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.”         

This Just In From Puerto Rico

It’s one of those things about Puerto Rico—while the rest of the world is occupying themselves about other things (Syria, governmental spying, even a royal birth) we are completely obsessed with our own affairs.

I tell you this because the world into which I woke, this morning, was devoted to three issues, which the morning radio repeated endlessly. First, Pablo Casellas is in a coma.

You may remember this guy, who is the son of Salvador Casellas, a federal judge, whom colleagues describe as completely recto or straight. Allegedly, Pablo Casellas returned home on the morning of 14 July 2012 and saw an intruder jumping over a ten-foot wall by the pool. Casellas, who is an expert marksman and has (or had at the time) 33 guns, went back inside, got a gun, and fired several shots. He then discovered his lifeless wife sitting at the poolside; she’d been shot.

What did Poppa do? Well, the judge rushed to the house to be with his son, and to ensure that the investigation is done properly. The press arrived at about the same time and caught the judge scurrying under the yellow “do not cross—police investigation”—tape. Made a great photo—the judicial rear end bumping up against the tape….

But that was only the beginning. There were bloodstains in Pablo Casellas’s car; the grass on the other side of the wall showed no sign of being trampled; the shots in the wall were from a special gun that Casellas reported stolen in a “carjacking” close to the shooting range where Casellas had been practicing. Except that it was closed, that day; it was Fathers’ Day.

Well, it’s taken a year of legal screwing around to get this case to court, and the trial was to have started next Monday, so what does Casellas do?

The family isn’t talking—do they have to? “Sources” are saying that he’s in very, very delicate shape, and that they will start a process akin to dialysis to cleanse his blood. The next 24 to 48 hours are critical….

So where’s Poppa now? Sitting by the bedside, presumably on the taxpayer’s dime. And morning radio is speculating—is it suicide? Did Casellas fils swallow pills? A guy with all those guns has to do the one spectacularly poor way of offing himself?

I know ‘cause I was a nurse. Every time one of our regular patients presented at the ER with an empty bottle of Tylenol in her hands, the ER nurses had instructions: don’t buy in, be utterly matter-of-fact, and tell the patient, “just sit over there, hon—we’ll take you when we can.”

So Casellas is in the anteroom of death, and the island is hanging on its ears. But what else is going on?

Coffee—the price is going up 40%.

Coffee, according to The New Day, is doing about as well as Pablo Casellas, at the moment. Costs of fertilizer, electricity and everything else have gone up. The farmers are being squeezed out of business—which is serious, because we drink 300,000 quintales (no idea what that is, but sounds impressive) of the stuff but only produce 80,000 quintales annually. So we import the majority of our coffee.

You might ask—isn’t there land for coffee in Puerto Rico?

Of course there is—plenty of it, and in fact there is lots of coffee that goes unpicked. So what’s the problem?

Nobody wants to pick it.

Be fair—it’s a pretty rotten job. You’re standing (hopefully—otherwise you’re sliding) on a wet, muddy mountainside with branches slashing your face and insects stinging you and carrying a sack into which you are putting more and more coffee—thus adding more and more weight as you get more and more tired.

Now it begins to rain….

Second scenario—you can go to the Departamento de la Familia and get the Tarjeta de la Familia and that gets you free food, which you can munch on around noon, when you get up.

Well, fortunately the next island over has never dreamed up the idea of the Departamento de la Familia—so guess what? The mountains are filled with Dominicans (from Santo Domingo—not the religious order), according to a student from Jayuya, deep in the center of the island.

OK—Casellas in coma, coffee in crisis…what’s next?

Well, the island has 14 people who are still in shelters—down from the 88 people who were in shelters last week, when a tropical wave dumped 9.15 inches of water on the island. And now the mayor of San Juan wants the governor to declare San Juan a disaster, since the city has 300 cases of damage to examine.

But there’s a problem.

According to The New Day, the entire island is in a permanent state of emergency. Why? Because the planning has been so wretchedly bad that any rain can cause chaos. We have built on flood plains; squatters have built on flood plains; we have given no maintenance to whatever systems we had to drain water.

Nor is it entirely the government’s fault.

“You can’t be serious,” I said to my student, after she had described her flood-plained community’s creative approach to financing redecoration.

Their practice—before the advent of a serious storm—was to throw a few sofas into the Rio Cañas just before the storm. The sofas would block the culvert down by the bridge; the water would rise wonderfully. Soon, it would be swirling deliciously through their house, delightfully whisking away all that stuff the eyes had grown tired of seeing. The press would come, the neighbors would stand woefully in front of their houses, and then FEMA would send the check.

