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.