The Calypso.
Two years later I took the time off work to fly out and sell my house in P.R. I’d made up my mind never to go back as things were prosperous in Canada and I had a pension to build up, already well started. So I resolved to finalize matters there.
I recall the first night I arrived in 2004. I flew into San Juan early afternoon, rented a car and drove straight there. But I got lost on the road in Aguada, took a wrong turn and lost an hour on mountain roads going the wrong way. Road signs were near non-existent there and I’d been away five years. I had my lodgings with Jean all set up for the night but wanted to drop in for a beer at the Calypso and see who was still around. It was seven p.m and dusk. Just as I drove up in front of the place Nonny noticed me right away, ran up to my open window, all glad with greetings. Cindy was ten feet away at that moment and she was yelling at some girl, maybe her cashier. She saw me, paused, walked over surprised to see me after so long, greeted me and asked why I was back. I told her I was just here for a week to sell my house. Then she turned and went back to yelling at the girl. Nonny looked at me embarrassed. I just gave her the look: ‘same as usual’ and parked the car.
I remember finding Steve and Miami Dave that night at the bar, glad to see them after so long, buying them beers as they mentioned they were just scraping by. But in the two hours I spent there, catching up with them, Cindy didn’t come over once, though thirty feet away. I suppose my telling her I was there to sell my house settled all her concerns about me. She probably had strange delusional fears I might be on some other mission, perhaps an envoy from Jaime with plots against her. She never did talk to me again or ask about Jaime. She treated everyone like crap in her own screwed up mind and then she flushed them away with nothing left. I left early as Jean, a real person, was waiting up for me.
I sold my lot and wreck of a house, even the canipa tree beside it was half fallen down, for sixty thousand dollars, a price I randomly came up with and asked of the first person I showed it to. He instantly accepted, not for the house but the view from the second floor, unfinished bedroom, as soon as he saw it, the west coast of P.R. If I’d kept the place until today, I wouldn’t be able to sell it for one-tenth that price, or sell it at all, Puerto Rico is such a mess and ruined island now.
Two years ago Cindy committed suicide, her daughter, Nonni, long since escaped to the States to live with her Grandparents. They owned an apple orchard in upper New York state. They had come to Puerto Rico and built a fancy house on a hill the same year we moved there, 1992. They lived in it a few years and sold it and went back home, to escape Cindy. Cindy really was mad and it got worse over time, like a brain tumor.
When her parents came to P.R. they arrived with a third person, a man exactly Cindy’s age. They’d bought a lot and a kit house to be shipped from the States. This carpenter by trade had lived with them for fifteen years and was going to assemble it for them. I (and everyone else) found out that he’d been love stricken by Cindy in the States long ago and they’d had some brief affair as teenagers. Then she left for Rincon. But her parents adored him and when she ditched him, he was so upset, they took him in as a ward, employed him on the farm all those years. Now he was back in her presence after fifteen years, single and waiting, and she gave him not the slightest notice. I was present at one of her first meetings with her parents and him, behind the house they rented on the beach, the same house Betty later rented, next to captain Bill’s. Addison and Jaime were also there and Sanita and I, before our divorce, all sitting on fold out chairs facing the beach. We all knew the story and couldn’t believe how she totally ignored him while she made chit-chat with her parents about their A-Frame house, when it would arrive and how long it would take to assemble.
If ever a woman had the talent, (or curse) to look right through a person sitting close to her as if he weren’t there, she had it then and it was shocking. He was a total idiot for hanging on so long, without a sliver of hope, wasting his life. But she was so cold the scene was disturbing to all of us (except perhaps Sanita, taking lessons). How could a woman be so cold as to not even acknowledge another human being who sacrificed everything for her. Addison, Jaime and I talked about it later that night after the party split up. When I heard she committed suicide I only thought it should have happened twenty years earlier. She was inhuman, a freak, a monster.
