San Juan Noir

by Mayra Santos-Febres

  “And you, what’re you doing here? Get mugged over at Santurce Plaza too?”

  “No, I’m chilling. It’s just the hotel is in rough shape and they laid us off until November. But the axe comes and goes, I got a couple months of unemployment to even the score.”

  “Man, you don’t have to tell me twice. But don’t say any of that to the officer, loco. There are fewer federal funds for the people all the time.”

  “Relax, one of the supervisors is a buddy of mine. We go way back.”

  “Ah, good. How lucky . . . Hey, what’s the name of the night manager at the Majestic?”

  “Melecio. Carlos Melecio.”

  “Ay! It was you with the con artist. Damn, loco, everyone in the industry knows that story, dude.”

  “What? Don’t mess with me, man.”

  “They booted Melecio too. Turns out the gringa was an underwear model and a professional con artist. She’d charged more than a hundred thousand dollars in jewelry and clothes to her hotel account. When everything went down, the hotel didn’t realize. The trick is that they don’t realize what’s happened until she’s already on the plane heading home. She did the same thing at the Conquistador, the Marriott, and the Intercontinental too. I thought you guys knew about her. Fuck! I didn’t know the bellboy was you. Damn, everything’s so fucked up.”

  “You’re not messing with me, right?”

  “No, I swear. Last week I ran into Inés, one of the girls from the lobby at the Cactus, at four in the morning and she told me everything. I can’t believe it, man . . . Ah, that’s my number. See you. Good luck, man. Take care.”

  And so I stayed in that chair, watching as my buddy from Santurce Plaza went in to talk to his case officer, wondering what other hotel Carlos Melecio had hidden in.

  I went outside to smoke a cigarette. I came back quickly because it was hotter than hell. When I got the paperwork from a little old lady, I wondered what story I could invent to convince the officer to accept my case, when I couldn’t put down the only legal employment I’d had in more than fifteen years as a reference.

  THINGS TOLD WHILE FALLING

  by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro

  San José

  So many things begin and perhaps end as a game.

  —Julio Cortázar, “Graffiti”

  1.

  You play at identifying buildings to avoid the anxiety that landing always causes. There you are, right in the middle of the airplane’s gut, aisle seat. From there you watch, turning your neck from side to side, and spread yourself into that metal bird’s extremities. Left wing and right wing; engines to the right and left; identification lights off—it’s daytime—to the left and the right.

  A therapeutic late-afternoon sun threatens to leave you blind, keeping you from enjoying the descent. You curse the blind man to the left, in the window seat, who cares little about looking out of it. If only they’d given you that seat. You also curse the abundantly white Afro of the old lady sitting in the seat next to the right window. The mass of her messy hair blocks all visibility. You move restlessly about in your seat, sometimes stretching your neck, bobbing up and down, rolling your shoulders, trying to play the game. The game that calms you, keeps you from falling into mania.

  You spot the first identifiable place: Palo Seco, an energy plant that supplies electricity to various towns, which exploded once when you were little. The fire could be seen all the way from Las Vegas, Bay View, even from Amelia, the neighborhood where you grew up. No one was implicated in that “accidental” incident, blessed ode to the impunity of creole terrorism. Fuentes Fluviales, as they were previously called; now the AEE in concert with the AAA, investigated by the FBI. You spell them out to see if you remember what each letter stands for—it’s part of the game. Not getting nervous is always the primary objective. Fucking landing.

  You keep playing at identifying structures. The second one: Los Molinos, some concrete plants where they manufacture purine, grain, and other contaminants. You also identify the barges at the dock, the cranes, the containers. Some of them say Sealand, others Navieras de Puerto Rico. Your uncle worked all his life for an abusive business just like that one, until he ended up with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and a pension that barely provided enough to buy the essentials: eggs, milk, bread. Never meat. Never some good chops or steaks. Los Molinos, even today, continues to erode the health of many people, without the affected or the witnesses ever saying or doing anything. Without anybody protesting.

