San Juan Noir

by Mayra Santos-Febres

  “Hey, no gringos in this playground!” my father yelled. The two white boys ran but my father and his Vampires chased and fell on them. My father tackled one of the boys, threw him down on the pavement, and started screaming at his face: “This is our playground. No Norsemen! No white Norsemen!” My father wielded his dagger. Began stabbing the white boy and then the other boy . . . but these were not the Norsemen. They were just white kids hanging out.

  Bleeding a river of red, the first white boy made it to the entrance of a tenement building. He knocked on the door of some old lady. She quickly recognized him as a boy from the neighborhood. The old lady kneeled down and held the bloodied boy in her arms as if she wanted to give him what was left of her own life. He in turn looked up at her eyes and tried to say something but died in her arms.

  The other white boy made it to his nearby tenement. He managed to drag himself up a flight of stairs and to his apartment. His mother opened the door and saw her bloodied son coughing like a broken radiator. She held her son as he died in the hallway.

  This happened a long, long time ago, when my father was just a fourteen-year-old kid. New York City had never seen anything like this. My father made the cover of Newsweek. Was in Time and all over the papers. The media wanted his blood. Called him the Capeman. He was sentenced to the chair but was pardoned at the last minute and did sixteen years.

  Many years afterward, a legendary and wealthy musician wanted access to my father’s life story. This guy wanted to produce a multimillion-dollar Broadway musical based on my father’s life. The musician went looking for my father too, like I am looking for him today, but all he found was Mama and a twelve-year-old me. The musician gave Mama a piece of paper; it was a legal contract. It stated that they were setting aside a lot of money in an escrow account. Should my father ever show up, the money would be waiting for him. The Broadway show went on, though Mama never saw it. She held onto that piece of paper like it was a lottery ticket. She kept the contract safe and dry for years. “Remember, Julio,” she said to me on her death bed, “only ask of him what is due to us. What he never gave us.”

  * * *

  The gates of San Juan are lovely, but they frightened me. They are there to lock you out. To deny you access to the city. To tell you that you are a pirate. An outsider from Spanish Harlem, the mainland. A tourist and not a true Puerto Rican from the island. When I arrived at the huge red doors, I did not enter. I stayed standing there looking out toward the sea. I was afraid that for some reason I would not be let back into San Juan, that I’d be left out among the iguanas and stray cats that roam El Morro all night and day. What scared me the most was that the Capeman might be on the other side.

  “Are you going to just stand there or come help me fish?” she asked, not ten feet away from the gates.

  “Hi,” I said, “my name is Julio.”

  “I don’t want to know your name. You came looking for my father?”

  “Your father?”

  “I have my net and pole over there,” she pointed with her chin. “Come help me.”

  She was young, much younger than I was. She was lovely beyond anything, as if she had been assembled by a committee of men. She was sweaty. Wearing shorts and her long, long hair hid her behind when she walked in front of me. I quickened my pace for us to be side by side. I studied her face to see if I saw my father or myself in her. It was a stupid thing to do since I had never seen him. Just pictures of when he was the Capeman.

  “Caldo de pez tastes so good,” she said. “Touristy restaurants buy them from me. All I need is to catch one today and I’ll have enough money for a month.”

  We walked toward a small inlet marina. There were many fishermen. From the boardwalk’s platform stemming from El Morro, one could see the large fish swimming below.

  “With you here next to me, the men won’t be able to take the best spots for themselves. They’ll see you and make way for me.” She elbowed her way between two men who, annoyed, saw me standing behind her and left her alone. She then baited her pole and casted it out to sea. I could see that there were fish just a few feet away from us. “Those are no good,” she said, knowing full well what I was thinking, “too skinny.” She didn’t have a hat or anything to cover her head and the sun was beating down on me. Even the men had covered their heads. “Why are you looking for my father?”

  “Because if it’s the same man, you are my sister.”

  But she didn’t bat an eye. She continued to wield her pole, jiggling it, hoping to get a bite. “Do you know how many brothers I have? All from him. Do you see any of them trying to help me feed him?”

