Steps beach and Becky, the witch.

Though they proved to be the most friendly people in the world to newcomers, (to me at least) Puerto Ricans seemed to lack an aesthetic sensibility in some departments. They built their houses close together along main roads or in valleys, almost gullies, thick with vegetation and mosquitoes and the streams at the bottom where they thrive, with no view and little sunlight.

Cindy lived in such a jungle. That’s why she needed the mosquito netting. My house was near the top of a hill. Most of it was grass and brown much of the year, with a few trees and bushes here and there. I never needed mosquito netting or spray. A steady breeze from the ocean not only tempered the heat of the day, it made the evenings and nights delicious weather to sit out on our open kitchen deck, which I often did. Our house doors were always open for more air circulation. I might by chance receive one or two mosquito bites a month. Exposed like that at Cindy’s I would be eaten up.

Yet most Puerto Ricans lived in these tight, winding valleys or on their steep hillsides and had to clear their yards with a machete every few months. Or else they lived in town, equally crowded and cramped, (like old European towns). The Americans who moved there, if they couldn’t afford beachfront property, built their homes on hilltops, away from other houses and pests, with magnificent views.

On Saturdays and Sundays the locals all flocked to the balnario, the one rather small public beach at the foot of the town, hundreds of them, packing the beach so tight they were stepping over each other and planting their towels so close it looked like a sea of bodies. But just down the strand, a quarter mile away, were coves of beaches between the outcroppings of rocks, with coconut trees for shade, beautiful coves and always empty, except for the few Americans who enjoyed them, their own private little plots of paradise, with palm trees too. And there were dozens of these so you could always find one for your family with a little stroll, and enjoy it for the whole, undisturbed day.

The beach, one of a thousand.

By March of 1993 we were moved in, my jaw was unwired and Bill, my father, and Muriel flew in, the first of their yearly visits to see us. They fell in love the island.

On the first trip we gave them the grand tour, drove through the central hills and in the middle of the island found an old coffee plantation turned into a hotel, from a century earlier, with nothing remodeled. The rooms were just as they’d been so long ago, no T.V.’s, no electricity, but an excellent restaurant in the central, open courtyard, like the atrium of a Roman villa, the rest of the building surrounding it. On all sides, adjoining each room ran a wide veranda where you were expected to sit and smoke cigars or read newspapers until you went to bed. They were delighted with this novelty and the jungle trails all around it, which we explored each day for hours. This was our last family vacation before the storm.

Walking in the hills.

Now it was time for me to find work, to support the family I thought I still had. Our coopertivo money was nearly spent, between the house and the jaw. Sanita had no job opportunities in or near Rincon, no skills and no motivation. Her last seven years were one endless summer on the beach, or something like it, a warm room with a totally blank schedule. Jaime had no new jobs yet, living off the profits of the last one with Cindy, quite content. So I called Vance in St. Croix. He told me to jump on a plane. He had industrial work for me, fifteen dollars an hour pay. It was nice work, with great companions and I liked our foreman Augie. He even put me up in the house they were staying at. Unfortunately, the job was almost over, three weeks left to it and the crew about to disperse back to the States when it was over.

It was during those few weeks that I received the call. Staying at Augie’s big, rented house we had poker games many nights a week, seven or eight of us. It reminded me of our old games in Berkeley and I loved them. In the middle of one, still early, the phone rang. It was a short call as I told Sanita I was busy, as soon as I was handed the phone, and it was not a good time. So she briefly told me that she wanted a divorce, that her decision was final and that she would discuss the matter with me when I came back to P.R.

I was inwardly stunned, but this was not the time or place to mention such grim, private matters to a happy group of poker players, most of whom were strangers to me. So I hung up and resumed my seat and continued playing as if nothing had happened, in good cheer, drinking many bottles of beer till eleven, when we called it quits. The strange thing was, I won quite big that night, a few hundred dollars. What kind of signal does that portend?

If I were superstitious I would say this was a sign foretelling future prosperity and happiness ahead. It took years, but it did happen as time passed and I put her out of my mind for the most part, and more importantly, I left P.R.

I’m not a superstitious man, not then or now. Yet this strange fluke did cross my mind several times, winning big at a poker game the same moment your spouse tells you she wants a divorce.

I had the suspicion that Sanita was contemplating divorce, with her growing coldness towards me, her refusal of sex, and finally, my running out of money for the first time since she’d met me, our one solid bond. But I found out from friends in the following months that she was persuaded to make this decision by a witch of a woman, Becky, Captain Bill’s wife, soon to be divorced themselves.