  Plaza Las Américas, the center of everything. From Santa Cruz, Saint Thomas, and Monserrat—where a volcano spouts ash on its leeward side every ninety-some days—people come from all over the Antilles to buy things and lose themselves in the largest commercial center in the Hispanic, Anglo-Saxon, and Francophone Caribbean. “The people from the little islands” is what they call those individuals with ordinary features. You remember well that during your childhood, your grandma called them madamos. Actually, that’s what she called the really dark blacks, the purple blacks; the ones who did or didn’t wear turbans. Blacks blacker than you, with gigantic noses and protruding lower lips.

  Teodoro Moscoso Bridge. You promise yourself you’ll look up who the hell that guy was on Wikipedia, because the truth is, neither you nor anybody you’ve asked knows. You’ve always imagined that it has something to do with Moscoso Pharmacy, the one you frequented as a kid on the way to the Cantaño boat launch, where one time they found a half-dozen dogs with their throats slit, and no one immediately responsible despite the fact that the suspects walked around at school quietly singing: Under my house, there’s a dead dog. The one who says eight, will eat it off their plate, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . .

  Approaching the bridge you get unnerved, because you’ve reached that point of arrival. You stretch your neck even farther, and the old lady with the white Afro notices. She gestures to you with her hand, asking if you want her seat. You say yes. So she stands and you stand too, and from a distance, the flight attendant scolds you because you’re supposed to remain seated, the plane is about to land. When the warning ends, you’re already clutching the window.

  You fasten your seat belt. You pull out your digital camera because you like to take photos of the landing. You count in silence and breath rhythmically. You’re about to pass over the booth of the excessively expensive toll that opens onto Avenida Central, and everything ceases to be Lilliputian. First photograph. You inhale and exhale. Now you count the flags of the damned United States and the blessed Island of Enchantment fixed to the bridge as they grow larger. Photograph. You inhale and exhale. You count the little houses on the water in San José, all of them half-fallen into the lagoon that’s deminiturizing in front of your eyes. You inhale. A boat and you replicate Gulliver’s gaze. You exhale. Flash. A San Juan police boat and you are Micromegas. You breathe in. Two kayaks. One bright blue and the other apple green. You breathe out. A jet ski. Another photo. You inhale. Another boat, the coast guard this time. A sequence of flashes. A police helicopter hovers far away, and you imagine it’ll wait until the air traffic clears to approach. You hold your breath. The mangrove. You turn off the camera’s flash and hold down the shutter to lengthen the sequence. The mangrove increasing in size and the bushes with splayed roots drinking from the pestilent lagoon. A body. A floating body. Your finger pressing the button gets nervous, but keeps shakily shooting the target. A woman floating in the water with breasts and downy pubis exposed. Her face so far away from you, from your plane, and lifeless. Zoom in on every detail, zoom in on every new horror. Arms extended, like the wings of the aircraft, but she doesn’t fly. A woman who doesn’t fly. Increase zoom to 60X Optical by 2000X Digital. Hands removed from those arms at the wrist; surgically severed without pain or glory. They’re gone. A woman, dead and incomplete. A corpse that screams of violence and welcomes you back to your homeland, after ten years of absence.

  2.

  You fall.

  In the end you fall across the surface of
the planet, which turns out to be the same as the surface of your homeland. You fall, landing and floating, intrigued and alone. So alone. Falling things have the significance of lost things, of abandoned things, of things invented to stave off madness, of the sudden daring that’s preceded by fear. A desperate need to tell of fallen things that will later keep you company is more than right and necessary.

