More waiting….

Well, it troubled my day and vexed my night, that question of mine. So I asked Mr. Fernández at the dinner table.

“Where are the readers? I wrote a post today and left myself stranded on the side of the road, waiting for a público that might never come. And then I sat down with my cell phone in hand, expecting the calls of concern to come flooding in. And guess what! Not one! Nobody, but nobody, called.”

Mr. Fernández was patient, he frequently is. He explained that readers—more intelligent than I—would assume that if I were posting blogs (or blogging posts, don’t know which), I must have found my way to safety, or at least Wi-Fi.

Oh.

Well, the Remeron may not fully have kicked in. Or maybe it was just remembered dread. Let me explain. Getting off the island of Culebra was a breeze. For 2.75$ I got a ferry ticket, and sat in wonderful comfort and watched the ocean drift by. Culebra does that to you—puts you in such an alpha state that whitecaps become compellingly interesting.

Landing in Fajardo smashed all that!

Here’s the deal. The públicos are supposed to be just that—public. They’re not taxis, which are private. However, there are no taxis—just públicos. So guess what! There were all these públicos and about six of us who were not parked 500 hundred feet away. Right—six of us, five of whom saw the logic of paying ten dollars for a now-non-public público for a private ride to wherever they were going.

Guess who didn’t see that logic! And who, in the blazing heat of Fajardo Playa, forgot the words he had written: “arguing with a chofer is like arguing with a cat.”

Well, I was rescued, as I always am, by an old man who took pity on a ridiculous man and told me he would take me wherever…

…free!

The universe provides—though on its own timeframe.  

So I was sitting in comfort and listening to two other gringos practicing their Spanish and then I turned and saw it—a público marked Farjado to Río Piedras! Just what I wanted, I told my driver / friend / rescuer. 

No, that was Indio, and he’s going home for the day.

But then he saw another público. And that was the one for me.

But it was just going to Río Grande.

And that, Intelligent Readers, is how I came to be stuck in Big River.

Waiting on Highway 3—well, beside Highway 3—for a público that might never come.

Fortunately, I had company. The guy had lived in New Jersey for nine years and loved it. It was clean! It was orderly! You had a broken light on your car? Well, get ready, ‘cause the first cop you meet is gonna pull you over, take your license, and you’ll be at the station, next day, with your car repaired and your license back in your wallet! But here! Look at that car!

OK, it was more duct tape than car, but the guy driving it?

Wow!

And what about the status issue! Do you think this referendum is going to settle that? What do you think!

Puerto Rican readers will know, and will have tensed. Others won’t. Here it is: a group of Puerto Ricans favor statehood, a group favors independence, a group favors something called the Free Associated State, our current status.

This had puzzled me, those twenty years ago when I came unSpanished (I see you, you little red squiggly line, but I like it, it stays!) to the island. But even I could figure out Estado Libre Asociado.

But what did it mean?

“IT’S A LIE, A VICIOUS LIE!” screamed Mr. Fernández over the dinner table. I became alarmed—I had never seen him violent before. I removed trajectables (sorry, computer!) from reach.

Then I figured it out. The status issue had to be somewhere close-by.

“You’re a cultural genocidalist,” said Harry’s father to me, years ago. “It’s nothing personal. But your country has practiced genocide on my country. You therefore are responsible. And though I have nothing against you, I have to tell you that you are personally and individually responsible for the great wrong that has been done to my country.”

He was quite calm, but it seemed best to agree.

And he taught me a great lesson, which I—added value, as we used to say in Wal-Mart—will now teach you.

You are paying attention, right?

Never talk status.

The trick is to inquire what your interlocutor thinks, and then nod your head, appear thoughtful, and agree.

Were I in a classroom, I would have you practicing—it’s conversation / conversación 101.

Right, wow, good point / claro, estoy de acuerdo; muy buen punto.

“The whole thing is ridiculous,” my buddy of the bus stop was saying. Look around you—Walgreens, Sears, Wal-Mart! Statehood is already here!”

