House on the Lagoon

by Rosario Ferré

  Quintín loved going with his mother early in the morning to the chapel on the other side of Water Bridge, at the entrance to the lagoon. It was one of the few buildings Pavel had built that were still standing. Buenaventura never went with them: he liked to open the heavy, iron-studded doors of his warehouse at La Puntilla himself and was usually at his desk at seven, when his employees arrived. Quintín was only eight but he remembered this time of his life clearly. He was happy: the other children hadn’t been born yet and he didn’t have to share his mother with them. Mass was the one time of day when he was alone with Rebecca. He would walk with her down Ponce de León Avenue holding hands, and together they’d jump over the rain puddles from the night before.

  At that early hour the lagoon was shrouded in mist and the vessels coming into San Juan seemed to float in the distance like ghost ships. As they entered San Juan Bay, their wailing horns reverberated through the windows and woke people up, just as they do today. The haze seemed to seep through everything, giving the lagoon a fantastic air. The royal palms that grew around the lagoon’s edge were plumed mermaids standing on their tails; the black boulders the Spaniards had dropped at the entrance to the bay to keep pirate ships away were fierce dogs baring their fangs at the enemy. Everything seemed possible to Quintín at that hour: Buenaventura might go back to Spain to fight alongside his Fascist friends, and then Rebecca would belong only to him.

  The only section of Pavel’s house Buenaventura didn’t order destroyed was the terrace. The contractor said it might weaken the foundations of the new house, so the terrace was left standing and was made part of the Spanish Revival mansion. Ignacio was born in 1938, a year after they had moved into the new house. Patria and Libertad followed soon after, in 1939 and 1940, respectively. Rebecca bore her frequent pregnancies patiently, seemingly reconciled to her fate. But she was exhausted. She put away her dancing shoes and her poetry books and slowly faded from view.

  QUINTÍN

  ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON QUINTÍN made a disconcerting discovery. He was in the study reading Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Romans when he needed to look up a word in Latin. He went to the bookcase to take out the Latin dictionary, a two-volume affair bound in red leather, and he came upon a manuscript hidden behind it, in a tan folder tied with a purple ribbon. He read the first few pages quickly, then sat down in amazement on the study’s green leather couch. He knew he didn’t have time to examine all the manuscript before Isabel came back from the market, so he put it back carefully in its hiding place. Around two in the morning, when Isabel was sound asleep, Quintín got up quietly from bed, returned to the study, and took the folder from the back of the shelf. He sat in front of Rebecca’s ornate desk and began to read with intense concentration. The manuscript had no title, but the first page read: “Part One: The Foundations.” There was also “Part Two: The First House on the Lagoon”—eight chapters in all.

  Quintín remembered saying to Isabel long ago that it would be an interesting project to write down the story of both the Mendizabal and the Monfort families. They had been so young, so idealistic! He didn’t want Isabel to be just another bourgeois housewife; he wanted her to amount to something, so he could be proud of her. Isabel wanted to be a writer, and being a historian himself—he had a master’s degree in history from Columbia University, although life had forced him to travel a different road—he thought they could embark on the project together.

  History is one of fictions most important quarries, he had told her, imagination being the other important source. He was at her disposal with whatever historical information she needed to write her autobiographical novel. He could help her with the research, he said, and leave the literary part to her. But Isabel had let the matter drop; after writing a few chapters, she hadn’t done any more.

  Some of the pages were yellowed; others looked relatively fresh, as if they had been typed recently. Quintín had thought it curious that since they came back from Manuel’s graduation at Boston University, Isabel had been asking him so many questions about the Mendizabal family history. He had answered as well as he could and had seen her take some notes, but he hadn’t given the matter much thought.

  As he read on, Quintín began to feel uncomfortable. The manuscript was an authentic effort at writing fiction; Isabel definitely intended it as a novel. But she had made up incredible things about his family and left out much of what had really happened.