  You start breathing again when you pick up your bags at carousal ten. You pause and look at the screen of your camera where your photos have been stored. You zoom in and out to see every detail. You only know what’s been explained over the loudspeaker and by passengers with Internet access on their cell phones. Minimal information regarding the discovery, the crime scene, or the investigation. Everyone tried to move to the windows, to see what could be seen. You were one of the lucky few who caught a glimpse of the dead girl laid out like that—lifeless skin in its greatest splendor. Inert skin on an island that leaves so many alone, so many orphaned, widowed, and dispossessed. The rest of the travelers have resigned themselves to the speculations of those who saw something. There’s another hubbub inside Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport. Everyone is talking about it, speculating about the stranded people who won’t be able to make their flights out of the country because of the traffic jam. They’ve closed off various roadways including, of course, the one that connects to the bridge. The family members who would certainly be coming to pick up the arriving travelers wouldn’t be there either, as they haven’t been allowed through. No one was coming to get you anyway; you weren’t going to be received by anybody. A total helplessness impregnates the air, an ode to detachment. So witnessing those who are stranded gives you great pleasure.

  3.

  You leave your bags at a fleabag hotel in Isla Verde and get back in the rental car. You arrive at the San José police station from the opposite side of the bridge, coming in on Milla de Oro, behind Plaza las Américas. Your pithy journalism courses at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón provide the key to getting inside. You remove the little notebook and pencil, conveniently located in the front pocket of your striped shirt, identify yourself as a press correspondent, and show your driver’s license with the New York City logo. The checkpoint officer, not really paying attention, lets you pass. Already mingling with a small group of reporters, you simply fall in line and listen. Listen and pretend to write in your little notebook. Simulating professional interest, looking up and down. Listening with great care. Finding out as much as possible.

  4.

  At the funeral, you meet the dead girl’s mother, her sisters, her uncles, aunts, and cousins, who cry facing the casket, to the beat of a rhythm like a jukebox bolero. You add and subtract, and the obvious notable absence is the husband, a man originally from Saint Martin—he’s the only one not in attendance. The “best friend” is there, and she cries desperately, as if something valuable has been torn away from her. To those who ask, you say you were classmates with the dead girl. At Colegio San Vicente? someone sporadically inserts, and you immediately nod yes.

  Later that day you discover another interesting possibility: the “best friend” of the dead girl, a lesbian, hasn’t come to the burial. Everyone speculates. You decide to interview friends and acquaintances, in groups. Sometimes together and sometimes alone. Like the older sister, who talks about the pain one feels when something very dear is taken away. She also talks about the odyssey of staying single at this age, in such a mundane society, so frivolous, so machista, so full of double standards. That afternoon, without wanting to, your mouth and hers find one another. She cries and you’re amazed to be swallowing her tears while kissing her. You know what it is to lose someone. You know what it is to be left with nobody. You know it very well.

  * * *

  Over the nine days of the novena celebration, you’ve gained the confidence of Violeta’s older sister. That is the dead girl’s name: Violeta. You go to the movies, you eat lunch in the Plaza Food Court, you even go to the General Police Station to give testimony regarding one of the suspects. When the detective in charge of the investigation interrogates you, you tell him about your concerns regarding the participation of the lesbian lover in that horrific crime. You insist on the strangeness of that supposed friend who’s now disappeared. And with great skill you delineate your hypothesis of the amputated hands. From your perspective—that of a man dedicated to collecting stamps, baseball cards, and memorabilia about The Divine Comedy—severed hands represent the feminine genitalia. You explain how gay women use their hands to give and receive pleasure: the fingertips and fingernails to tease; the palm to rub; the stem of the extremity to caress; two, three, and even four fingers to penetrate; a brush of knuckles in obvious seduction; inserting a full fist in clear domination; the end. That’s why the dead girl Violeta was killed, you say. Her lesbian lover—when she found out Violeta wouldn’t get a divorce, and that she also very possibly had another male lover—went crazy. Violeta, the best friend from high school, inseparable even after college, deep down wanted to end that affair, but the other girl’s rage wouldn’t allow it. She’d rather kill her than not have her for herself.

  5.

  So when, three days later, the paper publishes the news that Violeta’s widower has turned himself in to the authorities, you don’t give it any credibility. You’re unconvinced that the grief-stricken husband had it in him to cut off her hands, despite the sensationalistic details: he hit her when he drank, cut her with kitchen knives, with scissors, skewered her with screwdrivers—and one night, she hit back. She got tired of it. Defending herself cost her her life.

