The Accidental Native (30 page)

Where at first I had disliked these sessions, and the “cultural field trips,” I began to appreciate them as I accepted my mother's passion and deep-rooted convictions; and the overwhelming idealism I could never hope to emulate. Julia was growing on me. Those feelings were only disrupted by the haunting reason behind her abandonment of me as a baby. I tried to get beyond that, although it gnawed at me. But right now, I was more worried about how I would approach her about my involvement with the committee, how I would ask her to re-start the lawsuit.

Our breakfast at the bakery was shorter than usual, and I didn't ask questions when she ordered ham croquets and sandwiches to go.

She had brought along her Mazda MX5 roadster. I anticipated an adventure. To see her driving that car was an adventure in itself. She worked the gears like a maniac, her booted foot pumping
the clutch, her face serious, except on those occasions when a familiar song came on that she felt obligated to sing along with. A horrible voice, squeaky and off pitch, but she put so much feeling into the lyrics. On these trips I never asked where we were going. In the beginning I did and she would tell me, “Be quiet and soak it all in.”

And I did. On this trip, I reclined on the leather seat and let the wind hit me as I looked at the untamed greenery, the whitening limestone karst clinging to the hills, enjoying the curious sights that popped up, and joined her in whatever songs we both wanted to mangle. Occasionally, she initiated a conversation in Spanish to make me practice.

We hopped on the 2 going west toward Arecibo, and in less than half an hour we were heading south to the Camuy caves. The first thing she did after easing the car into the parking lot was take off her stiletto boots. I had to peel those off her, and then she slipped into a pair of raggedy sneakers. She looked way shorter without the boots.

“Someone so fashion conscious and those are the kicks you wear?” I asked.

“Because I
am
a fashionista is why I wear these.” She shook. “Your generation with this obsession over tenis.”

I didn't want to tell her how the use of “tennis shoes” dated her, even her Spanglish version.

“Anyway,” she said, “they have good traction and you need that in the caves.”

If they made stiletto sneakers with traction, I thought, she'd wear them.

Julia bought tickets and we had to wait for the guide to call our group by number. We sat and talked a bit, about nothing important, as she smoked a few more cigarettes. The tour guide called our group's number and gathered us, about twenty in total, in front of the entrance. He made us wear green hard hats, which made us look ridiculous.

The guide, Ramón, a chubby man with cherubic cheeks and the straggliest of mustaches, herded us into various cars of a neon orange trolley. As the tram maneuvered through thin roads up to
the cave, Ramón gave us some geologic history and background. He was professional and knowledgeable, always trying to mix humor in with the educational bits he was offering. Julia seemed distant as he rambled on. Her ears and eyes perked up when we arrived at the entrance to Cueva Clara. She handed me a camera and told me that I would want a photo of this. She was right. Everyone ambled out of the tram and walked carefully on the slippery walkway, holding on to the handrail, to observe a display of light filtering through a hole above us. It looked like a dozen spotlights hitting the cave ground or the beams of a spaceship taking off to faraway galaxies. In between the oohs and aahs, I snapped a few pictures, amazed again at how such a small island contained so many natural wonders.

Ramón pointed to the Río Camuy, the third largest underground river in the world, which rumbled below us undisturbed. In the darkness slept thousands of bats, only their squeaking and guano there to remind us of their presence, as we gawked at the river and surroundings. Back on the trolley, Ramón peppered his formal commentary on the various karst formations with the funny names the guides gave them. “We call that one 10, a skinny man with a fat lady,” he explained, smiling. Some of us laughed, but the heavy-set woman next to him stared at him sternly.

One of the final stops was the sinkhole, or sumidero, surrounded by large stalactites. Outside again, we saw the cascade falls, which loomed above us and seeped down to a trickle closer to us. “The Fountain of Youth,” Ramón said and urged us to drink from its natural waters.

“I'll take my chances with cosmetic surgery, thank you,” Julia whispered to me, while others in the group scooped some of the water up and slurped it or dripped it over their heads.

“I feel younger already,” an older American said.

The tram made a final stop in front of the main building, which held the restaurant and souvenir shop.

“Crappy food,” Julia whispered and took out the food from the coffee shop we had visited earlier. We sat at a picnic table under a shady jacaranda tree, near a large coquí sculpture that I photographed.

“I love the caves, they're so cool inside,” she said, fanning herself.

“Yeah, they're cool that way, too,” I said, playing with a croquet.

“Did you know the Taínos believed human beings emerged from caves?”

“That's news to me,” I answered.

“To them, we were once spirits dwelling in caves,” she said as she waved her sandwich across the air. “One of the myths tells they left their caves only to wander out to eat our native fruit, jobos, at night. One day they stayed too long eating jobos and daylight hit them.”

“Must have been some mighty good jobos,” I said.

“Sunlight transformed them into humans, and that began the process of humans leaving the caves.”

“And you're telling me this because?”

She shrugged. “I like the idea of sunlight making us human.” Her eyes widened and she wiped her mouth on a soiled napkin, set her sandwich down. She hadn't eaten much. Holding up a cigarette, she cupped my hand with her one free hand.

“Okay, now tell me why you called me yesterday.” She blew smoke away from my face and smiled.

I wanted to tell her but just couldn't. At my silence, she leaned toward me, her eyes expectant, and grabbed both my hands with her delicate, firm hands, the burning cigarette between two fingers.

“René, you know you can tell me anything. There's nothing—nothing—in this world that you can tell me that will change how I feel about you.”

I nodded slowly, looking down at my half-eaten sandwich, at her tiny hands gripping mine, her thin veins bulging.

“I've been so tough on you,” I said, biting my lower lip, shaking my head. I looked away. “All you did was seek me out. All you've ever done is love me, and I've just been a selfish asshole.”

