Ernesto Quiñonez - San Juan Noir

“I needed to go,” he placed a hand on my shoulder, “I needed to live in the darkness.” His eyes were watery and his nose was running. “After what I did to those kids. The light, Julio, it shames me.” And he embraced me. I embraced him too.

I took him back with me to the Sheraton Puerto Rico Hotel & Casino. I wanted to talk to him all night about many things, as if in one night I could make up for decades of his absence. I felt happy when we reached the hotel; he placed an arm around me and excitedly told people, “This is my son.” He kept proudly saying this all night, to anyone who passed us, so that all could hear: “This is my son.” That night he told me everything about how he became the Capeman. The killings of which most I already knew. Everything he said I had heard or read about, but hearing it from him made it all part of my life too, by being his son.

One night we went swimming at the nearby San Sebastian beach. It was there, when I tasted the salt of the Caribbean, that I felt he was truly my father.

“When you swim this sea,” he said while we were in the water, the air cooling my temples, “you don’t feel poor.”

I knew I had to give him the envelope. All he had to do was sign it, show proof of who he was, and he’d have more money than he’d ever need.

“In America we could never taste the salt of the sea and feel the heat of the island, so we felt poor, we were poor, but here, Julio, I’m rich with nothing but my island.”

I had stayed in San Juan for two weeks. Two weeks with my father talking at night, as he only came out at night. We talked about many things, catching up on our lives. Soon, my vacation time was over. I would need to go back to work. My intention was to go see him before I took the plane. Tell him about the contract and give it to him. Let him know I would send money so he could return to New York City. Stay with me while he straightened out and collected the money that the wealthy musician had set aside for him. And then it would be up to him.

At the Sheraton desk I received the checkout bill.

“He said many times he was your father. You’re his son, right?” the hotel clerk said. I was being billed for thousands of dollars in casino gambling. “You are his son? And he was always with you?”

I had not stepped one foot in the casino, but he had. Many times, under my name and room number.

Before taking a cab to the airport I went looking for Magaly; I knew where I’d find her.

“You and him got me pretty good,” I said. She was fishing the sea in a terrible spot since the men had taken all the good ones. “What’s his real name?”

“Listen,” she replied, continuing to hold her fishing pole steady, “everyone here is trying to make a living, okay? This island is poor. You are all tourists. Even if you are Puerto Rican, you don’t live on the island; you are a tourist, and because of that, you have more money than us.”

She wasn’t going to tell me anything. She might really be his daughter. But it didn’t matter.

“Magaly...” I handed her the contract. The piece of paper that Mama had kept for so many years, hoping that our ship would one day come in and like Columbus we would find riches. “Tell him that if he can play the part of the Capeman as well as he played it with me, there’s money for him and you.”

Boarding the plane, I could not get Mama’s words out of my head: Remember, Julio, only ask of him what is due to us. What he never gave us. The plane took off and slowly Puerto Rico became a dot in an endless blue sea, and I knew I had obeyed her. Flying into that night sky, Mama was alive and I understood why she had held onto him even when she was leaving a world that would now and forever mean nothing to her. I was happy and felt less alone. I looked out the window; the stars were in my face again and I was sitting on Mama’s lap like an obedient child.

Originally written in English

Santurce

You think of Samira with a kind of guilty feeling — the best student, the most promising girl in the twelfth grade — now missing. Optimistically, you don’t believe she’s dead; she has just disappeared, location unknown.

You look at her photos on Facebook: one with her boyfriend, El Gato, murdered weeks earlier in the Manuel A. Pérez projects, that older boy who came to pick her up every afternoon in an old Mercedes-Benz.

You remember your student, her caramel face, long black hair, and the mole on her right elbow in the shape of a cockroach. That’s how she described it, anyway. Maestro, have you ever seen a cockroach wearing a wig? Well, look, there’s one right here. Then she took your right hand and made you feel the texture of her birthmark.

Again you think of her with a kind of guilty feeling, because you never talked to her about the dangers of the street. Combinatorial operations; absolute values; linear and quadratic equations; inverted functions; variable isolations; ratios and proportions — advanced mathematics doesn’t allow room for other subjects.

Nobody’s heard from her for two weeks. Her mother suffers at home; she’s all run out of tears. A long-time widow, and now she’s lost her daughter too, that’s what Señora Vélez, the social worker, said. Samira went out and didn’t come back, just like that — a purebred puppy lost in the wild jungle of Río Piedras.

The students didn’t know anything either.

Best case, she went off with a new boyfriend, said one of the boys in the classroom.

El Gato got her hooked on the meat. Who knows, someone might’ve kidnapped her to steal her kidneys, a goth girl suggested. Sorry... not to be so morbid. She could’ve just left the country with someone to go become a dancer, everyone knows Samira was into that nonsense, she continued.

That girl is dead, said a Pentecostal girl, so she can’t snitch on El Gato’s killers.

Her name always struck you as attractive: Samira. You even looked it up in the dictionary once. Samira: of Islamic origin, a woman who tells stories at night, a female entertainer. You look at her Facebook photos again. She’s dressed as a belly dancer, in a black-and-gold costume covered with small metallic bells; everyone applauded when she won the talent show. You saw her leave with El Gato after the show that Thursday night, and you remember that she didn’t come back until the following Monday.

You can’t relax at home; an inaudible call compels you to leave the comfort of your apartment. You want to find the equation that will solve this mystery, and you wish for a new use of polynomial functions that would decode Samira’s location. You long to touch the oblong mole on her elbow again, to determine how chance had planted it on her young skin.

You get on the train at Sagrado Corazón to see the city by night. It dawns on you that the map on the wall resembles a folded arm: the shoulder in Santurce, the elbow in Río Piedras, the hand in Bayamón. At the elbow you enter the subterranean part of the route — the underground, an inferno. You can’t see the urban landscape; the windows reveal only darkness. You catch your reflection in the glass. You haven’t shaved recently, so you look like a vagrant, a drunk sick with dengue fever. You don’t see Samira. You get off the train and wander through the streets filled with bookstores, ruined buildings, bars, walls covered in urban art, the street dormitories of junkies recently introduced to the alternative life, and murals of dogs and cats. Deep down you consider the probability of running into Samira. If you found her, you’d ask her why she wanted to disappear. A homeless man tries to bum a cigarette; you say you don’t smoke. Asshole, he says without resentment, staggering off down the street. If you found her, you wouldn’t question her, you’d offer to help her — after all, you’re just her teacher, not her father or relative — and you’d notify the social worker. Down a dark street, you see a man pull out his cock, moving it like a dead serpent. This is what you’re looking for, daddy, come get it, it’s not easy to find around here. You act like you don’t see or hear him. You come to the public square. Cops remove a handcuffed man from a patrol car and take him into the station. Nobody would care if you found her — let her live however she wants, die however she wants, disappear however she wants. At that elbow on the map, Río Piedras, you squash a cockroach on the ground near the station.