The Cellist Destroying America!

Well, it was one of those things I came across in that surreal time between wake and sleep, when a medicine I take that knocks me off reliably forty minutes after taking it then wakens me sternly and craves sweets. It’s called mirtazapine, and if you don’t have to take it, don’t. If, however, like me, the choice is the black dog of depression or mirtazapine, then run for it. Anyway, here’s the text:

Hi, please read this letter. I am a musician who has nothing to do with this incident, but I am very interested in making sure that no harm comes to the extraordinary antique you have in your possession.

1. You need to know that without a violin case, you risk serious harm to a living piece of history. I know you threw away the case, so go buy another violin case at a music store. Today. Store the violin safely in the case.

2. Dry winter air could be very damaging to the violin. Go out today and buy a room humidifier. Run it a few hours a day in the room where you keep the violin. If the wood dries out too much, it will crack, doing terrible damage.

3. You will never sell this violin. The violin is individually known and marked. It is not like a diamond where you can have it recut before it's fenced—think of the violin more like a human being, as someone's child. It is a living piece of history, 300 years old. Benjamin Franklin was a boy of 9 when this violin was lovingly crafted in northern Italy.

There is a powerful network out there looking for stolen instruments. If you attempt to sell it, you will certainly be caught and will spend years in jail. What you have done is tantamount to kidnapping. Violinists the world over hate your guts. Not a one will give you a dime.

4. After you buy the case, your best bet is to take the violin into a local mall and set it down safely, then walk away. Leave it somewhere warm where it won't be crushed or in danger of water damage.

Do the honorable thing. Give the violin up so that it may continue making music. It is worth nothing to you, while the music that still lives inside it is priceless.

Well, as a cellist, that was all pretty interesting. Also interesting is that this appeared on Craigslist > Milwaukee > all personals > rants and raves. What was the deal, or would I go back to bed? Bed I could do, I decided; a stolen violin in Milwaukee was beyond my reach.

The next day, I checked in on what I had been reading during the night, and was interested to find that it was the Lipinski Stradivarius that was stolen in an armed robbery in a Milwaukee parking lot after a concert.

That at least is reassuring, since the possessor of the violin—Frank Almond, the concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony—had been attacked with a stun gun and had the violin taken from him. And that implies—at least to me—that the thieves (a man and a woman) knew very well what they wanted and what it was worth.

In the case of Strads, many of them are named after the famous people who have played them. But this Strad is particularly illustrious—it was owned by Giuseppe Tartini, an Italian baroque composer most known for his “Devil’s Trill” sonata. Why the instrument is known as the Lipinski Strad—after Karol Lipinski, a Polish violinist of the first half of the 19^th century—and not the Tartini Strad is a mystery no one can explain.

So the concertmaster had left the concert with his violin…but wait. It wasn’t—Almond, like so many others, couldn’t afford an instrument of that quality and especially that rarity. So the violin was on loan. But from whom? It isn’t stated—or rather, the violin was lent anonymously by someone who had “strong ties to Milwaukee,” but it’s almost certainly the estate of Richard Anschuetz, a pianist who bought the instrument for his wife, the Estonian violinist Evi Liivak. Here’s what one source had to say:

Mr. Anschuetz missed her dearly, and continued to do so until his death in 2008. He could not bear to be parted from her beloved violin, and treasured it to the end.

So Almond was—in a sense—lucky. The worst fear of a string player is that their instrument will be stolen by some junkie, who will abuse it and possibly destroy it. That said, I can’t imagine the agony of having my cello stolen. It would not be losing my instrument, not even losing my voice: it would be losing my soul.

Don’t think that it goes just one way—that the player makes the music. I recently rented for a week a cello in New York City. It was a cello mass produced in China, and it wasn’t bad, though it was miles behind my instrument at home. But that’s when I learned: even a bad cello can sound good. But it can sound good in only one way. A great instrument can sound good in every way.

And so an instrument teaches the player—suggests a sonority, allows a phrasing, responds and reacts. And it becomes not an instrument but a part of the body.

Which is why a surprising number of players have had their instruments stolen: their instrument is so much a part of them that they forget to watch it, or even take it out of the cab they had been riding in. Think I’m wrong? Quick—what is your left hand doing right now?

