House on the Lagoon

by Rosario Ferré

  There was something special about living in a seaport. It was as if the sea were constantly licking your wounds, telling you not to worry, not to feel disappointed. The world was out there; life and love were promises glinting on the tips of the waves. You just had to find a way to reach them. You didn’t need money for a boat ticket or anything like that; you could travel with your imagination, the sailboat of the soul.

  During one of his strolls down Luna Street, Arrigoitia saw a pink house with a curious sign over its door. The house was at the less reputable end of the street, near San Cristobal fort. It was a dilapidated neighborhood occupied by lottery vendors, prostitutes, the owners of the small cafetines and bares of Old San Juan. Arrigoitia stopped to read the sign: “Visit Tosca the Soothsayer and find solace.” Below, there was a hand with the palm divided into five sections: “emotion,” “self-respect,” “energy,” “inner strength,” and “the spirit.” Over each finger was a picture of an African saint: Elegguá, Changó, Obatalá, Ogún, and Yemayá. The Anima Sola stood at the center of the palm, a naked soul surrounded by a circle of flames.

  Arístides identified himself with the Anima Sola. He pushed aside the curtain of colored beads and entered a dark hallway. “Please take off your shoes before you come in,” said a voice from the end of the hall. It was a young voice, and there was a light-hearted sound of water coming from the cool interior. “Now take off your tie and jacket,” said the voice. Arístides looked around him, wondering how she could tell what he was wearing in the dark. There was a small altar at the end of the hallway decorated with papier-mâché flowers, with a picture of the spiritualist Allen Kardec, and over him a full moon surrounded by seven stars. He walked toward it and put his shoes, tie, and jacket on a bench in front of the altar. A door opened and a beautiful mulatto girl in a flowered robe entered the hallway.

  “The full moon is the godmother of all mayomberas,” she said, taking him by the hand. “She gives power and light to those who worship her, and helps them to find the road.” And she made him kneel in front of the image. Then she led him into a small room at the back of the house. There was no furniture; they sat on the floor, on worn velvet cushions. An incense burner released a single spiral of smoke into the room and the water in a fish tank bubbled in the corner.

  Tosca lowered her head and placed her hands before her in prayer. She had flowing dark hair which hid her face when she looked down, so that Arístides felt that he was staring into the shadows. “You don’t have to say anything,” she said. “Simply turn your thoughts loose, let them fly toward me.” Arístides was sitting in front of her. He gave a deep sigh. “Everybody has abandoned you: your wife, the governor, your friends,” Tosca whispered, still holding her hands in front of her forehead like a chapel of slender fingers. “But you mustn’t worry about it, you’ve come to the right place. I’ve had many terminally ill visitors who were worse off than you are.”

  Tosca took Arístides’s hand gently and followed the lines of his palm with the tip of her finger. She began to talk in a funny voice, as if reading from a book. “You had a good marriage for many years,” she said, still holding his hand. “But your father-in-law died, and he left orders in his will that he should be buried far away. Your wife didn’t want to be parted from him, so she took his coffin back home with her. Your daughter, the apple of your eye, is married to someone you dislike and you hardly ever see her. Loneliness can be harsh punishment, and you haven’t done anything to deserve it.” When Tosca finished, she lowered her hands slowly and gazed at him intently. Arístides just sat there, his head slumped on his chest.

  “I came to see you because I want to kill myself and I don’t have the courage,” he said. “I’ve been accused of a crime I’m not guilty of.” Tosca looked sadly into his eyes. At fifty-nine, Arístides was still handsome, with long silver hair and an imposing physique. “You’ve always wanted to be a good man,” she said. “But one man’s good is another man’s evil, and you never made up your mind about what’s good for you. You shouldn’t kill yourself until you find out.” And she put her hand on his thigh and bent over to kiss him on the mouth.

  Arístides closed his eyes. He felt as if he were dissolving into thin air, like the incense burning on the small lamp next to Tosca. All of a sudden he sensed Madeleine was near; he could almost smell her favorite orchid perfume, her peach-like cheeks. He let Tosca press him down gently on the cushions strewn over the floor. He didn’t offer any resistance as she took off her clothes and lay naked alongside him, silent and still. Her dark skin was like quail’s flesh; it was tender and at the same time tasted of wilderness, of tangled bushes and acid earth. Arístides closed his eyes and penetrated her to the farthest corner of her being. When he lay back on the bed, exhausted, he had forgotten all about Madeleine and her peach-like cheeks. He was amazed at how relaxed he felt. “Thank you, Tosca,” he said to her. “You know how to soothe a man’s soul.”

