Stories from El Barrio

When I was about five years old someone broke into our apartment but stole nothing. We lived in a five-story, turn-of-the-century tenement on East 111th Street in El Barrio (Spanish Harlem). Mami, Papi, my sister, Taty, and I were away on a day trip to Brooklyn, visiting my uncle, Tio Toño, and his family, who lived in Flatbush, a quiet area in the mid-fifties. Tio Toño lived on a tree-lined street in a beautiful apartment, and he owned a grocery store. My family left early to take the hour-long subway ride from El Barrio to Brooklyn and returned in the early evening.

The burglar broke in through our rear fire-escape window. We returned to a ransacked apartment; Mami's panties, bras, and girdles hung out the sides of her bureau drawers, her nylons dangled from the bureau mirror's edge, Papi's socks scattered over the floor, his underwear drawer opened but untouched, Mami's blouses thrown over the bureau top, the closet door ajar with the clothes and shoes inside in disarray. Mami cried and cursed in Spanish as she picked up and subsequently hand-washed every item disturbed by the burglar.

The burglar must have been in our apartment for a long time because he had put every one of Mami's cosmetics neatly lined up by category on the railings of our fire escape. The fire escape was 12 square feet of black metal railing with stairs leading to an upper level and underneath the stairs, a large opening for the stairs going down. On one rail were her five different lipsticks, each one opened, its cap placed next to it. Pale pink, rosy pink, plum, scarlet, and red berry rounded points peeking out at us. On the following rail the crook placed Mami's little bottles of Emeraude, Youth Dew, and Maja colognes. Next were Mami's Maybeline eyebrow pencil, her Coty rouge, and loose powder containers. Then came her Mirta de Perales moisturizer, Pond's cold cream, hand lotion, and cottonball jar. Finally, on the outermost rail, were her numerous nail-polish bottles, colorfully arranged from bright pinks to raspberry reds.

No items were missing from our belongings. Unfortunately, Mami lost quite a few cosmetics when they slipped out of our nervous hands as we brought them inside from the fire escape and they fell through the railings down into the rear trash-ridden alley. To this day the burglar who stole nothing but touched everything, remains a Hidalgo family mystery.

In the heat of the city summers, the fire escapes functioned as precarious balconies, accessible through windows, for the residents of 118 East 111th Street. Families refreshed themselves, lovers romanced each other, teenagers taunted people below, and neighbors conversed on their fire escapes. My family lived in a fourth-floor, rear apartment, but my best friend, Dolores Quiñones, lived in a fifth floor, front apartment. On hot summer days I was allowed to play with Dolores on her fire escape.

Dolores's fire escape had no protective stairway closure, since it was a top floor apartment. Adjoining the surface of her fire escape was a large gaping hole. Her father had tied a small wooden swing to a corner of their fire escape. Dolores and I would take turns on the swing under her mother's careful watch. I would sit on the swing feeling my stomach tighten from fear, and simultaneously excitement flowed through my body like the sensation of being suspended on top of a Ferris wheel. The people and cars on the street below looked like small animated toys. The noises from the street—car brakes screeching, people talking, babies crying, ambulance sirens blowing, children shouting, ice cream vendors' music blaring—were muted by the distance of five stories.

When I dared to look up, I saw the blue-gray sky unobstructed by gloomy tenements. From the little swing I could see east toward First and Second Avenues, where the public swimming pool was located, past the Italian neighborhood that, as children, we had to run through because the local bullies didn't like Puerto Ricans on their blocks and would beat us if they caught us. From Dolores's swing, I also could look west across 111th Street over the above-ground New Haven railroad tracks that ran along Park Avenue and passed the blocks of tenement rooftops; then I got a glimpse of the green treetops in Central Park on Fifth Avenue, to a different city from the one I knew.

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Dolores attended the same Catholic school as I did but was a year older. In the first grade, before I was allowed to play downstairs by myself, Mami left our apartment door open while I played with Dolores and our paper dolls on the fourth-floor landing of the stairway. At the ages of six and seven, Dolores and I had amassed large paper doll collections.

