The Ojeda House

I didn’t want to hear it, but Tomás said it anyway.

“Your mom will leave your dad and then she’ll leave you. Over and out.”

Tomás was my best friend, and we were playing astronauts. We sat under the wrought-iron patio chairs that we had turned over to resemble the cockpit of a rocket ship. He captained the rocket, and I was the second in command. He sat in front; I was in back. It was the order of things. We used his walkie-talkies to communicate.

Tomás was eight years old, one year older than me, and he was bigger and chubbier, although it didn’t take much to beat me in that department. His nose beat mine, but not by much. It had a crook in it that gave Tomás a Nosferatu look. His pasty complexion also helped him look the part of the vampire, his favorite monster, and it set off his blue eyes and red cheeks.

Tomás had a large collection of the latest toys. Each day, he brought out one toy and made me aware of his hold over me. One day we would play with his walkie-talkies. Another day we watched movies on his super-eight projector. Another, we listened to music in his portable eight-track player, which had the shape of a bomb detonator. To change tracks, you pushed down on the handle that sat on top of the speaker.

“Your life will change forever. Over.” He spoke into his walkie-talkie.

Tomás knew almost as much about the future as my nanny’s favorite astrologer: Walter Mercado. “You, La Nena, and Güicho will become orphans.” Tomás was an only child, but I had two siblings. I was the ham of the sandwich. Younger than La Nena but older than Güicho.

We were playing in the brick patio, under the old mango tree in the yard of the Ojeda house. Its thick canopy of leaves protected us from the rain. The branches extending out from its trunk made the passing storm darker still. Its leaves, the void of space. The wind shook the tree branches and rotten mangoes fell, hitting the patio furniture with a twang, meteorites punching our make-believe rocket ship.

The Apollo landing on the moon inspired our game. We had seen the risky journey on TV the summer before. Tomás sat with me and my siblings in the living room of the newly renovated house on Calle Ojeda.

The Ojeda house was a two-story building in the Spanish revival style. It had a flat roof, decorated by red terracotta tiles sitting on top of white stucco walls, and two-pane thick windows protected by wrought-iron enclosures.

A lush garden with a fountain, a doll’s house, two garages, a service building, and the mango tree with the red brick patio surrounded the house. A five-foot high white concrete wall enclosed the property and separated the house from El Condado, a posh neighborhood in San Juan also known as La Losa.

The renovation made the Ojeda house smell of fresh sawdust and grout. It was filled with furniture from Mami and Papi’s trips to Europe and Mexico, and with the latest gadgets from the U.S.

I could control the lighting of the new chandelier hanging from the center of the living room with the dimmer on the wall. They installed an intercom system throughout the house with an AM / FM radio embedded. With the touch of a button, I could talk to anyone in any of the other rooms, pretending I was talking to the command center, or to a lost astronaut in another dimension. Tita, our nanny, forbade us from using the intercom, but we played with it behind her back.

Like the rest of the country, Tomás and I followed the progress of the Apollo mission during the three days it took the astronauts to reach the moon. By the time the lunar module was about to land, everybody, except my grandmother was watching. Abuela Cita had a disease of the heart, and she couldn’t leave the Governor’s mansion.

The move to La Fortaleza had been rough on Abuela Cita. She moved to the capital to be with Abuelo Beto when he became Governor of Puerto Rico. And she got sicker than I had ever seen her back in the Alhambra house in Ponce, on the other side of the Island.

Before La Fortaleza, I had only seen Abuela Cita in the Alhambra house. She would sit outside, in the Andalusian blue tiled patio, under an umbrella, with her big white pamela hat on. She would sip Earl Gray tea, eat breakfast, and listen to the domesticated orioles that sang from three large cages. The cages had been made to order. They had tin roofs and were big and multileveled. Fancy bird condos.

