My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor Read Free Book Online

looked two hundred years old to me. Her rocking chair of carved wood and woven cane tilted between this world and another that was beyond imagining, wafting scents of talcum and medicinal tea, auras of lace-edged
santos
whose eyes rolled up to a heaven too close for comfort.
    We were in an area of San Juan called Santurce. Abuelita visited with her sisters and brothers while I played on the balcony or in half-hidden gardens. There had been ten of them all together, she said (Diezilita, Piatrina, Angelina, Eloys …), but I couldn’t keep track or tell sisters and brothers from cousins and uncles and aunts. We were in a city, but it seemed to teeter on the edge of dissolving into nature. Vines snaked under iron fences and up balustrades. Chickens scrabbled under hibiscus bushes and bright yellow canario flowers. I watched the afternoon rains pour down like a curtain enclosing the balcony, ruttingthe street below with muddy streams, pounding on the corrugated roofs and wooden walls until Abuelita called me inside to a treat for
merienda
—maybe a
tembleque
, a gelatin made of coconut milk and sweet condensed milk, or fruits that I’d never seen in New York: guavas with their sharp perfume,
quenepas
with pits as big as grapes and a thin layer of featherlight flesh that puckered your mouth when you sucked on it, and mangoes of a melting sweetness unlike any I had tasted back home. At night, I slept with Abuelita in a room crowded with sisters and cousins, and the mosquito nets transformed our bed into a cozy hideaway among gauzy clouds. The traffic noise gave way to the rickety rhythm of the ceiling fan and
coquís
—the tiny musical frogs that are a symbol of the island—chirping in the shadows as I drifted to sleep.
    On my earliest trips to Puerto Rico, when I was small—including my first as a toddler—it was just Abuelita and I. My mother was determined that she would never, ever go back to the island, but then she changed her mind. Some of the best summer vacations I remember were traveling with my mother and Junior to Mayagüez to visit her family.
    Traveling with Mami to Puerto Rico was a little like being around Rip van Winkle on the day he woke up. She wore an expression of constant wonderment: everything surprised her by how much it had changed, except for the things that surprised her because they were just as she remembered them.
    Barely out of the airport, we would stop at the food stands on the roadside, joining the traffic jam of people returning who couldn’t wait another minute for a first taste of home. The coconuts were big and green, not like the shriveled hairy brown things in boxes on the sidewalks of the Bronx. We would shake them and listen to find one that had a lot of liquid swishing around inside. The vendor would hack a piece off the top with a single swipe of a long machete and stick a straw in the hole. We would sip the almost-sweet nectar as the cars passed by on the highway, and I would listen to my cousin Papo and Titi Aurora, my mother’s elder sister, filling my mother in on the news she needed to know before we saw the rest of the family: who’d married whom, who’d had whose baby, who’d been sick … Though Titi Aurora lived in New York, she went often to Puerto Rico to visit friends and sort out familyproblems. Before she finished her briefing, I’d hand the empty coconut back to the vendor with the machete, and he would hack it in two so I could use the little top piece that he’d cut off first to scoop out the creamy flesh, which to me was the best part of all.
    Another day, my mother stopped a perfect stranger with his cow in a field beside the road and asked him for a glass of milk. He looked at her as if thinking: crazy American. Even in Puerto Rico people were drinking their milk pasteurized by then, not straight from the cow. But memories of the old ways must have overwhelmed her. She pushed the tin cup at me, but I wouldn’t touch it. I just watched as she drank, a