My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor Read Free Book Online Page B

bakery would fill up in minutes. I helped with serving, and I loved the two-handed challenge of the lunch hour rush. I knew the price of every item, and I knew how to make change—I was discovering that I had a facility with numbers, which I inherited from Papi—and Titi Elisa would let me work the cash register when my uncle wasn’t around. Although he had seen me in action, he couldn’t quite believe it. He wasn’t comfortable with the idea of girls handling money.
    When I wasn’t busy helping, I played with my cousin Tito in the alleyway behind the bakery, reenacting scenes from the Three Stooges. Tito was Moe and I was Curly. We could usually convince Junior or someone else to be Larry, the third
chiflado
, but only Tito and I knew all the moves and the right sound effects: a twang for a fake eye poke, a ratchety sound for an ear twist, and the all-purpose “Nyuk! Nyuk! Nyuk!”
    Before she left Puerto Rico, my mother had lived in Lajas and San Germán and had seen very little of the island beyond the neighborhoods of her childhood. She was eager to show us places that she’d heard about but had never seen herself. We went to the beach at Luquillo. It was nothing like Orchard Beach in the Bronx, which was the only beach I knew. There were no traffic jams in Puerto Rico, no waiting for hours packed in a hot car to get there, no dirty sand, no standing in line for the bathroom. Progress has caught up with the island since my childhood, and it has its share of traffic jams, but the water is still warm and clear, and the sand is perfectly white. When you look down into the water, you can see the bottom, and it rolls out blue until it meets the blue of the sky.
    The Parque de Bombas in Ponce fascinated me, a fantasia of red and black stripes that wouldn’t go away even when you closed your eyes. The fire truck looked like a giant toy with its ding-dong bell, and I couldn’t imagine it in action. How did they ever put out a real fire? “
Mi’ja
,” said Mami, “all those little wooden houses burned down anyway. But they did the best they could.” She would say that about a lot of things: they did the best they could.
    Of all the sights, the art museum in Ponce left the deepest impression. I had never been to a museum before. The building is beautifuland seemed to me then as grand as a castle with its staircase that sweeps in a big circle on two sides. It was so magnificent that I just had to run up and down the stairs to see what it felt like. It felt horrible when the guard yelled at me. So I walked slowly and looked at the paintings one by one.
    I figured out that portraits were pictures in which a person from olden times just stood there or sat, wearing fancy clothes and staring very seriously. I wondered who these people were. Why did an artist choose
them
to be in a picture? How much work was it to paint this? How long did he have to stand there like that? Other paintings were more like stories, though I didn’t know what the story was. Why did she cut off his head? I could tell that dove was not just an ordinary dove that happened to be flying by. I could see that it had a meaning, even though I didn’t know what the meaning was. When I got tired of not understanding the stories, I noticed other things: Sometimes you could see the brushstrokes and the thickness of the paint; other times it was smooth, without texture. Sometimes things in the distance were smaller, and it felt as if you could reach into the space; other times it was flat like a map. I wondered, were these the things I
should
be noticing? I could tell that there was more going on than I could describe or understand.
    Does it seem strange that a child should be so conscious of the workings of her own mind? I have clear memories of many such moments, often turning on a recognition of something I didn’t know, an awareness of a gap in my knowledge. A framed reproduction of a painting that mesmerized me hung for years on the wall in