I was too excited to go to sleep. I looked up at the ceiling, remembering scenes from Thunderball. The underwater fight with scuba divers shooting spearguns at each other played in an endless loop. Mami allowed us to watch the movie because it was the start of the weekend.
After Batman, James Bond was my favorite hero.
Like Bond, Papi liked water sports. He liked to sail and scuba dive. He’d been on the Varsity swimming team at Canterbury School. His event was the 100-meter backstroke.
He taught me and La Nena how to swim at the Casino de Puerto Rico, and he also gave lessons to Güicho, who was still learning how to swim.
Like Domino Derval in Thunderball, Mami was an expert swimmer and diver, and collected starfish and conch shells. In the movie, Bond told Domino that she didn’t paddle like a girl. That she swam like a man. Mami was just as fast as Papi.
On my ninth birthday, Papi gave me a speargun as a present. Mami didn’t approve, but in the end, she let me have the gun, with the provision that I only use it when they were both around.
We had a trip planned to El Convento, the Governor’s beach, for the next day, and Papi promised me we would go spearfishing.
El Convento beach was on the eastern side of the island in the town of Fajardo, next to the Aguas Prietas lagoon. It was hidden in a mangrove forest, and you had to have special permission and keys to get past the locked gate.
Abuelo Beto was to join us in his Oldsmobile 98. His motorcycle police escort would drive ahead in their Harleys and stop traffic. Allowing us to zip through all the traffic lights. The three-hour road trip would take half the time. The policemen would get to El Convento beach first and open the gate.
My bags were sitting next to my bedroom door. They were packed with my bathing trunks, flippers, mask, snorkel, and my two-band Scubapro speargun.
When I got up the next morning, I heard Abuelo Beto in the house.
I hurried downstairs to breakfast. Mami, Papi and Abuelo Beto sat at the table, talking about a nuclear reactor that the government was shutting down after two years.
Like the villains in the Bond films, Abuelo Beto was also a fan of nuclear energy. Of course, he didn’t want to use atoms for evil. He just wanted Puerto Rico to be energy independent.
“Nuclear energy is the future of ‘Progress Island, USA.’”
Perhaps Abuelo Beto had named his political party, the New Progressive Party, after nuclear energy.
“The name of the reactor is BONUS, for boiling nuclear superheater.”
Abuelo Beto stirred the sugar in his porcelain coffee cup.
“Governor Muñoz built it in collaboration with the Atomic Energy Commission as part of President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace Program.”
He took a sip. Careful not to stain his pressed white linen Guayabera shirt.
“It was an experiment to demonstrate the technology of boiling water-nuclear superheat.”
A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Abuelo Beto was interested in all things Physics. He was the very opposite of me. I was curious about the nuclear powerplant but not in any practical sense. Whether the plant provided enough energy to make the Puerto Rican people energy independent or not was of no importance to me. And I didn’t know how nuclear energy worked, nor did I care why cars would one day fly or drive underwater. To me, they were simply dreams of a future I wanted to see happen.
“Oh my God! Are you serious, Papá?”
Mami made room for me at the table, and served me a helping of scrambled eggs and bacon from a silver tray.
“I’ve never heard of BONUS. Where is it?”
“It’s on the opposite end of the island from El Convento beach, don’t worry, Mijita.”
Abuelo Beto smiled at me as I ate my breakfast.
“We built the reactor on Punta Higüera, at the westernmost tip of Puerto Rico.”
“And why are you decommissioning it, Sir?”
Papi washed down his eggs with orange juice.
“The reactor’s too small, antiquated, remote, and costly to maintain. We must build another reactor somewhere else.”
“So, the rumors I heard that there was an accidental escape of nuclear radiation aren’t true.”
Papi wiped his lips with his linen napkin.
The conversation about the reactor reminded me of SPECTRE’s evil mastermind Emilio Largo. It was as if I were living inside a movie. In Thunderball, Largo hijacked two warheads and threatened the world with nuclear destruction unless he got one hundred million dollars in ransom money.
A part of me was glad we were going to the other side of Puerto Rico, where we might be protected from an accident. But another side of me wanted to go in the direction of the feared meltdown. There was something exciting about the possibility of an explosion, of a town at the tip of the Island, teetering at the edge of a precipice. A part of me wanted to witness the powerplant fall into a sinkhole of its own making. I gulped my glass of milk and waited for the next volley.
“No, that’s just a rumor from the Independentistas. They want to discredit anything that the US government does.”