  Before he left, Tosca said to him: “Madeleine’s road was very different from yours. Come and see me once a week and I’ll show you.” She was right. After making love to his wife for thirty-seven years within the holy bonds of matrimony, loving Tosca was a liberation. Sex with her was a mystical experience, inseparable from finding one’s spiritual way in the world. Arístides began to spend more and more time with her and was truly happy for the first time in his life.

  The detention officer followed Arístides to Tosca’s house. He didn’t report the visits to his superiors, but he told Rebecca all about them. Rebecca was furious when she found out about her father’s love affair with the soothsayer; she couldn’t forgive him for taking a colored mistress. When Arrigoitia came to visit the house on the lagoon, he would sit for hours on the terrace waiting to see Rebecca, but she never appeared. Even Buenaventura, in spite of his antipathy toward Arrigoitia, was more humane. He thought the affair with the soothsayer was picturesque, and healthy besides.

  “Tosca sounds like just the right medicine for him,” Buenaventura said to Rebecca. “If she’s made him forget about his ridiculous gala uniform and about being chief of police, good for her! If a man is still alive in bed, it means he’ll be around for a while!” When Buenaventura came home from work and found Arrigoitia at the house, he would sit on the terrace and chat with him for a few minutes. He would ask Arrigoitia how he was doing and if he could help him in any way, before going up to his room to take a bath and dress for dinner. But if Rebecca walked by, she would turn her head and pretend there was no one there.

  Arrigoitia couldn’t bear to have his daughter ignore him. He was a Basque, and Basque families are close-knit. He began to act strangely. He would stop at a corner in Old San Juan and suddenly launch into a speech. He would praise statehood and independence in the same breath. “Puerto Rico will one day be the forty-ninth state in the Union,” he would say to anyone passing by, “and will thus bring greater glory to our fallen Nationalist cadets. Praised be our American Constitution, as well as our American congressmen, who one day will grant us statehood so that we can become an independent nation.”

  When Rebecca found out about her father’s eccentric behavior, she was convinced he had lost his mind. She began to badger Buenaventura, insisting that Arístides be put in a sanatorium. Buenaventura resisted for a while, but when rumors began to fly around Alamares that his father-in-law was wandering the streets of Old San Juan looking like a beggar, his clothes all ragged, and raving about the island’s political status to whoever stopped to listen, he had no choice but to acquiesce. A few days later, the sanatorium’s van with two male nurses aboard went to Arrigoitia’s house in Puerta de Tierra to pick him up, but he had disappeared. They looked high and low, but he was nowhere to be found and no one knew what had happened to him. During one of his trips to San Cristobal fort a few days later to deliver merchandise to the U.S. Army stationed there, Buenaventura noticed that Tosca’s sign had been taken down. The neighbors told him she had moved away a few days earlier, with the help of a white-haired
man who “was very tall.”

  Buenaventura never mentioned any of this to Rebecca, but whenever he heard talk about Arrigoitia’s tragic fate, he would wink and look down at his feet. He was the one who told Quintín the story of Arrigoitia’s disappearance many years later, and Quintín later relayed it to me.

  15

  Carmita and Carlos’s Elopement

  FATHER, CARLOS MONFORT, WAS more than just a cabinetmaker; he was a true artist. That’s why it was such a tragedy that he stopped working at his craft and became a run-of-the-mill businessman. He was never any good at investing large sums of money, and when Abuelo Vicenzo died and Carlos started managing Mother’s fortune, everything began to go wrong. Carlos lived for the art of carving wood. Among my earliest memories as a child are the silver swish of the handsaw, the smell of wood glue and varnish, and the coolness of turpentine when it touched my skin. The hammer, the plane, and the chisel were always near my crib, and Father used to make beautiful furniture with them.

  Carlos was thin and sallow, like many people who come from the mountains. He had spindly arms and legs, and when he was bent over a piece of wood, he looked like a water spider. Although he was born in San Juan, there was something countrified about him. He liked to dress in jeans, wore water-buffalo sandals, and talked in funny, antiquated proverbs, such as “Calma, piojo, que el peine llega” (“Be patient, lice, your comb will come”), “Entorchó la puerca el rabo” (“When the sow sticks out its tail, keep out of her way”), or “Lo fiao es pariente de lo dao” (“Credit is giveaway’s first cousin”).

  I remember watching him as he worked. He had his own style of decorating furniture with all manner of tropical blossoms: hibiscus, orchids, bougainvillea, gardenias. People admired his work: his rocking chairs, easy chairs, and side chairs were to be found in all the elegant living rooms of San Juan. His tall marble consoles were popular with the casinos and ballrooms of the period—with their baskets of pineapples and elegant palmetto leaves carved on their crest. At the society balls, girls danced gaily before his beveled mirrors, admiring their own reflections.