The affordable Betsy McCall dolls had more clothes than we could ever imagine owning. But some of the outfits were puzzling to us: why would anyone wear a short white skirt, matching white blouse, and white sneakers? Another perplexing outfit (which I now know was a Bazooka-pink, Chanel double-knit suit) had short cotton gloves, and a strand of pearls. We couldn't figure out what the Doris Day-looking pill-box thing with netting was or where it went on the doll. Dolores thought: "Ponlo on her arm, como un muff" (Put it on her arm like a muff). "No, tiene que ser a scarf for her neck" (No, it has to be a scarf for her neck), I countered. We turned to our older, more sophisticated friend, Raquel, who was ten; she informed us the pink round mound was a hat.

After school we spread our paper characters across the staircase. Our dolls and clothes would take up the entire space, forcing people to step over the colorful pieces of paper. Mostly, the people passing us were good natured, carefully stepping around our dolls, except for el super when he made his daily garbage-collection rounds.

Around dinner time, el super carried his ten-gallon steel garbage can to the top floor. Once there, he proceeded to roll the steel can down the five flights of stairs. When the residents heard the clamor of the huge metal can scraping against the steps, they brought out their refuse, which el super stuffed into his steel can. When Dolores and I heard el super coming up the stairs with the can to begin his rounds, we quickly picked up our dolls to avoid being chased away by his usual cruel comments: "Saquen esas porquerías de aqui, antes que las bote en la basura. Las escaleras no son para juegos" (Move that junk out of the way, before I throw it in the trash. The stairways are no place to play). He would yell whenever he caught us playing on the stairway.

Mami was always missing some ingredient for the evening's supper—a can of Goya tomato sauce, a green pepper, or a head of garlic. At seven, when I was old enough, I became the errand girl, running to the grocery store in the building next door to purchase the missing dinner ingredients. She would give me the money in a tightly wrapped scrap of brown bag with the name of the item written on the inside. I didn't mind running downstairs to the store since the responsibility showed I was a big girl, except for the times Mami forgot more than one thing. Then I made many trips to the store, which interrupted my favorite television shows like The Mickey Mouse Club, The Lone Ranger, and Popeye cartoons. The other problem with the daily errands was that I was scared to go up the stairs by myself as I returned from the store.

Many times when I visited Dolores, I ran across young men huddled together at the dark, fifth-floor doorway leading to the rooftop. The men's sleeves were pulled up, white handkerchiefs tied around one arm, their fists tightly closed, while they injected a white liquid into the veins of the other arm with their free hand. Coming suddenly upon these men paralyzed me on the spot. At that moment I heard a quiet, sluggish mumble, "Get out of here, kid," advice that I took seriously and fled the scene.

So I developed a little plan to lessen my fear of confronting the slow, doped-up men on the stairway. As I reached each landing, I peeked into the long hallways—right, then left, to ensure no one was there waiting to hurt me. Once the hallways were safe, I quickly ran to the next staircase until I got to the fourth floor.

Papi had the habit of coming home intoxicated on weekends. Fridays were payday and the day to socialize after a week of hard labor—viernes social. Late one Friday night, Papi flew through our front door telling a story of how a woman tried to steal his wallet from his pants pocket as he napped on the third-floor stairway, a habit he developed from drinking too much. Papi claimed he grabbed her hand as she was rifling through his pockets, and then he slapped her hard across the face. After a heated verbal exchange, the woman left swearing revenge at Papi as he ran inside our apartment. I wondered about Papi's story knowing his tendency to exaggerate when he drank rum and Coke. Nevertheless, Mami, Taty, Edwin, and I were all relieved that Papi was safe. But close to midnight, a woman and two men with baseball bats pounded on our apartment door, demanding that Papi come out so they could pummel him for slapping the woman.

When Papi did not appear, the men continued to beat on our apartment door, yelling profanities at him and our family. We all cried uncontrollably except Papi, who stood with his back against the inside of our door. Mami made Taty, Edwin, and me hide under the bed in our bedroom in case the men broke through the door. We called the police, but our calls went unanswered. Our neighbors stayed behind their locked doors. No one helped us. The intruders terrified us for over two hours that Friday night before they left. The next day, as we opened our door on our way to church to give thanks to God for our safety, we saw the outer side of our door. The right-hand corner was almost entirely kicked in, and there were deep indentations all over the outside of the cheap metal door. While Mami, Taty, Eddie, and I went to church, Papi went to the lumber store to buy a new heavy oak door. That same week, Papi also brought home a rifle.