14Your inner ear may at this point have begun to suggest themes from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, but if so, please abstain from going so far as to actually try to visualise the Disney-Stokowski version of the same: the flying white unicorns are not strictly necessary to complete the picture.
A season in Puerto Rico
So from here I believe the script — now irretrievably lost in cyberspace — continued with an account of the longest of my sojourns in Guatemala’s former capital Antígua. With hindsight I’d rather skip over the introduction to this part which would have brought us to the by all means lovely island Corfu off the Greek mainland in the Adriatic Sea. There was a reason for this brief stop-over though, since although Corfu isn’t located in Latin America, my second visit to this island immediately preceded my return to Antígua, this time to study Spanish at one of their many Spanish schools for foreigners. The main purpose of bringing the reader the roundabout way over Corfu was to mention some of the circumstances surrounding the writing of my historical novel on the fall of Constantinople entitled The Owls of Afrasiab. I might have hoped to be able in this way to inconspicuously promote the story to at least one reader beyond the chosen one.
I had begun working on the script some years prior to this event, but it was in 2007 when I came to Puerto Rico and stayed for almost a year in ‘Gringo’s Paradise’ — a section of the town of Rincón offering spectacular sea and land views — that the bulk of it was brought to completion. Except for me, and the late Bill Cady, to whom the novel was subsequently dedicated, Rincón isn’t much frequented by poets and artists. Inversely this privileged corner of the island is a magnet for surfers, primarily from the North American continent — according to the aficionados Rincón counts among the ten best surfing locations on the planet. I can understand why. Just off the northwestern cape of the island (the Punta Higuero and its picturesque light house) the vigorous tradewinds over the Atlantic create an impressive swell tempting these daredevils to constantly mount the frothing horses of Neptune. Although I do admire their courage and indifference to the prospect of hungry sharks and razor-sharp rocks lurking beneath the surface, I find surfers out of their element to be a rather trivial party crowd. I wouldn’t say that they’re all devoid of talents besides that of being able to balance a board on the crest of a wave, but it’s reasonably fair to state that they’re seldom intellectually inclined. Since they’re also youngsters their conversation more often than not follows the general pattern of ‘I was like, I don’t know, awesome, and she went: What? And I said, that’s just so cool.’
Neither the imported girls, nor the local ones, hanging out in the bars of Rincón are very pretty or interesting in any other ways (whatever that would amount to!) Since Puerto Rico, without ever having acquired the status of being a state within the federation, has undergone a rather intense ‘gringofication’, after the United States had wrung it out of the hands of the Spanish by the end of the 19th century, prostitution proper is concentrated to the capital San Juan, and almost non-existent in Rincón. Even though the area comprises a number of resorts there is simply no comparison whatsoever, as far as easy access to female companionship is concerned, with nearby island Hispaniola, home to both the Dominican Republic and Haiti. This alone makes Puerto Rico a conspicuous exception to the rule among the larger Caribbean islands. I mention all this to underline the rather curious fact that it was surprisingly difficult to find decent female company in the vicinity of Rincón. The gringa women who weren’t part of the surf crowd stuck together as thick as thieves, spending all their pent-up affections and tenderness on horses, justifiably belittling men as best they could. So there I was, on a lovely Caribbean island but with little else to do than to transform my procreational instincts into fertile literature. True, there were some rather mature ladies looking for fun; in particular, I had a married local woman after me in hot pursuit, which was not all that agreeable considering that she was careless enough to turn up in high heels and mini-skirt at my doorstep in the daytime, in plain sight from all the highly religious neighbours, all knowing each other and presumably her husband too...
