After the Hurricane(44)
“It’s good you come,” Maria tells her. Elena smiles, bitterly. Good for who? “You take care. You sure you no want the concealer? It would really help with this.” Maria gestures to Elena’s whole face, and Elena smiles, again, accepts the concealer, and says goodbye.
That evening she sits on the roof again, her Instagram page open on her phone as she sips water, the ice melting and the glass sweating into her palm. She checks on her friends in New York, but they are doing things without her, and while she does not begrudge them this, she does notice that no one she knows has checked in yet, asked how she is doing. Of course, no one knows that this is hard for you. You’ve never told them. She reminds herself this, but it doesn’t make her feel any better. She thinks about telling Daniel. He would understand a little piece of how this is for her, she knows. She let him in more than most other people in her life. She’s never really wanted to tell anyone much about her father, never wanted to burden them with her baggage. Just like him, just like he didn’t tell you anything, she thinks, and then shakes her head. Why are they all just carrying all their things with them, why can’t they ever lay anything down? Why is history so heavy on her heart, on his?
She looks up Daniel’s profile, and sees that he’s posted something new, an image with friends, male and female, one woman tucked up in his side comfortably, her smile wide. Elena knows she should feel angry at the possibility that he’s moved on so quickly, but instead she feels relief. He looks happy. Her biggest fear in life is causing damage, leaving a permanent mark. Her own life has been battered by her father, who does not seem to care about damaging others at all. She doesn’t want to leave footprints on someone else’s life the way he has on hers.
She thinks for a moment about her conversation with Mercedes, and then opens up the profile for @vidaboricua12 once more, and clicks on the links back to Jessenia’s blog. She scrolls back and back, as the steady chirping of the coqui bleats on and on into the night, until she finds an early post that looks interesting titled What’s in a Name, and she opens it up and reads.
Although now we are pretty short here, this is the land of giants. Boriken, Boriquen, names for this island from people who knew it before Columbus. Does it matter what we call things now? Should we remember the old name, should we tear “Puerto Rico” out of our mouths and call it what it was? Do places care what they are named, and re-named, by the people who think it matters, and will matter, in a hundred years? Words have power, we know that they do, but what’s in a name, anyway? If I call this place the land of giants, will any of us grow?
Of course, we are allowed to be irritated by the name Puerto Rico. It was clearly a complete afterthought, a total fail. Puerto Rico. “Rich Port.” Not even a saint’s moniker, not a soup?on of flair. That’s like calling New York or London or Paris or Tokyo “big city.” The lack of effort, the sheer failure of imagination, well sometimes it makes one weep. Being a conquistador must have been exhausting, all that pillaging and raping and enslaving and such, but would it have been too much to ask that these great men who exterminated millions took a little time from their busy schedules to be creative in their monikers?
Speaking of names, Christopher, Christopher, why should we call Columbus that? No one he knew would have done so. In his hometown, Genoa, he would have been Cristoffa Corombo, “son of a weaver.” His name would be bastardized by his fellow Italians to Cristoforo Colombo. When he moved to Lisbon, he was Cristóv?o Colombo, when he begged for ships in Spain he was Cristóbal Colón. And who knows what the people he destroyed called him, some with direct slaughter, some with diseases none of them, himself included, would have understood.
Christopher is, of course, the “carrier of Christ,” a man whose original name is long erased, supplanted by his choice to bear Jesus over a river, cementing his identity forever as a beast of burden. Our many-named man, too, carried all he needed with him, both crucifixes and aedes aegypti, a mosquito carrying yellow fever, a hat on a hat. This man called the island that is now Puerto Rico “San Juan Bautista.” Its port-city was rich, and so they named the place they docked their ships Puerto Rico. But at some point in time, somewhere between the extermination of the Taino people and the swinging hips of Richie Valens, the city and the island switched names behind everyone’s back just to see who was paying attention. No one was.
Do you know the story of John the Baptist? He lived off locusts and honey in the wilderness, he baptized Jesus in the river Jordan, then a pretty girl danced for a king and asked for John’s head instead of singles tucked into her underwear and he died. To think, we read this book to children.
Maybe it doesn’t matter what we call this place. This island wears names lightly, it must, it is older than the names it bears. Who knows what they may be called tomorrow, or when the world is very old? Who knows if there will even be names, then, or people to say them?
Elena thinks for a long time about all of the names she has just learned, all of the names of people connected to her who she will never know, and then, when her brain is so tired it aches, she sleeps a dreamless sleep, for which she is grateful.
The next morning she wakes early, her numb limbs once again nudging her to consciousness. Everything here is dirty, she thinks, looking around at the slightly cleaner, but still messy and filthy, place. She wants to rescue this house from her father, she realizes. It hurts her that it is falling apart under his ownership, hurts her because it is a piece of history, not just of the island’s, but of her family, her parents’ marriage. It hurts her because it shows her how little her father cares for anything, the way he has let this place down.