They say Guzmán had been a difficult pregnancy for Mamá Cielo, who had little patience for the bouncing ball in her belly. She claimed the monkey was climbing her ribs, that she felt fingers grabbing her bladder and squeezing, so that she had to stop attending mass for the shame of urine trickling down her legs. She took to slapping her abdomen smartly as if she were killing a pesky fly. Her meek husband, Papá Pepe, worried about the unborn child but did not dare to interfere. During her pregnancies Mamá Cielo always became fiercely self-absorbed, not even letting him...

Small towns are vindictive, and when it became known that El Padrecito César had been sent away to a mountain retreat for his health, a rumor began to circulate that the young priest had been caught “in flagrante” by the housekeeper, Leonarda, who had then aroused Don Gonzalo from a deep sleep. For days Leonarda was sought after by the townswomen for afternoon coffee, and even invited into the wealthier homes in town, where the old woman had never crossed the threshold except to wash floors. They interrogated her endlessly about the scandal up at the rectory, but she played...

The president of the Holy Rosary Society was Doña Martina Modesto, the plump young wife of the town of Salud’s only lawyer. Married only five years to the town’s most eligible bachelor (now its most zealously guarded husband), Doña Tina had once served Don Modesto as his very able secretary. She had since assumed her rightful position as queen of Salud society, a situation that by its nature demanded that she and her ladies be the watchful guardians of the moral status of the town. With the church as her center of operations and Don Gonzalo so dependent on their...

Coming home was for Guzmán a painful thing. Mamá Cielo treated him like a leper whom she pitied more than hated. In her dark-ringed eyes he could see the sleepless nights and the pain her sons had brought her, one by scattering the precious life she had given him across the unimaginable landscape of a foreign land, the other by shaming the family in taking up with a whore. Guzmán looked at her distant face, the hands shrinking from his touch even as she placed the food in front of him, and he almost yearned for the former violence of...

The Saturnino matriarch had turned Guzmán’s name in to the police. She had claimed that she had caught him in the act of climbing through her daughter’s bedroom window to steal her jewelry. She showed the police evidence of his forced entry in the broken window frame. She wanted him arrested.

As Guzmán entered the house, Mamá Cielo arose slowly from the rocking chair where she had been waiting for him. She had been awakened in the middle of the night by the Saturnino men, she told him in a furious whisper.

“I was not going to steal anything, Mamá.”...

They say my mother, Ramona, was a beauty. Her bones were light and fine, and when nature began to clothe them in flesh she turned into an enchanting young woman, a combination of fragility and lushness that people, men in particular, remarked upon when she was only fourteen or fifteen. But she hardly had time for vanity in her childhood. While Mamá Cielo was bearing children, Ramona, as the oldest daughter, had to be nurse and babysitter. By the time she entered adolescence, she was tired of children and the endless drudgery of housework. She promised herself she would someday...

Ramona says Rafael was a stranger again to her when she arrived at the airport in New York on a bitter cold November day. Because she was unable to find an adequate coat in Mayagüez for either one of us, we were wrapped like gypsies in shawls and scarves. Ramona was beautiful, and people stared. Or perhaps we looked to them like two sisters, orphaned in a war. She was eighteen years old and in full bloom. Rafael in his dark navy uniform looked like an American sailor on leave. They were shy with each other, and Ramona says that...

They talked at the table in the kitchen, and I listened. I stayed in my bed, ill with adolescence for days. The midnight trip to the hospital emergency room on Christmas Eve had revealed nothing more than a few drops of blood on my underwear. The doctor, eyes glazed from celebration in the supply room, suggested in patronizing tones that the liquor be kept out of the reach of children and that my mother explain to me about babies. There was silence in the taxi coming home except for Guzmán, who hummed softly along with the Christmas carols playing on...

After the ambulance and the panic, Ramona nursed her brother back to his feet, but the tension in our apartment was as real and perceptible as the bloody bandages she changed and the smells of alcohol, both the kind she used to disinfect his wound and the kind he drank to help him get through the weeks of convalescence.

The man José had plunged his knife deep into Guzmán’s side, barely missing a kidney. There had been a lot of blood lost and enough damage to make my uncle lean to one side from then on, a little lopsided, like...

Most days were for me a gray blur of school, church, and the afternoon shock of El Building. During Lent, many of the men were out of jobs and hanging around at the bodega, a place I had to visit daily for my mother, who believed in day-by-day grocery shopping. I heard the men talking about the bosses and the factories, how they hired and fired at will, giving the jobs to blacks moving up from the South or out from New York City—or worse, to newly arrived paisanos, who were desperate for work and would accept low pay...

I took Gabriel to the library the Saturday morning of the big meeting because Ramona wanted us out of the way. Walking there, I noticed that even the few scraggly trees that had clawed their way up from little clumps of earth between buildings were sprouting a few green leaves. Soon it would be the Easter season. At Saint Jerome’s the nuns had been in a frenzy of activity preparing us for a pageant. Though I had kept up my grades, I had neglected my friendships, turning down invitations from Letitia, who had managed to talk her parents into accepting...

If the place you live in is destroyed in a fire, your priorities arrange themselves before you as a checklist, with the corresponding emotional reaction like a dictionary definition following. The lives of your loved ones come first, with hysteria or terror prescribed by your brain now functioning under stress; once they are safe, then comes concern for possessions, accompanied by regret for their loss and anxiety over the need to replace them—the need for survival leads to the immediate desire to find a substitute shelter. The aftermath of all this activity seems to be a morbid dwelling on...

Guzmán’s story took a long time to tell; in fact, it is not, nor will it ever be, finished. My mother told me her story throughout the long, lonely first season of our newest exile. She told it leisurely through the summer when the fingers of the witch, scratching at my bedroom window, awakened me to the full moon, and I would hear Ramona walking around this house that she could never make hers. We would sit in the kitchen and drink coffee and talk about her Island and Guzmán. As if to encourage us to continue with our thousand...