House on the Lagoon

by Rosario Ferré

  Buenaventura landed in the port of San Juan on July 4, 1917, the same day President Woodrow Wilson signed the Jones Act, which granted us American citizenship. Luis Muñoz Rivera, the bill’s chief proponent and our Resident Commissioner, had died the year before and President Wilson, in deference to his memory, had signed the new bill with the Resident Commissioner’s gold pen. Muñoz Rivera was a poet as well as a statesman, and like many of the island’s politicians at the time, he juggled American interests with nationalist conceits, fighting for Puerto Rico’s independence on the sly.

  As Buenaventura’s ship dropped anchor in the harbor, the festivities celebrating our brand-new American citizenship were going full blast. Now each of us would have the right to an American passport, a talisman so powerful it opened doors all over the world. For nineteen years, since the Americans had landed on the coast of Guánica in 1898, we had lived in a political limbo. Spain had given us our autonomy six months before the Americans arrived, but we were never granted Puerto Rican citizenship. We still traveled with a Spanish passport, and lost it at the end of the Spanish-American War. A new document had not been issued, and for a while we were citizens of nowhere at all.

  Not to be citizens of any country, however insignificant, was uncomfortable enough. Then we were told we couldn’t travel anywhere. The greater part of our island’s bourgeoisie consisted of seafaring immigrants, people from the Canary Islands, the Balearics, and Corsica, as well as from mainland Spain and France. Some had come to the island from Venezuela, and others from neighboring Caribbean islands, fleeing the wars of independence, which inevitably brought ruin—if not death—to the well-to-do settlers. They were used to traveling freely to and from the Continent, migrating with the seasons. Travel was imperative to establishing stable commercial relations with business partners. Not having a passport meant growing poorer every year.

  For this reason, our brand-new American citizenship was hailed as a godsend, and a first-class celebration was in order. We would now have a definite identification with the most powerful country in the world, and the golden eagle would be stamped on the cover of our passport. Henceforth, we would cherish it as our magic shield: we could travel anywhere, no matter how far or exotic our destination; we had the inalienable right to political asylum at the local American Embassy; and the American ambassador would be our civil servant.

  Buenaventura disembarked from the Virgen de Covadonga and found lodging near the wharf where the ship had docked. Don Miguel Santiesteban, a longtime friend of his family who had immigrated from Extremadura some years before, owned a warehouse at La Puntilla, the harbor area where most of the merchants’ depots were. Buenaventura dropped off his satchel, put on his black sombrero Cordobés, and walked up the street to where the festivities were in full swing.

  The heat was stifling, as suicidal pelicans nosedived into the molten steel of the bay. Buenaventura walked along the harbor, admiring the Mississippi and the Virginia, steamships anchored at the dock, decorated with streamers flapping gaily in the wind. He passed the new Federal Post Office and admired the impressive pink Federal Customs House. A handsome new building, it had guava-colored pinnacles on the roof and garlands of ceramic grapefruits and pineapples decorating the windowsills. Near the Customs House was the National City Bank, which reminded him of a Corinthian temple. Several gaily painted pushcarts were parked under the huge laurel tree in the plaza, selling “hot dogs,” a snack which was evidently very popular because the line of people went around the Post Office building. Buenaventura asked what “hot dog” meant and burst out laughing when he was told. He bought one and it didn’t taste like dog meat at all; it reminded him, instead, of a cross between salami and a German wiener. Another vendor sold beer from a barrel, but it was warm and he couldn’t swallow it. He would have given anything for a glass of red wine from Valdeverdeja. He settled for a glass of fresh sugarcane juice, which he found delicious.

  As he walked on, the Atlantic glimmered at the end of the street like a jewel. He felt as if he were still on deck; the road was paved with large polished blue bricks, and for a moment it seemed to be rocking gently under his feet. A huge crowd gathered on the sidewalk and he stood on a corner to watch the Fourth of July parade go by. A lady standing near him, wearing a starched white cap with a red cross sewn on it, gave him a small American flag. “You must wave it above your head when Governor Yager arrives,” she said to him, “and call out ‘God Bless America’ as he rides by in his open convertible.” He took the flag and thanked her, doffing his hat.

