We The Animals

“And when our father was gone, we wanted to be fathers. We hunted animals. We drudged through the muck of the crick, chasing down bullfrogs and water snakes. We plucked the baby robins from their nest. We liked to feel the beat of tiny hearts, the struggle of tiny wings. We brought their tiny animal faces close to ours.” 

Feeling the absence of Paps, the boys want closeness with other things. However, they don’t know how to be gentle, so they take the baby birds from their own homes and try to be near them. Then, without regard to where they came from, they toss them in a box. Through showing, and not telling, Torres illuminates the cycles of abuse and neglect already instilled in the boys.

“But there were times, quiet moments, when our mother was sleeping, when she hadn’t slept in two days, and any noise, any stair creak, any shut door, any stifled laugh, any voice at all, might wake her, those still, crystal mornings, when we wanted to protect her, this confused goose of a woman, this stumbler, this gusher, with her backaches and headaches and her tired, tired ways, this uprooted Brooklyn creature, this tough talker, always with tears when she told us she loved us, her mixed-up love, her needy love, her warmth […].”

This description of Ma gives the reader an idea of who she is. She works to the point of exhaustion and must sleep for an extended period of time, but it allows the brothers to regroup and enjoy a quiet moment, to silently protect a woman who normally pinballs around her life, feeling many emotions but never coming to rest until she is entirely drained.

“‘This is your heritage,’ he said, as if from this dance we could know about his own childhood, about the flavor and grit of tenement buildings in Spanish Harlem, and projects in Red Hook, and dance halls, and city parks, and about his own Paps, how he beat him, how he taught him to dance, as if we could hear Spanish in his movements, as if Puerto Rico was a man in a bathrobe, grabbing another beer from the fridge and raising it to drink, his head back, still dancing, still stepping and snapping perfectly in time.” 

Paps uses dance to show the boys their Puerto Rican heritage. The narrator goes on to describe Paps’s childhood, the hardships, dancing, and language that the narrator has seemed to glean from other conversations. Paps expects his sons to automatically know his history by watching him mambo. It does give the boys an idea of what Puerto Rico is, or at least enables them to put an image to it. However, the narrator seems skeptical that Paps is correctly demonstrating their heritage, or could do that just with movement.

“I sank down for a long time, disoriented and writhing, and then suddenly I was swimming—kicking my legs and spreading my arms just like Paps had shown me long before, and rising up to the light and exploding into air, and then that first breath, sucking air all the way into my lungs, and when I looked up the sky had never been so vaulted, so sparkling and magnificent.” 

When the narrator is at the lake with his family and Paps lets him go, he begins to drown. Out of necessity he starts to kick, and then he is swimming like he was shown, and it feels natural. He is able to come up to the surface and grab that first breath of air. Everything above the lake seems beautiful, not only because he thought he was going to die, but because the narrator was able to conquer his fear of the depths by literally rising above and learning how to tread water. He is now more independent and capable.

“When we were three together, we spoke in unison, one voice for all, our cave language.” 

The brothers develop their own language that involves using the word “us” and an adjective, such as “us hungry” or “us scared.” This language identifies Manny, Joel, and the narrator as one individual, and also serves to communicate needs or fears. The simplicity and incorrectness of the language also underscores the animalistic nature of the boys.

“Millions of questions. Like how come animals aren’t afraid of the dark? Especially the tiny ones, the bunnies and little birds that are skittish enough during the day—what do they make of the night? How do they understand it? How can they sleep out there, alone? Were the trees and bushes and rabbit holes all filled with ears listening, listening, and eyes never daring to shut? And the other locusts, what’s wrong with them, why do they come last, and what’s left for them to eat?” 

When Joel and Manny begin to fight, Old Man makes them leave and the narrator is left with a bunch of questions that he wants to ask him. He wishes to know why little animals seem to be exempt from fear of the dark: What makes them different from human beings? In this way, the narrator begins to distinguish himself from the more animalistic tendencies of his brothers, as witnessed by not fighting with them and questioning the ways of the larger world. 

“He was somewhere, at some phone, in a phone booth, or sitting on the edge of a someone else’s bed, drunk or sober, and it was loud and hot, or cold, and he was alone, or there were others, but every single ring brought him home, brought him right there before us.” 

When Paps leaves Ma for a time, possibly to have an affair, he eventually tries to get in touch with her. She and the boys are eating a meager dinner of soup and crackers when the phone rings. Somehow, Ma knows it is Paps and won’t let anybody answer. It rings so much that the narrator begins to contemplate what those trills mean. This is another mode by which Torres dehumanizes one of his characters, effectively replacing Paps with a sound akin to a distant animal call. 

