Bird of Paradise Read online

  Doña Dolores waited at home, ambivalent about the whole thing. She wanted to straighten out her little boy, but not if it meant Manuel would be tempted to play her dirty yet again.

  The ride to Nicolas de Ovando was silent. The voices of the city’s poorest children screaming, “¡Maní! ¡Maní! ¡Maní!” could be heard along El Malecón, making Antonio hungry. The boy thought about what his friends might have been doing: drinking at the underground gay bar, smoking marijuana, jerking off to straight porn at the movie theater. Antonio tried not to think about all the pussy he’d be faced with that night. Vaginas reminded him of papayas, which nauseated him.

  Boîte el Criollo was a tiny bordello run by Ligiah, a tall fat mulata áspera with gold teeth and a huge-ass wig. She roared at the sight of Don Manuel. “¡Ay, Dios mío, hombre, cuanto tiempo! Where have you been? I haven’t seen you in so long.” Madame Ligiah turned away from the cash register and welcomed Antonio with her deep rasp. “We love your dad here, you know? And I have some great-looking muchachitas for you.” Antonio’s knees almost gave out under him. A mama’s boy, he was repulsed by how warmly his father was received in this shit hole. He had wished many times that his mother would leave Don Manuel.

  The first girl Antonio was offered was about thirteen, fourteen. This doesn’t feel right, was his first thought. Sensing his discomfort, Ligiah offered him a different girl. “She’s helping at the register, but I could send her up with you.”

  “No, I prefer someone a little older.”

  Janet was a fat, juicy morena in her mid- to late thirties. Horrified and amused, Antonio followed the woman to a filthy room down the hall. “Oh, lie down and relax on the bed while I get ready,” she said, taking off her clothes.

  Janet squatted down atop a ponchera in the corner of the tiny room. Maintaining eye contact with the boy, she grabbed a wet bar of jabón de cuaba and began to scrub her vagina and culo with a mixture of dark soapy water and cum from previous customers. The boy struggled to keep down whatever he’d eaten that day as her dirty chocha dripped even dirtier water back into the basin.

  “Okay,” she said, patting her legs and feet dry, “now I’m ready for you.”

  Janet lay down next to Antonio, who was still fully dressed, and unzipped his jeans before taking his dick into her huge experienced mouth. Antonio closed his eyes and imagined Janet as a man until he started to get hard. But just as he began to relax, he was startled by a cacophony of slapping and moaning, crying and yelling from the room next door. Antonio went limp.

  “Oh, that’s Maria. She’s very tough on men, but they all seem to like it that way,” Janet whispered, stroking Antonio’s face gently with her rough hand. “Don’t give it a thought.”

  “¡Yo te voy a enseñar hacer hombre coño!” Maria screeched, slapping her customer so hard it sounded like rounds of firecrackers going off on Noche Buena. He squealed, begging for more punishment, and she complied. “Desgraciado maricón, who’s the real bitch here!”

  Antonio had enough. He paid la vieja Janet in full and went downstairs to meet his father.

  “How did it go, mi hijo?”

  “Actually, nothing went, and I want to get the fuck out of here, and I don’t really want to do this.”

  “Ah. This may not be the right place,” Don Manuel said, “let’s go to Nancy’s.”

  As he left Ligiah’s brothel, Antonio was even more convinced that he was gay.

  Several places over from Boîte was a larger, well-known establishment with a curiously ordinary name: Nancy’s Nightclub. The brothel’s namesake was a popular and straightforward madam, Don Manuel said. Antonio could barely make out what she looked like because of the flurry of whores who rushed out like a wave, dancing around him as soon as he sat down on the bar stool.

  “Papi, Papi, Papi, Papi, vamo’ a sing’a,” they sang, competing for his attention.

  “Oh my God, this is worse than that other place,” Antonio said to his father.

  “Okay, let’s go to the last one, and I promise—”

  Herminia’s Nightclub was a massive whorehouse, the largest in the barrio, originally erected to cater to invading U.S. troops in the market for chocha. The joint was so large that no one recognized Don Manuel among the chulos and tourists on the massive dance floor. Tons of putas of all ages and shapes in the variant shades of brown present on the island—from leche condensada to espresso—danced like lactating mothers around their young.

