2.
You fall.
In the end you fall across the surface of the planet, which turns out to be the same as the surface of your homeland. You fall, landing and floating, intrigued and alone. So alone. Falling things have the significance of lost things, of abandoned things, of things invented to stave off madness, of the sudden daring that’s preceded by fear. A desperate need to tell of fallen things that will later keep you company is more than right and necessary.
You start breathing again when you pick up your bags at carousal ten. You pause and look at the screen of your camera where your photos have been stored. You zoom in and out to see every detail. You only know what’s been explained over the loudspeaker and by passengers with Internet access on their cell phones. Minimal information regarding the discovery, the crime scene, or the investigation. Everyone tried to move to the windows, to see what could be seen. You were one of the lucky few who caught a glimpse of the dead girl laid out like that — lifeless skin in its greatest splendor. Inert skin on an island that leaves so many alone, so many orphaned, widowed, and dispossessed. The rest of the travelers have resigned themselves to the speculations of those who saw something. There’s another hubbub inside Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport. Everyone is talking about it, speculating about the stranded people who won’t be able to make their flights out of the country because of the traffic jam. They’ve closed off various roadways including, of course, the one that connects to the bridge. The family members who would certainly be coming to pick up the arriving travelers wouldn’t be there either, as they haven’t been allowed through. No one was coming to get you anyway; you weren’t going to be received by anybody. A total helplessness impregnates the air, an ode to detachment. So witnessing those who are stranded gives you great pleasure.
3.
You leave your bags at a fleabag hotel in Isla Verde and get back in the rental car. You arrive at the San José police station from the opposite side of the bridge, coming in on Milla de Oro, behind Plaza las Américas. Your pithy journalism courses at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón provide the key to getting inside. You remove the little notebook and pencil, conveniently located in the front pocket of your striped shirt, identify yourself as a press correspondent, and show your driver’s license with the New York City logo. The checkpoint officer, not really paying attention, lets you pass. Already mingling with a small group of reporters, you simply fall in line and listen. Listen and pretend to write in your little notebook. Simulating professional interest, looking up and down. Listening with great care. Finding out as much as possible.
4.
At the funeral, you meet the dead girl’s mother, her sisters, her uncles, aunts, and cousins, who cry facing the casket, to the beat of a rhythm like a jukebox bolero. You add and subtract, and the obvious notable absence is the husband, a man originally from Saint Martin — he’s the only one not in attendance. The “best friend” is there, and she cries desperately, as if something valuable has been torn away from her. To those who ask, you say you were classmates with the dead girl. At Colegio San Vicente? someone sporadically inserts, and you immediately nod yes.
Later that day you discover another interesting possibility: the “best friend” of the dead girl, a lesbian, hasn’t come to the burial. Everyone speculates. You decide to interview friends and acquaintances, in groups. Sometimes together and sometimes alone. Like the older sister, who talks about the pain one feels when something very dear is taken away. She also talks about the odyssey of staying single at this age, in such a mundane society, so frivolous, so machista, so full of double standards. That afternoon, without wanting to, your mouth and hers find one another. She cries and you’re amazed to be swallowing her tears while kissing her. You know what it is to lose someone. You know what it is to be left with nobody. You know it very well.
Over the nine days of the novena celebration, you’ve gained the confidence of Violeta’s older sister. That is the dead girl’s name: Violeta. You go to the movies, you eat lunch in the Plaza Food Court, you even go to the General Police Station to give testimony regarding one of the suspects. When the detective in charge of the investigation interrogates you, you tell him about your concerns regarding the participation of the lesbian lover in that horrific crime. You insist on the strangeness of that supposed friend who’s now disappeared. And with great skill you delineate your hypothesis of the amputated hands. From your perspective — that of a man dedicated to collecting stamps, baseball cards, and memorabilia about The Divine Comedy — severed hands represent the feminine genitalia. You explain how gay women use their hands to give and receive pleasure: the fingertips and fingernails to tease; the palm to rub; the stem of the extremity to caress; two, three, and even four fingers to penetrate; a brush of knuckles in obvious seduction; inserting a full fist in clear domination; the end. That’s why the dead girl Violeta was killed, you say. Her lesbian lover — when she found out Violeta wouldn’t get a divorce, and that she also very possibly had another male lover — went crazy. Violeta, the best friend from high school, inseparable even after college, deep down wanted to end that affair, but the other girl’s rage wouldn’t allow it. She’d rather kill her than not have her for herself.
5.
So when, three days later, the paper publishes the news that Violeta’s widower has turned himself in to the authorities, you don’t give it any credibility. You’re unconvinced that the grief-stricken husband had it in him to cut off her hands, despite the sensationalistic details: he hit her when he drank, cut her with kitchen knives, with scissors, skewered her with screwdrivers — and one night, she hit back. She got tired of it. Defending herself cost her her life.
You look at the photos from your digital camera that you’ve already had developed and printed. You decorate several walls of your temporary home. The lagoon, the mangrove, the rescue boat, the body.
Found bodies make silent speeches. The demise of that human being is fully explained by the exposed sequence of details of that found body. All that’s missing is the translator, who reveals the linguistic code and explains it. You feel that you are the translator. Will there be signs of lost love, of diminished feeling, in the energy surrounding a lifeless body?
You stop seeing her sister because you intuit that her whole family is a fiasco, a string of deceitful blacks, blacker than you. What an evil thing to lie to the citizenry about a crime, just to have it cleared up. You’re convinced the husband is innocent. So in the end, Violeta’s death was well deserved.
Her pathetic sister, melodramatic and blubbering, is just like your few remaining family members. Your grandma — thank God she’s six feet under — was right: one can never trust a madamo.
Part III
Never Trust Desire
Turistas
by Ernesto Quiñonez
For Edward Rivera
Dos Hermanos Bridge
I came to San Juan because Mama said my father, a certain Salvador Agron, lived here. “Remember, Julio, only ask of him what is due to us. What he never gave us.” Mama was leaving this world, and with a sense of urgency she passed on the family inheritance by handing me the envelope. I never put much stock into it. But I loved Mama, and so I promised to find my father.