361

POLLITO CHICKEN

Ana Lydia Vega

"Un homme à cheval sur deux

cultures
est rarement bien assis."
Albert Memmi

I really had a wonderful time, Suzie Bermiúdez told her boss as

soon as she set her spike heel in the office.
San Juan is wonderful, the boss corroborated in a benevolent
tone, while biting back the desire to add: / wonder why you Spiks
don't stay home and enjoy it.
This all puts us in a mind to tell you about the surprise return
Suzie Bermiúdez made to her native land after ten years of constant
struggles.
Prompting her decision was the breathtaking poster of
Fomento which she saw in the travel agency in the lobby of her
building. The aforementioned breathtaking poster showed a couple
of beautiful people holding hands in the Hotel Conquistadors
funicular. The beautiful people seemed so deliriously happy and the
sea so strikingly blue and the sunset—Let's not forget the sunset a
la Winston tastes good-the sunset so shocking pink in the distance
that Suzie Bermiúdez, who would never walk through the Barrio on
foot for fear of Mafia style execution, who would rather lose a
fabulous job than write Puerto Rican on the application and who
would rather die of hunger than receive Welfare or food stamps like
all those lazy, dirty, no good bums who were her countrymen, Suzie
Bermiúdez, I repeat, took all her savings earned as a secretary in a
housing project for Blacks--who weren't any better than New York
Puerto Ricans but at least weren't New York Puerto Ricans—and got
on a 747 quick and uninterrupted flight to San Juan.
When she arrived, she all of a sudden felt like a frankfurter
turning on a spit in a glass oven. She couldn't breathe and she had to
hold desperately onto the image of the breathtaking poster so as
not to start running back towards the plane. The sight of that noisy
crowd masked in loud colors, and crowned with kilometers of hair
rollers made her wonder if it wasn't better to take a bus or
something and seek refuge somewhere in the country around Lares in
Grandma's loving arms. But on second thought she told herself she
had made reservations at the Conquistador and after ail Grandma
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had been rather bitchy with her and Mother ten years ago. Dad
never had wanted to marry Mother so as not to bear the cross of
Grandma who was always sick with headaches and spasms and
athlete's foot and rheumatic fever and boils all over and a
thousand other bestial diseases
—besides Grandma could never make him out in the picture because
of all that kinky hair. Therefore Mother had taken Suzie to New
York and Thank God because if she had stayed in Lares poor Mother
would have died before she did there in the Bronx and from
something surely worse.
Suzie Bermiúdez got in the Hotel Conquistador's station wagon
which was filled with full-blood, flower-shirted, Bermuda-Shorted
Continentals with Polaroid cameras hanging around their necks. And
it was probably because the station wagon was air conditioned that
she felt as if she were dancing a fox trot on the roof of the Empire
State Building.
With certain amusement she thought about what would have
happened to her if Mother had not had the brilliant idea to emigrate.
She probably would have married some drunken billiard-playing
bastard, one of those born with a cue stick stuck to his hand, who
locks the fat ugly housewife in the house with ten screaming kids
between her cellulitic thighs while he shows off his pretty-body
and roams about the street with any and every shameless bitch. No
thanks. When Suzie Bermiúdez marries because maybe she'll get
married to pay less, income tax--it will be to a straight All-
American, Republican, church-going, Wall Street business man, like
her boss Mister Bumper, because they make good husbands and treat
their wives like real ladies raised on Amy Vanderbilt's book and
everything.
On the way to the hotel she noticed nevertheless the
transformation of Puerto Rico. That proliferation of urbanization,
factories, condos, highways and shopping centers seemed very
encouraging to her. And still those filthy, no-good Communist
terrorists dared to talk of independence. They weren't going to
make her swallow any of that crap. No matter how backward and
underdeveloped the island she had left ten years ago was. All they
had to do was learn to speak good English, pick up the trash they
threw in the streets like savages, act like decent people and quit
making all the fuss.
To her the Conquistador seemed a castle from the Middle Ages
as it arose from the waves. It was just what she had always
dreamed about. Her ill-timed one week leave began to take on new
meaning before that ravishing view. As soon as she had made all
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the necessary arrangements, Suzie hurled herself toward her de

