When Sugar Was King

It was a flash moment, but all the more potent for that. I was looking for the oldest guy in town.

OK—it wasn’t a bar, and I wasn’t buying him his cigarettes and beer. But the process was pretty much the same.

“Yo busco a Chan,” I said to the three guys lounging on the boardwalk.

“Pa’ matarlo?” returned one. To kill him?

I must have passed, because they led me to him.

Guess it’s in the genes. My eye had been drawn to two large decaying towers. Gotta be sugar cane, I thought. But most of the chimneys I’ve seen were taller and thinner. So I asked a guy, who in turn asked me for a buck for a flask of wine. Helps him get through the day….

That’s how I got to Chan….

Who was a nice guy, gave me a seat in front of his fish shop, and told me the story of the area. Seems the area—Fajardo Playa—was originally mangrove swamp, “rescued” by his grandparent’s generation. It came there because there was work—a limestone (cal) mine on the nearby island of Icacos. The limestone came by ship, was packed and sent to the hardware stores around the island. In fact, they built a special pier just for the limestone. Called muelle de cal—limestone pier—it was nicknamed muelle de lambeojos—brownnose pier.

Now all the limestone comes from Mexico.

And it was Icacos limestone that was used to build the two towers that—yup—were for refining sugar. Called a central—it got the sugarcane from a valley behind a mountain that the wine-seeker pointed out in the distance. Came by rail—a special train used just for transporting the cane.

OK—knew about that. There’s a famous one down south somewhere. Well, the Central started up in the early 20^th century. Closed down in the mid 70’s. The sugar cane would come, be processed, then transported in sacks by ships to a larger ship anchored at sea. Harbor in Fajardo Playa wasn’t deep enough.

And local guys would work the ships—standing on one and heaving sacks of sugar to go to the other ship.

Hard work, and Chan said the guys had muscles for days. Still do. There are two of them surviving, and they’re both sharp as machetes, mentally. One of ‘em is 95.

Well, the Central closed down in 1977. It had been the biggest employer in town for decade. But it was cheaper for the gringos to bring it in half a world away. So what to do? Well, a lot of the guys turned to the sea. Took to fishing, which is also a hard life. Hour after hour under the sun, and indeed it’s hot here, in this corner of the island. And they could go for a couple of days without catching anything.

So the kids in town? Where are they working? 

Answer—elsewhere or they’re not. In 1997, the unemployment rate was 22-25%. And that was the nineties—good years, good times. Now? Curiously, it’s lower. Just 19%, the highest in Puerto Rico. The census tells the story—4000 people left town in the first decade of the 21^st century.

Most of the local businesses have closed. On the outskirts of town, there are the malls, the chain stores. Puerto Rico’s most expensive hotel, El Conquistador, sits rather smugly on a nearby mountaintop. Designed to face the sea, it also turns its back on the town.

And yes, two pharmaceuticals—the backbone of the 1950’s Bootstrap miracle—still remain. Estamos sobrevivendo por la misericordia de Dios. We’re holding on by the mercy of God, said Chan. Times are bad.

And Chan has about 20 fishermen who supply him with the red snapper, conch (when it was legal), and lobster he sells.

Well, Chan had given me half an hour of his time, and the name of a book—El Grito de Silencio, The Shout of Silence—which would tell me the story of the Central. So I gave him my hand, thanked him for his time, and for the information. We’d passed half an hour chatting and looking out over the sea, remembering or learning the old days, when guys had jobs and produced stuff, instead of lingering in bars or flipping hamburgers.

Memories are selective and often defective. But nothing about Fajardo Playa, today, spoke of good times.

The Case of a Missing Generation

Where’s Daddy?

That was my first thought when I read the news that 75% of Puerto Rican grandparents are principally responsible for their grandchildren, and nearly 50% have actual custody of them.

Hunh?

Where are the parents? 

Of course, there are always going to be grandparents who step back into the role of parenthood. A couple dies in a car crash, a single mother succumbs to breast cancer—sure, Abuela steps in.

But 75%? 

Yet, thinking back on it, it may be true. Consider my students’ lives. They got up at 5AM, took the sleeping baby to their mother’s house, suffered the morning traffic jam, and clocked in at 7:30. Reverse procedure at 4:30, with the addition that most of them ate dinner at Mamita’s. 

