Willemstad

Diary, Saturday 15th of February 1997: A long walk. Through Punda, right over to Otrabanda and back again. I tried to walk over the huge Juliana Bridge, which rises out of the internal lagoon like a large rainbow made of steel and concrete and dominates the skyline as a flourish of rhetorical modernity. I wasn’t allowed to. Several urgent signs urged anyone on foot to return, with hefty fines for being caught up there. The reason was plain. Suicide by fall from a high structure, the high-flier of modernity, many curaçaoans had used the bridge to transcend the city and sacrifice themselves at its feet. Then I walked back, through Otrabanda, loving the roofscape as I descended from my bridge, all these tiled roofs with their brightly coloured walls, back into Punda over the Koningin Wilhelmina Brug (Older Queen, older bridge) into Fleur de Marie, the urban shanty town of Willemstad , along Scharloo and back through Pietermaai. Exhausted.