The Accidental Native (33 page)

“Learn from this, René,” my mother advised. “Just remember: in Puerto Rican politics, nothing is what it appears to be, and all that it appears to be is nothing.”

I was kicking the footbag in our bedroom, when Julia called. After the protest camp debacle, I went to a corner to heal my spiritual and physical wounds. Most likely in that corner I'd be kicking the footbag ragged. There was a difference, though. Once enjoyable and challenging, hacky sack had now become an activity to keep me from the doldrums, a way to forget the events of the past few weeks.

My mother, astute as always, knew my state of mind. “Pack your weekend carry-on,” she said in her usual curt way, which I had grown to interpret as “We're off on an adventure somewhere.”

I looked forward to these impromptu trips now. Even in an island 100 by 35 miles, there is enough to make you want to jump in the car and explore, and my mother was a great tour guide/historian/road companion.

But it wasn't just that each one of these “cultural field trips” had been educational, as Julia had promised. How dumb for me not to see it at first. Or, maybe, so numbed by my hurt, so simply lost, Julia showed me that when hard times hit, you need to regain a sense of direction. Movement toward something. Rage against the inertia. At first, I thought she was just being pedantic and overbearing, pushing an agenda, when it was her way of just being there for me.

“Where we going now?” I asked, excited.

“The Fiestas in Loíza,” she said. “Pick you up in an hour.” And she hung up.

We drove up to the house in Guaynabo, and from there we headed toward the condo in Fajardo. We didn't go straight to the condo. Loíza coming first on Route 3, Julia decided to go directly to the festival since it was getting dark and we were hungry. It was Friday, the first day of the three-day festival celebrating Santiago Apóstol, or Saint James' victory over the Moors. Each day of this festival began with a procession in which a group of men carried the saint's statue from the center of town to a barrio approximately three miles away called Las Carreras. The first procession, which we had missed, is dedicated to the men, the second to women and the last one to children. It was essentially the same ritual every time.

“No big whoop,” she said. “But the people get dressed in wonderful costumes and it's so much fun, you'll see.”

As night fell on the town, the residents of Loíza, and others from all over the island, roamed the streets dressed as the traditional four carnivalesque characters—caballeros, vejigantes, locas and viejos or locos. The caballeros, or knights, wore wide-brim hats, with dangling ornaments or streamers, and they waved wooden swords. Sometimes they rode on horseback, resembling the Spaniards who had conquered the Moors in the medieval Iberian peninsula.

“How bizarre,” I observed to my mother. “A town with such an African legacy and the Spaniards are the good guys.”

“And what's most African, the vejigantes,” she responded, “are demons, the bad guys.”

Trickster figures, the vejigantes bounced and pranced in their lavish, vibrant colored jumpsuits that opened wide like wings as they extended their arms and legs. Their ornate, painted masks were spiked with three to eight long, curving horns. They circled the festival grounds in packs, a flock of children following them, chanting, demanding food, drink or money on their behalf. If you refused, they'd strike you with a simulated goat bladder, or vejiga. These days, the “goat bladders” were long plastic sticks with an inflated bag at the end.

I don't know how many times my mother and I were struck with those silly plastic vejigas. Even as we ate our alcapurrias and
tacos de chapín, they would walk by us and slap our butts with them. After a while, you just ignored them and their little smacks like gnats floating in the night air.

We passed the various kiosks, surrounded by caballeros and vejigantes. At one point a band of vejigantes rumbled by, and Julia screamed and grabbed my arm. I protected her from the playful vejiga blows, and we both laughed. Closer to the band stand, a group of viejos and locas danced for spectators. The locas had blackened faces, wore wild wigs and exaggerated, padded breasts and butts and hit large tin cans rhythmically to the music. The viejos grinded against the locas, who kept slapping them with brooms and at times emptied their pockets. They harassed dancers and spectators who congregated by the band shell. The locas flirted with the men; the viejos ogled the women.

