Valentina lifted Mirta over the coffin.
“Is Mami sleeping?” Mirta touched her mother’s cheek.
“No, darling,” Valentina said. “Your mami is with baby Manuel.”
“Is Mami an angel, too? Dolores said baby Manuel is an angel.” Mirta braced herself on the coffin’s edge.
“An angel like baby Manuel,” Valentina said, although she wasn’t sure if she believed in angels.
“Mami is an angel.” Mirta kissed her mother.
Valentina wondered what had happened to Sonia’s shoes. She would have to go back to the infirmary to get them. She could bargain with the shoes or save them for the little girls. But why was she thinking of shoes?
Valentina set Mirta down on the ground and bent over the coffin.
She kissed her friend and whispered, “Querida, I’m sorry I didn’t let you make love to Vicente.”
The little girl began to cry. “I don’t have a mami now.”
“You’ll always have us.” Valentina knelt and took Sonia’s daughter in her arms and she cried, too.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
TIBURÓN
When Raulito realized that Vicente wasn’t on the pier in Oahu, he tried to jump in the water to swim after his brother, but several of the Puerto Ricans pulled him back.
“¿Muchacho, estás loco? There are tiburones in the water!”
Raulito tried to break free. “I’d rather be shark meat than lose my brother!”
“Don’t be stupid! You won’t find your brother inside the stomach of a tiburón,” somebody said.
¡Vicente! ¡Hermano! Where are you?
Raulito turned twenty-one on the sugarcane plantation. His mother Eusemia finally started coming to him in dreams, with her hair tucked in a turban of bright colors. In his dreams, she always smiled. In life, her lips weren’t accustomed to turning up at the corners of her mouth, and they didn’t know that they weren’t supposed to quiver.
Brother, where are you?
It was a nightmare, this Hawaii.
From what Raulito had seen of Oahu, it wasn’t very beautiful, though it might be up in the mountains, where he heard there was no sugarcane. It couldn’t be as beautiful as Puerto Rico because that was impossible. Oahu was the green or yellow of the cane stalks that cut into his palms; it was the scratches on his neck; it was the silk that got caught in his fingernails and made him want to tear them out. It was his body bent to the will of the cane, to the will of the luna. Work, Work, Work. Hana, Hana, Hana. Oahu was lonely, lonely nights. He slept on a bare cot in the single men’s barracks, where there wasn’t even an escupidera to use as a chamber pot, as he and his mother had always had. He didn’t like to do his business outside in the middle of the night when the plantation policemen were patrolling. If they saw you, they threatened you with their guns or nightsticks.
Everyone said that life in the camp was trabajo y tristeza. Some unlucky puertorriqueñas had lost their husbands to death or the planters’ negligence and had to earn money however they could. People asked him why he didn’t take a wife—there were a dozen pretty girls in need of a husband. Men advised him to visit Nina Pagán, whose husband had drowned in a pond soon after el pobrecito arrived in Oahu.
When Raulito went to introduce himself to Nina, she sent her three children to gather kindling. Stale odors lingered in the one-room shack. He saw that there was no way to make his escape. The shack was crowded with a cot and a table and a bench for sitting. Cooking utensils and several bags of foodstuffs like coffee beans and cornmeal covered the table. An empty oil can was used as a fogón with scraps of kindling.
Nina took off her dress. “Don’t just sit there like a tonto. What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
“I’m not crying.” Raulito wiped his eyes with his sleeve. Nina sat next to him on the cot.
“Didn’t you come to make el amor?”
Raulito looked down at the shoes Vicente had given him after he lost his in the hurricane. Vicente hadn’t said so, but he’d known that the shoes once belonged to their father.
“Then why—”
“I can’t—”
“You can’t? Or you don’t want to?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why are you here, then?”
“Please let me stay,” Raulito said. “I’ll pay.”
Nina put her dress back on. From then on, Raulito visited Nina every week and he paid her to talk. He listened to stories of how once she had been la ama de casa of her own household. The arrangement suited them both.
“My husband Victorio was a very good man.” Nina mashed spices like garlic and onion in a small wood pilón while he smashed coffee beans in a larger one he had made her as a present.
“A very hard worker. Sometimes I think of Victorio and how hard he worked. What good was it? We come here and what happens? He goes to bathe in the reservoir and his foot slips. And he leaves me thousands of miles from home to fend for myself and the children.”
After the first few times, Raulito only needed to nod or murmur when she paused, to insert a sympathetic “ay bendito,” or an affirmative “claro” or “no me digas.” It got to be that he found it soothing to hear her voice in the background of his thoughts, the way he’d listen to the caw of a bird on the mountain. He’d think about how he lost his brother and how he would find him. Once, Raulito looked up at Nina’s hands paused in the act of snapping a bean pod. He took a chance and said, “¡No me digas!” Nina snapped the bean.
When Raulito left Nina’s house, he strutted around the camp like a rooster so everyone would know where he had been.
Raulito ate, slept, and woke at dawn to cut cane, ate, slept, and woke at dawn to cut cane. A day was forever when one was young and alone in a strange country, with nobody to love and nobody to love you. Others had their families or their women, but not him. He came to enjoy Nina’s company, but because he paid to visit, he knew that any friendship they shared would be over if he couldn’t pay her.
He ate with the family of a fellow puertorriqueño named Carlito Maldonado, whose wife Soraida cooked for him. Soraida asked why didn’t he find himself a woman and make a family? Carlito said he could marry a nice girl and still visit Nina, nothing wrong with that. It was a man’s right to have as many women as he wanted, especially if he could hide his querida from his wife. Raulito remembered his father Raúl Vega then. How he’d discarded his mother and never acknowledged him. If he ever had a woman—and he never would—he wouldn’t be like his father, no señor; he would be like his brother Vicente.
Raulito liked to go to the parties on Saturday nights. The Puerto Ricans took turns as hosts; they talked politics, lamented that they’d left Puerto Rico and their fate of trabajo y tristeza. But it was really a dancing and drinking party. Raulito, like most of the Puerto Ricans, loved to dance. The Puerto Ricans danced because they wanted to forget the cane, because it gave their hard lives joy, because they were young, because they were old, because the sun was bright, because the moon shone, because the stars twinkled and the sea was blue, because the music allowed them to pretend that they were still in Puerto Rico. Valentina had taught Raulito all the dances. La guaracha. El seis. La danza. El vals. The dance floor was the largest room of the sugarcane workers’ two-room house. El vals, la mazurca, and la polca required lots of spinning and space. The host would announce the numbers of partners and call the direction of the dance. The women waited for the men to ask them to dance after they finished their cigarettes outside. The rules were always the same: Don’t dance too close. Don’t cut in on another man’s dance. Possession rights for all dances were granted to the first man who asked a woman to dance. It didn’t matter if the woman didn’t like the man. Always ask the husband for the honor of a dance with his wife. To avoid trouble from a rejected suitor, a Puerto Rican girl was trained from a very young age to never, under any circumstances, refuse to dance with a man who asked her. It happened that sometimes a girl or woman would refuse a dance with a man she disliked, or because she preferred to wait for another partner, and then her punishment was to forfeit the rest of the dances. A man had his pride.