Sometimes your life runs like a film with a damn good script and you’re the lead. You’re hitting all your marks, and you’re not even finished with act one. That’s how it felt for me until she entered the scene like an extra gone rogue. After her, everything was upended, and I realized my entire life up to that moment had really been more like a movie about deception which had hit its major twist.
It all started with the violent, freakish deaths of my parents. They both swore they’d be buried in Puerto Rico. They belonged to that generation of Boricuas who grew up on equal helpings of rice and beans and nostalgia for Puerto Rico. They believed in the Puerto Rican Dream, which meant work in the U.S. to live your golden years in the island. So, they slaved to buy a house there but never returned, and they never did get around to buying a plot. Why would they? They were years from retiring, and too preoccupied with living. But I knew, because half-jokingly they made me promise, that if anything happened to them I had to step up and grant them that wish.
The funeral home in Jersey held them in their private morgue until I could buy a plot in Baná, their hometown. Erin drove me to the airport, where I made the classic request for “the next plane out”—in this case, San Juan. I had only opaque memories of Puerto Rico from a childhood visit, knew only the little my parents spoon fed me about it. How appropriate my journey into this new life of deception should start there. The Enchanted Island.
Picture a tropical paradise. Warm sunshine on happy faces focused on making you comfortable, accommodating your every whim. By the beach the ocean laps the sand as you drink the cool rum-spiked milk from a coconut dropped down to the ground by a sultry breeze. Everywhere you see bronzed, curvaceous women and Latin Lovers strutting half-naked along the inviting, turquoise water. Life is wonderful, swinging in your hammock, listening to the steady afro-Caribbean sensual rhythms stirring your loins.
Okay. Now, let’s take ourselves out of the tourism commercial and talk reality, or as the natives say, “vamos a hablar inglés,” let’s talk English. If you look at all the important national statistics—from unemployment to mortality rates—Puerto Rico persistently ranks low. And then you have the power outages, water shortages, work stoppages, the corrupt governments, the high crime rate, the lousy service you get most places you go, the horrific traffic and drivers, the increasing water and air pollution. Yet, every year Puerto Rico comes out in the list of the top five happiest nations. Puerto Ricans consistently say they are happy. The Puerto Rican avoidance strategy is to create a fantasy world and call it enchanted. But I didn’t know any of this. I was just going down to this tropical Disneyland to bury my parents.
The only place I could find to stay in the area at the last minute was a “fuck motel.” A place where you drive into a garage, out of nowhere someone closes the garage door, and you walk through a side door into a room without windows. The bed vibrates with a few quarters and if you want a “night pack” with toothbrush, toothpaste, condoms, you call and a few minutes later there’s a rap at the sliding window. It was half an hour from Baná.
At Baná Memorial Cemetery, the director told me that he had a few plots in the cemetery’s new extension, Monte Paraíso, and threw in a discount because he knew about my parents. He handed me a business card with the name of a local tombstone company. After I signed the paperwork and paid for the plots, he grabbed the phone to call the nearest funeral home. “I’ll take care of everything,” he said, patting me on the back.
My parents came from small families, and death seemed fond of both sides. Most of my few aunts and uncles had already passed on. Both sets of grandparents: gone (or so I thought). The one remaining uncle I knew, from all accounts was ill and feeble, suffering from Alzheimer’s. Cousins, I didn’t keep track of, couldn’t care less about the extended family thing, anyway. There wasn’t anyone to contact on the island other than my sickly uncle, Mario. No wake; they had waited long enough. So, I stood alone, dressed in ritual black, sweating like a pig over a roast pit, without as much as an umbrella for shade. My head was throbbing, my shoes sinking into mud.
Four cemetery workers lowered the caskets with canvas rope, one at a time, on top of each other, into a hole dug by the towable excavator parked a few feet away. Behind me, the director’s assistant held a corona, a complimentary crown of plastic flowers, which would be used again for another hurried ceremony later in the day.
Past them, under a large tree about a hundred yards back, a woman dressed in a smart pantsuit, appeared to be watching me, the entire scene, although I couldn’t tell for sure because she wore sunglasses. Even from that distance, she was the type of woman who stole your attention. But I didn’t make much of it. I just thought she was waiting for another funeral.
My mother often referred to Puerto Rico as “this little piece of patria.” I thought of that as I tossed a handful of dirt over their remains. The “house priest” had his concerned face on when he told me, “They’re in a better place.” I didn’t know about “better,” but they now slept in eternal peace in the muddy, undeveloped and barren extension of the municipal cemetery of this raggedy-ass town in central Puerto Rico. Right next to their neighbor for life, “María Lazos, 1920-2009.”