Good deal, hunh?

Never thought so. Certainly my own mother wouldn’t have bought in. You got a kid? Then you’re responsible. Sorry—I did it, now you do it. Not my problem.

Which was also the way it worked with adult kids. You got a job? Get an apartment, learn to cook, do your own laundry. Coming back home is for emergencies only. The moment you’re on your feet again, you’re out the door.

Well, it’s a gringo point of view. But is it the best point of view?

Well, the first question might be if it’s sustainable. What’s going to happen when the kids grow up, have kids of their own, and look to their own mother to be a grandmother? Is she going to do as her mother did? Will she be able to, financially? Will she have learned somewhere how to cook, so she can feed her daughter the way abuela did?

And is it good for kids to be raised by grandparents? Sure—they’re a bountiful source of love, but what about discipline? My students all bemoaned the fact that no one today was doing what their father did—take off his belt and pelt the kid. A younger dad is a different parent than a grandparent.

But it may, after all, be a good thing. The gringa grandmother, alone in her condo in Florida, a thousand miles from her grandchild—is she happy? Doesn’t the responsibility of raising a child also bring some joy? The nuclear family—is it normal?

As always, I have no answers. Just questions….

Two Writers, One Gone

I began thinking about it on the daily trot, after reading another review of Iguanas. “I fell in love with Franny,” wrote Mayra, and again it struck me: how could she? Is Franny still making friends, even in the afterlife?

Seems so!

Well, not much surprises me down here. Reality is different in Puerto Rico, as different as the air. So I looked at the ocean, took a breath, and then got thinking about another writer—far greater. John Kennedy Toole, and if you haven’t read A Confederacy of Dunces, stop everything. Get the book. Unplug the phone. Cancel your life for two days. Read.

Well, that's probably unnecessary advice—the book has sold 1.5 million copies. Has also been translated in 18 languages. So you’ve likely read it, and know the curious story behind it. How the book was rejected, how the author despaired and then suicided, how the mother barged into Walker Percy's office after mercilessly harassing him with calls and letters. She demanded that he read it.

There is something about a mother’s love!

What you might not know is that the book was at least partially written in Puerto Rico.

Toole was drafted in 1961. Not being obvious cannon fodder, he was shipped to Puerto Rico, to teach English to the recruits. (Do I hear bells ringing?) He rose meteorically—his word—and got a private office. That’s when he started to write Confederacy.

The insanity and unreality of Puerto Rico itself has been interesting at all times that it was not overwhelming. (Great agreement errors in this sentence, I fear).

That’s what he had to say about Puerto Rico. And knowing Puerto Rico lends an interesting take on Confederacy. The main character is completely unlike any other character in fiction—insane, unkempt, learned. The plot stumbles along in its own illogical way. The absurdities pile up.

I won’t know without doing more research than I want how much of the book was written in Puerto Rico. But I’ll go out on a limb.

The book could only have been written in Puerto Rico.

Closer Than I Wanted

There are times when, even now, even after two years, even after writing a damn BOOK about it…

…I can’t believe that she did it.

Stopped eating and drinking. Referring to you-know-whom.

I think it especially today, since I was a damn fool this morning. Took off for a walk at 10AM on possibly the hottest, most sun-blazened (sorry, computer—it’s a word now!) path in the city.

OK—I wasn’t completely stupid. I had bought a bottle of water. I made sure that I was drinking it—a surprising number of people don’t. I was wearing sun-glasses. But at a certain point, the sun and the insomnia of the night before got to me. 

I dove into the bushes and sought shade.

It was a purely physical reaction—as reflexive as jumping back when the scorpion lifts its tail. So I sat in the bushes, and wondered how I was going to get out.

A couple walked by—should I ask them for help? I do have a history of manhunts at El Morro.

I followed them, instead. And I eventually made it home. 

So it was a minor thing. But it left me panting and exhausted. And contemplating, again, the amount of will that an 89 year-old lady—my mother—must have exerted, those two years ago.

“It hasn’t been too bad,” she said, in that last week, referring to the fast. But now I wonder—how could it not have been?

(Thanks to Erica Iris for these images….)

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.

Casellas Wived

Readers who don’t know the story of Candid Flowers won’t get it, so let me show you the picture:

Yes, after almost two months in which it was glaringly obvious who slaughtered Carmen Paredes, her husband has at last been put in esposas (wives or handcuffs) and charged with first-degree murder, lying to a federal agent, and destruction of evidence.