And then, we spotted the público. Instantly, we dropped the question and stood jumping by the road and flailing our arms—they were still sore the next day.

But relax, gentle reader. It slowed, we opened the door, we plunged our bodies through to our seats.

You can sleep easily tonight—I was rescued.

Waiting in Big River

Well, it was the moment I had been expecting, or maybe fearing. I was on the side of the road just outside Río Grande, waiting for a público.

I had decided to do it. Get out of the house. Get onto the island. See something else, talk to other people, look outward, not inward.

It is a solitary business, after all, this writing thing. In New York, there are places where writers, poets, artists get together to work alone but with other people nearby. And they hang in the kitchen, drinking coffee, talking about their projects.

And I see why. So here was the challenge—how many of the island’s municipalities could I see by public transportation? And what would I see, what would I find there? And why do it?

Well, maybe just because. And maybe because there’s a whole subset of Puerto Rican culture out there that no one listens to. Or writes about. Or maybe it was just for that best of all reasons…

…just for the hell of it!

Well, Sonia thought it was a good idea, when I explained the project.

“I think Puerto Ricans may be very stratified,” I said, fearing she would sniff criticism.

“Yeah? BOOKS have been written on the topic!” she cried.

And then went on to tell me her público story. 

It was early in the morning, she was on the way to work. Behind her, a middle-aged man was whispering his sad story to another.

“Papi died last week.”

“Ay,¡que lástima!” Wow, that’s a shame.

“Sí, but that’s not the worst of it.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“It was me. I was responsible. Listen, I killed my own father!”

“Listen, that’s crazy. I’m sure you’re just feeling guilty. Everybody feels that, after someone they love dies. Don’t worry, I know you were a good son.”

“No listen, you don’t get it. I’m not feeling guilty, I killed my own father, really killed him!”

Sonia, you remember, can’t see these guys, and also, well, can’t help but hone in on this radio show.

Be honest—could you?

“Look, whatever you did, I’m sure it was with a loving heart.”

“That was the problem. I couldn’t say no. He begged and begged me, even though the doctor told him—one drop of alcohol and you’ll die. But he’d been guzzling the Palo Viejo for years. He was going crazy. He pleaded and pleaded with me.”

Sonia is imagining the scene—the old man sitting on an ancient sofa; the sacred heart of Jesus, immediately above his head; the ceiling fan barely stirring the dust of the hot, humid room. The son, anguishing.

“So?”

“So I went to the colmadito and got him a caneca.”

A flask of Palo Viejo rum….

“No,” breathed the other man.

Sonia sees the old man’s gnarled hands, twisting off the cap in desperation, rushing the flask to the parched lips, spilling the rum on his guayabera on the way.

“So what happened?”

“It was terrible! Papi took the flask, drank the whole thing in one gulp, and…”

“Yeah?”

“Fell down dead on the floor!”     

You can imagine the silence in the público…..

But it gets better!

“Wow—that’s terrible, just terrible. And how many years did Papi have?”

Ready?

“One hundred and three.”

Sonia is holding her breath, trying not to burst out in guffaws….

The other guy?

Goes on just the same as ever!

“Wow, qué trágico! That’s a shame. What a pity.”

So yeah, it’s a tradeoff. You cede all autonomy, comfort, personal space when you cast yourself to the fate of the público—which may in fact never even come.

Flip side?

Stories like that….

To the edge once again

It’s the reason so many psychiatric patients eventually exhaust all but the most devoted of their support system.

Come clean—I stopped taking one of my meds.

But be fair—I told my doctor, my psychiatrist that is, and though skeptical, he agreed.

It’s called Remeron and it has two faces. The first is to lift the spirits. I looked it up on a great website—crazymeds.org. OK, maybe not the most reliable, but definitely more readable than the drug-sponsored sites.

This guy’s take (site is obviously written by a manic)?

Remeron is legalized marijuana.

Might be. Because it does exactly what dope did to me, those many years ago when I was young and experimental.

Remember the munchies?

“Coffee ice cream!” I shouted over my shoulder at Raf, who was puzzled—why was I going to CVS at 11PM? And why couldn’t I stop and answer, so urgent was the craving?