At this time my Spanish was still rudimentary and it certainly didn’t help that the dialect spoken in Puerto Rico is among the most guttural in the entire region, whereby one should keep in mind that nearly all Caribbean dialects of Spanish are particularly hard to grasp for foreigners. Specifically, the Puerto Ricans make almost a virtue of stripping every word of as many consonants and vowels as possible. Preferably, the beginning, the end and sometimes even the middle of the word is simply left out, or only hinted at in pronunciation, making the learning of Spanish in this environment a quite difficult task. My progress in conversational Spanish was further slowed down by the fact that every other indigenous person would answer me in English even if I had succeeded to address them in reasonably correct Spanish. For example, I remember asking in the Dollar Store: ‘Por favor, en donde se encuentran los utensilios de cocina?’ (Could you please tell me where I may find the kitchen utensils?) only to see the visibly terrified female employee scurry across the room to get hold of the manager. He came over and politely asked me what I was looking for, and I said I had already explained that to the girl. ‘Oh, I’m sorry’, the manager replied, ‘but she doesn’t understand English’.
The linguistic situation was so desolate that not a single person I met could even recommend me a Spanish teacher. Most of the locals were so unfamiliar with formal grammar that they could not explain any of their verbal usages by other means than translating them into English. No wonder that I, with the novel just about finished and tons of commercial translation work done for a living, felt that I and Puerto Rico henceforth better go separate ways. I had arrived in the island in the month of October, at the end of a hurricane season that literally sent delicious avocados, the size of babies’ heads, into my lap. I left it by late July. As I came back to briefly visit the place about eight months later, I learned that my friend Bill Cady had sadly passed on.
Bill’s character was an odd mixture of apparent incongruities. He was rather short and stocky, a bit thin-haired and had a very pale, Irish looking complexion: snow-white skin, freckles, etc. I believe he was in his mid-sixties. On the one hand he seemed very proud of his family’s military traditions and his own time in the US Marines, or Navy — I can’t remember which one it was. On the other hand, he loved to sketch women in crayons and paint them in watercolours; in general he was crazy about women, but the surprisingly young ones he introduced me to (and this time perhaps not too surprisingly), seemed less interested in having sex with him than he with them. With not so subtle references to his precarious health, fragilised by a massive open heart surgery a couple of years earlier, he explicitly entertained the hopes of dying in the arms of a woman. I don’t think he was granted that sweet favour by capricious Fate.
While living in Rincón I had no idea that he was so close to his demise. I particularly remember his vivacious and ironic twists in conversation, his rather hysterical sounding laughter that contrasted so strongly with the completely dead grey of his gaze, betraying a man that had already once crossed into the land of Death and mysteriously returned, albeit, as it turned out, not for very long. He lived in a villa sitting on the border between the communes of Rincón and Aguada, surrounded by portions of junk that he always promised he was about to take care of but never did. He taught me basic watercolour techniques and we had spirited conversations whenever we met, which was usually in one and the same place: Bunger’s Hotel and Bar down by the sea. One would hear him arrive from afar. As opposed to the locals he didn’t play reggaeton on his car stereo through open windows, but preferably something like Siegfried’s Journey on the Rhine or Ride of the Valkyries by Wagner. I think he was the only person in the neighbourhood, apart from myself, who ever listened to classical music.
Bill took some interest in my historical script (at least I’d like to believe so)
and as it progressed always wanted to know how many times, and in what ways, the hero had by now made it with the heroine. He even started to sketch her and show me the invariably humorous results. I appreciated hanging out with him since most of my other acquaintances, in addition to the alcohol we pretty much all indulged in, were more into poker, weed and cocaine than I was. My best moments in Rincón were thus either associated with the rather slow but steady progress of my Byzantine story, or with long walks, even jogging, along the sandy shores connecting Rincón with Aguada and, still farther away, Aguadilla. Along this stretch the beaches, as mentioned, have treacherous waves and are dotted with reefs. To find the beaches good for swimming on one has to turn to the westward coast of Rincón (the word itself signifying ‘corner’ in Spanish, which is actually what Rincón is: the western corner of Puerto Rico, jutting out from a peninsula rather in the manner of a baboon’s nose — look at the map and you’ll see what I mean). Here the sand is white and fine and the heavy swell from the Atlantic considerably less menacing, allowing for all sorts of peaceful aquatic activities. This is consequently where the majority of the sea resorts are located.
