What was
the result? Well, we now have a bricked road, vaguely reminiscent of the famous
blue adoquines that pave the rest of
the old city. When the street was finished, I breathed a sigh of relief, and
concluded that the affair was over, that there were no new ways to confound my
life.
Ah,
innocence!
I hadn’t
noticed, you see, that while the street was done, the corner was not—so that meant that that
had to be ripped up, that the asphalt had to be dropped, the generators ignited,
the greetings shouted. Oh, and there’s a problem—funny how often there is,
somebody should really look into it—because while we are nearing completion of
the corner to my right, the corner to my left? It still has that dreadful
asphalt.
We do many
things well in Puerto Rico, but silence? We shatter it, we slaughter it, we
massacre it. An example: Puerto Rican children are routinely taken to Old San
Juan, to see the adoquines, to look at the colonial architecture, and to scream
slogans, such as “Yo soy boricua, ¡pa’ que tú lo sepas!” (Roughly, “I’m
Puerto Rican, so that you know it!?”)
This is
done at the urging of their teachers.
OK—it was
hot, it was loud, and how could I write? I was driven to find an alternative, a
place where they would feed me, know my name, and let me watch the characters
come and go. There is, for example, Elizabeth, who is mopping the floor of the
gift shop she minds on the other side of the café, and whose two children drift
in from school around three PM and sleep on the couches or play video games.
Then there’s Naïa, who…well, why not check in with her?
“Naïa, are
your dragons behaving themselves?”
“Yes,” she
replies, from around the corner, where she is sitting making a virtual zoo,
which, at the moment, is animal-less.
“All except
Screaming Death….”
“So what
did he do,” I ask.
“Almost ate
a baby dragon…”
She then
goes on to show me the dragon that is currently accompanying her, as she
munches on pretzel sticks. Called “Toothless,” after a character in How toTrain Your Dragon—“it’s
a really good movie,” reports Naïa,—it in fact does have teeth. But the coolest
thing is that it also opens its mouth and ejects smoke.
People
can’t do it—at least in the café—but the dragon can. Is that fair? I point this
out to Naïa, who gives me a disgusted look.
Well, not
really—we move past disgust and into is-he-being-stupid-again, the
answer to which is so often “yes.” She returns to the infinitely more
interesting world of the virtual zoo.
There’s a
woman—probably homeless—who is snoozing in a chair in the gift shop’s open-mic
area next door. Why do I think she’s homeless? Well, do you walk around
with a backpack stuffed with clothes?
There’s
Jorge, the manager of the café, of whom I keep waiting to see: will he ever
lose his cool? In the year plus that I’ve been here, he never has. I did get
the report, though, that he’s capable of it, since the café, during the mayhem
that is the San
Sebastián Street Festival, was the object of a dog-knapping. Yup, somebody
stole the toy Chihuahua, Lorca, and it was only via the intervention of a
customer who spotted Lorca, grabbed him, and brought him back, that we have
Lorca today.
“And can
you believe the dog-knappers had the gall to insist that Lorca was their
dog! That’s when Jorge flew into a fit, and cursed the people in both English
and Spanish. He nearly got into a fist fight….”
So reported
Lady, the prevailing muse of the place. She comes in and the kissing begins,
since she knows everyone and if she doesn’t she soon will, so why not start out
on the right foot and give a stranger a kiss? Because of this, she enjoys
robust good health, having fortified her immune system by night and day
mingling with the microbial world. So she never gets sick, and everybody is her
friend.
“I don’t
have a college degree, but I have the Poet’s
Passage,” she reports. In her early forties, she’s a poet, though she’s
decided that seven is enough: she’s not doing any more. She married a
Frenchman, who came over to do a project for his MBA program, and who stayed to
fall in love, marry, and paint. That, for a Frenchman, seems more fitting than
an MBA program.
“In the
early days, we were so poor that we were eating—sharing, actually—a can of Chef
Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs,” she once told me. Surprising, Naïa was born
with no genetic abnormalities, unless preferring dragons to Barbie counts as
one.
“And when
we were looking to buy the building, I gathered all the facts and went down to
the bank. And there were all these men in suits, and there was me—a poet,
answering all their questions. There’s money in poetry….”
Well, the
bank went bust a couple years ago (not quite that dramatically—at the insistence
of the FDIC, it was “bought” by another bank, but the whole thing fooled
nobody). But the Poet’s Passage? Still here!
“Sunshine,
what would happen if I stole a cookie?” I ask. Yes, his name is Sunshine—why
shouldn’t it be? Do we all have to be Toms and Bills?—and yes, he agreed to
look the other way.
It was
better as a kid, or maybe it was better when it was more illicit….
“Are you
going to play today?” asks Omar. Probably I will, since at about five every
day, I start thinking about scotch, which I’m trying not to do. So playing Bach
Suites on the cello is a nice alternative. What I need to do now is start
playing later and later. I might have a chance at sobriety at last. People come
by and throw money in my cello case, and I donate it
to four charities in the Third World.
And in the
year or so that I’ve worked here, well…what have I created? A blog with 585
posts and over 43,000 page-views.
That’s a
year’s work? Shouldn’t I have written the great American novel, or a scholarly
treatise on the enriching effect of the Caribbean literary tradition on
mainstream American literature? What’s a blog?
The
electronic version of a newspaper, and where’s yesterday’s newspaper? Very
likely in a corner, under your new puppy….
So I looked
back. Was there anything there? Could I put the best of what I had written into
a book? Something I could hold, and maybe—wow!—sell. The New York Times, of course, would rave—a major literary
voice has been found!—and I would have stalkers, all of whom, of course, I
would ignore.
(Time out
for an interruption. Sunshine has just informed me that El Barco de Vapor—the Steam Boat—is giving 12,000 bucks to
anyone who wins the first prize in the children’s book competition.
I instantly remember Naïa.
“Hey, can I
use your dragon to power a steam boat?”
“Marc, it’s
a toy dragon….”
Ohhhh….)
Now where
was I?
Oh yes, a
book, which will give me something to do (besides honest work). But is there
anything there?
You
decide….
