by Jaquira Díaz
I don’t tell them about the sadness, the not sleeping, the nights I throw on a T-shirt and shorts and walk out, heading to the beach at midnight, at 1:00 a.m., while Cheito sleeps. How I stand in the darkness, listening to the waves crashing. How once, when I was sixteen, a customer at the pharmacy where I worked—his cheeks red, his eyes bloodshot, smelling like a week-long bender—told me he could see my future. You are a child of Yemayá, he said, madre del agua. How he said it was the ocean that made me, and to the ocean I would return. You will die by drowning, when Yemayá calls you home.
We talk about movies and TV, about Daddy Yankee and Rihanna and Drake. We laugh when the waiter brings three spoons for my key lime pie and I tell him to take two spoons away because I ain’t sharing shit. We laugh when somebody plays Ginuwine’s “So Anxious” on the jukebox and it’s been more than ten years since I heard it but I know all the words, and suddenly we all feel how old we are.
“Fuck that,” I say. “I stopped aging at twenty-seven.”
Nothing is better, not yet, and I know it, but at least I have my girls. It’s like they heard me calling from miles and miles away. And that night, and the night after that, I will sleep, finally.
Puerto Rico, 2015
During the summer, I return to El Caserío Padre Rivera. I drive past the candy store and turn, past the gate, ready to check out la cancha where Papi taught me to shoot hoops. I check out our old apartment, my first elementary school, drive around Eggy’s old building to see if I can park close to la plaza. I wonder if he still lives here, but I know how unlikely that is. I remember how back in the day, kids rode around on their bikes carrying guns, how I heard on the news this morning that there was a shootout here just last week, and two people were killed.
I’ve been inside El Caserío less than five minutes when a boy on a bike approaches the car, motions for me to roll down my window.
“What are you doing here?” he asks in Spanish. He can’t be more than sixteen.
“Just visiting,” I say. “I was born here.” I tell him how I went to school in the elementary school on the next block, how I lived across the street, how I used to ride my bike out here. I point to my old building.
He keeps his hands on the handlebars, checks out the inside of my car for a while, then gives me directions to the nearest exit, even though I haven’t asked for them.
“I know my way around,” I say. “I used to live here.”
“You do not belong here,” he says, then pedals away, disappearing around the corner.
Puerto Rico, 1950
Two years after Law 53 was passed in Puerto Rico, a gag law meant to suppress independence activists, which made it a crime to display or own a Puerto Rican flag, to sing “La Borinqueña,” to organize or speak against the US government, citizens and Boricua Nationalists were being arrested all over the island. Their crimes: displaying la bandera, advocating for independence, speaking out against the United States government or the US-appointed governor. Each person served up to ten years in La Princesa, without a trial, without due process.
The cops had been trying to catch Pedro Albizu Campos, who’d been out of prison for about three years. He’d been gaining a following, speaking publically about independence, organizing. So they targeted his friends, other members of the Nationalist Party, anyone they suspected could be aiding him. On October 27, the Peñuelas Police murdered four people during a traffic stop.
That day, Albizu Campos was arrested in his home in San Juan, sent back to La Princesa, where he’d live out the rest of his days. Years later, we would hear about how he had been tortured with radiation. We would read the doctors’ statements confirming that the wounds on his legs were radiation burns. We’d see photos of his swollen, charred legs, the man unable to stand. And we would know that he was killed by a colonial government, in his own country, for wanting independence.
Three days after his arrest, the Nationalists revolted.
In Jayuya, Blanca Canales, who had been amassing weapons and ammunition, armed a group of Nationalists, led them to the police station, the post office, and through the town. There, in the center of Jayuya, they raised the banned Puerto Rican flag, declaring Puerto Rico a free republic. For three days, Puerto Rico—or Jayuya, at least—was free.
In Utuado, another Nationalist group exchanged fire with police. Most were killed; the rest retreated, hiding in the home of one of the leaders. To deal with them, the Governor, Luis Muñoz Marín, called the US National Guard. And so, in November 1950, American bomber pilots bombed the pueblos of Jayuya and Utuado.
