I could
have written about the son of a Federal judge, Salvador Casellas;
the trial of the son is in
its 11th 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.”
