Una Dama, Though Cynical

“Quizzical,” I thought, when I first saw Antonio Quiñones Calderón. There was something—perhaps an ever-so-slightly raised eyebrow—that suggested puzzlement. Or perhaps it was a newspaperman’s curiosity mixed with slight anxiety?

I have a minor talent—I put people at ease. He sat down and told me his story.

And what a remarkable story. Tony grew up in a small town on the west side of the island seven decades ago; his father died either before he was born or just afterwards (can’t recall). At any rate, he grew up early assuming responsibility.

As well as writing. So he wrote his way through high school, and then headed off to work—he had to help his mother and sister back home. And where does a writer who needs a job get one?

At El Mundo, now defunct but then a very serious, respected newspaper. And Tony—fresh out of high school, no money or time for college—started at the bottom. And he worked his way up, in traditional newspaper fashion, from writing obits to the police beat to covering municipal meetings, to finally get the big stuff.

“I remember the funeral of Muñoz Marín—I was covering it for El Mundo,” he said, “and yes, it was big….”

I’m picking his brains, first because the pickings are very good indeed, and second to get him to talk. What is he writing about now?

“A history of the corruption in Puerto Rico,” said Tony.

“Tony, that’s gonna be one long book,” I said.

We joke a bit—he has a wry, self-deprecating humor.

“And how is your health,” I asked—Tony is in his mid-seventies.

Well, I shouldn’t have worried: Tony has one impressive track record. He wakes up and writes, seven days a week. And he’s put together an impressive body of work: 50 Décadas de historia puertoriqueña, published in 1992; La perversión de la política; En los pasillos de poder: Testimonio íntimo de un Secretario de Prensa, 1998; Reflexiones de periodista; El Libro de Puerto Rico; the list goes on and on up until his most recent book, Carlos Romero Barceló: Una vida por la Igualidad. He has about as many books as you and I have fingers and toes.

Well, if anyone can write a book about ex-governor Romero Barceló, it would be Tony. Why? Because he was press secretary for two terms for him, and served in the same capacity for former Governor Luis A. Ferré.

He is unabashedly a statehooder, feeling—as Ferré did—that he preferred to be a state, but if the US said “no,” he’d be quite content to be independent. But colony is anathema to him.

And though a statehooder, he’s tough and fair-minded: he cuts the politicians who favor statehood no slack.

“You’re a cynical old newspaperman,” I told him, after he had pronounced our legislators “gangsters.”

“Old? Old? The rest I accept, but old?”

Relatively speaking, Tony may have a point: his mother is 92 and going strong.

Well, I know newspaper people, having grown up around them. And Tony reminds me very much of my own father: hardworking, critical but just, dig-until-you-hit-the-pay-dirt.

There’s something more about Tony. Beyond knowing more than almost anyone about the political history of Puerto Rico, he’s an expression of something wonderful about Puerto Rico. A self-made man, he sent his kids off to the States; two of them went to Yale. They’re now judges, lawyers, doctors.

We agreed about it a couple weeks ago. What keeps us on this island, with our horrendous crime, our gangster legislature, our continuing economic crisis? Why don’t we bail out and move to Florida; why not join the majority of Puerto Ricans who live off, not on, the island?

The people.

The people like Tony: gentle, kind, scrupulously honest, and gently self-ironic. He is egalitarian in a noble way, extending the same courtesy to all. My mother would have called him a “sweet man.”

But we have an expression, down here, probably very old, probably directly from Spain.

Él es una dama.