MANHATTAN TROPICS

TRÓPICO EN MANHATTAN

By / Por Guillermo Cotto-Thorner

Edited by J. Bret Maney and Cristina Pérez Jiménez
Translated from the Spanish by J. Bret Maney
Introduction by Cristina Pérez Jiménez

Arte Público Press

Houston, Texas
 CHAPTER I

“I’m telling you, you won’t change my mind. Juan Marcos’s

plane gets in at eleven this morning and I promised I’d meet him
at the airport.”
“But in this rain? You’ll catch a cold that’ll last months. You
know that when you come down with the flu in summer, it drags
on until winter.”
“Never mind about that—I’ll bring the umbrella, the coat. To
please you, I’ll even wear those darned galoshes. Heck, I’ll even
put on the old hat I’ve had in the closet for a hundred years.
Anything you want, but let me be, because I’ve got to get going.
You know how much I like to watch the planes land.”
On that Saturday morning Antonio was hurriedly preparing to
meet a friend who was arriving from Puerto Rico. It had rained all
night and the new day was dark, damp, sticky, and insufferable. A
ray of light nonetheless shone through the gloomy weather—the
prospect of welcoming a beloved countryman with open arms. Finí
did not completely share her husband’s romantic ideas. She had a
pragmatic streak born of many years of toil and disappointment in
the streets of New York. But Antonio continued just the same as
ever. New York, instead of dulling his innermost sentimental
nature, had polished it to a high shine. Indeed, he said he felt more
Boricua in Harlem than in the peace and quiet of Barranquitas.
“Give me a kiss. I’m going now. You see that I’m setting out
better equipped than an explorer. We’ll be back for lunch, so don’t
forget to send the kid to the bodega. Rosendo set aside a tin of
guava paste for the dessert.”
“Goodbye, you knucklehead. Give Juan Marcos a hug for me.”

h
7
8 Guillermo Cotto-Thorner

It was drizzling when Antonio entered the street. He bought the

News and La Voz at Lorenzano’s newsstand and descended a few
minutes later into the gloom of the subway station. He was lucky
not to have to wait too long. Soon after reaching the platform, he
spotted the red eyes of the electric train making a noisy entrance
in rhythm with the screeching of the brakes. Antonio took a seat in
the last car. He looked about him instinctively and noticed there
were very few passengers in that part of the train. Across from him,
a venerable rabbi—a traditional Jew with a long beard and sad
mien—read a well-thumbed black book. From time to time, the
rabbi lifted his eyes from the page to stare into space. His thoughts
were evidently turned inward. He gave the impression of being
aloof from the world. Or maybe he had suffered so much that quiet
meditation was his last resort. At the other end of the car, Antonio
noticed a woman decked out in showy clothes. Her legs were
crossed and she had a common, worldly face. When the breeze
from the electric fan indiscreetly revealed the outline of her thighs,
she didn’t even bother to adjust her skirt. Antonio frowned upon
the woman’s gaudy makeup and appearance. At the first station
where the train stopped, an elegantly-dressed colored man got on.
He sat down near the passenger who was pursuing his meditations,
and Antonio could not help but notice that he carried an “intellec-
tual” magazine under his arm. As the colored man immersed
himself in his reading, the Boricua-observer continued his scrutiny
and silent conjectures.
Antonio tried to read but couldn’t. He made an effort to
amuse himself by examining the color advertisements that curled,
with bourgeois flourishes, or wove commercial wreaths about the
ceiling of the car—ads for funeral parlors, chewing gum, whiskey,
cigarettes, beer, cough syrups, movies and undergarments. But
these also failed to hold his attention. He knew them all by heart
because he saw them every day. Antonio then thought about Juan
Marcos and began to recall afresh his own arrival in New York ten
years earlier. The monotony of the train served as a backdrop for
his reminiscences.
 Manhattan Tropics 9

