The Accidental Native (18 page)

The older cousins, who came over with their spouses or significant others, threw languid stares at me, made empty promises about hanging out, traded cell phone numbers, all a shallow show of familial solidarity. For the teen cousins, I had become a novelty. I was the main attraction in an otherwise dreary, traditionally boring event that they were expected to attend ever year. They asked unabashedly stupid and ignorant questions like if I lived in a ghetto or if I had a girlfriend, with Marisol sitting next to me. Or comment something along the lines, “Wow, this must suck for you. I would die.” I wondered how politicians kept up with meeting so many people, kissing babies and such, grasping so many strange hands. I was exhausted, drained. I was so glad that Marisol came along. She grounded me, made me laugh, told me to take it all in stride—deja que te resbale, she quipped, “Let it all slide off you.”

After meeting Juanco, the cousin with the parrot, and his attractive girlfriend, Marisol took advantage of the interest that Iggy the bird had stirred and grasped my hand. We ran off into the wooded areas behind the house. Earlier she had spotted a small creek and wanted to show it to me. We ran like children down an incline toward the bubbling water.

Out of breath, we threw ourselves on the ground.

We stayed like that for a while, peeking through the branches to get a glimpse of sunlight, the heat on our faces feeling wonderful. The gurgling of the creek soothed us, made us drowsy.

Marisol sighed, and said, “This is fabulous.” Like two blind lovers, our solitary hands searched for each other and clasped.

“This is kinda cheesy,” I said, and we started laughing.

She let go my hand and swatted me. “It's romantic,” she said, fake pouting, still laughing.

I turned to her and kissed her. She bent at her waist and grabbed the back of my neck, returning the kiss. She pulled me on top of her, my face buried in her neck. I breathed in the mix of perspiration and floral soap. Just when she wrapped her legs
around me as we continued kissing, a gaggle of children stomped toward us, screeching. We jumped, startled at the screaming and running but also embarrassed.

The grandchildren and some of the teen cousins led by Juanco were rambling down the hill toward the creek, and us, their heads up to the sky. Juanco, in particular, was frantic, trying to run forward with his gangly legs, looking back and yelling at his girlfriend, who was crying. He kept looking up, and I realized Iggy was not with them.

“The parrot ran away,” I told Marisol.

“Oh, no, your poor cousin,” she said.

“Poor Iggy,” I said.

We both started scouring the branches, and soon we joined the posse looking for Iggy. A few minutes later, a few of the older folk came down to search.

I spotted him on a low branch of a ceiba and pointed to Marisol. Iggy bobbed up and down on the branch, whistling and making strange sounds. I told Marisol to get the others and tell them to be quiet. “Don't do something stupid,” she said with a worried look on her face.

“Don't worry, I'm an expert tree climber.”

“Are you serious?”

“Just get the others.”

I had been climbing trees up to my teen years, and although rusty, it wasn't a hard tree to climb. I loved sitting on a branch on a cool day. Mami would tease me and called me monkey boy. I took my shoes and socks off, secured a good footing and pulled myself up to the branch, which was no more than ten feet from the ground. A sturdy branch, one that could support both bird and man. I sat at the edge closest to the trunk.

Iggy kept bobbing, but less so now, his quizzical eyes staring at me. I didn't move, trying not to scare him off. “Hey there, Iggy,” I said, in that sing-song way one talks to a baby. By then, a crowd had gathered below, their eyes gaping at me and Iggy. Juanco looked like he was crying, his hands wrung together in prayer-like fashion. His girlfriend, distraught, stood behind him, biting her fingernails, her eyes red and raw.

“I know,” I whispered to Iggy, “they're assholes.” I tried to soothe him, patted the branch beside me, lay my hand on it. He approached me cautiously. When he was close enough I patted his neck feathers with two fingers, and he let me. I put out my wrist and he stepped up onto it, as he was obviously trained to do. I caressed his feathers, soothing him with my voice so as not to fly away again. I could have stayed up there with Iggy for a while. It was peaceful and isolated. The wind blew away all our worries.

