Love War Stories Page 2

  It’s all I could hear—the clinking of their laughter. Rita kept her hand on my arm and said silly, mean things about Estefania. Called her Estefeania. Said she’s like the Americanas we see in movies, the easy Marilyns. Girls who unfastened their legs for boys without a thought to futures, to reputations, to family names.

  Ricardo doesn’t break eye contact with me as he flips Estefeania’s hair, as he leans to whisper some amusement into her ear.

  This is a game we’ve played.

  The unwritten rules of the courtship entailed breaking the rules of propriety and meeting in secret for a few minutes after school before I rushed home. And Ricardo, he would push me up against the school walls. I only let him kiss me, though. He would whisper that I was loca like my aunt. And when he talked to other girls, I cornered him in the same hallways where he whispered his desire for me. I would beat on his chest and fold into a handkerchief of grief.

  When Lola met Carlos at her quinceañera, it was because she had disobeyed the rules, not followed them. Her partner, a boy her father had chosen, a boy from a good family, one who would never have to leave the island and go work in the United States—that was who her father chose. Carlos was merely an attendee, not even one of the caballeros. What her parents wished for at her quinceañera was not what Lola wanted. She didn’t know who or what she longed for until she met Carlos, and even though he was poor, there was something about him that could be redone, refashioned. He could easily be made into the man Lola wanted. And it was that moment that barricaded her future.

  A constant picture of that stolen dance of theirs when she touched his face playfully in front of everyone. That was the way she saw her love, in snippets, highlights of the best moments. How they eclipsed the rules and the townspeople. Even though a lot could have happened in seven years, she remained turning back to those moments. Because who could have supposed the happiness, the freedom, felt on that day could lead to this?

  I came home and found them in the living room. Doña Olga turned to look at me, and the highlights of my life washed away from the shore. She was as formidable as my mother, two bulls in one ring. My mother’s pale skin was matched by Doña Olga’s dark skin. My mother’s thinness to Doña Olga’s thickness. Each was equal.

  All the times I had watched Tía Lola cry, I had never seen how it permeated the community, how others were affected by it. I had seen the laughter, but that was just an amusement for the townspeople. Nobody had really cared.

  Now, Doña Olga was here because she cared very much.

  I wanted to cry, but I knew I mustn’t in front of Doña Olga. But as I walked into the room to give her my regards, my mother broke out into a little smile, and Doña Olga even gave a short laugh. I looked at my mother and was grateful that she had steadied Doña Olga.

  As soon as she saw Doña Olga had safely made it back to her home, my mother ran upstairs. She instantly became fierce, yelling and screaming at Tía Lola. My mother projected the future; Tía Lola negated it.

  “Doña Olga just left. She said that if you don’t stop, the courtship between Noelia and Ricardo will end. And if he decides after the quinceañera that he doesn’t want to marry her, then who will want to come near her with an insane aunt in the same house? Everyone will think this craziness runs in the family.”

  “No, no, no . . .” Tía Lola repeated, and I imagined her dissolving into her bedroom floor.

  Tía,

  I know you feel terrible, but not only has Doña Olga come over but also Ricardo has been aloof with me. This should be one of the happiest times in my life, and it’s marred. Please, Tía, I urge you to think about the joy you felt during your quinceañera. Surely it was one of the most spectacular times in your life. And listening all those years to those stories about Tío Carlos, well, I couldn’t wait until it was my turn. But my time has come and there has been so much angst around your grief. I say this respectfully, Tía. Just as you enjoyed your quinceañera, I wish to have the same happy memories you did. I have always listened to you and championed your love. I wish you to do the same. This is not how I want to remember my quinceañera.

  Noelia

  All week I had watched my mother fight with Tía Lola, forbid her to go outside and wail, and each morning, she was out there nonetheless. Tía Lola was the only person my mother could not control.

  I quietly slid the letter under her door. Even though Tía Lola was nine years older than me, I had always been closer to her; she had wiped my tears when my mother was the cause of them; she plaited my hair and fashioned it the same as she always had, two French braids down her back. “When he comes back, you can even have your own room in our house,” she would say to me before kissing me on the cheek.

