I hate it when he’s sage.
☼ ☼ ☼
I lived on Nantucket for three years in the early ’90s.
When I first moved to the island I couldn’t believe how much I loved the place. It was crisp and fresh and beautiful. I met great people and I had a decent job, in a drop-out sort of way, as a concierge at a wildly expensive hotel.
And yet every summer, after I’d been in residence no more than six weeks, I was suddenly seized with what the locals call “rock fever,” meaning that I was desperate to get off the island, if only for a day or two.
And then I did what everyone else did unless they were rich enough to fire up the family jet and fly to Paris for a long weekend.
I got on the ferry and took a day-trip to Hyannis. I did a little shopping, I saw a movie, I ate dinner at a chain restaurant—in other words, I spent the day doing what most Americans do at least twice a week.
It was fun for eight or ten hours and then I couldn’t wait to get back on the boat and return to the glorious, rarefied atmosphere I had been completely fed up with the day before.
I never used to get seasick on the ferry to Hyannis. I must have taken that boat ride twenty times during my Nantucket years and never once I did I feel nauseated.
The same can’t be said of the morning we took the ferry from Fajardo to Vieques. I’m not sure if it was something I ate or simply a case of the jitters but I felt distinctly chartreuse the whole seventy-five minute voyage. Of course the screaming children, frigid air conditioning and hideously uncomfortable benches didn’t help.
Armando wasn’t there to meet us at the ferry terminal when we finally arrived in Vieques. This was strangely unsettling. We were already in the grip of a minor meltdown about the whole enterprise; the last thing we needed was for our agent to go AWOL.
But when I called his cell phone, trembling with indignation, Armando assured me that he was on the way and five minutes later he arrived wreathed in smiles.
He continued to exude breezy cheerfulness as we rode along the narrow verdant lanes to our house, and by the time we pulled into the driveway he had convinced us that we’d made the best deal in real estate history, including the purchase of Manhattan by the Dutch for a handful of trinkets.
Just as people you’ve met only once before have a tendency, when you encounter them a second time, to look both better and worse than you remembered them, our new house seemed superficially more run-down than we recalled, and structurally more sound. While this was slightly disappointing, the other way around would have been a disaster. We were lucky.
Even so, the upstairs had been stripped bare.
The appliances (except for the rusty stove, which they’d apparently decided wasn’t worth hauling away) were history. There was a dead mouse on the kitchen floor. With the elaborate window treatments gone we noticed that the window casings were in bad shape and several of the louvered glass panels were cracked.
Unluckily for us, the plastic chandeliers were still in place.
Ready for renovation
We had barely absorbed these mini-shocks when it was time to venture downstairs to the part of the house we’d never actually set foot in.
“To be honest, my brother hasn’t finished moving out yet,” Armando warned us.
“But we take possession of the house tomorrow,” I protested. “When is he going to clear out his stuff?”
“He’ll be out,” Armando assured us, though with little conviction.
But what did it really matter? Although the house would technically be ours within twenty-four hours (last-minute glitches notwithstanding), Armando’s brother could probably camp out downstairs for at least a couple of more weeks without any serious repercussions.
Who knew, maybe he’d still be there when we came back in February.
☼ ☼ ☼
Daniel, the property manager recommended by Michael’s gym acquaintance, showed up right on time with his partner Rod.
A pudgy, garrulous Southerner, Daniel did most of the talking and wasted no time putting us in our place. During the first fifteen minutes of our meeting he made at least six or seven pointed references to the wealth and general fabulousness of his other clients.
His conversational style included lots of high-end product placement—the kind you encounter in airport novels and made-for-TV movies but seldom hear in real life—rolled out with salacious brio. It was the verbal equivalent of interior design porn.
Michael, ever grounded, mounted a counterinsurgency by dropping the names Pier 1 and Home Depot like stink bombs into the conversation.
Daniel either didn’t hear him or was so traumatized by the mere thought of these lower-end emporia that he temporarily lost his ability to speak.
We roamed in silence for a while, Daniel scribbling furiously in a leather-bound notebook. I would’ve given a thousand bucks to know what he was writing. I’m guessing it was something along the lines of, “These are the tackiest people I’ve ever met.”
More awkward silence.
“Are you planning to rent out the house?” Rod asked at length.
“I think we’ll have to at first,” I began. “You know, to help recoup our expenses.”
The idea that we might need a return on our investment seemed to make Daniel even more uncomfortable.
“Oh my gosh!” he muttered under his breath, as if we’d admitted to a penchant for paintings on velvet or a secret passion for yodeling.
After an increasingly uncomfortable half hour wandering around our distinctly un-fabulous property, Daniel put away his notebook.
“We’re all set. Welcome aboard,” he said.
We could hardly believe it. From everything he’d said and done, we’d assumed he wouldn’t have touched us with a six-foot (custom-designed) pole. But when he poked out his sweaty hand to seal the bargain, we smiled and pretended to be delighted, feeling we had no other choice.
“It won’t cost you more than $40,000 to do this whole place over, top to bottom,” he announced as he and Rod roared away in their flashy turbo-truck.