Oddly, I don’t actually like coffee ice cream—but four hours after taking Remeron 15mg PO at HS (that's for Ruthie, to remember her nursing days) I would commit armed robbery to get it.

Well, it wasn’t doing my blood sugar any good—to say nothing of my cholesterol. And my other antidepressant—Lexapro—had worked fine for two years, until Wal-Mart sacked me when I was working my way through the death of Franny. 

I convinced the psychiatrist. And I tapered off the drug, as instructed.

First days were fine. Actually, almost better than fine. I was in Culebra and had an exalted moment. I was on the morning trot, listening to The Creation, when it hit me, how uncannily apt the music of my journey had been. Starting with Winterreise as I went into the bottom of death and despair. Then Beethoven, the Heiliger Dankgesang—as I moved through sickness to health. Lastly, The Creation, as I gave birth and set forth a Franny—a new Franny, my Franny—into the world again.

The Creation—get it? The gods aren’t subtle around here....

We came to a hill, Franny and I—she was trotting alongside of me—and the Haydn came to a long, achingly beautiful ascending—acsending, catch that word?—passage.

Right, so we were three: Franz Joseph, Franny and I.

So I had Franz Joseph in my ear. I reached out and grabbed Franny by the shoulders and hugged. And we sailed up the hill together.

Right—all was well for the next couple of days. But then I stopped writing. Got off my normal schedule. And two days ago, had a very strange thing happen.

Hypoglycemia.

Well, it’s happened before. And somehow, it was 2PM and I hadn’t eaten anything. So I went to the café, and they made me a very good, very large tuna sandwich.

Oddly, the sensations didn’t go away. For me, hypoglycemia is about anxiety. I get desperate / frantic to eat.

You do, and it goes away.

Why wasn’t it?

Right—went to CVS and bought orange juice. Drank the full container. 

Still felt hungry.

Then Miss Taí calls—she’s sensing a rat, or maybe something fishy. I tell her about the hypoglemia. Call tomorrow.

By the time Raf arrives, I’m pretty much a wreck. Now I’m having muscle cramps, and I decide I need magnesium. And oddly, the muscles cramping are ones that never cramp—my fingers and the top of my ankle. Then I notice that I can’t really breath. Well I can, but not easily. And damn, what’s going on with my blood sugar?

Why am I so anxious?

And why was I still feeling strange the next day?

And feeling dammit it’s not fair why has my life been so fucking hard I’ve had to STRUGGLE FUCKING STRUGGLE for fucking years now and I’ve never had it easy and fuc kingf can fuqeiufam l;alcqm09rinf             p’

Phone rings. Miss Taí, wondering how my mood is? 

Can’t talk, I need to eat, call me tomorrow.

But she made me think. This couldn’t be hypoglycemia. Come on, Marc—you’re an old nurse. Think it through. What’s different?

I go into the kitchen. Why am I here? Why is a banana in my hand? Am I supposed to eat it…..

You can eat it if you want. Now go back into the kitchen.

Why am I standing in front of the sink?

Water—you need water.

And now the pill.

I see the pill in my palm. I take it and swallow it. It is four fifteen.

At five, I am doing dishes. I am telling myself, ‘you’ve also been given stuff many people have not. You are way talented in ways many others are not. You see things others don’t. You had wonderful parents, and have a long stable marriage. Yes, it’s been hard. But others have had it harder….’

OK—so Taí?  Call me at four—let’s figure out how to sell this book.

And thanks!

Culebra

“Culebra is a pretty good place to leave your stress behind,” said the lady who had stroked, caressed, pounded and pulled my body for a half hour.

Relax—it was all done in public.

And the lady, besides giving me a very good massage, was right. Culebra does induce relaxation. In fact, I arrived under the assumption that I was fine, rested, relaxed. And could barely get out of bed the next day.

It’s Puerto Rico’s version of Key West. It’s a tiny island between the main island and the Virgin Islands. And yes, it has a seriously good beach.

