San Juan Noir

by Mayra Santos-Febres

  You don’t turn on the light to shower. You scrub your body vigorously as you try to remove the filth from your skin and your brain. You’ve seen cats clean themselves with their tongues, passively, parsimoniously, with all the time in the world, but yours is not a cat bath—it’s tense, exaggerated. But the water doesn’t eradicate the filth you feel, the dirt you harbor. It runs bloody in the darkness, down the drain that’s darker still.

  When morning comes you have no desire to get up, to go back to the school. You decide to stay home with the memory of the dream, the sensation of claws embedded in your chest, and the thought of Samira presenting a report on inverse trigonometric functions. She herself was inverse: she wasn’t a normal adolescent; she acted like an adult, a teacher, erudite. She spoke more than the rest of the kids combined, and her conversation was substantive. Maestro, if so many people live happily off government benefits without needing to study, why do us kids have to study so much? Maestro, if God knows everything, why did He create the devil?

  That question goes beyond the scope of mathematics, you would always answer.

  You look like a vagrant now. You watch the news again, flip through the channels, peer out the apartment’s front and back windows, and look through the newspaper. You read every page and inspect every photo, but you don’t find Samira. Your hands are dirty, so you clean them with your tongue, passively, parsimoniously, with all the time in the world. Math is good for nothing—nothing in this life—it doesn’t help you live well, or be born, it doesn’t help yield high probabilities of ending up with an good family, and when you die it won’t give you one extra microsecond.

  The students give you a surprising reception. Maestro, you don’t look so good. Are you sick? You look like you’re about to die. Maestro, we have news for you, says one of the boys in the classroom. Look at this picture. You see the façade of a notorious bar called Y. Stories of killings that have happened there have been in the papers and on the news before. You think of “Y” as one of the protagonist variables in an equation on the chalkboard. Some of my friends saw her there last night . . . She’s a total star, a sensation, the little jewel of the business, the most popular whore. Maestro, can you go save her?

  * * *

  You let the night enter you as you board the train at Sagrado Corazón. You no longer care that the map of your trajectory resembles a folded arm, but you do remember the mole in the shape of a cockroach on Samira’s elbow; you enter the underground at that elbow. The urban landscape is unimportant, you think, seeing the long beard of a sick, drunk Zeus. You don’t see Samira. You exit the train and enter the street amid the shadows and decaying odors, where cat-sized rats run by. Deep down you think about the probability of forgetting Samira. A kid offers you cocaine. You tell him that you’re not interested. Fuck yourself, he says without fear. You want to go home. Down a dark street you see two women kissing, and you act like you don’t notice. You arrive at Y. Some men enter with the tranquility of coming home; you long to go to your own home. I’m ridiculous, you can’t stop thinking. The large, red Y outside invites you in, as if you’ll find the answer to the equation you’re trying to solve.

  You drink two beers in one hour—the last one already tastes bitter. You listen to the noise; the salsa; the solicitations of older women: you can do everything for this much; the proposals of little girls; none of them is Samira. You feel tricked; it’s impossible that you’d find one of your students here. With her intelligence she’s guaranteed a promising future. Samira would become an upstanding citizen. You think about ordering another beer, but instead decide to pay, leave a tip, and get out of there. You make your way through the patrons who’re there to have a good time.

  Back on the train you hear the faraway click of high heels. A shadow approaches with a distinct glow around her hair, like a character with a halo from the calendar of saints. She moves sensually, the sashay of hips possessed by tropical music—you can almost imagine the salsa playing at the Y. As she approaches, you see a black silk scarf. It’s long and it plays with her to the rhythm of inaudible music. You don’t recognize it; you do recognize her.

  Maestro, good evening. I never thought I’d see you in these shadowy places.

  You don’t answer. You look at her: she’s overly made-up, like a woman already, an adult; she’s not the student you once knew, and you can almost imagine an extensive life history. She traps you with the scarf, tosses it over you, and you feel the band of cloth on your back. She comes closer to you with a slight pull—a grouping of sets, whole numbers, Samira is equal to—standing, she curls up into you.