  Nearby was the new capitol—still under construction—the dome of which was to be “an exact copy of the one Thomas Jefferson built at Monticello,” as someone proudly told him on the street. He looked at the corner sign and noticed that the avenue was named after Juan Ponce de León, one of the Spanish Conquistadors, and his heart skipped a beat. Several floats went by, pulled by army mules and covered from top to bottom with American flags. From them waved a chorus of beautiful girls with red, white, and blue sashes draped across their chests—the names of the States of the Union written in glittering silver dust.

  A mob of barefoot children stood cheering on the sidewalk; they were brought there from the public elementary school by the superintendent, who was dressed in black and carried a bowler hat in his hand. It was the first public school on the island, a passerby confided to Buenaventura, completely funded by the American government. Every time a float went by, the children cheered and waved their flags spiritedly, but they shouted the most when they saw Uncle Sam walk by on stilts, wearing long silk pants with red, white, and blue stripes on them, his top hat aglitter with silver stars. He threw handfuls of brand-new pennies at the crowd, and they gleamed on the ground like gold.

  Buenaventura observed everything around him with a keen eye. He had come to the island to stay, and any knowledge about his new situation would help him get settled. He noticed that the people sitting on the dais, at the foot of the unfinished capitol, and the soldiers marching down the avenue were foreigners. Most of them were blond, tall, and well-built, whereas the natives were of sallow complexion, medium height, and a delicate frame. The well-to-do had parked their open carriages and motors on the side of the avenue and were watching the parade from the comfort of their leather seats, sitting under opened parasols. They were fashionably dressed, the men in dark cloth coats and the women in white cotton percale, with intricate lace frills at the neck and sleeves. The people standing on the sidewalk looked thin and pale, as if they rarely had three meals a day. But they were in good spirits. Most of them were barefoot and wore straw hats on their heads, with the fringe turned down to shade their faces from the blazing sun.

  A tall man with a large mustache, wearing a tuxedo and top hat, was sitting next to a large-bosomed lady carrying a wide-brimmed hat with a silk cabbage rose pinned on the side. Buenaventura found out from his chatty neighbor on the sidewalk that they were the governor and his wife. A detachment of cadets marched behind the Marine band, wearing red caps with patent-leather visors and carrying their rifles on their right shoulders. They marched down Ponce de León Avenue to the beat of Sousa’s Semper Fidelis. Buenaventura liked the music immensely; he found it so inspiring he almost went two-stepping along behind them. Any nation that marched to that kind of music was bound to be optimistic, he thought. He would like very much to belong to it. The scathing heat, the screaming children—none of it would matter as long as he could be part of the brave and the free.

  His native land was very different. Spain was a decaying country; its buildings were crumbling with age and everything seemed outdated. In Valdeverdeja, water was still sold house to house from earthenware jars hauled by mules, and the villagers went around in two-wheeled carts pulled by donkeys. It seemed to him that his countrymen had been disenchanted with the world from the time of Segismundo, Calderón de la Barca’s hero, and that skepticism had sapped their spirits. They didn’t believe in anything anymore—not in the values of patriotism, not in th
e dogmas of faith. Religion was no more than a convention of respectability. But here the young men were full of spirit as they marched down the avenue; he could see it in their eyes, which shone with enthusiasm every time the cry “God bless America and America will bless you!” was heard from one of the bystanders.

  Buenaventura was still standing there watching the parade when someone announced through a loudspeaker that all citizens over twenty-one were expected to sign up as volunteers in the U.S. Army. Tables would be set up at the end of Ponce de León Avenue once the festivities were over. Suddenly people began to run here and there, calling to one another excitedly. Buenaventura thought that, despite all the hoopla about the new citizenship, the natives wouldn’t risk their skins for it, and would run home and hide under the bed. But the reverse happened. In no time at all, there was a line of several dozen young men eagerly waiting to sign up beside Uncle Sam’s portrait, and in less than three hours the quotas were filled.

