The Boy of Clay – Chapter 2, Part 1

There is an infinitesimal mention of my great-grandfather José in this chapter. I’m not sure if Evaristo is saying that he could remember very little of his brother in childhood, or if he could barely remember him at all. It’s such a strange dynamic, and it’s a mystery I’ll hopefully uncover while I’m reading the book. So far as I know, both lived in San Juan, both published books of poetry, both wrote for and edited newspapers (albeit different newspapers). They have so much in common, but are rarely mentioned together.

Chapter 2, Part 1
 

The first years of my childhood cross the cinematic screen, star-studded memories. As I enter the forest, both sad and delighted from by childhood, my laughter shines, but my eyes cry and my heart bleeds from its wounds.
 
Because my mother couldn’t breastfeed me, she resorted to using a wet nurse. The wet nurse was a healthy and vigorous Negro; and her name: Mercedes, happened to be my mother’s namesake. The breasts of Mamma Mercedes nourished me with the milky juice that I extracted from those purple, feral nipples. From the perfect, secreted fruits of that black human higuëra–the nuzzling, palpitating tree from a race that coexists with ours in sunny Puerto Rico–I withdrew the nourishment I needed to survive; and she, the Black Mamma Mercedes (as everyone in the household had called her), nursed me with care and affection. I was not the sole proprietor of the white, liquid wealth from the breasts of Mamma Mercedes: I was forced to share with a generous Black baby. Sometimes my milk brother and I would quarrel, and through the infantile strategy of tantrums and whining, I would enjoy the privilege of one side and the other all by myself. Mamma Mercedes made use of her tricks, which were numerous, to let us both relish in the delights of her motherly paradise. 
 
The breasts of Mamma Mercedes were never dry; and I owe the health I maintained throughout my childhood to their abundant flow of wholesome sustenance.
 
I had four siblings: two brothers and two sisters. Their names? Mercedes, César, Rosa y José. Mercedes and José have long since been erased from the dusty depths of remembrance. Rosa and César, on the other hand, I remember with extraordinary vividness. César was strong, robust, violent; Grandpa, who, as already mentioned was given to nicknames, dubbed him el gallego (The Galician). Befitting his temperament, César would lay into all of us. He was our tormentor. With my congenital weakness, I was no match for such a high-spirited foe. Because his persecutions were frequent, my hasty retreats were frequent. After closets and traveling trunks, I ended up safeguarding myself in baskets of dirty clothes. Was it the providential hand that had intervened between my brother and me? My poor, dear brother–at only four years of age, amongst these moments of acute ecstasy, crawled up some chairs, and from their seats threw his head into the floor; shortly thereafter, he banged his head against the wall. The force of these blows brought on an illness. He died from an inflammation of the meninges. The membranes that cover the brain and spinal cord: the dura mater, the arachnoid and the pia mater, refused to endure those ongoing frenzied attacks, and rebelled. Meningitis forever took away my tormentor, but we cried about it; I cry about it still. . .
 
Many things had served me in my fight against the world: All those things were the muscles I used to defend myself against those who sought to physically annihilate me during the years of my childhood.
 
I never lacked for compensation. If God did not grant me muscles to defend myself, he granted me heart, mind and spirit to wander between the spokes of the wheel. That’s why my shadow comes and goes from the center to the periphery and from the periphery to the center, determined to break the limits, to go beyond the circle; to obtain, regardless of whatever pain that may befall, that which God wills… My little shadow, with its brilliant restlessness like quicksilver, never stops. Never gives up. And it fights, bleeds, dreams. And it is gilded by a light similar to that as the star of my destiny. This is the way I’ll see it forever. Indefatigable–broken, but upright; driven and sustained by the desire to exist, with a right to possess everything that is denied in an unfair, unjust, barbaric world–where the law of God exists, but is violated by those privileged by fortune.
 
When I look, retrospectively and introspectively, at my life as a child, I see the figure of Mama Mercedes emerging next to the figure of my mother, and both are blurred, since one gave birth to me and the other one nursed me with her mighty breasts. My white mother and my black nursemaid multiply in my memory like the pieces in a game of checkers. Has the time from that remote world of childhood passed already? During the day my mother sewed, weaved or embroidered. Her needles and thimbles, all silver and gold, were preserved for a long time in the coffers and chests of the family. My mother! Beautiful, tall; the sweet face, animated by her lovely green eyes; hair that, unfettered, came down to her ankles. Thus she appears in the mirror of my dreams.
 
From the long, fine hands of my mother sprang, as from the baskets of a fairy, miraculous garments: astonishing needlework, lace of incredible refinement, embroidery that plucked out cries of admiration. The family always remembered, as we would anything of extraordinary value, the tablecloths, the pillows and handkerchiefs that came out of her hands. My mother was amidst this work, like some marvelous spider, astonishing us all with the infinite delicacy of her fabric. The common thread in her hands acquired the tenuity of a moonbeam or the lightness of fog. While my mother worked miracles with her hands, Mama Mercedes took care of me with her inexhaustible black gentleness.
 
We were not living on the street of the Moon, but of the Sun. We ascended the astral scale to where we had the best light. My visions were–therefore–clearer, stronger and more precise. I was growing. The plant was steep on its stem, and was already starting to sprout some green leaves. The mission of Mama Mercedes was to nourish my brand new brain with the inventions and fantasies of her superstitious wisdom. Aided by the batwings of her untamed imagination, I flew at a steady height. My aerial excursions would begin at dusk, when the lamplighter was lighting the lanterns; and they concluded when, late into the night, the guard or watchman (the night watchman was called sereno) sang the hours with a voice that went from street to street, while I, frightened by the phantoms from the tales of Mama Mercedes, could hear the footsteps of that singer of the hours. Sometimes Mama Mercedes, taking me into her arms, showed me the street from the balcony of the house. The street, paved with stones called chinos, would appear all in shadow. The only areas lit were the ones with a lantern. Clarity was falling, as from a fainting spell, on the streets and walls of the houses.
 
The tales of Mama Mercedes suggested the existence of a world different from our own; there was another world we could visit mounted on brooms and frying pans, as did the witches mentioned by the Black in some of her fables.
 
Our world was accessible by the inhabitants of that other world. I never saw them, but I validated their existence. Mama Mercedes claimed to have seen them and to have talked to them. They were designated by names such as: The Old Man in Burlap, The Cursed Old Woman, The Giant, The Man Without a Nose, The Dwarf with Three Heads, The Man who Ate Children, The Witch of the Cave, and many others. According to Mama Mercedes, that world–false and fanciful for adults–was a world in which ghosts, witches, and a multitude of characters with monstrous appearances were all mixed together, and they were real.