The teenager Javier, a family friend in the Caiseas neighborhood of Mayagüez, often took old Gabriel out to the patio which overlooked the Caribbean, out towards the Dominican Republic. The patio was beside a pasture where Gabe once kept a small flock of sheep. That corral was now paved over. The old man too seemed frozen in time, like the jungle over which his wife Marta had concrete poured, once Gabriel was no longer in shape to fight it back. He could not speak, or move, and was in the endgame of progressive supranuclear palsy. But he listened attentively, and seemed to find ways to make his thoughts known.

Andrés, a Humanities professor who lived in an apartment below the family’s hilltop homestead, could hear Gabriel’s mute savage cries. He talked to Marta, the matriarch, from time to time, about her abiding love for Gabriel, and his ability to communicate without speaking. He also came up to the patio to speak with Javier, and began piecing the old man’s story together.

For those on Caiseas who revolve around Gabriel, he is dying sun that still has a gravitational pull. Everyone seemed intent on pulling their own kind of stories out of him, of framing the patriarch in a particular way.

His wife Marta is the resident goddess of this world that Gabriel built during his prime. She controls virtually every facet of his existence. There is nothing he does, sees, hears, or tastes that is not predetermined by his wife, it seems.

Marta likes to read to Gabriel, her angel, from her red Bible. Sometimes it is the erotic poetry of the Song of Songs. Sometimes Marta chooses a passage that seems to speak directly to Gabriel’s current condition:

“Would that I were as in moons of yore…

as I was in the days of my prime

…and now my life spills out,

days of affliction seize me.”

As the years passed, Marta confessed to Andrés, she sometimes asked herself: would the depth of their relationship have been possible without money? After Gabriel was confined to a wheelchair, she wondered: could the endurance of her affection be sustained without the financial resources which he had put at her disposal?

A certain verse took on new meaning for her:

“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Her materialistic husband, Gabriel, had wanted his treasure on earth. Marta grew to believe that Gabriel was her treasure. That is where she put her emotional resources. He was absent enough to where she was able to keep a certain romantic distance, over the years.

When you’re young, you think that love will last forever. Then come Hard Times. These can intensify, and endure, leaving one to identify with the heart-rending words of Job:

“For I hoped for good and evil came.

I expected light and darkness fell.”

When his health deteriorated, Marta took ownership of the situation. This is what you have been given, she would remind herself. The loss of such a vibrant and loving husband might have seemed like a caprice of the Creator, and cruel and unmerited punishment. But as Marta began to craft Gabe into a different species of a “new man,” she reached a point where she felt like this must be a part of the Creator’s master plan, and even some sort of mysterious blessing.

He is an empty shell, it seems, and Marta can fill this container with whatever content she desires. She can fill up this vessel of flesh and bones and create a new man. He cannot walk or speak, but he listens. Marta chooses the radio programs and the TV shows that they hear and watch. She chooses when and where they go to church. She hires whoever provides nursing care to Gabriel when she cannot be there, or when she simply needs a break.

One could only imagine how Gabriel felt about Marta’s Bible-reading. But he still has access to the company of men, and in their presence, Gabriel seems to be a different sort of man. He escapes Marta’s orbit when he sits with neighborhood men who care for him, or talk with each other in his presence, or attempt to elicit responses from this mute witness of bygone glory days. They pull a less sanctified script out of him.

One afternoon Andrés sees Javier taking Gabriel out on the patio, and goes to sit on the old plastic-covered futon that Marta keeps there, under a tin roof. Javier talked to Gabriel, then held his ear close to the old man’s lips, when he seemed to voice word fragments. Javier would translate to Andrés what he thought the answer to a question was.

Javier is fattish, with thick plastic glasses that make him look owlish. Javier speaks alternatively to Gabe like a friend, an ex-boss, and a child. They have known each other for all of Javier’s life.

“How old are you now, Javier, nineteen? Eighteen?”

“Sixteen,” the youth says, keeping a light touch on the wheelchair, which Gabriel keeps trying to maneuver, as if he were a boy determined to take his tricycle out on the street and then off to the freeway.

“Do you remember this place before the concrete? When Gabriel was still walking?”

“Oh yeah. Gabe used to keep sheep out here. About 10 of them.”

“To eat? Or as pets, or what?”

“To eat.”

The tallish youth casts his eyes over the concrete, with the row of ornamental trees leading down to the banana orchard. “But packs of dogs used to roam up all over this mountain. Ten or fifteen of them, together. They would kill the sheep.”

“For food? Or for fun?”

The old man mumbles a word, and it sounds for sure like a piece of the word “diversión” in Spanish. Javier doesn’t even have to lean his ear to Gabe’s mouth this time. “For fun, he says.”

A big smile crosses Gabriel’s face, pleased at being understood.

“But Gabriel started poisoning all the dogs around Caiseas. He had a reputation. Maybe he was trying to protect his sheep, but just about all the canines were cleared out.”

Javier’s dog Lucky is trying to hump Andrés’s leg. Even Gabriel seems to join in the laughter which Javier and Andrés share. Then Javier continues his bilingual tale to this Puerto Rican professor who he knows lived in the northland for eight years.

“We kids all thought that Gabriel was mean,” Javier continues. Gabriel shakes his head ruefully, not denying it, just amused that this little mocoso that he used to chew out is now talking shit about him, when he can’t say anything back.

“So the dogs all cleared out?”

“Tu sabes. Gabriel had more than sheep, there were chickens and other animals running around.” Gabriel has wheeled himself to a gate opening west, down to the concrete slope running beside the banana grove, next to Andrés’s apartment, and on down to the blue Caribbean. “This used to be a wild mountain.”

He takes Gabriel away from the gate, which he seems capable of opening if left alone. Javier looks back toward his house, behind which his grandmother still lives, in an older house of her own. His family sells white pit bulls, $125 a shot, which is what Boricuas on this hill use for protection nowadays.

“Mi abuela says that the drunken soldiers used to stumble all over the hill. They came up off the ferry. They would climb the trees behind her property, so that they could look down into the yard and see the girls playing there—her granddaughters showing skin in the sun. Grandad used to keep a mosqueta.”

“Did he ever shoot anyone?”

“No. But earlier, my bisabuela says, there were Dominicans fleeing up into these hills. They would just leave their canoas on the beach, and try to disappear up into the forest. One of them raped a girl in the neighborhood. My grandmother and great-grandmother were always very afraid. That’s why grandad always kept his musket loaded, which had been passed down to him by his Dad.”

“Sounds like Gabriel tamed the mountain,” surmises Andrés.

“I guess you could put it like that.”

“And then the mountain tamed him.” Andrés pauses to contemplate this scenario—probably something he read while in grad school. He shifts gears for the sixteen-year-old caretaker who conveys a certain mercenary instinct. “There’s still stray dogs all along Mani beach. But you don’t see any packs of dogs up here. And the drunken soldiers have gone somewhere else, verdad?”

“Yes, Mom says that things have calmed down a lot since Gabriel and Marta came up here.” Javier eyes the young profe Marta still calls “el vecino,” the neighbor. “Even more so since Marta took over. No Dominicans, no drunken soldiers, no stray dogs.”

Gabriel smiles beatifically, as if Javier is a praise song singer. This is how he wants to be remembered, Andrés mused. Marta fashions him as her angel, but his preferred legacy is of a harder, rougher-edged sort of man who could bend a mountain to his will, and clear out a space of peace and security for the women, children, and lesser men who lived in his wake.