  “They must have good reason to leave. I’m beginning to suspect famine on this island has been even worse than in Valdeverdeja,” he wrote to a friend in a letter he sent home the next day. “I’m amazed at the eagerness with which the young men of San Juan lined up to board the Buford, the military transport ship anchored at the wharf. In Extremadura it’s not surprising if people want to sign up in the Spanish Navy. Land there is dried-up leather, and everyone wants to leave. But this place is as green as the Garden of Eden, and no one can go hungry. One has only to squat by the roadside and shit a few guava seeds, and in no time a full-blown tree is growing there, laden with fruit and flowers. Puerto Rico must have been a miser’s paradise in days gone by, and who knows but it may still be so today.”

  Buenaventura had acquired an accountant’s certificate in Spain, but it didn’t do him much good here, because it didn’t conform to federal standards. It was proof of his experience, though, and he went searching for work in the city’s commercial district with his certificate in his pocket. As he passed by the wharf, he saw a ship loaded with casks of rum which were being thrown overboard by the crew in view of a group of government officials. He asked what they were doing and they said the cargo’s owner was abiding by the Dry Law, which had just been imposed on the island. Buenaventura marveled that the islanders should want so fervently to be good American citizens. They had been drinking rum practically from the cradle, and he didn’t see how giving up liquor was going to make them better citizens.

  Farther down the street, he came to an open circular building, a wooden arena with bleachers all around, where a cockfight was about to take place. People were placing bets and yelling, ready to pit two cocks against each other. Two men blew mouthfuls of rum into the birds’ beaks to make them more aggressive, and everyone was drinking openly. Apparently, rum was not forbidden at cockfights. The men were affixing razor blades to the spurs of the struggling fowl and they glinted in the sun like tiny scythes.

  Buenaventura had seen plenty of bullfights in Valdeverdeja. But when the men let the cocks loose and one of them in a minute trailed its innards in the sawdust, he suddenly felt like vomiting and had to leave. That evening, when he arrived at his lodgings, he wrote another long letter to his friend back in Extremadura. “Here islanders have kept many African rites alive. It’s going to be difficult to teach the Congolese and Yorubas the good manners of the Mayflower.”

  To a cousin in Madrid he remarked: “Soon this place will be a fakir’s paradise, where everybody will live on air. The present war in Europe has made the economy more precarious, but the main concern of the islanders is to prove to the United States that they can be good American citizens. Their most popular refrain at present is ‘Food can be as effective as bullets.’ They have tightened their belts dramatically, cutting down on their intake of flour, sugar, rice, and milk, and donated the proceeds to the troops fighting overseas, so that American soldiers will be better fed.

  “The sale of Liberty Bonds has been extraordinarily successful, and even public-school children have bought some of them with their penny savings. Although hungry and often dressed in rags, these islanders have managed to purchase twelve thousand three hundred and eighty-three dollars in bonds, their contribution to the defense of the powerful nation that has adopted them. Sometimes they’re so generous they remind me of Don Quixote.”

  3

  The Queen of the Antilles

  BUENAVENTURA DIDN’T HAVE A cent to his name when he arrived in the city’s old port, but he wasn’t exactly destitute. He had his good looks, and he brought with him an old parchment in which his family pedigree was inscribed. This moth-eaten document claimed he had the right to a title from his great-grandfather, a descendant of Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of Peru.

  At the time of his arrival, our bourgeoisie all descended from one exuberant family tree, and everybody was kin to everybody else through this or that offshoot. If you wanted to know who someone’s relatives were, you only had to visit your grandmother slumbering in her rocking chair, wake her up, and ask her to whisper you her secrets. Since colonial times, a clean lineage was worth a family’s weight in gold. In every town, marriages were carefully inscribed in two books, which were jealously guarded in the parish church. They were called the Bloodline Books by Spanish priests. Originally, they had been instituted to keep the blood free of Jewish or Islamic ancestry, and separate records of all white and nonwhite marriages were kept in them.

