No matter how much we Lonely-Planet ourselves up, the story of traveling is the story of being caught off guard by the very things that frighten us. But San Juan, Puerto Rico, has so far given me every reason to disregard that rule. I’ve been here for a week now, and this is an incomplete list of mental souvenirs I’ve collected: The roasted pork with a plastic fork at the lechonera. The chat with the uber driver about Bad Bunny’s nails. The birthday party at the corner
store that I inadvertently crashed. The eyes of the coquí.
This list says San Juan isn’t waiting to catch me off guard. It also says a few things about me. That I’m a privileged tourist, and a nosy tourist, and not a museum type of tourist. Mostly, though, the list says this: I’m a tourist.
So tonight, as my vacation comes to a close, I feel the urge to go where tourists go. I want to see the island one last time with an outsider’s eye; I want to activate those tiny, tingly particles that lodge under my skin. You know, the tingle that a foreign place can produce and a familiar place can numb.
I head to La Placita de Santurce—an area comprising a mishmash of bars and other drinking opportunities. At La Placita, the cobblestone streets have been paved over, and the colonial houses have been covered with plasticky banners advertising Coors Light and Dewar’s. Things old and new are collapsed, but not too neatly, so if I look closely enough I see the flakes of today peeling off to reveal the flakes of past decades. I skim through the bars, wondering which of
them is going to do the tingly thing to me. Not the one serving tacos. Not the one pouring mojitos. Maybe the one selling alcapurrias, or the one playing salsa, or the one with the country’s flag on the wall? Them neither. Instead, I’m drawn to the bar with no decor, the dull glow of fluorescent office light leaking through its doors, and an outsized Heineken sign where its name should have been.
The bar has lots of empty space. All those square feet and absolutely no furniture, nothing but floor and ceiling. I wonder if the owner thinks that real estate is cheaper than chairs. At the far back there’s the bar countertop, and behind it there’s a woman pouring drinks, and behind her are eight liquor bottles and a wall calendar with an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Other than this, there’s only a pool table, a tube TV in a cage, and a jukebox. The space is mostly filled with an overpowering silence. None of the five other patrons is talking. No music is playing. Nothing is making the air move.
But: there’s a jukebox.
A jukebox can be a portal. I want to play with the jukebox. I walk up to it and start leafing through the albums. But as each record cover piles up on top on the previous record cover, I realize I know none of the artists. All the faces are unfamiliar, all the names are foreign. Yellowed pictures of smiling men layer up from left to right, then from right to left, and I have no idea what they mean. My knowledge of Puerto Rican music is restricted to reggaeton, Ricky Martin at best. But the haircuts populating this jukebox could belong to Ricky’s uncles, or great-uncles. I’ll need guidance.
I spot a woman by the bar. She’s in her seventies, and not drinking, and dressed in those beige Bermuda shorts that were designed to be worn while watching soap opera. She sometimes bickers with the bartender in a hushed voice that barely pierces the silence. So, I fantasize that she’s the bartender’s mother-in- law. In my fantasy, she’s supposed to help run the family business, but she hates it, though she’d hate it even more to let her daughter-in-law run things her way. So she hangs out and pretends to help, but no way she’s going to dress up for this shit.
I figure that since she’s not really helping the bartender, maybe she can help me. I approach Mother-in-Law and tell her in my broken Spanish that I have a dollar and want to put on some music. I bring her closer to the jukebox. Could she pick a song?
“Sure, mija. What do you like to listen to?” “Anything,” I say.
So, she throws a singer’s name at me that is as unfamiliar as the ones I’ve just read. A name that, if I was to make it up, would’ve been something like Romeo Miguel:
“Do you like Romeo Miguel?”
“Well, I don’t know—I don’t know him. Sounds good, though. Let’s go with this one.” I try to sound grateful and practical at the same time. Neither intention gets through to her.
