Luna de Miel (The Honeymoon)

 

It was a sultry night in Cartagena de Indias. The prostitutes were lazing on benches and pretending to talk on their cell phones in the shadow of the Puerta del Reloj, where the three wide arches of the main gateway, like the loose women, welcomed visitors to the pleasures of the walled city, and its founder, the conquistador Pedro de Heredia, watched over the exploits. In the Plaza de los Coches, where they used to sell the slaves, little tables were crowded with groups of friends drinking Aguilar and Club Colombia Negra beer and men smoking Cuban cigars. Salsa music emanated from the bar on the corner where couples were dancing inside, but hadn’t yet spilled out onto the street.  It was early still and Don Fernando Mendez Borrero, who was on his honeymoon, had just finished dinner, with his bride, at the 17^th century Sofitel Santa Clara, which used to be a convent and which the great writer Gabriel García Márquez chose as the setting for his novel Of Love and Other Demons. The Santa Clara had a lush courtyard with a statue by Botero and a toucan named Mateo. Don Fernando Mendez Borrero and his bride had walked to the Plaza de los Coches from the restaurant in San Diego and the walking made Don Fernando hot and the heat reminded him of the donkey who caught on fire.

The story went something like this. Don Fernando Mendez Borrero had an uncle, un malo, who never went to church. His mother, abuela of Don Fernando Mendez Borrero, was always admonishing him for not going to church, but el tio was unmoved until one day, he did go to church which you might think was a good thing, and maybe it is for un malo and his mamá también, but it turned out to be a very bad thing for a certain beast of burden because at the exact moment that el tio walked into that sacred place, a donkey, who had the great misfortune of walking past the steps of the cathedral at that same exact moment, burst into flames. The conflagration of the donkey was caused, it was said, because el Diablo had entered a house of worship. One hundred people saw it.

You might think that Don Fernando Mendez Borrero was recounting this tale solely to his bride, but you would be thinking, mistakenly, that Don Fernando was on a traditional honeymoon. He was not. There were eleven people on Don Fernando Mendez Borrero’s honeymoon. Accompanying Don Fernando Mendez Borrero on his honeymoon were six members of his Colombian family: his brother, Ricardo Mendez, who came from Houston with his son, Nick Mendez, and his son’s wife, Eva Mendez, a haggler of extraordinary prowess; and his sister, Martha de la Cruz Mendez, who came from Bogotá with her husband, Gustavo Baracaldo, and their son, Gustavo Andrés, whose translation abilities facilitated conversation because also accompanying Don Fernando Mendez Borrero on his honeymoon were his bride’s American girlfriend, the surgeon; and his bride’s American girlfriend, the writer; and the writer’s husband who, each morning at the breakfast table, told an off-color joke freshly plucked from the Internet by Don Fernando Mendez Borrero. There was room for everyone because the villa Casa Catalina, once owned by a viceroy and won by Don Fernando Mendez Borrero in a drunken night of gambling, had six bedrooms, two of them in a mysterious hallway that sometimes disappeared.

The eleventh person on Don Fernando Mendez Borrero’s honeymoon was, claro, su esposa, his bride, Ellen la Hutton de la Reina. Don Fernando Mendez Borrero, it might be noted, had a circuitous route to the altar. Once upon a time, Don Fernando Mendez Borrero, perhaps irrevocably scarred by the conflagration of the donkey, had been studying to become a priest. But then Don Fernando Mendez Borrero discovered women, and then he discovered Ellen la Hutton de la Reina, and then, one night in Philadelphia, on the night that pigs flew high above the trees of Rittenhouse Square, he got down on one knee and presented her with a fiery diamond and proposed and because he had also made a reservation and bought her a nice meal, she said yes, first to Don Fernando Mendez Borrero and then, through the magic of Facebook, to the rest of the world.

Ten months later, Ellen la Hutton de la Reina and Don Fernando Mendez Borrero were married in a black-tie wedding. La boda at the Stotesbury Mansion was held on the first day of February, in between two snowstorms. The bride wore red and was so ravishing, a collective gasp went up in the candlelit room when she appeared in the doorway, a vision. The guests, breathless from the bride’s entrance, also laughed when, during the ceremony, before administering the vows, the officiant counseled them to be prepared for conflict in marriage. The groom—although he would never face a firing squad like Colonel Aureliano Buendía in the great writer Gabriel García Márquez’s Nobel Prize-winning novel One Hundred Years of Solitude—did have a penchant for pantomiming his death and would visually express his thoughts on relationships by tightening an imaginary noose around his neck, fake-shooting himself in the head, slitting his wrists with a nonexistent knife and, just to guarantee the job was complete, extending his arms, crucifixion-style, with the palms turned down so the blood would be sure to drain out. Everyone knew that Ellen la Hutton de la Reina and Don Fernando Mendez Borrero were muy apasionados. One hundred (más o menos) guests danced and drank champagne and toasted to love and happiness for los novios all night long.