I had no plan how to get down a tree while holding on to a bird. Luckily, one of the uncles had the intelligence to get an extension ladder from the house. I took off my shirt and managed to cradle Iggy in it, while they shot the ladder up to the branch. Juanco climbed up the ladder and took down the bird swathed in my shirt. The crowd cheered, surrounding Juanco and Iggy, and off they went back to the festivities.

I sat on the branch for a few minutes. Marisol climbed halfway up the ladder.

“Ingrates,” she said, “that little snot didn't even thank you.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Why don't you come up?”

She gave me a dirty look as she hugged the middle of the ladder. “Come down. Let's go home.”

That was the best thing I had heard all day.

We walked back, arms around each other's waists. My shoulders and legs ached a bit, and I had to admit my tree climbing days were over.

When we returned, I received my shirt back, which now had Iggy's droppings. A little souvenir to say thank you, traitor, I guess. Julia came over with a tied dye T-shirt she had found somewhere and handed it to me. Iggy was now in his cage. Julia told me Juanco worked for the DRNA, the island's natural resources agency, and thought it would be cool to bring one of the parrots to the family reunion.

“For the kids,” she said with a smirk, “but it was all to impress his girlfriend.” The girlfriend wanted to hold the bird and, once on her wrist, she panicked when the bird started pecking at her arm. When she screamed and shook her arms, Iggy took off.

“You saved Juanco his job,” Julia told me. “I'm very proud of you.”

“I did it for the bird,” I said.

She nodded and wrapped one arm around mine. Mari had gone to get some leftovers for the road.

“You don't mind if I steal you away from your babysitter for a while, do you?”

“Come on, Julia.”

Laughing, she steered me into the shade under a Royal Poinciana, and then stared at me. “Okay, all jokes aside,” she continued. “Where's this going with Marisol?”

“Why does it matter to you?”

She exhaled, looked up, returning that heavy gaze on me. “Seriously, René. How can you ask me that?”

“Ah, jeez. I didn't mean you don't have the right …”

She shook her head vigorously. “I'm asking because I'm concerned. Is that wrong?”

“No, no, it's not.” Glaring into those eyes was like staring into a mirror. “It's kinda nice, actually.”

“René, I know it's hard to have a mother come out of nowhere. I get that. But it's hard for me, too,” she said, tapping her chest, “to have to
earn
a son's love,
every day
.” She stood staring at me with a confused, pleading face, her hand now on her hip.

“I'm good with Mari, okay?”

“Okay, but don't think age doesn't matter. It does.”

I didn't want to hear it, partly because she was probing into an area I had visited several times. But Mari and I were in a good place. Why spoil it with these gnawing thoughts?

“Thanks for bringing me to the reunion,” I said, trying to change the subject.

“If I hadn't, your grandparents would have skinned me alive,” she responded, laughing, pushing back a loose strand of hair. “But, I'm glad too,” she added, holding my hand, squinting into the setting sun.

“You know, meeting all this family, I thought it would change something.”

She sighed, her back sliding down against the tree trunk, until she sat. I sat down by her, and we both glanced back at the crowd of relatives milling about.

“They say you can't choose your family,” she said.

“I don't mean to complain or anything. I just thought finding them would, I don't know, give me some insight into myself.”

“It doesn't work like that, m'ijo.” She tossed her hair and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I was always the black sheep in this family.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. The rebel, the political activist, the feminist. The law student who got knocked up.” She ripped a handful of grass and tossed it. “My parents thought I was starving for attention, but I was just living out my restless life, my way.”

She put her hand over her eyes. The ranks among the relatives were thinning out. You could hear goodbyes, the slamming of car doors, the ignition of car engines.

“Roots can ground you,” Julia said, quickly turning to me. “But they can strangle you, too.”

“The photo gallery was cool, though,” I said.

“Sure. Family history fills the gaps,” she said, shaking her head. “But in the end, it's just a bunch of dusty pictures of dead people, René.”

She gripped my hand tight.

I nodded.

