After Madeleine and Arístides were married, they stayed on in the Guaynabo country house with Don Esteban. Arístides was a capable man. After his marriage he went to work in his father-in-law’s steamship company, but he also joined the local police force as a part-time volunteer officer. He had a mystical approach to politics and saw Puerto Rico’s becoming a part of the United States as almost a religious crusade. Arístides found his father-in-law very congenial. Don Esteban was getting on in years and somebody had to take care of him, so there was no sense in their moving away. Madeleine kept house like no other woman Arístides had ever met. She brought two jibaritas from the mountains of Cayey to help her keep the country house spick-and-span, and taught them to mop the floors with Clorox, disinfect the toilet bowl, and scrub the bathtub. In the kitchen, her pots and pans were so bright they shone like silver, hanging on the wall. Quintín says he never saw anything like it. The contrast between Madeleine’s and Petra’s kitchens always impressed him as a child. In Madeleine’s kitchen there was an electric stove and one could eat off the floor with a spoon, the tiles were so clean. But food had no taste at all: it was always honey-glazed baked chicken, Idaho potatoes with a dab of Brookfield butter, and “squeezed cloud juice”—Madeleine’s euphemism for plain tap water—in one’s glass. In Petra’s kitchen, on the other hand, there was a coal stove with burning cow dung, and cockroaches often dove merrily into the stew, but everything tasted like a pio nono, like a bishop’s fancy blessed with a fresh sprig of basil.
At first Madeleine was afraid to have children. She dreamed of returning to Massachusetts someday, where she had had a happy childhood. A baby would be a powerful reason to remain on the island, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to establish herself permanently where she felt a little bit like a stranger. Don Esteban still owned a beautiful turreted brownstone near Boston Harbor, in the Italian quarter of the city, and he decided not to sell it in case Madeleine might someday want to go back.
Madeleine enjoyed sports. She played tennis every afternoon on the military base nearest to Guaynabo. Island women never played any sports at all, so she played with the young recruits at the base, which gave tongues something to wag about. She was an admirer of Helen Wills Moody, the first American woman tennis player to become nationally famous. Madeleine was tall and willowy, wore her skirts much shorter than women on the island, and was always in a hurry to get where she was going. She loved taking long walks by herself or driving out to the mountains in her father’s Reo, looking for wild orchids, which she would bring back with her to town.
Orchids were her hobby and she bred cattleyas, laelias, and phalaenopsis in a nursery Arístides had built for her behind their country house. Madeleine grafted them herself and created extraordinary specimens; some looked like pink-legged spiders, others like golden scorpions or blood-speckled butterflies. She liked the sense of privacy the nursery gave her; it was so quiet under the protective green canopy it felt almost like being in the mountains: one was at peace and in total control of one’s self. Arístides enjoyed orchids, too, but for other reasons. He found them erotic and liked to collect them because they made him feel as if he were surrounded by beautiful women. A few years after they were married, he bought a farm high up in the hills of Barranquitas, where he bred orchids by the dozens.
Madeleine never learned to speak Spanish. She spoke English at home with her father and with her husband, and sign language with everyone else. Even thirty-seven years later, when she finally returned to Boston, she still couldn’t speak a word of Spanish, though she understood most of it. When Arístides’s friends invited them to their house, she suffered. For the first ten minutes, everybody in the room tried to be polite and spoke mincingly in English so as not to exclude Madeleine from the conversation. Slowly but surely, however, a bit of juicy gossip would slip out, or a risqué joke or expression which could only be rendered in Spanish: “Estaba más jalao que un timbre e guagua” (He was as drunk as a skunk); or “Eramos demasiados y parió la abuela” (There were already too many of us, and then Grandma got pregnant). Then everyone would jump in, speaking Spanish like mad. They would slap each other on the back, laugh and curse and jabber away like magpies, as if they wouldn’t be able to talk again for the next fifty years. No one listened to what his neighbor was saying; people spoke for the pleasure of hearing themselves speak.