One may ask how I managed to pass nearly ten months under such circumstances. The truth is that I, besides continuing my script and occasionally engaging my eternal love and enemy, the violin, always had a supply of commercial, thus very tedious but also quite well paid, translations to work on. I also travelled back and forth to Miami several times during that period to perform, and in January took a trip to Peru only to return to a Puerto Rico in the pristine season of tropical winter blessed with a glorious sun, immaculate blue skies and the distant vision of humpback whales migrating through the Strait of Mona (thus called after the Island of Mona strategically located midway between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola). The whales would regularly come to surface to breathe and show off their gigantic tails while ejecting enormous jets straight out of their backs. One or two evenings were so cool that one could actually use a light sweater or jacket to keep warm. It really was the best of seasons.
October and November by contrast had been unsettled with frequent thunderstorms and torrential rains causing power cuts and, perhaps even more annoyingly, interruptions in the water supply system. This was the time when I was made intimately familiar with the ‘one-gallon-shower’, which is exactly what it sounds like. The trick is to use precious little water while working the soap, and this only in the most critical places, in order to have enough for the rinse. But the real masterpiece is to simultaneously, and successfully, wash one’s hair. I learned to do that as well, since the communal water supply could sometimes be off for a week or more. I therefore told my landlord, who happened to be running for mayor in town, that it would be better to promise the citizens reliable water supplies and the final completion of the regional roadworks that had seen no less than seven contractors come and go, than to envisage the renovation of the local skateboard facility, but then he just looked at me as though I had been suggesting a trip to Mars, and I realised that, after all, we weren’t on the same planet.
Speaking of beaches, one of the more spectacular ones in Puerto Rico is the so called Playa Salvaje (Wilderness Beach). Paradoxically it’s jammed in between the US military base in Aguadilla, the golf course and the airport. One wouldn’t imagine this to be an ideal location for the promotion of wildlife and vistas of nature’s wonders, but it is. Due to the military presence the area is restricted in so far that no new buildings can be added to the few existing ruins nestled in the low vegetation, of which the most fascinating is the old lighthouse built by Spanish conquistadors in the early 16th century. But although the military base is located nearby there is free access to every part of the Wilderness beach.
Like so many other places in the Caribbean, Aguadilla claims the honour of being the ground of Columbus’ first landfall and there is a group of statues (some incorrigible snobs would say they testify above all to bad taste) in one of the city’s traffic roundabouts, visualising his allegedly first encounter with the local Taino population. Whether that really was his first encounter with human beings in what he took to be the East Indies I don’t know, but the lighthouse, of which only one wall is still reasonably intact, surely is from the epoch and, even though of rather modest elevation, offers a wide view of the sandy bay to the north, ending in steep cliffs clad in dense vegetation, privileged nesting grounds for sea fowl. There is also an array of rocks spread out over the sand, partly in and partly above the shifting waterline. In good weather it’s a wonderful place to take a swim at and the sunsets here are truly mythological. It really is a wilderness beach to the point that it’s advisable to be a little bit curious of who else is on that long stretch of sand before you venture on to it. I personally never encountered any problems there whatsoever and recommend the spot to anyone who would like to verify first-hand what a Caribbean beach might have looked like when the first conquistadors arrived.
Speaking not only of beaches, but also of lighthouses, there is another spectacular, and easy to visit one, right on the southwestern cape of the island. It’s called Los Morillos and from its high cliffs I have spotted schools of dolphins and flocks of pelicans moving back and forth between the Atlantic and the Caribbean Seas. Mysteriously, the area around Cabo Rojo (at the end of which the lighthouse sits), and particularly its wildlife refuge, has an unusually high number of reported UFO sightings, so much so that several TV documentaries have been made on the theme trying to explain what the possible causes of these phenomena might be. Among these there is at least one attributable to natural cause: at certain times of the year huge swarms of fluorescent plankton light up the shallow waters of the wildlife sanctuary at night creating something like a submarine aurora borealis. The beach adjacent to the light house is also nice to take a swim in as it offers protection from all winds except the ones from southeast. However, on occurrence these are rare and mostly feeble.