The evening sun shot orange streamers across the sky. Led by Justin, my uncle, a few relatives picked up guitars and four-stringed cuatros and entertained the others. Before that, the classically trained Matos and Canales crew showed off their expensive music lessons with a Bach fugue here or Mozart sonata there. During one of the musical numbers, Cuco, a German Shepard, sat down to chew on something resembling a curving bone. His owner, a cousin third removed, took it from him with some struggle. The strangeness of the artifact intrigued those gathered, and speculation began as to whether it was human or not. Magi, a cousin twice removed, and a graduate student in archaeology,
wondered if it was a piece of Taíno hip belt used in ceremonial ballgame which the Indians played.

“It's clearly not a bone,” she said, although Wiso had another opinion.

“Who cares about the Taínos,” a drunken distant cousin yelled. “All they gave us was barbeque.” Laughter. Someone yells, “Not a bad idea right now. I'm hungry.”

Magi wrapped the artifact in a towel, stashed it in her bag. Wiso whined, and she rewarded him with a leftover piece of turkey.

Julia asked me to stay with the few family members who remained a bit longer, but I declined. We hadn't packed for a longer stay, I said, glad that we hadn't thought of bringing a change of clothing, something we usually did on our outings.

I ached to leave and started to kiss my grandparents goodbye, when the photographer declared time for the family photo. Of course, I felt obligated, so I promised Marisol we would leave right after that. It was a burdensome production. First, to cut down numbers, telling non family people to get out of the frame, then trying to squeeze everyone into the shot. Even with his panoramic lens, he had problems. Finally, he had to go on the balcony to take several shots.

We gave our goodbyes to everyone present. Just when we started the car, an older female cousin appeared on the balcony. Waving her hands, she yelled, “Aunt Luz did it again!”

Julia laughed and peeked into the car. “Every year Aunt Luz takes down the photo of her sister, Blanca, from the gallery and hides it somewhere on the property.” She shrugged. “It's a long story,” she said, and with that joined the others in what had become the inadvertent traditional family scavenger hunt to find the purloined photo of Tía Blanca.

We waved, both of us happy to leave. But Marisol made me stop at the Lares Heladería, where she had the rice and bean ice cream combo, and I just had strawberry. We wanted to rush back because the work had piled up, now that the strike was over and classes had resumed. But as luck would have it, we hit a traffic jam on 129. An angry motorist had shot a cow after he had hit it. Both his
car and the dead bovine blocked the roadway, and he refused to move his car if he was going to be charged for killing the animal.

“I was trying to put it out of its misery,” he kept yelling. But he was having a hard time convincing the officers, who thought his true intention was revenge for the damage it had done to his Mercedes.

Normally, at three o'clock on a Friday, I'd be home or in the car with Marisol riding a blue highway hugging the side of the Cordillera, heading to one of our hideaways. A beach tucked in some cranny of the island or a favorite bar or restaurant lost deep in the interior. Anywhere but in my office. But there was nothing normal about the last week of Fall semester classes. Craziness creeps in everywhere. Colleagues review rosters, prepare final exams, evaluate student essays they should have returned a month ago. All of this while attending to the various meetings and responsibilities that pile up at semester's end. And everyone is dying for classes to end, to go home and rest from mental and physical exhaustion, to enjoy the holidays.

Meanwhile, students deemed M.I.A. came down from the hills begging for some “consideration.”

“Who are you?” I asked one, not facetiously.

The student then proceeded to tell me his life story, the problems had, the troubles seen.

A young woman cried, tears streaking down her face because she “just can't fail this class.”

“But you only attended the first week of classes,” I said, shocked.

Another came in with her parents for support. “My daughter is a good girl,” the mother affirmed.

“I'm sure she is, Señora Estofona, but she is not a good student,” I replied, pointing to the missing quizzes, tests, assignments, the rather poor record her good daughter had accumulated.

“Ay bendito, profesor,” I heard a lot. “Consideración.”

Yes, I considered you to be an awfully irresponsible individual with big cojones who had no business entering a college classroom. That's what I would have loved to say, but I didn't. I smiled and wished her luck and told her I would take it under consideration, noting in my mind the big F she was going to receive.