Authors: Tom Connolly
I would trade anything for the sight of my man running by my open door!
At night everything finds its way home. It’s like the ocean—the waves come in, crash and yet the tide takes them home. The horses go looking for the grass along these roads—she glances up for a moment looking out the door—but they return to their stalls when the sun sets. The dogs run to their packs in the sun but run home at night. And the roosters, noisy in the morning, herd their hens into the coop when it gets dark. I hope they are quiet tonight.
I wish I had time to be idle. Idleness is part of life here. It is how life is lived, not a mad cluttered world with images and noise. Not television. People stand outside and wave to each other passing by. I used to have more time to talk with my customers, to look up and wave to them.
Conversation in the barrio goes on for hours. Domino games last for days.
Juan liked to plant coconut trees on his land. When we would go to the beach at Isle Verde in San Juan, he would run along the edge of the ocean and return with dozens of small coconut shells that the tide brought in. He loved watching the long fronds poking thru the cracked shells. He would bring them home and nurture them. Last Sunday I walked by the house he built and saw his small trees growing. They love all this rain.
Up where Juan’s house is, the road gets very steep. It is like looking down from the top of a roller coaster. I don’t know how he ever ran on these roads.
In the winter time, in February, they have a race here in honor of our patron saint, San Blas. The Africans who come for the prize money fly over the hills. They are short people with powerful legs. They remind me of the pigmy people on the other side of the mountain, through the stinking town of Aibonito, with all its chicken processing plants, and down into the valley to Cayey.
Juan was a good strong runner; he had legs so long they looked like stilts. He was tall, and he had a long thin torso. I watched him in the San Blas marathon. He was leading the race at the halfway point; he was even ahead of the Africans coming up the big hill after passing through Coamo. But they caught him on the backside of the race, the downhill part. He was in such pain after the race. He pulled his shoes off, and his feet were calloused and bleeding. I can still see him slamming his shoe down; mad at himself for wearing new socks to run a race. The new socks had caused the bleeding and pain. But he recovered quickly.
At the finish line at the stadium, there was a big celebration with bands and dancing and food. We stayed all night. We danced; even with his feet hurting, he loved to meringue, swung his hips better than the girls. My quiet man would come alive dancing with me, swiveling to the music, throwing his head back as the music flowed through the night air. Coolness. After a hot day in the sun.
Now she looked up as a clap of thunder sounded overhead. She continued ironing, glancing up to look at the rain.
It rains here in slow motion. The water is so light it takes a long time to reach the grass.
After going by Juan’s house on Sunday, I left Mare at my Aunt Carmen’s house so I could walk into town. The town is always the same but always being repaired. It is old. The plaza around San Blas’ church has undergone renovation—new tiles, cement borders, new benches, and they planted new trees. This transformation is magical, still the original plaza but new and green. I like it. Now it is alive with people. Before, the people would not walk over the cracked tiles, and the grey, bleached broken cement sticking up would trip you. There were places to sit, but even the two-foot wall around the plaza was falling down. They have done a wonderful thing fixing it. The town seems like it has found itself—the people are walking there again, talking, sitting on the benches. And even though it was still hot in the afternoon, the canopy of lotus trees seemed to bring a breeze with it as dappled sunlight squeezes in.
Over by the church, the old, old crape myrtle tree is still there with its fragrant pink flowers hanging down. And they kept the small monuments dedicated to past citizens. I sat by myself on a bench just watching the people and occasionally talking with some of the older women. I didn’t know anyone. All of my customers live up on the hill. My friends are all gone, married, and left for other towns or to the States. My best friend, Santa Alba, the beauty queen of Coamo, went to New York to fashion school and never came back. My parents are gone, my mother died, and my father went to Brazil with my little brother, Chunk. My aunt still lives here, over on the first hill, just before my house.
I left the bench I was sitting on and walked down some of the side streets. The music poured from the casitas. At night in town, it is always the music from the casitas; at night in the hills, it is always the dogs waking up the roosters. But over all of this is the fresh island air. Free to breathe, cool on my face.
It started to rain while I was on my walk so I left town to go home. The air here makes its own environment. Rain comes not in waves but in short bursts from a sky so clearly black at night you can see across the Milky Way. In the day the sun is always there, but it can rain seven or eight times during the day. Once, I kept track of it while washing the clothes of my customers; it rained twelve times that day, but not for long and always on the wings of the constant breezes.
As I walked home, I saw life all around me. Everyone in town talking to everyone else, knowing everyone else. In the hills toward home, strolling on the streets were pigs, horses, cats, dogs, and roosters. Billions of roosters. Er-Er-Ering wildly all day; cock-a-doodle, doodling all night.
Here the men are the men. There aren’t girly men here. My friend Santa Alba writes to me about all the fun things she is doing in New York. But she does say the men there are more like girls—she calls them “metro-sexuals.” She says there is something in big cities that makes them feminine. Nuh, uh. Not that way here; although, the men do the shopping here. The women? The women stay home, sashay around in too tight jeans and low (really low) cut blouses.
When I reached my aunt’s house, we talked for a while; she fixed Mare and me rice and beans and then we walked on home. I told Mare she was never going to wear tight jeans and low cut blouses. She said, “What are you talking about mommy?”
Juan was always very modest, and he liked that I was also. He would shoot his daughter before he ever let her out of the house in clothes like I saw in the plaza today. I will shoot her for him when it comes time. Maybe that is why there are so many children here in San Blas. Almost as many as the roosters.
On our way home we passed a dead tree, arms outstretched, as if saying, “Why me?” It is the only dead tree on the island. Everything is alive here; nothing dies here.
