Nelia Zafón
I am Boricua loud and proud, born and raised in Puerto Rico until I told my mami in 1964, the year I turned seventeen, that I wanted to live in New York City and dance on Broadway. My mami put up one hell of a fight. You are only seventeen! You don’t have any money! ?Estás más perdido que un juey bizco! All of that. But I had a dream that I was going to be the next Rita Moreno. I was going to be a star. I told my mami, You can look for me in the movies! And I left.
I didn’t know a soul when I got to New York. I slept on the floor of Grand Central Terminal for the first three nights, watching everyone’s feet walk past, men in loafers, women in patent leather heels. Click click click. Everyone with somewhere to go except for me. I had gotten to my destination and now what? A dream isn’t the same thing as a plan. I started feeling like I wanted to return home, but the way I left—all that youthful righteousness and conviction that I threw at my mami como un tornado—I would have been embarrassed to go back so soon. My mami would have said, “You see, nena! You’re just a little girl after all.” No. I had planted a stake and now I had something to prove, to my mami and to myself, to everyone from my neighborhood. I had to prove that I could make it.
I got lucky, though. In the train station, I met a girl, this chica de compa?ia named Josie, who had gotten kicked out of her parents’ house for smoking dope. She had a friend, a guy in Queens, who was going over for the war and she was going to stay in his apartment until he got back. I’ll never forget, she said, “I have to water his plants for him so they don’t die.” Later, when he didn’t come home, when they couldn’t even find enough pieces of his body to put together to send back, she cried so much and for so long that I knew: She was in love with him. She had been waiting for him, every day pouring cupfuls of water into the pots that held his plants, turning them in the sunlight, taking care of them because she thought it was a way of taking care of him.
I lived in that apartment for one year. I had gotten a job as a waitress, but Josie never charged me rent. Her friend’s parents were paying for the apartment, she said. It was covered. Instead I put all my money toward dance classes and acting classes that I took in the mornings at a little studio in Elmhurst. For food, I ate leftovers off diners’ plates at the restaurant. I scraped whatever people didn’t eat into cardboard take-out containers and saved it for later. Hash browns, toast crusts, noodles, creamed corn, todo eso. The boss didn’t really care.
I went to auditions when I heard about them. I remember there was an open call for Man of La Mancha at a small theater in Greenwich Village. I tried out for the role of the housekeeper. When I got there, a man was lining up all the girls. I remember I asked him whether it was okay that I wasn’t Spanish. Because of course it was a Spanish play. He said, “What are you?” I told him, “Puertorriquena,” and he said, “What’s the difference?”
I didn’t get that role or any role after that. Not a single one. For years I tried. After the news of Josie’s friend, I had left the apartment in Queens because it didn’t feel right for me to stay there. Josie refused to leave. She took over the lease. She kept watering the plants. Maybe it was denial, but maybe it was her only way of holding on to someone she had loved. Maybe we should all be so passionate.
Once I was on my own again, I found a place in the cellar under a corner grocery store. Really a cellar. It had damp stone walls and one window no bigger than a squinted eye. I danced all day and took trains and buses all over the city to auditions, and at night I carried around trays of food and flirted with the men for bigger tips. On my walk home sometimes, and as I stepped back down into that cellar apartment, my eyes heavy from exhaustion, I would think, Is this what it is? This country? My life? Is this all?
But even when I thought that, I was always aware of some other part of me saying, there is more. And you will find it.
Oh, I didn’t find it, though. I worked like crazy. I practiced dancing until my feet bled and my knees felt like water balloons. I rubbed Vicks into my cracked heels and took so many hot baths I lost count. I went to a voice coach and sang until my throat was raw. I killed myself, but it never happened for me. The world already had its Rita Moreno, I guess, and there was only room for one Boricua at a time. That’s how it works. Americans can handle one person from anywhere. They had Desi Arnaz from Cuba. And Tin Tan from México. And Rita Moreno from Puerto Rico. But as soon as there are too many of us, they throw up their hands. No, no, no! We were only just curious. We are not actually interested in you people.
But I’m a fighter. You get me against the ropes and I will swing so hard—bam! So I thought, well, if I’m not going to find it, then there’s only one other option: I will create it.
I researched and found out that taxes for new businesses were lowest in Delaware, so I saved money for a while—I stopped taking classes and signed up for extra shifts at the restaurant—and said good-bye to New York. I came to Wilmington to try to start a theater company of my own. I got a job as a waitress again, only at nights, at a bar this time, and during the day I worked on getting the theater going. It was a different time then. The society was different. Free love, fellowship, turn on, tune in, drop out. There were communities of artists, people who didn’t want to work for the big corporations, people who were willing to help a girl like me, and many times they worked for free. I met a guy who helped me build sets and put up some lights. I did all the painting myself. I got a whole truck full of wooden pews from a church that was being renovated. I lined them up for the people I dreamed would one day come to watch my shows. The Parish Theater, I called it, because of those pews.
In 1971, we had our first production, a play called The Brown Bag Affair. It was very racy, provocative, a lot of nudity, but the story was powerful, and even though for the first few weeks only a few people showed up to see it, word started to spread. First, we had an audience of ten people, but eventually it grew to twenty, everyone sitting shoulder to shoulder in those long pews. Every few months, we did a new show, and two years after we opened our doors, we were getting regular crowds for every one. The theater wasn’t making much money, but we were bringing in enough to keep the plays on. That by itself was some kind of miracle.
Now, twenty years later, I still run the Parish Theater. We do just one production a week. I act in them sometimes, but the real pleasure for me now is giving roles to other actors, watching them perform, especially the young ones. I was like them once. I can relate. And now I think, Okay, this is what it is. My life. This country. It took me so long to get started, and I never became a big star, but now I feel proud when I go back to Puerto Rico to visit my old neighborhood in Caguas because in a certain way, I did make it, after all.
