"About your son…" Carella said at last.
"Si," Mrs. Hernandez said. "Aníbal would not kill himself."
"Mrs. Hernandez…"
"No matter what they say, he would not kill himself. This I am sure… of this. Not Aníbal. My son would not take his own life."
"Why do you say that, Mrs. Hernandez?"
"I know. I know."
"But why?"
"Because I know my son. He is too happy a boy. Always. Even in Puerto Rico. Always happy. Happy people do not kill themselves."
"How long have you been in the city, Mrs. Hernandez?"
"Me, I have been here four years. My husband came first, and then he send for me and my daughter—when it was all right, you know? When he has a job. I leave Aníbal with my mother in Cataño. Do you know Cataño?"
"No," Carella said.
"It is outside San Juan, across the water. You can see all the city from Cataño. Even La Perla. We live in La Perla before we go to Cataño."
"What's La Perla?"
"A fanguito. How do you say—a slom."
"A slum?"
"Si, si, a slum." Mrs. Hernandez paused. "Even there, even playing in the mud, even hungry sometimes, my son was happy. You can tell a happy person, señor. You can tell. When we go to Cataño, it is better, but not so good as here. My husband send for me and Maria. My daughter. She is twenty-one. We come four years ago. Then we send for Aníbal."
"When?"
"Six months ago." Mrs. Hernandez closed her eyes. "We pick him up at Idlewild. He was carry his guitar with him. He plays very good the guitar."
"Did you know your son was a drag addict?" Carella asked.
Mrs. Hernandez did not answer for a long time. Then she said, "Yes," and she clenched her hands in her lap.
"How long has he been using narcotics?" Kling asked, looking hesitantly at Carella first
"A long time."
"How long?"
"I think four months."
"And he's only been here six months?" Carella asked. "Did he start in Puerto Rico?"
"No, no, no," Mrs. Hernandez said, shaking her head." Señor, there is very little of this on the island. The narcotics people, they need money, is that not right? Puerto Rico is poor. No, my son learned his habit here, in this city."
"Do you have any idea how he started?"
"Si," Mrs. Hernandez said. She sighed, and the sigh was a forlorn surrender to a problem too complex for her. She had been born and raised on a sunny island, and her father had cut sugar cane and fished in the off seasons, and there were tunes when she had gone barefoot and hungry, but there was always the sun and the lush tropical growth. When she got married, her husband had taken her to San Juan, away from the inland town of Comerío. San Juan had been her first city of any size, and she had been caught up in the accelerated pace. The sun still shone, but she was no longer the barefoot adolescent who walked into the village general store and exchanged banter with Miguel, the proprietor. Her first child, Maria, was born when Mrs. Hernandez was eighteen. Unfortunately, her husband had lost his job at about the same time, and they moved into La Perla, a historic slum squatting at the foot of Morro Castle. La Perla—The Pearl. Named in high good humor by the poverty-stricken dwellers, for you could strip these people of their belongings, strip them of their clothes, toss them naked into wooden shacks that crouched shoulder to haunches in the mud below the proud walls of the old Spanish fort—but you could not steal their sense of humor.
La Perla, and a girl-child named Maria and two miscarriages that followed in as many years, and then another girl-child who was named Juanita, and then the move to Cataño when Mrs. Hernandez' husband found a job there in a small dress factory.
When she was pregnant with Aníbal, the family had gone one Sunday to El Yunque, and the Basque National del Caribe—the Rain Forest. And there Juanita, barely two, had crawled to the edge of a fifty-foot precipice while her father was snapping a picture of Mrs. Hernandez and his older daughter. The child had made no sound, had screamed not at all, but the plunge had killed her instantly and they came home from the national forest that day with a corpse.
She feared she would lose the baby within her, too. She did not. Aníbal was born, and a christening followed on the heels of a funeral, and then the factory in Catano closed down and Mr. Hernandez lost his job and took his family back to La Perla again, where Aníbal spent the early years of his boyhood. His mother was twenty-three years old. The sun still shone, but something other than the sun had deepened what used to be laugh wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Mrs. Hernandez was coming to grips with Life. Life and Fortune combined to find more work for Mr. Hernandez. Back to Cataño went the family, moving their scant belongings, convinced that this time the move was for good.
It seemed a permanent job. It lasted for many years. Times were good, and Mrs. Hernandez laughed a lot, and her husband told her she was still the prettiest woman he knew, and she accepted his lovemaking with hot-blooded passion, and the children—Aníbal and Maria—grew.
When he lost the job that had seemed permanent, Mrs. Hernandez suggested leaving the island and heading for the mainland—heading for the city. They had enough for a plane ticket. She packed him a chicken lunch to eat on the plane, and he wore an old Army coat because he had heard the city was very cold, not like Puerto Rico at all, not with the sun shining all the time.
In time, he found a job working on the docks. He sent for Mrs. Hernandez and one child, and she took the girl Maria because a girl should not be left without her mother. Aníbal she left with his grandmother. Three and a half years later, he was to be reunited with his family.
Four years later, he was to be an apparent suicide in the basement of a city tenement.
And thinking over the years, the tears started silently on Mrs. Hernandez' face, and she sighed again, a sigh as barren and hollow as an empty tomb, and the detectives sat and watched her, and Kling wanted nothing more than to get out of this apartment and its echoes of death.
"Maria," she said, sobbing. "Maria started him."
"Your daughter?" Kling asked incredulously.
"My daughter, yes, my daughter. Both my children. Drug addicts. They…" She stopped, the tears flowing freely, unable to speak. The detectives waited.
"I don't know how," she said at last. "My husband is good. He has worked all his life. This minute, this very minute, he is working. And have I not been good? Have I done wrong with my children? I taught them the church, and I taught them God, and I taught them respect for their parents." Proudly, she said, "My children spoke English better than anybody in the barrio. Americans I wanted them to be. Americans." She shook her head. "The city has given us much. Work for my husband, and a home away from the mud. But the city gives with one hand and takes back with the other. And for all, senores, for the clean white bathtub in the bathroom, and for the television set in the parlor, I would not trade the sight of my happy children playing in the shadow of the fort. Happy. Happy."
She bit her lip. She bit it hard. Carella waited for it to bleed, amazed when it did not.
When she released her lip, she sat up straighter in her chair.
"The city," she said slowly, "has taken us in. As equals? No, not quite as equals—but this too I can understand. We are new, we are strange. It is always so with the new people, is it not? It does not matter if they are good; they are evil because they are new. But this you can forgive. You can forgive this because there are friends here and relatives, and on Saturday nights it is like being back on the island, with the guitar playing and the laughter. And on Sunday, you go to church, and you say hello in the streets to your neighbors, and you feel good, señores, you feel very good, and you can forgive almost everything. You are grateful. You are grateful for almost all of it.