Lady and the Monkey

It was a day when about all I could do was listen to the story of Lady and the monkey.

I could have written about the son of a Federal judge, Salvador Casellas; the trial of the son is in its 11^th day, and everybody is talking about it. Nor is it looking very good for Casellas, who is accused of killing his wife as she sat by the pool one weekend morning last year. The wife is reported not to have struggled against her assailant; a neighbor—though admittedly a junkie—reported seeing a man driving a light grey Mercedes. Nothing too unusual there, but how often do you see someone fling a quite rare and expensive pistol out a car window? Fortunately, the junkie knew what to do: he went down to the drug punto and sold it for a thousand bucks (and some marijuana) to the pushers there. Oh, and today’s news is that the bullets match the gun that Casellas reported as stolen months before the murder.

OK—so a guy whom a friend told me was seriously entitled even as a child is—apparently—not getting away with murder. Anything else happening on the island?

Well, the teachers are furious, as are the judges—both groups got their pensions slashed. So the judges did what judges do: go to court. The teachers went to two very predictable allies—the fire-and-independence breathing archbishop and the new mayoress of San Juan. And the archbishop instantly invoked the magic word: without teachers, he thundered, there is no patria.

Astute readers of this blog will know: anytime you want to talk independence covertly, the word patria is invoked. So the archbishop and mayoress are getting together at the Colegio de Abogados de Puerto Rico, along with assorted others, to forge together “amendments” to the bill.

It’s hard to imagine what amendments could be done to the bill, but it’ll fun to see. In all likelihood, the teachers will propose to increase their retirement to higher levels than they were before the reform, and will lower the number of years teaching to be eligible to retire from thirty to five.

People aren’t getting it—we’re broke, and one more degradation of our credit rating will sink us into junk category; the party, as one economist put it, is over. Nor is it just the central government: El Nuevo Día reports that 16 of our towns have unemployment rates above 20%; one town up in the mountains has a rate of 27.5%.

“Mommy, the teachers begin teaching the moment the bell rings,” said the son of a friend of a friend, whose mother had sent him for a year to Alabama to learn English. The child was astonished—in Puerto Rico, the teachers chat in the hall for ten or fifteen minutes before ambling into the classroom.

So the question on everybody’s lips is whether the two-day strike that the teachers announced for next week will really only be two days. Or will the strike be extended? No one knows.

That said, it seemed easier, yesterday, to hear the story of Lady and the monkey.

“I never liked that monkey,” said Lady, who owns the coffee shop and two other businesses, and she showed me a picture of it: it was barring its teeth in a truly frightening way.

Nor was it an empty threat; the monkey attacked and nearly killed Lady’s stepfather. Among other things, it carried the stepfather up a tree and then dropped him. So Lady’s mother had to go wrestle with the monkey, who was pulling the legs one way as mother was pulling the shoulders the opposite way. Eventually, the monkey let go, and mother dragged the stepfather into the house.

It was a brutal mauling, with large chunks of flesh….OK, I’ll spare you. And Lady, then seven years old, was stunned

There was a bar next door, and one of the patrons, who was completely sloshed, decided that someone had to dispense the monkey. This he proposed to do, if he could get out the door. To no one’s urging, he left the bar, found the monkey, whipped out a gun, and on the first shot got the monkey right between the eyes.

“He was a hero in the town, after that,” said Lady.

“Nonsense,” said Saúl, who had stopped by to use the Internet, and who had stories of his own. “It was just a lucky shot.”

Lady considered this, and went on with the story. A hurricane arrived—these things happen in Puerto Rico—a few days later, and since everybody wanted to be close to the hospitalized stepfather, and nobody wanted to be up in the mountains, their veterinarian offered to take the kids. And Lady was having a hard time of it—having frequent nightmares and flashbacks of the monkey.

And one night she had a particularly bad nightmare, woke up screaming and crying, and went down to get some milk—not knowing that there were two refrigerators: one for food, one for dead animals. So what did she see when she opened the refrigerator door?

Right—the monkey!

We go on to talk about animals—which ones can interact with humans, which cannot. Crows, says Saúl, are very intelligent; snakes are—well—snakes. And he once knew a guy who had a 20-foot long python, as well as a six-year old daughter. And one day, the python began losing weight. The vet, when consulted, was stumped, until he asked, “were there any kids in the house?”

“The python is making room for your daughter,” said the vet, “so tell me what to do with it, ‘cause you’re not taking it home….”

We sit and ponder this for a moment; Lady has to go off to paint casitas, the ornamental plaster house facades that she sells.

“It’s like a sit-com, coming into this place,” said one of the employees. “You know that the regulars will be there, in their usual places, doing their usual things.”

Lady comes by, kisses me, tells me, “I love you.”

“I love you too.”         

Do You Know Where Your Prócer Is?

Well, having taken care of the decision, yesterday, of whether to charge the Boston bomber in civilian courts or treat him as an enemy combatant—thanks, Barry, for following my guidelines—we can turn our heads to local news.

Not much of which, typically, is particularly cheerful. We have fallen arms (brazos caídos) in the police department—which is to say that almost 1000 cops called in “sick” today. This, states the chief, is putting us all in danger.

This is questionable, at least for me, since the principal activity of our local force seems to be chatting. But my mind may have been poisoned, those decades ago before I moved to Puerto Rico, by the descriptions of the police given to me by my friend Harry, who also told me the following joke, common throughout Latin America.

An old lady hears noises in her living room late at night. She peers through the keyhole and sees two robbers stealing her silver. She then rushes to the window and cries out, “Thieves in the house, call the police!” The next night, she again hears noises, peers through keyhole, and rushes to the window. She shouts, “Police in the house, call the thieves!”