Later, after the pueblos had been decimated by American bombs, after the people of Utuado and Jayuya had died, after the National Guard walking the streets with their machine guns and their bayonets had occupied the land that had been stolen again and again, after they ordered the surviving Nationalists to surrender, after they walked them down Calle Doctor Cueto to the Plaza de Utuado, where they were ordered to remove their shoes, their belts, everything they owned taken, everyone heard the shots. The National Guardsmen had rounded up the survivors. They had walked them behind the local police station. They had lined them up. Their backs to the wall, their eyes open. The youngest only seventeen, pleading for water, begging for his life, bayoneted time and time again until he died. Julio Colón Feliciano, Antonio Ramos, Agustín Quiñones Mercado, Heriberto Castro, and Antonio González. All of them executed by American soldiers without a trial.
Puerto Rico, 2016
I’m writing a feature for The Guardian about Oscar López Rivera. After speaking with his lawyer on the phone, I meet a group of activists in el Viejo San Juan. We talk for a few minutes, then walk. Along the cobblestone streets, I come across a chalkboard mural on a building on Calle de Tetuan where someone has written, “Mandela is still ashamed of you. Free Oscar.” All over the city, people are wearing free oscar T-shirts, college students hitting the streets with makeshift signs, calling for his release.
That afternoon, walking in el Viejo San Juan, I go into the old prison, La Princesa, where Juan Antonio Corretjer and Pedro Albizu Campos were locked up. In 1993, La Princesa was renamed, and now it’s the Compañía de Turismo de Puerto Rico, an air-conditioned building housing an art gallery, a grand piano, and the Puerto Rico Tourism Company’s offices, where you can get trolley maps of Old San Juan.
La Princesa is full. Families walking around, tourists taking selfies, studying their maps, checking out the sculptures and paintings, handing me their cell phones so I can take their photos where so many people died, where, during the years of the Gag Law, people were imprisoned for waving Puerto Rican flags, for holding assemblies, for wanting independence. La Princesa, a house of torture where people starved, where Pedro Albizu Campos spent decades living among the rats, enduring radiation burns, his legs swollen and charred. La Princesa, a place where our ghosts live, our history right there for us to see, but none of us actually seeing.
I know something about the in-between, of being seen but not really seen. I have lived there my whole life. I mean quite literally that I’m a child of colonialism, born into poverty on an island that was seized and exploited, first by Spanish colonizers, then by Americans. My family, although they’re also US citizens, are colonial subjects, and most of what we know about our black family is limited because of slavery. We can trace as far back as Haiti, but before then, nothing. Like most black people in the US, the Caribbean, and Latin America, our histories, our cultures, our people, were stolen.
In the courtyard, two of the cells are in their original condition—stone walls, rusted bars, the stench of dried piss, pigeon shit. Even in the summer heat, the tourists are lining up for photos.
A woman approaches, asks if I will take a photo of her and her two kids. I take her phone, stand in front of one of the cells. I take their picture.
“Gracias, mamita,” she says.
And then, without thinking, I hand her my phone so she can take one of me.
How strong our collective d
esire to erase our history, our pain.
How easily we let ourselves forget.
After leaving San Juan, I spend a couple days driving up and down winding mountain roads, hugging the curves, singing along to Héctor Lavoe’s “Un amor de la calle.” I call Papi from the road to fill him in, tell him about my drive up the mountain, deep into the island, no cell reception, no GPS, all the way up to Cerro Maravilla, where two young pro-independence activists, college students, were murdered by the police in 1978. How next to the communication tower’s antenna at the top of Cerro Maravilla, I found a small memorial under a Puerto Rican flag raised in their names, two crosses, one for Carlos Soto Arriví, one for Arnaldo Darío Rosado, their portraits, the words Prohibido Olvidar.
“Call me again tomorrow,” Papi says before we say goodbye.
I take a drive to Comerío to see my tío David. Across the street from the Catholic church in la plaza de Comerío, across from la Parroquia Santo Cristo de la Salud, where my tío is one of the priests, I find a mural: Oscar López Rivera’s face, the mountains, the flag. Oscar is not forgotten.