  Maestro, I like this too much . . . With every man I relive the nights with El Gato, my cat. It’s like this dead man comes back to life every day, like a miracle, and I want to do this for the rest of my life. Don’t give me that face; I’m happy, and my mom knows all about it—she brought me here. She got laid off at work, like they throw out the trash, that’s how they got rid of her. My mom brought me to these dark places and I enjoyed it from the very first time. I couldn’t let my little mother go hungry after all that she’s done for me, so I closed my eyes and felt my cat on top of me, beside me, and behind me. I also want you to know that for as long as I can remember, after working all day, Mom helped me with my homework at night, we played together, and I went to bed early with a prayer to God. Later, I sometimes escaped from my bed, and would find her with other men in the house. At first she told me it was Daddy who came in spirit to visit her, because spirits have needs too, and at first I believed it, but then I saw Daddy as a big man, other times as a small man. Sometimes he was white, sometimes black, and a few times I saw him with Asian eyes; being a spirit gives you such powers, you can change shape. Some nights Daddy could transform himself into a rich or a poor man, and his soul is so powerful that my mom said it can even transform itself into a woman. And I pretended to believe her. Maestro, I don’t want to go back to school. What I wish for now is to be on one of those cheap motel beds, where you can hear people jabbering in the streets, where the red lights change the color of your face, where not even a fan can evaporate my sweat and filth—our filth. Ay, maestro, you don’t know how much I’ve fantasized about you! I’ve imagined it so many ways that sometimes I think it’s real, more real than the men who’ve been fucking me these past few weeks. Maestro, if you say anything or if I find out that people from the government have done anything to my mom, I swear that you’ll never forget me, because I’ll tell everyone the story of how you tried to touch me at school. I’ll tell them that a few days later you took me on your desk and threatened my grades so you could screw me every day. I’ll cry when I tell it, with an expression of shame and pain, and there won’t be a single police officer or judge who won’t be moved. Ah, I want to go to bed—

  You finally escape from the restraint of the scarf and your forehead feels sweaty, your face is hot, and your ears are red. You leave Samira in the darkness and run to the train. I’m a delinquent, you think, seeing the terminal as an impossible goal. Finally, it’s there in the distance and you can hear your own heart beating like a drum. It’s no longer imaginary music, it’s an internal percussion. You want to forget that conversation. You want to get home, shower, and erase the memory of Samira’s words. You long to be in front of the chalkboard. Invertible functions, variable isolations, ratios and proportions. You see a black cat; it moves quietly, without hurry, without worry. The animal turns around to fix its gray eyes on yours. If it could speak, what would it say to me? The feline’s gaze is challenging, uncomfortable, and intimidating. You look back the way you’ve come, back to where you left El Gato’s girlfriend. Samira, the girl with the mole in the shape of a cockroach on one elbow, an unsolved equation. With a kind of guilty feeling, you decide to go back and solve it.

  INSIDE AND OUTSIDE

  by Edmaris Carazo

  Old San Juan

  “I’m a resident,” he said, and removed the piece of paper from the glove box that apparently confirmed it. Th
e officer looked at it, tilted his head like a dog, checked out my legs, looked him in the eye. He showed the officer his perfect teeth and returned the head tilt. I prayed that he didn’t catch a whiff of alcohol on our breath.

  He looked at the document again . . . “Go ahead,” he finally said, holding the paper a couple seconds more before returning it. He didn’t believe us. That’s what I thought, but maybe it was because Miguel didn’t live in Old San Juan. I really wasn’t sure where he lived. Yes, there was his father’s house in Carolina, where I waited for him that one time in the pickup while he looked for his board. The same house where we shook the sheets in the half-light of a room with the door open and his old man’s snores as background music. There was also that empty apartment with nothing but a cot and a refrigerator, a very useful place but not fit to live in. Resident—a resident of Old San Juan—I doubted it more than the officer did. Anyway, deep down, I celebrated his lie.

