Free My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor Page B

it was not easy. The kids were cruel in a thousand small ways. They would attempt any kind of silly
burla
—making faces or doing a little dance behind the back of the teacher as she wrote on the board—just to make Celina laugh her nervous laugh. Then she would be the one to be punished. Whack! It was just the way she would then punish her own pupils. When she got home and there was no one to play with or talk to, she taught her lessons to the trees: “Children, repeat after me!” And when they didn’t get it right, she would swat them with a stick. It helped her remember the lessons, and she liked being surrounded by the trees. Nature was a solace and a kind of freedom.
    The best part of school was the library and carrying home a book. She loved to read, hoarded magazines and pamphlets, any scrap of writing she could find. When the sewing was finished, she read stories into the evening, by the light of the
quinqué
with the moths dancing around the kerosene flame.
    It was an evening like that when her mother died, when she was nine, the same age I was when Papi died. People came to the house that very same night for the wake, drinking and talking until dawn, with the
quinqué
burning all night long. They brought ice to put on top of the box and under it, since there was no embalming, nothing to slow the ravages of the hot days and nights. They buried Doña Francisca Toro Torres in the morning.
    After her mother died, what little remained of the household was broken up. Pedro moved in with Mayo, and Celina was sent to live with Aurora in San Germán. Her brother Abraham had already left for Mayagüez. He was young still, but old enough to run off with a woman and old enough to step into the ring. He loved boxing, but he didn’t know how and he lost every bout.
    The house in Barrio Bosque where Aurora lived with her husband was just one street over from the train station. From the little room by the kitchen where Celina slept, she could hear the sound of the train escaping down the tracks. It was the last link to Lajas, to so many people who vanished from her life. Pedro came to visit a couple of times but gradually lost touch. He got married, joined the army. She never saw her grandmother again. That was just the way it was. There was never any choice, so there was not much room for feelings. But it could have been worse: usually orphans got sent to work in rich people’s houses. Aurora had saved her from that fate.
    Aurora was busy with the handkerchiefs, working long hours and traveling to collect piecework from other women who sewed. Celina still made her two dozen handkerchiefs every week. She cleaned the house on Saturdays and did small things to make it nice, picking flowers to put beside the photographs in frames. They had electricity, though the toilet was still outside. Aurora’s husband, Emmanuel, was an old man and crazy in his own way. He was a blacksmith, but he spent more time fussing over his son Alfred than he spent working. Alfred was just a baby but the center of his universe, and people talked about how Emmanuel seemed weirdly obsessed with the child.
    In school Celina was lonely all the time and so quiet that practically no one knew she was there. She lived in the library and often read so long that there was no time left to study. Her grades suffered, but she knew a wealth of words from those precious books, words that nobody would ever guess she knew.
    Walking between school and home, or during the break at lunchtime, she had the freedom of the town. San Germán is like a cap on the dome of a hill, with a sky that’s bigger than you’d expect in a place where the forest closes in tightly around. She would wander and look at the fine houses that seemed to be dressed in lace, with colored windows and filigreed gates and porches that wrapped around like shawls. She used to go to the post office just to watch the girls come from the college to mail their letters, with their chaperones waiting