Madeleine cringed and began to inch toward the wall. She felt like a soldier caught in the cross fire, bullets whistling this way and that over her head, while she was unable to fire a single salvo. It was as if Spanish were the only way to assert one’s presence in the room: if you didn’t speak it, you simply didn’t exist, you were completely invisible. One’s tongue was almost a magic peduncle with which one reached out to touch one’s neighbor. One groped around with it to examine a face, tweak a nose, or poke into someone’s eyes and ears. Madeleine, accustomed to her peaceful life surrounded by orchids, shuddered when people were milling around her or anyone tried to touch her. Soon she was next to Arístides, pulling him by the elbow and then nudging him toward the door. Only when they were outside did she feel safe again, in control of her own mind and body.
The result of these unhappy episodes was that Arístides’s friends slowly withdrew. They didn’t want to seem impolite to Madeleine, but they couldn’t help it. The uncomfortable situation only repeated itself again and again. So they stopped inviting them to their homes, and loneliness closed in around the young couple like an iron hoop.
Quintín’s mother, Rebecca, was born two years after Arístides and Madeleine’s wedding, and this helped the marriage considerably. Arístides had wanted to have children right away, but Madeleine forced him to observe the rhythm with steely determination. The rhythm, in the opinion of the nuns of the Convent of the Immaculate Conception in Boston, was God’s law. One wasn’t supposed to use anything that thwarted Him—like prophylactics, creams, or vinegar sponges—which were all contra natura, preventing life from engendering. If one wanted not to have children, one made love only on those days when the egg had already been discharged from the uterus, flowing down the tide of life. The trouble was, one never knew for sure when this happened, and making love became as dangerous as ducking bullets. The only safe time was during the six days following menstruation, but this wasn’t always easy to observe. Once Madeleine and Arístides were spending a long vacation on the Barranquitas farm, where there was very little to do. On the seventh day they made love, and Madeleine became pregnant.
When the nuns at Auxilio Mutuo Hospital asked Arístides to come to the nursery so he could meet his daughter, he was amazed at what he saw. Thanks to her long walks, Madeleine had an easy delivery and the baby’s face was neither red nor swollen. She had Madeleine’s peach complexion and upturned nose, with a delicate golden fuzz on her head. Wrapped in her pink embroidered blanket, she looked like a little rosebud with petals still curled tight. “You never would have guessed she’s the granddaughter of a Basque highlander,” he said to the nun who held her in her arms. And kissing her on the forehead, he added, “Now I can sleep soundly, because I know I’ll have someone to take care of me in my old age.”
Arístides was overprotective of his daughter. After Quintín and I got married, Rebecca herself used to tell me about the trouble he gave her when she was growing up. When a boyfriend came to visit her in their Guaynabo home, he always sat with them in the living room and made small talk. The visitor would feel so self-conscious he wouldn’t say a word, eventually leaving the house in dejection. When Rebecca was invited to parties, Madeleine stayed home and Arístides was the one who chaperoned the young woman. Her father enjoyed following a tune and loved to dance with Rebecca, so her friends rarely had a chance to dance with her. When they did, Rebecca was so accustomed to her father that she invariably stepped all over their toes.
Arístides wasn’t aware that anything was wrong; he thought his daughter was enjoying herself as much as he was. One evening he asked Rebecca to dance with him for the
third time and she burst out crying. “Don’t you see what you’re doing, Father? If I dance with you all the time, I can’t keep step with anyone else.”
Arístides shamelessly spoiled Rebecca; he bought her everything she wanted, but in return he expected her to obey him in all things. She became a virtual prisoner; he never let her do anything on her own. When she wanted to do volunteer work at Presbyterian Hospital, he refused permission. When she was offered a job proofreading at The Clarion, San Juan’s largest newspaper, he called the owner on the telephone and pressured him not to hire her. When she wanted to visit her cousins in Boston, he wouldn’t allow it. After she graduated from high school, she wasn’t permitted to go to the university; she had to stay home and help Madeleine with the housework. Soon she was so bored she began to retreat into a fantasy world. When she turned sixteen, the ladies of the committee from the Spanish Casino fortunately paid her a visit. Who knows what would have happened to Rebecca if they hadn’t arrived with Buenaventura’s portrait in its red-velvet frame.