Once in the Governor’s mansion, Abuela Cita became bedridden. A plastic transparent tent covered her head and shoulders. Velcro and zippers held the tent together. Plastic tubes connected the tent to tall and narrow oxygen tanks that were bigger than me and were colored in military green. Each one had numbers written in black on their sides. They stood next to her mechanical bed, uniformed soldiers at attention.

Abuela Cita was another NASA astronaut in a space capsule ready for launch. She also inhabited a capsule to survive a hostile environment. Except the vacuum of space for her, was the air we breathed every day.

Abuela Cita now lived in Old San Juan, only twenty minutes away from the Ojeda house in El Condado, but she might as well have been living on the moon.

She should have been used to life in another world. Abuela Cita’s Alhambra house was across La Cordillera Central that cut the Island from East to West. Puerto Rico is a small place. It’s only 35 miles wide. But the trip North to South, across the vast green expanse of the mountain range, took four hours.

Mami illustrated this fact with a loose leaf of paper. She put it down on the table, horizontally, and drew the capital letters “A” and “B” on the top and bottom margins of the page. She then drew a line connecting the two letters and traced it with her index finger saying, “Imagine this piece of paper is Puerto Rico. When you see it on a map, you think the Island is small and it should be easy to get from point A to point B, right? But the Island is really like this.” She would then crumple the piece of paper and throw it in the trash. “Now you see how long the trip is, and how difficult it is to get to Ponce.”

To visit Abuela Cita in Ponce was to travel to a forbidden planet across a dangerous verdant universe. We left the safety of San Juan’s highways for the narrow military road that crossed the mountain range with hair-raising curves.

At one point, I could see Las Tetas de Doña Juana off to the side: two prominent cone shaped boulders pointing at the sky. Were they hidden launching pads concealing Minutemen ICBMs?

Papi honked at the incoming trucks shooting down the roads, pulling heavy loads of sugarcane, and threatening to push us down into the forbidding ravines covered with giant bamboo trees and boulders.  

After we crossed over the mountains, everything changed. La Cordillera Central was thick and lush, but Ponce was flat and dry as a bone, closer to the surface of the moon. Its air was less humid than San Juan’s. There was less traffic and less noise, but it was difficult to breathe with all the dust coming from Abuelo Beto’s Cement Factory. He laughed when we complained. “It’s a small price to pay for progress.” It was easier to be in Ponce if I found a shady spot away from the factory.

Abuela Cita’s house in the old neighborhood of La Alhambra was different from the Ojeda house in El Condado. La Alhambra was named after the magical gardens in Granada, Spain, and the house fit their description.

The grass of the front lawn was green and watered by oscillating sprinklers that were on all day, every day. There were also many animals in the back yard. Abuela Cita had singing orioles or turpiales, a pair of caged guaraguaos (a fearsome mountain hawk), a rooster (Abelardo), his harem of hens, a billy goat that butted us (Serafín), and a gaggle of geese that attacked me every time I set foot in the backyard.

So, I wasn’t surprised when Abuela Cita decided to stay back in La Fortaleza for the lunar landing and sent Abuelo Beto to the Ojeda house instead. Watching the Eagle land was his thing, not hers.

Abuelo Beto was a mechanical engineer, and he loved thinking about the future. He carried a silver Multi Pencil in his pocket that reminded me of the Atlas rocket of the Apollo mission. The super Norma 4 mechanical pencil was so advanced it could write in four different colors. Abuelo Beto said he would let me use the rocket pencil if I behaved, so I had to give up on the idea.

I could barely hear Neil Armstrong’s crackling voice on the screen. The announcer repeated “One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.”

I learned the meaning of those words when my third-grade English teacher explained them to us later that year. But at the time, Armstrong repeated the nonsense that came out of the chest of my astronaut GI Joe when you pulled on his dog tag. “Elsa ke komensa, el geret.” That’s what I heard Armstrong say, or some such thing.

A part of me felt it didn’t matter what the astronauts said. The point was that the Americans got to the moon, and they talked to us from there. From another world far away. Much farther than Ponce. Everyone could hear them and understand what they were saying. Armstrong’s words didn’t need translation.

