Everything Had Changed,but Nothing Had Changed

Esmeralda Santiago

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I had corresponded with Papi for the first few weeks after our arrival in Brooklyn. I described our apartments, la marketa, the Jewish people, the Italian girls, and the books I was reading. He wrote back with remembrances from Abuela and newspaper clippings（剪报）. But when my sisters and brothers came, they brought stories with them that he hadn’t included in his letters.

Papi, Delsa said, had married shortly after Mami left with me, Edna, and Raymond. He had scattered Delsa,Norma, Hector, and Alicia among relatives, hadn’t visited them regularly, and hadn’t seemed to care what happened to them. He had, in fact, seemed relieved to be rid of them so that he could start his new life, just as we were starting ours.

I asked Mami about this. She said that yes, Papi had another wife, and there was no chance we would ever live with him again. I wrote him a letter asking why he hadn’t told me, and I told him that from now on he was as good as dead to me. He wrote to Mami accusing her of turning his children against him. Mami yelled at me for lying to Papi about what she said about him. It was all mixed up. Mami blamed me. Papi blamed Mami. I blamed Papi. But none of us said we were sorry.

Still Mami insisted that we keep in touch with him.

“You must never forget your father,” she reminded us at Christmas, Father’s Day, and his birthday. “You’re his flesh and blood（亲骨肉）, and even if he has another family now, he still loves you.”

We didn’t believe her. Grudgingly, we sent him cards on special days, copied out our best compositions, stayed in touch, knowing it was all show. Because in Brooklyn,after Francisco’s death, Mami became, even more than before, both mother and father to us. We could count on her in a way we had never been able to count on Papi,Tata, or Francisco, who had made everyone happy for such a short time before dying and becoming a ghost that haunted us all for the rest of our lives.

Mornings, Mami left the house while it was still dark for the subway ride into Manhattan. She dressed“for work” in clothes that she changed out of the minute she came home, so that they wouldn’t get stained with oil,achiote（胭脂树）, or tamato sauce. She began as a thread cutter, even though in Puerto Rico she had been a machine operator.

《当我还是个波多黎各人》的作者埃斯梅拉达·圣地亚哥和母亲离开波多黎各移居美国后不久，父亲就和别的女人结了婚，把和前妻生育的留在波多黎各的三个女儿和一个儿子分别寄养在亲戚家里。后来弟弟妹妹们也来到美国和母亲及作者团聚并定居。父亲责怪母亲挑拨父女关系，母亲责备女儿不该告诉父亲她们母女之间的谈话，然而母亲仍然坚持自己的孩子们应该跟父亲保持联系。

一开始的移民生活极其艰难，母亲希望孩子们好好读书，以后有个职业而不仅仅是工作。而作者却感到她们在布鲁克林的生活并不比在波多黎各更好，现在的生活只不过是过去生活的延续。一切都变了，然而一切又都没有变。

“Here you have to prove yourself all over again,” she said. She tried hard, which impressed her supervisors, and was moved up quickly to the stitching work she loved.

She bought a special pair of scissors for work. When she walked across the projects on her way home from the subway, she put them in her pocket and held them tight until she was safely inside the house. She then wiped the sweat off them and put them in a special quilted case she had made.

We joked about her handbag, which we worried was an inducement（诱因）for muggers（行凶抢劫）, since it was big and bulging（鼓鼓的）. In it she carried our birth certi ficates, immunization records（免疫记录）, and school papers. She also kept a small notebook in which she wrote the hours she worked, so that El Bosso wouldn’t cheat her on payday. She kept her makeup (pressed powder,eyebrow pencil, rouge（胭脂）, and lipstick) in its own small pouch（小袋）. If a mugger were to steal her purse, he wouldn’t get any money, because she carried that in a wallet in her skirt pocket under her coat.

When she worked, Mami was happy. She complained about sitting at a machine for hours, or about the short coffee breaks, or about El Bosso.But she was proud of the things she made. Often she brought home samples of the bras and girdles（束腰紧身衣） she worked on and showed how she had used a double-needle machine, or how she had figured out that if you stitched the cup a certain way, it would fit better.But even though she was proud of her work, she didn’t want us to follow in her footsteps.

“I’m not working this hard so that you kids can end up working in factories all your lives. You study, get good grades, and graduate from high school so that can have a profession, not just a job.”

She never asked to see our homework, but when we brought home report cards, she demanded that we read her the grades and then translate the teachers’ comments so that she would know exactly how we were doing in school. When the reports were good, she beamed（两眼发光）as if she herself had earned the good marks.

“That’s what you have to do in this country,” she’d say.“Anyone willing to work hard can get ahead.”

We believed her and tried to please her as best we could. Since we’d come to Brooklyn, her world had become full of new possibilities, and I tried very hard to share her excitement about the good life we were to have somewhere down the road. But more and more I suspected Mami’s optimism was a front（表面做出来的样子）.No one, I thought, could get beat down so many times and still come up smiling.

