The Chrysalis

Contents

Chapter One

Fantasies of the Sad Flaco

Chapter Two

The Unexpected Visitor

Chapter Three

The Angel That Protects Me

Chapter Four

Blood on the Beach

Chapter Five

Esperanza and Roots of Africa

Chapter Six

Existential Crisis

Chapter Seven

Raúl is Exiled to Madrid

Chapter Eight

Romance Between DNA Nucleotides

Chapter Nine

The Discovery

Chapter Ten

Back to the Island

Chapter Eleven

The Address

Chapter Twelve

Final

Dedicated to my wife, Marta Ivonne, for her patience and understanding—and to my children and grandchildren. Special thanks to my friend, Dr. Enrique Chaves, for his support and review of the manuscript.

Chapter One

Fantasies of the Sad Flaco

The jolt of the needle in my left ear lobe made more real the decision to wear a diamond earring. The nurse had numbed the area but I still felt it when she did the perforation. I clung to the chair as I looked out the window to the courtyard of the medical office. I do this for you, grandfather.

I got up to leave and looked out the window onto old San Juan. A shiver went through my spine, like a steel dagger, when I thought of what my father would say when he saw the earring on his own son. He had said at a family lunch, when I supported males wearing earrings: "That is a thing of maricones (faggots)."

I whispered again to my grandfather: I’m going home now, what’s done is done.

I am 22 years old, a senior about to graduate from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, with a degree on molecular biology and genetics. In this upper class racist town, my physical highlight is my raja, as they call here dark black skin. I am handsome, thin (flaco), with a strong build, tall and with green-brown eyes. My lips are very red, fleshy; this and my color make me un papito chulo (darling) for some girls. Perhaps you can surmise that it does nothing for me. No question I have two strikes against me—half-black and gay or tras que pietro maricon.

¿Y tu abuela donde esta?" or where is your closeted black grandma? is a refrain Ricans use to imply that someone has hidden black blood, which in my case is true and I am the darkest in the family. A true black sheep.

I am the skinny guy of the sad eyes, my grandmother would say, and the hero of a novela or noon TV soap that makes the people in Puerto Rico drop everything to listen each day. But of course they had no gay characters then, only super machos who looked like me, without earrings.

Strike three: my father and brother together.

The redemptive leader of Puerto Rico! my father would say, when I gave my speeches about the chaotic, racist, greedy state of Rican society. Our family lunches, (Puerto Ricans are always eating, cooking or travelling with food), were my proving grounds.

He thinks he is the last Coca-Cola in the desert, my brother Francisco would chime in.

We lived together in adjoining houses, without an outside patio, typical of the eighteenth century buildings of old San Juan. It had two floors with the entrance hall opening onto a marble staircase, a bubbling Andalusia fountain in the central courtyard and a dining room on the second floor looking to the center of the old city. In the wrought iron balcony, overlooking on the other side to the bay, I spent my childhood dreaming, watching the ships enter the bay at the mouth of El Morro castle and imagine the pirates who had invaded the island, Sir Francis Drake and the Earl of Cumberland, in battle for the capital. The island had never been conquered by any invading armies or pirates except in 1898 when the Americans bombarded it at the beginning of the Spanish-American war. Once well received as liberators of the tyrannical Spaniards, they remain causing some unrest.

My upper elementary school was there, in this beautiful walled city, with its cobbled, narrow, romantic streets, full of history, legends and my own roaring fantasies. My family lived a pleasant life, wealthy with money my father inherited from his dad, and a good position as a certified public accountant. They were seemed mostly indifferent to the poverty that surrounded us, in the area of La Perla, the slum outside the walls of San Juan that bordered the sea in the north and in the east outskirts, where "el Mud" and others stood constantly as reminders of our greed.

"Jesu manifica. They like to live like that," some would say.

I studied the biological sciences and was passionate about the biology of behavior and the emerging specialty of behavioral genetics, and I fantasized about making a major discovery and thought that science, in general, offered the best opportunity to overcome problems, with studies of population growth, pollution, energy constraints, unequal economies, and diseases of modern times.

Wearing an earring in 1976 was an act of defiance. To my mind at the time it showed my family and the whole Puerto Rican society of wealthy people, religiously conservative, that I wanted no part of their hypocrisy, artificiality, and intolerance.

The Puerto Ricans are well versed on machismo and suspicious of any man’s unmanly mannerisms or lack of girlfriends, and a man thirty years old and unmarried was labeled maricón and penciled in, until further notice, with the big M on their foreheads.

The upwards and those who aspired to be so sought to give their children a marriage for money, and if there was any black heritage, raja, the marriage was affected. The blacker the man more certainly he must know his place.

