The Noise of Infinite Longing by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa Read Free Book Online Page A

slashes he made.They were pictures to her, and she imagined him in the port town where he lived, on the eastern end of the island, a mountain-edged region of sugarcane fields and flat sea heat. She thought she knew the details of his days, his routine. But she knew only what he wanted her to know. His letters in those first months when they knew each other had the force of a life totally outside her own, outside the familiar circles of the life she knew in San Juan. The story of his days rushed at her,
    along with his desire and his raw ardor.
    She found his tenacity, his strength, irresistible, and she fell in love madly—madly being the only way she could have ever loved— and in that madness she did not see the smallness in him, the earth- iness, the brooding anger.
    When they first met, my father was a chemical engineer. He was the first professional in a family whose ancestors came from the province of Galicia, driven out of the red-rock fallowness of Spain a century before, a poor, sullen, hardy, stocky people, their skin blanched white. His father, Ernesto López Orengo, owned a drug- store at a time when such a thing on an island town, owning any store, gave a family a certain stature in the town’s society. Guayama, where my father was born, and where his father had his first drug-

    store, was a placid city of Spanish-colonial homes, sugarcane fields, and pasofino horses on the southeastern coast. It was out of the way of the major east-west and north-south commercial traffic of the island, but for a time it was rich in sugar, coffee, and cattle.
    My father was a grown boy when Don Ernesto moved his busi- ness and his family to the northeast coast, to Fajardo, a shabby, con- gested port town of busy commerce and big refineries, fishing villages, sugar landowners, and the droves of mountain people who came down to the coast for work.
    The drugstore was a small shop, surviving on foot traffic, doing well enough during the Depression to support my grandparents and their large family, but my grandfather was not a moneymaker. He was a man behind a desk, a courteous storekeeper rising affably to attend a customer, moving carefully around the store shelves, peer- ing through his thick glasses, studying the labels on the potions and powders. He was not an imposing figure. He had a square, robust frame, same as his sons in their middle age, and a dour face, with somber, dark eyes behind black-frame glasses.
    He died before I was born, and there are few stories about him, but everyone said he was a man of few words, reclusive and quiet around his wife, Josefina Candal Feliciano. She was a round-hipped little woman who bore eight children, four boys and four girls, and dominated the family even in her old age, when her hair had turned thin white, and her eyes had gone to a filmy light brown.
    Even with her children grown and married, she commanded them with her piercing shrill voice and her pinprick, puckered, dis- approving mouth. She terrified the women her sons had married; strong women themselves, they became sheepish in her presence, fearing the enraged temper her sons had inherited. Defenseless as she appeared with that sweet, little girl’s face of hers (she had the face of nuns I had known), she could explode in anger over some

    unintended slight—an impolite grandchild, a birthday forgotten, a gift not brought.
    She would rise up from her chair, wrap herself in the shawl that she almost always had around her shoulders, and taking her walking cane, demand to be taken home. One of her sons would invariably follow, apologizing, and we her grandchildren would obediently call after her, Abuela, abuela!
    My father was her glory, the first of her boys to make money, enough money to send his younger brothers and sisters to college. He was twenty-one when he started working at the centrales around Fajardo and Humacao, on the eastern coast, at the old nineteenth- century sugar refineries that were left over from Spain’s