Free The Noise of Infinite Longing by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

here. She was a housewife, a young woman with children. She bathed us and dressed us, swept and mopped every day, and cooked dinner—we could hear her screams every time she burned herself at

    the stove. But she didn’t complain that her hands had burns, that her nails kept breaking. She studied cookbooks, standing over the tiny kitchen counter, like she had once studied law books, and she did the shopping and dusted the furniture.
    On Calle Génova, a two-lane road several blocks long between the Paseo de la Reforma and the Avenida Chapultepec, the farmers’ market sprawled from one side of the street to the other, and mother shopped there every morning, remarking to no one in particular about the crimson color of the carnations she loved or the smell of coffee beans or the tenderness of tomatoes.
    We wandered away from our block, and in these walks with her, we crossed Londres and Liverpool and Hamburgo, a grid of streets whose names she said aloud, ah, Niza, Florencia, every name trans- porting her, and us with her, my first lesson in European geography. She liked to make conversation with the women in the mercado, heavy women hunched down with invisible burdens, with their impenetrable dark eyes and wide, slanted Indian faces, who would stare back at her silently, smile shyly, and giggle among themselves. I could tell they didn’t know what to say to this thin, pale young woman with the ribbon in her hair. In the mornings in the mercado, in her espadrilles and headband, with her children immaculately groomed, my mother seemed a foreigner, like the wives of diplo- mats, like the ladies who sent out their servants and came around in chauffeur-driven cars. But my mother walked and had no servants and checked off her grocery list and counted her coins, carrying home a bag full of the tomatoes that I would later eat whole, like
    apples.

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    oon she had three children. A year after our arrival in Mexico, she was in her eighth month of pregnancy. She didn’t complain

    about that either. But she wanted her baby to be born on the island; she wanted her mother with her. My father couldn’t go, but she took Angeles and me with her, and we made the long, sickening trip back to San Juan.
    My brother was born, a boy just as my father had wished, and a couple of weeks later, we were boarding a plane again, leaving my grandmother and Tití Angela Luisa behind, leaving San Juan, flying into the now-familiar airports in Habana and Miami, waiting in hotels and terminals on the interminable trip just to get to Miami, which in early September was hot and wet like an equatorial island. We traveled by Greyhound to New Orleans and all the way to Mexico City. My mother, still frail, still swollen in her stomach and her breasts, carried my brother in one arm and held on to my sister and me, standing at the bus stop in her low-heeled flats, while the men loaded the luggage. Hollow-eyed and sleepless, she managed to find a hotel for the overnight stop in New Orleans, and then endured the exhausting damp heat of that late summer in a stifling, crowded bus on
    the twenty-hour journey from New Orleans to Mexico City.
    The bus moved slowly, overloaded with villagers and their bun- dles, just like we seemed to be ourselves. It whimpered up and down the narrow, broken-down roads of northern Mexico, rock and desert Mexico, as arid a land as I had ever seen.
    But she was happy. She was bringing my father a boy, what he had wanted, what he had waited for impatiently when first one daughter, and then another, had been born, not the sons who would carry on his name. Now she had that boy, a boy named after him, Amaury.

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    he apartment in Mexico was not big enough for all five of us, but my father was on a scholarship, and was making no money.
    We could not think of moving anywhere else. On our weekend drives

    around the city, my mother pointed longingly at the Spanish-style houses with their grilled balconies and the haciendas in the stone- street