  Don Manuel and Antonio sat at the bar. Soon the women flocked around them, swaying their hips suggestively to the live music. Antonio found Herminia’s whores less aggressive than Nancy’s and certainly more attractive and charming than those at Boîte.

  “Oh, do you like the way I dance, chulo?” asked a blonde with a large pajon. Her hair was thick and curly, her eyes piercing blue. Her face evoked a time when African women bore their masters’ children.

  “Mira, mira, mira, mira . . . do you like, do you like?” she asked Antonio.

  Antonio looked over at his father and said, “I’m enjoying this, but for all the wrong reasons.”

  “Excuse me? What do you mean?” Don Manuel shouted over the music.

  “I think these women are actually funny. They’re comedians, all of them.”

  “Oh God, there’s no hope for this guy,” Don Manuel said, staring up at the high ceiling. “He’s really not going to fuck anybody after all.”

  Father and son finished their drinks and went home.

  * * *

  That night Antonio thought about his sister Rocío on the ride back home. He wondered if she was coping better than he was in the love department.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mean Streets

  Mete la mano en el bolsillo

  Saca y abre tu cuchillo y ten cuida’o.

  Put your hand in your pockets

  Take out and fling your knife open and be careful.

  —HÉCTOR LAVOE, “CALLE LUNA, CALLE SOL”

  ROCÍO FOLLOWED EDUARDO TO NEW YORK CITY IN 1972 WITH A knot of cash gifted to her by Don Manuel. Eduardo promised to move her into a sprawling apartment, but the couple made a detour. They began their life together in a room at Germosa and Raul Cepeda’s prewar apartment on 145th Street and Broadway, where a few thousand newcomers from the island found themselves feeling a little unsettled.

  The fact that Eduardo didn’t make good on his first promise didn’t matter much to Rocío. The girl was finally free to be la reina in Eduardo’s kingdom: a tiny rented bedroom down a seemingly endless hallway in the elderly couple’s fairly large apartment. Every week they paid a little extra cash for the right to use the bathroom. The kitchen was off limits.

  The king and queen spent hours in their room, planning a future full of children and riches. Eduardo didn’t understand when Rocío started going off about existentialism and Jean-Paul Sartre and someday visiting Paris, where the philosopher had been born. For some reason, not knowing turned him on. Rocío was the smartest woman he’d ever met. “I’m going to take you on my next tour all over South America,” Eduardo promised his child bride. “They love my show over there. They love me.” When the couple got tired of talking, they took breaks to make love and, when Eduardo could get Rocío in the right mood, fuck each other to sleep. They couldn’t afford to do much else.

  Months later, just in time for my arrival, Rocío has her own kitchen in a decent two-bedroom apartment. She can come home after work and fetch something to drink from her refrigerator in her kitchen. She can use the bathroom without worrying that someone will walk in on her. Rocío is free to be the doting mother she feels she never had, as well as a loving maternal figure to her husband.

  She glances over at Eduardo, dozing off on the couch, then back out the window.

  * * *

  A Hindu couple exits a building from across the street, screaming at each other in a language Rocío doesn’t understand. The commotion startles her back from daydreaming to reality.

  A boy—he can’t be over two ye
ars old—is at the woman’s side. He’s probably their son, she thinks. The boy is crying and holding on to the hem of his mother’s skirt. The white noise coming from the couple is deafening even from Rocío’s window. The boy looks terrified. Perhaps he’s not used to seeing his parents fight. Or maybe the impending feeling of doom, like Rocío’s own, is what’s scaring the shit out of him, causing the child to sob uncontrollably.

  “Ay Dios, por favor call the policía, call,” she begs Eduardo. Rocío is picking up English with relative ease by reading everything she can get her hands on and watching the news. Eduardo’s English isn’t much better, but it’s easier to understand than hers. “I said call the policía, Eduardo, por favor, hombre.”

  “Stay away from the window,” Eduardo responds. His voice is flat and almost unaffected by the shouting outside.

  “But I think algo malo sucederá if you don’t call—”

  “Get out of the window right now, Rocío, you’re not supposed to be watching them.”

  Rocío doesn’t move. The woman and child disappear into the building. The man leans quietly against the rear of a double-parked moving van in front of the building. The sun is shining down on the silver ramp the man had been walking up and down all morning, moving pieces of furniture and boxes he neatly stacked from back to front.