Socially, the young masculine guys like my brother Francisco, who though he was a flan or stiff was a super-macho. Many of the moms drooled for him and would say to their daughters, Mira mija, go with that boy from old San Juan. Even though he has some black blood, he is handsome and from a good family, and his dad inherited a bundle of money from his family in Ponce. The youngest one, Raúl, has too much raja but is good looking. God knows the trouble that one is into in the University as he is always protesting and marching.

They sent their children to the colleges in the United States where there is good schooling and no chusma (low class), and where they can learn good English.

I often wondered why I was not a regular guy who cared about sports, fast cars, frivolous girls, and the atmosphere of a white run fraternity that my brother, Francisco, loved. Instead, I sought solace at the ocean, and in the summer mornings when the tide was low and the roaring and explosive ocean became quiet, with waves lapping the shore dimly I saw myself as a variant or whim of nature.

I was attracted in my adolescence to boys my age and in my class I had fantasies about defending effeminate boys who were made fun of and grabbed and pushed around at recess. With this earring I would be an activist and advocate for people like them and other young men who suffered ridicule and persecution and their own family’s rejection.

It was in seventh grade that I had my first romantic infatuation with my classmate, Jose, with handsome, sad eyed, who sat in front of me in class. I spent long hours dreaming of him and felt the wonder of being in love, but I never told him except one day during a school outing.

It was in a tour of the old castle El Morro in San Juan. The group of boys was taken by teachers through the tunnels of the old fort, and on one occasion he and I were separated from the group to explore one of the jail cells of the time of the insurrection against Spain. The room was dark, musty and had moss on the walls. My heart beat hard on being alone with this boy. We approached the opening of the cell that led to the ocean and observed ecstatically the large body of deep blue water. I felt the touch of his hand with mine. The moment was magnificent, a glorious day, and in that historic, but mysterious jail cell, we were finally alone. After a long silence as we watched the wide horizon, I turned to him and with a spark of love in my eyes I said, Well. You have beautiful eyes.

He turned pale, looked down and dashed out. I was left alone in the prison and it seemed that the walls were closing in on me too. I felt lonely, rejected again. It seemed that the prison was my own. The beautiful defeating scene would stay forever in my mind. I looked down at the waves crashing against the rocks and thought: My life, will it always be so?

At eighteen, my high school buddies took me to a casa de puta (brothel) to do what all the boys had already done, to break la coca (virginity).

The site was a dirty little cafe on the ground floor with rooms above for the massacre. In the bar a jukebox projected a delicate and romantic song of Felipe Rodriguez that was desecrated by an atmosphere of the meat market. The woman, who started to dance with me, was slightly pretty, skinny, with an odometer, if not broken, near expiration. She had an air of déjà vu about her, and indifference. She wore purple. A wide neckline revealed an endless brassiere. During the dance of the romantic boleros she hit it hard to arouse me, stroked my hair and jammed her body to get a reaction that never came. After a while of dancing, and in a last attempt not to lose the battle I climbed a long dirty stairway lined with blood-red wallpaper and lit by a tired light bulb. An old man handed out the rooms to couple. He looked at my date with an air of déjà vu.

The little room assigned was sober, primitive and dirty, with badly painted walls. It was warm, with a fan in the ceiling that made a rhythmic sound. She undressed without preamble, mechanically, and I looked at her eyes briefly, but no one was there.

She then laid naked, limp, with legs open waiting for me. My own eyes lacked adventure. I knelt between her legs, and looked at that used area and it gave me nausea. I tried but failed to have an erection. My friend, who had already finished, knocked on the door.

Raúl, how does it go?

I did not reply still trying to get excited, sweating now and nervous about my inability. The woman was not looking at me.

I gave up and got out of bed disappointed and sad. She went to the sink in the room and washed her parts with water and soap, making a noise that seemed so crude, irreverent and empty.

I dressed quickly and found my friend who was so pleased to be co-conspirator in my initiation and I lied with an icy smile, and then felt a void in my chest.

In the car, they wanted the details.

"You got over your coca (virginity) in style?"

Yes, my brother would be proud of me, I said looking out the window as a somber rain wet the night. I remembered an unpublished poem of a university friend:

Who cries in the rain?

Is it a girl´s heart?

And I felt, finally, my sadness.

After that incident, I tackled a string of thwarted infatuations and intense fantasies of love—until college. When I came to college it was an oasis of acceptance. I observed the spectrum of gay youths like me, from an extremely effeminate male—to me. Here I could wear the diamond earring, displaying it as a sign of life. I had blood running through my veins—African and Spanish—from my father and grandfather—mother and grandmother and this was the end of a split personality. I would embrace my life with all my heart, show my true colors, and let God deal the cards.

But then there was family dinner. As I shaved in preparation, I felt my gesture had something of revenge in it because the stories and rumors about my paternal grandfather were always the same. It was said that the grandfather had been involved with a man and this idea filled the talkers with shame. I never met my grandfather. He died when I was only just born, but I knew from my own gay life the meaning of sudden silences and