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….
