Read Online My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor - Free Book Online
Authors: Sonia Sotomayor
Ads: Link
night since Papi died, because my mother couldn’t bear to go back to our apartment. That meant getting up very early in the morning so Mami could get us to school on time, after which she would go to Ana’s. They would drinkcoffee and talk and cry together until school was out, and then she would take us back to Abuelita’s. Fortunately, the building manager at Bronxdale Houses let us move into a different apartment very quickly. It was over on Watson Avenue on the second floor—much better than the seventh floor if you’d rather not see what happens in the stairwells. It was much closer to Blessed Sacrament, too. Best of all, my mother was able to change her schedule at the hospital. She didn’t have to work nights anymore, so she could be at home after school.
Tío Vitín and my cousin Alfred helped us with the move. They cleaned out Papi’s room and carried out a big bag of clanking empty bottles. They found those flat, half-pint bottles, drained of Seagram’s Seven, under the mattress, in the closet, behind the drawers, in his coat pockets, his trousers, his shirts, in every jacket. There was even one hidden inside the lining of a coat.
It occurred to me that every day when he came home from work and sent us off with pennies for candy and fifteen minutes more to play, my father was keeping us outside just long enough to have a drink before starting dinner. Junior, who had slept in the same room with Papi, in the other twin bed, and sometimes only pretended to be asleep, now confessed that he had known all along about the bottles under the mattress. I always slept with my mother in the other room, and nothing ever woke me up once I fell asleep. I wondered what else I had missed.
I do know that my father loved us. But as much as he loved us, it wasn’t enough to stop him from drinking. To the end, Abuelita and my aunts blamed my mother for Papi’s drinking. It’s true that Mami could say all the wrong things; neither of them knew how to stop an argument once they started. But I knew too that my mother didn’t make him drink any more than she could make him stop. I knew he did this to himself; even as a child, I knew he was the only one responsible.
All those hours that he sat by the window looking out … I treasured those times when I stood beside him, inhaling the scent of Old Spice up close and of rice and beans bubbling in the background, and he told me what he imagined the future would be: all the different stores they would build on the empty lots around us, or how one day a rocket ship would carry a man to the full moon that was rising, low and yellow, over the South Bronx. The truth is, though, that for each of thosemoments, there were so many more long hours of sadness, when he stared in silence at the vacant lots, at the highway and the brick walls, at a city and a life that slowly strangled him.
On the day we moved in, it smelled of fresh paint. The view from the new apartment on Watson Avenue was different. You could see the school yard at Blessed Sacrament from our window. The kids had left for the day, but there were still two guys practicing shots on the basketball court. Farther back, one of the nuns was walking along by the buildings, but I couldn’t tell who it was under the black bonnet … As I looked out the window, a memory came to me of something that happened the day Papi died, which I’d almost forgotten in all the commotion that followed. I was down in the school yard at recess, standing by the fence, looking this way toward the projects—and I thought about him. It wasn’t a normal thought that pops into your head or one that’s connected to the thought that came before it. More of a feeling than a thought, but almost not even a feeling: like the barest shadow of a mood passing over, or a breeze so perfectly soft that nothing moves. I didn’t know yet what had happened, but maybe that was Papi himself, saying good-bye.
Six
I N THE DAYS and weeks following the funeral,
Tío Vitín and my cousin Alfred helped us with the move. They cleaned out Papi’s room and carried out a big bag of clanking empty bottles. They found those flat, half-pint bottles, drained of Seagram’s Seven, under the mattress, in the closet, behind the drawers, in his coat pockets, his trousers, his shirts, in every jacket. There was even one hidden inside the lining of a coat.
It occurred to me that every day when he came home from work and sent us off with pennies for candy and fifteen minutes more to play, my father was keeping us outside just long enough to have a drink before starting dinner. Junior, who had slept in the same room with Papi, in the other twin bed, and sometimes only pretended to be asleep, now confessed that he had known all along about the bottles under the mattress. I always slept with my mother in the other room, and nothing ever woke me up once I fell asleep. I wondered what else I had missed.
I do know that my father loved us. But as much as he loved us, it wasn’t enough to stop him from drinking. To the end, Abuelita and my aunts blamed my mother for Papi’s drinking. It’s true that Mami could say all the wrong things; neither of them knew how to stop an argument once they started. But I knew too that my mother didn’t make him drink any more than she could make him stop. I knew he did this to himself; even as a child, I knew he was the only one responsible.
All those hours that he sat by the window looking out … I treasured those times when I stood beside him, inhaling the scent of Old Spice up close and of rice and beans bubbling in the background, and he told me what he imagined the future would be: all the different stores they would build on the empty lots around us, or how one day a rocket ship would carry a man to the full moon that was rising, low and yellow, over the South Bronx. The truth is, though, that for each of thosemoments, there were so many more long hours of sadness, when he stared in silence at the vacant lots, at the highway and the brick walls, at a city and a life that slowly strangled him.
On the day we moved in, it smelled of fresh paint. The view from the new apartment on Watson Avenue was different. You could see the school yard at Blessed Sacrament from our window. The kids had left for the day, but there were still two guys practicing shots on the basketball court. Farther back, one of the nuns was walking along by the buildings, but I couldn’t tell who it was under the black bonnet … As I looked out the window, a memory came to me of something that happened the day Papi died, which I’d almost forgotten in all the commotion that followed. I was down in the school yard at recess, standing by the fence, looking this way toward the projects—and I thought about him. It wasn’t a normal thought that pops into your head or one that’s connected to the thought that came before it. More of a feeling than a thought, but almost not even a feeling: like the barest shadow of a mood passing over, or a breeze so perfectly soft that nothing moves. I didn’t know yet what had happened, but maybe that was Papi himself, saying good-bye.
Six
I N THE DAYS and weeks following the funeral,
Similar Books