  You look at the photos from your digital camera that you’ve already had developed and printed. You decorate several walls of your temporary home. The lagoon, the mangrove, the rescue boat, the body.

  Found bodies make silent speeches. The demise of that human being is fully explained by the exposed sequence of details of that found body. All that’s missing is the translator, who reveals the linguistic code and explains it. You feel that you are the translator. Will there be signs of lost love, of diminished feeling, in the energy surrounding a lifeless body?

  You stop seeing her sister because you intuit that her whole family is a fiasco, a string of deceitful blacks, blacker than you. What an evil thing to lie to the citizenry about a crime, just to have it cleared up. You’re convinced the husband is innocent. So in the end, Violeta’s death was well deserved.

  Her pathetic sister, melodramatic and blubbering, is just like your few remaining family members. Your grandma—thank God she’s six feet under—was right: one can never trust a madamo.

  PART III

  NEVER TRUST DESIRE

  TURISTAS

  by Ernesto Quiñonez

  Dos Hermanos Bridge

  For Edward Rivera

  I came to San Juan because Mama said my father, a certain Salvador Agron, lived here. “Remember, Julio, only ask of him what is due to us. What he never gave us.” Mama was leaving this world, and with a sense of urgency she passed on the family inheritance by handing me the envelope. I never put much stock into it. But I loved Mama, and so I promised to find my father.

  I was staying at the Sheraton Puerto Rico Hotel & Casino, and in the afternoon I went looking for him. Scaling up hills covered with multicolored colonial houses, cobblestone streets, and tons of tourists, most from cruise ships docked by the Malecón. The only pictures I had of my father were from when he was a teenager, when he acquired his famous name.

  I spotted three old men sitting outside, drinking coffee by a café.

  “Have any of you seen an old man named Salvador Argon, also known as the Capeman?” I asked in Spanish.

  “You came to San Juan looking for an old man?” one of them answered in Spanish. “The whole town is old.” And they laughed together.

  I continued walking. The humidity never bothered me. I expected to find him in some corner drunk and lost. I walked all around Old San Juan. Lit a candle for Mama at the cathedral. The c
ult of Mary is not in my bones.

  Exhausted, I gave up as night was approaching. I took a taxi back to the Sheraton.

  I replayed this search the next day with no luck.

  On the third day he rose from the dead; I received the call. It was a female voice, speaking in English.

  “You are looking for the Capeman?”

  “Yes,” I said anxiously.

  “Why?”

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  “Meet me tomorrow at the San Juan Gates, where the fishermen are.” And she hung up.

  Whoever she was, she knew him by his famous name. So she knew what he had done.

  * * *

  My father was born in Mayagüez and had been shuffled from the island to New York City by his parents as many times as he would later be shuffled from juvenile detention to juvenile detention, from prisons to asylums and back to prisons.

  He came from a time when the New York City streets belonged to teenage gangs. My father was president of the Vampires. Like many members, he had dropped out of school, left his mother, and then rented a five-dollar-a-week single-room occupancy on the Upper West Side.

  The night of the playground incident was a Saturday. All over the West Side of New York City, from the 100s down to the 60s, the large population of Puerto Ricans who lived there before gentrification, before the cleaning up of Needle Park, were taking in the street life. Radios blasting salsa. Everyone looking for someone to love and be loved in return. Everyone cooling off from a summer heat wave.

  It was around nine o’clock when word arrived that some kids from a white gang named the Norsemen had beaten up a Puerto Rican member of the Vampires. As president of the gang, my father called up all the Puerto Rican members and told them to meet at the playground on 46th Street and Ninth Avenue. Some came walking. Others took the bus. My father jumped the turnstiles, hopped on the 1 train, got off at 42nd Street, and walked west. He was a Vampire and so he wore a cape. In his hands a dagger, along with years of anger, betrayal, abuse—a wealth of tragedies from his young life just waiting for a reason to be set free. When my father and his Vampires assembled at the playground it was midnight. The lampposts were broken. Hanging out by the swings were these two white boys. It was a moonless New York neighborhood known back then as Hell’s Kitchen.