For me, a Renaissance man, to say such a thing, might seem unusual. I say it rarely but in this case with heartfelt conviction. I have a high regard for every human life, per se. But there are definitely human beings out there who have no rights to that status, by their cruel and inhumane behavior. They are freaks, human in shape but animal in mind. The tiniest sliver of her mind did the right thing when it compelled her to slit her wrists, after so many years of cruelty and blindness to everyone around her.
Rare picture of Cindy smiling, circa 2002, her daughter Nonni beside her and Carlos with his children. He was her boyfriend from over a decade earlier who lost his hand after the car accident and his bandages not being changed in Mayaguez.
Jaime’s father, Jack, had also left, by then, moving near Mobile, Alabama with Kitty, where she had relatives. He’d bought some property in St. Croix with the profits of his tool business and with more profits built a wooden store, ground up, all by himself, ‘Tools of V.I.’. Then he tired of it and sold it and went back home, lasting a decade on that dismal island. I don’t know how he did it, but a slow, constant stream of profit was the motive.
Betty was also back in the States, in Plano near her daughter Charmaine by 2004. She’d met a man her age, mid-sixties, as a boyfriend for awhile, an American who took her sailing on his boat moored off the harbor. Other than that she was friends with some of Sanita’s old girlfriends in Rincon, which kept her there the few years after Sanita left.
In 2004, I visited R.S. and Jean, the only people I wanted to see. Irving had gone back to L.A. and with the experience I mostly taught him managed to talk himself into the electrical union there. Laura and Joe had left the island and split up. Corky’s house was abandoned, you could tell by the yard. I don’t know what happened to him or his children.
For all those years of hard work in P.R. I left the island with the little cash from Victor’s last job, a few thousand dollars, a neglected, rotting, cottage on a half-acre lot on a hillside in P.R. and twelve thousand dollars of debt owed to the coopertivo in Rincon. But I was glad to be home, confident of a better future, and most of all, sound of mind and body.
Those seven years had been a very wild adventure in a foreign place, with one smashed-in face, one unexpected divorce, one long embezzlement of all my hard earned profits and finally the abduction of my child, with me completely in the dark for three months and only able to see him infrequently for another four years, a harrowing experience.
On the other hand I survived it, not only that, I came out stronger in the end. I’d built a house from ground up with one helper, gained vast electrical knowledge and with that a reputation and confidence, made new friends, male and female, Puerto Rican and American, memorable, rich, rewarding friendships, raised my son well with mutual gratification on both sides, for him and his many friends, taught him much and permanently cemented our bond. He had a happy life there, from the age of five to ten. Our divorce probably bothered him somewhat, but the fact that Sanita lived nearby and didn’t date and kept on friendly terms with me minimized that split-up. I had him every weekend for the next three years, (which would have been the case either way, working in San Juan) which made it seem hardly like a divorce at all. And because of it I tried even more to be the perfect father when I did have him, devoting all my attention on him, to gain his heart and mind. His ‘Hell’ began when they left for Florida. But being a boy of ten it was softened with all the pleasures of that age, making friends at schools, however brief, all the computer games, all the distractions of unfolding life in bloom.
I learned through all these vicissitudes to be the Stoic I always admired. I was in several ways knocked down but I picked myself up. I’d been tested and now felt I could go anywhere with nothing and make my way by my talents and mind. In the years before this it was easy sailing. I sometimes tempted fate for a few months at a time, overdoing drugs or living in ghettos or in brief alliances with crazy people. But I had no responsibilities other than to maintain my own health and sanity. With marriage and a child that responsibilities expand exponentially. Now I felt confident I could do right for my child and I set about doing exactly that. I would establish myself, make a home for him. And I was not only prepared but ready for this. I’d led such a random, erratic existence for so long I was eager to settle down. My bones ached for it, the same way one craves for the return to a soft, familiar bed, after ten years of long, wearying, dangerous wandering, just like Ulysses.