Tío and I have lunch at a new restaurant in the Hotel Media Luna, overlooking the cliffs, where we talk about how much Comerío is growing. He’s aged, his close-cropped Afro has some gray in it now, his eyeglasses have gotten thicker. But he is smiling so wide. He is happy.
“How’s your father?” he asks, and for the next hour we talk, we laugh. We order beers and talk about Papi, who is divorced now and living with Anthony. We talk about Anthony, who has a baby now. We talk about Alaina, who is abroad, seeing the world, rescuing animals. We talk about my writing.
“Tu abuela,” he says, “she did something right.” I understand that he means he is proud of me, and realize that even though he’s a priest, and a man, I’m a lot like my tío. He’s an independentista, like my father was all those years ago, who still reads the poetry of Corretjer and de Burgos, who looks at the mural for Oscar López Rivera across the street from the parroquia and feels proud to live in a pueblo that still holds on tightly to Puerto Rican culture. We don’t know it yet, but in a year, Hurricane María will hit Puerto Rico, leave our people in the dark, without power, without water, without help. It will pass right through Comerío, strike so hard that the Hotel Media Luna will be damaged, the area all around the hotel will be flooded, and the water levels in Río de la Plata will rise more than eleven feet above flood stage, causing flash floods, destroying most of the houses, leveling much of the pueblo. I will not be able to get ahold of Tío for more than a month. But we don’t know any of this yet, so for now, we are fine.
When I drop him off in la parroquia, I hug him hard, promise to come back later this week.
I drive through the Comerío mountains, pull over on the side of Route 167, overlooking one of Río de la Plata’s hydroelectric dams. I get out of the car, step out onto the rocky ledge over the dam and the river. After María hits, the dam will break and the river will flood all of Comerío, drowning entire houses, and for weeks, people in the community will be digging mud out of their living rooms, out of their bedrooms. But not this summer. This summer there is a drought, and the southwest of the island is completely dry, parched. Yesterday, driving to Ponce, I saw a small fire along the side of the road, the dead grass charred black. But here, the water falls over the dam, green mountains all around us, houses hidden among the trees, the rocky river below. The air is hot and humid, and I hear nothing but the sound of the waterfall, a long, soft shushing shhhhhhhhh. Clouds of mist rise, tiny droplets covering my bare arms and face, the pull of the water, reaching for me.
Tomorrow, I will get back in the car and drive to Ciales. A handful of men will be playing dominoes on somebody’s front porch as I turn into the main street. A pack of satos will roam the neighborhood. A woman will push her baby stroller across the street. And then, standing in the same plaza where I first saw Juan Antonio Corretjer, my notebook in my messenger bag, Lolita Lebrón’s photo tucked between its pages, I will try to memorize the blue of that sky, and I will be that little girl again, my father’s daughter.
Miami, 2017
Shorty picks me up in Miami. Her two kids, Arianna, who is twelve, and Sean, thirteen, ride in the back of the SUV while I ride shotgun. We head south toward their house, stop at a Peruvian restaurant on the way. I sit next to Shorty and the kids laugh across the table from us, sipping on their juices and poking fun at each other, smiling. It’s frightening how much they look like her, how much they both smile, how happy they are, how funny. They have her eyes, her smile, her goofy laugh, her dimples.
“I can’t believe you made two humans,” I say, “and they look so much like you.”
It’s something I say again and again, to each of my friends, because it’s true. I can’t believe we’re this old, that we actually made it, that they all have children, and some of those kids are grown. Some of them are in college, have their own cars, relationships.
Arianna is into music and art, and we talk about her drawings, reading music, singing, a new friend she made in school. Sean is a writer. He writes satire about presidential candidates, long stories about heroes and magic, essays about his family. When we get to their house later, he will print out one of his stories, give it to me, and I will read it, give him some notes, and before I leave their house, he will hug me, and Arianna will hug me, and my heart will ache for a family of my own.
Please write, she says in a letter dated July 20. I’ve been thinking about you a lot. I need your help.
