A Rekindled Love Story Set in Old San Juan Puerto Rico

The blue cobblestones of Old San Juan are made of adoquin, an iron slag brick brought from Spain as ballast in the seventeenth century, and they give the city its particular blue cast in certain lights — especially in the hour before sunset when the facades of Calle del Cristo and Calle San Sebastian go the color of old gold and the shadows between the buildings deepen toward violet. This is when the city is most undeniably itself, and it was during this hour that Sofia Maldonado-Rivera sat on the wall of El Morro and watched the Atlantic below and thought about what it meant to return to the place where you had been, for a time, most alive.

She was forty-six, a professor of Caribbean literature at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras, and she had been returning to Old San Juan every weekend for twenty years the way that islanders return to their most essential places — not for tourism but for recalibration. She had grown up in Santurce, had studied in New York for five difficult and formative years, had come back because the island demanded it of her in ways she could not articulate but could not ignore. She wrote about identity and displacement and the literature of return. Her colleagues said she wrote from a place of personal understanding. She did not argue with this.

Javier Colon-Sanchez had left Puerto Rico at twenty-three and returned at forty-eight, after twenty-five years of architecture practice in Chicago that had produced buildings he was proud of and a marriage that had ended with mutual respect and the kind of sadness that attaches to things that were genuinely good but genuinely over. He had come back because his mother was eighty-one and lived alone in Santurce and because — he admitted this only to himself — Chicago had never once felt like where he was from. He had a return contract with a firm in Hato Rey working on post-Maria reconstruction.

They had known each other. This was the complication and the context of everything that followed. They had known each other at twenty-two and twenty-three, during Javier’s last year in Puerto Rico, when Sofia was finishing her undergraduate degree at UPR and Javier was at the school of architecture and their social world in the Santurce arts community was small enough that everyone knew everyone. They had been together for eight months — a time that both of them had subsequently described to various people over the decades with a careful vagueness that indicated the description was being managed. What had ended it was simple: he was leaving and she was not, and both of them had been too young to negotiate across that distance.

Twenty-five years is long enough that recognition comes strangely — the face is the face you knew with time laid over it, and the strangeness is not the change but the continuity, the features that have persisted. They saw each other at a literary festival in the Ateneo Puertorriqueno — she was on a panel, he was in the audience — and the recognition happened at the same moment for both of them, across the room. They managed it with the composure of educated adults in their forties, which is to say they each had a drink and then spoke briefly and then circulated away from each other and each found, independently, that the rest of the evening was somewhat abstract.

Old San Juan gave them a city to be in together that was not charged with the history of specific places. They did not go to Santurce, where the old geography lived. They walked the walls of El Morro and the streets of the colonial city, which belonged to them as Puerto Ricans but not as former partners, and the city’s age put their own history in proportion without trivializing it. The Museo de las Americas, the Casa Blanca, the narrow streets where bougainvillea erupted from walls and the cats moved through everything with their sovereign indifference — all of this was neutral ground, shared inheritance, a version of home that predated them both.

They talked about what their lives had been. He told her about the buildings he had made and what he thought they meant now. She told him about the books she had written and what she had been trying to understand. He said Chicago had never made him feel the specific gravity that the island generated — the way the place insisted on itself, on its own terms, in ways that were exhausting and necessary simultaneously. She said she had written an entire book about that feeling without being able to explain it to anyone who had not lived it. Maria had changed Puerto Rico in ways still being accounted for, and both of them carried the event in their bodies as people carry the catastrophes that reshape their relationship with a place. Javier had not been here for it — he had been in Chicago watching the news with the impotence of the diaspora — and this asymmetry was honest between them, which distinguished this from the relationship they had had at twenty-two.

They did not rush. Neither of them was twenty-three anymore, which meant neither had the luxury of carelessness or the excuse of inexperience. They walked El Morro on several Sunday evenings and ate at a small restaurant on Calle Fortaleza where the mofongo was made with the particular attention that Old San Juan restaurants bring to their anchor dishes. They talked about the island and about literature and architecture and about what it meant to build things meant to endure in a place that hurricanes visited and that history had treated so consistently with contempt and that persisted anyway, in beauty and difficulty, as islands do. The cobblestones held the evening light as they always have. The Atlantic made itself heard below the walls. Sofia had written about the literature of return for twenty years and had never quite finished her own version of it. She was beginning to understand that the story needed this ending, which was not an ending at all but a continuation — the island insisting, as it always does, that what was real does not disappear, only waits for the right light to show itself again.

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