Abuelo Beto defended himself and I believed him. I doubted that he was deliberately threatening the Island with nuclear meltdown. Abuelo Beto was a numbers man, a thinking man. He tried to avoid controversial action, preferring to think before he spoke, to look before he leapt. I didn’t have his patience to reach practical solutions. I much rather jump into things with my eyes closed, if only to feel the pull of gravity and the thrill of the fall.
“Well, I hope you’re right and there was no radiation leak.”
Mami finished drinking her coffee and set her cup down on the table.
“I don’t think Mamá would have been happy knowing that there was a nuclear reactor so close to her family’s summer home in Guanajibo.”
Mami rang the silver bell to signal that Tita and María could come into the dining room and pick up the dishes from the breakfast table.
“If you ask me, you’re out of your depth here, Papá. The idea of nuclear energy is plain reckless.”
Mami stood up. We all pushed our chairs back in unison. Breakfast was officially over. Mami liked to put a stop to arguments, no matter how sudden and uncomfortable the end. It didn’t seem like she enjoyed having the last word, though. She didn’t look like she had won anything.
I loved winning arguments. Thinking that I had the upper hand, the best hand, but Mami ended conversations without argumentation, by claiming that there was nothing to be gained. It was futile to try to persuade when the terms of the argument had been set by others and beforehand.
She preferred the lapidary phrase, the closer, to the elegant solution to a problem. Leaving the room was her answer to impossible questions. If nothing else, she showed us her right to her own movements. I could respect that. But I also hated it.
Abuelo Beto’s response was soft and calm.
“Perhaps you’re right, Mija.”
He stood up.
“Either way, the nuclear reactor is now decommissioned. All’s well that ends well.”
He looked at his watch. And followed Mami out the swinging door of the dining room.
“My goodness me, look at the time. We should get going if we’re to arrive at El Convento beach early enough to go for a late afternoon swim.”
Güicho and La Nena, came running down the stairs with their bags. We followed Papi out the door and to the Pontiac, three blind mice.
***
Mami rode with Abuelo Beto in his bullet-proof Oldsmobile 98.
Fearing for his life, the former Governor had ordered the custom-made armored car after the Nationalist revolts in the 1950s.
I’d visit the black automobile in the garage of La Fortaleza. It had a Motorola radio in the back seat, which was separated from the driver’s seat by a thick pane of glass, controlled by a switch up front. The speakers of the cab were connected to an eight-track player also controlled by the bodyguard. A case full of the classical music Abuelo Beto liked to play, sat on the front seat: Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn.
To ride with Abuelo Beto was to experience the world from inside a bullet proof fishbowl. Abuelo Beto could safely wave and smile as he ran all the traffic lights to El Convento beach.
We made the trip in record time. When we arrived at the property, the police escort dismounted the Harleys and opened the gate. I was riding shotgun, and felt giddy from the drive. Güicho and la Nena were riding in the back.
Papi navigated his Pontiac carefully around the tight turns on the road through the mangrove forest. It was thick with beach grape trees and Cedars that threatened to rip the canoe right off the roof of our car.
Papi owned a super light 17-foot Grumman aluminum canoe that he piloted around Condado lagoon, and in mountain lakes like El Lago Dos Bocas.
The canoe was covered with a blue tarp to protect it and to hide a surprise that Papi said, he had in store for Mami. Whatever Papi had in store, I knew I’d be fun.
When we got to the beach, we unloaded our bags and took them to the beach cabin.
It was a cottage duplex designed and built by Henry Klumb, a German architect and a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. The two connected small buildings were made of light wood, had open windows, an open terrace, and lifted foundations. They blended in with the surrounding vegetation.
We stayed in one, and Abuelo Beto stayed in the other with his bodyguards. The police escort drove out to get dinner for us.
The cabins were small but comfortable. Each one had a living room, two sofas, and a small kitchen area. Two bedrooms and one shared bathroom. We slept in bunk beds. Mami and Papi slept in the master.
A long wooden table with two benches sat outside the cabin, under the Cedars and palm trees, surrounded by beach grape trees.
“We’ll have our dinner there, before the sun sets and the mosquitos arrive.”
Mami allowed us to put on our bathing suits, and I didn’t have to be told twice. I hurried inside the bedroom, put on sunscreen and my bathing trunks, took my snorkeling gear, and, when Mami wasn’t looking, grabbed my Scubapro, and ran out the door.
It was late afternoon, and the temperature was dropping with the sun. The sand felt cool on my feet, so I could run down to the beach head without effort, where I knew I would find the beginning of the coral reef, underwater, close to the shore.