A few months ago I met a man who came to the theater. He’s younger than me, a gringo, an attorney, so young and handsome. ?Cielos! We have almost nothing in common, but somehow we’re a good fit with each other. He makes me laugh. How can I explain it? He has a spirit. I’m fifty-three years old with wrinkles on my hands. I’ve never been married in my life, and now this. You never know what life will bring. Dios sabe lo que hace. But that’s what makes it so exciting, no? That’s what keeps me going. The possibility.
Alma
One day near the end of January, Maribel and I were sitting at the table, going over her schoolwork, when, three hours before he usually got home, Arturo walked through the front door, slammed it behind him, and marched down the hall.
Maribel looked at me, confused.
“I’ll be back,” I told her.
I found Arturo in the bathroom, stripping off his clothes, tiny crumbs of mushroom soil raining down to the floor. He turned on the water and, without waiting for it to warm, climbed into the shower, burying his head under the spray.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
I rested my hands on the rim of the sink, feeling the cool, smooth porcelain, and stared at myself in the mirror. For a second, fear got the best of me. What was it? Something with the boy?
“Did something happen?” I asked, trying to conceal the anxiety in my voice.
Arturo pulled his head out from under the water, heavy droplets streaming down his face, dripping off the tips of his mustache. “You really want to know?” he said. “I was fired.”
“Fired?”
“Yes. Because I changed my shift. The morning when I stayed home for Maribel’s first day of school.”
“But that was months ago!”
Arturo turned off the water, twisting the handle so hard I thought he would break it. I watched as he picked up his towel from the floor and rubbed himself dry, the hair matted on his barrel chest, his limp penis hanging between his stocky legs.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
He snapped the towel against the floor. “?Chingao!”
“It has to be a mistake. They went through all the trouble of getting you a visa. Why would they do that and then turn around and fire you?”
“Because they’re cowards.”
“What does that mean?”
“The only reason they sponsored our visas was because the government was pressuring them to hire workers with papers. But now everyone’s saying it was all talk.”
“But why does that mean they have to fire you? What are they going to do? Get rid of everyone they already have and hire people without papers now?”
“Probably. It saves them money that way.”
I thought, I could call his boss and explain the situation. Maybe if he knew about Maribel, he would have some sympathy. Maybe if he knew what it meant to us. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. We had followed the rules. We had said to ourselves, We won’t be like everyone else, those people who packed up and went north without waiting first for the proper authorization. We were no less desperate than them. We understood, just as they did, how badly a person could want a thing—money, or peace of mind, or a better education for their injured daughter, or just a chance, a chance! at this thing called life. But we would be different, we said. We would do it the right way. So we had filled out the papers and waited for nearly a year before they let us come. We had waited even though it would have been so much easier not to wait. And for what?
Arturo finished drying himself in silence.
“I worked hard,” he said after a long time.
“I know.”
“I did what I thought—”
“I know,” I said.
We were both quiet for a moment. “Maybe I could look for a job?” I suggested.
“No. Our visas are only for me to work. I have thirty days. If I can find something within thirty days, then we’ll stay in status. It can be anything. Just a paycheck and our visas will be good.”
I reached toward him, but he stepped back, tense, locked in his thoughts.
“You’ll find something,” I said.
SO DURING THE DAY, every day, Arturo looked for work. He dressed in his church clothes—black pants and a button-down shirt, a brown belt, his cowboy boots—and walked into store after store, asking for applications. People laughed in his face. They told him, “Haven’t you heard that the economy’s in the shitter? We can’t get rid of workers fast enough.” They told him, “Crawl back across the river, amigo.” And yet, what else could he do but try the next place, and the one after that?
We had to take money from our savings to pay the rent. There was no other choice. Arturo and I tried reasoning with Fito, but Fito was firm. “I feel bad for you,” he said. “I do. But I have a mortgage to pay and it depends on collecting the rent.” Arturo shook Fito’s hand and assured him we would bring him the money soon, even though both Arturo and I feared that might not be true. Two months, we estimated, was as long as we could go without a paycheck coming in.
I made rice and beans and rice and beans and more rice and beans, but since we couldn’t afford chiles or ham or anything to spice it up, we soon grew tired of rice and beans. “Oatmeal,” I suggested. “We still have oatmeal left.” But neither Arturo nor Maribel wanted that either.
We walked around the apartment in the shadows, turning on the lights only after the sun had gone down. We kept the heat off at night. We showered every other day to save on water. I still washed our clothes at the Laundromat, but I carried them home sopping wet and laid them all over the kitchen counters and the floor to let them dry. I would have draped them over the balcony railing except that I was afraid they would freeze stiff. Instead of sitting at the kitchen table at night, drinking tea, now I simply boiled water for Arturo and myself instead, but the water was a poor substitute and trying to pretend otherwise only made me more depressed.
I tried to be at the apartment during the day in case Arturo stopped back at home, either to eat or to drop off applications. I made him food and gave him pep talks, and then he was off again, ready to try somewhere new. I went only as far as the Dollar Tree or the Laundromat, both of which were close enough that I didn’t have to be gone for long. The Community House was too out of the way and even though I had gone back to the English class there only a few times, now I stopped going altogether. I still wanted to learn English, though, so I asked Celia if she would come over to teach me a few things. She brought a workbook that she and Rafael had used when they first came to the United States. It had illustrations to show basic vocabulary—words for colors, foods, parts of the body, animals—like a child’s book of first words.
“Rafa and I both learned English in school in Panamá,” Celia said. “But when we got here, we had to refresh our memory.”
We sat at the kitchen table while she said, “Miércoles. Wednesday.”
I repeated the words.
“Jueves. Thursday,” she said.
I said, “Tursday.”