  “The Pizarro Mendizabals had always been successful merchants before they turned into soldiers,” she said in the chapter “The Merchant Prince,” and it was from Don Francisco Pizarro that they inherited their uncouth heraldry: a warlord beheading a hog with his short sword. What a way to turn things around, Quintín thought. The Mendizabal coat of arms had a chevalier hunting a wild boar, not beheading a hog. In the Middle Ages the Spanish nobility used to hunt to keep in good shape while they awaited the moment when they would wage war against the Moor, and this was what Quintín’s great-great-grandfather had done. But Isabel had altered everything. She was manipulating history for fiction’s sake, and what was worse, she was putting words into his mouth as if the false information had come from him.

  Quintín was dumbstruck. How could Isabel write such things about his parents? At first he was angry, but then he began to see the humor of it. If she’s been writing this all along, he told himself, Isabel must hold the record for wives who have shared the same bed with their husbands for years and still have managed to keep secrets from them!

  Some of the allegations Isabel made were truly shocking. She accused Buenaventura of being a German sympathizer during the First World War, then implied that his mother had been secretly in love with Milan Pavel, the Czech architect. Her description of Rebecca taking a stroll with Pavel by Alamares Lagoon beneath her lace parasol as she talked him into building them the house, and the scene of the kiss in the spring’s shed, would have been romantic if it weren’t so preposterous, almost as preposterous as Rebecca dancing naked on the terrace for her artist friends—something he never witnessed. What Isabel had written was absurd; it was impossible to take seriously.

  “Writing lies means writing lies,” he had once heard a famous author say. And yet that wasn’t always so. Many writers had a rich imagination; they could make everything up from scratch without having to resort to personal experience. Isabel simply hadn’t learned to apply Turgenev’s advice: an author must cut the umbilical cord that binds him to his story.

  On the other hand, all writers interpreted reality in their own way—and that was why Quintín preferred history to literature; literature wasn’t ethical enough for him. There were limits to interpretation, even if the borders of reality were diffuse and malleable. There was always a nucleus of truth, and it was wrong to alter it. That was why Quintín didn’t consider writing a serious occupation, like science or history.

  Isabel’s lack of professionalism bothered him even more than her fantastic fabrications. She was a truant, a brain picker, an intellectual pickpocket! She had unscrupulously plagiarized the historic material he had given her—she could never have written the chapters without his help—and yet she never acknowledged it. Not only had he confided to her with naïve sincerity the story of his family; he had given her all the historical background she needed.

  She owed him the picturesque story of how Rebecca had met his father when she was sixteen, for example, and of how she chose him to be King when she was Queen of the Antilles. She also owed him Milan Pavel’s story; Isabel could never have found out about the Czech architect on her own. Quintín had been an admirer of the man and had collected information about him for years. No books about Pavel had been published, and Quintín had come by his material through interviews with the owners of Pavel’s few houses that were still standing. The owners of these houses were all friends of his family. Would they have talked to Isabel Monfort about Pavel? Would they have bared their family secrets to her? He didn’t think so. She wasn’t a Mendizabal by birth; she belonged to San
Juan’s bourgeoisie by marriage, and people tended to be clannish.

  Not content with her plundering, Isabel had blatantly altered Pavel’s story. Her description of the famous architect as a Bohemian Count Dracula who went about the city with his black silk cape fluttering in the wind was ludicrous. True, Pavel was a scoundrel, but he was a refined scoundrel. Quintín had seen photographs of him wearing starched white linen pants and white suede shoes. Isabel had also suggested that Milan had returned Rebecca’s favors, and had become infatuated with her himself, building the house on the lagoon to please her. The whole story was a sham and yet perhaps there was a seed of truth to it. Perhaps Rebecca would have been happier married to someone like Pavel.

  Isabel had made some inexcusable mistakes. Some of them were silly; for example, pretending there were hot-dog stands in 1917, and that Buenaventura had eaten a hot dog on the day he arrived in San Juan. Quintín laughed again. No one knew for sure when hot dogs had arrived on the island, but he doubted it was before the Second World War.