I don’t write back.
Please write, she says in a letter dated July 27. My new trial starts November 27. I am fighting for my life.
I don’t write back.
Please write, she says in a letter dated July 30. I need your help. I did not kill my son.
I don’t write back.
At the end of November, when Ana María Cardona’s third trial begins, I fly to Miami from Ohio, where I’m living temporarily for a writing fellowship.
In the courthouse, day after day, I sit with other journalists covering the story for Rolling Stone, the Miami Herald, ABC News, NBC. We all take notes furiously, look away when our eyes meet. They all wear suits, blazers, dry-cleaned pantsuits. I wear a gray hoodie, jeans, sneakers. They all have full time jobs reporting for Newsweek and CBS. I’ve been trying to make it with freelancing gigs and fellowships and teaching.
Ana is sitting with her defense lawyer, Steve Yermish, who I talked to on the phone a few months back. In the jury box, the jurors take notes, listening attentively as the prosecution presents evidence. Not one of the jurors is looking at Ana.
After a few hours, one of the jurors starts nodding off. I watch him for a while. His head bobs unexpectedly, and he catches me watching him, shuffles his feet. From now on, he will watch me, look for me in the courtroom to see if I’ve caught him nodding off again. And I have, several times. Every time our eyes meet, we will both know this.
Once, when the lawyers ask for a sidebar, Ana Cardona looks over to the other side of the courthouse, where I’ve been sitting the whole time. It’s the first time I’ve seen her look my way. She looks gaunt, tired. When our eyes meet, I wonder if she knows who I am. She watches me a little too long, no expression on her face. When Mr. Yermish returns to his seat next to her, she looks away.
The prosecutor, Reid Rubin, pulls out a photo, sets it on a projector to display for the jury, for the entire courtroom to see. It’s Lázaro’s body on the autopsy table. I’ve seen this before. One side of his face bruised, blackened, his eye swollen shut, his skinny, malnourished body broken. I gasp, look away, look down at my sneakers, at my notes. Behind me, several people gasp, a woman says, “Ay Dios mío.”
Reid Rubin raises his voice. “She killed him slowly,” he says. “Over time.”
I glance across the courtroom at Ana.
Her eyes widen. “Oh my God,” she says in English, dramatically, shaking her head.
Mr. Yermish places a hand on her hand, whisper
s something I can’t make out, and she quiets.
The prosecutor pulls out another photo, projects it. A different angle. He begins to describe all of the injuries, each one, in detail.
I start to feel sick, anxious. My eyes start to water. Behind me, a woman says, “Ay Dios mío,” every time the prosecutor describes another injury.
I consider leaving, check behind me for the other journalists, writers, reporters.
No one gets up.
I stay.
In front of the court, facing the jury, Reid Rubin says, “After Lázaro died, they went to Disney World. As the police were driving her to Miami from Orlando, she was making out with Olivia in the back of the police car.”
And then I see: as Mr. Rubin describes injury after injury, the details of every broken bone, pointing at the enlarged photo, to every broken tooth and cigarette burn and skull fracture, Ana is nodding off, her eyes closed. Behind me, a woman says, “Is she falling asleep? Wow. Unbelievable.”
Mr. Rubin looks at the jury, points at the enlarged photo of Lázaro on the autopsy table, says, “According to the medical examiner, the baby had looked that way for months.”
Mr. Rubin looks at the jury, says, “Ladies and gentlemen, you heard her. On the stand, she said the last time she saw her son was in August. And then when I asked her what they did for the baby’s birthday, she said that she sang him “Happy Birthday,” that she hugged him.”
Mr. Rubin looks at the jury, says, “By the way, his birthday was October 18. Less than two weeks before he died.”
Mr. Rubin looks at the jury, says, “She confessed three times on the stand. She got caught in three separate lies.”
In a few months, after the third trial is over, a friend will ask, Why are you so drawn to people who do terrible things? How come all the people you write about are in prison?
In the jury box, all the jurors are wide awake, taking notes. Across the courtroom, Ana is nodding off.