  Rocío can clearly make out the beads of sweat racing down the creases of his forehead into his red eyes. He is thinking, waiting, it seems—but for what?

  “You see? Nada pasó. It’s nothing. Now get away from the window,” Eduardo says.

  The feeling of dread doesn’t abandon Rocío. The weight is even heavier than when she first boarded the airplane bound for New York City. She had never left her country before that trip and wondered how the huge chunk of steel would make its way from the familiar world to a distant one without falling apart.

  Rocío continues to stare at the Hindu man, hoping he won’t become aggressive again when his wife and child reappear, for the child’s sake.

  The creases disappear from the man’s forehead. His expression is almost subdued when he starts tracing the building with his eyes, forcing his head up despite the unforgiving sun, looking up until he spots his wife and son, holding on to his mother’s hem, on the roof.

  Rocío follows the man’s gaze, brick by brick, up to the roof where his wife, yelling again, is looking down at him. Her son stands next to her, his eyes swollen almost completely shut from crying. The man’s eyes are fixed on his family standing on the roof. He doesn’t respond to her.

  “¡Eduardo, Dios, call la policía, hombre! She is going to do something crazy,” Rocío screams. She braces herself, praying to La Virgen de la Altagracia that the woman doesn’t jump from the roof and traumatize her child for life.

  “I said, it’s none of our business.”

  The Hindu man doesn’t yell. Doesn’t move. The woman picks up the boy, now silent, over her head and tosses him off the roof.

  The boy’s father doesn’t move.

  Rocío, a sheltered teenager from Santo Domingo, hasn’t witnessed this kind of violence before, not even during the civil war in 1965. She becomes distraught, wailing for the child who has been reduced to pieces of skin, brain tissue, and all kinds of unrecognizable matter splattered on the ground and on his father.

  Rocío looks at me through her protruding belly. She believes in omens.

  Eduardo is sad for the child, but the sadness is fleeting. He quickly goes back to thinking about the mess he’s gotten himself into, and about other women.

  Too soon afterward, everything goes back to normal.

  * * *

  Rocío immediately returns to cleaning houses and working at the factory, back to signing over all her checks to Eduardo, back to defending Eduardo to her bosses and coworkers.

  “Rocío, how can you give that man all of your money when he’s spending it on other women, no seas tonta,” people would say.

  “You don’t understand how much Eduardo loves me. He would never do that,” Rocío would respond.

  “You’re a brilliant girl but with no common sense,” was the usual response. “Go back to Santo Domingo, back to school.”

  “I don’t expect anyone to understand our love.”

  * * *

  I’m born at the end of that spring, not long after the woman tossed her son off the roof. My father finally makes good on one of his many promises and abandons his singing career to get a real job as a dental technician. And my mother, still cleaning rich people’s apartments downtown, has stopped daydreaming about a life of literature and philosophy. Rocío dropped out of Lehman College to help my father finish his degree, hoping he’d someday return the favor. She begins to doubt he will.

  My mother has trouble taking care of me. She can barely take care of herself.

  * * *

  My earliest memories are adrenaline-fueled vignettes set in Inwood and Santo Domingo. I star in each; my father, hardly ever; my mother, more so, and never without those tacónes raising her five-foot frame high off the ground as she sped to and from our apartment on Seaman Avenue.

  I call Rocío “Mami,” even though I’m not sure she’s mine or that I’m hers. There’s no real bond. I haven’t spent much time with her or Eduardo. I call him “Papi,” though I don’t remember a single instant between him and Mami that illustrates their connection or where I fit in. The only proof of parentage I possess is a black-and-white photograph of us all together, taken shortly after I was born.

  When I turn six months old, Mami drops me off in Paraíso on the first of many round-trips to the island that I’ll take before my sixth birthday. There, I’m sent to live with her parents, Don Manuel and Doña Dolores, whom I call Papa and Mama. I meet my tíos, Antonio and Paloma, and a gray bipolar poodle named Oliver. A Donald Duck mobile becomes the thing I cherish most, next to Mama’s company and Papa’s grilled cheese sandwiches.

