There is also the cathedral, described in the guide books as being pink, but apparently recently painted blue. A large part of the plaza was fenced off for renovation--this is standard wherever we go. In Puerto Rico, we couldn't be sure if this was to repair the damage done by Hurricane Hugo three years ago, spruce up the place for the 500th Anniversary celebrations of Columbus, or just general upkeep.
After walking around the plaza we decided to have lunch and go on to the Tibes Indian Ceremonial Center just outside of the city. There isn't that much in Ponce itself to fill time with, and the drive from Tibes to Manati would take at least two hours. I had called my uncle Beto and arranged to call from a particular gas station on the Manati-Ciales road between 6 PM and 7 PM, and I wanted some time in Ciales before that.
We found a cafeteria on one of the side streets which served Puerto Rican food. This appealed to us a lot more than the Burger King or McDonalds on the plaza itself. Mark and I both had pastel y platano. A pastel is something like a Mexican tamale--meat wrapped in a corn meal dough, though without hot sauce. Platanos are plantains, something like bananas (there is also a non-sweet variety), only fried. Yum! And we shared an avocado salad and three Cokes. All this came to about $9 for the two of us.
After lunch we attempted to leave Ponce, got stuck on one-way streets, and eventually got out. After only one more wrong turn, we found Tibes.
On arriving we paid the $2 admission for each and started with the film about the Indians who lived in Tibes and in Puerto Rico before the arrival of Columbus. The most recent and best known were the Tainos, who were a peaceful people who went to war only when attacked by the Caribes, a very fierce and cannibalistic tribe that roamed through all the Antilles. The one characteristic object of the Taino seems to be the cemi, which is a sort of triangular stone but with two sides slightly concave and the points somewhat rounded. These represented spirits of some sort, but it's not clear how they were used.
After the film there was a guided tour (for us and one other couple). After seeing all the archaeological sites in Mexico and Peru, this one was a bit of a let-down. Even though its the major archaeological site in the Caribbean, there isn't much to see. What was discovered after Hurricane Eloise in 1975 were several batays, or ball courts, marked by stone borders rather than the high stone walls of (say) Chichen Itza. There were also some skeletons and pottery objects found. The reconstructed Indian village there is just that--a reconstruction. (Well, you can't expect grass huts to survive five hundred years, can you?) There are some petroglyphs in the stone, though they would be almost impossible to see if they weren't outlined in white paint (some by the museum and some by vandals--I'm not sure why one is more acceptable, though the vandalized ones may also have been scratched).
There were also some pottery and other objects found there, which were displayed in a small museum with bilingual labels. (Not all museums will have this, it turns out. Now that Spanish has been declared the official language of Puerto Rico, there may be even less English that there is now.)
We decided that rather than back-track to Ponce and take Route 10 (labeled as a through road) to Arecibo, we would continue up 503 (listed as a road), then take 143 to connect with 10. 503 was a road, but so steep and curved that a speed of 25 miles per hour was as high as we could get. There were signs warning of curves ahead, but they appeared to be at regularly placed intervals rather than marking any particular curves. The road was very scenic, that's for sure. What was strange was that every once in a while we'd see a cluster of houses, sometimes enough to call a small town, but often just a half dozen or so. There might also be a beverage/cigarette stand (sort of like the rural equivalent of a 7-11), but nothing more. Where do these people work? Do they drive into Ponce each day? (There's a commute you'd hate.) Do they work in nearby fields? Do they telecommute? The houses looked prosperous and there were very nice cars there, so these weren't the unemployed. (There were also no gas stations for most of the distance between Ponce and Arecibo, so people must go to one or the other to fill up at least.)
I had considered taking back roads to Ciales because it was shorter, but I decided that the through road would be faster even though longer. But, all things considered, Route 10 wasn't that much better. It was more downhill than up, which helped but would have been true in any case. I think the real 10 was under construction and we were detoured onto side roads anyway. Eventually we reached the outskirts of Arecibo and connected with Route 22, another toll road, to Manati. From there we took Route 149--marked as the same type of road as Route 503, but much wider and easier to drive--to Ciales. Ah, Ciales, my ancestral home. In fact, that's what I wanted to find--my ancestral home at 4 Palmarito Street. After driving around for about fifteen minutes hoping to hit it by random chance, I stopped and asked someone where Palmarito Street was. Who knows if it's even still there, I thought. It turned out to be only two blocks ahead of us. It is a small street, only one block long. Number 1 was clearly labeled but neither of the two houses on the other side had visible numbers. On the porch of one was an old woman, so Mark (a better Spanish speaker than I, and at times like this, more extroverted) went up and asked her where Number 4 was. It wasn't. Hers was Number 6 and the other house was Number 2. The empty space in between must have been Number 4 at one time. There was a fragment of a house still standing there, but even that post-dated my grandfather's house--it had plumbing. We explained to the woman that my father had been born there eighty years ago. She said the house had been torn down, either in 1955 or 55 years ago (I didn't quite follow, but you get the idea). She seemed to recognize the name 'Chimelis' though not from my T-shirt (maybe she couldn't read), and said the Chimelises now lived in Manati. So we must be a well-known family, because Beto later said that my grandfather had lived in Caleche the whole time after he returned from the Dominican Republic (around 1940?).
