Marisol left me a present in my office: a candle that Micco said looked like a phallus. And when you looked at it carefully, he was right. It was an aromatic candle that was supposed to relax you, make you feel sexy and “lovey-dovey.” That’s what she wrote on the card. Besides an apology for getting angry at me earlier. Maybe it was really a votive candle.
About the same time, I met with Ledesma at his office to sign the papers transferring the house to me. That was the proverbial good news, followed by the bad. Even though the house was now mine, I could not serve the Riveras with an eviction notice.
“Why not?” I asked, confounded.
“Because you don’t have a legal standing for eviction.”
I practically jumped out of my seat. He held out one of his delicate hands as his face turned to the side in a sign of impatience.
“They didn’t owe you money; they owed the past owners of the house.”
“Who, by the way, were my parents.”
“That does not come into play. The property has been transferred to you. You cannot end a tenancy of which you are not a part of, contractually speaking. Your parents also didn’t initiate an eviction process after several months of non-payment. That doesn’t help your case.”
Great, I thought. Just like my parents to feel sorry for squatters. The infamous “ay bendito” plaguing Puerto Ricans. That phrase is uniquely Puerto Rican. Since being on the island, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard it used in varying situations, always expressing a sense of sorrow or feeling sorry for a person or thing. But it also expresses resignation that nothing can be done to alleviate the sorrow, the pain, the suffering. A Puerto Rican says “ay bendito” in solidarity with the sufferer’s inertia.
I just sat there and sighed, with this profound sense of frustration and powerlessness, feeling with every minute more Puerto Rican.
“So, what now, Ledesma?”
“We’ll present your case with the tribunal and see what happens.”
“You don’t sound too sure.”
“The worst possibility is the court gives the squatters more time to move, if they have a valid reason. We need to check up on them a bit.”
That meant I had to dish out more money. Whatever my parents had left to me in cash was going down this deep hole in my attempt to secure the one major item they had left me. I signaled “go ahead” with a nod.
“Have faith,” Ledesma yelled as I walked out of his office.
Yeah, right, I said to myself.
A few weeks later, I found another gift from Marisol in my office. A copy of a Georgia O’Keefe flower painting, the one that looked like a vagina.
“Many of them look like vaginas,” Micco reminded me. Then, he went on about O’Keefe in startling detail and with great knowledge of the painter’s biography.
“How do you know so much about O’Keefe,” I asked.
He hesitated, then said, tight-lipped, “My father.” O’Keefe was one of his father’s favorite painters. Then he said, “Not for the greatest reasons,” smiling.
It was such a strange smile that it caused me to look at him perplexed. Usually, Micco drops the subject. If you don’t get what he’s saying, he won’t bother to explain it for you. But this time, he looked embarrassed, as if he needed to, or wanted to, explain.
“My father’s a perv, what can I say.”
Again, the puzzled look on my face, this time with a mix of shock and incredulity.
“You heard right,” he said, and then proceeded to narrate his father’s sexual addiction, how he came to the realization one day that no one woman could satisfy him forever and within a week had moved out of the house, leaving his mother, sister and him stupefied. He was angry and confided in me that to this day he has issues with his father.
“He left me at a vulnerable time in my life, and I still resent him for it.”
He told me all of this within the few minutes between classes. And I was grateful that both of us had to attend to classes. Afterwards, I think we both realized the awkwardness of that conversation. For sure, I thought Micco wished he hadn’t given me that personal tidbit, until I found out others in the department knew. Julia even knew. In fact, within academic circles, many people in the insular bubble called Puerto Rico knew, because Dr. Montero, professor of philosophy, was a renowned and esteemed scholar, until his call for a Neo-Hedonism brought his career spiraling into ridicule. He told his family how sorry he was, but he had to follow his inner instincts. Sobbing, he hugged him and her sister, but Micco’s mother did not want to look at him. After the divorce, Dr. Montero used his life savings to move into a commune in New Mexico, where reports and complaints of wild orgies and bacchanalian parties in the desert surfaced often.
Surprises. They come out of nowhere, like the wonderful news that I was going to be “visited” by Roque and the Gang of Three, the more informal name for the Performance Review Committee, that body of tenured, senior faculty in charge of determining whether you are worthy of teaching at the university level or are better suited for other employment. I understood that they needed to review my performance, but I wasn’t keen on the blitzkrieg nature of the visit. They would not tell you when it was going down, so at any moment they could swoop down and do their damage. That’s how I saw it; that’s how I felt it. What, I asked, if you come on one of those crappy days we all have. They didn’t care to provide me with any type of decent answer. They had tradition on their side, years and years of doing it this way. And they were not going to change “the process” for some super young punk from the States who knew nothing about how things were done here in La Isla.
