The Arrival: Take One

CATEGORY: WORDS (THE EXPERIENCE OF MIGRATION & WRITING)

Note: With the exception of "The Arrival," an essay in three-takes, my entries will arrive monthly.

Long gone are my days at the barrio, where houses are barely two feet apart, privacy is but a silent audience on the other side of the walls, and intimacy filters through and overlaps with all other intimacies -traveling from balcony to balcony in a communal dance.

I am La Trigueñita, the brown island girl who has given up the cadence of her hips, the red lipstick, her sun tan, the big earrings, and her grand Cibuco river, to live near the Charles, where nobody yells improprieties to her as she walks down the street.

There was a time when they did yell improprieties to me. I still remember the day when another "anonymous man" yelled, “Mami, your delicious!” and I snapped and said, “OK. That’s a disrespect, cabrón. I’m tired of all of you machistas cabrones on the street treating women as pieces of meat!” And the man, taken aback by the unusual event of having his piropos verbally refused, yelled back, “Well, your ugly now! Your ugly!” And even though I could see the humor in the encounter, I was too busy being angry, so I got madder and kept walking anyway. Then I gave him The Finger. And then, of course, I laughed at myself.

As incredible as it may seem, I kind of miss those moments of island idiosyncrasies. I know very well what got me here, near the Charles River, into the fall that does change the color of the leaves and turns the breeze into a mass of tiny but sharp and forked daggers onto a shivery body, and it wasn’t the cabrones on the street, the hellish heat of the Caribbean, or all the litter in front of my neighbors’ houses.

I arrived at New England’s Cambridge three years ago, on a cloudy day in September. It had never been that cold in my life. I placed a pair of jeans over my shorts, and covered my blouse with four sweaters and a coat that someone gave me, about two sizes smaller, in bright, decadent fuchsia. I wore heels to walk on the snow because those were the only shoes I had that covered my toes, and a pair of gloves that filtered the freezing air. But I felt free. I had finally managed to escape from my barrio. Now I could become someone, I thought. Now I could grow, be smarter; I could progress -- I believed. I was no longer a college student, I was now an adventurous graduate. I had gone where I was convinced everyone who wanted a future had to go: Out there: allá afuera. La Trigueñita was finally out there!

No longer would I be subjected to the parents' schedule, to their dishes, their mood to lend me, or not, their car. Here I didn’t even need one! There was public transportation to rely on. No sugar cane field to traverse on a borrowed car in the dark. The roads were illuminated. The river was clean -- no old refrigerators and TV sets inside its waters -- and it didn’t flood. There was a supermarket I could reach by foot, and when I went there by my myself, to buy what I wanted to eat, my favorite brand of milk, of water, my fruits, I was at last, a grown up. I had finally "made it."

Or so I thought.

[To be continued... two more times]

Photo: The Charles river during winter. Credit: Iris Mónica Vargas 2010

[Note: details about people have been changed to protect people's identities.]