After Augie, I worked another three weeks in St. Croix living with Jack and Kitty at a miserable job for a friend of Jack’s, Mervin. He had a contract to wire pre-fab slab houses for the poor. He paid me eight dollars an hour and never visited the site once. He was too fat and lazy. The walls were all pre-formed, fastened together by pins and small cranes, box houses, all alike, put together in hours with built-in conduits and boxes which I only had fill with wires and install the lights, switches and outlets. It took me two days to complete each one, all repetitive work in a man-made dust bowl, bulldozed into a valley, perfect for a ghetto. I quit after three weeks and flew back to P.R. and my shack and my waiting and uneasy wife, firm in her resolve to divorce me but unwilling to discuss it. She knew she’d lose any argument or debate with me on the sanity of such a bad idea.

Becky had a sweat lodge on their large property at the time. Bill had made a good deal of money in the States moving large amounts of pot from Mexico in the seventies. He retired to P.R. soon after when land was still ridiculously cheap. To give you an example, the property I bough in 1993 for twenty three thousand, Johnny had inherited from his mother. He sold it to a friend for nine thousand in 88, bought it back from him two years later for fourteen thousand, then sold it to me three years later, almost doubling that amount.

Captain Bill, as he was called, was able to acquire his three acres with a long beachfront, a beautiful lot, for very little, when the first Americans were just starting to arrive in the 70's. They built a large two story house on stilts, with its infamous second story wrap around balcony, about twenty-five feet above the ground, where my brother-in-law Jaime destroyed his back, his career and his health two years later by jumping off it, on a dare.

Now Becky had met Sanita and me a few days after we arrived, at the Calypso bar, right on the beach at the best surfing spot, where all the Americans hung out on its wide patio, drinking and watching the surfers. She was tall, slender, dark haired, confident and well-spoken. She and I soon engaged in a long, intense conversation at that very first meeting, on sociology and trends in modern society.

We fell into a mild argument of sorts as she took the stance that social engineering and manipulation of the masses was ruining our world, naming a few famous books, (Bernays, Marcuse, Orwell) while I countered with optimists supporting society and democracy (Tocqueville, John Locke), classics she hadn’t read.

But we cut it short as we were rudely ignoring the four or five other beer drinking guests at our table talking chit chat. She was pretty but unsexy in the one detail that she never shaved and had long, thick black hair covering her arms and legs, what you’d call ‘hirsute’ in a male. But I formed no clue from that first meeting that she took a dislike to me.

In the following weeks, while I was at work and then away, she befriended Sanita and invited her to daily sessions in their sweat lodge, where a group would sit in a circle and hold hands and talk and meditate on who knows what, while steaming themselves and their brains to high degrees. They probably even chanted.

The sweat lodge, Becky staring.

She was a well-read feminist, didn’t love Bill, (only used him) was very charismatic and persuasive, a strong woman in control, and in a few months of ‘sweats’ she convinced another woman named April to leave her husband and her two boys forever, completely.

April lived right below us down the hill, the closest house to ours. They were happily married and her husband Corky had both the nicest disposition and the best job in the world, which supported them well. Their boys, Ben and Jeff were aged eight and five. Will was the same age and they became fast friends, playing together in the hills or in one of our houses all day, with frequent sleep-overs every weekend. Corky was about thirty, like his wife. But he was slim and handsome and she was quite overweight and ill-humored.

He made a good living by catching rare tropical fish which he bagged and sold to stores in Florida. He’d get up at four each morning and with only a snorkel, a mask and a net, walk to the beach down the street and knew where to swim in the warm ocean water near the rocks and scoop up fish, bag them and take them back to large holding tanks in his back yard.

He had about eight of these, each one maybe five feet in diameter, with water pumps and everything the fish needed to survive until he had them sold, bagged up and sent by plane to some fish store in Florida, a check in the mail upon receipt. He was done work each day by ten a.m. If this wasn’t the perfect job I don’t know what is. A healthy early morning swim in a beautiful ocean with a net, that’s all. Sometimes he’d catch a rare fish worth hundreds of dollars. Once he caught five baby sharks, just born, only five inches long. He was so excited he ran up the hill to fetch me and Will to see them. I don’t know what he sold them for but it was a small fortune.

Now April appeared to be happy with him. She seemed to love her sons, though she did yell at them often for being boys, as they were loud and sometimes argued, as close siblings often do, and messy with their rooms. With Corky she seemed fine. He was polite, a model husband, fit and handsome, almost meek and always smiling and always offering to help out.

But she left them all one day, by taxi, to everyone’s shock and surprise. She packed a bag, took the cash from their shared bank account, and flew off to Texas, without a note and never contacting them once in the next four years. I was their neighbor. She vanished. The only report of her was third or fourth hand. Corky and the kids were devastated. They had no prewarning. Rumor was she became a man-hating lesbian. That’s all we heard, along with Becky’s part in it, and her dark, persuasive powers in that sweat lodge.

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