The New Day is following it minute by minute. The morning radio is flooded with the story. And yes, it does raise questions.

My questions, though, may not be the ones everybody is asking.

OK—let’s review. Carmen Paredes was a successful insurance broker, married to Pablo Casellas, the son of a senior federal judge. Paredes was killed on July 14^th of this year.

According to her husband, he returned from visiting his father early in the morning, saw an intruder leaping over a ten-foot wall, and went to get his guns. Casellas is a marksman, and has permits for 33 guns. (Rather, he had—the permits were revoked after the murder.) He fired several shots, but the intruder fled. Casellas then found his wife dead, sitting by the side of the pool.

To say that the story was flimsy is to be generous. It held together like wet toilet paper. 

The vegetation on both sides of the wall was un-trampled. There were bloodstains in Casellas’s car. The bullet used was from a gun that Casellas had reported “stolen” after he had left the shooting range. Which, by the way, was closed that day.

That’s an oops!

Well, there’s a saying in Puerto Rico: you fart in San Juan, they smell it in Ponce.

So I wasn’t surprised when I ran into someone who had seen Pablo Casellas throughout his youth. And the report wasn’t flattering.

Nor, I’m sorry to say, was the report on the judge.

Because it’s he, more than his son, that plagues my imagination. The judge was permitted into the crime scene. OK—I can get that. A distressed father, a confused situation—what parent wouldn’t rush to his child’s aid?

But where was Pablo on the morning he summoned? At his father’s house.

Here, I say farewell to the judge. For I am sure that my father would not have harbored me had I done what Pablo Casellas did. And I hope I would have the backbone to do the same, had I a son in such a dilemma.

I think it was V. S. Naipaul who said that the tragedy of the Caribbean is that it doesn’t have a narrative, a story it tells itself that guides it, provides the framework. But it may be untrue. We have a terrible story of piracy, of violence and greed. And in the Spanish Caribbean, we have some unpleasant leftovers from Spain: arrogance, cruelty and entitlement being three of them.

The person who witnessed Pablo’s childhood was reticent, not wanting even years later to speak much. She did say that he was a little monster.

And I will say—he grew into a big one.

Oh, and Candid Flowers? Here’s a link….

http://www.bokorlang.com/journal/31amusements.htm

Stupid Days

Readers—beware! You’ll get nothing of value from this post!

How can I be so sure?

Well, it’s a stupid day, or a nothing day, as Franny used to call them. That is, a day when nothing works, nothing goes right, nothing will be accomplished.

Well, it could be worse. The Norwegians have a concept—the nothing YEAR! Yeah, a whole year in which you spin your wheels, accomplish zilch, create a big zero. It drives you and everyone around you to despair and madness.

There is—I can tell you, because I searched heroically—NOTHING good in the news today. OK—so what to write about? Music?

Well, I listened to a new piece—well, new to me—of music, but that’s sort of ho-hum. So was the music, actually—and that’s nice. There is after all a place for average in music. Not everything has to be great.

Right—then my student cancelled. Sears was coming to repair the roof. Well, I understand that. When Sears impends, you postpone!

(Yes, I can hear you wondering about that ”impends” up there. Well, why not? If it’s not right, it should be!)

And now, to top it all off, I can feel my editor going crazy in Tobago!

She’s taught me a lot, this sister of mine. In the past, I used to go absolutely nuts about technical issues on the computer. I should say—I’m neither a whiz nor an idiot when it comes to technology. In the days of Wal-Mart, I once created a complete “web-site” in PowerPoint. I learned how to “program” in something called VBA. I started in on HTML, and was actually getting somewhere when the guillotine fell.

And it wasn’t easy. Because my first response when something didn’t work?

Fury!

“If you have a button that says ‘enter’ then you should enter, dammit, and not give me this stupid message that you cannot enter because the script contains a deleted variable!!!!” That’s what I would scream, at the beginning of it all. 

Later?

Get up from my desk, go walk through the parking lot, look at the bamboo, address the iguanas. Screaming at a computer is like screaming at a cat. Unless you enjoy it, it’s pointless.

Also counterproductive.

I know this because of Miss Taí! She has two amazing qualities that I have slightly adopted. The first is patience.