It happened to Min-Jim Kym in 2010—she was eating at a London Pret a Manger and checking her iPhone (why am I not surprised?) and then…the Strad that she had been lent was gone. And then, after three years, it turned up in the Midlands. But in a curious and horrible twist of fate, the owner of the violin decided to put the instrument up for auction. It was sold for 1.38 million pounds. Kym, one classy lady, released this statement:

 "This violin was a faithful friend for many years, and I was devastated by its loss," Min-Jin Kym said. "Its recovery is an absolute relief, and I am eager to hear the violin onstage once more. I wish its next owner all the best of luck and success."

What do cellists Lynn Harrell, Yo-Yo Ma, and the violinist Philippe Quint have in common? They all have left their instruments in taxis—and all have gotten them back. And yes, all of them were Strads.

It seems that Harrell, at least, should stick to ground transport, if possible. Why? Check out the video below…. 

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive

The Priest Who Couldn't Be Bought (Not Part 2)

Well, I had thought to write the second part of The Priest Who Couldn’t Be Bought, the moving tale of a Polish priest, Wojciech Gil, who along with his fellow Pole and papal nuncio, Jozef Wesolowski, took on the drug lords of a narcotic-drenched Dominican Republic. They fought nails and teeth (strange how all the expressions get turned around in Spanish)—Gil increasing the number of altar boys from eight to 180—how dare you snigger out there! No shame!—and giving them money and cell phones and, oh, even trips to his native Poland. Wow—that’s a priest!

So in part 1, I had tidily gotten Wojciech Gil through his childhood, through the seminary (actually, that took about a sentence) and then to Santo Domingo and up the road to the little town of Juncalito, where he will spend the next eight years, and will be, by all accounts, well-received and loved by the residents.

There was just a little problem…

I spent yesterday afternoon watching YouTube clips about the case. There was the deacon, who spoke admiringly about the man, who described the house where Gil lived as being open to anyone, 24 / 7, where Gil was always prepared to listen, to make a good cup of coffee—Juncalito is in the prime coffee region of the Dominican Republic—and where….

But wait…

Because there was also, on several clips, the shocking photo of women’s panties and other accouterments not commonly associated with a priest’s wardrobe. Oh, and what about the reports that Gil could be found, with friends, completely sloshed—there was always vodka, his preferred tipple, whisky and gin in the house.

There was a clip of the collective luto, or grief of mourning, of the community. And then the clip of the fifteen year-old boy who had been abused for three years. And in addition to the gifts, there were the threats as well—there was a photo in the clip showing Wesolowski’s gun on his belt. Yup—the priest was packing.

So who was this guy? Had he been abused as a kid? What was going on in Poland, in those years when Wesolowski was growing up? Well, I knew that Gil was 38 or 39—a conscientious blogger would look that up—so he would have been born in the mid-70s. Which would have put him in his mid-teens by the time the Solidarity movement finally toppled the communist regime. What had that been like?

Then there was the interesting question—what was the power of the Catholic Church in those years? And what was the power of the church after democracy had been restored? I had a dim notion that the church ruled with a medieval hand—authoritarian and unchallenged. But was that true?

So it was time to zip over to Poland via the Internet and here’s what I found, on the first page of a Google search:

Paedophilia is caused by divorce, says Poland's top Catholic bishop as he blames parents for not bringing up children properly

•   Archbishop Jozef Michalik says child abusers are 'looking for love'

•   Claims divorce can be as harmful to children as paedophilia

•   Catholic church in Poland has been hit with paedophile priest allegations

Right—you know I had to read that one, so I did, and here’s Michalik’s tangy twist on orthodox thinking. These priests are not predators. The children, you see, come from broken homes—that’s the divorce part—and come seeking comfort and succor to a father figure—that’s the priest—and so things sometimes get out of hand. So it’s not all the priests’ fault: the children are partly to blame too—as well as those damned divorcing parents.

Well, to no one’s surprise, the archbishop came out the next day, and what he said was—hold on tightly to your seat, here—that he had been misinterpreted, his words twisted and indeed wrenched out of context. Of course he hadn’t meant that kids were responsible for the abuse, or were wantonly tempting those good men of the cloth on.

So that got me thinking. I’ve been to the Dominican Republic just once, but it was abundantly clear—it’s poor, but it is very, very Latin. The men are drinking beer and smoking and listening to bachata and trying to get into any girl’s pants, and the music is blasting everywhere, and the chickens are running around everywhere, and there is—paradoxically—a strange undercurrent of danger underneath all the seemingly loose and hot and casual enjoyment of life. The wrong look at the wrong girl? A gun will flash, blood on the floor, Mamita wailing as she grinds her face into the blood-soaked shirt of her son; she raises her head to scream at God, and her hands and face are smeared with her child’s blood.