See?

Well, it makes sense down here….

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.

Valores intachables

Those were the words used by a colleague to describe federal judge Salvador Casellas.

Valores intachables—impeccable values. That’s Mr. Fernández’s translation. But I looked it up—una tacha is a blemish.

And what if it’s true? What if the judge possesses unblemished values?

Then it’s a Greek, not a Caribbean, tragedy.

And I’ve wronged the judge.

Well, he’s no lightweight. Born in 1935, got his law degree from Harvard in 1961, served in the army for two years, worked at Puerto Rico’s most prestigious law firm, was appointed federal judge in 1994, and senior judge in 2005.

Do the math. The man is in his late seventies, and has had a distinguished career. Only now does he have…

…una tacha.

Well, we were discussing him at the dinner table last night. And Raf, as always, has a twist on the events. Carmen, he thinks, wanted a divorce. Pablo was jealous. He sets up a carjacking, and one of the guns “stolen” was a rare weapon, called a “cop killer.”

Goes through bulletproof vests.

Oh, and by the way, that’s the type of weapon that dispatched Carmen.

So, goes the theory of Mr. Fernández, Carmen goes through with her plans. She leaves home briefly, but comes back because her daughter is distressed. She’s reading by the pool. Pablo comes out, shoots her between the eyebrow and in the left chest.

Then empties 14 or 15 more shots in her. 

He goes to the bathroom—where apparently the blood was detected. Takes a shower. Then goes to visit Daddy.

Who knows nothing.

Pablo acts normally—some guys can. Leaves after a while, and then comes home to see the “intruder” leaping the fence.

A ten-foot cyclone fence with razor wire on top and vegetation on both sides that is intact with no sign of trampling.

Pablo fires the shots needed to establish an alibi of discovering an intruder, goes inside and calls the police. Then Daddy.

Or maybe the reverse order.

Then, this honorable judge, who has worked and struggled a lifetime, makes the mistake that will cost him his reputation.

He goes to the crime scene.

Why?

He doesn’t trust the cops.

And he loves his son.

If it happened that way, if this honorable man instinctively knew that the cops would make a botch of it and raced to safeguard his son, then yes, it’s a tragedy.

Not a Greek, not a Puerto Rican tragedy.

A tragedy for us all.

Who Killed Carmen Paredes?

Disclaimers first: I came to this story late. I only got curious about it when I saw the photo clip of Senior Federal Judge Salvador Casellas observing the paramedics loading his daughter-in-law’s corpse into the ambulance.

First question—what was he doing there?

Well, the cops let him in.

Into a crime scene?

Second question—how did the daughter-in-law die?

What version do you want?

According to the son of the judge, Pablo Casellas, it all started with a carjacking near a shooting range. Pablo has a nice little collection of guns, and was off on Father’s Day to do a little practice. Only problem was that the range was closed.

OK, he reports the crime, and the missing guns. Then a couple weeks later, on the 14^th of July, Pablo goes to visit his father, the judge. Comes home at 9:40 in the morning, sees an intruder leaping from the roof of his garage, goes to get his gun, comes back and shoots, to no avail. Then discovers his wife dead by the side of the pool.

Well, the New Day (El Nuevo Día—our local rag) is now painting a different picture. According to the Day, the evidence is piling up against Pablo. The police noted signs even in their initial investigation that the victim, Carmen Paredes, had been shot earlier than 9:40, as Pablo said. Neighbors allege that they heard shots earlier, at 8:30 or so. There is evidence that Paredes was killed in a different part of the house, and that the scene had been cleaned. Pablo is filmed leaving his closed neighborhood at 9:14, not 8:30 as he stated. There are blood stains in Pablo’s BMW and on his clothes, both of which were confiscated from…

…the judge’s house.

Just a second….

Had to read that last long paragraph again. Why? Well, it beggars belief. And you know, the questions in my mind multiply.

First, what kind of guy goes running to his father after he murders his wife? What in God’s name must their relation be? And not for the first time I begin to appreciate Jack, my father. Why? Because the first thing he would have done, had I come fleeing home with blood on my hands?

Call the cops!

Second question? What kind of cop allows Daddy—even or perhaps especially if he is a federal judge—into a crime scene?

Third question—where’s the press? Go to Google, as I did. Type in Salvador Casellas. And you’ll get, yes, information in Spanish about these goings-on. Fine! In English? Not in the first five pages, which I scrolled through in disgust.

Fourth question—is this where Puerto Rico has come to? That almost a month after a woman was killed, her husband still has not been charged?

Oh, and the question I DON’T have?

Who killed Carmen Paredes?