She snuffed out the cigarette on the sole of her torn left “tennis shoe.” She looked at me, studying my face, confused. Her eyes flattened, as if my words had deflated the spirit out of them. At seeing my head down, the tears trickling down my cheeks, she rose and hugged me.

She held my chin up. “You listen to me.” Her eyes embraced mine. “What happened to tear you apart from me was not your fault. Just know this: I'll never let it happen again. You understand?”

I nodded and she kissed me on the top of my head.

“Okay,” she said, sliding back around to the bench. Spreading her manicured fingers on the picnic table, she leaned into me. “Let's talk about the lawsuit.”

I looked up at her.

“It's a small island, René.” She tossed back her hair, sprung another cigarette from her gold case and waited for me to light it.

I briefed her on my activities with the committee, told her about Foley and his ominous comment, about Marisol's worries.

After I finished, she seemed lost in thought, agitated. She told me she was proud of me and made a few quick phone calls.

“Now, it's personal,” she said, snapping her phone shut.

Being surveilled, you can't help feeling trapped in an invisible jail, wondering why someone is watching your every step if you have not done anything illegal. Or, maybe that is the whole point: no reason, they're there just to intimidate you. If the surveillance is professional and competent, you of course have the added mind fuck that you are perhaps imagining that they are watching you. Every possible lingering car becomes suspect, any person lurking too close to you becomes a spy working for someone. You walk down the street, enter or exit a building, and wonder if they've just snapped your picture. Even in freedom, you are not free; you are neither free physically, nor in your mind.

My mother admitted that she assumed wire taps and that she never said anything important or possibly incriminating on the phone or in the house. She told me that she met with clients outside, where there was much noise, near a construction site, for example. All those scenes of wise guys walking and talking outdoors from the mobster flicks flashed in my mind, taking on a different perspective now. She joked about smiling for the cameras.

“I always give them my best side,” she added.

“I feel paranoid,” I told her.

“That's to be expected, René,” she said and quoted Bukowski: “Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.”

We both laughed into a pause, and then she sighed.

“Welcome to my world,” she said.

“I'm sorry you have to live in that world,” I said. We were having lunch at Amadeus, one of our favorite places in San Juan.

“Oh, I have something for you,” she said, pulling a wrapped gift from her large pocketbook and handing it to me.

“What's the occasion?” I asked.

“Something to help you get through this period.”

It was a poem titled “The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive,” by Martín Espada, printed on heavy linen paper, framed in dark teak.

The poem recounts the perspective of a painter whose revolutionary lover was imprisoned for a long time. Yet, she still is being surveilled by “the FBI man.”

At the end of the poem, as she paints her lover's portrait by the beach, at a distance the FBI man lurks behind her, waiting for her to sob. But she refuses to cry.

Touched by the poem and my mother's intention in giving it to me, I took it home and hung it by the doorway, to remind me every time I walked out the door to smile for the camera.

Mari was touched by Julia's gesture but not crazy about the idea of having to put up with people spying on us, or that loved ones had to suffer the political actions of their lovers.

“It's just romanticizing a bad situation,” she told me.

I kept my renewed organizing efforts a secret from Mari as long as I could. I did not want her to become worried during her convalescence. Since she was pretty much a recluse, I was able to keep it a secret for most of the summer. But Baná is a small town. With her recovery, she started going out more and bumped into someone who told her.

She was furious, first for keeping it from her, and then for threatening her job.

“We talked about this, Rennie. You promised me.”

“We'll be fine,” I assured her.

“Easy for you to say. You have a high-powered lawyer for a mother, who comes and wipes your ass every time you shit on something. You gonna guarantee my job, Che?”

I exhaled, trying to sift the hurtful things from the valid points she was making.

“We'll fight for your job, if it comes to that.”

“Fuck that, Rennie, I'm fighting for
my life
.” She banged her chest as she said this. “I can't afford to lose my health care, not now.”

I stared at my hands, folded in front of me, anything not to look at her angry face.

“Please,” I said, slowly. “Have faith.”

“In what? A bunch of revolutionary wannabes? What are you going to get out of this?”

“Stop it!” I said, holding up my hand. “You fighting for your life?” I walked over to her, put my face up to hers. “And why's that? Because some fucks contaminated where we work, that's why. Sometimes you need to get a backbone, Mari.”

She grabbed her keys and purse and stormed out of the door.

When she returned, with shopping bags from the mall, she was mellow. Shopping always calmed her down.

I had fallen asleep on the couch. She dropped her bags and slid in next to me, took my arm and wrapped it around her. She told me she was upset and frightened, but had no right to tell me what to believe or how to act.

“Just be careful, please,” she said, sleepily.

After that, she tolerated my committee work, sometimes made snide remarks about it, but we had no further fights on the issue. She prepared her file for her upcoming tenure review way in advance, bracing herself for the worst. I didn't think it was the right moment then to tell her about the town building inspector who had come around to ask questions about the recent work I had done on the house. I was also prepping for the struggles to come, thinking about alternatives, possible scenarios, plans of action. All the time, trying to deal with the uneasy feeling of being watched.

My ringtone, Nirvana's “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” was blaring from my cell, which lay on the coffee table inside, while my friend Kyle's cousin, Jordan, opened the door to her house. I ran in and grabbed it before Mami was about to hang up.

“Oh my God, where have you been, Rennie?” She sounded desperate, on the brink of crying.

“At Kyle's cousin's, like I told you.”

She started crying.

“Mami, you okay?”

“Have you seen the news? Turn it on,
Eyewitness News
.”

I asked my friend to turn on the news. On the screen a bunch of guys were spraying water on some women, yelling and acting all rowdy, something about a “wilding” attack in Central Park after the Puerto Rican day parade.

“Damn, Rennie, your people going berserk,” joked my friend, Kyle.