The crowds were getting rowdier, in the air was a constant stream of animated voices and laughter. The salsa was percolating, and droves of people dancing, but Julia wanted to head back to Fajardo.

“We need to get up early tomorrow to see the procession,” she said.

The next day we set out early to have breakfast at a little dive off Route 3 and then we drove to Loíza for the second procession. It was a much more somber event than I had anticipated, quite religious, with praying and chanting. Several men shouldered the platform, carrying the saint's statue. The saint, mounted on a white horse, brandished a sword. He seemed odd displaying that warlike stance festooned with wild flowers and flamboyant streamers.

My mother wanted to walk in the procession. “For your benefit,” she said.

I didn't understand what she meant. Not big on religious rituals, I walked to humor her. I never discussed religion with her. To think about it, Mami and Papi didn't push their religious ideology on me. I was baptized, did my First Communion, Confirmation, like every other Catholic kid. My parents continued to practice their faith to their last days. You could say they died because of their faith. As I withdrew, they showed concerned for “my spiritual side,” but
being intellectuals and scholars, they understood that thinking individuals go through various spiritual periods in their lives.

If I were to meet Julia, not as her reclaimed son but a stranger, I'd say she wasn't a religious person. But I'd be wrong. Perhaps not religious, but as I recalled her at Rita's funeral, and as I walked beside her during this procession, my birth mother's face was lost in spiritual contemplation. I knew that this woman had been through trials from which only faith in something could have delivered her. When I saw her in this light, she always seemed sad and alone.

When they reached the other replica of the saint in Las Carreras, those carrying the statue lowered the platform three times, as if he were bowing. This gesture done, they made a circular pass of the replica and returned to the town. Because this was the women's procession, the women followed immediately after the statue of St. James; they were followed by the various carnivalesque characters, showing more decorum than the previous evening. Behind them was an SUV waving the red and yellow flag of Santiago and the tri-colored flag of the town.

A disorganized mass of people marched behind the official procession, with only one thing in common: the direction toward the town square. Some marchers stood out, like the older man who had strapped around his shoulders a bouncing paper maché horse. The caballeros on beautiful horses, clip-clopping on the asphalt and flamboyant cross-dressed locas with huge umbrellas and bouncing derrieres. Then came a wave of masks, brilliant and bold, in the afternoon sun. Who's behind each mask, I wondered. How must it feel, for one day, to lose yourself in anonymity, to be free to play the trickster?

As the motley congregation approached the town, they grew brasher and livelier. When they arrived, the chanting grew to a high pitch. The religious songs gave way to clapping and strong syncopated rhythms, and the music swelled with the setting of the sun. Around the festival area, everywhere we strolled, clusters of drummers slapped and banged congas, inviting anyone, challenging them, to dance. At one such grouping, seven men lined up behind congas. They had been playing for a while, their tight
polos and tees drenched in sweat. Spectators took turns jumping in to battle the drums. Mesmerized, I observed the dancers' moves, the interplay between dancer and drummers. I didn't know much about the music, but you could tell these drummers had experience, their love for the drumming undeniable. They had drawn a substantial crowd of enthusiasts.

An older man, who had been dancing, tipped his baseball cap and bowed to applause and cheers, and, in a flash, I saw Julia, my mother, barefoot in the middle of the circle. My mouth dropped. She gyrated her hips as she approached the drums, bowed her head and then tapped it in reverence and respect to the drums. Easily, she was the whitest person dancing that day. I bent my head down, covered my face with my hand and looked at her through my fingers. She's going to make a fool of herself, I thought. Be booed or insulted away in mockery. But she shook her hips like a natural. With folded wrists on her hips in a sassy gesture, she shuffled her butt backwards, bounced on her feet quickly to the relentless beat of the drums. She bent and shook shoulders toward the lead conguero, shaking her breasts over his drum.

