I had resigned myself to a very hot seven days, had cut my hair to boy length even, but was still unprepared for the push of heat as Dad and I walked out of the San Juan Airport to meet his younger brother. Severo greeted us warmly, throwing an arm around Dad and hugging me to his side again and again as we made our awkward way through the breezeway and the parking lot to the tiny Hyundai that would be our transport for the next seven days. “¡Que gorda eres! Aren’t you fat!” he laughed luxuriously, repeating, “Isn’t she fat, Chilo?” and clapping Dad on the shoulder with generous warmth and affection that I had rarely seen from my mother’s side of the family. The only family I had known until that day, my mother’s family communicated most often through sarcasm, impenetrable silences and merciless grudge-holding. I had come to Puerto Rico to meet the rest of my family.
Tio Severo drove with dad riding shotgun. I was in back with our luggage, grateful for the reprieve as I struggled to gather my thoughts and adjust to the staggering heat coming in through the open windows. Even through my confusion, I couldn’t help but warm up to Severo as I tried to hear their animated conversation up front. To say I warmed up to him is a ridiculous understatement; I loved him within minutes of meeting him. He was younger than Dad, probably in his late fifties, and though he was darker and slighter than his brother and carried an unmistakable taint of hardship, he had so much of Dad’s easy charismatic charm, that it was hard to believe they had been separated for more than thirty years. Like Dad, Severo’s eyes and manner were charged with humor, his voice infused with barely suppressed laughter. Even as he drove Severo quickly revealed his tendency to hold his elbow to his listener’s ribs as he talked, nudging them for emphasis and to insist on full attention as he led up to his point or his punch line – a trait that was unmistakably my father’s.
Severo had taken a week from his job at a packaging plant for this long-awaited family reunion. Dad and I were to stay the whole week in the town of Bayamon only minutes from Severo’s house, with their oldest brother Polo. Polo and his wife Mayin, who had eked out a modest middle class retirement and whose children had moved away, had a free bedroom in their home, while Severo and his wife shared their home with three children and several grandchildren. We stopped briefly to pick up Severo’s wife Ani, who stood in front of their small tidy house waiting for us. She wore a neat floral housedress and a shy smile. Her forehead and cheeks came alive with fine lines as she laughed good-naturedly and joined me with the luggage in the back seat. We arrived at Polo and Mayin’s house in the outskirts of Bayamon as the sun mercifully began to sink and the coquí begin their twilight love song.
Other than a generally pleasant manner, Polo bore no resemblance to his brothers. He was about 65 years old, completely bald, hook-nosed, short, and remarkably shy and quiet. His wife Mayin was his opposite. A tall plump woman with a halo of orange hair, she howled with joy when she saw us, patting and hugging both Dad and I as Polo looked on with a pleased smile and Severo and Ani stood by with unreadable expressions. If the gods had neglected to bestow Polo with any animation, they had compensated by infusing Mayin with more than enough for the two of them. Mayin exclaimed endlessly about my beauty and fatness and Dad’s youthful appearance, apologizing repeatedly for the poverty of her home, the sparseness of her furnishings, the terrible lack of food and drink all the while plying us with cut meat, fruit, milk and spongy pineapple cake. Meanwhile, Polo quietly stood along the sidelines, nodding gently, his smile wide. Exhausted and hot from the trip, I wanted only a cold shower and a bed. But the front door burst open every five minutes or so with the couples’ children and grandchildren eager to meet their long lost tio Chilo, offer him bendición – blessings - and get a look at his youngest child, whom they all agreed, was indeed very, very fat. My Spanish wasn’t perfect and combined with the heat and the exhaustion, it had already been taxed to its limit. Luckily not much was expected of me other than flashing the smile I had inherited from Dad, answering several times to the amazement of all present, that, no, I had no children, and posing for photographs. Dad and I exchanged a few raised eyebrows and shrugged shoulders across the room, but I didn’t get to talk to him again that evening. After an hour or so, Mayin took mercy on me, showed me my room and the bathroom and I drifted off to sleep to cries of bendición from the living room and the calls of the coquí in the bushes outside my window.
The morning found Mayin no less effervescent nor Polo any less reserved. He smiled a shy greeting and continued to chat quietly with my dad at the kitchen table while Mayin insisted, “¡Sientete, sientete! Sit down, sit down!” as soon as I appeared in the doorway, as if I had just completed a triathlon rather than a walk from the bedroom to the kitchen table. “What do you want for breakfast, mi’ja? ¿Quieres un hamburger? Cake? Milk? You must be starving. Sit down! ¡Sientete!” Severo arrived just then, beeping the horn of his Hyundai in the driveway and then settling down quickly to drink a cafecito in the kitchen and plot a course for visiting the scores of relatives who dotted the island.
