Buen Provecho by Amina Gautier

We will never learn to speak Spanish—our mother fights us every step of the way. She wants nothing to do with her father’s language, nothing that reminds her of him— including herself. We’ve seen the proof in the pictures, those Polaroids from the seventies capturing her attempts at being a foxy mama. She’d tried to transform her fine hair into an afro, hoping the do would make the neighbors stop asking her what she was mixed with and put an end to the Puerto Ricans calling out to her on the street in a language she didn’t speak. She’d heard that beer would kink her hair and lend it body, but all she’d ended up with were drunken curls. 

Because we know the lengths to which she’ll go we keep our efforts secret and learn behind her back. On Saturdays, we work on our weekly book reports at the Stone Avenue public library, and on our way home, we stop to visit our grandfather’s sister who lives in the projects nearby. Our titi buzzes us up, and when we get off on her floor she’s standing in her doorway, waiting for us to get off the elevator, watching out to ensure we arrive in one piece. 

She closes the door behind us and turns a series of locks before sliding on the safety chain. Then she hugs us and says, “Come on in, kids. How are you?” 

We hug back and respond, “No hablamos inglés,” and our weekly game begins. 

For the rest of our visit she’ll speak only Spanish. It doesn’t matter that we can’t answer, let alone understand. We soak up her words, guess at their meanings, and do our best to follow along. After she sets the table, our titi tells us, “Sientense,” and we take our seats. When she sets the food before us—arroz con pollo, arroz con gandules, arroz con jueyes, arroz con habichuelas, always arroz con something— we say gracias, and she pats our cheeks in approval. Before we take our first bites she says, “Buen Provecho” and makes us repeat the same. We eat our fill of plates piled high with rice as our titi fills our ears with words. We remember please and thank you and I’m sorry and just a handful more— not enough to make a sentence, just enough to not offend. Our titi says these words are the bare necessities and that politeness will take us far. Just before we leave she bends and cries, “¡Besos! ¡Besos!” covers us in kisses, and makes us promise to come again soon. She wants us to give our mother her love, but of course our mother can’t know that we were ever here. 

We sling our book bags across our shoulders and troop out past the kids playing in the courtyard, past the teens leaning on the fences and checking their beepers, past the cars driving by with their booming systems, and past street after street of housing projects on the way to our own. We practice rolling our r’s all the way home. “Arroz,” we say, gagging at the back of our throats, struggling to master the trill. “Arroz. Arroz. Arroz.” We sound like pirates— angry, gargling pirates—but we don’t care. We only have ten blocks to practice. Once we turn up our street, we have to put our words away.  

Still, they slip out when we’re not careful. Hours after we’ve shown off our trove of borrowed books and our mother has checked our homework, she’s at the sink straining the spaghetti for dinner when my brother points to my chair and whispers, “Sientate.” 

“Sientate,” I whisper in response, pointing back at his. As if we’ve rehearsed it for a dance routine, we sit at the same time and scoot ourselves forward. Our mother joins us at the kitchen table, and we link hands and bow our heads and close our eyes to say grace. She squeezes our fingers at the end of the prayer to signal that we can eat. Taking up our forks, we twirl our spaghetti, forget ourselves, and say to each other, “Buen provecho.”

Our mother’s head snaps up. “What was that?” she asks. “What did you say?”

“Nothing,” we lie. 

 “You know I don’t like that kind of talk,” she says. “I don’t want to hear that in my house.”

We hang our heads and squirm under her scrutiny, afraid to meet her eyes. She leaves her food untouched and watches us instead, eyes scanning back and forth between us as we sit quietly and do our best to pretend this whole thing never happened, until she suddenly pushes her plate away and rushes from the table.  

If only we could say that we ran right after her, fast on her heels to apologize for the error of our ways. But even though our titi fed us only hours ago, we are hungry once again. Before we check on our mother, we finish our meals. After we’ve cleaned our plates, we polish off hers. 

Once we’ve eaten everything in sight, we seek her out and find her in her bedroom curled into a ball on top of the comforter, her back to the light shining in from the hallway. We didn’t mean to make her cry. 

“We’re sorry Ma,” we call from the doorway. “We didn’t mean the words we said.”

She flinches when she hears our voices, covers her hands with her ears, and curls her 

body even tighter. “I just don’t want to hear that.” 

We leave our words behind as we kick off our shoes and climb onto her bed and pry our mother apart. We each take a side and surround her, close as mercy, as we uncurl her legs and burrow beneath her arms. We soothe her into silence, patting her shoulders and back to beg pardon, huddling close to make her hush. Drowsy with dinner and the warmth of our mother, we sleep glued to her all night. In the morning she’ll forgive us, and we will put this all behind us. We’ll never speak of this night again. No, we will never say another word. 

Amina Gautier is the author of three short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, and The Loss of All Lost Things. Her stories appear in Agni, Boston Review, Callaloo, Cincinnati Review, Glimmer Train, Gulf Coast, Joyland, Kenyon Review, Latino Book Review, Mississippi Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Quarterly West, Southern Review, and Triquarterly, among other places. She is the recipient of the Eric Hoffer Legacy Fiction Award, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Fiction, and the International Latino Book Award. For her body of work she has received the Blackwell Prize, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, the Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and the PEN/MALAMUD Award for Excellence in the Short Story.

28 January 2022