The second is absolute fiendish determination.

This lady will NOT give up.

An example?

“Ah, the curse of being a religious, if you have a gold candle stick, it should be melted down and given to the poor.”

That’s a sentence from Iguanas that became a curse.

Look, it wasn’t that great a sentence. But doña Taí got it in her head—the average reader would be confused. What was “a religious” anyway?

I explained. A scientist, a doctor, a religious! See? Simple!

She dug in.

I sent her a link to thefreedictionary.com in which “religious” is called a noun—the name of a person practicing religion.

But Charisse—a canny lady indeed—had never heard of it! And if Charisse…

No, it’s my book, I’m the author, it stays.

Yes I know, ok, fine, but….

Taí!

“It’s just that….”

Well, the trench was six feet and Taí had an inexhaustible supply of grenades! And one hell of a throwing arm.

“I just think….”

Dammit!

Well, as I say, I can feel her spinning around down there, a terrier worrying a technical rat.

Here’s the problem:

Beautiful, hunh? And designed by none other than my editor herself. That MFA came right out! Even the name is spelled correctly!

Now then, how to stick it into an email, and link it to amazon.com so that I can avoid the fate of starting a little shoeshine business, just to keep body and soul together!

Gotta sell some books….

Well, she’ll do it, I know. She’ll nail that problem and explain it to me and I’ll nod my head, not understanding or caring in the least. Why should I? When Taí is there?

Oh, and about that sentence? “The curse of a religious?”

Got changed….

Click anywhere on the image to get your copy….

Banner design by 2012 © Taí Fernández All Rights Reserved

(Vector art courtesy of Mauricio Duque of snap2objects.com, through a Creative Commons 3.0 license.)

The Craziness Marches On

Well, it’s a day when religion seems to intrude itself.

Maybe it started yesterday, when I read the lovely and teaching story of Marriott's undergarments. Yes, there is a Marriott; yes, he’s chairman of the board of you-know-what; yes, he’s a Mormon.

And listen to what he said!

“I related to him how I’d been involved in a very serious boat accident, here  in New Hampshire,” Marriott said. “I caught fire; my polyester pants had burned off all the way to my waist. But my undergarments from my waist down to my knees had not even been singed. There wasn’t a mark on them. And I said, these holy  undergarments saved my life.”

¿Bíjte?! (as we’d say down here—“see”?!)

Of course, it could also have been yesterday, when I walked past the capitol with Raf. There’s a huge group of people, today, who are clamoring to God. And they’ve stuck up a huge “Christian” poster, completely obscuring half of the capitol’s northern face. Got the Jesus, got the sheep, got the cross! And they’ve got the quote from—I think—Ezekiel about the clamoring….

This, of course, used to set my Madison sensibilities howling. These crazy evangelicals who are anti EVERYTHING except personal-read-financial enrichment are being given the use of the preeminent public building on the island—I’ve paid for a block or two of the marble several times over, thanks!—and nobody whispers a word of disagreement?

Can we—gays and lesbians and women and just about everybody who isn’t insane—hold an alternative festival next week?

You know the answer.

Well, well. Mental hygiene. Breathe, Marc.

And then, it turned out the Reverend—wait, why did I type that!—Sun Myung Moon died at age 92 yesterday. Well—certainly had to check in on that!

And it is quite instructive, the life of our reverend. Born in 1920, he encountered—literally, he says—Jesus at age sixteen. (That’s Moon, age 16—sorry, writing about religion so often induces bad grammar, or maybe just thinking….)

Well, Jesus had a message, as he so often does. Moon was to go forth and complete the work that Jesus had left unfinished 2000 years ago. Sets up the Unification Church, and grows it by preaching family values.

The family often being the result of two strangers of different cultures being “blessed” in a mass ceremony.

Remember Madison Square Garden in 1982?

Well, Moon did what any sharp guy would do. Got rich, acquired money and power! The New Yorker Hotel, a ski resort—all manner of bangles on the guy’s bracelet.

Oh, and curious friendships—with Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and George H. W. Bush. As well, of course, as the dictator of North Korea.

I could tell you as well about the Church of Scientology (capitals by convention only) interviewing girlfriends for Tom Cruise.

But the brain tires.