As Mayin cut slices of cake and Severo and Polo consulted a local map, Dad and I exchanged awkward good mornings in Spanish across the small table. Dad had never taught us much Spanish, and my mother spoke not a word of it, but language had come easily to me in school and I conversed fluently with friends. This was the first time I had ever really spoken Spanish with my father, though, and it felt terribly uncomfortable. I had always found Dad’s thickly accented English as charming as it was idiosyncratic but lack of use had made his Spanish grammar rusty and his vocabulary sparse. He sounded unsure as he spoke and stumbled often over words. Worse, Dad looked at me suspiciously when I spoke to him in Spanish, as if he no longer recognized me. My uncles, however, who had no previous notions to support, acted very impressed with my language skills and I conjugated with abandon during my stay, no doubt humiliating myself endlessly.
I was thirty-one years old and felt completely like a child, in love with this family I had finally discovered after so many years of wondering and waiting. Dad who loved nothing more than to tell a good story- his elbow to your ribs as he spoke- had always maintained a stony silence when we brought up the subject of his family. I could count on my questions about his family to be the one sure way to get him to lose his teasing tone and become suddenly stoic. Though I badgered him with all manner of questions, I had only managed to learn that he was the second youngest of ten siblings, that his family had been very poor and his father had been a farmer who had died young. His mother followed soon after. I knew that dad had came to the states as a very young man, landed a factory job, learned English, met my mother (the daughter of an uninspired union between a first generation Italian and first generation Pole) in the melting pot of Boston’s immigrant-rich outskirts and married her at age twenty-six. There are no photographs of Dad’s family in any of our albums, no tios or tias present at family celebrations and no allusions to his brothers and sisters. When my brother, my sister or I asked about his family the only response we ever got was a stony, “You are the only family I have.”
Then a few months prior, just weeks after Dad had entered cyberspace and opened an AOL email account, an eager inquisitive e-mail had arrived from one of Severo’s sons. This had led to a tentative email exchange and an ensuing series of emotional phone calls all of which I learned about after the fact and through the filter of my mother’s interpretation - as everything was learned in our family. When the idea of a reunion had first come up, my mother had vetoed it. Well, that is both an overstatement and an understatement. She hadn’t pursued it and since Dad didn’t do much of anything without her approval, nothing had come of the insistent invitations from Severo. My parents are both gone now and I will never know what finally softened her heart to the idea of the reunion - it may have simply been the idea of having the house to herself for a week - but eventually she agreed to the idea of his going to Puerto Rico, making it clear that the bugs and the heat would prohibit her from making the trip with him.
Although I was the obvious sibling to join him since I was single and actually spoke Spanish, I was truly shocked when during my weekly dinner with my parents, Dad invited me to join him, my mother looking on with the air of a magnanimous benefactor. My mother guarded Dad’s time jealously and particularly the time he spent with me. She resented the easy camaraderie that existed between us and for as long as I could remember she had banned from the dinner table the slapstick routines, gags and open-mouthed laughter that liberally punctuated our conversations. I will never know what prompted her to allow our trip together, but allow it she did. Arrangements were made, tickets reserved, gifts bought and packed, drama aroused and subdued several times and this, finally, our family reunion came into being. I was ecstatic. Dad was nervous.
On the flight from Logan, I reviewed my dog-eared copy of 301 Spanish Verbs while Dad bounced his right knee up and down continuously and occupied his hands by alternately wringing them and rubbing the palms on the tops of his thighs. Occasionally I would shoot a pointed look and a raised eyebrow in his direction and he would flash me a toothy grin, then lean his head back against the airplane seat, puff out his cheeks and exhale noisily. His restlessness made him no less reticent about his family and for once I didn’t pursue it. I was going to see for myself. Now, finally, in the bosom of his – my! - family, I found it incomprehensible that he could have left them behind. What series of events had led to a thirty-year absence from this warm and kind band of kin?
Don’t get me wrong. This was not paradise; much of that week in Puerto Rico was a sticky hot blur. I was inundated with countless cousins whose names I could never remember, plagued by the staggering heat, mercilessly grilled about my unfortunate childless state and endlessly shuffled about from place to place with no will of my own. We attempted to leave Polo and Mayin’s house early every morning and although there was always talk of much to see and do and so little time, Severo and Polo and their wives moved languidly and always found time for another story, another cafecito before we made our endless trip from kitchen table to front door. This sluggish pace set me on edge, my East Coast upbringing rebelling furiously at the inefficient use of time and lack of structure. I found myself tapping my foot, clenching and unclenching my fists and eventually settling down to read a book on the sofa, at which point everyone stared at me in amazement saying, “Que haces? Ya nos vamos.” We would then move toward the front porch and the whole process would start again. I never fully relaxed until we were all seated in the Hyundai and Severo had turned the key in the ignition.