  Even though Quintín pretended not to share such absurd prejudices, I always suspected he felt the same way as the rest of his family. When he fell in love with me, this wasn’t a problem, since my lineage was clean. But Quintín’s hidden feelings would surface later, and create tension between us. In any case, at the time of our engagement, very few of our friends or relatives thought differently, which must be counted as a point in Quintín’s favor.

  When the Americans arrived on the island, the Bloodline Books were abandoned. Priests became poor and many of their records perished in random fires or during fierce island hurricanes, when the wind blew away many a leaky parish roof. But the Books disappeared also because the practice was considered unworthy of American citizens. For this reason, it was useful to have a grandmother you could ask about bygone days; she usually remembered how the Bloodline Books had read and knew exactly who might have hidden stains in his or her pedigree.

  Keeping track of these things was getting to be more and more difficult, Rebecca, Quintín’s mother, confessed to him. As the new habits of democracy gradually took over, unsoiled lineages were becoming almost impossible to find. With the exception of exclusive gathering places like the Spanish Casino, anyone who could pay for it could go to the Tapia Theater, the Palace Hotel, or the Condado Vanderbilt Hotel, and there were absolutely no racial restrictions on who could apply to the recently founded State University in Río Piedras, which was paid for with American dollars. The warm tropical breezes, the swaying palm trees, the waves which sighed and gave way to festoons of foam on the beach—everything on the island contributed to the loosening up of old Spanish customs, and eventually people forgot about the Bloodline Books.

  A balmy climate can be a dangerous seductress, Rebecca used to say to Quintín, and before long the sons of the well-to-do began to eye the bare arms and shoulders of the beautiful mulatto girls, who, following the American custom, went everywhere unaccompanied and worked where they pleased. The beauty of the quadroons, which until then was a hidden treasure, was suddenly discovered by the young men of “good families,” and there was a veritable epidemic of racially mixed liaisons on the island.

  A few well-to-do families, those who were really wealthy, like the Mendizabals, stubbornly kept to the old Spanish ways and countered the loosening up of mores with an even stricter code of behavior for their children. They urged them to be extremely careful of their friends and advised them to ask for last names, so their parents could check on pedigrees.

  These families were also influenced by our new American citizenship, but in a very
different manner. Rebecca often told Quintín how in the past many of their friends’ families had traveled by steamer to Europe for the holidays, and only a few had ever set foot in the United States. Most were born in the Old Country and still had relatives there; others owned property which had belonged to their ancestors; some even cherished the dream of returning one day, though in the end few did so.

  Once they became American citizens, rich families traveled often to the United States and began to send their children to first-class universities on the East Coast. Reaching the mainland at that time involved a complicated voyage by ship and train; airplane travel wasn’t commercialized until the end of the twenties. Pan American Clippers, which were amphibious at the time, would land in San Juan Bay, fly from there to Port-au-Prince, and then on to Santiago de Cuba and Miami. Before the Pan Am Clipper, one booked a steamship from San Juan to Jacksonville and there boarded a Pullman coach on the Florida railroad line to Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, or New York. As trains had coal engines and no showers, it didn’t matter how light the color of your skin was. By the time you arrived at your destination, you were black as soot from head to toe.

  It was during these trips to the United States that well-to-do families began to realize some surprising facts which reaffirmed their belief that the old ways were still the best, and that it was important their children abide by them. When they boarded the train at Jacksonville, for example, they learned that black passengers couldn’t travel in the same Pullman coaches as whites. As long as the train traveled through the South, Negroes had to use a different bathroom and go to a different restaurant car. This was an alarming discovery and at first these families were so amazed they couldn’t believe their eyes. It would never have happened in their country, they thought, where everyone could eat or make water in the same place. The concept of equality under law, which the new democratic regime supposedly had brought to the island and which they had so earnestly embraced because they wanted to be good American citizens, was interpreted very differently on the mainland.