Yet even after many decades, I could see how Jaime and Tony hesitated between branching passages, retreating into the inner topography of memory before disappearing behind a blind curve. So many of the conversations I caught on tape were merely directive:Vamos pa’llá,“”No, mas delande,“”And where is Javier?» Cross talk, stifled laughter. Jaime told me that sometimes they came across skeletons of goats that died lost in the maze. We learned to listen to each other’s voices.
“Yo la adoraba,” he explained helplessly.
At Cueva Caballo, Jaime shouted:Se la robaron, Tony!When we found him, he was kneeling before what looked like an empty altar. La Cabeza—a glistening stone in the shape of a skull on a slender neck—had been carefully decapitated. There was a market for this sort of thing: Manuel said he’d seen small businesses selling stalactites on the side of the road in the Dominican Republic. Even in the dim light of our headlights, I could see Jaime’s face turn red and I worried that he might cry. “Yo la adoraba,” he explained helplessly, using the word that blurs the lines between love and worship. “If I were an Indian, this would be sacred to me.”
The elders in our group often spoke as if they had taken the place of the natives. Jaime wore a string necklace with three finely polished shell and stone beads that he took from a cave years ago. Chito analyzed our dynamic as a “tribe”. And Quique invited scientific theories: Had I heard of epigenetics? How did Native Americans carry the traumas of starvation, displacement, and genocide across generations? Puerto Ricans, he continued, must carry our own ghosts. I was wary of these analogies, but I could also understand their emotional logic. Our guides had lived”el carpeteo,” the US government’s campaign against the Puerto Rican independence movement, when activists were tracked and jailed when close associates turned out to be snipers. They were nostalgic for what happened before the colonial encounter, when the islands they loved were sovereign. When we returned from Mona, Quique gave me a collection of scientific papers and a short essay he had written, simply titled “Colonies are there to exploit.”
I struggled to absorb the intensity of information being directed at me. Elisa, often at my side, said it was like standing next to a fire hose. Buried treasure, political intrigue, grand theories, deaths and disappearances. I missed so much, but at least I could record the poetic names and qualities of the local plants: tourist tree, for its red and peeling bark, the snowball cactus for its crown of white puffs and thorns, the plumeria called alhelí cimarrón. In the mornings when it was blooming you could close your eyes and almost find your way to the island following its fleeting scent. Tabaco marinorolly and smoky, it might lift you up a bit. Chicharrón, higo chumbo, coca falsa. Jaime and Tony often returned to the same refrain:Eso es de aquí na’ más.” Only in Mona. Some of these species were immediately striking: The Mona land iguanas were huge, with the terrible dignity of dinosaurs, and we had to fight them whenever we sponged by the cistern. Others seemed modest, enchanted only by the spell of our attention.
