Rosa

II. Wolfie

II.

Wolfie

On the bus the next day going to the sisters on Newtonville Road, she picks out Wolfie’s window in the Glengarden Arms. Someone must have told. They never send her to Wolfie now. It’s been months. The dreadful Irishwoman goes now, and Rosa is certain she is rough and cruel. It must be her who told, but how can she have known? Certainly Wolfie wouldn’t have told her even if he could talk. Probably the Irish had their santeria like the Puerto Ricans. You could see it in their divining eyes.

With Wolfie she always sat on the edge of the tub and he put his hand up her skirt and into her panties, caressing her shyly, apologetically. So sorry, he seemed to say. Was he apologizing to her for touching, or for not being able to properly carry out this seduction, which, though he didn’t know it, was as thrilling to her as any caress since Mondo’s father’s in that first year before he turned mean? Certainly more thrilling than Laureano’s pumping. But she had been a girl then, when Mondo’s father…

His name was Alejandro. Even his name had thrilled her once. Such an i***t. She certainly can’t tell the little girl about Alejandro. But the babies … It would be a pleasure to tell her about the babies. She remembers waiting for Mondo’s birth, how she pampered herself, oiling her skin and sitting in the sun outside the little house Alejandro was building for them in the forest in Xoyatla. Of all the building men in her life Alejandro was the finest. An artist. He built a boat once that won a prize from that museum committee. He carved it out of mahogany; it was ten feet long and sat on display in the patio of the museum in the capital—still does as far as she knows. She used to lie in the hammock watching him build, admiring the trueness of his corners as he set the windows in. A black man, he could work in the sun all day. Mondo would be a beautiful honey-colored baby, she knew as she waited.

Yes, the beautiful Alejandro turned mean. How can a body be as ugly as Clifford’s and as thrilling as Alejandro’s? Or any of his brothers and sisters’, even his mother and father’s. It’s what held her there in Loiza where he was from. They were so happy and so free. They carved coconut shells and they lazed about in hammocks and sang and played guitars. And there was plenty of fruit in the trees and fish in the sea. Every morning, not very early, they “walked” the dugout boats down the beach, advancing the prow and the stern alternately, over the sand and into the softly curling waves; then stuck up a little sail and lay in the bottom with a line hung over and tied about their ankles to alert them of a fish to pull in. And it was so warm you never had to wrap yourself up in wool blankets like in Xoyatla.

Xoyatla was the chilly forest and misty mountain. The mist didn’t rise off the mountain until eleven in the morning. There the tribes lived. Rosa, though she would never mention it to anyone, was a tribal person. Her people were squat and silent and hardworking. They never lay about and sang. The only place they ever sang was in church on holidays.

Was it living among them in the forest that turned him mean? Or the drink? By the time Mondo was born he had finished the house, and for a year they lived among her people. The baby, Mondo, was wrapped like a little package in wool blankets she wove herself. Mornings when she unwrapped him he was fiery red, covered with rashes. To heal him, they went often to Loiza, where he could sleep in a hammock with nothing on.

His pee went right through the loose weave. She often thought the Blakey sisters, that she used to care for sometimes on a night shift, and whose wet bedclothes she changed three times a night, might better sleep in hammocks. The people of Loiza not only slept in hammocks, they even had their babies in them. There she drew the line. Mondo was born in a bed with her aunt in attendance. Eva was born a year later in the clinic where Rosa was being treated for the broken jaw Alejandro gave her and the fall on the floor that brought on the birth three weeks early.