Or this….

Pablito sees his chance, and takes the deal Julito has offered him—cut out the middle man, Carlitos. What does Carlitos do, anyway? It’s Pablito out there, making the deliveries, and everyone knows him, trusts him. And for a few weeks it’s fine, until Carlitos puts the screws on the otherrunners. And if Carlitos lets that pendejo, that bastard get away with that?! Replay Mamita on the floor, from the paragraph above.

Then there was the interesting question of the 41 or 42 year-old man who is claiming that he was sexually abused here in Puerto Rico. The archdiocese offered $25,000, the guy wanted a million bucks. So that made me think—um, fifteen years old?

Time for some political incorrectness. At age fifteen, your body is awash in testosterone—if you’re a boy—and you are thinking more or less constantly about sex. In fact, a good number of 15-year olds are having sex. And we are not living The Bells of St. Mary’s, or whatever that 1950’s film was.

At this point, a group of kids who were probably 15-years old passed me, each one of them talking loudly and profanely, wearing gangster clothes, addressing each other as cabrón—which if you don’t know what that is, good for you! So the priest abuses a six-year old? Cut his balls off. But I’m a little unsure about a 15-year old.

Especially in a Latin country, where—as Mr. Fernández insists—it is part of the cultural responsibility of the older brother to explain to the younger brother that:

 1.     all priests are gay
2.     don’t let any one of them touch you
3.     if he does, tell me, and I’ll beat the shit out of him

See?

Well, all of this had taken most of the afternoon, since I was also absolutely riveted by a clip of the archbishop of San Juan, who looked anguished and also, I felt, deeply culpable. In fact, guilty as sin. And where was the post of the day, the tidy conclusion to The Priest Who Couldn’t Be Bought?

Stay tuned, Dar Reader—but it may take a while.

You don’t write a novel in a day…..

The Priest Who Couldn't Be Bought (Part 1)

It’s the stuff of movies.

He was a man of God, a man with a mission, a man who stood firm against the narco-traffickers who were using children—“children!” he exploded, when he first heard of it—to act as runners in the drug trade. As they grew up, they rose in the organizations, gradually working the puntos de drogas, picking up the drugs from the cigarette boats (so-called because they were low, to escape detection by radar, and resembled a box of cigarettes) as they skimmed over the emerald waters of the placid Caribbean.

He was in another world, a world far away from his native Poland, from his town 200 miles south of Warsaw, a town where his family had lived for generations, and where each day, his mother would rise at 5:30, dress hurriedly to the sound of church bells, and start her day by attending mass at the Holy Trinity Catholic Church.

The church—how much had he loved the church! The scent of incense, the swishing of the priest’s cassock as he waddled to the altar, the altar boys lighting candles, their eyes raised in adoration at Father Jozef. The mothers at mass were surging with pride. One day, vowed little Wojciech, it would be he standing at the altar, helping the priest, smelling the incense, feeling the heat of his mother's love as she watched her beloved boy.

There was never any question of it. Did anyone doubt that this quiet, solitude-loving boy had a vocation? He was as much a fixture in the church as the altar itself. And what an exciting time to be Polish, as the whole world fell in love with the first Polish pope, who had stood up to the Communists and won, who travelled the world so that the multitudes could roar the approval and love! He entered the seminary as you and I enter our homes.

There were hints of it, of course. A priest would be moved suddenly, sent off to a distant parish. Wojciech himself had had various priests keep their hands just a bit too long on his shoulder; gaze into his azure eyes just a bit too long. Had he done something wrong?

Later, he would know more about the filth, the corruption that had crept into his beloved church. There were the priests who organized the camping trips—just the priest himself and five or six boys. Never any parents to sleep in the tents or the cabins; why, wondered Wojciech? And a boy who had left sunny and mischievous, afraid of nothing and no one, would come back sullen and inward.

The day of his ordination, the happiest day of his life! All his family there, his mother beaming, telling Father Jozef, now so old but no less fat, how happy she was to give her son to the church.

“My child, you have made the greatest sacrifice to the Church. Wojciech may travel far, to distant lands, spending years toiling in the meanest, poorest hamlets, bringing the light of our holy church, shining the beacon of our Lord Jesus Christ. God will reward you, my dear….”

