After the Hurricane(49)

“Oh,” Elena says, flatly. Of course. This is a bar for drinking. This is not a bar like the ones on Calle Fortaleza or Calle Recinto Sur, bars built for cruise people, waiting just a few steps from their massive ships so they don’t have to wander far to dose their faces in buckets of pi?a coladas and margaritas. This is not a bar like the many places on Calle San Sebastián, filled with regulars who bury their irritation at the more authentic traveler who spends all of four days here, but takes pride in how they bravely chose Old San Juan instead of Condado for a more real trip, under layers of wine and beer. This is a bar for people who want to drink because they want to drink. Some come and go quickly, some stay until sunrise, for the bar does not close until six in the morning. This is a bar with a sign printed, quite clearly, above the register, stating: We do not make mojitos. Of course her father comes to this bar. It is probably the only bar he would go to in the entire city. He is a man who likes to talk, who loves people, loves an audience. He loves to pay little and get a lot. He loves pool and strangers. Drinking alone in his home would only appeal for so long. He comes to this bar for the same reason she did, this evening. So he does not have to be alone.

“I guess you are a regular,” Elena says, neutrally. She does not mean anything by this. Plenty of people go to the same bar a lot. She has learned over the years, through books, and dropping in on her mother’s Al Anon group, one Rosalind attends religiously—well, perhaps it is a religion, in a way, it promises hope, after all—that to enjoy drinking, to do it with frequency, has nothing to do with being an alcoholic. This came as a pleasant surprise to her, because she herself had been terrified that she, too, would become an alcoholic, and had spent the year before she learned this completely sober. She celebrated her new knowledge over a bottle of wine with her mother, became drunk on half a glass, and suffered through a headache the next day that had left her limp. Slowly, since then, she has rebuilt her tolerance, and now she could sit here with a stranger who drank with her father and down her rum and Coke with steely-eyed determination, letting it give her courage and release.

“I am,” Fernando says, carefully. “I’ve known your dad for a while. He moved here, what, a decade ago?” Elena nods. “I met him four years ago. I had just moved back myself, from the States. I got a job at the University of Puerto Rico.”

“You teach?” Elena says, tonelessly. Does she really care? They are both avoiding the point, her father, but it is comforting, in a way, the formalities, the banalities, the things they can discuss before discussing the real thing. And in a way, she likes that he is an academic. She has often thought about pursuing her Ph.D.

“Environmental sciences. And biology. I’m a botanist,” he says, curls of an American accent slipping in between his Puerto Rican drawl.

“Hence the tree,” Elena says. She wonders, vaguely, where he went to college, graduate school, how old he is, if he likes his work, if he masturbates in the shower, if he reads fiction, if he cooks, if he prefers cats or dogs, if he is a cruel person or a kind one. She wonders who he is, really, the stranger next to her. She wonders if they will become friends, if she will sleep with him, if he likes her. She wonders if he will tell her something important about her father. She wonders if she wants him to or not.

“What?”

“Your tattoo,” Elena says. Rita, the bartender, her tattoo has fantasy roses, fantasy vines. His was precise, like a print in an old-fashioned folio, a botanical illustration. She wonders if there is a Latin name printed next to the palm. Fernando nods.

“It’s a ceiba. That’s the official tree of the island.”

“Cool,” Elena says, caring not at all.

“I met your father here,” Fernando repeats. Elena smiles, bitterly.

“Of course you did,” she says, as Rita hands her the drink she ordered.

“Actually, lately, I’ve been wondering if something was wrong. I haven’t seen him for at least three weeks. I usually see him three, four times a week. I like to come, have a beer or two, grade papers here. I live nearby.” Elena nods at this. “Your father, he’s really smart. He has so much to talk about. I’ve learned a lot from him. He told me he had a daughter, but I thought you were, like, young. He talked about you like you were still in school or something.”

“I don’t think he’s great at keeping track. And he hasn’t seen me since graduate school,” Elena says, dryly. He has grown more and more confused as the years have gone by. Living down here, away from everything, soaked in rum, his life a hoarder’s nest of objects, maybe his mind has become a medieval painting, with everything happening at once. Maybe to him, she can be both six years old and twenty-three and thirty and none of it is a contradiction.

“What did you study?”

“History. Did he tell you where he might be going?” Elena asks, with little hope.

“He told me about all these places he wanted to visit on the island. But I didn’t know he was just going to go.”

Elena turns to Fernando, her eyes wide.

“He told you about places he wanted to visit? Can you remember them, any of them?”

Fernando leans back, perhaps the force of her words is so great it has formed a tangible thing, pushing him.

“He’s really missing, isn’t he?” Fernando says, shaking his head and pulling out another cigarette. He would seem unaffected if Elena didn’t see his hands, trembling. She takes the lighter away from him and lights it, cupping a hand around it, until his cigarette is lit. “Thank you.”