I suspect Rebecca’s difficult relations with her father were at the root of her advocacy of political independence for the island. I remember her telling me that when she was a child she had a stamp collection, and her favorite stamps were from France. Many of these commemorated the French Revolution and had the initials RF printed on them. As her full name was Rebecca Francisca, they were also her monogram. Blazing cannons, flying banners with cries such as “Long live the Republic!” or “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!” in blue, white, and red completed the picture. Rebecca swore that one day she would gain her freedom and fly to all parts of the world, like the letters her stamps gave wings to. “Every woman should be a republic unto herself!” she often whispered into her pillow before she went to sleep at night.
Years later, after she began to hold her literary soirées in the house on the lagoon, Rebecca’s artist friends were all Independentistas—albeit of the salon type. When they argued that the island should be a sovereign nation and cease being a territory of the United States, she agreed wholeheartedly. If she couldn’t be independent herself, she would say, at least her country should have control over its own destiny.
11
The Courage of Valentina Monfort
ABBY WAS MY FAVORITE Grandmother. She was petite, no more than five feet tall in her bare stockings, and she liked to remind you that Letizia Bonaparte, Napoleon’s mother, had been the same height. She had delicate features and her skin was as smooth as ivory. After Abuelo Lorenzo died, she always dressed in black and wore her gray hair pulled back in a knot, which made her coal-black eyes look even darker and livelier.
What I admired most was her presence of mind. She was convinced that greedy people always ended up badly. “Ambition,” she used to say to me, “is like a plague of termites. It makes inroads from father to son, from brother to brother, and before you know it, the beams of your own house are eaten through and through. Termites never sleep, they bore tunnels underground day and night until they finally reach the heart.”
Abby’s maiden name was Valentina Antongeorgi, and she was also of Corsican descent. She was born in San Juan in 1885; her father was a schoolteacher and her mother a social worker. Abby was preparing to be a nurse, but her mother died, and she had to take care of her younger brothers. She was forced to abandon her studies when she was sixteen and a sophomore in high school. The federal government had instituted health programs all over the island, teaching people the value of vaccines and modern sanitary methods, and she had planned to work in hygiene after her graduation. But she also enjoyed literature and music and took courses in both at school.
When Abby’s father remarried, her stepmother took over their house in Old San Juan, and Abby was practically relegated to the status of a servant. She had to cook, clean, and sweep the zaguán every day, because her stepmother was pregnant. The house was on San Justo Street, near the wharf. One day Abby was sitting on the balcony when Lorenzo Monfort rode by in his tilbury.
Lorenzo was a coffee planter from Adjuntas and he had come to San Juan to see about the arrival from France of a new crushing mill. One morning he rode by the house and saw Abby sitting there with a live chicken in her lap. She looked almost like a little girl, her features as delicate as porcelain. Her hands, though, were very strong, and as Lorenzo looked on, Abby took the chicken by the head, gave its neck a lightning twist, and in an instant the chicken was dead.
The next afternoon Lorenzo passed by the house again and heard someone playing the piano. He looked in through the window and saw the same girl, but this time her hands were flying up and down the keyboard as daintily as butterflies. He needed someone like that by his side, he thought, who could kill a chicken at devilish speed and play music like an angel. A few days later he went to see her father and asked for her hand. The year was 1903, and Abby considered herself very fortunate.
