After the Hurricane(58)



“My father,” Elena explains. Fernando’s eyes, already owlish under his glasses, widen larger.

“I didn’t know it was so bad.”

“It isn’t bad. It isn’t anything,” Elena says, and gets the feeling she always gets in her stomach when she is lying. But she isn’t, right? Do you always get so angry over people for who you feel nothing? “We don’t have a bad relationship. We don’t have one at all. But he can be a bit . . . unpredictable. Mercurial. When I was a kid he was so good for years, I mean, he was always up and down but he didn’t drink much, and he was more stable. But by the time I was eighteen it was, like, he was done trying. Sometimes he can be great, and then, when he’s going through a dark period, or a really manic period, he’s just hard to explain. Hard to contain. No matter what is going on, he’s going to do what he’s going to do. There is no best behavior. No special occasion so he does what he’s supposed to do. And that’s really hard. How do you explain that to people?”

“You’re ashamed of him,” Fernando states, flatly.

“No! No, I just . . . I just saw this whole thing, me having to explain it all to him over and over again, to Daniel’s family, and them not getting it, and judging him, and how much that would hurt. And I thought, if this is what I’m thinking about, then is this worth it? Having a wedding at all. Being with this person who, I know, I just know, will never really get this. Because—”

“Then he’ll never get you,” Fernando finishes for her.

“Yeah,” Elena says, breathing deeply. They sit in silence, watching the damaged landscape slide by. This place is a paradise, broken and rotting and lush and gorgeous all at once. Of course people like to come and go, Elena thinks. That way they can just see the color and the sun and the sea and ignore all the crumbling things in between.

“Well. Yours wouldn’t be the first wedding to fall apart over a guest list. My sister Rosa almost threw her mother-in-law out a window over their rehearsal dinner. Only two stories up, but still.”

Elena doesn’t respond. She is unsettled by how comfortable she feels with Fernando. Being close to people has never been an easy task for her. There is so much she hides from them, so much she does not say. It’s not easy for her to talk about her father, about the mess he has made of her life. She has never told a friend everything about her father, not the real truth, not about his drinking, his mental illness, his self-imposed banishment to this island like a Puerto Rican Prospero. They would have asked questions and she had so little to tell them, she knew so little herself. Even with Daniel she was tentative, careful, spinning the story. She has never had a conversation like this with anyone other than her mother. Never been with someone who knew so much, and was so open about what he knew. It is a new sensation for her, and it makes her feel on alert, waiting for something to go wrong, waiting for him to use what he knows in some way.

Elena looks at her phone, trying to disconnect from Fernando, to distance herself from him even though they are in the same car. She needs space, even just in her head. She pulls up her distant cousin’s blog again, and on a whim, searches the posts for her destination, Rincón. Her cousin has written about this place, it seems, and she starts to read.

Rincon is a place where people think it is named for one thing but it is really named for another and they just happen to be the same name. It is this kind of coincidence that makes the island a very confusing place for outsiders, and a perfectly logical place for residents.

Rincon means corner, or nook, and the area is technically sort of a corner of the island, although given that the island is a rather irregular oblong it hardly has corners at all. Many people think that is why Rincon is called Rincon, but many people are wrong. It is in fact named after Don Gonzalo Rincon, a wealthy sugar planter from the 1770’s.

It’s funny to think of sugar making men rich. That’s not what anyone came to the New World for, after all. They came for minerals, metals, and instead they got sweetness and human sweat. By the time the Spanish came to the New World, the Canary Islands, Portugal’s first colonies, were already rich in cane, already desperately processing juice to crystal to sweeten life on the Iberian Peninsula. And yet Columbus packs his bags with cane plants, no matter that the Indies he intends to find already have sugar, are the originators of the sugar plant centuries and centuries ago. Was that a sign, do you think, that he was not as sure about finding India as he claimed? Or was it like those people who pack their suitcases with food from home, fearing the options in foreign lands?

Come to think of it, Spain in the New World looks the way so many vacations look, especially those taken by college freshmen. They came for adventure and riches, but the mines ran dry fast, the natives died even faster, pesky things, and what started as a wonderful Spring Break vacation fueled by rum and party energy ends up as a century-long slog where half your landing party are dead with malaria. Who among us hasn’t had a vacation like that?

As Spain moved on to green pastures, untapped veins of gold and silver, swallowing up Mexico and jabbing its blunt fingers into what would soon be Colombia, Venezuela, Panama and Guyana, it left its first loves far behind, the islands clutching yearbooks full of promises and the hands of the thousands of forgotten dead. Puerto Rico, its natives gone, its gold gone, its purpose gone, gave itself up to the hearty pigs and skittish horses that now roam its virgin hillsides. But as the other islands in the Caribbean are converted into sugar factories, so too, eventually, is Puerto Rico, and Rincon, this little corner of the world, is an excellent place for that, its climate agreeable, its crop yields dense. And soon it is all sugar, from here to there, supplanting all local agriculture and making men servants to the painful crop.

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