And Ellen la Hutton de la Reina was happy. So happy, she said, that she needed a new word for happy. Ellen la Hutton de la Reina was happy to be married and even happier to be celebrating el matrimonio in Cartagena and happier still because there was a staff. Every morning of the luna de miel, Patricia, the acolyte, would serve up desayuno prepared by Madelsy, Diosa de la Cocina, who terrified all of the women in the villa which was just fine with Ellen la Hutton de la Reina because, unlike most little girls who dreamed of walking down the aisle in white, Ellen la Hutton de la Reina’s fantasy was to be forbidden from the kitchen by her own personal chef. On the first days of the honeymoon, before the family arrived, Ellen la Hutton de la Reina would emerge from her chamber and, avoiding the mysterious hallway with the bedrooms that sometimes disappeared, descend the staircase wearing her fluid silk peignoir, red to match the gown of her casamiento, and lounge by the private pool until she was called to the table. Madelsy insisted that there be cereal so there were Cheerios but there were also huevos and toast and queso fresco and arepas of all kinds and exotic fruits and fresh-squeezed juices; passion fruit, melon, naranja, guava, pineapple, mora, tomato from a tree, and, Don Fernando Mendez Borrero’s favorite, guanabana, which he mumbled when he pronounced, so it sounded like manamana.

Each day after breakfast the honeymooners (all 11 of them) would leave the villa Casa Catalina, turn left and then left again, and explore the port city with its blend of Spanish, Caribbean, and African culture. They walked single file, seeking slivers of shade, through the steamy streets of the walled city where the temperature rose to 88 degrees in the afternoons and the narrow alleys teemed with life. They passed vendors selling vibrant fruits and drinks that cost 40 million hundred thousand pesos, which was about one dollar, and dodged the old men hawking hats and beads to the gringos. They went in search of the orange home on the Calle del Curato where Gabriel García Márquez wrote Love in the Time of Cholera, and the bar, El Coro, in the old Santa Clara convent, where the great writer would sometimes go for a drink. They wandered through the Church of San Pedro Claver, named for the monk who ministered to the enslaved and was the first to be canonized in the New World. He lived in self-imposed austerity in a cell of his own, watching through his tiny window for the slave ships to arrive; in death, the saint’s body rests, encased in glass and exposed, in the sanctuary. They saw exhibits at the Modern Art museum and as part of the Biennial, Cartagena’s first, contemporary paintings and hallucinatory films juxtaposed against crumbling 16^th century walls. They walked through Getsemaní, and through the colorful flower market where the flowers were fake. They sought more shade in the arcades. In front of Plaza de la Aduana they saw the statue of Christopher Columbus and the non-Spanish-speakers learned from Don Fernando Mendez Borrero that the explorer’s patrons were not, as they had all learned in third grade, named Ferdinand and Isabella but rather Fernando and Isabel. They toured the Palacio de La Inquisición and saw the instruments of torture used to force confessions from the non-believers, although the little signs said none of the instruments was used in Cartagena. Some 800 people were sentenced to death in the name of Catholicism; no one was ever found innocent. In front of the palace now stands the equestrian statue of Símon Bolívar, who eventually freed the country, and four others, from the grips of colonialism. And on the corner of the plaza named for the great liberator is the cathedral, partially destroyed hundreds of years earlier when Sir Francis Drake, el pirata, attacked the Spanish Main to raid it of its gold and emeralds. Cartagena remains a city of treasure where the intrepid adventurer can yet discover unearthly delights, like the ecstasy of that first limonada de coco, con licor, at the convent of Santa Teresa, now the Charleston Santa Teresa Hotel. The nectar of the gods, one learns, is attended by a carafe of white rum.

The honeymoon junta would head home, turning left and then left again, past the pastel houses with bougainvillea-smothered balconies and grand, heavy doors guarding the cool, cloistered oases within. Up they would go along the Calle del Colegio which turned into the Calle Porvenir which turned into the Calle Universidad which became, without actually turning left or, for that matter, turning at all, Tejadillo, on which was the Casa del Virrey Eslava, within which was the villa Casa Catalina. It was easy to get lost in the labyrinthine maze and the maps were confusing, but there were landmarks, like the place where they had the first limonada de coco con licor, and the place where they had the second limonada de coco con licor, and the place where they had the limonadas de coco con an entire bottle of licor up on the ramparts, above the bar that they could never get into because it was either too early or too late. In the afternoons they would enjoy siesta or swim or relax in the tepid jacuzzi for two until it was time to walk the wall to where they could see Bocagrande in the distance and watch the sun go down behind the cannons and the neon lights at the Café del Mar, where one evening a mariachi band inexplicably materialized, singing “Happy Birthday” and drowning out the disco music. Sometimes the junta simply congregated on the roof of the villa Casa Catalina, which had another tepid hot tub and a shower with tiles of parrots, and watch from there the Cartagena sunset, which was just like a Key West sunset except in Cartagena.