  “I want to help you,” I responded. “I have something for him.”

  She quickly took her eyes off the sea. “Give it to me,” she demanded more than asked. She held the pole with one hand and stuck out the other toward me. “Give it to me and I’ll give it to our father.”

  “Can you take me to him?”

  “What is it that you have for him?”

  I wasn’t about to tell her. It was a long story. And I was not sure if she was telling me the truth.

  “If you want to see the Capeman,” she had both hands back on the pole, “you have to roam the streets of Old San Juan at night. That viejo only comes out late at night.”

  I had been searching for him only in the daytime; somehow she knew this.

  “You’ll find him by a tourists store that sells Cuban cigars under the counter,” she said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Magaly.”

  * * *

  I found him. Standing outside the cigar store on Calle Fortaleza, late at night, just like Magaly had said. He was wearing his cape. He was old but he was so tall that it gave him the appearance of having a lot of life left in him. He was light-skinned, almost white, with hazel eyes. The eyes saw me and smiled, and it was in the way he called me papo that I knew he felt comfortable both on the mainland and on the island.

  “You see, papo, many people don’t know me because I made myself invisible.” He laughed a little laugh and he had a huge gap between his big front teeth. I saw that his cape was really worn out, the satin fading. His pants were thin too, as was his shirt, both fabrics disappearing into strings. His hair was long, parted in the middle, and held together with a rubber band. He reminded me of a broken-down Jesus Christ, ragged and old, whose disciples had long ago deserted him.

  “My name is Julio,” I said.

  “Yes, I know.” He peered at the night sky as if he had lost something there. “I gave you that name.” His tone and his slumped shoulders told me he was harmless. No longer that kid who had killed people.

  “I’d like to begin again. But you see, I can’t do that, papo. So I live here in the night now and I try and forget, you know?”

  “My name is Julio,” I repeated because I didn’t want him to keep calling me papo.

  “Okay, papo, Julio,” he said and smiled a bit. “Your sister told me you have something for me?”

  “Yes, I have me. Your son.” I don’t know what I expected of him. I myself felt very little love. This was the first time I had ever seen him, talked to him. Why would I think he would feel any different?

  “A son is always a good thing,” he said with some joy, but no excitement.

  “Mama is dead.” I felt a pang of sadness just by saying this. I saw how it hurt him too. We were outside, on the sidewalk, with insects flying around us and drunken tourists walking by. He sat down on the warm cement and held his heart. I kneeled down and grabbed him because he was about to topple over in a sitting position. For the first time I saw his face up close. His eyes were faint glimmers in a nest of wrinkles.

  “I’m sorry.” I helped him get back up, leaned him against the wall of the cigar shop. “She didn’t suffer.”

  “No, no, it’s okay.” He crouched now, hunching his shoulders like he was humbling himself. Like I’ve seen many tall people do when they feel inferior for being so tall. “I loved your mother,”
he said in almost a whisper, “I did love your mother.” But no tears rolled down his face.

  “But you left us and never came back.” I had little sympathy for him. I was here only for Mama. “You left us.”

  He didn’t look at me but at the night sky, as if he could find the past there. Then he looked at the concrete below us. A cricket was hopping by. Then he looked at the taxis driving tourists. Then at the night sky again, as if he wasn’t sure where to start. When he did face me, his hazel eyes were huge like on an Egyptian’s coffin at the Met. He scanned my face like nervous radar, deciding if he should answer.

  “I needed to go,” he placed a hand on my shoulder, “I needed to live in the darkness.” His eyes were watery and his nose was running. “After what I did to those kids. The light, Julio, it shames me.” And he embraced me. I embraced him too.

  I took him back with me to the Sheraton Puerto Rico Hotel & Casino. I wanted to talk to him all night about many things, as if in one night I could make up for decades of his absence. I felt happy when we reached the hotel; he placed an arm around me and excitedly told people, “This is my son.” He kept proudly saying this all night, to anyone who passed us, so that all could hear: “This is my son.” That night he told me everything about how he became the Capeman. The killings of which most I already knew. Everything he said I had heard or read about, but hearing it from him made it all part of my life too, by being his son.