It’s a place I’m always a little suspicious of, son of a newspaperman that I am. Are the people really that cool? Is it that smooth—the relationship between the town people and the invaders? The gringos come and open chic little shops and hang at the beach, but what do the locals do?

Well, I first came to the place twenty years ago, when I was just new to Puerto Rico. And yes, it was magical: quiet, tranquil, relaxed. And the people seemed friendly, too. Would it be different now?

The answer seems to be no. Or so says Luis, the cab driver. I had just spotted a very upscale resort, and wondered how the town felt about it.

Well, it created jobs, both in the building of it and today. And he says the island doesn’t want anything bigger. A thousand-room hotel would swell the population from 2000 to 10,000—nobody can imagine that.

“But it’s still a very safe place. In fact, my door to the house is unlocked, and I have cash on the dining room table.”

OK—so what are they all doing?

The answer seems to be fixing the roads.

“The mayor’s got all this federal money—so he put ‘em all to work. Anybody who wants a job is working. If they don’t want to work, well—those days are over.”

True, I did see guys working on the roads. I also saw guys drinking beer in the morning in front of their ramshackle house. So I’d call it a draw.

“Guy hasn’t opened in six months,” shouted a guy driving by, beer can in hand. Well, everybody deserves a day at the beach, and at least he was adding color.

Of which there is quite a lot. Here’s the door to the guesthouse I was staying in…

Or what about this?

Walking the town, I came on an old gentleman carving ships out of cocoanut shells. He was also feeding banana kwits.…

Every morning he sprinkles sugar on the plate….

Well, it’s got its charm, this little island. What it doesn’t have is the pharmaceutical factory. In the days when I first came here, it was Baxter. Then it changed hands a few times, and is now shuttered.

So in a way, it’s an elusive island. The only thing here is tourism, and construction. Periodically, the state government will decide on a project, start to build it, and then go away. Even the city hall isn’t done. And there’s a huge complex by the airport that sits unfinished, open, and vandalized.

If you’re young and gringo, Culebra is great. But for the natives? Well, there are constant problems with the ferry. Prices are high—everything comes in from the main island. The “hospital” isn’t much more than a dispensary. And it’s hard to attract teachers to the island.

In one of the shops, I found myself translating for a gringa. She was buying food, and clearly had lived some time on the island. Why hadn’t she learned Spanish?

Luis—the cab driver—might be right. Maybe all is well. Why do I feel so unsure?

When Sugar Was King

It was a flash moment, but all the more potent for that. I was looking for the oldest guy in town.

OK—it wasn’t a bar, and I wasn’t buying him his cigarettes and beer. But the process was pretty much the same.

“Yo busco a Chan,” I said to the three guys lounging on the boardwalk.

“Pa’ matarlo?” returned one. To kill him?

I must have passed, because they led me to him.

Guess it’s in the genes. My eye had been drawn to two large decaying towers. Gotta be sugar cane, I thought. But most of the chimneys I’ve seen were taller and thinner. So I asked a guy, who in turn asked me for a buck for a flask of wine. Helps him get through the day….

That’s how I got to Chan….

Who was a nice guy, gave me a seat in front of his fish shop, and told me the story of the area. Seems the area—Fajardo Playa—was originally mangrove swamp, “rescued” by his grandparent’s generation. It came there because there was work—a limestone (cal) mine on the nearby island of Icacos. The limestone came by ship, was packed and sent to the hardware stores around the island. In fact, they built a special pier just for the limestone. Called muelle de cal—limestone pier—it was nicknamed muelle de lambeojos—brownnose pier.

Now all the limestone comes from Mexico.

And it was Icacos limestone that was used to build the two towers that—yup—were for refining sugar. Called a central—it got the sugarcane from a valley behind a mountain that the wine-seeker pointed out in the distance. Came by rail—a special train used just for transporting the cane.

OK—knew about that. There’s a famous one down south somewhere. Well, the Central started up in the early 20^th century. Closed down in the mid 70’s. The sugar cane would come, be processed, then transported in sacks by ships to a larger ship anchored at sea. Harbor in Fajardo Playa wasn’t deep enough.