Sometimes I lay in bed, in the unheated rooms full of beds and clothes and the rustle of sleeping bodies, terri fied that what lay around the corner was no better than what we’d left behind, that being in Brooklyn was not a new life but a continuation of the old one. That everything had changed, but nothing had changed, that whatever Mami had been looking for when she brought us to Brooklyn was not there, just as it wasn’t in Puerto Rico.

……

After we came to Brooklyn, all our time was spent indoors. We lived cooped up（被禁锢的）because our neighborhood was filled with “gente mala,” bad people.The little girl who was raped and thrown over the side of a twenty-one-story building in the projects was only one of the gory（血腥的）crimes I read about inEl Diario（《每日新闻报》）. Every day there were murders, rapes,muggings, kni fings, and shootings. In Puerto Rico the crimes had always happened somewhere else, in cities far from Macún. But in Brooklyn bad things happened on our block.

One day Don Julio, who already looked like a boxer who had taken too many hits, came home bloodied and bruised, his eyes lost behind swollen cheeks and nose.

“Ay, Senor, Dios Santo!” Mami cried. “What happened to you?”

“Some kids jumped me as I came out the subway station.”

They had used bats, pipes, and chains. Once they had him on the ground, they stole his wallet, which Don Julio claimed had only four dollars in it, and his Timex watch, a gift from his oldest daughter.

“They didn’t see my gold chain with the medallion（大奖章）of the Holy Virgin.” He pulled it out from inside his shirt and kissed it. “I guess She was looking out for me, or they would have killed me.”

It was still early, around 7:30 P.M., when Don Julio was attacked in the same subway station where Mami took the train every day. From that day forward I sat pretending to read by the window, watching for Mami to come down the street when she was supposed to.Every minute that went by and she wasn’t home added fuel to the images from the newspapers of women lying in pools of blood on cracked sidewalks, their handbags torn from their arms, split open, the contents spilled over them like garbage.

The men they beat up; the women, they raped. I couldn’t stop thinking about it as I walked to school, or home from the library: every man was a potential rapist,and every dark doorway was a potential hiding place for someone waiting to hurt me.

There were gangs, whose slogans and names were painted in bold letters（黑体字母） on the sides of buildings or on sidewalks.

“Don’t ever walk down that side of the street,” a classmate told me once. “It’s not our turf （地盘）.”

“What does that mean, turf?

“It’s part of the neighborhood that belongs to a gang.”

“But what if I have to visit someone on that side of the street?”

“Believe me, you don’t’ want to know anyone over there,”she claimed.

Mami said that at night gangs roamed the streets doing all sorts of mischief（恶作剧）.

“Like what?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know,” she warned.

When the days became shorter and night came earlier,we were only allowed out to go to school. We couldn’t even go to the across the street. When the weather was warm and people sat out on their stoops, Mami insisted we stay inside unless she could come out to watch us. Not even Tata was trusted with keeping an eye on us, and least of all me, since I’d already proved an unreliable baby-sitter.

If I told Mami exactly where I was going, who I was going to see, how long I would be there, and when I’d be back, she’d sometimes let me go off alone on a Saturday afternoon.

“Don’t walk on any of the side streets,” she’d warn.

“Keep to the avenues. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t accept any rides. If there are too many people milling around（成群地无目的地转） a sidewalk, cross the street and walk on the other side.”

In Puerto Rico when Mami had laid out the same general rules, I’d found ways of, if not completely ignoring them,at least bending them to suit my curiosity. Her caution then seemed to have more to do with keeping us from hurting ourselves. Now it was directed at preventing other people from hurting us.

作者

I couldn’t imagine why neighbors would harm me or my sisters and brothers. But I also couldn’t imagine how they could help us if we needed them. We lived separately by thick doors with several bolts（门闩）, windows with iron grates（格栅）, peepholes（窥视孔）. No one dropped in unannounced to chat. An unexpected knock would set our hearts thumping（怦怦地跳）,and we’d look at one another with questions in our eyes before peeping through the pinhole on the door,or opening it a crack, with the chain secured across the narrow gap.

“I can’t depend on anyone,” Mami often told us,and we knew that to be true. El Bosso could lay her off any minute. The welfare workers never believed a strong-looking woman like Mami couldn’t find work.Tata was sometimes dependable, but just as often she was incoherent（不连贯的）, or laid up with aches and pains. Our neighbors were strangers, or worse, gente mala. There was an extended family, Mami’s aunts,uncles, and cousins, who dropped in and out of our lives with warm clothes, advice, and warnings. But Mami was too proud to ask them for more than they volunteered, and we were all developing the same stubborn pride, behind which our frightened selves hid, pretending everything was all right.