Ten years ago, he had made his first trip below ground on the
very same route—the Lexington line. He looked around and mut-
tered to himself, “the same people . . . the same indifference . . . the
same characters.” He and Finí had been newlyweds when they
arrived in New York on a rainy summer day not unlike this one.
But no, he hadn’t flown here like Juan Marcos. He had come on
the San Jacinto, a fine little ship on which the passengers ate well,
hardly got seasick at all, and struck up an easy camaraderie with
one another. Antonio remembered the day in El Barrio years later
during the war when he had learned that a German submarine
had torpedoed the San Jacinto. It had been as if a piece of his life,
a snippet of his fondest memories, had slipped forever beneath
the Atlantic’s dark waters.
Yes, Antonio and Finí had arrived in the big city with little
money and high hopes. They had rented a small apartment in El
Barrio. It was on the fifth floor, and naturally there was no eleva-
tor. The Board of Health was about to condemn the building, but
it was still considered inhabitable. The swollen bathroom ceiling
drooped like a piñata. If some practical joker had poked its plaster
belly, so many cockroaches would have tumbled onto his head
that not even a dozen baths would have disinfected him. One of
the windows in the parlor—the one with the frosted glass—was
jammed shut. But for all that, there were two things in the kitchen
that he—and more than he, Finí—had desired for a long time: a
gas cook stove and an electric refrigerator that faithfully fulfilled
its duty despite being old and finicky.
Antonio had found a job in the kitchen of one of the big
hotels, the same hotel where he still worked today, though he now
had a better paid, more respectable position as the elevator dis-
patcher in the main lobby. Finí had worked for a few months in a
garment shop. She had quit when she got pregnant and had occu-
pied herself wholly with raising up the boy and keeping house
until just a few months ago. They had had a son, Luis Alberto.
A lurch of the train jarred Antonio from his reverie. He
glanced out the window and saw he had to get off at that station
to catch the airport bus. Outside, the rain had stopped. Blinking
10 Guillermo Cotto-Thorner

in the daylight, he noticed the sky was clearing yet the wind was
unseasonably cold.
When he entered the airport waiting lounge, Antonio heard
voices speaking in Spanish. A group of twenty or so Puerto Ricans
were waiting for friends and relatives. Antonio went over to one of
his countrymen who was smoking a cigar. “Do you know what
time the plane from Puerto Rico lands?”
“Ah, you’re also from the island? Well, they just announced it
will be a little late because of the bad weather.” After a pause, the
man added, “Please sit down. Who are you expecting?”
“I’m waiting for a young friend of the family named Juan
Marcos Villalobos. The father of this boy is a dear friend of mine.
We grew up together in the middle of the island. When I decided
to marry and come to New York, I suggested we come over togeth-
er, but he didn’t want to leave behind his business and set off on
adventures. He said that kind of thing was fine for newlyweds and
people who hadn’t settled down, but it wasn’t for him.”
“Well,” said Antonio’s new friend, “I can’t say I blame him for
thinking that way. I’m here today waiting for two little kids who
are traveling alone. My wife and I have always been sad we don’t
have children of our own, and these two youngsters, boys both,
just lost their parents in the Lares fire. So we decided to adopt
them.” The man paused to scratch his head. “Trouble is, now we
don’t know where to put them because the house is full. Last week
one of my sisters came over with her two kids. She left the island
because her husband deserted her and ran off with a girlfriend.
But you know what we Puerto Ricans say, “donde comen dos,
comen tres. There’s always room for one more at the table.”
Just then two very pretty girls entered the lounge and the new
friends fell silent. They gave the girls the once-over and offered up
smiles of aesthetic approval. Then a lady returned from the infor-
mation desk and shouted with glee to her companions and
anyone else within earshot, “They arrive in ten minutes!—only
ten minutes!”
Antonio got to his feet. He marked time with thick puffs of
cerulean smoke while he peered at the sky through the windows.
 CHAPTER II

It had been a direct flight with no stopovers. Juan Marcos was

a little disappointed because the clouds had kept him from viewing
New York from the air, which he had long dreamed of doing. The
plane had been crammed with anxious-looking passengers. Deep
within their eyes, strange premonitions were visible. The trip had
been tiring. They had passed through a violent storm, and each
time the plane dipped in altitude, then rose up again, or when light-
ning flashed nearby, threatening to split open the craft, the travelers
gripped their seats and silently lifted up their prayers to God.
During the storm, the calmest and most stoic person onboard was
an elderly woman in her seventies. While the faces of everyone else,
both young and old, showed signs of distress and nerves, the gentle
face of that little old lady was luminous. It radiated a serenity that
could only be the result of a pure and unshakable faith.
Juan Marcos was seated next to a youth who was also coming
to New York for the first time. They talked over various matters,
although they didn’t have much in common. The purpose of their
trips to the continent, their attitudes toward life, and the invisible
codes that governed their lives were diametrically opposed.
Nevertheless, when in close quarters, we often make conversation
with people who are unlike us. When traveling, especially when
traveling through danger, we forget those emotional or intellectu-
al qualms that are so important to us in daily life.
“Whatcha gonna do in New York?” asked Juan Marcos’s seat-
mate when they took off from San Juan.
The unexpected familiarity of address didn’t please Juan
Marcos, but he let it pass. “I’m going to work and study,” he
replied. Then, extending his right hand, he said, “My name is Juan
Marcos Villalobos.”