And local guys would work the ships—standing on one and heaving sacks of sugar to go to the other ship.

Hard work, and Chan said the guys had muscles for days. Still do. There are two of them surviving, and they’re both sharp as machetes, mentally. One of ‘em is 95.

Well, the Central closed down in 1977. It had been the biggest employer in town for decade. But it was cheaper for the gringos to bring it in half a world away. So what to do? Well, a lot of the guys turned to the sea. Took to fishing, which is also a hard life. Hour after hour under the sun, and indeed it’s hot here, in this corner of the island. And they could go for a couple of days without catching anything.

So the kids in town? Where are they working? 

Answer—elsewhere or they’re not. In 1997, the unemployment rate was 22-25%. And that was the nineties—good years, good times. Now? Curiously, it’s lower. Just 19%, the highest in Puerto Rico. The census tells the story—4000 people left town in the first decade of the 21^st century.

Most of the local businesses have closed. On the outskirts of town, there are the malls, the chain stores. Puerto Rico’s most expensive hotel, El Conquistador, sits rather smugly on a nearby mountaintop. Designed to face the sea, it also turns its back on the town.

And yes, two pharmaceuticals—the backbone of the 1950’s Bootstrap miracle—still remain. Estamos sobrevivendo por la misericordia de Dios. We’re holding on by the mercy of God, said Chan. Times are bad.

And Chan has about 20 fishermen who supply him with the red snapper, conch (when it was legal), and lobster he sells.

Well, Chan had given me half an hour of his time, and the name of a book—El Grito de Silencio, The Shout of Silence—which would tell me the story of the Central. So I gave him my hand, thanked him for his time, and for the information. We’d passed half an hour chatting and looking out over the sea, remembering or learning the old days, when guys had jobs and produced stuff, instead of lingering in bars or flipping hamburgers.

Memories are selective and often defective. But nothing about Fajardo Playa, today, spoke of good times.

The Case of a Missing Generation

Where’s Daddy?

That was my first thought when I read the news that 75% of Puerto Rican grandparents are principally responsible for their grandchildren, and nearly 50% have actual custody of them.

Hunh?

Where are the parents? 

Of course, there are always going to be grandparents who step back into the role of parenthood. A couple dies in a car crash, a single mother succumbs to breast cancer—sure, Abuela steps in.

But 75%? 

Yet, thinking back on it, it may be true. Consider my students’ lives. They got up at 5AM, took the sleeping baby to their mother’s house, suffered the morning traffic jam, and clocked in at 7:30. Reverse procedure at 4:30, with the addition that most of them ate dinner at Mamita’s. 

Good deal, hunh?

Never thought so. Certainly my own mother wouldn’t have bought in. You got a kid? Then you’re responsible. Sorry—I did it, now you do it. Not my problem.

Which was also the way it worked with adult kids. You got a job? Get an apartment, learn to cook, do your own laundry. Coming back home is for emergencies only. The moment you’re on your feet again, you’re out the door.

Well, it’s a gringo point of view. But is it the best point of view?

Well, the first question might be if it’s sustainable. What’s going to happen when the kids grow up, have kids of their own, and look to their own mother to be a grandmother? Is she going to do as her mother did? Will she be able to, financially? Will she have learned somewhere how to cook, so she can feed her daughter the way abuela did?

And is it good for kids to be raised by grandparents? Sure—they’re a bountiful source of love, but what about discipline? My students all bemoaned the fact that no one today was doing what their father did—take off his belt and pelt the kid. A younger dad is a different parent than a grandparent.

But it may, after all, be a good thing. The gringa grandmother, alone in her condo in Florida, a thousand miles from her grandchild—is she happy? Doesn’t the responsibility of raising a child also bring some joy? The nuclear family—is it normal?

As always, I have no answers. Just questions….

Two Writers, One Gone

I began thinking about it on the daily trot, after reading another review of Iguanas. “I fell in love with Franny,” wrote Mayra, and again it struck me: how could she? Is Franny still making friends, even in the afterlife?

