Free Las Christmas by Esmeralda Santiago

Fico or me, you opened your mouth in midchew to show off your prize to the prim girl cousins. “Mami,” they wailed in chorus, “they’re being bad again.”
    â€œI’m asking for a trampoline and a little airplane that flies and a
carrito
I can drive myself!” Fico was yelling as if he wanted Santicló to hear him all the way up in the United States. Each new present was pronounced at a higher decibel than the one before it.
    I was sick with envy. My cousin always had so many toys. His parents were rich and traveled to Miami and Nueva York and took him along. But Mami had married Papi who didn’t have that kind of money. In fact, Papi’s family lived in the interior in houses with crooked floors and furniture like the rockers in the maid’s room at my maternal grandparents’ house. Papi’s brothers were always in trouble with the dictator. One uncle, Tío Federico, was a lawyer who had to stay in the house all the time because he had done something he shouldn’t have done. Another, Tío Puchulo, had written something in the papers that made all the aunts walk around with their hands at their hearts and their eyes as big as the eyes of people in movies when they got a fright.
    I decided to holler out my list as well. Maybe Santicló would listen and bring me everything I asked for. “I want a trampoline and a flying airplane and a television.”
    â€œI’m asking for a television, too,” Fico piped up.
    â€œI asked first!”
    â€œYou did not!”
    We were almost touching chins, yelling at each other. I could feel my cousin’s moist breath on my face. Soon we would be rolling around on the ground, punching each other, until one of the maids came out and separated us and took us to our mothers, who would remind us that Santicló was coming next week and all he was going to bring us was two boxes of cat poopoo.
    That thought made me stop midholler. “Fico,” I relented, “maybe we’d better stop. Maybe Santicló can hear us.”
    Fico shrugged. “Santicló speaks English, stupid. He doesn’t understand us.” But he stopped yelling, too, just in case Santicló was like Tío Puchulo, who always said that just because he didn’t know any English didn’t mean he didn’t understand it.
    SPEAKING OF Tío Puchulo, where was he? Just a few days ago, he was the name on everyone’s lips on account of something he wrote in the papers. Then, like those sheets from the United States you drew on and lifted, abracadabra, he disappeared. “Where’s Tío Puchulo?” I asked a few days before Christmas when he didn’t appear for Sunday dinner. The whole patio of aunts and uncles and my grandparents went silent. My mother gave me that look the girl cousins gave me when I showed them my Russell Stover prize midchew.
    â€œWhy do you ask where your tío Puchulo is?” she asked me too lightly to sound like my mother talking.
    This was the stupidest question I’d ever heard. “Because he’s not here.”
    â€œOh,” everyone sighed and laughed with apparent relief. “Of course he’s not here. Your
tío
left the capital.”
    â€œWe don’t know where he is,” my mother added quickly. One of the maids had just come out to the patio with the rolling cart of platters.
    â€œLet’s talk about Santicló, shall we?” one of the aunts asked cheerfully. There was a raucous YES! from the kids’ table. “What does everyone want for Christmas?” Soon we were hollering our lists so loud, my aunt put a finger in each ear and rolled her eyes like a crazy person.
    When dinner was over, my mother pulled me aside. “Cuca,” she said, her lovey-dovey name for me when she wanted something. “Do you want Santicló to bring you that TV?”
    â€œSanticló’s going to bring me a TV?!!!” I cried