She laughed, too, as they sat on a couple of the barstools. A woman came out of the restroom, uttering apologies in Spanish, rushing to her place behind the bar and immediately pouring out a rum, neat, for Matteo and a small foam bowl of peanuts for them to share.
“To answer your first question, believe me, they have been trying for years to get Sylvia to sell, and she won’t budge. Isn’t that right, Sylvia?”
Sylvia winked at him. “Oye, Matteo, it isn’t mine to sell. This place is for the community, isn’t that what you always say?” She turned to Olga. “And what can I get you, mami?”
“Same for me is good.”
She poured her a glass, and Olga took a sip.
“Wow!” she said. The rum was smooth and rich with spice.
“Sí, ?verdad?” Sylvia’s raised her eyebrows. “This is the good stuff. They don’t even sell this here; you can only get it on the island. I always keep a bottle here, just for him.” She patted Matteo’s hand.
“To answer your second question,” Matteo continued, “Sylvia’s all aboveboard, aren’t you, se?ora? It was too risky with all those developers lurking around.”
“Ay, Matteo.” Sylvia swatted her dish towel at him playfully. “You’re making an honest woman out of me! I’ll be in the back, but holler if you need me, honey.”
She was in her late sixties, Olga figured. The skin around her ample décolletage—the same golden brown as the rum they sipped—had begun to crepe and was adorned with several gold necklaces and religious medallions. She wore shorts a bit too short for her age and wedge sandals that elongated her very shapely legs. Her hair, a shade of dark blond that matched her jewelry, was pulled up into a soft bouffant, large gold hoops showing off her long neck. She was, Olga thought, beautiful.
“Is she flirting with you?” Olga whispered when she was sure Sylvia had sauntered away.
“Is that jealousy in your voice?”
“Jealous? Please! Not every Latina is the jealous type, you know.”
“And certainly not you, ye with the New England ice in her veins.”
She laughed. “What do you have against New England? If I’m not mistaken, you went to school there, too.”
“Exactly, and that’s why I know of what I speak. They have a very specific way of letting you know what they think, without exactly saying it, if you know what I mean.”
“Well that’s definitely true, but how is that not just tact?” Olga asked.
“Because tact is, by definition, meant to spare people’s feelings and New England is designed to make you feel like an outsider. I mean, didn’t you?”
“Feel like an outsider? Hmm. There’s this myth that white Americans don’t have a culture, but they absolutely do, and New England is the cradle of it. So, I felt a bit like an anthropologist.”
“So, that said…” Matteo took another sip of his drink. “I have to ask. How did your parents feel about your … anthropological studies of the white elite?”
She felt her cheeks redden with anxiety at the direction this conversation was taking. As if he knew what she was thinking, Matteo continued.
“Don’t worry, I wasn’t going through your drawers or anything.” He put his hand on her knee and gave it a squeeze. “All I did was look at the stuff that was out in the open. You can’t be mad at a brother for being observant. Well, maybe you could be, but generally, it’s not socially acceptable grounds for anger.”
She exhaled and took another sip of her drink.
“Okay. Fine. Hit me. Ask what you really want to ask.”
“Well, I guess I did. But I can get more specific. It appears, based on that photo you keep out on top of your desk, that your parents were members of the Young Lords Party—one of, if not the singular, large-scale paramilitary pro-socialist Puerto Rican political protest organizations in American history. The Puerto Rican equivalent of Black Panthers. They were dedicated to toppling a capitalist, racist society, bringing social and environmental justice to inner-city minorities, and, of course, liberating Puerto Rico. And now, you, their daughter, seem to have found a way to make a living—a living that, despite the shoddy construction of your apartment building, seems pretty lucrative, if I may be so observant, but, if I may further observe, is a living reliant upon embracing the very people and values that your parents were trying to topple less than a generation before. So, my question is, how do your parents feel about that?”