A thunder cloud hung on the horizon. Barracudas came out in the rain, so I had to hurry.
After sharks, barracudas were my favorite fish. They were long, silver, with short fins, and an overbite of razor-sharp teeth. An easy target. I was itching to try my speargun on one of them.
I waded into the water. After a few feet in, there was a sudden ten-foot drop, and then the beginning of the coral reef. I sat on the shallow water and put on my flippers. Spit in my mask, rubbed it well (a trick Papi had taught me to keep the mask from fogging), and pushed it, and the snorkel, tightly against my face to create a vacuum.
I placed the butt of the speargun on my belly, and pulled back the two rubber bands. When triggered, they gave the spear its deadly force.
I dove in.
The reef was a large complex made of coral decorated with multicolored fans that waved back and forth. Each brain condo housed a different kind of fish, some of them blue and yellow, some red, some green.
Purple eels lived in the coral basement, hiding from view and rarely coming out.
Cratered shelves of coral went out to sea, littered with sea urchins hiding inside its cavities.
As I dove down the coral wall, I impaled a sea urchin with my speargun. I turned it belly up, exposed its tender mouth, and stabbed it repeatedly against the coral, until the creature broke into bits. The fragments rained slowly down to the ocean floor. Fish came to feast on the remains of the sea urchin.
I watched the carnage from a safe distance, floating on the surface of the water. The water plugged my ears, and my steady breath echoed inside my skull.
I looked up and blew out the water from the snorkel.
The sky grew dark, and I felt the raindrops on my head and shoulders. I searched for barracudas, treading water, spinning slowly to fix my target.
The water was cloudy. I was nervous and excited. A little Bond, stalking Largo, the Barracuda.
A big yellow eye swam past me. I followed it with my eyes and caught a glimpse of its tail. The body of the barracuda was the color of water, making it all but invisible. I lost sight of it but waited for the second pass.
The yellow eye came at me from the other side. The fish showed me its razor-sharp teeth. The slick creature was too fast for me. Still, I waited and didn’t pull the trigger.
I felt the tide pushing me out to sea, popping my head out momentarily to get my bearings. The shore was farther away than felt comfortable. I controlled my breath and waited, slowly bicycling my legs.
The barracuda circled back. This time it headed straight at me. I pointed the speargun at its gaping maw. The long target had suddenly shrunk to a couple of inches. I was not ready for a frontal attack. The gun released the spear with force, but it torpedoed next to the barracuda, missing it by a few inches.
The shot spooked the fish. It sprung and headed away from me in a flash.
The gun was spent, the spear was now a drag, and I didn’t have a second shot. I hadn’t thought the full scenario through.
I dropped the speargun, which floated to the ocean floor, and swam furiously to shore. Every third kick, I would look up to get my bearings and tried not to think about the barracuda following me.
My mask filled with water and my eyes stung. I didn’t know if the flooding was from the ocean or from my tears.
The rain stopped, when I made it to shore. I was shivering from the cold, and from fear at having to tell Papi I had lost the Scubapro.
***
I arrived at the beach cabin just as Mami was setting the table for dinner under the cedars, with help from La Nena. The red and white cotton tablecloth flapped in the ocean breeze.
The soft sound of a TV set came from the cabin next door to ours. The bodyguards made themselves scarce.
I rinsed the sand and salty water off my feet in the outdoor spigot, and went inside to put on dry clothes.
Abuelo Beto and Papi sat on the L-shaped sofa of the minuscule living room, their silhouettes talking in front of the floor-to-ceiling glass of the cabin. Güicho sat next to them. The sun was setting in the horizon turning a bright orange.
When I came out of my room, the family was already at the long table outside. Two large red and white Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets sat next to a pint of gravy, and smaller Styrofoam cups with mashed potatoes, coleslaw, and hot rolls.
The chicken was warm, and the Harley’s were parked nearby, suggesting the escort must have delivered our dinner.
I sat down and reached for two drumsticks and a roll. I was beach hungry after my adventure.
Papi and Abuelo Beto talked about the Apollo 13 mission that was on the news. Papi said that Jim Lovell, the commander, radioed halfway to the moon: “Houston: we’ve got a problem.”
“The phrase is more memorable than Neil Armstrong’s,” Papi said, as he picked a chicken leg from the bucket, my favorite part.
“NASA has a tendency to play down and hide its mistakes.”
Papi poured a generous helping of white gravy on his mashed potatoes.
