that separated the rich from the poor. Hospitals, schools, private homes, banks, office buildings, restaurants, and movie theaters butted one