Call Me María: List 1

It is a warm day, and even in this barrio
the autumn sun feels like a kiss, un besito,
on my head.

There is very little beauty in this barrio. I feel like I am doing penance.

Do you remember when I was preparing for my First Communion and you used to drill me in catechism?

Mami sighs, both amused and exasperated.

El Súper and his daughter, we are famous to the tenants
whose floods in the bathroom, whose disasters always happen
at midnight, whose heaters stop working
on the coldest night.

My father’s way of dealing with my mother telling him that she may not ever leave La Isla has been to plunge into his new life here, although it turned out to be very little like the futuristic vision he once had of his familia in a shining home replete with laborsaving devices and technology making our lives easier; in fact, here we have traded down from the life we had on the Island...

He seems to be shedding his Island like an old skin and becoming Barrioman in blue, the superhero to the tenants, able to fix any of our decrepit old building’s problems: leaky pipes, broken windows, broken hearts.

...she wears lumpy sweaters made by the descendants of Incas who live above the Andes, the wool carried down the treacherous peaks of Machu Picchu by llamas and yaks, whose own fur is used to make the lining of those boots on the big, traveling feet of la señorita Stuckey.

Her bracelets that click and clack and warn us of her approach are of abalone shells from beaches where she has spent entire nights waiting for giant turtles to emerge from the sea, heavy with the next generation, whose precious eggs she will cover with sand and watch over during one of her working vacations.

She speaks Spanish with an accent that sounds like the United Nations of Below the Border, and she lists the countries she has visited for us; the obscure pueblos she has discovered, the palaces she has entered, the churches, the huts, the caves.

She eats her lunch of mango or guava juice and tamales from the barrio bodega alone in her classroom.

Imagine me in a thick forest of book-bearing trees and a profusion of exotic flowers with blossoms the color of this indigo ink.

You never get pimples. When she wakes up with a blemish on her nose or her chin or her jeans won’t zip up, she will call you papi-lindo in front of her friends, and it will be spit in your face.

I know prejudice means to prejudge. I know what advantage means. I know that it is the prejudice of some people that makes them underestimate me; they prejudge me because I do not look or sound like them.

The huge boiler my father keeps running through the long cold American winter sits just beyond my bedroom wall in the dark recesses of the basement.

He is practicing his guitar playing and singing, transforming himself from janitor to balladeer for the nostalgic little groups of refugees from paradise—who yearned for what my father and I left behind—the idealized Island life of their childhood dreams and grown-up fantasies: the little casa in the country or by the sea, palm trees, green mountains, and ocean breezes.

He is practicing his guitar playing and singing, transforming himself from janitor to balladeer for the nostalgic little groups of refugees from paradise—who yearned for what my father and I left behind—the idealized Island life of their childhood dreams and grown-up fantasies: the little casa in the country or by the sea, palm trees, green mountains, and ocean breezes.

When the sighs
begin to roll
through the small gathering
of mango worshippers
outside the bodega,
it is time for my father
to strum his guitar,
and begin his repertoire
of national anthems
for the homesick

time for me
to run into Cheo’s
and choose the ripest plantains,
the plumpest mangoes, while Papi
leads the other customers
in a sad tribute
to our fertile little Isla.

It is a song too,
a wordless scatting song half jazz, half salsa,
intended to wake me out of my apathy,
and everyone on the block out of our boring lives.

If Whoopee could go back in time
and walk by Frida Kahlo on a street
in Mexico, in a place where her brown skin,
wild black hair, and small solid body
were like those of goddesses and queens
sculpted into the sides of temples,
she would be immortalized in a painting called
Girl with the Black Pearl Eyes.

Doña Segura is nearly blind, but she embroiders like an angel in patterns her fingers remember.

For forty years, she worked in factories to support her five children and put them through school. She is almost blind from that work, collecting a small pension and sitting in a corner of her daughter’s apartment working on her art by touch.

Barefoot, dancing salsa steps with undulating Ganges-hips, daughter in red-and-gold sari, mother in widow white, they wear bells on their ankles, it's all in the hips, all in the hips.

Some of the Latinas in our building complain about the pungent aromas of Indian spices that have permeated the plaster on the old walls in our building, weaving in and out of our apartments like saffron threads, rising through cracks and inside pipes, through vents and old bullet holes, so that even as we swallow our arroz y habichuelas, our pollo frito, and our tostones, all we are tasting is curry, curry, curry.

Some of the Latinas in our building complain about the pungent aromas of Indian spices that have permeated the plaster on the old walls in our building, weaving in and out of our apartments like saffron threads, rising through cracks and inside pipes, through vents and old bullet holes, so that even as we swallow our arroz y habichuelas, our pollo frito, and our tostones, all we are tasting is curry, curry, curry.

...Nepal, where the beautiful god Vishnu-Narayana lives, Bombay, silk saris, palanquins, maharajahs and a trip to Katmandu...

She also brings me rudrashka beads and bangles, and tonight an iridescent cloth I can wear as a skirt or scarf, or even hang on the wall.

Uma of the bronze skin, nose ring, turquoise sari, carries her U.S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization manual like a holy book in her hands.

Beautiful Uma knocks softly on my door at study time, when she knows I will have my schoolbooks in a circle around me on the floor, my father will be at his dominoes game at the bodega, and her mother will have her veil pulled over her head, kneeling in solitary meditation.