By: Nishika Navrange
Vieques
Across a stretch of a bioluminescent sea, beyond deceptively treacherous currents, and under a sky with
speckled constellations no longer seen anywhere else, there is an island where time stands still. The earth
is faintly illuminated by dull red streetlamps. Orange flamboyans and thin tamarind trees emerge from
gently sloping mountains. Scrawny horses and cats the size of chickens roam along dusty roads. Iguanas
creep beside cars and mongooses scurry from bush to bush. The wind carries the sound of waves lapping
against golden and black shores, punctuated by roosters’ cries and the occasional burst of reggaeton.
The land is inhabited by people who are immune to time, although not immune to history. There are
women who have somehow evaded the woes of aging. There are men who continue to fish and run their
shops well into their eighties. They are tanned and wrinkled by the sun, and receive each other with a
warmth that seems to be lost on the mainland. Lacking adequate resources, rebuilding from torrential
hurricanes, recovering from repeated invasion, they only have each other to lean on.
There is a man who roams the streets, sometimes suffering from an attack of schizophrenia. He receives
small jobs and food from the sandwich shop across the street. There is a woman who grows a miniature
rainforest in her backyard, giving away her starfruit and plantains to anyone who pays her a visit. There is
a grandmother who volunteers her time in a soup kitchen, giving back to the community that raised her.
There are many who lack true homes to live in, yet get by on the trust and support of their neighbors.
This is the slice of Vieques that few truly see. Most take the ferry in for a day, mildly irritated by the
inconvenience of the journey. They go to the beach in the afternoon and visit the mosquito bay by night,
blind to the residents surrounding them. They blast Bad Bunny from their rented cars and dine on bar
food at the singular restaurant open past 9pm. They pay no heed to the naval base across the island that
has insidiously continued to cause suffering in the form of economic isolation and cancer. They don’t
realize that the island is serviced by three physicians for ten thousand people. They don’t see the rigid
lack of assimilation between ex-pats and the natives of Vieques. They see their mystical, surreal moment
of Vieques and then disappear, allowing the island to dissolve into a dreamy landscape of their memory.
***
Vignettes of Vieques
Beside a dusty curve of a street, there stands a stout home of cats and plants. There is an overgrowth of
greenery behind a rusted fence, a lightbulb and battery scattered by the entrance. A hammock has been
tied to the porch, serving as a weak barrier to potential invaders.
Inside, there lives a woman tied to a man who has lost his mind. He spends the day jabbering to himself,
paranoid and argumentative. He has fallen into the slippery grasp of schizophrenia and dementia, unwittingly dragging his wife along. She sneaks him tablets of antipsychotic medication in the hopes that he might see a doctor. Bound by marriage, obligation, and aloneness, she has no choice but to stay by his side.
***
A family of four sisters lives in a pale pink house. They are happy to greet us, welcoming our visit with
open arms.
The eldest, not present, has fallen prey to her defeated memory.
The next is starting to forget, too. She battled breast cancer and won, but is slowly losing the battle to her
shrinking brain.
The middle sister is healthy today, but has suffered the most. She was born with a cognitive impairment.
At some point along the way, she was raped. She gave birth to a son with severe intellectual disabilities
and the compulsion to harm himself. He repeatedly poked his own eyes until he went blind. Now, for his
own safety, he lives with his hands tied behind his back.
The youngest sister’s husband has a leaky heart valve. The surgery that would save him is in Boston—a
ferry ride, flight, and thousands of dollars away. He selflessly refuses to undergo the procedure so that he
can stay with his family.
Somehow, the most juvenile member of the family has escaped all of these woes. She cares for her
siblings and partner without complaint, giving without reservation and providing without obligation.
The family in the pink house bids us goodbye with bright smiles. I find it difficult to comprehend their
suffering, to understand how they manage to cope. And yet, they are happy.
***
A golden husky guards the door of the house where a man has lived out nearly his entire life. The sitting
room is cluttered with jars of Goya and bags of Lays.
“How are you?” we begin. The woman of the house sheepishly chuckles, saying that she hasn’t been
eating well the past few days but is trying to do better. There is a young man preparing his meal of arroz y
habichuelas behind her. He playfully quips with his mother as she guides us to the back room.
Behind the faded white door, her brother is curled up and watching the television. His legs, tightly folded
against his thin body, are mere shadows of what they once were. Tattoos cover his arms, remnants of the
life he had before his stroke. He glances over at us, wide-eyed and smiling.
His sister gently shows us the bed sores she is most worried about. She lifts his body easily. His skin is
pressed to the bone like paper, ulcers lining the back of his right leg. Some have begun to open, a raw
redness that she struggles to keep clean. Hanging off the side of the bed is a bag of his urine. It glows bright purple, a color none of us have encountered before. “That’s how I know it’s infected,” his sister
casually explains.
We suggest medications—liquid ones, as he will spit out any solid pill. We search for ointments to
stimulate new skin growth over his ulcers. We answer questions about her own health, explaining the
results of her most recent labs. She smiles with relief as we show her that her kidneys are fine; her heart is
fine; her brain is fine.