Here’s the thing. 20 % of the followers of this blog—there are five—go to church faithfully (was about to say religiously, but thought not).

Her name is Susan.

And I respect Susan’s beliefs as she respects mine. I would also argue that she is the best sort of Christian, and that she, and her church, do good in the community. I cheerfully grant her and her church the right to be tax-free, and I shoulder a bit more of the burden April 15 for that dispensation.

But these crazies?

Needing a breath of fresh air, mentally, I turned to Mark Twain. And here he is, on the Book of Mormon:

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it.  I brought away a copy from Salt Lake.  The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration.  It is chloroform in print.  If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle--keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.  If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone, in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason.

The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament.  The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James's translation of the Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel--half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity.  The latter is awkward and constrained; the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast.  Whenever he found his speech growing too modern--which was about every sentence or two--he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as "exceeding sore," "and it came to pass," etc., and made things satisfactory again.  "And it came to pass" was his pet.  If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.

The Dead Finger

Readers of this blog know about it. Last May, as we were celebrating the second anniversary of Franny’s death, someone put her finger on the test button of the smoke alarm.

Recap—the Zanas had come out and brought food. The talk turned to mystical matters—how Bess always associates her mother with deer, and how, in speaking with her sister about this, she went to the window, to pull up the shades. “Wouldn’t it be weird,” said Bess, “if there were a deer…”

Don’t have to tell you. There wasn’t one.

There were fourteen.

And that’s when, in the Acres, the smoke alarm went off. And of course, there was no smoke in the house.

I took the damn thing outside, where there was a strong breeze.

Wouldn’t stop….

I finally took the battery out. And apparently unwilling to violate too many natural laws, Franny relented. Then the Morning Glories held their affair, to which they graciously invited us! Well, no Newhouse cannot NOT have the last word.

In this case, it was 17 minutes of Beethoven, the Heiliger Dankgesang. It, like Winterreise six months previously, had been haunting me. 

Well, that put an end to THAT party. Not much you can do after that. So I took a walk with Cheryl, our hosts cleaned up Franny’s house, and they departed. “Wow,” said  Eric, “wonder what an outsider would have thought of that.”

And then, an outsider turned the porch light off.

Wondering why I bothered, I went out to examine the empty porch.

(For a fuller account of the whole affair, as well as a wonderful performance of the Dankgesang, click here….)

Well, well—I knew about the dead hand (or thought I did), but the dead finger?  Because this morning, the Schumann I had decided on for the daily trot wasn’t to Franny’s liking.

She changed it to the Brahms’ Piano Concerto number two. 

Well, it was either the stupid shuffle button or the dead finger. But here’s the deal.

She wants Brahms? She gets Brahms.

And it was curiously appropriate. Because the second pregnancy began with another Brahms’ piano concerto. The first, of course—there are only two.

The first pregnancy ended with her death, which spawned a book. The second pregnancy ended with my death, and set off the writer. And now, in the curiously jumbled way things happen, Franny is born again, for the ten or ten thousand people who may read about her.

She’s out there stirring around—no more jangling for her!

I wrote, some paragraphs up (can’t be back…), that I knew about the dead hand. Seems I didn’t—thefreedictionary.com defines it thus:

dead hand

n.

1. The ever-present, oppressive influence of past events: "Psychotherapy explores the ways in which the past has shaped people, and how its dead hand continues to deform their lives" (James S. Gordon).

2. Mortmain

[Middle English dede hond, translation of Old French mortemain or Medieval Latin manus mortua, mortmain.]

Well, I knew the first definition, but what’s the skinny on the “mortmain?”

mortmain [ˈmɔːtˌmeɪn]

n

(Law) Law the state or condition of lands, buildings, etc., held inalienably, as by an ecclesiastical or other corporation

[from Old French mortemain, from Medieval Latin mortua manus dead hand, inalienable ownership]

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

mortmain

transfer or ownership of real property in perpetuity, as transfer to or ownership by a corporate body like a school, college, or church.

See also: Property and Ownership

This makes dim sense to me. Looked it up, further, and got an interesting account of the struggle in medieval times of property between the Church and State. 

But I was hot and sweaty, exhausted as much by the trot as the labor of two pregnancies. Plus the Brahms was washing through my brain, still. I decided to skip any further investigation of the dead hand, or mortmain.

I’ll take the dead finger instead….