  I fall in love with Paraíso. It’s like a giant playground where I’m never scolded for running around recklessly, where I’m almost overwhelmed with the amount of attention and love I receive from Mami’s family. In New York, I’m invisible. I hate going back to live with Mami, especially during the winter.

  * * *

  Mami walks fast, gliding over the snow in her high heels like an ice skater; my tiny legs can’t keep up with hers. My sides hurt real bad from walking so fast, but I don’t want to lose her, so I start running, barely holding on to her cold wet hand.

  “Camina, muchacha,” she scolds me. “Come on, girl, walk faster.”

  I can’t answer her. I’m out of breath. The cold air stings the back of my sweaty neck. My knees give out, and I slip on the sheet of ice. Mami lifts me up by the elbow. She rolls her eyes at me, disgusted. I am slowing her down. Tears stream down my face because I can’t part my lips to say “I’m sorry, Mami” for letting her down. I miss Paraíso terribly.

  Mami’s always heading somewhere, dropping me off with people I don’t know, running late to work before picking me up and running back home to cook dinner. I think Mami prefers the chaos. I’m afraid that if she stands still even for a moment, she’ll realize that she is completely alone. I can tell she doesn’t want to be quiet with her thoughts and all the bullshit promises Papi made back home in Santo Domingo. She tries not to allow her mind to race back to what could have been had she stayed working for Dr. Zaglul. Regretting her present would mean regretting I existed, and she doesn’t feel free enough to admit that, at least not out loud. Mami does not have to say it. I can almost hear her curse the day I was born and ruined any chance of her plotting to leave Papi and start over in Santo Domingo as if none of this happened. I can feel her sadness.

  The gaping hole in her heart is amplified when she catches a glimpse of the strands of silver hair framing her once young face in the mirror. “I look like a woman twice my age,” I hear her mumble under her breath. And to think she isn’t even twenty-one.

  To me, Mami looks like a fashion model (though shorter), an
exhausted version of the stylish women who go to the Latin Quarter and the Palladium to dance salsa. I bet they can’t walk across the ice in tacónes like her. She is pretty to me, though her teeth are slightly too big for her small face. And even if there are strands of gray hair crowning her young head, the dark waves cascading down her back make her impossibly small waist look even smaller. Everything she wears looks pretty on her.

  At home, I sometimes climb up on her bed when she’s sleeping and stare at her face, a kaleidoscope. I see someone different every time I look at her, depending on the angle. One day Mami looks like the funny Indian lady on TV who sings about being something called a “half-breed.” On other days she looks like a china, especially when she smiles. Lately, Mami’s eyes have been so dark, I don’t like looking into them because I’m afraid I’ll fall in. When she awakens, I try to play with her, but she never has time.

  * * *

  Ever since Rocío arrived in Nueva York, the city has been really mean to her. As much as she wanted to believe otherwise, the truth is, Eduardo hasn’t been much kinder.

  On one of those rare evenings off, Rocío and Eduardo decide to throw an impromptu party at their apartment. Their friend Miguel drops in with his violin. Eduardo invites his sister, Esperanza, who happens to be in the city with Sara. Rocío squirms when she opens the door to find her sister-in-law and Sara with an acoustic guitar standing in the doorway.

  “Esperanza, you have to spend the night. I can’t le’ you go back all the way back to Newport,” Eduardo says without Rocío’s consent. “And Sara se puede quedar, too.”

  The family and friends spend the evening singing popular boleros and religious songs. Sara strums her guitar throughout and sings a couple of duets with Eduardo. At some point in the night, Miguel overhears Sara talking to Eduardo—sitting next to her like an obedient dog—about a divorce. Esperanza makes herself scarce and ventures into the kitchen to help herself to a plate of food.

  Though Rocío is the queen of Eduardo’s kingdom, she doesn’t get the respect due to her from Esperanza and Sara. They ignore her while Sara openly flirts with Eduardo, leaning a little too close to him when they sing. But Rocío, the obedient wife and naive woman-child who wants nothing more than to make Eduardo as happy as they were when they first met, does nothing. Despite her own reservations and Miguel’s warning, Rocío offers Sara one of her negligees to sleep in. Eduardo may be immature, she thinks, but he can’t be that stupid. “Carajo Rocío, I guess it’s true what they say,” Miguel says, “the more bookish a person, the more she lacks common sense, mi hija.”