  * * *

  One night we went swimming at the nearby San Sebastian beach. It was there, when I tasted the salt of the Caribbean, that I felt he was truly my father.

  “When you swim this sea,” he said while we were in the water, the air cooling my temples, “you don’t feel poor.”

  I knew I had to give him the envelope. All he had to do was sign it, show proof of who he was, and he’d have more money than he’d ever need.

  “In America we could never taste the salt of the sea and feel the heat of the island, so we felt poor, we were poor, but here, Julio, I’m rich with nothing but my island.”

  I had stayed in San Juan for two weeks. Two weeks with my father talking at night, as he only came out at night. We talked about many things, catching up on our lives. Soon, my vacation time was over. I would need to go back to work. My intention was to go see him before I took the plane. Tell him about the contract and give it to him. Let him know I would send money so he could return to New York City. Stay with me while he straightened out and collected the money that the wealthy musician had set aside for him. And then it would be up to him.

  At the Sheraton desk I received the checkout bill.

  “He said many times he was your father. You’re his son, right?” the hotel clerk said. I was being billed for thousands of dollars in casino gambling. “You are his son? And he was always with you?”

  I had not stepped one foot in the casino, but he had. Many times, under my name and room number.

  Before taking a cab to the airport I went looking for Magaly; I knew where I’d find her.

  “You and him got me pretty good,” I said. She was fishing the sea in a terrible spot since the men had taken all the good ones. “What’s his real name?”

  “Listen,” she replied, continuing to hold her fishing pole steady, “everyone here is trying to make a living, okay? This island is poor. You are all tourists. Even if you are Puerto Rican, you don’t live on the island; you are a tourist, and because of that, you have more money than us.”

  She wasn’t going to tell me anything. She might really be his daughter. But it didn’t matter.

  “Magaly . . .” I handed her the contract. The piece of paper that Mama had kept for so many years, hoping that our ship would one day come in and like Columbus we would find riches. “Tell him that if he can play the part of the Capeman as well as he played it with me, there’s money for him and you.”

  * * *

  Boarding the plane, I could not get Mama’s words out of my head: Remember, Julio, only ask of him what is due to us. What he never gave us. The plane took off and slowly Puerto Rico became a dot in an endless blue sea, and I knew I had obeyed her. Flying into that night sky, Mama was alive and I understood why she had held onto him even when she was leaving a world that would now and forever mean nothing to her. I was happy and felt less alone. I looked out the window; the stars were in my face again and I was sitting on Mama’s lap like an obedient child.

  Originally written in English

  Y

  by José Rabelo

  Santurce

  You think of Samira with a kind of guilty feeling—the best student, the most promising girl in the twelfth grade—now missing. Optimistically, you don’t believe she’s dead; she has just disappeared, location unknown.

  You look at her photos on Facebook: one with her boyfriend, El Gato, murdered weeks earlier in the Manuel A. Pérez projects, that older boy who came to pick her up every afternoon in an old Mercedes-Benz.

  You remember your student, her caramel face, long black hair, and the mole on her right elbow in the shape of a cockroach. That’s how she described it, anyway. Maestro, have you ever seen a cockroach wearing a wig? Well, look, there’s one right here. Then she took your right hand and made you feel the texture of her birthmark.

  Again you think of her with a kind of guilty feeling, because you never talked to her about the dangers of the street. Combinatorial operations; absolute values; linear and quadratic equations; inverted functions; variable isolations; ratios and proportions—advanced mathematics doesn’t allow room for other subjects.

  * * *

  Nobody’s heard from her for two weeks. Her mother suffers at home; she’s all run out of tears. A long-time widow, and now she’s lost her daughter too, that’s what Señora Vélez, the social worker, said. Samira went out and didn’t come back, just like that—a purebred puppy lost in the wild jungle of Río Piedras.

  The students didn’t know anything either.