That should have been a dead giveaway right there.
Just before dusk, Armando drove us back to the ferry. We had been on Vieques exactly four hours and wouldn’t be back for three months.
“I’ll see you tomorrow at noon,” he said, referring to our closing the next day in Fajardo.
“Is there anything we should discuss?” I asked, gripped by uneasiness.
“Nope. Everything’s set,” he replied. “And stop worrying.”
Easy for him to say.
☼ ☼ ☼
With the exception of Armando, who seemed supremely confident, everyone who knew we were buying a house in Puerto Rico assured us that the closing would be a disaster.
“The paperwork will be a mess,” “the owners won’t show up,” “they’ll discover there’s a lien on the property.”
Even the bank officer Michael had been chatting with almost daily seemed a little iffy about our prospects. I was just waiting for someone to predict an earthquake.
Understandably we were feeling a bit uneasy when we pulled into the parking lot of the strip mall in Fajardo where our settlement bank was located. As usual we were more than an hour early. After strolling around for ten minutes and completely exhausting the window shopping potential of the downscale mall, Michael spotted the Metropol, a chain restaurant at the opposite end of the lot, and suggested grabbing a snack. I couldn’t have been less hungry but at least it would kill some time.
We had barely taken a seat in the spacious dining room when I glanced into the bar and spotted a familiar face. Armando. Sipping a glass of wine at eleven-fifteen in the morning. He quickly joined us, a guilty smile flitting across his handsome features.
“To steady my nerves,” he said, gesturing to his glass.
I gulped.
“Your nerves? What are you nervous about?”
He took a quick sip of his drink.
“Didn’t I tell you? T
his is my first closing.”
☼ ☼ ☼
Despite everyone’s dire predictions, the bank building did not implode during our settlement, swarms of locusts did not descend, and the paperwork was in perfect order. Everyone showed up on time, including Señor and Señora Tio, who had come over on the early ferry that morning.
Armando had recovered his self-confidence in spades and even blustered vaguely over a small inconsistency in the wording of the deed. The attorney, impeccably professional, offered assurances in Spanish, and then again in English for our benefit.
When it came time to sign her house away, señora sniffled a bit and fumbled with the pen. She and her husband had, after all, lived in the house for thirty years and were selling because of her poor health. She died barely six months later.
She was gracious as always, which made us feel even more like repo men driving her out into the street. But after she had traced her name on a bewildering assortment of documents she looked across at us.
“Buena suerte,” she said with a kind, brave smile.
Good luck.
It felt like a blessing.
When the last document had been signed, and everyone in the room had shaken everyone else’s hand at least twice, the assistant (Michael’s erstwhile telephone friend) disappeared for a few moments and came back with a tray loaded down with coffee and pastries. This was a charming flourish we’d never experienced at a stateside closing.
Fifteen minutes later we were done. Armando, looking relieved if slightly green around the gills, disappeared immediately.
As Michael and I walked through the bank lobby on our way to the car, we noticed señor and señora at the teller window, already cashing their check.
The house was ours.
☼ ☼ ☼
Now came what many would consider the fun part—furnishing the house. But having just dropped a few hundred grand on the house itself we weren’t exactly panting to rush out and spend more money.
And yet we realized that we had to make every minute count while we were in Puerto Rico. So we took a deep collective breath and headed for San Juan’s Plaza Las Americas, a huge, hyper air-conditioned mall, so generic it would have felt completely at home in Omaha or Atlanta.
What a way to spend a winter afternoon in the tropics.
We made a beeline for Sears, a store we wouldn’t normally associate with home furnishings but which, in Puerto Rico at least, held several irresistible attractions:
•It offered one-price shipping on any order of furniture and appliances regardless of volume.
•There was a Pier 1 franchise within the Sears store that participated in this shipping deal.
•It was fun imagining Daniel and Rod trying to cope, emotionally and otherwise, with the humiliation of signing for a truckload of boxes from Sears.
So, allow me to set the scene. Michael and I have drastically different shopping styles. His might best be described as Slash and Burn, all fire and action, while mine could be characterized (charitably) as Slow and Dithery. But I stepped up to the plate. Time was against us and I knew it.
We started with sofas. I was drawn to an off-white canvas classic, but Michael wasted no time in pointing out that a white sofa in a rental property is an invitation to disaster.
After a brief flirtation with a red contemporary, we finally concluded that a neutral-colored three-seater was our best choice.
Moving over to mattresses and box-springs, we chose a middle-range queen-size set in five minutes and were done.
Next we literally sprinted into Pier 1 and, trailed by a bewildered adolescent clerk with a clipboard and rampant acne, picked out a dining table and chairs, a bedroom suite, several side tables and a bookcase.
Check.
With ninety minutes left on the clock we headed for appliances. At lightning speed we selected a flat screen TV (bigger and nicer than anything either of us had in D.C.), a refrigerator, microwave, coffee maker, washer and dryer.
Then we jumped into the car and headed for the airport.
The whole thing was exhausting.
Frankly I couldn’t wait to get back to my job in Washington for a nice break.