My tio Severo was our self-appointed guide, pointing out landmarks and, to Dad’s gape-mouthed amazement, the many changes that the landscape had endured over the decades since he had been home. Severo drove his little car with great pride, shifting gears effortlessly, holding us passengers forever in the grip of a story, stopping often to check on everyone’s attention, nudging the ribs of whoever happened to be up front with him as he entertained us. The Hyundai struggled a bit going up the hilly landscape of the island, but never failed us. As we left Bayamon and hit open roads, we stopped often to snap photos of rich green landscapes and waterfalls. Tio Polo came along on most of our outings assuming a silent sidekick role. The four of us made an odd little ensemble - three small middle-aged dark men and a large blonde woman with a crew cut and a notebook, continually wiping sweat from her brow with a handkerchief - as we stopped to take photos or buy fresh cheese from a roadside stand. My father, dressed in novelty t-shirts and bermuda-length jean shorts looked like a tourist next to his brothers in their gabardine trousers and belts, button down shirts and dress shoes. Their poses were formal and smiles stiff through my lens while dad hit a carefree pose and a goofy grin.
As uncomfortable as they appeared on our trips to tourist spots, Polo and Severo settled into lush informality and comfort in their own homes and in all of the family homes where casual ease reigned. I did not find the awkward silences, tension and stiff formality that I had come to expect when family was gathered. Instead I was met with people with open friendly faces living in houses meant to be walked into. I became accustomed to the affectionate cheek kiss and the softly offered bendiciónes. Despite my omnipresent notebook, continual questions and the painstaking notes I took in an effort to create a family tree, exact family relations eluded me. Family members came and went with equal informality so much so that I remained constantly confused about who lived where. My tio Severo could be found in anyone’s kitchen perched on a kitchen chair with a cafecito, and my cousin Cuca appeared to greet us in bedroom slippers and curlers with a mop-haired toddler on her hip in nearly every home we visited. Even tio Polo, settled back on Veronica’s sofa or Juana’s easy chair with today’s copy of El Vocero opened in front of him, could have easily been in his own home. Though I was particularly drawn to Severo’s sharp wit and warmth, Polo became a touchstone for me during that visit. Often confused or overwhelmed during my time in Puerto Rico, I was comforted by Polo’s quiet presence and by the comfortable routine that he and Mayin represented.
I was able to convince Severo’s wife Ani to join us on one of our outings, to El Morro castle in San Juan, where we explored the ancient promontories and underground tunnels that had protected the island countless times against foreign invasions. That day’s outing had a different feel to it. Ani took what seemed like hours to get ready as Dad, Polo and Severo and I waited in her tiny kitchen. When she finally appeared, she was dressed impeccably in a trim patterned polyester dress, hose and high-heeled shoes. I felt instantly ridiculous in my usual costume of overall shorts, tank top and sandals. Ani drove in front with Severo and Dad, Polo and I squeezed into the back seat. Severo and Dad were much more subdued that day; Severo drove more slowly and he and Dad told few stories and even fewer jokes. In comparison to the abandon they exhibited on our usual wanderings, the two carried an air of chastened schoolboys. Polo was the only one who appeared perfectly content that day, quietly admiring the view out the window as we drove.
Although Mayin never joined us on our outings, she invariably greeted us upon our return with the pomp afforded soldiers returning from war. “You must be starving! Eat something! You want cake? No? What about some milk? Some milk? No? Ok, have some cake then.” She would say to Dad and I, cutting the omnipresent pineapple cake into thick slices as she spoke. Our event-filled days faded into lazy evenings spent in Polo and Mayin’s living room, where my uncles and aunts reminisced for endless hours with my father, catching him up on thirty years of family joys and sorrows. I learned that one of Dad’s brothers had been incarcerated for more than ten years although no one would tell me why. The most coherent response I could get was un crimen de amor. I learned that one of Dad’s older brothers and two of his older sisters were deceased and shockingly, that one of Dad’s sisters and her family lived in Springfield MA less than two hours from Dad’s house. I learned that I had sixty-five first cousins and uncounted masses of second cousins. At times their tales reached such crescendos of hilarity or depths of sadness that my brain started to hurt and I had to retreat to the front porch and the peace of my own thoughts. Towards the middle of the week I found myself consciously relax when I realized that there was not going to be a scene, no one was going to shout at Dad for being MIA for thirty years. There wasn’t going to be any guilt or reprimand. While part of me was relieved, my notebook remained at the ready and I was surprised to find myself slightly disappointed that there was no drama. Then I met Lola.