“We watched them; they looked each other in the eyes, teasing and laughing; their words were warm and soft, and we snuggled into the gentleness of their conversation. We were all together in the bathroom, in this moment, and nothing was wrong. My brothers and I were clean and fed and not afraid of growing up.” 

After Paps comes home, the whole family spends time in the bathroom, with the boys in the bathtub and Ma and Paps by the mirror. The brothers enjoy taking in the kind, loving way that their parents are acting towards each other. It makes them feel like the future could be better for the family because everything is calm. When they are calm, they are not frightened, and the idea that they might become adults and have to deal with the world that Ma and Paps deal with, a world that is not fair, is overwhelming to the boys. However, when they only feel love around them, they can believe in themselves.

“I joined in, kicking for Paps but hitting Ma; it felt dull and mean and perfect. Then we were all three kicking and slapping at once, and they didn’t say a word, they didn’t even move; the only noise was the noise of skin and impact and breath […].” 

After the bath, the boys pretend to hide, but their parents lose interest, making out instead. The boys punish them by tackling them and protesting being ignored. Though the narrator thinks that Paps will strike back, and that Ma will cry, their parents actually give them free reign to retaliate. It is as if they realize that the boys need a chance to punish them for their negligence, drama, and violence. 

“We were half as ugly, half as dark, half as wild.” 

This is the narrator’s observation in response to the other security guard saying that the brothers are at least better looking than Paps. It gets to something deeper, though, in regard to who they are in relation to Paps. They are half the things that he is because they are literally half of him and half of someone else. However, this quality of being half of something makes them feel lesser and other.

“‘So it’s not our fault?’ Joel asked. ‘Some,’ Manny said. ‘Some’s always ours.’” 

When Paps loses his job because he’s been taking the boys to work with him, the narrator tells them that all of this happened because Paps fell asleep. Joel is relieved that for once the brothers did not cause the issue. Manny pipes in to say that whatever they do or don’t do, some of it is always their fault. This reflects back on Paps, who, whether because of his pride or his personality, cannot accept that anything that happens is totally on him. It also gets to the idea that he blames them because they exist. If Paps didn’t have sons, he would not be in the predicament of having to bring them to work in the first place.

“Her eyes searched, wild and desperate, for something to grab, and for just an instant she looked at us with that same pleading look—she looked to us for help, but we stood there, out of her reach, watching.” 

Here, the narrator and his brothers watch Paps drag Ma upstairs. He thinks at first that she wants to have sex, but the look on her face says that she does not. The fact that she will grab anything in order to stop her forward progress shows that she is not remotely interested. However, Paps does not heed these protests. The narrator wants to do something, but knows that all he can do is watch. This scene most fully shows the brutal patriarchy that innate in the home.

“‘Honestly,’ she finally asked. ‘what should we do?’ She waited. ‘We can go home, but we don’t have to. We don’t ever have to go home again. We can leave him. We can do that. But I need you to tell me what to do.” 

After Paps rapes her, Ma takes the boys to a park. They spend the whole day there. Then she finally asks her children to make a very adult decision. All she gets is silence in return. In this way, we see how Ma, while raising three children, remains a child herself.

“[Ma] was standing at the edge of the hole, smoking and peering down inside. Then she stepped in and disappeared from view; she lay herself down in that hole, and not more than a minute later, the sky cracked, and the rain dropped down—pouring rain, sheets of it sliding down the window like at the car wash.” 

Ma is curious about the hole and also frustrated with Paps, who has failed to pick her up from work. The boys notice that she has come home drunk and angry. This aggravation is channeled into a desire to disappear from her responsibilities and trials. Ma goes into the hole, and immediately it begins to rain. Though she is being drenched in mud, the downpour acts like catharsis, washing away her pain and anger, as well as calming her down.

“It was a grave. It was my grave. Paps had dug my grave. Those were my first thoughts, and when I was fully horizontal, half submerged in puddle muck, stories about people being buried alive rushed into my mind—avalanches, mudslides, suffocation—but I had a wish, and so I stayed to wish it.” 

Here, the narrator experiences the trench. He feels like the hole is a grave that has been dug specifically for him, and fear of actually being buried alive begins to seep into his mind. However, there is also something about this trench that seems magical. This magical quality gives the narrator the idea that perhaps if he makes a wish it will be granted. This wish is never revealed, but whatever it is, he wants it to come true so badly he will remain in his own grave for just a bit longer.

“Manny was always saying all kinds of crazy shit, most of it to me, because Joel had a way of closing himself off from crazy, but I couldn’t figure out how to stop from hearing his words and howls, how to look away.” 

When Paps catches the boys camping in the clearing, he beats Manny. Manny calls Paps a murderer, and the narrator cannot shrug it off. Joel is better at letting the pleas and emotions of others bounce off of him, but the narrator is more compassionate and emphatic. This depth of feeling makes it difficult for him to separate himself from his brother’s pain.

