En mi Viejo San Juan

En mi Viejo San Juan is the melancholy song I always hear in my mind's ear when I visit the centuries-old city with its blue cobblestoned streets, its box-like mint-green, canary-yellow and sunset-orange row houses and its famous Spanish-style balconies with cascading trinitarias in every shade of magenta, violet and white.

Una tarde partí hacia extraña nación pues lo quizo el destino, pero mi corazón se quedó frente al mar, en mi Viejo San Juan...

(One afternoon I left toward a strange nation because fate willed it so, but my heart stayed behind, looking at the sea, in my Viejo San Juan...)

Old San Juan, in gringo parlance, is always a delight to my senses. It is a tiny bustling city with thousands of people from all over the world moving to and fro, like busy busy bees entering and leaving the hive. The anachronistic cars have trouble navigating the pencil-narrow streets that were never meant for anything wider than a horse.

And there are multitudes of hungry pigeons everywhere. But the ones I like best are those who prefer to perch atop the iron statue of Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León, whose outstretched arm signals toward the Isla Grande (as the Spaniards called the larger island viewed from the islet of San Juan), which he came to settle and colonize. Those pigeons, in what I like to think is a kind of political statement, have fun pooping all over Ponce de León's likeness.

Today mi Viejo San Juan had quite the gift in store for us. My mom wanted me to accompany her to see the newly opened Galería Nacional (national, as in Puerto Rican) at the old Convento de los Dominicos that used to house the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. The yellow and white building, erected in the sixteeth century, is an architectural jewel with a large interior courtyard and perfectly harmonized arches that frame its squarish two-floored structure.

Inside, the treasures left us speechless. Some of the most famous paintings by the Puerto Rican masters of the eighteenth and nineteenth century - José Campeche and Francisco Oller - and of the twentieth as well - Myrna Báez and Lorenzo Homar - are arranged in a flawlessly conceived gallery where the perfect lighting breathes life into the paintings, keeping those of us who are there to see them spellbound and enthralled.

Another wonderful part of the experience was that most of the attendants in the gallery were young people, beaming with pride, one of them boasting a bigote de patriota worthy of the nineteenth century. And, typical of Puerto Ricans and other Caribbean peoples (which never ceases to amaze and move me), they treated us like we were their long-lost cousins, finally found.

Even the security guard started up a conversation, telling us her improbable story about a centuries-old ceiba she had heard about and gone searching for and found in the middle of a barrio in the city. "What impressed me most," she confessed, as the three of us observed with awe how the paintings of past centuries, with their bohíos and palm trees and flamboyanes, teemed with life, "was the immesurable wisdom of the tree."

How right she is, I thought. The truest measure of wisdom, whether in art or nature, is beauty. That so many here are working hard at conserving both is also the truest measure of hope.