Day two. Our second day, a day to be settled in enough to learn that paradise, while still paradise, is imperfect. The pipes in Old San Juan, for example, are delicate, some barely fizzling out enough water to rinse our hair. The humidity is high, the cobblestones slick and uneven, and around the square is a young man cranking bass loud enough to rattle his windows. There are stray cats all along the cars parked along the narrow streets—some sleeping in the tire wells, some crouched under the shade of the bumpers, others sunning themselves on the roofs. One street corner smells faintly of urine, and on another corner a woman sitting on a black plastic garbage bag rattles her cup of change. “I’m sorry,” Ann says, handing the woman some coins. “Sometimes I can’t help it. . . . I can’t.”
But isn’t this always the way of paradise? The resorts may offer you a chlorinated version of the island scrubbed spotless by hired hands, but here is Puerto Rico as it is. As we learned this morning from Ann and Rigoberto, it is a place founded in hardship and sorrow. Columbus landed in 1493, and it only took the diseases brought over by the colonialists (not to mention their taste for gold) a hundred years to almost completely wipe out the indigenous Taínos, once a population of eight million. When there weren’t enough workers left and the sugarcane needed to be harvested, the Spaniards brought in African slaves, a practice that didn’t end until 1873. For four centuries a part of the Spanish Empire, the people defended themselves against most every possible invader—the French, the British, the Dutch—who tried their hand at claiming this fertile gateway into the Caribbean. The friendly-appearing Jones Act of 1917, which made the islanders American citizens, also made the people of the island subject to military drafts (but ironically unable to vote).
This blog is not a history lesson, don’t worry. I won’t go on except to say that our lecture this morning was followed with a walk up to El Morro Fort, and along the way, we saw a part of this legacy for ourselves, because there, to the right, in a neighborhood set low and close to the sea was a neighborhood that looked like a limping caricature of the one directly up the hill, where we are staying. It is a neighborhood of roofs crumbling and walls long gone, a neighborhood where ferns grow up from gutters and birds nest in the joists of rotting floors. “That’s the slum,” someone said, and sure enough, it was easy to see— the city is split and separated only by a busy road and a jagged stretch of the old fortress wall. There is one narrow walkway up from that neighborhood, and directly across the street was a policeman standing stoic watch.
It is not easy, these realities. We feel uncomfortable, but we are here to pay attention, to write it down. Yes, this residency may perhaps be, in part, a call to awareness. So yes, we continued to walk up to the fort, which is, more than anything else, the one undeniable artifact of Puerto Rico’s difficult past. It is gorgeous and crashing next to the sea, and our guide told us that from the air it resembles the skull of a bull. Inside, the thick stone is painted white. The walls felt cool to the touch, and the constantly moving ocean breeze makes it lovely as an old castle, so beautiful it is near impossible to comprehend death here. To me, it is impossible in the same way that it is impossible to imagine the history of the concentration camps in Slovenia. If you go there during the summer residency, you may agree with me. You see, next to the old prison is a graveyard nestled in the high green grass that bends in the valley of the Julian Alps, too beautiful for rot and for bones. I remember seeing the honey placed on the simple markers of those who died there and the amber light slanting through each jar.
But I digress. We didn’t end our day here. No, we walked away from El Morro Fort. We took a group photo and agreed how hungry we were for lunch and walked away. Some then stole a few moments before workshop to visit the silver shops and the spice shops, and some bought delicious coffee from a man just six doors down that grows and roasts his own beans. We perhaps caught glimpses of nervous chameleons darting behind palms, and perhaps we thought how adorable the Spanish tongue sounds in the mouths of children playing. But before all this, we walked away from the Fort. And for those of us paying attention, we saw those children flying kites across the expanse of green surrounding the fort once known as “the killing grounds.” I stopped and counted the kites. Eleven! Eleven kites, all scissoring the same air, all flying, despite everything, unabashed with joy.
—Nickole Brown, 2003 VCFA Alumna