I refused to let them visit me. I argued that they should allow professors the maximum opportunity to do their best; if it was a scheduled visit, the professor had no, or minimal, excuses for bad performance. But that fell on deaf ears. I would have turned to a union if we had one. The so-called Association of Professors had been trying to change this policy for decades. But said association had zero power. According to the Puerto Rican Superior Court, professors were considered part of management and therefore had no standing as workers to form a union. The association, therefore, collected dues, threw fabulous parties and managed to secure benefits for their members only when the Congreso de Obreros Universitarios, the union for non-faculty workers, went on strike and won a major benefit that had to be given to everyone.
I informed the Committee I would not let them in my classroom. I would close the doors for the entire review period. But, then, that was madness, assisted suicide with Roque pulling the lever. I asked if they could at least tell us, not just me, but the others undergoing this cruel process, the weeks of the visit. “We always do that,” they answered, smugly. They were also gracious enough to provide the newbies like me with the form they used, as if it were a crib sheet. I looked at all those boxes, waiting for check marks, and felt like I was being squeezed into them. Did I have to teach to the form? I asked, trying to be ironic, but the remark did not elicit a smile.
A few days later, I found another one of Marisol’s gifts on my desk. A German, Galileo thermometer, or a thermoscope. As soon as Micco saw it, he looked at me and we both laughed. For those who have never seen this contraption: it is long, about fourteen inches, over five inches in circumference, with a flat, round base and a tip that resembles the end of a condom. It’s a thermometer that works on the principles of weight and density. But the blatantly phallic quality of it made us laugh, but also made me wonder out loud to Micco if Marisol understood that or if it were some unconscious thing at work. This one came with the cryptic message: “Saw this and thought of you.”
These gifts were starting to creep me out. I did not like these little subconscious, erotic presents appearing in my office. I returned all of them with a note telling Marisol that I appreciated her gesture but there was no need. I accepted her apologies, gave her, again, mine for being an asshole, and told her for us to move on. I also told the department secretary, Nitza, to not let her into my office nor to take her gifts there, which she did not appreciate. Nitza was a big romantic and thought giving such gifts was a grand thing and, consequently, returning them was the height of rudeness. She told me that Puerto Ricans didn’t do that type of thing.
“Don’t sweat it,” I told her, “most people don’t think I’m Puerto Rican, anyway.”
Marisol did not respond well to my returning the gifts. My “rebuff” of these gifts, she told me, was “heartless and insensitive.” Giving gifts, she said, was her way of moving on. Marisol returned to the brain-freezing stares and monosyllabic conversations.
Weeks later, on a humid, rainy day, the committee marched into my classroom. I was prepared but nervous. The students, I think, were more nervous than I. At first, they clammed up worse than usual as the three somber faces stared at us from the back of the classroom, trying to look inconspicuous.
“We try to be quiet and blend,” said Carmela López, when I first protested against this type of intrusion. Now, her tired spinster face stood out like a gargoyle stuck to the white drywall, along with her two partners, Iglesias, who came the closest to blending, given his teen-like stature and demeanor, and Foley, whom I had seen only at departmental meetings. Apparently, doing performance reviews was a task that he relished or took seriously enough to show up. His penetrating blue eyes unsettled me the most.
The students’ willingness to help me overwhelmed me. Even those who had rarely spoken in class raised hands and tried to answer a question, read a passage or contribute something to the discussion. These were simple exercises, basic English, but that day my students in that class seemed heroic in their efforts. I thought the class went extremely well, and two of the committee members agreed. Carmela López did not. She gave me low scores for not following up on questions, organization, even “lack of respect” for students, citing my joking with a student that anyone in the classroom that day, including the student who laughed, understood to be teasing. Then Roque executed his “Chair’s Visit” and rated my performance “unsatisfactory,” writing extensively on each item.
“Clearly a hatchet job,” Micco told me.
With the committee going 2-1 in my favor, and Roque’s evaluation so adamantly against, an outside committee made of professors from other departments had to evaluate me. I was vindicated by the students’ evaluations, all of them excellent, despite a handful of complaints about hard grading. Student opinion only matters as far as how it can be used. If it is glowing, like mine, it would matter if Roque shared it and wanted me to stay. But since he wanted to rid the department of me, the students’ evaluation of my teaching was chalked up to their naiveté, or that they identified with my youth or had underdeveloped critical thinking.
I awaited this third visit, which would make or break me. This had happened too fast, and I had no plans. What to do if my contract were not renewed? It never occurred to me that I could be dismissed after one year. I didn’t want to live off Julia, and what would she think about my losing this teaching job? She would be angry for not confiding in her. She was trying hard to win my trust, and my secrecy on this would raise doubts.
Then, the students went on strike. A political strategy inherited from the sixties, the student strike was now considered passé in the States. In Puerto Rico they had become so commonplace that everyone anticipated a few days off during the school year for them. Some faculty scheduled trips, personal events or medical appointments during these breaks. A strike’s length depended on the issue. Tuition hikes would take months to resolve. Our students paid the lowest tuition anywhere in the United States, something like $50 a credit, half of what others paid at the privates on the island.