I wondered how long this had been her life. How long she had sacrificed her independence to become the
sole caregiver for her brother. But it seems that this question had never even crossed her mind, or if it had
she had made peace with it. She seems to have accepted that this was her life: her family fell sick, and so
she would care for them. That’s how the story goes.
***
A woman grows a garden of Eden in her backyard. Purple passionfruit blooms along the porch. Plantains
hang from palm trees. Starfruit ripens, flaunting its yellow-white edges. Chickens hop around, pecking at
the remnants of fallen citrus. Kittens flit between bushes. Little fish she had collected from the river
flicker under pools of plants.
Once, on her way to tend to her trees, she tumbled from her porch. She slipped from cement to cement,
but thankfully came away with her bones and mind intact. The only remnants of this accident are bouts of
vertigo and a fear of falling. But, she laughs, at least she has her green therapy.
***
A mother with six children, three kittens, two parakeets, a dog, and a fish lives out her last days in a
slanted blue home. She has cancer that has spread from her cervix to her intestines, her back, her chest.
She goes to the main island for chemotherapy and radiation every three weeks. She does not fully
understand her condition or her treatment, as nobody on the mainland seems to have time to explain the
way her body has rebelled against her. She doesn’t know why her mouth tastes like metal, why she is
plagued with nausea.
I wondered what would happen to her family. Her youngest is six years old. Did they understand how
little time she had left?
***
A softspoken man in a wheelchair is angry. He has one toe remaining on his left foot. A liquid antibiotic
is injected into his veins to fight the infection that has spread to his bones.
Years ago, he needed surgery on his leg. But something went wrong, and he suffered severe
complications. He bounced from hospital to hospital, facing negligent medical care and dishonorable
doctors. Once, they performed a procedure on the wrong leg. On other occasions, he was sent back
without being seen.
He returns—across the mainland, over an ocean, on his last limb—dejected and resentful.
***
The fisherman spends his days out on the water. He catches hundreds of fish per day and saves the most
brilliant ones for his friends. He sells the rest to keep himself afloat.
The fisherman has fought metastatic colon cancer and won. He used to travel on a ferry for an hour, then
drive another hour, to receive chemotherapy three times a week. But the hardest part was not the
commute. It was not the cancer. It was not the chemo.
The hardest part, he says, was that he could not swim.
***
There is a woman who lives alone in a house without water. Her house and dress are a matching vibrant
teal. She greets us with a melancholy smile and invites us inside. Recently, she tried to be kind to a baby
chick. It was sick, so she healed it, and it thanked her with fleas. I roll her sleeves up to take her blood
pressure, gently wrapping the cuff around small red welts that pepper her bony arms.
As we prick her finger, she tells us a story that I do not know how to decipher. She is convinced that she is
trapped in her home by gangs, that people are listening to her. Her mind makes tales, spins her past life
into a traumatizing narrative. She is haunted by memories and experiences that she may or may not have
lived.
My heart went out to her. Regardless of whether she has survived these stories, she wholeheartedly
believes in them. Her life has become an agony. Does it really matter whether her pain is rooted in truth?
***
On a sunny yellow porch, there is a wrinkled woman entering her ninth decade of life. She wears crooked
sunglasses to cover her foggy eyes. She had lost her sight to cataracts and her teeth to old age, but could
talk faster than a parrot. She tells us stories of her life, of her childhood and her husband. “62 years of
marriage!” she proudly declares. She could still feel his presence sitting next to her on the bench.
***
Near the local Viequensan eatery, there is a tattered yellow house without a roof. A stove sits outside of it.
The broken steps leading to the entrance are crowded with tall weeds and grass.
The man who lives here is a wanderer; he is often found anywhere else. Tracking him down is like a
game. We stop from street to street, asking shop-owners and friends if they have seen him. He works odd
jobs for kind neighbors and lives off of donated snacks. His mind wanders too; despite his best intentions,
he tells nonsensical tales that may or may not be true. He is guided by a mind clouded with schizophrenia,
a condition he struggles to control without medication.
When we finally find him, we give him a bag of antipsychotics, toothbrushes, and nicotine lozenges. In
big black letters, we carefully ink instructions on how and when to take each drug. Later that evening, we
stumble across him. He is laughing, arms lifted to the sky, hand still clutching the bag we had delivered.
I was struck by the little life he had built for himself here. To be homeless in Vieques, I realized, was far
different than in the United States. Here, you could live off of the charity of others. There, neighbors
would turn a blind eye as law enforcement shuttled you off the street. Perhaps Vieques does not have
enough external support, but one thing is clear: on this little island the people are there for each other.
***
These are merely snippets of the vibrant lives encapsulated within Vieques. Their stories deserve to
expand further than those hundred square miles of trees and sand. We all have something to learn from the
humility, gratitude, and presence of mind with which the people of Vieques live.
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