“After a while Manny started up again, talking to himself, plotting, saying, ‘What we gotta do is, we gotta figure out a way to reverse gravity, so that we all fall upward, through the clouds and sky, all the way to heaven, and as he said the words, the picture formed in my mind: my brothers and me, flailing our arms, rising, the world telescoping away, falling up past the stars, through space and blackness, floating upward, until we were safe as seed wrapped up in the fist of God.” 

Though the brothers react slightly differently to their difficult lives—Manny has his cryptic language and his rules, Joel is always picking fights with Manny, and the narrator is constantly afraid and contemplating death—all of them want to go somewhere else where life is easier. For Manny, this is heaven. The narrator likes the idea, as it functions as a mode of escapism. 

“We still ran thick; Manny up front, making rules, and Joel to break all of them, and me keeping the peace as best I could, which sometimes meant nothing more than falling down to my knees and covering my head with my arms and letting them swing and cuss until they got tired, or bored, or remorseful. They called me a faggot, a pest, left me black and blue, but they were gentler with me than they were with each other. And everyone in the neighborhood knew: they’d bleed for me, my brothers, had bled for me.” 

Each brother has his role, but as they get older there becomes more separation between them. The narrator is the youngest, and gets beat up; his gentleness makes him more of a target. However, they do go a little easier on him because he is smaller and younger. He is also their brother, and they would never let anyone in the neighborhood hurt him. He is a part of their pack, and therefore they have to protect him. 

“And, too, we had seen each other’s bodies—all of us, me and Manny and Joel, Ma and Paps—we had seen one another beaten, animal bleating in pain, hysterical, and now drugged, and now drunk and glazed, and naked, and joyous, heard high laughter, squeals and tears, and we had seen each other proud, empty proud, spite proud, and also trampled, also despised.” 

As the narrator watches the gay porn video in their neighbor’s basement, he thinks of other types of vulnerability. He has seen his family naked in every way, both literally and figuratively. Yet the way that he has seen them is so different from what he sees in the video, which is just sex without love or connection. Even the myriad ways that he knows his family do not prepare him for the staged display of disconnected gay sex that he sees in the video. This makes the narrator realize that there are numerous forms of intimacy.

“I wanted my body in all that swiftness; I wanted to feel the slip and pull of the currents and be dashed and pummeled on the rocks below, and I wanted him to let me go and to die.” 

When Paps holds the narrator out over the railing so he can see more of Niagara Falls, the narrator is mesmerized. To him, the ripples in the water represent countless lives. He wants to be a part of this cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. He also wants to be immersed in a powerful force that is much greater than he is; in doing so, he will cease to feel pain.

“Later still, they’ll realize that those boys are actually nothing like them at all. Who knows this mutt life, this race mixing? Who knows Paps? All these other boys, the white trash out here, they have legacies, decades upon decades of poverty and violence and bloodlines they can trace like a scar; and these are their creeks, their hills, their goodness. Their grandfathers poured the cement of this loading dock. And downstate, in Brooklyn, the Puerto Ricans have language, they have language.” 

The narrator notes the differences between himself and his brothers. They want to be friends with the other young men in the town, but they are not like the boys who know nothing about what it means to have a diverse racial background. Those young men have a history in their town. The boys’ history is at least partially elsewhere. Manny and Joel want to be like an average poor white kid; in some ways, they seem to achieve this, while in other ways, they’ll always be different.

“Secretly, outside of the family, I cultivated a facility with language and a bitter spite. I kept a journal—in it, I sharpened insults against all of them, my folks, my brothers. I turned new eyes to them, a newly caustic gaze. I sensed a keen power of observation in myself, an intelligence, but sour.”

Now that he’s older, the narrator looks on his brothers with pity because he feels they will never be great men. He wants to be a thoughtful intelligent person who will leave town and amount to something. The narrator is building a different persona for himself but in doing so, he uses his journal to say nasty things about his family. At this stage, he can only be better than them by illuminating all of the things they are not.

“At first they defended themselves, cursed me, slapped my face, but the wilder I became, the more they retreated into their love for me. Each of them. I chased them down into that love and challenged it—you morons, you sick fucks, I bet you liked reading it, I bet it excited you.” 

When Ma finds the narrator’s journal, he reacts with unprecedented violence. However, his unexpected reaction makes his family love him. The narrator doesn’t feel deserving of this love. If he has to start anew, he must strip away everything old, all the things that kept him in his old life. Also, if they still love him at the end of the physical and verbal beating he is giving them, perhaps they can prove that their love is truly unconditional and doesn’t discriminate.