Abuelo Beto had read all about the accident.
“The issue was with the oxygen tanks on the Command Module.”
He waited for Mami to serve him.
“Tanks exploded and the engineers at Mission Control had to jerry rigg a solution. They aborted the moon landing, used the LEM as a life raft, whiplashed around the moon, and then used the damaged Command Module as a shield for the return trip.”
He flicked open a cold can of Miller High Life.
“You gotta give it to the Americans. They’re problem solvers, and good cooks to boot.”
“The Americans have been very generous with us,” Papi said.
“But they are rushing into space, and they’re bound to make mistakes.”
Papi flicked open another can of Miller High Life and took a sip.
“People are losing interest in NASA. Nobody cares about a third mission to land on the moon.”
He helped himself to another chicken leg.
“If it wasn’t for the accident, nobody’d be paying attention.”
In his heart, Papi believed in what he did for a living. He was an Ad man, a marketing man. Like me, he loved TV jingles and what they stood for: the next best thing. He was a believer in what he called the latest thing in the public square, “lo último en la Avenida.” Whether a new product or a new idea. The promise was the thing.
And he was impatient with anything old. I suspected this was the reason why he didn’t like the idea of political independence. It was too old. Too nineteenth century. Something newer was around the corner. Something we couldn’t see yet. Something just out of reach. He liked to say, “You must be willing to take risks.”
I was a competitive and aggressive board game player thanks to Papi. Whether it was chess or Monopoly, I preferred the bold move, the all-or-nothing stakes, to the prudent accumulation of steps. “To the winner goes the spoils,” Papi also liked to say, to which Mami would reply, “but also the responsibility.”
I didn’t understand what she meant. Wasn’t everyone ultimately responsible for their own fate? The priests at school liked to preach about responsibility and guilt. Their sermons were also too remote from my life. I only knew that I hated to lose.
The trouble was that, taking risks not only made us poor losers, but it also made us accident prone.
“And remember the Atoms for Peace program of the Americans, Papá.”
Her tone echoed the ice in Mami’s glass, as she took a sip of water.
“The moon shot reminds me of BONUS, plain reckless.”
When Mami hit on a good word, she didn’t let go.
Mami and Papi criticized Abuelo Beto from different angles. Together they made a formidable team, putting him on his back foot.
“Let’s agree to disagree.”
Abuelo Beto bit into a second piece of chicken breast. He was an expert at defusing explosive situations and at preventing some bombs from going off. He had a lot of experience keeping the peace in the family. But it took all his energy to keep himself under control.
I saw the effort when we rode in his car, every time we drove by the slums of El Fanguito. He stopped himself from looking out the window of his car. He asked the bodyguards to put on a classical music tape. He brought three fingers to the bridge of his nose and shut his eyes closed to concentrate. Perhaps he imagined a better, more harmonious future.
I didn’t have that kind of discipline and self-control. Still, I feared Abuelo Beto was only postponing the inevitable. In the end, the future of the family and the Island seemed beyond any of our control.
Dinner made me sleepy, and I went straight to bed. La Nena and Güicho came in after me and lay down on their bunk beds. The springs of the mattresses screeched after so many months exposed to the sea air. The drone of the air-conditioning drowned out the sound. I dreamed of Bond and Domino saving the world from a nuclear holocaust.
***
The next morning, Papi was gone. La Nena was still sleeping, and Güicho was nowhere to be seen. I heard Mami stir in her room. Soon everybody was milling around the little kitchen, getting their breakfast of scrambled eggs, juice, and coffee.
I put on my bathing suit, but Abuelo Beto and Mami were still in their night robes. The morning breeze entered through the cabin’s open doors and windows.
The sun was rising on the horizon, and the cool sand was beginning to warm.
Later in the day it got so hot that the sun and the water formed a hard and thin layer over the powdery sand.
From the breakfast table, we saw Papi’s surprise. About a hundred feet from the shore, he was piloting the canoe. He had converted the Grumman into a sailboat. Güicho looked like he was holding on to the sides for dear life. He’s such a wuss. Papi waved at us. He was sailing at a good clip.
We got up from our seats and walked out of the cabin to the shore. La Nena grabbed her book and went in the opposite direction. My feet sank in the sand and left footprints. Armstrong’s boot prints on the beach crust.
“Dear!” Mami cried out. “What are you doing?”
“He’s outfitted the canoe with a main sail, outriggers, learboards, and a rudder.”
Abuelo Beto listed the parts of the new sailboat.