Culturally speaking Puerto Rico unites the best, alternatively the worst, of two worlds. One person might argue that the intrusion of American Judeo-Protestant capitalism into the island’s predominantly Hispanic Catholic traditions and institutions has resulted in a successful synthesis. True, without the massive American government spending (read: taxpayer’s money) on Puerto Rico, and without its strategic importance as a military outpost in the Caribbean, the island would most certainly offer general living conditions comparable to those of other impoverished islands in the region. As it is there are very few apparent slums although the lower strata of society tend to be just as illiterate, soda drinking, chips eating and chewing gumming as on the North American mainland. To me one emblematic image of contemporary Puerto Rican life is a woman taking her family SUV down the left line of the pan-insular highway at 20 miles per hour while typing an SMS with her three inch brightly coloured, spiral shaped nails, enhancing her makeup and — all simultaneously — cranking up the volume of her reggaeton: talk about a female talent for multi-tasking!
In and around the capital there is the usual urban setup where and whenever money meets the tropics: the well-known fast food chains, the Sheraton, Hilton, Regency, drugstores like Walgreens and CVS, corporate skyscrapers, bank palaces, large casinos and resorts to which loads of Americans with too much money on their pockets are flown in from all over the snow covered Midwest for a weekend behind the sloth machine.
The historical centre of San Juan has been carefully preserved and the Castillo San Felipe del Morro guarding the entrance to the lagoon housing the Rich Port City (Puerto Rico) is restored and open to visitors. One of the more unfortunate consequences of such maintenance, however, is that much of the genuine life and atmosphere of the historical centre has been subdued in favour of commerce on par with North American spending habits. Whereas in historical Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic, you may still find a decent hotel for 25 dollars a night, you’d be hard pressed to find one that only costs a 100 in old San Juan, and if you wan
t to visit a steakhouse you’d be seated by a hostess (Hello, my name is Sandra!) just like in the US. Notwithstanding, I once managed to reserve a whole suite for just a bit over that price at the famous Hotel El Convento for myself and a beautiful woman of Latin descent with whom I have had the privilege from time to time to share a bed. I remember there was a complimentary happy hour during which we managed to carry off a whole bottle and bring it up to the roof terrace and its jacuzzi. Once there we enjoyed complete privacy and a handsome number of gin and tonics before it was time to hit the sumptuous restaurant offering oysters and champagne.
The best or worst of two worlds? To the Puerto Ricans themselves, the fact that they are all entitled to carry US passports is of course an enormous advantage as it enables them to come and go between their island and the North American continent whenever. They don’t have to apply for any kind of VISA and can settle down and work freely in any state, even in Alaska and Hawaii. This may sound self-evident, but it isn’t really considering that Puerto Rico is not formally a state within the union but technically its own commonwealth. At least on paper it’s a semi-independent state with its own legislative and executive bodies — a Senate and a House of Representatives. But even though Puerto Ricans do run local elections to appoint their own Governor, US legislature dominates nearly every aspect of its civic life. Inversely, there are no Puerto Rican US senators and I believe only one token (non-voting) representative in the Congress. Furthermore, Puerto Ricans, although in all other respects fully acknowledged as US citizens, are not allowed to vote in presidential elections. But this, with hindsight, might be a rather small price to pay for generous kickbacks from Uncle Sam in return, constantly preventing the country from socially and economically falling in line with neighbouring island states such as the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica. There is a small political party advocating independence but so far the majority of the population has been smart enough to avoid listening to closely to that siren call — according to a 2012 poll a majority of the islanders are in favour of achieving full statehood within the US.
Incidents of Travel in Latin America Page 25