  For a moment, I envisioned myself just walking into her room, lying on her bed, and admitting my weaknesses to her. And that image gratified me for a moment, especially in thinking I could relieve her suffering, if only briefly—that that was something I had the power to alleviate. I stepped toward her door, putting my hand on it, wondering, hoping she could hear my breathing outside.

  But then I heard a muffled sound—like one of her sobs in the morning. The tightness in my chest inflamed once again. I imitated my mother’s stern face and stance before stomping away.

  Knowing she couldn’t see me, I fiercely stared at her. But she lay on her back in the grass, eyes in the direction of the sky, wailing, wailing.

  “Tía!” I snapped.

  “Loca,” I heard almost at the same time. One of the townsmen, Paolo, was snickering at our gate. He said it again, louder.

  In El qué dirán, Santa Dávila’s love was strong because it could cross borders, it could hold on. There, the community members respected her. They kept vigil with her. Not like here, where they make fun.

  The front door shrieked open, and Paolo quickly moved on as my father stepped outside. Dressed for work, my father stood there for a few minutes with a cup of coffee in his hands. He too looked at the sky, but it was clear that he and Tía Lola weren’t seeing the same thing. He was enjoying the sunshine, the morning, as if he couldn’t hear her, see her.

  When he went back inside, my mother came out and stood over her sister.

  “Get up,” she said to her as if she were talking to me.

  Tía Lola paid her no heed and kept on. She did not notice my mother, the townsman at the gate, me, or my father.

  But I saw her. Her sullied nightgown, the wet grass, the stillness of her body, except for hands clutching and clawing at her throat. In spite of all this, the sun sheathed her with its brightness. She was growing plumper. And glowed.

  Stripped for so many years, Tía Lola’s gathering of memories was feeding her.

  When I got home from school later in the day, I found a note from Tía Lola. She wrote that she wanted me to come to her room as soon as possible, that it was urgent she speak to me. I took the note and splayed it open in front of my mother. “Make her stop, please.” I was shaking. “Why can’t we send her to cousin Anna’s house?”

  When Tía Lola married Tío Carlos, her father was outraged, sputtered at her, pulled her by her hair, beat her even. This was all deeply cruel for Tía Lola, but at the end of it she had Carlos and that remedied much. But she blamed her father for Tío Carlos leaving. Her father refused to support her, and when he died a year later, she found he had followed through on his promise to cut her out of his will. And he left all of his money to my mother. Now Tía Lola was a woman without her own house, without a husband, and without a fortune.

  My mother was older, and while she took care of Tía Lola, there was no familial ease between them. Tía Lola sat at our table every day knowing that all she had in the world was because my mother thought the rumors would be far worse if she were uncontained, loose in the streets. They once were close, so Tía Lola told me, but when her father turned his back on her, so did my mother. And there I stood, with the people who had been the most vicious toward Tía Lola.

  The clanging of the cowbell
s. I jumped out of bed to look out my window, and Tía Lola was not there. Jubilant, I rushed out of my room, and for the first time in weeks, there was no anger or distress lingering in the air.

  My mother, sitting at the kitchen table, relaxed and smiling, said, “One more week.”

  Stepping onto the grass, I squinted up at the sky trying to see what Tía Lola had seen. I watched the cows lumbering in the distance before I sat down. I could smell the mango and coconut trees, the morning air. I lay on the warm ground where Lola should have been and involuntarily moaned as I felt the sun on my face, the blades of grass under me. The heat of the sun, the morning rising to possibilities, the noise and the silence. This moment, this space, was a place to dream.

  All this life around me. I wondered if her wailing tuned it out. Or if Tía Lola saw it and that’s why she came out here—to be born again.