One evening the honeymooners, accompanied by their camarilla, went to Piazza Navona, which the Cartageneros called Plaza Santo Domingo, and drank sangria in the cobbled square where another Botero, La Gorda, luxuriates, providing backdrop for tourists who pose fondling her ample breasts and buttocks. Inside the church of Santo Domingo an angel was singing “Panis angelicus” and the reverberations of the heavenly voice took wing high above Plaza Santo Domingo, like the pigs on the night that the pigs flew in Rittenhouse Square. When the honeymooners peered inside, they saw another couple being married. Four little girls and two little boys held the bride’s flowing veil and train as she and her betrothed processed to an awaiting horse-drawn carriage strewn with beautiful flowers that seemed real and fragrant, but might have been fake because at the time the honeymooners did not know about the fake flowers. They dined at La Vitrola and heard the Cuban music and walked home past the club Isis, where the whores were, because you cannot write about the town that inspired the great writer Gabriel García Márquez without having whores in the story at least two times.

Most nights, though, they dined at home where Madelsy made empanadas and fish with coconut rice and garlic chicken and plantain and the family of Don Fernando Mendez Borrero would tell boyhood stories about how Don Fernando, without using instruments of torture but only pantomime, would scare his brother, Ricardo Mendez, and make him cry by suggesting, on a long train ride, that he was destined to marry the hideous daughter of the ghastly butcher; or how the sadistic nanny would give the children nightmares by putting them to bed with harrowing fables about Pata Sola, the one-legged woman; or how Don Fernando Mendez Borrero’s parents wanted a girl so badly, that their first-born son’s arrival in the world was greeted with all manner of pink, including, in Don Fernando’s words, a “pink baby suit” that he was required to wear.

“You can’t make this stuff up,” said Ellen la Hutton de la Reina in disbelief, to which Don Fernando Mendez Borrero replied with something unintelligible that sounded like guanabana.

One day, for lunch, Madelsy prepared Bandeja Paisa: a comida típica of beans and rice, ground beef, chorizo, plaintain, arepas, avocado, lime, and a huge platter of chicharrones.

And another day, over the misgivings of Don Fernando Mendez Borrero, the honeymooners partook in a boat excursion. With the assistance of Eva Mendez the haggler of extraordinary prowess and the translation abilities of Gustavo Andrés, they negotiated some kind of fare, boarded a questionably seaworthy vessel that at least appeared to be floating, palliated their qualms via the procurement of a plastic bag of beers, and pummeled across the waves for the better portion of an hour until the water turned Caribbean blue. Still floating, the charmed boat anchored in the surf of Playa Blanca and her passengers waded ashore where they were immediately accosted by the native mujeres with the strong hands who proffered unsolicited massages and dubious happy endings. The honeymooners walked on the white sand beach and swam in the pristine blue sea and drank limonadas de coco con licor and sat at a long picnic table in the shade where they ate a lunch of freshly caught fish, cooked over broiling open coals by the slow-moving ladies behind the huts. Don Fernando Mendez Borrero ate everything on his plate, even the bones of the fish, even the tail of the fish.

“Donde va la cabeza, sigue la cola,” said Don Fernando Mendez Borrero.  Where the head goes, the tail follows.

“Guanabana,” replied his bride.

On the last night there was a feast: carne and cerdo and pollo cooked on the spit on the rooftop. Potatoes and more plantain and wine and corn on the cob. After dining afuera, the revelers downed shots of aguardiente—firewater. Afterwards, they left the villa, turned left and left again, and went to El Coro for one last limonada de coco con licor. They shared a table with the Austrian brothers, Hans and Franz/Silvio Berlusconi, and because there was live music, they danced and danced until the music stopped. On the way home they paused in the Calle del Curato to take art photos in front of the orange home of Gabriel García Márquez who, they were starting to suspect, was not, as they had read somewhere, such a great writer after all, just a very good note taker.

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 At the end of one week, the honeymoon was over. Don Fernando Mendez Borrero and his bride were sad to return to Philadelphia, but their compadres had visited Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree for Cartagena, an exhibit at the Bienal, and tied their deseos to the tree, wishing the happy couple 100 years of wedded bliss. Also, there was one small saving grace: It was possible for Don Fernando Mendez Borrero and Ellen la Hutton de la Reina to take a shower before boarding their plane home. It was a Friday, yes, but, thankfully, it was not the Friday before Easter. Everyone knows if you shower on Good Friday you will turn into a fish. Pigs may fly and donkeys may catch on fire but no one on their honeymoon wants to turn into a fish.