He stood up and took off his shirt, presenting a buffed chest and shoulders, biceps and forearms chiseled by years of drumming. Onlookers cheered and laughed as he fastened a bandana around his head. He cracked his fingers, swiveled his neck. Julia rolled her head back in laughter, while rolling her hips. And as I shook my head in amazement, she signaled the drummer back to work with a finger. They battled for a few minutes. Drummer rocking hard riffs, my mother keeping up. She tossed her head back, the lustrous hair wild and free, and after a frenzied onslaught of the congas, she burst out laughing and fanned herself as to say, “I surrender.” And she stopped, to rousing applause and cheers, bowing several times to the conguero, who stood up and slapped her a high five. While she was dancing, an elderly woman wearing a visor had leaned over to me and yelled in Spanish over the music, “Hey, your mom can really dance!”

As Julia returned to my side, fanning herself, perspiring, she wore a wide, almost panting grin on her face.

I looked at her, puzzled.

“What?” she asked, laughing.

“I didn't know you could dance bomba,” I said, finally.

She took a napkin the older woman offered her to wipe her sweat. My comment made her grin disappear.

As she patted herself, she turned to me seriously and said, “There's much you don't know about me, m'ijo.”

Later that night, back at the condo, we sat out on the balcony, sated from another fine seafood meal, enjoying a bottle of chardonnay and the salty breeze coming in from the sea. She had bought me a vejigante mask. At one point, I put it on to be silly. With the mask on, I played reporter, asked her questions about her “brilliant performance,” holding my wine glass like a mike. She giggled, and played along.

“I took dance classes at U Penn while at law school,” she said. Her interest in folkloric Puerto Rican dance developed there.

“You said there's much your son doesn't know about you. Can you elaborate?”

She looked down sadly, took a sip of wine. I peeled off the mask, looking into her eyes now watering up.

“Maybe some things are better left unsaid,” she said, shrugging.

“Oh,” I said, surprised. “I didn't mean for you to get into that.” It was true. I hardly thought about that past anymore. Perhaps I wanted to forget it, too. Make it seem like it never happened. What did it matter, anyway? My mother and I were here today, enjoying our lives together.

With two fat tears streaming down her cheeks, she looked back at me, straight on. “No, no. You deserve to know.”

With the bottom of her palms she wiped the tears, sat back on the lounge chair and exhaled sharply, so deeply I thought she wouldn't have any air left in her lungs. Resting her head at an angle, she gazed out into the horizon of the night sea for what seemed eternity, as if trying to find in the black distance the thread of her story.

“Your father and I …” she began. “We had this passion that at times scared me. I was young and immature.” She continued shaking her head. “Juanma, he was twenty-eight, and probably even
more immature. And, as liberal as he made himself out to be, he was, al fin, a Puerto Rican man. I became pregnant with you, and we both decided to get married, start a family, despite our career plans.

“I was so scared. I was finishing my first year of law school at UPR, one of a handful of women. My parents had such hopes for me. I had these ambitious dreams. I never hesitated to have you.” She looked at me. “But I was frightened that I would fail at being a mother as well as law student. I started having doubts about your father. Were we really in love, or was it a silly romantic notion to cover up the passion at the heart of our relationship?

“I was struggling with classes, with your father who had his own pressures working on his doctoral dissertation, with the attitudes of classmates and professors not accustomed to seeing a pregnant woman in the law school. My days were consumed with anger and resentment toward their stupidity. Your father and I would have monumental fights, dragging into the night. I was always tired, worried if I was eating enough, worried if all this tension could affect you in some way. Worried in the many ways a woman in her first pregnancy fears about what can happen.

“Then, you were born. Both Juanma and I were so happy that day. It seemed that all our troubles had disappeared. You were such a beautiful baby, with those big eyes, such a pleasure to hold. Your father was so tender then. He came with flowers and balloons and all types of things to make me feel comfortable and happy. But after that day, I grew more irritable, lashing at your father for any little thing. I couldn't sleep and was unable to focus. I'd say I felt like I was in a cloud, numb, but deep down I didn't feel anything. I didn't care about anything. I kept thinking, how could I feel this way when I was just blessed with such a beautiful, healthy baby? And I started hating myself for feeling nothing.”

She started sobbing.