Santurce Human Connections

I asked a woman at the Plaza del Mercado de Santurce where to find the best pasteles, and she gave me directions, a ten minute lecture on the dough, and a free taste while she talked. I did not follow the directions. I followed the lecture. It led me to the right stall. She waved from across the square the next Saturday like we had known each other for years. I now know three things about plantain and one about banana leaves. I am not allowed to say which.

Keep a small torch by the door and charge your phone before you go out to Calle Loiza in the evening. Power outages happen here, and I found out by standing in a dark stairwell with my phone light on and a battery that was nearly flat. The street carries on in the dark, music included, but you will want to see your own steps. So the torch lives by the door and the phone charges overnight.

You rode through the street fair on Calle Loiza on a Saturday afternoon in a three piece suit on a small folding bicycle, ringing the bell at every corner like you were announcing a ceremony. The crowd opened for you. A woman handed you a pastry without breaking your stride. I was on the sidewalk eating the other half of that pastry. We never met. We shared a pastry, and a street, and I think about it more than I should.

At a beginners salsa class in Machuchal on a Wednesday night my dance partner stepped on my foot four times in the first ten minutes and apologised each time more sincerely. By the end of the night we were both laughing so hard that we could not count the beat. We meet every Wednesday now. We have improved slightly. The foot has not. The teacher says we are a very warm pair. I think she means we both sweat a lot. I think we are fine.

The power went out in Miramar for two days after the storm and my food was starting to go. A neighbour I had never spoken to knocked on my door and said, we have a generator, put your things in our fridge. I did. When the power came back he said we should have dinner. We did. We had lived two doors apart for a year and never said hello. He had a dog and a cousin in Ohio. I knew neither. We say hello now. We say it a lot.

On Calle Loiza a man leaned out of his car window and called to a friend on the pavement, "I have been looking for parking so long I could have walked from home." The friend said, "Then park on the next block, you are already here." "That is the next block's problem," he said, and drove on. I laughed. I do not yet understand the unwritten rules about which spaces are fair game, and nobody has offered to explain.

I picked up a bag of small green round fruit at the Plaza del Mercado de Santurce one Saturday morning and had no idea what to do with it. The woman at the stall showed me how to crack the skin with my teeth and suck the pulp off the seed. She laughed at my first attempt and my second. I have eaten a kilo of quenepas since and she has not let me forget it. Every Saturday she holds one up before I say a word. I say, no, then I say, yes.

I was walking home on Calle Loiza in the evening with paint all over my hands from a mural job when you stopped, looked at the color, and said, that is the best blue I have seen all week. You were wearing a guayabera of the same blue. We stood there like two people proving a point. Then you went to catch a bus and I did not catch my breath. I kept the blue. It is under my fingernails. It is still there. It is the best blue I have had all week.