After the Hurricane(25)
She is relieved when, entering the house, it is as bad, worse, than she remembered. If she is busy cleaning, she will have no time to think.
Lying on the couch after several hours of cleaning, her arms aching, she lifts her phone up and opens Jessenia’s blog. She shouldn’t be letting herself read it, she knows, she didn’t talk to Gloria, she doesn’t deserve her reward. But for all the work she has done, her mind is still buzzing and racing, and reading this might calm her. Anything that distracts her from the empty house would calm her, she hopes. She scrolls down, down, to the very first post, begin at the beginning, she thinks, and clicks on it.
There is a part of the world which is paradise and hell. To come from the island is to be the inheritor of things as they are somehow sweet, ripe, rotten, all at once, to graft onto the patch of vivid emerald in a world of blinding turquoise even as it tries to wash you away with storms and waves, with earthquakes and with desperation.
On many days, as I sit on my boat in the wide bright teal sea and look back at the shore, I think I can see what it must have been, that first sight of land flashing against European retinas, that first moment when the old world met the new. What must they have seen, sweaty, starving, lice infested men with beards and nothing but seagulls, Jesus, and each other, for company, when the island came upon them? What must those grimy, stained men have thought it was, that patch of palm and stone, wet with rainforest droplets? They had come from dry lands of oranges and palaces and pox. These men had boarded hunks of rotting wood and set out for a land, a triangle in the sea, that they knew nothing of, save that it had pepper, that black wrinkled pimple, that jewel worth each of their lives ten times over. Before they left Spain, they had filled their floating homes with pigs and guns and bodies, soaking their wool trousers and linen shirts with sweat as their boat made its journey to the land that held everything they craved, everything that would make food worth eating. Was this it, they asked, the place beyond the edge of the world, beyond the Holy Land, halfway to China where God hadn’t even made His way yet? A spot of green, pure, vivid green, a color so lush and sweet they opened their mouths to taste it although they were still miles away? Would they know India when they saw it? Or had they died, and was this paradise?
What must the boricuas have seen, the many pairs of eyes watching the gigantic brown ships on the ocean come closer and closer to their world, their island? What did they see coming on the horizon, in such an ugly form, pale ghosts in heavy bags of fabric, great stacks of dead forests charging through the waves? Perhaps they thought it was an illusion, a mirage. The island knew it was one of many, as did its inhabitants, but the sailors who approached it could only see what was right in front of them. Like something from a dream. Beckoning to them, welcoming them to its pristine shores.
This is what history has taught me. Be careful with your invitations. To welcome is to leave your neck vulnerable, your blood available to be sucked dry. Oh, that I could have told this island, do not call. Do not invite these strangers to your doors and shores. You will regret their hands on your lands, their fingers rooting into the streams of your earth for shiny things, their bodies rooting into the caverns of your women, their thoughts and their gods and their needs becoming yours.
But it is too late for that now, far too late. To want is to become, to call is to transform, and I, we now are all what we are and cannot pull apart the threads between them and us, we are them, all of them, too late to warn the island, too late to turn back the tide.
So we must be all the things we are now, the discoverer and the discovery. The oppressor and the oppressed. Enslaver and enslaved. We have the blood of each one buried in us, and there is no turning back that tide.
Elena closes her phone, and her eyes, sure that visions of conquistadors will plague her dreams, but soon she is sleeping, her body buoyant in her dream of the sea.
The Instituto de Cultura is closed when Elena gets there in the morning. Elena had checked the hours carefully online, and arrived at 8:00 a.m., when it opened, but she had forgotten to check the days, and it is closed all weekend. She feels like kicking the door in frustration, but she cannot do that to a historic building, and unfortunately, this policy eliminates most of the city of Old San Juan. She contents herself with kicking the sidewalk, instead, and her foot begins to bleed.
She turns back and limps through the large orange courtyard of the Museum of Art and History of San Juan, which, to Elena’s surprise, now houses a weekend farmers market. The museum is one of several very large buildings in San Juan that, once inside, reveal themselves to be at least half courtyard. She stops, her foot throbbing, and looks around at the market. Signs in English and Spanish hanging from the lampposts tell her that this was the traditional market area of the city, and now, with this farmers market, it is that again. Another sign encourages her to buy, support local farmers deeply affected by Maria. Elena sees people with dreadlocks selling vegan empanadas and a red-faced white woman standing behind a stall as a burnished tan man hands her little bags of soft white cheese and beautifully vivid peppers to arrange. A florist shows off ginger blossoms and birds-of-paradise while a wizened woman arranges soaps just so next to a young male duo dusting excess flour off their loaves of bread. It looks like Saturday in Brooklyn, a little bit.
Elena walks out, down Calle Mercado, a street whose name has become a truth again, and onto San Sebastián, where she stops for a coffee, saying nothing but please and thank you to the friendly barista, who clearly wants to know more about her. Elena pretends she doesn’t understand, and sips her drink. She is stalling. She cannot fill her time with errands and clouds of dust forever.