  A more serious error was saying that Puerto Rico’s siege by German submarines had taken place during the Great War, when actually it had happened during the Second World War. Von Tirpitz’s plan for an invasion remained a dream, an insubstantial report in the archives of Kaiser Wilhelm II. It wasn’t until 1942 that Nazi submarines roamed Caribbean waters. But Isabel needed to invent the siege of Puerto Rico in 1918; the German submarine blockade was important for her development of Buenaventura’s supposedly Fascist sympathies. She had consciously altered the facts of history to serve her story.

  Quintín didn’t feel guilty about reading the manuscript; he felt he was doing the right thing. He was discovering something important about Isabel and was examining his family’s history in a way he’d never done before. It was true, Rebecca had sometimes been unhappy in her marriage. But to suggest that she had been in love with Pavel was a big leap. His father had been a difficult man; he had a vile temper and Quintín had had a hard time getting along with him as a child. But he was a generous provider and a kind parent. With time Quintín had come to understand Buenaventura better, and now that he was middle-aged, he could fully appreciate his father’s goodness. His mother and father had been happy and unhappy together, as is usually true of any marriage.

  By Chapter 8, Quintín had ceased to be amused. His mother had been a beautiful, delicate creature, both spiritually and physically, and he resented Isabel for ridiculing her. Rebecca was an accomplished poet and her literary salon had been a success in the San Juan of the twenties. When Quintín was born, she had given up her artistic career and had devoted herself to him. She hadn’t ignored Quintín, and he couldn’t remember at all having been relegated to the cellar when he was a child. Petra must have spread that vile rumor; she couldn’t stand Rebecca.

  From the moment she arrived at the house Petra had wielded an inexplicable power over Buenaventura. Being a Spaniard, he found African voodoo rites exotic. He loved to hear Petra talk about her embrujos and Quintín himself joked about her hocus-pocus with his friends at the San Juan Sports Club. But somehow those embrujos had had an effect on Buenaventura. Rebecca sensed this, and she tried to get rid of Petra, but it was useless. Petra had entrenched herself in the cellar like a monstrous spider, and from there spun a web of malicious rumor which eventually enveloped the whole family.

  By four in the morning, Quintín had finished reading Isabel’s work-in-progress. He gathered up the pages, put them back in their tan folder, and tied the purple ribbon around it. Then he hid the folder behind the dictionary. He wasn’t angry with Isabel, but he was uneasy. He didn’t want to mention the manuscript to her. But he would watch her behavior closely, very closely, during the next few weeks.

  PART 3

  Family Roots

  9

  Carmita Monfort’s Promise

  QUINTÍN OFTEN CAME TO visit me in Ponce when we were engaged, and he used to stay at the Texas Motel. It was a square cement building with four furnished rooms where traveling salesmen stayed one or two days, and it stood right next to the gas station. Texaco was the first gas station to open in our town, and I remember the first time its red star stayed lit all night. It thrilled everyone in Ponce, and we were naïve enough to think it was a herald of progress.

  Quintín had no money then, but we were very happy; we looked forward to the day when we would get married. But we were going to have to wait a long time to see our dreams come true. Buenaventura was adamantly opposed to our marriage until Quintín had saved enough money to be completely independent; we had no idea how long it would take.

  That summer we were both on vacation, home from our respective schools up North. A warm, sweet-scented breeze blew from the cane fields near town, and as there was no air-conditioning, we often went to sleep without any clothes on. I was twenty-one and Quintín was twenty-four. I was going into my senior year at Vassar College, and Quintín had just finished his master’s degree at Columbia University. He worked all week at Mendizabal & Co., lowering codfish crates with a forklift from the transport trucks at the warehouse, in order to save enough money to board the público which brought him to Ponce on weekends.

  There was very little to do in the town. We would go for a stroll around the plaza in the evening or maybe to the movies, to an Ava Gardner or a Rock Hudson film. We said good night early by the iron gate. Around one o’clock, though, when everybody else was asleep, I would get up and walk barefoot to the garden. I would remove my nightgown and walk naked into the shrubbery. Quintín would be waiting for me, deep in the groves of myrtle and fern.

  More than thirty years have gone by and I can still remember our lovemaking—how we rolled on the grass under the stars, with the dogs from the house wagging their tails as if it were all a game. At the end of that summer, after returning to college, we began to see each other every Sunday in New York.

