Autobiography
It was probably the boiling Puerto Rican night combined with gusts of cool salty Atlantic ocean air that provoked a fever of sexual excitement to arise in my parents. Perchance after supper they ate a delicately cooked aphrodisiac dessert of sliced Quince and Coco-de-Mer whose effects took place before they fell asleep transforming them into creatures of lust. Perhaps they did not have dessert and just had a plain entrée of arroz con gandules. All I know is that night as my mother's ovum progressed through her fallopian tube toward her aging uterus millions of sperm hurried toward her egg breaking down the tough coating surrounding it. Eventually one sperm penetrated the egg and in that instant she knew she was pregnant. The bed stopped making noise. In the room next to theirs my grandmother could finally fall asleep to the bewitching sounds of coquis, and the various insects and animals of the night. Meanwhile my mother lay on the wet side of the bed hypnotically staring and listening to the rusty ceiling fan with her heavy eyelids forcing their way down, and my father heavily asleep mouth wide open snoring at her side. My mother would wake up early the next day to my grandmother's wretched ear piercing voice singing along to the salsa playing on the radio and her additional accompaniment with her own section of percussion knocking down and running into anything that could possibly make a bang, and to the sizzling sheke sheke of scalding burning oil used to fry zorullos as the constant African shekere. Sitting up on the bed she would see a perfectly circular burgundy dried blood spot the size of a half dollar coin on the white sheets and a grayish-brown imprint of a mosquito next to it. If indeed that was what had stung her and caused her to bleed so much it was the biggest mosquito she had ever and would ever see. This led her to wonder if it indeed was a mosquito or some other being conjured by the night from Hades' underworld. What was certain was that she had been injected with a disastrous fever which would be transfered to the developing embryo and curse it to a life of doom. Approximately nine months later a male boy would be born. The Fates had it that he be named Oscar. My rapidly aging parents were introduced at a church meeting, yet acting if they were newly introduced grade school children at a playground they, out of timidness and stupidity, never directed a word to one another following their introduction. During the course of the following year they would see each other at the weekly sunday spanish mass and [at] noon and during church activities. Direct eye contact was avoided at all cost as to not give any assumption to their growing adult frustrations. Peripheral vision was used as a substitute to catch glimpses of each other. This lack of full vision marked a future in which they would never agree on anything even to why they married. At a church sponsored dance Luis, most probably having prayed to Zeus, Hera and all Gods, Goddesses, dark, white, pink, yellow, brown, short, tall, skinny, fat, of the heavens and hell, and even to the God's of atheists, breathtakingly asked the still lovely, though age thirty-eight, Olivia to dance. Luis was no Adonis for at age thirty-six his head was halfway becoming as smooth and shinny as a new bowling ball. Being a considerate individual, Olivia squeamishly asked her father for permission to dance, which he conceded. Months after my father asked my mother to dance, and having spoken to her for the amount of time he considered it a deep relationship he would ask her to marry him. Knocking the door to her apartment door he asked for Olivia, but since he is somewhat deaf it was more of a yell. When she eventually came out to greet him he, looking down at a stepped on a now grayish gum, which was at one point bright pink, on the sidewalk, instinctively blurted "Will you marry me? I'm leaving to Puerto Rico in two weeks...so if you want to marry me tell me before I leave or I might not come back." After saying this he left and did not wait for a response. He was too nervous to even see her countenance as he said those words. Nervousness would also be his excuse years later when confronted by my mother for concentrating on the gum on the sidewalk as if trying to use his imagination to turn it into figures and creatures the way one does a floating white cloud. I cannot fathom my father ever being a romantic man and perhaps it was best that that was the way he proposed to my mother. She was shocked at what came out of his mouth. The lack of romanticism, the nonexistence of eye contact, the carelessness with how he said it. No, she thought in her head. However, those feelings were quickly followed with more important ones. Did she love that man, could she still have children, and would she get proposed to again. She accepted his proposal, yet he was no where to be found for a week. During that week my mother thought that her dream of getting married had been ended by some man that had brutally killed her love, placed him in a bag and dumped him in the Chicago river, or perhaps Luis was in some underground mafia and was fleeing from the law and that was why he was going back to Puerto Rico, or even worse perhaps he had another woman that he lived with. My father had actually gone to Puerto Rico on emergency for the funeral of an older sister that died of lung cancer at age 62. He returned feeling destined that his proposal had been denied. On the 18th of March 1984 my parents were married. My mother would pay for all the wedding-even the hotel room my father had made the reservations for. After slipping on the ice getting out of the car, having her hair come undone, ripping the bottom of her pearl colored dress-which my aunts said was bad luck- she finally made it into the church and on her way to become a housewife, a wife, and then what she would love the most- being a mother. The conditions into which my father was born were not the ones he wished he had been received in. The stories he was raised with helped him come to this conclusion, and in his attempt to make those stories true I have been, to this day, weaned by his madness. I am constantly shown pictures of his father and his family during the glory days of our family history. He retells the stories by which his father put him to sleep. He narrates of his family having Negroes working in the family mansion and fields for even though they were once slaves to them they were so fond of the family that they couldn't bear to leave, being replied with 'yes, master,' and having acres of land with the New World's gold-sugar. But my father never experienced this glory. Those stories were that of his father and never fully his. Never having lived any of his stories was the driving force in his going mad. Because he is mad, I have also gone mad. By the time my father was born in 1946 his father was in his middle sixties and his mother in her early twenties. My grandfather always lived in glory. After slavery was abolished and after Puerto Rico became a Common Wealth of the United States of America my grandfather pursued the life of a politician. He was well liked by all. He gave his family's land to the poor, found jobs for people that were having difficulties finding steady work-a man that died three years ago still had the same job my grandfather had found for him fifty years ago. When my father was born the only land they had was where my grandfather had moved to. The mills, the sugar cane, the slaves then turned paid workers had all vanished. The main source of income was money my grandfather had inherited-which was spent quickly by him- and the little money that came from the little tobacco factory my grandfather created and operated out of his house. My father's lack of education was his own fault and not that of his father, and it was his ignorance to not continue going to college which led him to travel to the United States in search of economic glory. The only economic prosperity came from various labor jobs until he settled with being a janitor. He himself would never attain the glory he had been searching for ever since he was a little boy rolling tobacco leaves into perfect cigars. Yet this loss of his family's former social glory and riches was only part of my father's madness. My father had been the offspring of my grandfather's second wife-a mulatto. A devastating stain and further cause of my father's madness. A fact he would always try to hide with stories of being the master and not the slave. Perhaps that is why he calls his mother by her first name and not by mother.