SOME STUFF ABOUT LIFE
// muñeca gringa
Your grandmother grew up on a nameless hill. She had twelve siblings, six boys and six girls as plain and neat as a congregation on Sunday. They were all of similar likeness: large camel eyes, blonde hair, a broad build, and an astounding shortness. With their proximity to the karst mountains and insular knowledge of the family farm, las Sosas were about as close to the Puerto Rican elvish population as one was going to get.
Now they are only survived by two — Titi Haydee (aptly nicknamed la Chupacabra de Cabo Rojo, poor thing was born without a stable mind and has most recently managed to get her house burned down by a fed-up neighbor with arsonist tendencies) and Tio Rene. Tio Rene is eighty-four years old but manages the fields once cohabited with his brothers and sisters. He recently lost the ability to tend to cows and sold them to a cousin down the hill. Now he is overlooking seven horses, all hembras; female. He is married to an incredible woman, Titi Mildred, who makes the house smell like garlic and caramelized onions. She has prepared a plate of lettuce and tomato for your mother, since your mother hasn’t ceased to complain of her own fatness and Titi Mildred is taking her up on the joke.
The farm itself is infinite and lush. Lush seems like a misleadingly Anglo-Saxon word; lush is a word that makes this farm seem as if it is computable. There is an immeasurable gravity to this place, where everything coexists in a gentle harmony, and if there is any other word for it, there are several more.
We will live with lush.
You ask your mother if Puerto Rico is second-world. Somehow, this is a fact you have always been aware of but has simultaneously evaded you. There is electricity, and lovely hotels, and large highways, and fancy restaurants. There’s an especially famous restaurant off of Calle de Diego in Santurce that has a celebrity chef and an incredible margarita de guayaba. Yet, progress here moves slowly if there’s any at all. Puerto Rico has not changed since 1978.
Everything tends to work cyclically here. The stories of your bisabuelas are told like they were yesterday. The right turn you take in Cabo Rojo is dignified by crippled remnants of your great-grandpa’s bodega which no one has taken the personal agency to remove. This is possibly for the love of the bodega, but no such structure would stand for over a decade where you come from. Cemented by the fact that your mother is repeating the same stories of your cousin’s shortcomings on the bread of each couch cushion she rests on; Puerto Rico is certainly a place that never changes. It’s old rope: tired and worn thin, though deceptively strong and unencumbered.
Max the Dog is lying under the hammock. You walk over to take better account of the moon:
The craters are evident. The moon is enormous and brilliant. You think about the darkness that surrounds the farm; there aren’t lights from neighbor’s homes since the mountain is a mountain and everyone exists on a decline. You look up and see the constellations that have long escaped you in New York. You remember your father pulling you out of the car in the driveway and pointing out Orion’s belt. You could identify that, and the big and little Dipper, and sometimes Pleiades. It has been a long time since you have seen absolute darkness. It eats you.
Your Puerto Rican identity, to the naked eye, has always been in question. You are white like an eggshell, and you don’t have an accent, and your mother doesn’t have an accent, and you’re not a great dancer, and you’re vegetarian and a hipster. People have, once or twice, had the audacity to say that you aren’t Puerto Rican at all. That you are a fake. Como una muñeca.
You want to open your mouth and respond — pero soy del campo, and you want mangroves to explode from your lips and you want your eyeballs to turn into shells, and you wish you were born a little more triguena. You wish you were more than the comment that you look Puerto Rican when you wear hoops, as a compliment. You wish to kick the words “Jewish face” and “Latina body” into a well and leave it there. Your mother feels the same. The cultural heritage of your family is so complex (and thusly invariably American) and can be only summed up in the following terms: you-look-like-one-thing-but-you’re-actually-five-things-and-no-you’re-not-Italian-but-thanks-for-asking-yes-you’re-sure, coño. You don’t have a right to be mad. You simply don’t look Boricua.
But here. Here, it doesn’t matter because you can hang out with a bunch of dogs and you don’t need to talk to anyone. Here, you can take a nap in the hammock or Titi Mildred’s bed and she’ll lend you her underwear after you ride the paso fino. Here, there are hills that span like piano keys. Here, you are shut away and time is deduced to a blink; an incremental tenth of a second of pure black.
On this nameless hill, you began.
[muneca gringa]
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