  Her need for him made me wait for him too. I also lit candles wanting Tío Carlos to come back. I knew all their anniversaries: when he first kissed her, when he bought her the string of pearls that still chokes her neck, the number of days from the last day that he wrote. I gazed at his picture almost as much as Tía Lola did. She always described him as the most beautiful man in Puerto Rico, said he was a descendant of Arasibo, the Taíno cacique our town was named after. She said she could imagine him on the beach before they came and we became a different people. He was fair-skinned, though, with dark curls, not at all the man Tía Lola imagines him to be. I didn’t see him on the beach, a descendant of Arasibo, but as the one who was coming to claim this land as his own.

  Nonetheless, he was a man to me. I believed in him as she did, and I fulfilled his promises to her. I envisioned for her what their life could have been—should have been if he were still here or came back. I constructed the house they would live in, one like ours, spacious, white, and clean. I could hear their laughter as Tío Carlos chased Tía Lola around the house, and these were the moments when her heart could just stop because she loved him so much, and she was so delighted he was here and hers. These were the moments when she would shut her house to visitors in the daytime, would close all the doors—lock them even—pull down the window shutters, and lie next to him in bed, hold his hand under the pale-ivory silk sheet, and she would wish for a hurricane to come right at that moment and blow them away or submerge them in the tropical waters of Puerto Rico, because then the last thing she would ever know was this bliss. This everlasting happiness with Tío Carlos.

  She shook me awake and I suppressed a yelp. Her brown hair was no longer pinned but fell messily along her shoulders, and she wore a thin white nightgown. I thought she was coming back tomorrow. The last week of silence had been so luxurious that I thought I would cry only hearing the cowbells every morning. In the semidarkness of the night, only half of Tía Lola’s body was visible, so she looked like a mere girl.

  Then I remembered how she scratched my mother’s face. I pulled my sheet up to my hammering heart. “Please don’t be mad. Mamí forbade me to come and see you before the quinceañera. She didn’t want to upset you more than you already were.”

  She continued to stare at me with her intense brown eyes and paused before responding. And in those few seconds, I thought about everything she had ever done for me. How she had always been there to comfort me, and how she, more so than anyone else, had made me feel loved all my life.

  She reached for my hand and said softly, “You’re young, Noelia. I know you must do what your mother tells you.” She got up and stood by my mirror, in front of my dress. “Tell me what you think is to come. What do you hope for?” she asked in a small, sweet voice. The voice she had when Carlos first left.

  She held my white quince dress in front of her. We both looked at her preening in the mirror and laughed. This Tía Lola was neither in pain, nor in anguish for love. I shushed us—these were the kind of noises I would later learn my mother envied about us. The sounds of delight that would be muffled in any other room. It’s the other sound I would associate with Tía Lola: laughter that tingles and sprouts vast smiles, overtaking a room. It says there is wonder, and so much ahead, so much to come.

  She pressed her body against my dress and had me hold up her hair.

  “We should be engaged by next year,” I said, instantly lighting up. I felt like all the times I had been in her room and she told me about Tío Carlos. I had been waiting for this day: To offer her a story of my own. And because I would be a woman hours from now, I could offer something real, not just a schoolgirl’s fantasies.

  I leaned forward, telling her my innermost dreams and secrets. Probably the same ones as she or maybe Tío Carlos had. Ricardo and I kissing while watching novelas. Me always getting up and meeting him at the door. I see his smile. Picture our kids, a boy and a girl, singing around the house. I always imagine myself looking at him with this simple wonder.

  Lola nodded her head. I saw the sadness, the wail, come back to her eyes. “I thought that too,” she said softly.

  I turned away from her and checked the hour. It was time for her to leave. I had spent so many hours dreaming about Ricardo’s and my future together. My body tingled at the prospect that I would be new the next day. And I wondered what it would be like to be born a woman. Would I see changes in my face? In my body? Would I be recognizable in the streets?

  The damas gathered around me at the church. They asked if I had seen Ricardo. That he looked handsome. They swirled around me in their pink dresses and told me I was beautiful in my white one. When it was time for the ceremony to begin, I glanced around. Tía Lola had not arrived. Upon waking that morning, I wondered if her coming to my room last night had been a dream.

