"Casa."
At 3:00 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon,
the hour of cafe con leche, the women of my family
gathered in mama's living room to speak of important things
and to tell stories for the hundredth time
as if to each other meant to be overheard by us
young girls their daughters.
In mama's house, everyone called my grandmother mama.
It was a large parlor built by my grandfather
to his wife's exact specifications
so that it was always cool, facing away from the sun.
The doorway was on the side of the house
so no one could walk directly into her living room.
First, they had to take a little stroll
through and around her beautiful garden
where prize-winning orchids grew in the trunk of an ancient tree
she had hollowed out for that purpose.
This one was furnished with several mahogany rocking chairs
acquired at the birth of her children
and one intricately carved rocker
that had passed down to mama at the death of her own mother.
It was on these rockers that my mother her sisters
and my grandmother sat on these afternoons of my childhood
to tell their stories, teaching each other and my cousin
and me what it was like to be a woman, more specifically
a Puerto Rican woman.
They talked about life on the island and life
in Los Nueva Yores, their way of referring
to the US from New York City to California
that other place not home all the same.
They told real life stories though as I later
learned always embellishing them with a little
or a lot of dramatic detail.
And they told cuentos, the morality and cautionary tales
told by the women in our family for generations, stories
that became a part of my subconscious
as I grew up in two worlds, the tropical island
and the cold city, and which would later surface
in my dreams and in my poetry.
One of these tales was about the woman
who was left at the altar.
Mama liked to tell this one with histrionic intensity.
I remember the rise and fall of her voice, the size,
and her constantly gesturing hands
like two birds swooping through her words.
This particular story would usually
come up in a conversation as a result of someone
mentioning a forthcoming engagement or wedding.
The first time I remember hearing it I
was sitting on the floor at mama's feet
pretending to read a comic book.
I may have been 11 or 12 years old at that difficult age
when a girl is no longer a child who
can be ordered to leave the room if the women wanted freedom
to take their talk into forbidden zones
or really old enough to be considered
a part of their conclave.
I could only sit quietly pretending
to be in another world while absorbing it
all in a sort of unspoken agreement of my status
as silent auditor.
On this day mama had taken my long tangled mane of hair
into her ever busy hands.
Without looking down at me or interrupting her flow of words,
she began braiding my hair working at it
with the quickness and determination which
characterized all her actions.
My mother was watching us impassively
from her rocker across the room.
On her lips played a little ironic smile.
I would never sit still for her ministrations.
But even then I instinctively knew
that she did not possess mama's matriarchal power to command
and keep everyone's attention.
This was particularly evident in the spell
she cast when telling a story.
It's not like it used to be when I was a girl, mama announced.
Then a man could leave a girl standing at the church altar
with a bouquet of fresh flowers in her hands
and disappear off the face of the Earth no way
to track him down if he was from another town.
He could be a married man with maybe even two or three
families all over the island.
There was no way to know.
And there were men who did this, hombres with the devil
in their flesh who would come to a pueblo like this one
take a job at one of the haciendas never meaning
to stay, only to have a good time and to seduce the women.
The whole time she was speaking, mama
was weaving my hair into a flat plate which
required pulling apart the two sections of hair
with little jerks that made my eyes water.
But knowing how grandmother detested whining and boba sissy
tears as she called them I just sat up as straight and stiff
as I did at La Escuela San Jose where the nuns enforced
good posture with a flexible plastic ruler they bounced off
a slumped shoulders and heads.
As mama's story progressed, I noticed how my young Aunt Laura
had lowered her eyes refusing to meet mama's meaningful gaze.
Laura was 17 in her last year of high school
and already engaged to a boy from another town who
had staked his claim with a tiny diamond ring then left for Los
Nueva York to make his fortune.
They were planning to get married in a year.
But mama had expressed serious doubts
that the wedding would ever take place.
In mama's eyes, a man set free without a legal contract
was a man lost.
She believed that marriage was not
something men really desired but simply
the price they had to pay for the privilege of children.
And of course, for what no decent synonymous
with smart woman would give away for free.
Maria La Loca was only 17 when it happened to her.
I listened closely at the mention of this name.
Maria was a town character, a fat middle
aged woman who lived with her old mother
on the outskirts of town.
She was to be seen around the pueblo delivering
the meat pies the two women made for a living.
The most peculiar thing about Maria in my eyes
was that she walked and moved like a little girl, though she
had the thick body and wrinkled face of an old woman.
She would swing her hips in an exaggerated clownish
way and sometimes even hop and skip up to someone's house.
She spoke to no one.
Even if you asked her a question,
she would just look at you and smile showing her yellow teeth.
But I had heard that if you got close enough
you could hear her humming a tune without words.
The kids yelled out nasty things at her calling her la loca.
And the men who hung out at the bodega playing dominoes
sometimes whistled mockingly as she
passed by with her funny outlandish walk.
But Maria seemed impervious to it
all, carrying her basket of pastels
like a grotesque little Red Riding Hood through the forest.
Maria La Loca interested me as did all the eccentrics
and crazies of our pueblo.
Their weirdness was a measuring stick
I used in my serious quest for a definition of normal.
As a Navy brat shuttling between New Jersey and the pueblo,
I was constantly made to feel like an oddball
by my peers who made fun of my two way accent.
A Spanish accent when I spoke English
and when I spoke Spanish I was told
that I sounded like a gringo.
