Free The Noise of Infinite Longing by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa Page B

the same man who held me lightly, comforting me when I had nightmares, who took me to the circus and bought me popcorn, who taught me to ride a bicycle and ruffled my hair when he came home every night.
    The first time he struck one of us was at dinner, a day like any other.Angeles was so small, so shy then. She longed for his attention. Tugged at his pants wanting a kiss, and when he spoke down to her, she looked up at him smiling, adoringly. That day, she and I were seated at the dining table as usual, my parents on either end. Ange- les was not eating.
    She is so thin, my mother complained, looking at him. Like hun- dreds of time before, she tried to force Angeles to eat, pushing a spoonful of rice into her mouth, but Angeles spit it out, sprayed it all over herself and the tablecloth. My mother tried again, her fingers pinching Angeles’s skinny arm, forcing another spoonful into her mouth. Shaking her head, Angeles started crying. My mother barely touched her own food, she ate so little herself, spearing the peas, pushing aside the rice, glancing at my father, those glances they had.
    He screamed at my sister. Eat, eat! My sister cried louder.
    He unbuckled his belt, a narrow black leather belt, and yanked it through the loops of his pants and laid it, doubled up, by his plate. The belt lay there like a twisted ribbon. My sister cried harder. I stopped eating. He clutched the buckle and wrapped the belt in his right fist and with his other hand he reached out to my sister and grabbed her by her wrist, his hand a clasp around a tiny bone. He lifted her off her chair in one quick movement and dragged her to our bedroom. I heard her cries, at first loud and then like muffled

    whimpers, and the snapping sound of leather on flesh, a sound that became the single most frightening image in my nightmares. I held to the hem of the tablecloth, clutched it, trying not to cry, but cry- ing all the same.
    Please stop him, I begged my mother.
    His voice was a growl, louder with each stroke of the belt.
    In this house you do as I say, in this house you do as I say, he repeated with each blow.
    My mother did not stop him. She did not leave her chair, but a faraway, clouded look came over her as if she were not there at all.
    I had expected her to stop him, to march into the bedroom and take his belt away from him, but she didn’t, not that time, not ever. This woman who had no fear, who spoke so fiercely to us, to her family, to her friends, who won arguments by sheer force of will, sat helpless, weak, afraid, and I saw that fear in her eyes, and I was terrified.
    Many years later, on the day that would turn out to be the last time I saw her before her death, I reminded her of this. Why didn’t you stop him? I demanded an answer, I wanted an apology.Why had she not stopped him from hitting us, why had she not left him and taken us with her?
    She was an old woman now, and she began to cry, defending her- self, and swore that she had no memory of any of it, none.

    E

    very morning my mother walked with me the two or three blocks to the Van Dyke Academy, a colonial-era Catholic con-
    vent of gray stone spires and black iron gates. I was five, in first grade, a wisp with spindly legs and straight long hair tied back with a ribbon, a squint in my eyes, and already a furrowed brow. She left me at the gates, in the hands of nuns who wore those black habits and rimless thick spectacles that scare children. In my dark blue uniform

    with a starched white collar, I carried my books in a canvas bag and sat in the back row, too timid to raise my hand even though I almost always knew the answers. I had a knack for absorbing everything I heard, and soon I was getting straight tens in all my subjects—geog- raphy, sociology, reading, arithmetic, languages—and my world became filled with books and far places.
    School was the life outside my parents’ house. It was my world entirely.The first time I saw blood was there, when a boy in my class