After the Hurricane(45)
She arrives at the Instituto de Cultura just as it opens, which amuses her, because she arrives at 9:00 a.m., and the institute is supposed to open at eight, but it is Puerto Rico, what does she expect? Punctuality is for mainlanders and cold places. It is a large yellow building, and above the iron gates, the story of its creation is written out in Spanish, and Elena reads the dizzying long names of the Spaniards who brought the building into being, starting in 1841. One, Manuel Egozcue y Cintron, particularly interests her, and she tries to figure out how to pronounce the name. When she asks the man at the entrance desk how it’s said, he looks at her like she is insane, and shrugs, pointing to the paper sign-in sheet. She signs and asks him where the archives are, but she just gets another shrug, more apathetic than the last. He vaguely gestures around and goes back to reading his newspaper, leaving her with no new information.
Elena looks around, but of course there are no directional signs. She does see a sign telling her more about the building, and learns it was built to be a charity house, for the old, the abandoned, and the insane. Elena wonders where all those people go, now. She wanders up the tiled steps to the second floor, only to see a series of closed doors and no people. But from the second floor, at least, she can spot a sign back on the first floor saying Archivos Públicos, on a door tucked into the side of one of the courtyards. Heading back down, she is confused by several doors marked Entrada that also have a sign saying not to enter them.
“La próxima,” says a voice behind her, and Elena sees a smiling woman pushing a cleaning cart.
“Gracias,” Elena says, heartfelt. Of course the only truly helpful person in the place is the cleaner. Walking through the next door down, into an office, she is immediately assaulted by a blast of air-conditioning, and she sees that the man in front of her, sitting at a desk, has a jacket on. Everyone on the island insists on making the air colder so they can then bundle up against it.
“Hello, I wanted to ask if it is possible to see the file on 300 Calle Sol?” Elena asks, politely, in Spanish. She practiced on her way over, trying to fix any mistakes, but now she is nervous, and of course she trips over her syllables, giving herself away. “I’m the daughter of the owner,” she explains. She has her license and even pulled up photos of her with her father, on her phone, that hurt to look at in case they need proof, but the clerk just nods, once, and walks into another room, coming back mere seconds later with a thick file.
“Oh, wow, that was fast,” she says, in English this time, startled. The clerk shrugs. Elena is amazed at the apathy that clearly runs through the building. She sits in the seat indicated by the clerk, who has turned back to his computer, utterly unconcerned with her, and opens the file.
It is, she quickly realizes, the recent history of all changes made to the house, each one denoted by requests to the Institute. Because it, like most of the city, is a historic home, in the interests of preservation each change must be evaluated by the Institute before it can be approved or denied. Changes without petitioning for approval mean legal action, Elena can see, because there are documents informing the owner of the place back in the 1980s about a lawsuit in response to his decision to paint the house gray. Elena flips the pages back to the present day, and sees documented the back-and-forth between her parents and the historic committee about the violet her mother had picked, and how she had had to prove that the house had been repainted by several owners and therefore the original color was unknown. To keep the city pretty, Elena reads, the Institute makes sure there is a balance of colors on each block, and once they had done a survey of the area and confirmed that there were no houses in the immediate vicinity that were close in color, her parents had finally gotten the approval. It had taken two years.
The owners of the building are listed on each document, and Elena can see her father’s name on the most recent document, a request to put up a satellite dish that was denied from six years ago. Elena is surprised her father was cognizant of things enough back then to make an official request. Her mother’s name is listed on previous requests, ones from when they were still together, and as Elena flips back in time, she sees requests from other owners, photos of the house as yellow, then gray, then powder blue, watching as windows come and go, turning from the wood they are now to rusted wrought iron. A document catches her attention, from the 1960s, a request to rezone the bottom floor of the building from a Juan Cintron, and in the document, Elena is fairly sure, despite the formal legal Spanish she can barely understand, that Juan was declaring the property to be his because of the recent passing of his father, Agosto Cintron, citing Agosto’s will. The response was affirmative about the new ownership, but negative regarding the commercial zoning request, denying Juan a chance to build the cafeteria of his dreams. The first floor of the building is even older than the second, the document informs Juan, and therefore Elena. It was built sometime in the seventeenth century, and cannot be rezoned.
“Excuse me?” Elena has switched to English. What she wants to ask is too complicated for her Spanish. The clerk looks up. “Can you tell me, when someone has a property here, how does it change hands legally? I mean, do you have to register a new deed? Do you happen to know?” The clerk nods, slowly.
“You supposed to file a change of hands for property in the Puerto Rico Property Registry, but because you don’t have to, some people don’t.” The clerk rolls his eyes, he clearly has a healthy distaste for people who don’t respect historic records. Elena nods.