“What do you mean, you’ve never heard of Romeo Miguel? He’s very famous.” “He sure is. But I’m not from here,” I explain as if my insistence in pronouncing every R wasn’t already giving me away.
“But he’s very famous.”
I fall silent. I feel that anything I say from here on will make the conversation go in circles.
Mother-in-Law looks me up and down, suspicious. As if my ignorance was a sign of me being an outsider not to this island, but to this planet. She tries again. She goes on to another album and then another and another; all strangers smiling to me in yellowed pictures.
“I don’t know him,” “Or him,” “Him neither,” “Nope.” When I run out of ways to express cluelessness in Spanish, I move on to shrugs and embarrassed headshakes.
I want to give her my full answer, which is: I don’t know him, so can you initiate me? But that would be beside the point. As Mother-in-Law keeps pointing to album covers and asking the same question over and over, I realize she’s more lost than I am. I don’t know those singers, but she doesn’t know anyone who doesn’t know those singers. I’m unlikely, unlikable. I somehow bypassed a reality that to her had been obvious. Where was I when the voice of Romeo Miguel was blasting everywhere—in her neighbor’s house, in the portable radio on the kitchen counter, in the ’78 blue Chevette parked in front of the butcher shop?
She needs a sign that we share something, anything: a memory, an ideal, an idol. At this point, we’re no longer negotiating how to best spend one dollar in music; we’re negotiating a common ground between our radically contrasting views of my role in this place. She expects me to be from here when, as a tourist, that’s precisely the one thing I’m not. She says, without saying the words, that I shouldn’t be so different. I say different is what I came here to be.
*
I came to Puerto Rico to escape Miami, and most of all to escape the way Miami makes me feel. But this jukebox, with these damn unfamiliar faces behind a glass, has pulled me right back into my most crushing state of mind.
Miami is the city I call home now, although I didn’t exactly choose it—I chose a husband that chose a job that chose Miami. I’ve been living there for a year, and by now it’s clear I don’t belong. I’m Brazilian, which makes me a non-Hispanic Latina that used to be considered white back home. The abundance of labels may sound like I’d blend in easily, but in practice it means I can’t fully claim any of them. Miami is a city of multiple cultures, not necessarily of intersecting cultures. Its communities, like clumps of shared memories and ideals and idols, float around each other, dancing, changing places, but never truly merging. In the space where they don’t touch, in the void created when a clump repels the other, that’s where I stagger. In Miami, I live permanently in between.
I’m so close to other Miamians; I’m so different from other Miamians.
Sometimes I roam the streets and I look at each group that goes by me and I think: would I belong with them? The answer is always no. They’re either White, and I didn’t grow up reading Dr. Seuss. Or they’re Black, and I didn’t watch Martin. Or they’re Hispanic, but a caja china was never part of my Christmas. Or they’re Haitian, Russian, Jewish—and I’m so far from belonging with them I
don’t even know what it takes to belong. Every group shares memories and ideals and idols that are off-limits to me. Even when they’re Brazilian, it’s rarely ever a match: folk who leave Brazil for Miami are often too rich and too conservative for me to infiltrate. Back home, we may have shared a zip code, a diploma, even a tax bracket—but that’s about it. Our values and dreams are worlds apart. They come to the U.S. hoping to live in a ’90s Macaulay Culkin movie, but it kind of bothers them to find out that so much Spanish is spoken in their movie. Or maybe it’s me who’s impermeable to them, I who own too few wine glasses, who don’t even own a car, who had way more fun in the Hialeah Flea Market than I did at the Brickell City Centre. Maybe I shouldn’t be so different.
Sometimes I sit on the beach and see strangers interacting with one another. I see eyes of every color and shape browsing around for a friendly smile at a nearby towel. I guess every crowd learns, from a very young age, a few poker signs to identify their equals when outside of their natural habitat. So hazel eyes meet hazel eyes, round eyes meet round eyes. But these eyes never settle on me. They slice right through me, as if I was a lump of air over an empty towel. On those moments I feel, physically feel, that I’m invisible to them.