11
12 Guillermo Cotto-Thorner

“I’m Aurelio Fortes,” said his seatmate, “but everybody calls

me Yeyo. Give me five!”
They talked for a while about the sensations of air travel. Both
confessed they were “a little frightened, but not too much.”
“Ah yes, so you asked me what I was going to do in New York,”
said Aurelio. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll find
something to do where I don’t have to speak English. What I really
want is to make me some dough and find a nice little sweetheart
to keep me warm at night. They say they’ve got some terrific
places there to have a good time.”
“And where will you live?”
“That’s the least of it! I didn’t tell anyone I was coming,
though I do know a cat who lives in the Bronx . . . wherever the
heck that is! I’m sure that when I show up, he won’t throw me into
the street. Friends have got to be good for something.”
Yeyo shot a glance toward the back of the airplane. A very
good-looking girl was seated in the last row next to a man of sixty.
“If that old timer wasn’t back there with Miss Hot Stuff,” he said,
nudging Juan Marcos with his elbow, “I’d go get me some of that.
Too bad, or like the record says, ‘mala suerte.’”
The line had been crossed. The more they tried to find points of
reference for shared conversation, the more they sought them in
vain. Juan Marcos thought it best to shut his eyes and get some sleep.
Yeyo, half-bored since his seatmate didn’t dance to his tune, took out
a magazine of lewd jokes and racy photographs. He amused himself
by examining the nudes from all angles as the propellers blazed a
trail through the dense clouds. Hours later, the airplane prepared to
make an elegant landing in the mysterious city of hope.

h
In the distance Juan Marcos spotted the vertical zigzag of
Manhattan’s skyscrapers. He was struck by the width of the
avenues; his retinas had yet to adapt to the dimensions of the
metropolis. While he rode the bus with Antonio, he was all eyes.
Antonio, who understood what he was feeling, saved for later the
 Manhattan Tropics 13

questions about back home. I’ll let Juan Marcos stuff himself on
New York, he thought. In a little while, the novelty will wear off.
In Puerto Rico, Juan Marcos had said to himself, I will be so
moved when I see those skyscrapers, it will be hard to contain my
emotion. In search of that feeling now, he trained his eyes out the
window. But what he had expected, didn’t occur. In glimpsing the
yearned-for city, he felt a blunted happiness. It seemed to him that
he was viewing something ordinary, and not for the first time. The
city wasn’t, after all, as big as he had imagined. He wasn’t bedaz-
zled. A certain drabness began to ruffle his hopes. The books and
movies, the people who had already been here, had described New
York so well that everything was already familiar. That is, the
appearance was familiar, because what was inside, that, nobody
could describe—you had to live it.
In a matter of minutes Juan Marcos found himself “walking
underground” for the first time in his life. The subway captivated
him and he began to feel the mystery and grandeur the city
imposes on its dwellers. He didn’t miss a single detail. While he
had been tired from his trip, he now felt replenished with new
energy to look and assimilate all there was to see. At the first sta-
tion, their subway car filled with passengers. The newly-arrived
jibarito noticed a pretty American blonde who clung to one of the
stiff ceramic straps hanging from the ceiling in front of his seat.
Behaving as if he was in Puerto Rico, where good manners have
deteriorated less than in New York, Juan Marcos jumped to his
feet. In his undomesticated English, he said to the woman, “Lady,
dis is a sit for yú.”
The young woman looked him up and down. “Don’t be a
sucker,” she said rudely.
Juan Marcos felt like he had been slapped in the face. To be
sure, he didn’t quite know what the New York slang “sucker”
meant, but judging by the woman’s rude, unwelcoming gesture, he
guessed that it couldn’t be anything good. It had, without a doubt,
something to do with the translation of the verb “to suck,” which
in good Spanish was “mamar.” Juan Marcos fell back into his seat
as if someone had yanked him by his jacket, and for a moment he
14 Guillermo Cotto-Thorner

