FICTION

ELDORADO IN EAST HARLEM by Victor Rodriguez (Arte Publico Press: $9.50 paper; 160 pp.). “When I was a senorita in Puerto Rico,” Amanda Gomez tells her son and only child, 17-year-old Rene, “being a teen-ager was no big deal. In fact, it was somethin’ we wanted to get over with fast so we could be adults, real people.” Yet it is a big deal to Rene, for in East Harlem in 1960, adulthood seems something to be forever delayed, bringing with it little but poverty, unemployment and envy of those with money. Not that Rene enjoys being a teen-ager; far from it: He does little but sleep and hang out in the neighborhood, having been led to believe by his mother and others that “I always do what’s wrong.” Three things change Rene’s life, however: He develops a friendship with Silas Turnvil, the book-binding shamas of the local synagogue; he finds love (or at least sex) with Luz, his mother’s best friend, and he becomes an errand boy for his mother’s new Merchant Marine boyfriend, the two-faced Fernando Fuentes. Rene is pulled in various directions, but Fuentes’ pull proves strongest because the sailor, having caught the boy stealing from him, has forced Rene further into crime. The subplots come together when Fuentes organizes an attempt to rob Turnvil’s temple, after which he betrays his supposed friendship for both Rene and his mother, leaving Rene wiser if no better off. “Eldorado in East Harlem” is a lively, credible evocation of one family’s life in the barrio, caught between nostalgia for Puerto Rico and dreams of making it big on the mainland.