But in his first years, he had stayed in his beloved Poland, endured its winters, rejoiced in its lissome spring, and most, savored its rich food, and swum in the comfort of his native tongue. His family he saw frequently, his parishioners claimed him as their own.

“You do speak Spanish, don’t you?” asked the Monsignor.

“Hardly,” replied Wojciech.

“But you studied it in the seminary?”

The teachings of Paul, Sir Thomas Aquinas? Those he had devoured, his pursuit of Spanish was leisurely.

‘It was like being shoved into a sauna,’ he thought, as he remembered standing at the top of the runway steps, paralyzed by the heat and humidity, which the Dominicans behind him so much wanted to embrace, to frolic in. He looked out the window at a road well paved but carless. Indeed, the activity on the road was principally on its side, as streams of bikes and scooters—with several people clutching precariously atop them—whizzed by. The road was flat, but moving relentlessly to the Cordillera Central, the backbone of the island of Hispaniola. Shacks appeared now and then on the side of the road—men sat sitting on broken wooden chairs, seemingly with nothing to do. ‘Why aren’t they working the fields,’ thought Wojciech. In Poland, no man would have dared to be seen out of his house, sitting idle.

The car began to rise, to climb the foothills, to slow slightly as they passed villages—wooden shacks with rotting zinc roofs, the doors open and the barefoot, dirty children gazing out at the passing car. They passed dozens of villages; Wojciech’s heart thudded when he thought, ‘this car will stop, and I’ll get out in the infernal heat, and look around at the poverty and squalor, and that’ll be my town, until somebody tells me it’s not. My God, can I do this?’

He thought back to his homeland; the poor there did their best to hide it—keeping their clothes tidy no matter how old or how mended. They would have scorned to have junk in their yards, to be braying so blatantly their indifference to their own poverty. But these people! Their poverty was a sheet on the wash line, hung for all to see!

The car slowed, slowed more than it did merely to pass through the town. Wojciech’s stomach churned.

The church was the only thing that Wojciech could appreciate; it was erected with twin towers in the Italian style sometime in the 19^th century. The toadstools of huts had seemingly sprung up decades ago, and had refused to be eradicated.

His dislike of Padre Julio, standing to greet him in the rectory, was visceral—less a feeling than a blow. Sweat and grease and the stench of garlic oozed out of him, his eyes shifted away from Wojciech and drifted off to something more interesting—or was it an insult? A dismissal? Padre Julio spoke a greeting, not bothering to clean up his broad, coarse Dominican Spanish.

“Cerveza?” asked Wojciech, pronouncing his zeta with the Castilian th. Padre Julio snorted, and ambled off, not even bothering to show him his room. Though, it was obvious; opening one door, Wojciech saw a room strewn with clothes on the floor, an overflowing ashtray, beer cans resting where they had been tossed. The next room was hardly clean, but at least visibly unoccupied. Wojciech put his suitcase in the exact center of the bed, and began placing his shirts on hangers. They’d have to be ironed, of course, but they still had to be hung—one the right, as he had done since childhood. The pants, mostly, were permanent press, and might need just a firm hand to flatten out the wrinkles. Fortunately, the dresser was in good condition, and could receive his t-shirts in the top drawer, underwear below, socks underneath that….

Wojciech washed his face and stood facing the door. A clash of music from the several open bars slashed through the door. ‘Do I have to?’ a voice pleaded within him.

But he knew: if he didn’t face it now, he never would.

Note: I have written so much about the two Polish priests, the nuncio Jozef Wesolowski and Wojciech Gil accused of sexual abuse of minors in the Dominican Republic, that even I am tired of it. The Dominican government wants them extradited: Wesolowski is in the Vatican, which has no extradition policy; even if it did, Wesolowski is protected by diplomatic immunity. As for Gil, Polish authorities have refused to turn him over. Or as the Dominican press reports:

Más temprano las autoridades polacas informaron que no hay posibilidad de trasladar al sacerdote a República Dominicana para ser juzgado.

(“Earlier, Polish authorities announced there is no possibility to transfer the priest to the Dominican Republic to be processed.”)

Gil has claimed that the power drug lords have framed him, as he fought courageously in defense of the children who were being lured into a life of crime and violence. He pointed out that the computer on which the 500 photos of underage children engaged in sexual acts were put there by someone else—it was a shared computer.

And now, according to one account I read and now cannot find, after the denunciations of last May the village has gone silent. Why? Is everybody just tired of it? Or is someone putting screws? The drug lords? The Church?