didn’t dare look at Antonio, who was watching him very intently
with a half-smile on his lips. ¡Mira que chica más sinvergüenza! Juan
Marcos thought. Could all the women here be like that?
With the devil churning inside him, he felt like standing up
again and giving the gringa a piece of his mind. Yet how could he?
If the English he knew was no good, not even for selling tomatoes?
Yes, he, Juan Marcos Villalobos, first prize in English in secondary
school, teacher of sociology in the high school at Ponce, he, Mister
Goody Two-Shoes, who demanded—on orders from higher up—
that his students in Puerto Rico do all their lessons in English, he,
the young bilingual intellectual, who knew more of Shakespeare,
Byron, Carlyle and Dewey than of Cervantes, Lope de Vega or
Tirso de Molina! Yes, he, the diligent young man, the product of
an unbridled system, who could recite whole passages from The
Merchant of Venice, could not now tell, in plain English, this ill-
mannered and ungrateful americanucha what she very much
deserved to hear! In the midst of the deafening noise of the train,
he bristled with anger.
“Look, Juan Marcos” said Antonio, breaking the silence. “This
is your first lesson in the city. Don’t offer your seat on the subway
or the bus to a healthy woman. We’re not in Puerto Rico anymore.
Around here, you show courtesy in a very different way.
Everybody fends for himself and is after his own thing. That lady
probably thought you were trying to pick her up.”
“Pic-up?” asked our confused young man. “What’s that?”
Antonio laughed. “Man, you have a lot to learn! Pick-up means
recoger. I mean, when a man approaches a woman he doesn’t know
and starts a conversation with her, to have fun with her later, if
she’s interested. You know, for a good time. . . . Although around
here you have to keep your eyes open, because sometimes it’s the
women who do the picking up, right on the street. There’s nothing
that doesn’t happen here, you’ll soon see.”
“I do. I do already.”
“I should warn you though,” added Antonio, “it’s considered
your duty to give your seat to a woman with a child in her arms
 Manhattan Tropics 15

or an old lady. As for the others, if they don’t want to fall down,
they better hold on tight.”
The subway shuttled rapidly and noisily through the dark and
endless tunnel. At last, the human moles reentered the light. They
were at the corner of 110th Street and Lexington Avenue. A patch
of sky was shedding itself of the storm clouds that had caused the
previous night’s downpour. Antonio was uncomfortable in his
galoshes, raincoat, umbrella and old hat. He felt silly. Seeing the
sliver of bluish sky, he had the urge to strip off his gear and pitch
it in the first ash can that he came across. But he quickly changed
his mind. He had his old lady to please.

h
Juan Marcos had read and heard a lot about El Barrio, Manhattan’s
Puerto Rican colony spread across Lower Harlem. After he exited
the subway station, he stopped instinctively to take it all in, while
Antonio politely took hold of his valise. Looking a block’s distance
to the east, he discovered the elevated train, the Third Avenue El,
which slowly crawled across a gigantic steel bridge, rattling as
though all its parts were loose. To the west, he saw an aerodynamic
silver-plated train shoot across the sturdy bridge that reclined
along Park Avenue. And looking once more toward Lexington, he
saw a Puerto Rican greengrocer pushing a vegetable cart, which
reminded him—that being life!—of his favorite song, “El Lamento
Borincano.”

h
Nueva York is the city of commotion and mobility. The noise can
be so intense that it numbs the senses, and the person who lives in
this environment for a long time loses the notion of silence. The
torrent of pedestrians and vehicles is endless—streetcars, buses,
automobiles, horse-carts, trucks, trains, bicycles, motorcycles, air-
planes and wheelbarrows; fire engines, with their high-powered
motors and ear-splitting sirens; the shouts of children and adults;
16 Guillermo Cotto-Thorner

the buzz of conversation of the human swarm on the sidewalks;

guffaws, curses, cries; the explosion of a backfiring engine; wheels
that bump over the rails and rend all tranquility; the spinning of
propellers boring thunderously through space; noise, noise,
NOISE: New York.
Mankind has won a victory over the horizontal. New York
aims overhead, is in perpetual pugilism with space. From the hard
rock of Manhattan, man has shot up to conquer the clouds.
Strapping buildings, as tall and long as the jíbaro’s hope, dotted
symmetrically with windows and bordered with a little aesthetic
detail to silence the critics—austere, linear, devastating. In sum-
mer, they give the impression of macabre furnaces where
eyelashes burn, bodies melt down and all feeling contorts and
loses its sense.

h
Juan Marcos and Antonio set out on their walk. On both sides of
the wide street, the newcomer Juan Marcos could only make out
two huge buildings stretching from corner to corner—windows
in parallel with identical fire escapes that led to the sidewalk from
six floors above the street. But no, they weren’t two buildings but
many, one jammed next to the other, all erected in the same style.
In these buildings lived hundreds—thousands—of compatriots
who had, like him, abandoned the island to try their luck in “Los
Nuevayores.”
Some kids were playing ball in the middle of the street.
“Pepe, get over here. You’re up.”
Pepe was a sickly-looking boy of about twelve with trigueño*
skin. He was licking a piragua and had forgotten that it was his
turn to bat. He gave the piragua to a slight dark-eyed girl who was
watching the game from the sidewalk.

*Trigueño is a racial ascription common in Puerto Rican Spanish used to describe

a variety of skin colors that fall on the spectrum between white and black. Literally
meaning “wheat-colored,” trigueño skin may be olive-complexioned, golden-
brown or darker [Translator’s note].