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

colonial era, when sugar was the island’s gold, when acres of coastal sun-scorched fields were worked by African slaves (the native Indians, the Taínos and Arawaks, had long ago been decimated) and the grand landed families, Spaniards and criollos, lived in fabled estates in the cool mountains.
    There were no longer slaves in the early 1900s—slavery was ban- ished in Puerto Rico in the mid-1800s, before the American Civil War—but the descendants of slaves and Taínos, the mestizos, the negritos and jíbaros, the illiterate and landless, did the menial work. They were indentured servants, tenants, small-plot farmers, and sea- sonal sugarcane cutters in straw hats and rolled-up threadbare pants. They came down from the hills and the coastal villages season after season, brown-skinned, with hollow chests, their thin-muscled arms bearing the scars of machete cuts.
    In those thick fields where the cane grew taller than they, the men endured bug bites, infections, and their bare feet sloshing in mud. At the end of the day, their backs broiled, they carried their bundles of sugarcane, long stringy poles roped around their torsos, the bundles weighing them down. On the edge of the sugar fields, they loaded the

    oxcarts that would take the sugarcane to the centrales, the sugar mills and refineries, a collection of sheds and brick buildings with smoke towers that filled the air with plumes of vapor that was sweet with the smell of crushed cane, boiling sugar, and molasses.
    My father rarely spoke of his time at the centrales, perhaps because he had hated the heat of the sheds, the monotony of the rounds he made, looking at test tubes, gauging by color and thick- ness the quality of the molasses that would be distilled into a thick, cloying liquid to be poured into wooden barrels to ferment and age until it turned into prime dark rum, cinnamon-colored Puerto Rican rum, the best in the world.

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    uestra clase de gente, grandmother liked to say. I can’t remember the first time I heard her say that, but it was some-
    thing I understood very early, hearing her wonder aloud, while sit- ting in the porch with her newspaper, if such-and-such a person in the news, or someone she heard about or just met, was related to such-and-such family in Aguadilla or Lares or Aibonito. She and mother could spend hours doing this, tracing family histories, remembering the connections between a family and a town, and what came of them.
    Our world was simple then, and the layers of society seemed clearly marked: good families at the top, and the gentuza at the bot- tom; and the gentuza were definitely not nuestra clase de gente.They were out there, my grandmother said, pointing in no particular direction. They were the masses, the unschooled, the families of the barrios, the men in the bodegas, the people who didn’t know where they came from.
    There was nothing new in the system. From the reign of the caciques, who kept lesser tribes away from their plaza, through the

    reign of Spain, which built a fortress around its garrison in San Juan to keep invaders at bay and the natives out, Puerto Rico had been ruled by class—no less than the rest of Latin America, no less than the European empires. It was a society built on manners and tradi- tional customs and mores, on riches and exploitation, on the fiction that class was a birthright.
    My father came from a good family, my grandmother declared after making her calculations. Perhaps it was not a prominent family, but they were solid, refined, and made up of serious men. My father had manners, he knew to stand up when my grandmother entered a room; he was deferential to my grandfather. He had been a good stu- dent and a devoted son, and on the occasions when he escorted my mother to a dinner or to a dance, he had the bearing of successful men. Era tan guapo, my grandmother remembered. He cut a fine figure, self-assured, a man who could join any conversation. He also had the personality my