I thought about it all over the joe of the morning, and thought, ‘well, what if?’ Jack, my newspaperman father, had been glowering—one of his talents—down at me for a while. Dig for the facts, tell ‘em straight, give both sides of the story, and then go hunt for the next story. Had I been doing that?

So here’s the other side….          

The News Out of Arecibo

News flash—things are getting seriously weird in the Diocese of Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

It all started last year, when a parishioner came forward and said there was some funny business of a sexual nature in the San Martín de Porres. The priest, José Colón Otero, fought the charges nail and teeth, as we say down here, and appeared under the hot Puerto Rican sun in front of his church. What happened a few days later? Somebody vandalized his church.

What happened next? Well, here’s the word from the New Day:

Tras una pesquisa que duró cerca de tres años, El Vaticano emitió un decreto en el que expulsa del sacerdocio al cura de la Diócesis de Arecibo José Colón Otero, eje de denuncias de índole sexual y violaciones al sigilo sacramental que sacudieron la Diócesis de Arecibo y a la parroquia San Martín de Porres.

Con esto, Colón Otero se convirtió en el sexto sacerdote de la Diócesis de Arecibo en ser expulsado por El Vaticano desde el 2011.

(“After an investigation that lasted almost three years, the Vatican issued a decree in which it expelled the priest of the Diocese of Arecibo José Colón Otero, the source of accusations of sexual misconduct and violations of the sacraments which shook the Diocese of Arecibo and the parish of San Martín de Porres.

With this, Colón Otero became the sixth priest in the Diocese of Arecibo to be expelled by the Vatican since 2011.”)

Um—six priests in three years?

Well, Colón Otero isn’t taking it lying down—he has several months to appeal, and he says the Vatican cleared him of the charges of sexual misconduct. Instead, all he did was violate the confidentiality of the confessional. No big deal!

Right, so the island was absorbing all of that yesterday, and woke up to the news that the Vatican is now investigating the bishop of Arecibo, Daniel Fernández Torres, on charges of…the usual. Here is the florid response of the bishop:

Jamás imaginé que las cosas pudieran llegar hasta el punto de la calumnia y de la vil mentira, pero sé que si al mismo Jesucristo lo crucificaron y lo humillaron por ser Él mismo la Verdad, el escarnio es parte de los seguidores de Cristo”, detalló en declaraciones escritas.

(“Never in my life did I imagine that things might arrive to the point of calumny and vile lies like this, but  I know that if even Jesus Christ they crucified and humiliated for being the very Truth, the ridicule is part of the followers of Christ, detailed the bishop in written declarations.”)

So the island scratched its head and thought about that for awhile, and then the news hit at lunchtime: the bishop of a neighboring town, Rubén González of Caguas, has been asked to... well, let him explain:

“En un caso como este, a mí se me ha pedido un servicio... El servicio implica que yo dialogue con unas personas y que hable con unas personas, que dé mi parecer. Pero eso no es hacer una investigación. Estoy en búsqueda de la verdad”, manifestó.

El obispo de Caguas fue cuidadoso en hablar sobre la tarea encomendada por el Vaticano. Se limitaba a exponer que su función es solo “dar un servicio” y no “juzgar el hecho”.

(“In a case such as this, from me they have requested a service… The service implies that I dialogue with various people and talk to various people; that I offer my opinion. But this is not the same as conducting an investigation. I’m only seeking the truth,” he maintained.

The bishop of Caguas was cautious in speaking of the task asked by the Vatican. He limited himself to saying that his function was only to ‘give a service’ and not ‘judge the fact.’”)

Um—we got the bishop of Caguas walking around talking to people and trying to figure out what went down, and that’s not an investigation?

Boys?

Oh, and by the way, where’s the archbishop, who is the highest church official on the island. Isn’t he the bishops’ supervisor, or did they change the hierarchy without letting me know? But no, he too is being a model of discretion:

Ante esta denuncia contra el obispo de Arecibo, el arzobispo de San Juan, Roberto González Nieves, prefirió guardar silencio.

“Desconozco si hay algo oficial”, fue lo primero que señaló el líder de la iglesia católica en la Isla.

Luego, expresó que “de momento, yo prefiero no opinar sobre ese tema”.

(Forget the translation—González denies knowing if there’s anything official and prefers not to comment. Raise your hands, Readers, if you believe that!)

In the movie The Queen, the Tony Blair character says about the Royal Family, “somebody has got to save these people from themselves….”