When Armstrong stopped talking, everybody clapped. We were so happy. It was like the feeling from blowing the candles on a birthday cake. Mami, Papi, Abuelo Beto, Tita, Güicho and La Nena, we all clapped. Even Tomás clapped. And he was an Eeyore. I looked around, and I felt a great sense of security. Anything was possible.

Papi said, “Some people are born blessed by the stars, others crash right into them.” The moon landing assured me I was born blessed by the stars.

When Tomás destroyed everything with his prophecy, I didn’t want to believe him. “No way,” I said talking into my walkie-talkie from our make-believe cockpit. “Is that what divorce really means? That Mami will leave Papi?”

Sure, Mami and Papi fought, but that was only natural. I fought with my brother, Güicho, all the time. And Tomás was not easy to get along with either. But in the end, everybody made up and got back together again, didn’t we? I couldn’t bring myself to say “over and out” into the microphone.

I had been certain the future would be the same as the present, only better. Lost in Space was one of my favorite TV shows. The Robinsons were a tight nuclear family. And so were we. At least that’s what I thought. I tried to convince myself that we couldn’t explode as Tomás predicted. But now I had my doubts.

One night, my nanny, Tita, told me the story of four astronauts from Krypton, Superman’s home planet. They were separated by a meteorite shower that hit their supersonic spaceship. Each one of the astronauts found himself hurtling towards a different place but they were still connected by their walkie-talkies. One shot towards the stars, another floated to the Crab nebula, a third fell back to Krypton, and the fourth talked with his friends over the radio as gravity pulled him toward the planet’s Red Giant sun.

From science class, I knew that the Red Giant was the last stage of a star before it exploded. All stars eventually collapsed into a supernova, including our sun. My teacher told us global destruction was inevitable, but it was millions of years in the future. “It’s not going to happen to us,” Miss Mundo assured the class.

“What’s going to happen to the astronauts?” I asked Tita.

She gave me a funny look. “What do you think?”

Tomás gave me a similar look when I asked him, “How do you know the meaning of divorce?”

He pushed the red button of his walkie-talkie. “I saw it on TV, in the last episode of La Pandilla, Our Gang.” He paused, and then continued. “Weezer hears his parents fighting and they say they would get divorced and then this kid comes along, and he gives it to him straight. Over and out.”

It was the second time I’d heard the word “divorce.” Incredibly, the first time had been that very morning, from my older sister, La Nena, on the way to school. Maybe she had told Tomás.

I had gotten up late, and had to down my breakfast of soft-boiled eggs with a big glass of milk. There wasn’t enough time to sit and eat. I stood in front of the breakfast table and heard my stomach rumble.

I woke up hungry every day, but the thought of soft-boiled eggs made me feel queasy. Mami shared her taste for eggs with us, a taste she inherited from Abuela Cita, who ate a fresh soft-boiled egg every morning. They both thought a breakfast of soft-boiled eggs was the breakfast of champions. Tita repeated the family commercial with a smirk.

I stared at the breakfast and cringed. Tita said, “come on, Noti, drink it cul cul, right quick.”

She had already cut the top of the egg off. The gray gelatinous thing peeped through the hole, and I thought I saw a little black eye staring back at me. I grabbed the white porcelain egg coddler, shut my eyes, brought the egg to my mouth, and with a whiplash move, downed the spittle. I followed the soft-boiled egg with two gulps of cold milk, trying to stop the slimy feeling on my tongue. The first wave of nausea hit me, but the milk put a lid on it.

Doña Teté honked one time from her station wagon idling outside. Doña Teté took us to school every day. She was a cantankerous old lady, and I knew better than to wait for the second honk. The noise would wake up my parents and that was not a good thing. Besides, Doña Teté was not someone to be kept waiting. She followed a tight schedule, and everything had to be ship-shape Bristol fashion. She reminded me of the captain of the HMS Bounty.