Ten
The Useless Islands
The history of Vieques has always reminded me of a tale of three petulant children—in this case, the sovereign nations of England, France and Spain—squabbling over a small, seemingly-undesirable toy.
It wasn’t that any of the children particularly wanted the toy; they just didn’t want the other kids to have it.
The aforesaid toy, a.k.a. Vieques, was first spotted by Christopher Columbus in November 1493. “Spotted” is the operative word here. He didn’t bother to come ashore to claim the island for Spain, he just called dibs on it from the deck of the Santa Maria. He totted it up in his notebook and, just like that, it belonged to Spain. Its pristine beaches and fertile fields were instantly the property of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and its indigenous, peaceable Taino and Carib people were instantly their subjects.
Minimum effort, maximum gain.
Adding insult to injury, Columbus dubbed Vieques and the neighboring island of Culebra Las Islas Inutiles—the useless islands.
Talk about bad press.
Surprisingly, it was the French who first settled Vieques around 1535. It’s hard to imagine how they endured in this unimaginably remote backwater without a single vineyard, bakery or accordion in sight.
Not that they suffered long. In 1666 the English kindly released them from their Gallic misery by invading the island and tossing them out. For most of the 18th century, the island see-sawed between English and Spanish control until the Spaniards finally established dominance on the island in the early 19th century.
For a place described as “useless,” Vieques seemed to get plenty of people worked up.
In 1811, for some inexplicable reason, the Spanish sent a Frenchman to serve as military commandant on Vieques. This gentleman, quelle surprise, spent most of his days holed up in his country house smoking, drinking and making sport with the local lovelies.
His fun, alas, was interrupted in 1816 by none other than Simón Bolívar, who dropped by en route from Venezuela to St. Thomas. The French commandant reported that Bolívar, true to his name as the Great Liberator, liberated half of his personal possessions before sailing on to glory.
Even more surprising is the fact that it was a Frenchman, Le Guillou, who consolidated Spanish control of Vieques once and for all. Le Guillou was himself a refugee. Having operated a spectacularly successful sugar plantation on Haiti for a couple of decades, he had been invited by his slaves in 1823 to get lost—or have his throat cut.
Having heard that Vieques was in a state of anarchy, Le Guillou set sail for San Juan to make a deal with the governor: he would “tame” Vieques for Spain in return for unfettered personal use of the island for the rest of his life.
Nice work if you can get it.
Shortly afterwards, Le Guillou and his merry band of thugs, invaded Vieques and took control of the island. In the process, they replicated the hellish conditions of Haiti by creating vast sugar cane plantations and importing slaves from Martinique and Guadaloupe to work them.
And just like that, Vieques became a sugar “monoculture,” which it remained for the next hundred years.
Other than the ruins of the sugar plantations, only two or three vestiges of that period remain, most notably the fort that stands above Isabel. Begun around 1845, the fort went so far over budget that Queen Isabella (a descendant of Columbus’ famed patroness) asked petulantly if its walls were made of gold.
This handsome fort, the last one ever built under Spanish control, first protected the island from invasion, then housed its recalcitrants in a moldy jail (aptly called La Disciplinaria), and finally became Vieques’ chief museum in the 1990s.
Despite its grandeur, the fort is named for the Count of Mirasol, whose title is vaguely reminiscent of a toilet bowl cleaner.
El Fortín Conde de Mirasol
The U.S. first made its presence felt in Vieques in 1898 by defeating Spain in the aptly named Spanish-American War, thereby claiming control of all of Puerto Rico for the duration. Vieques’ downtrodden and weary residents hoped that the U.S. would upgrade living standards. But alas, it was in vain.
Shortly afterwards, the workers took matters into their own hands and launched a general strike in 1915. This helped improve conditions quite a bit but in the end Vieques became a victim of its own success. Through over-cultivation of the land, the big plantations essentially dried themselves up. By 1935, sugar cane was no longer king.
As if this weren’t bad enough, in the late ’40s the U.S. military claimed over seventy percent of the island for military use. This meant shipping out a third of the civilian population to other islands (mainly St. Croix) and squeezing the remaining Viequenses into the central third of the island.
Needless to say, this was a somewhat unpopular move.
I try to imagine how I’d feel if my condo were appropriated by some foreign super-power and I was herded, along with my fellow D.C. citizens, into a small quadrant of the city so that the land I once lawfully owned could be used for bombing practice.
But that’s what happened. The bombs were stored on the western end of the island and blown up, for target practice, on the eastern end. The locals, clustered in the middle, covered their ears and swallowed their pride for half a century until they couldn’t take it any longer.
Things came to a head in the late ‘90s. In 1999 a civilian security guard was killed when the Navy accidentally bombed an observation tower on the naval base. Widespread protests ensued. Demi-celebrities like Al Sharpton, Edward James Olmos and Bobby Kennedy, Jr. came to the island to join in the fun and were promptly arrested, which only added to the publicity value of the story.
In May 2003 the Navy left the island forever.
As far as I can tell, not one tear was shed.
The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House Page 6