Sometimes I squeeze my arms and calves to make sure I’m not invisible.
Sometimes, though, I travel. My favorite place in Miami is the airport: it’s so convenient. It’s a three-hour flight from lots of cool places; it’s a twenty-minute ride from town. So, twenty minutes after leaving my apartment, I get off an Uber at the MIA and head to the dog-sniffed security check. I stand barefoot on this questionably clean floor. I place my shoes on a tray. Since I’ve been stripped of all dignity, as one usually is at the TSA, I use the chance to snoop into other people’s trays. I see a pair of high-top Nikes, a pair of black flats, a pair of orthopedic shoes. None of them are like my flower-patterned mules. And that makes me smile: that’s why I travel. I travel because it means putting myself in a situation where I by definition do not belong, am not expected to belong. I travel to remember that it’s okay to be different.
My favorite place in Miami is the airport: it’s so comforting. As I cross to airside, I scan the humans sitting down, pushing strollers, lining up for Starbucks as they fill the time between the TSA line and the boarding line. They all have their shoes on now. I look at them and I delight in knowing that everyone around me will be or has just been an outsider somewhere.
Just then the PA system surfaces me back to reality:
“Good morning, passengers on Spirit Flight 3148 to Puerto Rico. We’ll now begin boarding at gate G10.”
*
And that’s how I wind up here: in Puerto Rico, San Juan, La Placita, this bar, staring at this jukebox. Here, where someone is requiring—yet again—that I share a past with them.
At some point, common ground is found. For the seventh time, Mother-in- Law points at an unfamiliar face on a record; this time, though, I switch my I-don’t-knows for a vague nod. It’s not a confident yes, and she probably even knows I’m lying. But at least it’s not another no—another complete denial of everything she considers normal or important.
I slip the coins in the jukebox. She presses the two-digit disc number, then presses what in this jukebox is the equivalent of the OK button. It tells the device to pick whatever tune from that album is most widely known, and to play it. The button reads: Popular.
A click-unclick of this button releases into the air a song that’s completely unknown to me. The music works its way across the room, like a coat of paint being applied over the silence. The occasional patron sings along, his words not quite matching the original tune, each unmatched word like a rough brushstroke adding yet another layer of coat to it. Mother-in-Law, absentminded, silently lets her memories unfold from her eyelids and fall on top of the other layers and layers and layers that make up this song. The song is a collage that’s being assembled in real time, but whose layers are mostly invisible to me. I’m a tourist. I can see a universal overlay: the sadness in the voice of a crooner. And underneath that, a very Latina one: the syncopation of the shaker. But all the deeper layers, all that belongs to Puerto Rico, and to this neighborhood, and to the stories of each person sitting at this bar, whatever belongs to all the memories I don’t belong in—this is out of reach to me.
After a few notes, a cat slides out from a door cracked open, and lazily lies in front of the jukebox to enjoy the music. He is completely at home. I wonder if the cat has a memory of this song, or an opinion about this singer. If he would’ve picked this tune from the jukebox. I wonder if the cat perceives himself as different from the people around him, and if he cares about it. I care about it. I’m different from the cat. Here I am, disintegrated. And there he is: whole, nonchalant, spreading his plump belly on the cold floor, the unshakable confidence in his right to be here. He doesn’t belong to this place so much as the place belongs to him. I wonder if there’s ever a place I can go to where I’ll be the cat.
Flávia Monteiro is a Brazilian writer based in Miami, FL. She recently had a jukebox in Oregon eat her $2. Her work has appeared in Hunger Mountain, the Acentos Review, Vol.1 Brooklyn, and Memoir Monday. She’s an alumna of Tin House, VONA, Kenyon, and the RootsWoundsWords writers’ conferences. You can find her tweeting erratically @flavia_monteira.
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