Exactly!

Drama Queens

A year ago, it was the pianist Martha Argerich who was the object of an infatuation that almost verged on stalking, though only electronically. Which is to say that I watched every clip on YouTube that I could, in both English and Spanish. In fact, it got so bad that I was driving myself crazy by revisiting my high school French when I finally got over it.

OK—so who is it now?

Joyce DiDonato, the American mezzo-soprano whom Dame Janet Baker recently called “at the peak of her game,” or words to the effect. And when Dame Janet says that about you, you can take the day off and go have a beer. Or maybe not—maybe you should hit the practice rooms really hard that day. It’s serious praise….

Well, DiDonato would know, since she gave the single most cogent comments about the inner critic when she gave a master class at Juilliard, some time back. “Would you ever,” she asked, “ever speak to another human being the way you speak to yourself?” Then she went on to give a parody—no, wait, it was an exact replica—of the nonsense that lived in my brain for about four decades: “that’s not GOOD enough you have to get that better and it worked yesterday….”

You get the picture…

Not surprisingly, DiDonato also gave the most helpful, the funniest, and the most supportive master class I’ve seen. Maybe because, as she stated in one interview, she had once been savaged in a master class when she was a student. 

So of course I had to watch DiDonato talking about her latest project, Drama Queens, which features mostly unknown but by no means unworthy music. How unknown? Well, have you ever heard of Guiseppe Maria Orlandini, who…wait, here’s Wikipedia:

Giuseppe Maria Orlandini (4 April 1676 – 24 October 1760) was an Italian baroque composer particularly known for his more than 40 operas and intermezzos. Highly regarded by music historians of his day like Francesco Saverio Quadrio, Jean-Benjamin de La Borde and Charles Burney, Orlandini, along with Vivaldi, is considered one of the major creators of the new style of opera that dominated the second decade of the 18th century.

OK, I’m proud to announce that I’d heard of one of the names in the paragraph above….

Right—what about Giovanni Porta? Here I give you the full text of what Wikipedia has to say about him.

Porta is believed to have been born in Venice. One of the masters of early 18th-century opera and one of the leading Venetian musicians, Porta made his way from Rome, to Vicenza, to Verona, then London where his opera Numitore was performed in 1720 by the Royal Academy of Music (1719), and eventually back to Venice and Verona, and finally Munich, where he spent the last 18 years of his life.

Well, as you can hear in the clip below, Porta’s treatment of the soon-to-be-dying Ifigenia is a knockout. But in fact, the album—which I bought weeks ago, and which I listen to frequently—is filled with knockouts.

I once had a friend who insisted: baroque music is the most expressive of all the styles in classical music. And listening to this music, it’s not hard to make the case.

The other great thing about the album? Absolutely stunning performances by Alan Curtis and Il Complesso Barocco—performances that are both historically informed (as the jargon has it) and also tremendously musical.

Il Complesso Barocco is a joint endeavor by Curtis and the American crime writer Donna Leon, one of whose novels I had just finished yesterday. Here’s one description of how they work together:

Mr. Curtis does the hands-on artistic and administrative work for Complesso. Ms. Leon lends her name and underwrites the costs. But more than that, she travels Europe, tracking down potential singers. And sometimes she appears in mixed words-and-music shows herself, reading appropriate excerpts from her books: the "operatic" moments in which Brunetti ponders (as he tends to) the relationship between the lyric theater and real life or simply sinks into a reverie about some favorite voice.


Well, she’s a fascinating character. She writes during the day, and runs an opera company during the evening. And she lives in Venice….

It’s impossible to gauge the happiness or depth of fulfillment of any person’s life. But why do I think Curtis, Leon, and DiDonato aren’t doing badly?

On the Edge

I can tell you that Lebanon is about the size of New Jersey, that 70% of the population is Moslem, and 30% are Arab Christians. Oh, and that the civil war lasted one and a half decades.

I can tell you this because a man in his fifties is reading from The World and Its People to a 14 year-old girl, who last year was struggling through state capitals. She’s Naia, the daughter of the café where I write, and she’s being home-schooled, which in this case means reading a lot of stuff in the book, and then getting quizzed on it. And so each morning I watch the pair; they seem to get on well.

In fact, the information that a civil war lasted three decades doesn’t quite begin to tell you the real story. That was best done by author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and it went something like this:

There was once a place where people of all kinds lived in peace: Jews, Christian and Moslem. But religion, though important, wasn’t all-important; being Lebanese was at least as important. And so people lived side by side in prosperity and peace, just as they had for generations, just as they always would.