“It looks stable enough to me.”
“He has always wanted to go faster in the canoe.”
Mami fiddled with the sash of her night robe.
“He must have ordered the parts from Grumman. Do you think it’s safe?”
“Well, if they’re good for NASA rockets, they must be good for a canoe.”
Abuelo Beto squared himself, his arms akimbo.
I knew Papi had something fun in mind for us. I looked out at the ocean and envied Güicho’s good luck. He tried the new sailboat on her maiden voyage.
Mami started to turn back to the cabin.
“Sometimes there are strong wind gusts coming from the islands and the sail looks a little flimsy.”
That put a hex on Papi.
He was tacking into the wind when a strong gust hit the main sail, and the canoe capsized. Güicho jumped into the water first and the sail landed on top of him. Abuelo Beto gasped, making Mami turn around. The bodyguards watched frozen in horror from the cabin.
Mami was the first to react. She took off her robe and ran into the water in her silk pjs, leaving deep craters in the sand as she went. Aiming straight at the capsized sailboat, like a torpedo. She reached the floating mess and dove under the sail. Papi pushed the sail up from the water.
Mami emerged with Güicho, who wore an orange life vest. She pulled him from under the sail and brought him to shore. Abuelo Beto ordered the bodyguards to help Papi with the boat. They waited for Papi to bring the canoe back to the shore, and then helped him to pull it up, away from the rising tide.
Güicho was sent back to the cabin to put on dry clothes, and Mami and Papi disappeared into their bedroom. The light wood design of the cabin might have made it eco-friendly, but it also made its walls so thin you could hear the explosions going off.
“You know Güicho can’t swim. That was plain reckless!”
Papi and Güicho were safe and sound, sanos y salvos. I breathed a sigh of relief, but I also wished I’d been a part of the stunt. Their adventure reminded me of my encounter with the barracuda the day before. Was it worth the risk to stare right into its maw?
The coconut didn’t fall far from the Palm tree.
***
The fight flushed La Nena out of the beach cabin. She went to sit at the dinner table with her book in hand. Güicho and I followed her. Abuelo Beto took us by the hand and walked us to the farthest point of the beach.
I told him about my adventure with the barracuda the day before.
“You shouldn’t get ahead of yourself.”
Abuelo Beto shortened his stride so we could keep up with him.
“Leave the spearfishing to the grownups. Enjoy exploring the coral reef and watching the fish while you can.”
He smiled at me.
“Soon you’ll be grown up, and life will speed up. You’ll have to spend your time figuring out how to keep up.”
He looked at the horizon.
“You’ll find yourself tacking into the wind and making mistakes.”
Abuelo Beto was getting philosophical. He liked to draw lessons from life’s trials. It brought me closer to him. I had to slow down and think about the consequences of my actions to myself and to others. He liked to tell us stories of little fishes in shrinking ponds of water, or of little chicks that could nevertheless swallow oceans, to prepare us for the position we would someday occupy in the world.
But I also felt that the un-hurried lesson-learning couldn’t keep up, and was somehow inadequate to the rate of the changes happening around me. The future was anything but guaranteed. Like Papi, I was impatient with Abuelo Beto, and wanted to cut to the chase.
I interrupted him. I said I had lost the speargun and was afraid to tell Papi.
La Nena and Güicho turned to face me. A look of surprise on their faces. I couldn’t keep my trap shut.
Abuelo Beto turned to me.
“You should tell your Papi what happened. He might surprise you.”
When we returned to the beach cabin, it was time to leave El Convento beach. We disassembled the canoe and put it back on the roof of the Pontiac. Papi noticed that I hadn’t packed my speargun. He asked me where I put it.
I told him the barracuda story and confessed that I had lost the gun.
“The barracuda came after me and I had one shot left. I missed, dropped the speargun, and crazy-kicked until I got back to shore.”
Papi kneeled in front of me and looked me in the eyes.
“And, what did that teach you, Noti?”
“That I need a rapid-fire semi-automatic speargun?”
Papi laughed. He watched Mami walk past us holding Güicho by the hand. She climbed into Abuelo Beto’s Oldsmobile.
The police escort was back on their Harleys. They turned on their flashing lights and sirens. The wheels spun in the sand, grabbed the roots of the grape trees, and lunged forward.
Papi put his hands on my shoulders.
“Going off spearfishing by yourself.”
Papi stood back up, climbed into his Pontiac, and we followed the Oldsmobile as it drove into the mangrove forest.
“That, Noti, was reckless.”