  The damas lined up with the caballeros, and they proceeded down the aisle in line. I watched all of them, and it was like each couple was one second in a minute, and each of their steps brought me closer to my future. Then it was my turn. My father in his fine black suit linked arms with me on my right side and my mother was on my left. She wore a purple satin dress that brought sunshine to her face. Her bare arm felt warm against mine. In slow, even paces, we walked down the aisle together. I looked straight ahead to make sure the expression on my face remained modest, though I was smiling brightly inside.

  We stood to the right of the priest and he said, “Congregation, today, it is with great honor that I conduct this quinceañera mass. Noelia Nuñez and her family have long been faithful members of this church. It is with the sincerest of pleasures that I preside over this mass to usher Noelia into the rites of womanhood.” He then paused, and my parents presented me with the typical quinceañera gifts. They both smiled triumphantly. My father stepped behind me and placed a gold necklace around my neck. The necklace symbolized my faith in God, myself, and the world, and in my head I added that the necklace also symbolized my faith in love, in what it meant to be a woman, and in marriage. My mother set in my hands the red rose I would place in the bouquet beneath the altar of the Virgin Mary. After I added my flower, my mother then presented me with my own new bible and a pink rosary. The three of us then participated in the Eucharist. This was just the beginning of the many rites of the day. Dancing with my father would be the last thing I did as a girl. Dancing with Ricardo would be the first thing I did as a woman.

  I made my entrance into the reception hall on Ricardo’s arm and was able to count how many people were actually there. Aunts, uncles, cousins, people who knew me when I was first born and others whom I had not seen since had traveled to be with me on my special day. I beamed at Ricardo. All the difficulties of the past weeks had boiled down to this, and it was how I had always envisioned it. I caught a glimpse of how Tía Lola must have felt—to be perpetually frozen in a beautiful moment. And for once, I clearly understood how difficult it could be to let go of such memories. It was a day I could easily lament the loss of and could easily play over and over again in my head.

  Ricardo led me to the middle of the reception hall, to my special woven chair, with a back that fanned ou
t around and above me. The hall was filled with balloons and flowers, and on the wall across from my chair was a sign that said “Happy Birthday, Noelia.” The music stopped, and that was the cue for my father and the commencement of the next rite. My mother came toward me. She carried a white satin pillow with my high heels on top of it. My father knelt in front of me and raised my skirt (only a proper amount). He took off my flat shoes one at a time, replacing them with the heels. Everybody clapped and he took my hand to dance. My father placed his hand on my waist, and I placed mine on his shoulder. As we started to move, I saw Ricardo standing in the sidelines, waiting to dance with me next. Even though I could not wait for my dance with Ricardo, this moment slowed for me because I knew this was the last thing I would do as a girl in this world. And I took it all in, every second. Every aspect of my body was in tune with this moment. Every part of me smiled as I counted down the time. My father twirled me around the room, and in the last spin of our dance, Tía Lola strode in.

  I stared at her for interminable seconds.

  It was a simple ivory silk dress. The very dress she wore on her wedding day. Though tighter today, constricting.

  Her hair was the same. One braid, wrapped into a bun on the left side of her head.

  Everything down to the shine on her shoes was the same.

  The merriment was silenced.

  Everyone stared. My mother was immobilized. No one laughed like they normally did in Tía Lola’s presence.

  Tía Lola sauntered across the dance floor, and the tapping of her heels roared in my head.

  She came over and easily pulled my father toward her, taking my confirmation dance away.

  I faced my father.

  My father, not sure if he should play along, moved for a beat or two with her. Then he looked at me in my white dress and finally let his arms drop, and stepped away from Tía Lola. I spun around the room to all the faces that had come to be with me. Everyone caught in that moment. How they just stood there. They all blurred, and it was not my tears. Two faces easily came into focus, Doña Olga and Ricardo. She desperately whispered in his ear, and he effortlessly nodded his head.