The way my stomach felt, I didn’t look forward to the ride to school. Tita had prepared my lonchera with its thermos of cold milk and my afternoon snack. After examining it, I closed its metal lid decorated with a picture of GI Joe in his Mercury Seven astronaut suit. Tita hurried La Nena and me out the door, through the garden, the front gate, and then she pushed us into Doña Teté’s station wagon. My stomach was primed, and then La Nena told me about the divorce.

My sister was one year older than me. My grades were good, but hers were much better. She never played outside. She had a closet-full of books and spent all her time reading.

We had inherited Mami’s illustrated collection of fairy tales from every country in the world. The books were so old, Mami had them fumigated against paper-eating moths. You could see the tiny holes and narrow passages left by the dead moths. An abandoned underground city running through their yellowing pages.

There were more than ten oversized books, all bound in red leather with golden letters. I would look at the pictures and imagine the stories about the heartbroken dog, the beautiful siren, the magic coin, the mechanical bird, and the strangest of them all, the story about the weird animal from the Blue Forest: the misfit and extinct Muliñandulipelicascaripluma.

But La Nena read the stories. In fact, she loved her schoolbooks so much that when she passed them on to me, she wrapped them in glossy paper sleeves with the school emblem, and she wrote a note on them, in her perfect penmanship, telling me to take good care of them because books were forever friends.

La Nena was quiet, but she wasn’t shy. She simply kept to herself until she had something to say, and then, you’d better listen.

“I’ll bet you don’t know what I heard,” La Nena whispered to me. I was squeezed between the station wagon door and her, a crammed pea in a pod.

Doña Teté was old, but she was a speed demon. She was always in a hurry. She did the rounds of El Condado in less than one hour. I was daydreaming, thinking of Doña Teté installing ejector seats in her station wagon. In the future, I thought, we will get to school, and Doña Teté will simply push a button to throw us out of the car. We will look back at her as we fly through the air.

I pricked up my ears. “What did you say?” I asked La Nena.

The traffic light turned red and Doña Teté brought the station wagon to a screeching halt. The car behind us honked. Doña Teté looked at the offender through the rearview mirror and gave him the evil eye. We idled on the corner of Calle Luchetti and Avenida Condado, in front of the public-school.

It was named after Madame Luchetti, the matriarch of one of the wealthiest Puerto Rican families from long ago who donated the grounds. Papi told me that the family was now almost completely wiped out from the memory of the Island. Only one street and one old public school with their name remained.

The uniformed students sat on cement benches under the mango trees, playing and waiting for the bell to ring and classes to start.

The morning eggs swished inside of me as I looked out the window trying to distract myself. The sweet smell of gasoline started the second wave of nausea. I didn’t turn to face La Nena. I held on to my seat and managed to ask her again, “What did you just say?”

“I heard Mami and Papi fighting again last night. They said they were splitting up, getting a divorce.”

The traffic light changed, and the station wagon jolted forward. A cosmic wave of nausea hit me for the third time. I stuck my head as far out the car window as I could. My lid blew off and I ralphed the eggs.

“Really?” my sister said in disbelief.

The students across the sidewalk stared at me. Everyone inside Doña Teté’s station wagon whooped and screamed with evil joy. Doña Teté looked at me from the rear-view mirror. “You’d better not get any of that on my leatherette seats, Vomititos.”

The name stuck like puke. Doña Teté took out a Kleenex from the glove compartment. The kids in the front seat passed the tissue back to me chanting Vo-Mi-Tí-Tos, Vo-Mi-Tí-Tos. They looked away and pinched their noses, making all kinds of revolting noises. Hacking a collective loogie.

***

Back to the mango tree one last time. Tomas’s prophecy together with the morning events overwhelmed me and left me exhausted. I crawled out from under the capsule and turned away from our pretend rocket ship.

The Ojeda house rose in front of me, a Red Giant in the afternoon light. The open door to the house, a void pulling me inside. I left Tomás, his walkie-talkies, his camera, and his detonator behind and I ran into its black hole.