It surprises me that people move from the smaller towns to the bigger cities, not necessarily to San Juan but to cities in the States. They always come back for visits, and many of the older ones who left are moving back here. They have their money and can live here reasonably. One of my customers retired from the phone company in Boston and came back home to live. She can’t believe how cheaply she can live here. Maybe I need to raise my prices.
My customer said here she pays no state tax, no town tax, no sales tax, and no real estate tax, except for a twelve dollar annual land tax. Yes, that is true.
Less and less though, I think the children of San Blas are leaving. Many of the things they were previously drawn to are now coming to them. This is good. Jobs and modern conveniences are arriving, and our local culture is being preserved. Some of the things we see on television that happen in the states are thankfully not happening here.
In a lot of ways, we need those jobs and conveniences. I remember reading in my geography books in high school of sixteenth century Spain. I never saw a difference from that book to my hills of San Blas. Local residents ride horses in these hills and on the roads, animals roam freely around the countryside and return home at night and doctors live next to carpenters. Children and parents spend hours in front of their homes talking with passing neighbors and relatives. And relatives, everyone is related here. Up on the mountain, Juan has twenty cousins; ten aunts, his mother is living with one of his cousins; and maybe seven or eight uncles, not always with those same aunts.
The cars are a problem. The roads are too narrow, and every boy from sixteen on has a car. I don’t know how their parents can afford these cars for these kids. I can’t afford a car, and I work all day. While the parents stay thin, I notice the kids are getting puffy. I think that is from all the television watching. The kids in town didn’t look puffy when I walked there Sunday, but I notice my customer’s kids—puffy. Not enough exercise. The Spanish diet of chicken and rice and beans is being replaced by fast food. They have now opened a Burger King next to the McDonalds. My customer from the states, the one who retired from the phone company, eats at McDonalds so much they made her customer of the year. I saw her picture on the wall, standing next to the store manager, under the sign that said “Customer of the Year.”
And I think we need more doctors here. I took Mare in for her shot on Saturday. By 9 a.m., forty people had shown up, took their tickets and were assigned a “general” time to come back. We did our shopping and came back at our “general” time of 1 p.m., and the doctor was not back from lunch. Mare didn’t get her shot until 3 p.m.
A customer walked in, and Silvana popped out of her reflections to help the lady.
Once the customer left, Silvana went back to her thoughts. She thought of Santa Alba, her best friend growing up. She hoped to hear from her again soon.
She put the iron down, walked back across the room, reached in the tin box, and took out the letter. She began to read it again.
Chapter 18
The Beauty Queen of Coamo left her home town in Puerto Rico to attend the Fashion Institute of Design in Manhattan, Chelsea to be more exact. Even as a young girl she had style and grace, which only added to her beauty, although it was not those assets that helped her become a hometown beauty queen. That distinction belonged to her father, a prosperous land owner and developer of the local golf course. This was the same golf course that tied into the Banos de Coamo, the legendary Fountain of Youth of Ponce DeLeon.
No, Santa Alba owed her beauty title to the three judges who were fellow business men with Edwardo Alba. And it was not that Santa Alba wasn’t beautiful, she was, but at seventeen the beauty of San Blas de Coamo and maybe all of Puerto Rico was the school girl Silvana DeLuna. But when the results were announced at the festival of San Francisco, outside the church in Coamo’s main plaza, there was much joy. And to think she came in second to her friend Santa Alba filled Silvana with pride. The two hugged each other for more than a few moments. They had been the closest of friends all through school. And it was dear Santa who convinced Silvana to enter the beauty contest. Silvana had demurred. She might be friends with Santa Alba, but she was not in the same class. Santa came from the moneyed part of town, and her father was well respected. The opposite was true for Silvana DeLuna. After her mother died in child birth with Silvana’s younger brother Chunk, it was largely Silvana who raised Chunk. Their father was mostly unemployed, due to his constant drinking. And things only got worse when her father took Chunk to live with him in Brazil.
Santa Alba had dreamed of being a fashion designer from her early teens. She read every magazine, her father indulged her with the latest fashions, but mostly she enjoyed drawing up, cutting, and sewing her own clothes. Frequently her own work won more praise from other girls than did the more expensive clothes from San Juan and New York.When she applied to the Fashion Institute, she sent a portfolio of her own drawings along with a dozen pictures of her and Silvana DeLuna modeling her handmade skirts and blouses. The talent was recognized, and she entered the Institute in the fall of her eighteenth year. By twenty-one she had her own apartment on 20th St, next to the Atlantic Theater Company’s hall.
In the summers of her second and third year at the Institute, she stayed in Manhattan, or rather Manhattan with all manner of the world’s fashion sense stayed in her. Those two summers she interned with Donna Karan and after that second summer was offered the position of associate designer upon graduation.
Life in the big city agreed with the young Latin beauty. Wherever she went men frequently found her irresistible. After graduation she took a designer position with a young up-and-coming Spanish designer, Paulo Cartino, and at twenty-four she was accompanying Paulo and lead designer Simon Lancaster to Paris during Fashion Week.
During that time in Paris, they stayed at a less than elegant hotel in the St. Germain area, the Hotel St Andre de Arts, on Rue St Andre de Arts. The name of the hotel gave it more cache than it deserved. Their rooms were three singles out of seven on the fourth floor of the walkup. Santa’s room looked more like a closet off of one of the other rooms. Things were so tight in the small room that when she showered on her first morning in Paris and bent to pick up the soap, she cracked her head on the sink, which protruded into the shower by about five inches.
Paulo asked her about the lump at breakfast and apologized for the less than ideal quarters.
“But, my dear, we are one block from everything elegant in the world. So suck it up for a few more days.”
“Oh, it’s fine, Paulo,” she protested. “I love everything about it, even my bump.”