My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor Page B

theater when the reel stopped and the lights came up for the announcement: the Germans had surrendered. They went out in the street, and then came the scene that my mother would describe so many times, always with the same look of wonder. “Beautiful pandemonium,” she called it. Thousands of people, all the soldiers and all the girls, everybody kissing and hugging, yelling their heads off, embracing strangers, everyone so jubilant. It was magic; it was electric. Like nothing she’d ever seen.
    Carmin had friends in the Bronx, and one day they braved the long subway ride to go to a party, getting up at every station so as not to miss the stop at Intervale. They had never taken the subway anywhere except back and forth between the hotel and the post office.
    That was the day she met Juan Luis Sotomayor. The family called him Juli (
Juu-li
), in the typically creative Puerto Rican approach to nicknames. He saw that Celina was shy, and he was very gentle. And fine looking,
guapísimo
. She liked the way he paid attention. No one had ever paid attention to her. He talked to her about things he read in the newspaper; they both read the whole of
El Diario
every day. No one had ever talked to her about reading before either. Afterward, he would write letters, just to tell her about his day—and to ask when she was coming back. There was always a reason to come back, always another party. Even after the WACs were reassigned to Camp Shanks, somehow Celina and Carmin would find their way down to the Bronx, to 940 Kelly Street.
    And at the same time as Celina fell in love with Juli, she fell in lovewith his mother too. “Don’t call me Doña,” she said, introducing herself that first day. “Call me Mercedes. Doña is for old ladies.” Mercedes loved people, drew them around her, and was the life of the party. She
was
the party. She always found something to laugh at, something to argue about, news to share. Coming into that family, for Celina, was an awakening to life and energy, to the joy of being with people. She could forget about being an orphan.
    Mercedes and her son were two of a kind, both of them
embusteros
, spinning tall tales that swept you along, right up to that moment when it dawned: That can’t be true! And the poetry that followed after the room went quiet and each looked to the other, mother and son, to see who would begin—the pleasure of that moment of anticipation.
                    
¿Qué cómo fue, señora?
                    
Como son las cosas cuando son del alma
.
    As it is with matters of the heart … 
Y entre canto y canto colgaba una lágrima …
* Celina had always loved poems, as far back as Lajas, copying them onto little slips of paper so that she could learn them. But she had never heard anyone recite them so they came alive.
    When she was coming up for discharge, she decided she didn’t want to go back to Puerto Rico. Juli said: Stay in New York; we’ll get married as soon as you’re out of the service. They did, at city hall, with no more ceremony than a couple of signatures and a kiss. When she moved in, it was she and Juli, his brother Vitín and his sister, Carmen, all living with Mercedes and Gallego, the whole family piled into two bedrooms, girls in one, boys in the other. Until the newlyweds got their own place downstairs. The building was an old tenement, with dark and narrow rooms, but their kitchen was big and Juli made it beautiful. He put up curtains and pretty tiles. He raised a scaffold and mixed different colors and painted the old plaster molding on the wall. It was glorious, bouquets of flowers on her kitchen wall. Juli had such flair.
    When friends came over, he always had something to offer them, knew how to make them at home. He taught his bride to dance. Bolero. Cha-cha-cha. Merengue. She was clumsy, apologetic. “You’ll do okay, Celina,” he said. “You’ll do okay.” She was learning to be like him, and that was all she