Tia Lola was standing on the balcony of her second floor apartment in San Juan when we pulled up in front of her building. She was a fat woman wearing Dad’s broad grin and a quantity of chins which would tremble with emotion when she sharply reprimanded dad for his disappearance act and that would later wobble with laughter as she recounted tale after tale of dad’s mischievous behavior as a child and his rakish behavior as a teen. As we mounted the steps to greet her, though, Dad looked up, down, anywhere but at Lola. He had no answer to her reprimands of course and she held him at arm’s length, scowling, for several seconds while I held my breath. Finally unable to stand it anymore she dropped her resistance and held her long lost brother to her tightly, laughing and crying out loud. Polo and Severo, probably as uncomfortable as Dad had been, let out sighs of relief and then Lola had her way with all of us, crushing us to her bulk and introducing Dad and I to her three equally round and joyful daughters. Bendición they said to their uncles, respectfully, smiling shyly at me and asking how many children I had.
Lola had a smile that reached her eyes and a tongue as sharp as a cleaver. Dad was obviously cowed by her and whatever their relationship had been so many years ago she reclaimed her dominance immediately. I confess I enjoyed seeing him squirm under her scrutiny and as she unearthed tales of his youth that he would rather leave buried. Nothing she told us surprised me very much, but her command over his composure led me to hold her in awe. I had never seen anyone disarm him. For the rest of us, Lola’s laughter was contagious as she reminded Dad of his insistent and annoying attachment to her as a little boy and how he had followed her everywhere. She doubled over in laughter as she recalled the beatings that his antics as a boy had earned from their father and his fierce attachment to the animals on the farm and in particular to one favorite pet chicken he had befriended and allowed to sleep in his bed. She even laughed as she recounted the visit that a shotgun-wielding neighbor had paid to their father in regards to his daughter’s virtue when Dad was only fourteen; how he had trembled and hid in the outhouse for hours expecting to be shot, or worse, married off. Lola got choked up only once, when she recounted their goodbye more than three decades earlier, his promises to visit, to write, to never forget her or any of them. After an interminable silence while Dad lowered his head and silent tears washed down Lola’s face, she grasped his hand and held it to her wet cheeks kissing his palm. After this visit on the balcony that lasted too long for Dad’s comfort and was much too short for me, Lola led us through her crowded apartment to her tiny kitchen table where she fed us huge quantities of richly seasoned red beans, rice and fried plantains. And then it was my turn to squirm as Lola turned her sharp eyes and tongue on me to ask questions about my love life, my finances and my weight, and to cluck her tongue and shake her head in amazement at my childless state. When it was time to go, Lola refused to let us leave without a large bowl of leftovers. We tried in vain to refuse, knowing that Mayin and her pineapple cake awaited us at home, but Lola would brook no refusal. Once we accepted the bowl of leftovers she immediately began to fill another. Our protests that she had given us too much already were met with vehemence. “That!?” she spat, referring to the large bowl, “That is nothing! What if you should get hungry on the ride home?” she said, heaping servings into another bowl, panic rising to her eyes at the thought of us famished during the forty-minute ride back to Bayamon. Bendición, I said quietly to her, kissing her cheek, as we left.
On the day before our scheduled flight home, Severo and Polo took us on the long drive to the mountainous town of Comerio in the center of the island to the scraggly farm of my tia Leonides, my dad’s oldest living sister. On the ride up, I learned that Leonides had once famously received a Mother of the Year plaque from Rafael Hernández Colón the then governor of Puerto Rico – and had borne seventeen children on this mountain – on this same farmland - her sprawling family raised in two squat side-by-side houses alongside the goats and chickens. Elfin was the best word to describe her, tiny and merry, her eyes rimmed with the laughter lines that ran in the family. When Leonides hugged me, her small head nestled exactly between my breasts and there she clung for several moments, wetting my shirt through with her tears. She then held me at arms length and looked me up and down with satisfaction, a smile spreading across her face. I was deeply moved by her instant approval, and was shocked to find tears spring to my eyes for the first time during our trip. I was choked with a barrage of emotions including an intense burst of anger at my father. Why had he left all this behind? How I would have benefited from Leonides’ warmth and generosity, from Severo’s ironic humor, from Polo’s steadfast presence and from Lola’s frank but forgiving nature. Why had my sister, my brother and I been denied these uncles and aunts? I couldn’t stay lost in my thoughts for very long. A dozen or more of my father’s nieces and nephews, great nieces and great nephews crowded around us in the large courtyard between the two houses, waiting to meet us. “Bendición, tio,” they said to my father, some tearfully. “Bendición,” they said, offering him babies to kiss as if he were some sort of prodigal son turned pope.
