Our Glorious Gobe

It’s not a jackhammer; it’s actually a tractor with a super-sized jackhammer attached. And it’s right outside my apartment, making enough noise that I cannot hear loud music played at full volume on my iPod.

The purpose? The jackhammer is drilling 6-inch diameter holes in the pavement of the street. After the street has been completely pockmarked, another tractor will come, scoop up the asphalt, and dump it into a truck. Then, the street will be remade in brick.

Why? Well, parts of San Juan have the famous iridescent blue adoquines or cobblestones. Here—have a look….

Very beautiful, very slippery when wet. So the mayor, or rather ex-mayor, decided to make all the streets in Old San Juan adoquined.

The problem? The real adoquines got their lustrous shiny blue because of slag put in the ballast of ships transporting goods to the island. Now, however, there is either no slag, or there are no ships—I’ve no idea which. And anyway, the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, which defends greatly the patrimony of Old San Juan, would never allow anything new which looked old. Anything new has to look new—see? Otherwise a new thing could be mistaken for an old thing and that would be very, very bad.

The solution, therefore, is to pave the street with a dullish, blue-gray brick—which very quickly becomes stained with whatever fluids cars leak—and that means removing the asphalt and preparing the ground to receive the bricks.

And does anyone need the streets to be brick, you ask?

Of course not. The city doesn’t have a library, much less a zoo. There are very few parks, and those that exist tend to be vacant and disheveled. That means that the only thing a parent with a child can do in San Juan is

1.     go to the movies

2.     go to the mall

The point of this all, then, is not to beautify a city already very beautiful but to spend some federal funds, employ some people, and do something visible in a visible place.

Oh, and speaking of money—everybody wants to know: what happened to the billion dollars that were earmarked for the special communities fund, set up by the redoubtable Sila Calderón? Yes, she was our very first lady governor—evil tongues dubbed her “the governess”—and she was a tigress in championing her special communities.

Yes, these derelict communities of (usually) squatters needed all the help they could get—the roads were unpaved, water and electricity spotty, no recreation fields or basketball courts or baseball diamonds. So Sila stepped into the picture, or rather into one particularly down-at-the-heels community, Barrio Obrero, or the Workers Neighborhood. And speaking of heels, there Sila was, wearing her trademark canary yellow dress with Armani shoes to match, tittering on a plank of plywood stretched over a sea of mud; her eyes narrow with terror, her mouth clenched in a smile. Once in the house, she demonstrated the presence of water in the new kitchen sink by washing dishes—something she had never done before, since her father sold virtually all the ice cream on the island for decades; the lady is loaded. But dishes she did, as a large and very black woman—presumably the missis of the house—stood by and watched in puzzlement.

Well, I was once asked what exactly Sila built with that billion dollars, and wanting to be truthful, I responded—signs. Yes, signs that got put up next to the basketball court with no baskets or the community center with the broken out windows, and which remained there for four years, resting in glorious silence as residents of the special community strolled past with their midday beers.

So—where did the money go? Well, Sila harbors dark thoughts about her successor, a man from her own party who would go on to be hauled into Federal court for various shades of fraud. Oh, and then there was the next governor, of the opposite party—so he’s a likely suspect as well. So now the new governor—of Sila’s political ilk and so to be trusted—is gonna investigate, since the money is gone and the neighborhoods continue special, instead of ordinary.

But here’s the great part. Is La Gobe, as disrespectful tongues dubbed her, content to sit back and let the current governor conduct the investigation? Not she! She’s gonna start her own investigation—to be absolutely sure that there’s no trickery, no chicanery, no playing footsy with the truth.

Well, well—she’s a powerhouse, our Sila. And no, it’s not true that her disappearance for a month after winning the election—time lesser individuals spend thinking about their cabinet choices—was spent recovering from a facelift.

Some people naturally have their eyebrows tickling their ears….

Sort of looks Chinese, doesn’t she? And no, she doesn’t go to the same hairdresser as Ronald MacDonald….

Two ladies, and one very much not....

OK—today’s post is a double feature.

Let’s get the ridiculous part over with first.

Readers of this blog will remember Ofelia, once a boss, always a friend. She operates an important language school (she bristled when I once wrote “a very good little language school”…) and has a quality that is fast disappearing.

Graciousness.

It used to be cultivated, aspired to, worked for. It now languishes with those other arts: needlework, playing the piano, writing thank-you notes.

That’s half of what you need to know about Ofelia.

She’s a whiz of a teacher.

Much better than I, actually. She’s una maestra de corazón (literally, a teacher of the heart—figuratively, a born teacher) unlike me. It’s just a thing I do.

Now then, enter the other character, La Comay. This would be the lady very much not-a-lady.

Not even a woman….

A drag queen, in fact, whose real name is “Kobbo” Santarrosa. And every day, he gets all gussied up in a dress and high heels and finally a cabezudo. That’s a big foam head.

Here the story get murky. There is something to like about La Comay. His show opens with a candle in front of little Lorenzo—the kid who saw too much, which cost him his life. La Comay isn’t gonna give up until that murderer is brought to justice.