What happened? I can’t remember and that may have been the point. For Taleb, the civil war illustrated how immensely fragile societies are, and how easily they can be torn apart.

I think about this because of two events taking place or that took place recently. The first was the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián, which lasted temporally four days and experientially as long as the civil war in Lebanon.

To say that the affair was boggled is to be polite. First of all, the mayor of the city decided to erect cyclone fences on several of the streets and proposed having checkpoints on the rest. Oh, and everybody—residents included—would have to go through metal detectors, be scanned by wands, and do what-not. To do all this, the mayor contracted a private company, at an undisclosed cost.

This immediately aroused the concern of the ACLU, who argued that the idea, and certainly the practice, violated the fourth amendment. It aroused my concern—I thought we’d have a stampede. So the ACLU met with the mayor and got nowhere. Then they took her to court, and got the court to rule that the barricades and checkpoints were indeed unconstitutional. So we went from having extreme security to having virtually none.

The police, you say?

The police in Puerto Rico are more decorative than functional. In fact, in an absent-minded moment, I once looked at a cop and thought, ‘I can’t believe they give those guys guns….’

So the police stood about and watched as a stream of people sauntered by, the children being urged by their parents to make maximal noise. This they did, the worst of which were the boat horns. Don’t let the size fool you: they can roar at up to 135 decibels.

That was the first problem. The second? The city had negotiated with the taxistas to provide—at a charge of five bucks per person—service from the convention center into the fiesta. There were also buses for free. So the predictable happened: nobody took the taxis and the wait for a bus could take an hour.

What follows isn’t so predictable: the taxistas became incensed, and decided to block off access on the major roads that lead to the old city.

You have to understand, Old San Juan is on a little island connected by a bridge to the mainland. Therefore, having an event of this magnitude is not so much flirting but cock-teasing disaster. My in-laws are well into their eighties, and the family was holding its breath that there would be no emergencies.

And so no one could get in to the fiesta, and there were massive traffic jams. So what did the city do? Call the cops and get the taxis towed?

Nope—they cancelled the bus service!

So the residents—those who hadn’t fled—of Old San Juan endured two days of maximal abuse, supervised by our chatting police, who did their best to ignore the crowd. The madness and the noise went on until at least three in the morning.

The café closed, since why stay open when nobody buys anything and your bathroom gets trashed? Because though the festival has great crafts and attracts decent folk during the day, at night it turns into a bacchanalia. The only thing that sells is beer.

Well, that was the first thing. The second thing? Well, the jury is out for Pablo Casellas, the son of a federal judge. The son is accused of killing his wife, and Daddy ducked under a police tape on the day of the murder.

It’s taken four months to get to this point, the principal problem being to find 12 people who didn’t think Pablo did it. The whole thing smelled from the beginning: an alleged robbery of a special pistol that later was found to have been the same type of gun that caused the victim’s death. Casellas alleged that the assailants jumped over the fence so lightly that they didn’t trample the grass, which was quite tall. Oh, and the bloodstains in Casellas’s car? Then there was the DNA….

It was all pretty clear who did it, but it almost came apart when the pathologist testified that—given her wounds—it had to be someone the victim knew, probably family. The defense seized, and petitioned for a mistrial. The judge said no.

He’ll be convicted, of course, and the verdict will be appealed.

Unlike the people who mobbed my city last weekend, Casellas had it all—money, power, status. And he was arrogant—he thought he could kill in cold blood and get away with it. He thought that everybody would believe his story and go away.

That, more than the pathetic hordes whose only fun is to come to a beautiful place and trash it, worries me. If Casellas really lived in a society where the rich can get away with murder….

…we’re screwed.

The Vatican Gets Tough

Wow—strong stuff.

True, the Vatican announced recently that Jozef Wesolowski, the former Papal Nuncio to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico who is the highest-ranking official in the Catholic Church to be charged with child sexual abuse, won’t be extradited either to Poland or the Dominican Republic. Why? Because he’s in the diplomatic corps of the Vatican, which doesn’t permit extradition.

This was announced a few days ago and discussed in Geneva, Switzerland, in what The Telegraph called “an unprecedented grilling” by the United Nations. Instead, he will face trial in the Vatican. And, assuming he’s found guilty, he’ll serve time there.