You had to give credit to the students for their organizational abilities and enthusiasm, though. They turned these strikes into festive parties. Soon you had dozens of young men and women in front of the college playing congas, timbales, güiros, maracas and other assorted Latin percussion to the established repertoire of protest golden oldies. There had been rumors about this strike—there are always lingering whispers. The students were upset about a new college attendance policy that threatened the “beca,” the local name for the Pell Grant, the federal funding that almost every student in Puerto Rico received. If they were not attending all their classes, the “beca” would also be eliminated. A substantial amount of students had grown accustomed to using the “beca” for anything but college. In my short time in the college, I had witnessed a steady acquisition of “beca” shoes, “beca” parties and even “beca” cars. This infuriated me when I saw a well-dressed student, having received the “beca,” still without the classroom text.
The students wanted the absence policy to remain the same, which would give them time to receive their “beca” and spend it as they saw fit. Student leaders met, decided and wham: ¡Huelga!
I was teaching one of my classes, when I heard the chanting coming down the hall. The syncopated rhythms of the percussion, the clapping of hands, felt like a Christmas parranda entourage coming our way. But it wasn’t Christmas, so we knew it was the strikers. Students in the class gathered their materials and stuffed them into backpacks, waiting for my signal to leave. The marchers arrived at my door, parked themselves outside, stopped the music and started chanting. One of the leaders charged into the classroom and gave a little speech to the rest of the students, declaring an official huelga, and then proceeded to disable the chalkboard by smearing it with cooking oil. The students looked at me. The student leader was agitated that they were still seated.
“The college is closed,” she yelled.
I signaled with my head to go and they proceeded out of the classroom. Some students joined the conga line shaking down the hall. Others, I presume, would go to the beach. The more diligent would use the time to catch up or study for a big exam.
I found their cause self-serving. But I didn’t care. Like the others, more than other colleagues, I welcomed the time off to think about my situation. At the guest house, I uncapped a beer and sat by the porch to look out toward the mountains. The sunlight was bright and enticing.
I have a new car begging for mileage, I thought. I rushed into the bedroom and tossed some clothes into a carry-on. Midway through the packing, I picked up my cell and dialed Marisol. After the gift incident, we had been having a series of long telephone conversations, and by now I had her on speed dial. Just as fast, I cancelled the call. It scared me to think she was only a quick dial away, that I could call her to invite her on a trip without first considering the possible consequences. No one would know us beyond the college campus, I thought, not thinking about the more serious situation: we would be alone, relaxing somewhere, catching rays half-naked in a tropical setting. Just thinking about it aroused me.
We both agreed to a friendship. We kept our distance, ran through our schedules, and when we bumped into each other in the hallway, it was a quick hello and goodbye. I was finding it harder to do, especially when she looked especially stunning. Later in the evening, during the marathon phone conversations, we would spill our feelings like it was therapy.
When we arranged an outing in San Juan, we always hoped someone from the college would not spot us. That was not impossible. A good amount of professors, including Marisol, lived in La Losa, the nickname given to the capital, which literally translates to “tile,” the fancy, ceramic kind, of course. Micco always mused how in Spanish it can also mean gravestone.
Most of these professors hated teaching in Baná, which they considered similar to a soldier being sent to a remote outpost, or doing missionary work in the interior of some God-forsaken third world country. They complained about the long drive, and had their chairs devise special schedules so they only had to come in two days a week. They looked down their noses at the institution, the students and the town, kept their eyes and ears open for resignations or open positions at the central campus, the alleged crown jewel of the system situated in Río Piedras, just outside San Juan.
Hanging out in San Juan always meant a risk of bumping into one of these snooty professors, something we both didn’t want. Roque would get on my case for this, too, if he found out. We made sure that we selected a secluded club or greasy spoon that these people would never think of patronizing. Even then, we kept our eyes open. All this so we could dance together, laugh a little—just have fun.
Roque had me wondering if I was cut out to be a university professor. Maybe, he was right, I thought. “If you want to write,” he told me, “then do and don’t teach,” paraphrasing Bernard Shaw. Did I want to work in this type of hostile environment? He would always be on my ass, and the tenure process runs seven years. Seven years of hell, I thought. He had me running scared. Right then, in early November, with the campus shut down by strikers, I just wanted to pick up and leave to somewhere quiet. We were on a tropical island with renowned beaches I had yet to visit. But suddenly I wanted to go with Marisol, to sit on the sand with her and see her run into the water in a bikini. See her smile in the radiance of Caribbean sunlight.
Dialed, cancelled, dialed, cancelled. I wanted to spend this time with her but was afraid to be alone with her. The idea of making love to her again made my heart race, but frightened me. I visualized us together by transparent, turquoise water, spread out on a colorful beach blanket, listening to soft tunes, while our bodies absorbed and exuded heat.
I dialed again, almost losing my breath when she answered.
“Hey, you up for a road trip?”