  Best case, she went off with a new boyfriend, said one of the boys in the classroom.

  El Gato got her hooked on the meat. Who knows, someone might’ve kidnapped her to steal her kidneys, a goth girl suggested. Sorry . . . not to be so morbid. She could’ve just left the country with someone to go become a dancer, everyone knows Samira was into that nonsense, she continued.

  That girl is dead, said a Pentecostal girl, so she can’t snitch on El Gato’s killers.

  Her name always struck you as attractive: Samira. You even looked it up in the dictionary once. Samira: of Islamic origin, a woman who tells stories at night, a female entertainer. You look at her Facebook photos again. She’s dressed as a belly dancer, in a black-and-gold costume covered with small metallic bells; everyone applauded when she won the talent show. You saw her leave with El Gato after the show that Thursday night, and you remember that she didn’t come back until the following Monday.

  You can’t relax at home; an inaudible call compels you to leave the comfort of your apartment. You want to find the equation that will solve this mystery, and you wish for a new use of polynomial functions that would decode Samira’s location. You long to touch the oblong mole on her elbow again, to determine how chance had planted it on her young skin.

  * * *

  You get on the train at Sagrado Corazón to see the city by night. It dawns on you that the map on the wall resembles a folded arm: the shoulder in Santurce, the elbow in Río Piedras, the hand in Bayamón. At the elbow you enter the subterranean part of the route—the underground, an inferno. You can’t see the urban landscape; the windows reveal only darkness. You catch your reflection in the glass. You haven’t shaved recently, so you look like a vagrant, a drunk sick with dengue fever. You don’t see Samira. You get off the train and wander through the streets filled with bookstores, ruined buildings, bars, walls covered in urban art, the street dormitories of junkies recently introduced to the alternative life, and murals of dogs and cats. Deep down you consider the probability of running into Samira. If you found her, you’d as
k her why she wanted to disappear. A homeless man tries to bum a cigarette; you say you don’t smoke. Asshole, he says without resentment, staggering off down the street. If you found her, you wouldn’t question her, you’d offer to help her—after all, you’re just her teacher, not her father or relative—and you’d notify the social worker. Down a dark street, you see a man pull out his cock, moving it like a dead serpent. This is what you’re looking for, daddy, come get it, it’s not easy to find around here. You act like you don’t see or hear him. You come to the public square. Cops remove a handcuffed man from a patrol car and take him into the station. Nobody would care if you found her—let her live however she wants, die however she wants, disappear however she wants. At that elbow on the map, Río Piedras, you squash a cockroach on the ground near the station.

  * * *

  That night you dream of Samira: you find her in the classroom dressed in the black-and-gold outfit from the talent show; she’s the teacher, you, the only student in a room illuminated by black candles. From a desk you watch her, glowing, self-absorbed, solving equations on the chalkboard. She turns around to begin class; the bells ring in the background. This is what we call the inverse ratio, with the constant Ω. This kind of ratio also appears in natural processes and phenomena, for example . . . In the middle of her explanation, a gust of wind slips in through the recently opened door. All the candles go out; the moon provides the only illumination for what comes next. El Gato enters and undresses in front of a silent Samira. She keeps looking at you, as if wishing to continue the math lesson. He’s in front of her, naked, his skin covered with tattoos—skulls, tombstones, feline sex acts, men with pistols in place of their genitals, and women with breasts like curled-up cats. He strikes her and throws her on the floor. She seems to enjoy the beating. You stay motionless, paralyzed. You don’t want to stand; watching her suffer makes you feel good, so you watch her enjoy it, smiling passively, bleeding from the nose. El Gato positions her on the desk to take her. He’s panting, they’re panting, moaning, licking each other. You feel them licking your neck, and then you’re panting, it’s you moving on top of her, you feel your cock inside of her. El Gato is no longer there—you’re El Gato now—your arms spread on the desk, which creaks, and your arms are cat legs. You growl, you meow, and your tail quivers with pleasure. She sticks her claws into your chest. The pain wakes you up.