  * * *

  Old San Juan is like a family member you miss right up until the moment you see them again. Not a day goes by that you don’t show up and wonder what’s going on now, what caused the hullabaloo this time. Then certain streets get shut down and only people who live there can enter. The guards stop you in front of Plaza Colón and filter out those who can enter. The residents of Old San Juan are the lucky ones, those mythical creatures. Nobody knows where they park, or how they’re able to go in and out and lead relatively normal lives within the walled city.

  The only thing worse than trying to get into Old San Juan on a Friday night is trying to do so when it’s raining. On this island, cars stop moving when the first raindrop hits. Any street, any intersection, any checkpoint can become a traffic jam. San Juan in the rain is a spectacle: every puddle illuminated by streetlights, every cobblestone slick—even the disgusting ditches acquire a certain charm. I love cities in the rain. They’re like men in suits. If a city doesn’t look beautiful in the rain, it never will.

  I always enter through the lower end, not caring where I’m going. Even though I come down Avenida Muñoz Rivera as if to go past, I always stop in Plaza Colón, traffic jam or not. I head down as if I were going to the Tapia theater, along the touristy cultural route. I always park at the Doña Fela parking garage on Calle Comercio. It’s dark and ugly, but it only costs three dollars for the whole night and it’s close to my usual haunts—the restaurants, the bars, Paseo la Princesa. When it’s up to me, I stick with Calle Fortaleza and Tetuán. Familiar routes soothe my soul.

  I hate driving. When you first start driving, your car is a window of freedom, providing the illusion of being able to go wherever you want—ignoring the small fact that we’re stuck on a piece of dirt surrounded by water. Besides, I’ve been nearsighted since I was twelve, before my first period. At night the lights blind me, and alcohol makes it even worse, drying out my eyes and contacts. My lenses reflect the glare of the stoplights and headlights of other cars, and the additional $134 was too much to pay to have them put on antireflective coating. It seemed like a pointless charge at the time.

  Miguel loves to drive, I imagine in his mind it’s like surfing on dry land. Miguel does everything with grace: even scratching his beard, tying his hair up in a bun—that would be feminine if it wasn’t for his huge hairy hands filled with rings. Being natural is easy for him, which sounds redundant, but it’s not. I, on the other hand, look like I’m about to have an aneurysm when I’m driving through Old San Juan, dodging bums who cross the streets as if they have license plates of their own. It’s like they wear dark colors on purpose, blending into the wet cobblestones with their filthy faces and bags on their feet. Maybe that’s why I prefer that someone else drives, why I don’t question the white lie. Because it saves me from parking in the Doña Fela, allows me to avoid the aroma of rancid piss, of local beer, that sweet rotten smell that fills the city. When I leave the Fela, I usually head right for the street, even though the parking lot has a pedestrian walkway. I hurry out through that little exit, “home” to a commune of who knows how many. I don’t know if they’re the same ones or if they sleep in shifts. I never ever look them in the eye, I dodge their sores, I hold my breath when they’re close by. For some reason I have nightmares about passing through that space—I’m terrified that they’ll latch onto my legs, throw me to the ground, touch me, infect me.

  * * *

  We got on the Norzagaray and drove around aimlessly, seeing the coast from the highest point on the street, passing by La Perla, like tourists, at a distance—seeing the little colorful houses, crammed together, dropping down to the shore. In its beginnings, La Perla was a slaughterhouse, cemetery, and residence for slaves and servants. It was there that they slaughtered cattle and buried humans, outside the walled city, of course. The poor sometimes have the best views in the world, as well as some cemeteries.