Very convenient, because... Dominican jails? Well, Puerto Rico got an earful about them when a journalist ventured off to the Dominican Republic and got herself into some trouble over a little cocaine deal. So the island stood on its ear for months and watched as she got tried and convicted.

I’ve tried to google “Dominican Republic jails” but guess what? The Internet is off somewhere in a meeting—presumably on how to be capricious, willful, and completely unreliable, as well as maddening—so this account of Laura Hernández is completely from memory.

But if memory serves, the Dominicans start with the presumption of guilty until proven innocent—a nice little Caribbean twist on things. And unlike the United States, which according to today’s edition of The New York Times is seeing a surge in request for Kosher meals (which are better and four times more expensive than regular prison fare), Dominican jails tend to offer a more basic experience. Which is to say that the family has to bring in the food, personal hygiene items, and pretty much everything else. And as I remember it, the floor was dirt. Nor was there a bed….

And so for a period of several years, the island was treated to pictures of Hernández, who was reliably sobbing, and the inhumane, awful treatment she was receiving. And then, one day—presumably after some pressure from the United States—Hernández was freed.

Well, Wesolowski had a habit of drinking beer—very Caribbean—and walking the Malecón—Caribbean, yes, but, in this case, an area associated with kids who provide services not encouraged by the Catholic Church. Officially, that is.

So the top guy in the church went off and told the new pope—whom we’re all in love with—that the Dominican press was about to out Wesolowski and another Polish priest. And what happened? Did the Vatican follow its own rules—which as I remember require the offending clergy to be turned over to local authorities and jurisdiction? Nope—the Polish priest returned to Poland, and Wesolowski was recalled to the Vatican. And also, if memory serves, there were rumors swirling about false travel documents.

Well, whatever the Vatican is going to do, it has acted swiftly and decisively in at least one action. And that would be? They photoshopped him out of an official picture. Here’s the Telegraph on the subject:

In the original picture, he appears smiling in the second row, wearing a dog collar, black vestments and a heavy crucifix.

But in the re-touched photograph, his head has been replaced by that of an emeritus bishop, Francisco José Arnáiz.

The Huffington Post, writing of Wesolowski, said this:

His case has raised questions about whether the Vatican, by removing him from Dominican jurisdiction, was protecting him and placing its own investigations ahead of that of authorities in the Caribbean nation.

Raised questions?

Not for me!

Stampede Warning

Well, we’re about to get festivalled, and all the indications are that it will be bad.

The Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián (sometimes nicknamed SanSe) as we know them today started out life in 1970 with 30 people in attendance, and it was charming, quaint, picturesque. Now? It’s an impending disaster.

The day-time stuff is not so bad—there are lots of artisans selling their wares, and some of it can be very fine. Puerto Rico has a nice tradition of carving santos de palo—here’s a nice example….

Then there’s the silkscreen art, of which Puerto Rico has a long and proud tradition. There’s music, too, at least in the eyes—or ears—of everybody but me.

So what’s the problem?

Well, the festival that started out so sweetly got highjacked by the beer companies, and the whole affair, at night, becomes extremely crowded, loud, and chaotic.

Emphasis on the chaotic: if you lifted your feet, you’d still be moving. It’s an annual experiment of turning a colonial small town into an anthill.

And last year, how many people crammed into Old San Juan, which is about seven streets by five streets? Half a million. And how many left? 499,999—since one guy got killed for the outrageous crime of bumping into someone. A fight ensued, and honor dictated that the matter be settled thus.

Enter the Mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, who announced extreme security for this year’s event, at which 600,000 people are expected to attend. And extreme it is—the event will require passing through a checkpoint, presumably with metal detectors. Oh, and backpacks will be checked.

In fact, what the mayor has done is to erect barricades everywhere—as I write, I and every other sanjuanero is in a cage. Nor are the barricades a flimsy affair—suggestions at crowd control. Have a look:

Oh, and to add more insult to the situation, stages have been erected in all parts of the city, so that everyone can be blasted equally.

“Leave town,” said my brother Eric, “that’s what we did for Mardi Gras…”

We did last year, and had planned to do so this year. Then two things happened: Raf’s adored cat requires a special diet, and also requires Raf to be there encouraging him to eat. I know—it’s crazy: we’re animal people.

And now Raf is in bed, suffering from a humongous cold. Or maybe it’s the flu—who knows? And in the meantime?

The refrigerator decided to die….

The festival will last four days, unless of course what I greatly fear happens.

I think we’re gonna have a stampede.