“Welcome home,” I whispered, shaking my head.
I shook the priest’s hand, thanked the assistant. Wiped the sweat trickling down my face, took one last look at the gravesite. The church bells rang three times. Game over, I thought.
Not knowing what else to do or where to go, I wandered into town.
I passed a couple of teens kissing on a corner, an older couple having a heated discussion, the wife waving a hand backwards in dismissal, a man scraping at a big block of ice to make snow cones, school kids fidgeting around him. At one point, I had the sensation someone was following me. Thinking back, did I see her slink into a small grocery store, hear her stiletto heels clicking on the sidewalk? I soon blended into the flow of faces looking like mine, but everything was foreign, distant.
I hit the plaza, drained and exhausted, and sat on a dirty, wooden bench. Mami claimed that as a young girl she had seen my father as a young boy in this very plaza and knew she would see him again. My father, the historian, called that improbable because his family had been established in San Juan for decades and only returned to their home in Baná during summers. Perhaps they never were here together at the same time, but for sure at some time both had individually stood here to watch pigeons waddling about, to people watch, to admire the majestic ceiba trees or to daydream about the future. As a group of children in school uniforms marched by, I started to cry, the back of a hand on my mouth, attempting to silence the sobs. The kids turned around, stunned at first, then started to laugh, pointing at me as if I were a freak.
The dark-haired woman, dressed in a navy blue pantsuit, scolded the children. They ran off, screaming and laughing. She walked over to me and slid by my side and offered tissues. As I grabbed them, she took off her sunglasses and I looked up to her eyes, red and teary, nervously scanning, almost devouring my face.
“I must look like shit,” I joked.
“You’re okay,” she said, rubbing my back.
I stared at her, my head askance. Her English was near native with only the thinnest trace of an accent. She panned my face with eyes entrenched in hardness; everything from the eyebrows to the few wrinkles framing the sockets signified a life of fighting, of burdening pain and hardships. Yet, at that moment, they softened just slightly so.
“I was at the cemetery.” She offered this as an explanation, but it only confused me more.
“I thought I was alone.”
“No, you were not,” she responded, defiantly. “I was there, right behind you.”
“I saw you,” I told her. “Did you know my mother and father?”
She lowered her head. “Yes,” she said, nodding. “Yes, I did.”
A longer pause. I returned some of the unused tissues and she wiped her nose.
“Long ago,” she told me, widening her fleshy lips into a smile. “Your father and I were together …”
I looked at her like she was speaking in tongues.
“It seems like another time and place.” Another smile, this one sad and lost. She dabbed at her eyes.
“No fuckin’ way,” I said, more to myself in a near whisper as I squinted at her like an apparition, trying to make sure she was real. But she heard me.
Her brows knitted; her eyes regained their hardness and pinned mine. Her reddened cheeks inflated, the fist brandishing soiled tissues in front of my face uncoiled a pointer finger.
“A little more respect,” she demanded.
I looked down into embarrassed silence.
And then she blurted it out.
I thought she was nuts. A fifty-something whack job with maternal yearnings who stalked vulnerable grieving orphans. And I was about to say “Okay, bitch, this is no time to be fucking with my head,” or something along those lines. But she pushed that piece of paper in front of me before I could say anything: the birth certificate. There they were: my name, her name, my father’s—all interconnected forever on that piece of paper. I kept looking at it, at her, shaking my head. Re-reading it until it got blurry. It hit me that every time I had needed a birth certificate for some official purpose, my parents took care of sending it to the right place. Too lazy and indifferent, I never asked why. Now, my head spun with anger, confusion, my throat and chest tightened by grief.
The woman took me by the arm and walked me over to a hole-in-the-wall diner by the plaza for coffee and a sandwich, the birth certificate dangling from my hand.
“In due time, in due time,” she repeated, “I will explain.”
I threw the certificate back at her. Stared at the sandwich, hungry but thinking I would retch if I took a bite.
“I know it’s a horrible time for you,” she said, folding the certificate back into her purse, “but fate has given me a little happiness by returning you to me.”
I shook my head, put up my hand for her to stop.
“Please, just give me a chance to know you, that’s all,” she said, giving me her business card with her home address and cell number scribbled on the back.
She took both my hands in hers, and brushed back my hair. I couldn’t look at her as she walked away, her heels clicking against the plaza’s stonework. I crumpled the card.