The other hand?

Easier just to tell the story.

We were in the doctor’s office, Ofelia  and I, and the room was predictably crammed. Just as predictably, there was a television, on at the usual 900 decibels. The show came on.

This was during the hapless reign of our governor (or governess, as some called her) Sila María Calderón. She was our first and only female governor—we haven’t repeated the experiment.

And she entered into office a married lady, then became a divorcee, and then—feeling perhaps very gay (in its first meaning)—decided to date!

Well, the island was on its ears! Sila had a boyfriend! And not just any boyfriend, but one of her cabinet ministers, a guy named Ramón Cantero-Frau. (Mr. Fernández, who loathed him, immediately took to calling him Cantero Fraud….)

Well, this is an island where people have to know! This is the land of the presenta’o! (Literally, presented / figuratively, nosy) We take a generous interest in our neighbors, and look—ya gotta talk about something, right?

Cantero Frau’s car pulls up to the governor’s mansion. Instantly, swarms of journalists are waiting for hours. Will he spend the night? Are they doing it in the gubernatorial equivalent of the Oval Office? Oh, the delicious wickedness of it all. Don’t tell me!

Yes, do….

All right, so now you have all the elements. And you will have guessed that La Comay, seeing the entire island jump on this boat is not gonna be anywhere else.

And it’s the day after the First Couple goes to the movies! Yeah, there they were, Sila and Cantero Frau, right at the Fine Arts Cinema!

And La Comay that day was especially merciless. His parody of the scene—Sila was eating popcorn and spitting out the kernels; Cantero Frau, of course, was trying to get into her pants—had everybody in stitches.

But one.

She stood, that teacher, and immediately took charge of the classroom. She used a word I didn’t know but recognized immediately—vulgar. She stated that she had every confidence that NO ONE in the room was enjoying the show and so would take the liberty of turning off the television.

This she did, in a room with more silence than I’ve ever heard in Puerto Rico.

An awesome performance.

As was the performance this morning of the music the iPod chose to give me.

Marian Anderson singing the Alto Rhapsody.

It’s almost sad that the one thing people remember about her—if they know anything at all—is the famous concert at the Lincoln Memorial. It’s so compelling that it crowds out what was really a remarkable life.

Here’s how I remember her.

I know the story, but I don’t know who it was. Furtwängler? Toscanini? Von Karajan? It was, at any rate, one of the great conductors being hounded out of Germany by the nazis (no—no caps, computer! Not for them, and not in these  times…). Right, so what was his response?

He conducts his last performance for the music-loving Germans. And brings out Marian Anderson—as black as the keys on my keyboard—to sing for the Aryans. They conclude the concert with the Alto Rhaphsody, receive a standing ovation, and leave the stage, arm in arm.

This would be termed having the last word.

Oh, and one other thing about Anderson.

Two, actually…

She was a complete lady—once sweeping the stage before her concert, always gracious, always in control.

She had an amazing voice and sang with her brain.

Don’t think so?

Here’s Jessye Norman….

Marian Anderson was a woman of such quality, compassion and modesty that her humanitarian efforts alone would warrant our adulation. But she was also blessed with a matchless voice - a voice with so much warmth, richness and mobility that Arturo Toscanini was moved to call it a voice "heard once in a hundred years."

Marian Anderson, 1965.
Credit: The New York Times.

I became acquainted with this glorious sound at about age 10, through a recording of Brahms's Alto Rhapsody, and was so overwhelmed I wept, not really understanding why. When I was 16, in the early 1960's, I traveled by train from Augusta, Ga., to Philadelphia to participate in the Marian Anderson Voice Competition. I was so young and thrilled at being there that I was unaware that perhaps I should have been anxious as well. I did not win a prize, but the gentleness and warmth of that experience remain with me to this day.

It was in Constitution Hall in Washington that I first heard Miss Anderson in person, in 1965. Her voice filled the vast space easily, whether singing Schubert at full strength or "Deep River" with a profound hush. She was queenly in her every gesture. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to permit her to perform in this hall on racial grounds. Eleanor Roosevelt broke ranks with her fellow D.A.R. members and helped arrange a concert at the Lincoln Memorial, a historic event that has been called America's first civil rights rally.

Miss Anderson and I both attended a Metropolitan Opera performance of "Les Troyens" in 1973, when I was privileged to meet her for the first time. She recalled having sung in Augusta some 20 years before, and I was happy to tell her that the city still thought of her visit not only as a watershed but also as a blessing. On the occasions when we were able to sit and talk, I found her interest in me flattering, but I preferred listening to her speak about herself. How could she show the world such poise when she was faced with touring a segregated United States? How could she not take exception to her exclusion from the Met until late in her career? How could she be so deeply spiritual without being at all sanctimonious?

She wore the glorious crown of her voice with the grace of an empress and changed the lives of many through the subtle force of her spirit and demeanor. If the planet Earth could sing, I think it would sound something like Marian Anderson.


Jessye Norman is an opera and concert singer.