The atmosphere on the farm was lively and relaxed. Some of the men drank shots of rum in the shade of the courtyard and Dad hammed it up, delighting the children by posing for photographs with the animals and drinking milk straight from the cow’s udders. Despite all evidence to the contrary tia Leonides was determined to believe that I neither spoke nor understood Spanish and communicated to me solely in pantomime. Was I hungry, she asked, mouth open, patting her stomach? Thirsty? Raising a phantom glass to her lips. When I tried to speak to her she smiled pityingly at me shaking her head and exclaiming to anyone within earshot, “¡La pobre! No habla ni palabra de espanol. Poor thing doesn’t speak a word of Spanish!”
At around two o’clock Leonides disappeared for a while into the kitchen and reappeared laden with platters of rice, blood pudding, pork tripe stew and fried goat. Several of my cousins joined us eagerly at the table for what were clearly special holiday dishes. While I picked at my meal suspiciously, Dad wolfed down two huge platefuls barely raising his eyes from his plate. We sat afterward for what seemed like hours, my father rubbing his belly with satisfaction while the uncles discussed the health of the livestock. Once Dad and tio Severo had gotten up from the table to visit with the animals, tio Polo had settled on the sofa with El Vocero and my cousins had found comfortable spots to sit and gossip, Leonides silently gestured for me to follow her to the bedroom. Her elfish smile spreading from ear to ear, she led me into the dark cool room, its heavy crowded furniture protected from the sun by thick, lacy curtains. She gestured for me to sit on the bed and then lifted the corner of the glass dust cover of her bureau to retrieve a black and white photograph of my dad that was sandwiched there and probably had been for decades. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I could see that the photograph was taken when dad was probably in his early twenties and movie-star handsome, dressed in a light sports jacket and tie. His lush black hair was magnificent in the miniature pompadour that he had worn, a style that had gradually been cropped and whitened through the years. She held tight to this cherished keepsake and let me look as long as I wanted but not touch. She replaced the photograph and then reached back under the dust cover to pull out something that really surprised me. It was a photograph of my mother, impossibly young and holding my older sister, a newborn, her firstborn, in her arms. My mother’s eyes held equal parts vulnerability and bravado. I had seen this photo before - there must exist a copy in a family photo album - but here, in this setting, the openness in her eyes hit me like a brick, knocked the wind out of me, and then embarrassed me and I had to fight the urge to look away. Leonides showed me these treasures silently; I know that all she had to tell me she had shown me in those perfectly preserved photographs.
The next day Dad and I entered the air-conditioned lobby of the San Juan Airport and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. It was the first time I had felt cool or dry in seven days. I also felt a sense of fullness and deep satisfaction that I had never felt before. A warmth nestled in some impenetrable place within me. I was overjoyed at the thought of being back in my own space and in my own world to write and think about all I had seen and learned and to revel in this new gift of a family. Dad and I spent the first half of the flight reminiscing and remembering the events of the week before, beginning to find words and ways to frame our experience so that we would somehow be able to share it with the rest of our family. After a while, I drifted off to sleep. When I awoke, I saw that silent tears were streaming down Dad’s face and I instinctively reached for his hand. He brushed me away gruffly, muttering under his breath something about allergies and swiping angrily at his eyes.
I couldn’t wait to develop the photographs I had taken in Puerto Rico. There were several rolls of posed photos with the tios and tias, including poignant shots of Dad and Severo and Polo and lots of photos meant to tell a story with groupings of family members lined up by age or by relation or by some other category that I had already forgotten. As self-appointed photographer, I was pictured in very few of them myself. These few photos show a large sweaty woman with a notebook, about a head taller than the other women wearing a butch haircut, an air of earnest confusion and a hangdog look of heat exhaustion. I still look at those photos sometimes. I find myself scanning them for something beyond what is there. I want to laugh at the earnestness in my eyes, but I can’t. I had come with pen and paper. I had come with camera. I had come to strip away mystery. I wish I could say I came home with answers but there were none, not really. Only blessings.