  We would meet at the Roosevelt Hotel, which had already begun to deteriorate, with its sprinklers running the length of the ceiling in dark corridors, and its stained faux-marble and electrified gas fixtures uglying its walls. The Roosevelt had an underground tunnel connecting it to Grand Central Station. It was convenient in two ways: in winter, one didn’t have to go out into the cold weather—which I hated—and relatively few people used it, which cut down on the chances of meeting anyone from home. Getting her reputation compromised was just about the worst crime a girl from a good family could commit back then, and I remember trembling at the thought of meeting someone from home in the hotel lobby. The Roosevelt tunnel was a perfect escape route: one could go in and out of New York unseen.

  As I boarded the train in Poughkeepsie I felt I was already in that tunnel. It was an exhilarating feeling. The moment I left my dormitory at school, I was already in Quintín’s arms. At Grand Central I nearly ran down the Roosevelt’s passageway, took the elevator, and entered the corridor at the end of which there would be a bed where Quintín was waiting for me. It was like walking into a maze where desire and distance melted into one. Mother, father, Rebecca, Buenaventura were all left behind, shut out equally by the intricate turns of the labyrinth. There, in that prenuptial chamber, on that nondescript mattress far from the prying eyes of family and friends, we both lost our virginity, purified by an innocent lust.

  When I met Quintín, my heart was thrown into turmoil; I lived at the very center of desire. Everything around me was confusion; only meeting Quintín in the garden in Ponce or in our hideaway in New York would soothe me. Nor did the powerful attraction I felt for Quintín ebb after the sad episode of the tenor’s suicide.

  Quintín was very good-looking; he had inherited Buenaventura’s swarthy Spanish looks. He had broad shoulders, a young bull’s neck, hazel-green eyes, and hair black as a raven’s wing, carefully combed back and dabbed with eau de cologne. The only thing that worried me was his fiery temper. The moment I saw him on the verge of anger, I’d shake my head and refuse to look into his eyes. This was to be our secret signal. Quintín had li
ved in terror of Buenaventura’s ferocious temper, and our signal was a way of preventing his own anger from surfacing. It proved effective for a while; Quintín would laugh and forget what he was angry about. In fact, it brought us closer.

  “Life is like a war,” Abby would say to me when I was growing up. “The longer we live, the more scars we carry around with us. There’s a maimed veteran hiding inside each of us; some have lost an arm, others a leg or an eye; we’ve all been buffeted by life’s blows. We can’t grow our missing limbs back, so we have to learn to live without them.”

  I believe my mother, Carmita Monfort, was responsible for my hidden wound, though she was not aware of it. When I was three years old, something dreadful happened which I’ve never been able to forget. At the time we were still living in Trastalleres—Father, Mother, Abby, and I. Trastalleres was a lower-middle-class suburb of San Juan, and it was there that Carmita became pregnant for the second time. I have a blurred recollection of the day. I was playing with my dolls under the terebinth tree which grew at the back of the house and I could feel the noonday sun on the nape of my neck. Mother’s bathroom window was high over my head and it was open; I couldn’t see her but I heard her cry out. I dropped my dolls and ran to the other side of the house, went up the stairs, and flung open the bathroom door. She was lying on the floor unconscious; a pool of blood lay on the white tiles like lacquer.

  Mother’s parents, Doña Gabriela and Don Vicenzo Antonsanti, were both from Corsica, where, according to my grandfather, there was only the sea, the soaring cliffs, and mountains covered by scrubby vegetation pared down by goats. When they were in their twenties, Gabriela and Vicenzo came to our island to visit relatives who lived near the town of Yauco. They fell in love with its velvet-green mountains, which harbored valuable coffee shrubs beneath a canopy of guamá, yagrumo, and mahogany trees. Gabriela and Vicenzo were first cousins, and to get married they had to get a Papal dispensation. Once that problem was taken care of, they were married and they worked hard as a team. Soon they owned a prosperous coffee farm on the outskirts of Yauco, where they lived.