Abby and Lorenzo went to live at San Antonio, the coffee farm near Adjuntas which the young man co-owned with his brother. The town was high up in the mountains; the steep terrain made its houses look like eggs at the bottom of an eagle’s nest. Lorenzo was a gentleman farmer. He had studied agronomy in Barcelona and knew about all the modern inventions related to the coffee industry. He imported the latest hydraulic crushing mills from France and had the two-ton boulder of the tahona pulled up the steep hills of the farm on palm husks tied to six mules that almost burst their guts with the effort. He had several turbines made to order in the United States and used them to move the machinery which husked and polished Arabian coffee beans. The farm had ten springs which provided it with water power. Lorenzo had them channeled into an aqueduct which he set up with dozens of sluices so he controlled the force of the water as it ran down the mountain. But as he also had an artistic sensibility, he built a fountain with marble dolphins which sent water down the other side of the hill. Coffee shrubs surrounded benches which allowed one to sit under the trees and read books or just talk to a friend. One of the most valuable assets of the San Antonio were the hundred-year-old capá, yagrumo, and mahogany trees which spread their protective mantle over this arbor.
Abuelo Lorenzo had a twin brother, Uncle Orencio, who also lived on the farm. Orencio was a merchant and took care of the commercial side of the business, while Lorenzo supervised the planting and harvesting. It was Uncle Orencio’s responsibility to get the coffee beans to Adjuntas in large hemp sacks. Thanks to Orencio’s entrepreneurship, the brothers had their own mule train to carry the sacks down the steep mountain road to Ponce, which entailed considerable savings. They also had their own warehouse in Ponce’s harbor, where their merchandise could be stored for months. Orencio would wait for coffee to go up in Europe and the United States, and would sell it only when the price was sky-high.
They were identical twins and it was difficult to tell them apart. Uncle Orencio was born a few seconds before Lorenzo and considered himself the older, so he expected everyone to obey his orders. He was very different from his brother; he had absolutely no aesthetic sensibilities and didn’t give a damn whether the Arabian coffee beans “shone like drops of black gold on the palm of your hand,” as Lorenzo used to say. He made everybody work from dawn to dusk and paid his workers the same salary year in, year out.
Lorenzo was a kind man, and he didn’t agree with his brother’s policy of squeezing the last drop out of the local peasants. But he was afraid of Orencio and seldom stood up to him. He worshipped trees. He saw them as minor deities which purified the atmosphere and kept the island’s sparse soil from running out to sea. “Trees are our best executors,” he used to say to Abby when they took long walks around the farm or sat on the benches near the dolphin fountain. “They hold on to the soil. Let us plant coffee and make a living from it, and when we die they’ll make a good resting place when we’re buried under their shade.”
When Abuelo Lorenzo brought Abby to live at the farm, he thought Uncle Orencio would move away, but Orencio acted as if nothing had changed. He didn’
t move out his bed or his dresser. The only concession to privacy he made for the newlyweds was to have his meals in the kitchen instead of in the dining room, and to bathe in the cement cistern at the back of the house instead of in the enameled iron tub with griffin feet that Lorenzo had installed on the second floor after he got married. Lorenzo didn’t dare ask him to leave, though Abby would have liked him to. There were no decent lodgings around, and Orencio would have had to move into one of the peasants’ shacks or travel every day by mule to and from Adjuntas, a two-hour trip each way.
Abby was very happy with her husband. They understood each other and shared the same tastes. The house they lived in was extremely pleasant. It was two stories: the first floor served as a warehouse where the coffee ready to be sold was stored; the living quarters were on the second floor. Lorenzo lived in considerable luxury. He had his food served on delicate china, used silverware, and slept on linen sheets. He also had a Pleyel vertical piano and a small but well-provisioned library with the novels of Balzac and George Sand standing side by side—which Abby took over.
A balustered balcony was wrapped around the house like a harmonica, and Abby loved to spend time there. It was never hot and there was a magnificent view of the mountains. The yagrumo trees always seemed to be waving their shimmering leaves at her, and the African tulips sprouted tiny flames from their dark treetops. She practically lived in this gallery, and on breezy days she swore it hummed her favorite tunes.
House on the Lagoon Page 9
