Mangos: A Memoir

“A mango is sweetest when it’s ready to fall”, said Abuela as we watched tia Constancia furiously shaking the branches of our mango tree with a broomstick. A hard unripened mango fell and hit the ground, like a rock. Tia Constancia picked it up, cleaned the gooey sap bleeding from the stem with her skirt and stuffed it into a paper bag. “Ay dios mio, she is never going to learn, this is why she doesn’t have a husband,” Abuela said as she stroked my hair. She bent over and looked into my eyes, her eyes were yellow like the sun. “Don’t do as your aunt, forcing a mango to ripen, it gives the mango a different taste, like milk that you can taste is ready to spoil, have patience my love, and have patience, because men are the same way.”

Abuela was a wise woman. A woman's wisdom was often measured by the length of her hair and her hair was as long as a river, her skin the color of  earth. I’d spend most of my afternoons with her while my mother and father worked.  She taught me many things, like giving all living beings a name and how to listen to sound of nature through different mediums.

I had given our mango tree a name, her name was Manzanita or little apple. Apples were rare where we lived, one of the few fruits we had to buy from a market a couple towns away. I wanted our mango tree to have a special name, so I named her after a special fruit.

Manzanita was majestic. She sat at the entrance of our dirt driveway and her beautifully colored mangos glowed against her dark hunter green leaves and the cerulean sky that peaked through her branches. She sat right at the edge of the mountain on which we lived. Climbing her was dangerous; one wrong step and you would be tumbling down the side of the mountain. Surely you would break bones on the steep virgin terrain. But if you climbed her, the view from atop her thick branches gave you an aerial view of the entire city of Utuado. She could see everything.

Abuela told me Manzanita had witnessed the change of the wilderness turn into towns. She was older than Abuela and had seen more than she had. Abuela would say that if she had hair it would be so long that it would flow straight down into the towns below; a river of hair full of knowledge about life, death and transformations. Manzanita had already birthed her first mango when Abuela and Abuelo escaped into the mountains after the slaves in Arecibo were freed.  

Every day, before it rained, I would sit under Manzanita with Abuela and we watched as the rain would fall in the valley. I loved watching the clouds approach as they enlivened the sky with thunderbolts and pounded the air with roars of thunder. Abuela taught me to rest my hands on Manzanita’s unearthed roots and feel the sound of the thunder vibrate through her meaty bark, to feel how she experienced the sounds that approached her. Abuela would remind me that Manzanita could experience pain, just I like could and that beating it with a broomstick like tia Constancia was a sin. That it was best to pick a mango that had already fallen from the tree.

"You have to let it decide when it's ready." Abuela would remind me. 

In the mornings I’d go with Abuela to make her rounds, picking coffee beans, bananas and mangos. She'd wake up so early the night’s breeze had not yet died. The heat of the sun warmed the exposed skin of your feet but the cool breath of night kissed the soles. I walked barefoot. I detested shoes. I liked feeling the cold beads of water ornamenting the grass burst underneath my feet.

On those mornings, I'd watch Abuela sort through the squishy, leaky, rotting mangos on the ground. Sometimes I would be disgusted, but she would remind me this was the only way to find the best mango. I remember looking up at the handsome mangos above me and hoped that one would fall into my hands.  Abuela caught me and smiling she asked “Is that the mango you want?” I embarrassedly nodded yes. “Wait for it” she said “and when you grow up remember that men are like mangos, they are always sweeter when they are ready to fall, and if you catch him before he hits the ground, he’ll be everything you hoped for."

A strong wind blew, and into my hands the mango fell. Abuela laughed. "You see, let's go inside and peel it." We walked into the kitchen where tia Constancia's mangos sat on the windowsill. Flies were swarming our kitchen following the smell of the rotting fruits. Abuela, threw them outside and grabbed a knife and sat on floor of the porch off the kitchen. She sat me next to her and sliced through my ripened and tender mango, feeding me pieces of the mango as she cut through it. I sank my teeth into the slices and let the sweet juices run down my face and neck. It was the best mango I had ever tasted. 

I must have been five-years old at the time, but it was a lesson I never forgot. 

And as I discovered once my mother abandoned the tiny little mountain countryside and moved to a big American city, I had to learn to turn the wisdom in Abuela’s stories to fit new social rules and cultural attitudes.