luxe suite in order to put on the sexy polkadot bikini she had bought
at Gimbel's especially for this fantastic occasion. She passed a
comb through her hair tinted Wild Auburn and straightened with Curl
Free, she put on Bicentennial Red lipstick to accentuate the
whiteness of her teeth and she rubbed a drop of Evening in the South
Seas behind each ear.
A few minutes later, she felt her first down when they told
her the funicular was out of order. She would have to substitute
the pentagonal swimming pool for thewhite-sanded, palm-lined
beach thus giving up her exciting dream of the breathtaking poster.
But
"Such is life,”
Suzie told herself and she rented a chaise-lounge at the edge of the
pentagonal swimming pool just beside the bar. The waiter served
her a typical drink called a pina colada which surprised her very
positively. She belonged to the generation of sweet cola and cane
liquor which weren't exactly what she would call her typical
favorite drinks.
Around the pentagonal swimming pool the local fauna teemed
above the full-blood Americans. A loud speaker played the
mellifluous Music from the Tropics, sung by a crooner with a
quivering voice and disgusting English accent while the athletic
Latin specimens showed off their biceps on the trampoline. Suzie
Bermiúdez looked in vain for a freckled face, a ruddy crew cut to
which to direct her fluttering eyelashes. Unfortunately, the group
was predominantly senile, composed of Middle-Class, Suburban
Americans, showing off their first Social Security check.
"You're Puerto Rican, aren't you?"
asked an awful little man who was only three feet tail, stuffed
like a little low class kid into an imitation Pierre Cardin mini-suit.
"Sorry,”
Suzie whispered with magnificent indifference. And putting on her
sunglasses she opened the current bestseller to the exact page in
which the black Haitian was hypnotizing his white victim to carry
out some primitive Voodoo rites over her naked body.
Three pina coladas later and. after the bestseller's
protagonist's rape, Suzie had nothing better to do than begin to
inspect the native specimens out of the corner of her eye. And--it
was probably because poolside wasn't air-conditioned--it was then
that our heroine realized the bartender's looks burned more than the
three o'clock sun on a zinc roof.
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Each time Suzie's turgent breasts threated to fall out of her

bikini-bra like two ripe grapefruit the man’s eyeballs about fell out
of their sockets. There was a subtle fencing of looks before the
timid and lady-like New York housing project secretary dared fix
her gaze on the hairs of his Tarzan like chest. In the meantime, the
bartender's eyes descended on one way elevators to more lush and
fertile areas. And at the moment of the most feverish rush, Suzie
Bermiúdez felt they were fatally pushing her toward a sweaty bad­
smelling and uproarious street car named desire.
The blushing young lady was so confused with this discovery
that she picked up her Coppertone suntan oil, her beach towel and
terry-cloth robe and desperately fled toward the deluxe suite
where she got under the refreshing mauve sheets of her queen size
bed.
Oh my God, she murmured, blushing like a frozen strawberry
when she felt her platinum frosted fingernails looking,
independently of her will, for the telephone. And with the best
falsetto of an executive secretary and wth her head spinning like a
broken merry-go-round she said:
"This is Miss Bermiúdez, room 306. Could you give me the bar
please?"
"May I help you?"
inquired a virile baritone voice with an accent worthy of the
Resident Commissioner in Washington.

That very night, the bartender told his hanger-on lobby buddies
"That lady in 306 doesn’t know if she's a gringa or a Puerto
Rican. She asks for room service in perfect English but when I'm
ready to take her, she opens her mouth and shouts out in the local
speak."
"And what does she say?"
his fan club of aspiring lay-those-gringas responded in a salsa beat
chorus.
Then the most admired mammatologist told how, at the very
moment those platinum-frosted fingernails passionately found
themselves embedded in his afro, the half-opened lips of Suzie
Bermiúdez, from the unattainable skyscrapers of an intra-uterine
orgasm, produced the sonorous ancestral roar of
"¡VIVA PUERTO RICO LIBREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

Translated by Martha J. Manier