Captain of the Sleepers

This is a tropical story of secrets and conflicts: familial, sexual, social, political, all intricately tangled up together in the Caribbean islands. It proceeds along parallel timelines, unfolding in the present day and in the 1940s and '50s, switching narrators at times, evoking disturbing events in which North American expatriates, tourists and Marines play key roles. It tells of love, death and a failed revolution. The novel begins starkly: "I'm in the last place on earth I'd like to be. Waiting for the last person in this life I thought I'd ever see again." The narrator Andrés has come to St. Croix to meet a man he calls the "Captain of the Sleepers," an old friend and enemy from childhood. The two men are at odds over an incident that occurred some fifty years ago. There's a secret something that Andrés saw or did not see or seemed to see, that the Captain admits, but does not admit: "It never happened. . . . Not in the way you imagine." The Captain, J.T. Bunker, is the son of a man who engineered the U.S. takeover of the Virgin Islands. His father later returned to Maine, but the Captain stayed, eking out a living by flying cargo and passengers around the region, including the small Puerto Rican island of Vieques where he got to know Andrés. Some of his passengers were actually corpses, being ferried home to be buried; bodies that the small boy's parents described to him as merely "sleepers." The history of the islands will be unfamiliar, perhaps confusing, to many North American readers, but also fascinating. Montero's lyrical prose, full of colors, sounds and smells, brings the reader into close contact with the exotic setting. When the U.S. Navy begins to expropriate land on Vieques for a bombing range, the scene moves from the camp at Montesanto, where displaced women "who'd just given birth died like flies," to the hundreds of American paratroopers practicing their jumps on the beaches to the distressing waves of dead fish, mutilated sharks, even a smashed sea turtle, that wash up on the sands from naval maneuvers offshore. Amid all the commotion, the novel centers on Andrés and his mother Estela, an enigmatic beauty who says little and never tells her own story in her own words. Readers must try to piece together the fragments other characters contribute, in order to understand Estela's complicated relationships with her son, her husband, her women friends and family, Bunker and Roberto, the doomed leader of a group of Puerto Rican nationalists. Montero's use of male narrators preserves Estela's mystery, which is perhaps the author's goal, but, as a woman reading about a woman in a book by a woman, I felt more than a little cheated of a chance to know Estela from her own perspective. The book is nevertheless intriguing, whether you read it for pleasure on the beach this summer or as an introduction to postcolonial studies when you head back to school this fall.

A pilot, a small hotel on the beach and an insurrection; from such inspiration, Montero weaves a fascinating tale of love, betrayal and the loss of innocence. Vieques is a small island off Puerto Rico, used for field exercises after World War II, the residents forced to evacuate so that the Navy can blanket their homes and land with bombs. Individual family passions mixed with a nationalist obsession, one man's unfettered lust for Estella and a jealousy that eats away at the mind, are all part of this richly evocative era embroiled in political upheaval, social change and the fanaticism of political beliefs. The novel begins in the present, but the crux of this story takes place in Puerto Rico in the 1940-50's, the author blending past and present in an exotic tapestry of myth and truth, layered in secrets and mystery. Andres Yasin has waited fifty years to confront the only man alive who may have the answers, J.T. Bunker, now eighty-three and dying of cancer. Yasin has no intention of allowing Bunker to exit this world without revealing the truth of the tragic moment that defined Andres' youth and poisoned his adulthood. One of the secrets Bunker hoards is an affair he supposedly had with Andres' mother, Estela. But there is more he seeks than the details of the affair; Andres yearns as well to learn the circumstances of his mother's death. Bunker was known in the 1950's as Captain of the Sleepers, a pilot who transported people who died on the mainland back to the island of Vieques for burial, a common practice for islanders. There was a time when Andres believed that "the corpses transported by the Captain in his small plane were travelers who had fallen asleep". Yasin reaches into memory, no longer a child, reliving the impressions from the perspective of childhood, locked in the past that haunts him. The family history is shrouded in mystery, the secrets Andres assumes J.T. will finally disclose answer only one small part of an experience that involved everyone, his father, Estela and the man she so desperately loved and Bunker. All of it came crashing down in one fated day, hopes extinguished for more than his family. As so often happens, Andres' years of rage and confusion have been misspent; the unvarnished truth isn't so easily obtained. Caught in the great human drama of revolution, Andres' family is central, but to the boy, his parents' political aspirations are irrelevant; he views all through the eyes of a child. Even as a grown man, he is unable to relinquish the hurt feelings of his youth. Forced finally to accept alternative perspectives, the story evolves, images of a time and place where personal freedom is purchased at a great cost, misconceptions perishing along the way. Yasin has pinned all his hopes on the dying declarations of an old man. The truth he uncovers requires courage, and with it, a revelation of self. Luan Gaines/2005.