Seems so!

Well, not much surprises me down here. Reality is different in Puerto Rico, as different as the air. So I looked at the ocean, took a breath, and then got thinking about another writer—far greater. John Kennedy Toole, and if you haven’t read A Confederacy of Dunces, stop everything. Get the book. Unplug the phone. Cancel your life for two days. Read.

Well, that's probably unnecessary advice—the book has sold 1.5 million copies. Has also been translated in 18 languages. So you’ve likely read it, and know the curious story behind it. How the book was rejected, how the author despaired and then suicided, how the mother barged into Walker Percy's office after mercilessly harassing him with calls and letters. She demanded that he read it.

There is something about a mother’s love!

What you might not know is that the book was at least partially written in Puerto Rico.

Toole was drafted in 1961. Not being obvious cannon fodder, he was shipped to Puerto Rico, to teach English to the recruits. (Do I hear bells ringing?) He rose meteorically—his word—and got a private office. That’s when he started to write Confederacy.

The insanity and unreality of Puerto Rico itself has been interesting at all times that it was not overwhelming. (Great agreement errors in this sentence, I fear).

That’s what he had to say about Puerto Rico. And knowing Puerto Rico lends an interesting take on Confederacy. The main character is completely unlike any other character in fiction—insane, unkempt, learned. The plot stumbles along in its own illogical way. The absurdities pile up.

I won’t know without doing more research than I want how much of the book was written in Puerto Rico. But I’ll go out on a limb.

The book could only have been written in Puerto Rico.

Closer Than I Wanted

There are times when, even now, even after two years, even after writing a damn BOOK about it…

…I can’t believe that she did it.

Stopped eating and drinking. Referring to you-know-whom.

I think it especially today, since I was a damn fool this morning. Took off for a walk at 10AM on possibly the hottest, most sun-blazened (sorry, computer—it’s a word now!) path in the city.

OK—I wasn’t completely stupid. I had bought a bottle of water. I made sure that I was drinking it—a surprising number of people don’t. I was wearing sun-glasses. But at a certain point, the sun and the insomnia of the night before got to me. 

I dove into the bushes and sought shade.

It was a purely physical reaction—as reflexive as jumping back when the scorpion lifts its tail. So I sat in the bushes, and wondered how I was going to get out.

A couple walked by—should I ask them for help? I do have a history of manhunts at El Morro.

I followed them, instead. And I eventually made it home. 

So it was a minor thing. But it left me panting and exhausted. And contemplating, again, the amount of will that an 89 year-old lady—my mother—must have exerted, those two years ago.

“It hasn’t been too bad,” she said, in that last week, referring to the fast. But now I wonder—how could it not have been?

(Thanks to Erica Iris for these images….)

A Hundred Grand an Hour….

It was a curious spectacle of reality and cynicism. Yes, the killer was at last shackled, and led off to prison.

He was also free four hours later, after Daddy, senior federal judge Salvador Casellas, forked up 400,000$ in bail.

It raises questions. Had Pablo Casellas ever seen the place, the Bayamón Regional Prison? Most likely not. It’s out of the way—no reason to happen on the place, you have to seek it out. 

But in fact I have seen the place, and not because I sought it. If you take the público (the lowest form of mass transit in Puerto Rico) you frequently are sidetracked there. The van will have eighteen people crammed airlessly in it, and will slide from Cataño through Juana Matos. For every victim the van discharges, another is picked up. On one side is a ramshackle community sprung up on a flood plain—squatters who have been there generations. On the other side, a housing project routinely raided for narco-traffickers.

You creep toward Puente Blanco, and then pass B. Fernández, distributor of the island’s number one beer. And then someone calls out: ¡La Regional!

You’ve suspected it, of course. There are days when the público fills up quite quickly—not waiting in the 90-degree heat for those 18 passengers.

Mostly, it’s the faces that give them away. Tight, wary, constricted. Also, of course, weary.

The body as well—add 10 pounds for every five years after age 25. 

And the sex—always women.