Right—Harry tells it better.

I will say, however, that I caught myself thinking, absentmindedly one day, “Wow, I can’t believe they give those guys guns….”

Well, the police are protesting because of changes to the retirement plan, which is broke, and which had to be amended by a recent law—an action that was basically forced on us by the likes of Moody’s and Standard and Poors. We are, sadly, one small step away from junk bond status, and any degradation would be, if not fatal, at least quite sickening. So we passed a law pretty much in the dark, since, in fact, we have absolutely no knowledge of how much money we need. Why not? Because nobody has ever done any actuarial work on the plan. In fact, it may be that nobody could do actuarial work—it’s not clear that we have the data.

So we passed a bad law and now people are, to say the least, grumpy. Actually, some people are predicting that there will be a massive retirement before the new law goes into effect on June 1, and nobody is quite sure what that will do.

People in our gated communities are grumpy, too—a federal judge has just told them that the Jehovah’s Witnesses have a constitution right to enter their communities, walk the neighborhood, knock on doors, and spread the good news. Well, churlish individuals don’t, apparently, want the news—“how do I know,” they are thundering, “that the Jehovah’s Witness isn’t really a delinquent?” (or delincuente, as it works better in Spanish….)

Well, it raises all sorts of questions. The Witnesses are allowed in because they sued, and won. But what about the Mormons? Or what about just Marc—shouldn’t I be allowed to walk down a street provided and maintained by the government? Among the many things that I never quite got, the right of a community to gate themselves in is one.

Right, so The New Day (El Nuevo Día, the local rag) reports that the Archbishop of San Juan, Roberto González Nieves, is very likely grumpy, too. Or maybe not—he’s a scrappy guy, always up for a fight. And what is it, this time? Well, two years ago he decided to name one of the chapels in the cathedral the Altar de la Patria.

Time for a language break—patria has a particular meaning. It’s the motherland, the homeland, the native land. It also, unfortunately, may mean nation, and here the battle starts. The archbishop has made no bones about his views on the status of Puerto Rico—he supports independence. No problem, says some of his parishioners, but don’t drag it into the church.

What González did drag in, a couple of weeks ago, are the remains of a guy—all right, a prócer or patriot—named Ramón Power y Giralt and another guy named Juan Alejo de Arizmendi.

OK—Power first. He was born in 1775 in Ponce, and then was sent at age 13 to Spain, to continue his studies. He joined the navy, and distinguished himself in the blockade of Santo Domingo against the French. None of that is controversial.

What is controversial—at least potentially—is his work as a prócer / statesman. He was appointed to represent Puerto Rico in the Spanish Cortes, a parliamentary assembly meeting in 1810 in Cádiz. And he must have impressed—he was named vice president of the assembly, and fought hard for more autonomy for Puerto Rico. He succeeded in passing the Power Act, which established five tax-free ports on the island, eliminated the monopoly on flour, reduced tariffs, and provided for economic reforms.

The Cortes also wrote a constitution, passed in 1812, and called—get ready—The Constitution of 1812. It was the most liberal of its time; it established universal male (of course) suffrage, freedom of the press, constitutional monarchy and—here you really should get ready—national sovereignty.

This was not a great time in Spain—the French controlled much of the country, what they didn’t control were controlled by juntas—, Bonaparte had deposed Ferdinand and installed his own brother Joseph as king. The Constitution of 1812, says Wikipedia, was never really enforced. At any rate, Ferdinand regained power in 1814, and guess what the first thing he did was?

Right—tear up the constitution.

For those people who support independence, Power y Giralt is a major figure since, for two tumultuous years, it was through him that Puerto Rico enjoyed autonomy. The rest of the island, of course, doesn’t spend much time on him.

Important—Ramón Power y Giralt died and was buried in Cádiz, Spain, in 1813.

Right—on to Arizmendi. First important fact—he was the first native-born bishop in Puerto Rico. He was a strong defender of the poor, and made straw baskets, sold them, and used the proceeds to buy food and clothes for the poor.

He was also a strong supporter of Power y Giralt, and most famously gave his bishopric ring to him, saying it was "as sure pledge that will sustain you in the memory of your resolution to protect and maintain the rights of our fellow countrymen, as I myself am resolved to die for my beloved flock."

Seems pretty innocuous, right? Well, I’ll step back from the controversy and let Wikipedia tell the story:

A modern day interpretation, which has no historical foundation that can be found in the footnote, is that for Arizmendi this was also a national symbol of Puerto Rico by joining his country and God in his heart.  

Well, two years ago the current Archbishop of San Juan dreamed up the idea—why not dig up the remains of Power, over there in Spain, and bring him over to be re-united with the remains of his old friend, Arizmendi? We could have the two great próceres together and put them—guess where?—¡en la Altar de la Patria! Wow—who could object?

If you don’t know, you’re not Puerto Rican. And since there is a group that is both Catholic and pro-statehood, they began petitioning the Vatican, which last year sent over a guy from Ecuador, Antonio Arregui Yarza, to check into the matter.

And Arregui—what did he find?

Not known, says the New Day, but what is known is that the Archbishop of San Juan has been told twice—enough with the Altar de la Patria and nix to the idea of interring the remains of the two patriots in the chapel.  

And so it was that on 6 April 2013, the remains of Ramón Power y Giralt were escorted solemnly into the old city by a group of very dignified—you can see them below—young sailors from the Spanish navy training ship. The remains went first to the capitol, where everybody received them with much formality and respect and protestations of good will. Then, they went to the Department of State, where the process was repeated.

And now?

Well, the New Day doesn’t quite say where the remains are, but…

…I’m running up to the Cathedral to see….