  We found a place to park on the street, a miracle that would’ve never happened to me, and we went down the San Justo hill. Whoever says bajando hasta las calabazas obviously hasn’t tried to walk down cobblestone in high heels. I was using Miguel as a walker, avoiding cracks, gutters, and raised cobblestones. We stopped at a door, Miguel took out his cell phone, waited, looked up, then down at the ground. “Caballo, I’m outside,” he said, and closed the cell phone. It was an old flip phone, prepaid like a burner. While we waited, he hugged me from behind, bit my neck, and squeezed me, until someone appeared in the doorway.

  It was a kid—he looked like a minor—pale, bright-eyed, fragile, freshly bathed. “Come in, come in.” We followed him up a spiral staircase that seemed endless. It was very dark and smelled like damp wood and cat piss. We came to a huge door, which wasn’t a standard rectangle. It was tall, and the upper part was a semicircle with gold-stained glass windows. When it opened, we were transported to another dimension.

  It was cold in Old San Juan in mid-August, central air blew throughout the whole world of that apartment, which was covered in varnished wood paneling. The ceilings were exceedingly high; I couldn’t help but wonder how the hell they’d hung all those chandeliers. The kitchen was spacious, with stainless-steel appliances. On the other side was the living room, some white leather sofas, plush cushions, and about half a dozen women who looked like they’d been pulled out of the pages of magazines. The music seemed to be coming from the walls themselves. It was one of those electronic rhythms that make the floor and your ribs shake. There were three open bottles of champagne in silver buckets full of ice. And yet, almost nobody was drinking; everyone was dancing, moving their blond heads from side to side, as if hearing a different rhythm.

  Migue brought me a glass. I took a breath and put on a questioning face. He kissed me. “Don’t ask, just dance.”

  I drank that champagne with such thirst that it was like I’d walked all the way from the Doña Fela to that strange mansion. I was hoping to feel what everyone else seemed to be feeling, but nothing was happening. I went up to the champagne buffet and filled my glass again. Migue spoke with the kid, while his feline eyes slid over the bodies of the girls. The music had a robotic feel, like a scratched disc, a broken and repetitive melody that gave me more of a headache than a desire to dance. But the rest of the girls danced, eyes closed, fingering their lustrous necklines, smiling as if something very pleasurable was happening to them.

  I went back to the table, filled my glass, took three sips, and served myself more. I touched one of the girls on the forearm to get her attention. To my surprise, she opened her big green eyes, smiled, and looked at me as if my face was the most striking one in the world. “Do you know where the bathroom is?” She smiled and tilted her head, came even closer to me, furrowed her brow, and pulled me to her ear—she smelled like lavender and cherry blossoms. “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  She turned around, went to the sofa, and began to move the cushions, as if she’d lost something of great value. She went to the other sofa and did the same thing, pushing the cushions aside, sticking her hands i
nto the cracks. Finally, she pulled out a small bag, white and gold, approached me, and took me by the hand. I followed her down a long, dark hallway. It was full of huge canvases, colorful paintings framed in sequoia. I knew the exact kind of wood, because my grandfather had owned a framing business and I spent many summers haggling with galleries and rich people who wanted their recently purchased paintings in frames made of the most expensive material on the market. Then I started to wonder who these people were, who this apartment belonged to, how anyone had so much money in an economy that was so fucked. How old was that kiddo living the life of an artist? Who were these women?

  The girl led me to the bathroom and held onto my hand as she entered. She flipped on the light, and I turned to leave. “You can stay.”

  I smiled at her and looked down at the floor. I think I said, “Thanks,” and left. Halfway down the hallway, I remembered I still had to pee. I turned back toward the bathroom, praying to run into the blonde in the hallway. But no, I got back to the bathroom and the door was still shut. Then, as if by magic, it suddenly opened. The blonde threw her head forward as if she was going to kiss her knees, then straightened up quickly. Her hair fell back in a cascade, the image of a mermaid. Her eyes were so big, her eyebrows so high, her lips so red, her smile so wide, so drunk, her jaw set as if fighting an overbite and an underbite at the same time. She went strutting off down the hallway, like she didn’t even see me.