Being the outsiders had already turned my brother and me
into cultural chameleons, developing early the ability
to blend into a crowd to sit and read quietly in a fifth story
apartment building for days and days
when it was too bitterly cold to play outside.
Or set free to run wild in mama's realm
where she took charge of our lives
releasing mother for a while from the intense fear
for our safety that our father's absences instilled in her.
In order to keep us from harm when father was away,
mother kept us under strict surveillance.
She even walked us to and from public school number
11, which we attended during the months
we lived in Paterson, New Jersey, our home base
in the states.
Mama freed the three of us like pigeons from a cage.
I saw her as my liberator and my model.
Her stories were parables from which to glean the truth.
Maria La Loca was once a beautiful girl.
Everyone thought she would marry the Mendez boy.
As everyone knew Rogelio Mendez was no other
than the richest man in town.
But mama continued, knitting my hair with the same intensity
she was putting into her story, this macho
made a fool out of her and ruined her life.
She paused for the effect of her use of the word macho, which
at that time had not yet become a popular epithet
for a non liberated man.
This word had for us the crude and comical connotation
of male of the species, stud.
A macho was what you put in a pen to increase your stock.
I peeked over my comic book at my mother.
She too was under mama's spell, smiling conspiratorially
at this little swipe at men.
She was safe from mama's contempt in this area,
married at an early age an unspotted lamb.
She had been accepted by a good family of strict Spaniards
whose name was old and respected though their fortune had
been lost long before my birth.
In a rocker, papa had painted sky blue sat mama's oldest
child Aunt Nina mother of three children, stepmother
of two more.
She was a quiet woman who liked books but had married
an arrogant and ignorant widower whose main interest in life
was accumulating wealth.
He too was in the mainland working
on his dream of returning home rich and triumphant
to buy the finca of his dreams.
She was waiting for him to send for her.
She would leave her children with mama for several years
while the two of them slaved away in factories.
He would one day be a rich man and she a sadder woman.
Even now her life light was dimming.
She spoke little in aberration in mama's house
and she read avidly as if storing up spiritual food
for the long winters that awaited her in Los Nueva Yores
without her family.
But even Aunt Nina came alive to mama's words rocking gently
her hands over a thick book in her lap.
Her daughter, my cousin Sara played jacks by herself
on the tile porch outside the room where we sat.
She was a year older than I. We shared
a bed and all our family secrets, collaborators
in search of answers.
Sara and I discussed everything we heard the women say,
trying to fit it all together like a puzzle that
once assembled would reveal life's mysteries to us.
Though she and I still enjoyed taking part in boys games
chase volleyball and even vaqueros
the island version of cowboys and Indians involving cap gun
battles and violent shootouts under the mango tree in mama's
backyard, we loved best the quiet hours in the afternoon
when the men were still at work and the boys
had gone to play serious baseball at the park.
Then mama's house belonged only to us women.
The aroma of coffee perking in the kitchen,
the mesmerizing creaks and groans of the rockers,
and the women telling their lives in cuentos
are forever woven into the fabric of my imagination.
Braided like my hair that day, I felt my grandmother's hands
teaching me about strength, her voice convincing me
of the power of storytelling.
That day mama told us how the beautiful Maria had fallen prey
to a man whose name was never the same in subsequent versions
of the story.
It was Juan one time, Jose, Rafael, Diego, another.
We understood that the name and really any of the facts
were not important only that a woman had allowed love
to defeat her.
Mama put each of us in Maria's place
by describing her wedding dress in loving detail.
How she looked like a princess in her lace as she
waited at the altar.
Then as mama approached the tragic denouement of her story,
I was distracted by the sound of my Aunt Laura's
violent rocking.
She seemed to be on the verge of tears.
She knew the fable was intended for her.
That week she was going to have her wedding gown fitted
though no firm date had been set for the marriage.
Mama ignored Laura's obvious discomfort digging
out a ribbon from the sewing basket she kept by her rocker
while describing Maria's long illness, a fever that would not
break for days.
She spoke of her mother's despair,
that woman climbed the church steps on her knees
every morning, wore only black as a promesa to the Holy Virgin
in exchange for her daughter's health.
By the time Maria returned from her honeymoon with death,
she was ravished no longer young or sane.
As you can see she is almost as old as her mother already.
Mama lamented while tying the ribbon to the ends of my hair
pulling it back with such force that I just
knew that I would never be able to close my eyes completely
again.
That Maria is getting crazier every day.
Mama's voice would take a lighter tone now
expressing satisfaction either for the perfection of my braid
or for a story well told.
It was hard to tell.
You know that tune she is always humming?
Carried away by her enthusiasm I tried to nod
but mama would still have me pinned between her knees.
Well, that's the wedding march.
Surprising us all mama sang out da da,
then lifting me off the floor by my skinny shoulders
she led me around the room in an impromptu waltz another session
ending with the laughter of women
all of us caught up in the infectious joke of our lives.
And I wrote that.
And in that essay and I hesitate to call it essay
because it's really like I said creative nonfiction
I have information that later appears in many of my poems
but actually not later.
It appears in my poems first and then
I dug back in my memory to see where I had gotten it.
And I would like to read you now the poem
that follows this essay.
One of the first poems I ever wrote
was The Woman Who Was Left at the Altar.
And later it occurred to me that I had retold mama's story
and made it my own.
This time you know I added all kinds of little things to it
but it was definitely mama's story
and I had used her license to change names and whatever
to make a point.