We were supposed to call my uncle Beto (actually Emerito) from a certain Texaco station. One small problem: the phone was broken there. Luckily, we found another close by and within a couple of minutes my uncle arrived.
Brief family history interlude follows, which can be skipped by people more interested in the travelogue part.
History of the Chimelis Family: My father's father (Ramon) had three wives. The first was my father's mother, Isabel. My father (Raphael, later Ralph) was the oldest, born in 1913. The next was my uncle Ramon (later Raymond). Then my grandparents divorced and my grandfather, father, and uncle moved to the Dominican Republic in 1926. Isabel remarried and had four more children, but they didn't get along with my grandfather's side of the family and I've never met them. My grandfather then married Leonor, a Dominican woman, and had two more children, Juana (later Juanita) and Francisco. Juana was born in La Romana, but Francisco was born after my grandfather moved to Santo Domingo, leaving my father in La Romana working in an office as a clerk (this was about 1927 or 1928, so my father was fourteen). Juana eventually married a Colombian, Henry Rodriguez, and moved to Hyde ParkNew York, and finally Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (Ramon married Idalia and lived in Paramus, New Jersey, and eventually Miami, Florida. Idalia's family is also large, but luckily for you I won't try to describe it.)
In 1929, when my father was sixteen, my grandfather decided he should finish his schooling (at least through the eighth grade), so he took my father back to Puerto Rico, where he arranged with a friend that my father would live with them and attend school each day, then work in the friend's office after school and on weekends to pay for his room and board. My father finished fifth through eighth grade in two years, and then (I think) came to New York City in the early 1930s. Meanwhile Leonor died (or there was another divorce) and my grandfather returned to Puerto Rico. I'm not sure at this point where Ramon and Juana were, but I know that Francisco stayed in the Dominican Republic, and in fact, my father doesn't remember ever meeting him. My grandfather returned to Manati, where he married Maria and had (in some order), Vincente (later Vincent), Emerito (later Beto), Eduardo (later Tato), Ana (later Anita), Rosin, Marinita, and Armando. I also have a semi-adopted aunt named Wendy.
Ana was raised from about age 10 up by my Aunt Juanita in Hyde Park, so I think of her more as a cousin, especially since she's only about five years older than I am. She now lives with her husband Norman and their two children in Southampton, Massachusetts, very close to where my parents live in Chicopee. Vincente has a Ph.D. in astronomy and lived in the Southwest for a while, then in Ohio (next door to the people who were my parents' landlords during the 1940s in Miami!), and finally in Melbourne, Florida. Armando died of cancer in Hyde Park, and his son was killed in a car accident that we found out about when someone at the newspaper where my brother works saw the name 'Chimelis' on the wire story and showed it to him. (It wasn't a great shock, as we had never met him, and I had met Armando only once.)
Anyway, Francisco is still in the Dominican Republic and Beto, Tato, Rosin, Marinita, and Wendy are still in Puerto Rico. Rosin is in Caleche/Ciales; the rest are in Manati. In fact, Marinita lives next door to Beto, which is convenient, because Beto's wife (whose name I never did get) broke her foot recently and Marinita is doing the cooking and housework.
(The above is all as I understand it now, and undoubtedly has errors.)
So I got to meet Beto, Marinita, and Wendy, as well as Beto's oldest son Albert and Wendy's children (no names given). Beto has another son Luis, and Albert and Luis have filled the living room with sports trophies. (Even in Puerto Rico they have problems spelling 'Chimelis'; one plaque said 'Chimelli.' I mention this because my brother's trophies also have an assortment of spellings on them.)
Unfortunately, of all these people only Beto spoke any English. (I would have expected Albert, who was about twenty, to have learned it in school, but I guess not.) While I can understand Spanish moderately well (if spoken slowly) and read it even better, my ability to speak it is below Mark's. So we ended up in triangular conversation: Mark spoke Spanish, someone responded in Spanish, I translated for Mark, etc. This allowed us to carry on a conversation, albeit awkwardly. I had hoped to do better over dinner, but when dinner was served it was just for the two of us-- everyone else had eaten earlier. We both felt very uncomfortable about this--it's bad enough to have someone cook dinner for you, but when they aren't eating with you, it can make you very uncomfortable indeed. Beto did come into the kitchen and talk for a while, but on the whole I can't say the visit went outstandingly. After dinner, Mark took a picture of all of us (except himself, of course) and we said our goodbyes. I hated to eat and run, but getting back to San Juan was going to take over an hour (longer, actually, because we got lost again!) and I've been conking out by 9 PM. I hope our early departure didn't offend them, but on the other hand, they were probably as uncomfortable as we were. (Oh, by the way, a note to my mother: Marinita puts olives and diced potatoes in her beans. And the rice here is different too--sort of shiny and a little smoother than on the mainland.)
I'm glad I met all this family, but I think I will probably not try calling Francisco. He speaks no English, and since even my father has never met him, I'm not feeling too guilty about not calling him.
(Oh, I checked the San Juan phone book and I also have a relative there, Rafaela. |