They tend to come in pairs—mother and girlfriend. Occasionally trios—a baby that will be passed from the back of the van to the front when the van bumps its shockless way down the pot-holed road to the prison.

At that point, 16 of the 18 people get out of the van. 

Is any prison pretty? Maybe in Norway, but this is as dreary as are our public schools. The only difference? The razor wire atop the 16-feet cyclone fence. 

I used to contemplate it, the lives of these women going to see their son or boyfriend in jail. Passing the baby, I would peer into its face. A boy, and he would be here in twenty years.

Rather—there, inside the prison.

A girl, and she would be here, in the van with me….

It was intense heat, humidity, and silence—those mornings in the van. No one talked, no one chatted. And this, on a compulsively loquacious island.

The mothers dressed drably, the girlfriends coquettishly. They started in a group to the front gate of the prison, opening their purses for inspection by the guard who awaited them.

The van would turn around—the pavement had petered out, it was now dirt, if not mud. I would stretch, lunge for the window, breathe.

I was going to write, today, about the judge. There are good reasons to suggest that he resigns. He was at the crime scene, and that scene was altered. But my mind goes back to those far-gone days when I was number three of four people crammed in one of the banks of the mini-van.

Yes, Casellas fils has seen more than I of La Regional. But I have seen by a stretch much more of the people who fill it up, who languish there, who are forgotten except on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when mother and girlfriend wake at five in the morning to await the two or three públicos down from the mountains to a flat, flood-prone, sun-drenched hell.

Casellas Wived

Readers who don’t know the story of Candid Flowers won’t get it, so let me show you the picture:

Yes, after almost two months in which it was glaringly obvious who slaughtered Carmen Paredes, her husband has at last been put in esposas (wives or handcuffs) and charged with first-degree murder, lying to a federal agent, and destruction of evidence.

The New Day is following it minute by minute. The morning radio is flooded with the story. And yes, it does raise questions.

My questions, though, may not be the ones everybody is asking.

OK—let’s review. Carmen Paredes was a successful insurance broker, married to Pablo Casellas, the son of a senior federal judge. Paredes was killed on July 14^th of this year.

According to her husband, he returned from visiting his father early in the morning, saw an intruder leaping over a ten-foot wall, and went to get his guns. Casellas is a marksman, and has permits for 33 guns. (Rather, he had—the permits were revoked after the murder.) He fired several shots, but the intruder fled. Casellas then found his wife dead, sitting by the side of the pool.

To say that the story was flimsy is to be generous. It held together like wet toilet paper. 

The vegetation on both sides of the wall was un-trampled. There were bloodstains in Casellas’s car. The bullet used was from a gun that Casellas had reported “stolen” after he had left the shooting range. Which, by the way, was closed that day.

That’s an oops!

Well, there’s a saying in Puerto Rico: you fart in San Juan, they smell it in Ponce.

So I wasn’t surprised when I ran into someone who had seen Pablo Casellas throughout his youth. And the report wasn’t flattering.

Nor, I’m sorry to say, was the report on the judge.

Because it’s he, more than his son, that plagues my imagination. The judge was permitted into the crime scene. OK—I can get that. A distressed father, a confused situation—what parent wouldn’t rush to his child’s aid?

But where was Pablo on the morning he summoned? At his father’s house.

Here, I say farewell to the judge. For I am sure that my father would not have harbored me had I done what Pablo Casellas did. And I hope I would have the backbone to do the same, had I a son in such a dilemma.

I think it was V. S. Naipaul who said that the tragedy of the Caribbean is that it doesn’t have a narrative, a story it tells itself that guides it, provides the framework. But it may be untrue. We have a terrible story of piracy, of violence and greed. And in the Spanish Caribbean, we have some unpleasant leftovers from Spain: arrogance, cruelty and entitlement being three of them.

The person who witnessed Pablo’s childhood was reticent, not wanting even years later to speak much. She did say that he was a little monster.

And I will say—he grew into a big one.

Oh, and Candid Flowers? Here’s a link….

http://www.bokorlang.com/journal/31amusements.htm