  Carlos married Carmita against Abby’s will, and against the wishes of Abuelo and Abuela Antonsanti, too. They were very different. Mother was taller and heavier than Father, and she had absolutely no artistic sensibility. She had large, cow-like eyes and skin like tightly packed vanilla ice cream. From the moment Abby laid eyes on her, she didn’t like her. Carmita had a smug way of sitting, with a smile on her face, as if she knew a secret that made Carlos happy.

  She was never in a hurry; she never lost her temper. When she met Carlos, she was twenty-eight (two years older than Father, and in those days almost a spinster), and she had never had a serious beau. Carmita was the youngest of six sisters, and when she met Father, the other girls were all married. They had met their husbands before Abuelo became rich. Abuelo Vicenzo did all he could to have Carmita marry someone of her own status, rather than a fortune hunter. She was a coffee heiress, he would say to her, and if she married beneath her station, she had everything to lose.

  Father and Mother met at Ponce’s fiestas patronales for the Virgen de Guadalupe. Carmita slipped out of the house for a stroll around the plaza and was standing next to the tin-horse roulette, about to bet on one of the horses, when Carlos approached. “Put a dollar on number 13,” he said. “Today is Tuesday the 13th and it should bring you good luck.” Carmita looked up in surprise. Carlos was dressed in a faded blue suit and was carrying an old suitcase in his hand. He had come to the fair to sell his furniture and had a stand nearby full of chairs and rockers. She liked his thin mustache, which spread a little wing of brown hair over his smiling lips. She bet two dollars on the yellow horse with the number 13 painted on its red saddle, and won twenty dollars.

  “It’s the first time I’ve won at anything,” Carmita said. “Tell me which horse to bet on next.” Carlos said to bet on the red horse, number 2. “Two is my favorite number, because people should never be alone,” he said. She won another twenty dollars. “How splendid!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands like a little girl. Carlos left a friend in charge of his stand, took Carmita by the arm, and they began to tour the booths together. “You and I are going to have to stay together,” she said, laughing, as she counted the money she had won. “You’re definitely bringing me luck.”

  A little later, a man walked up to them selling papier-mâché masks for Vegigante costumes from a tall pole he carried on his shoulder. He twirled it this way and that, advertising them over the heads of the crowd. Most were of devils, and the young people from the barrios wore them at carnival time. Carlos thought they were beautiful and put one on. It was fire-engine red, with a green horn on its chin, two yellow horns sticking out of the temples, and a blue horn perched on the nose. He started to jump up and down like a grasshopper, waving his arms and crying, “Vegigante a la bolla; Contigo, pan y cebolla!” (“Marry me tomorrow, and we’ll live on radishes with bread and onion!”). Carmita laughed till tears came to her eyes.

  “Buy me the Sad Princess,” she asked him, pointing to the mask of a girl with a sequined crown on her head and a rhinestone tear on her cheek. “Next time my parents tell me not to fall in love with a scoundrel who is after my money, I’ll put it on and cry: ‘Contigo, pan y cebolla!’ (‘Hurrah for radishes with bread and onion!’).”

  The next day Carlos went to see about a truck to take the furniture he hadn’t sold at the fair back to San Juan. He then went to the Línea Cofresí station, at Plaza Degetau; the público would be leaving at one o’clock. Carmita was waiting for him, still wearing her princess mask, her blond hair braided in neat tresses. In her right hand she carried a small suitcase, and in her left a large bunch of honeyberries. “One has to eat what’s available,” she said, winking at him and smiling. “Coffee has to be ground and paid for before we can drink it, but honeyberries grow free by the road all the way from Ponce to San Juan.” Carlos took the suitcase and they boarded the público together.

  Abby couldn’t understand what Carlos saw in Carmita. She reminded her of a Raggedy Ann doll, with her long braids and her sad way of laughing at everything as if she were five years old. “She’s a nitwit. If she lives with us, she’ll have to earn her keep, and she can’t cook, clean, or sew. All she does is comb her hair and sleep until eleven in the morning. We can’t afford to take in a woman like that.”

  So the next day Carlos moved his bed to the workshop and took Carmita to live with him. He didn’t ask her to do anything at all. He just liked to look at her. “Her skin reflects the light in a special way,” he said to Abby. “She helps me to see things differently. I can carve much better when I have her around.” Carmita sat naked on one of his chairs all day long, watching him work, her hair flowing like honey over the back seat as she brushed it. They were very happy together. Abby, and Abuelo and Abuela Antonsanti, had to accept Carmita and Carlos’s affair post facto, long before they finally decided to marry.

  I was born in 1932, when we were still living in the workshop of Trastalleres, which my parents turned into a home. We lived there for almost ten years, and when we moved to Ponce, we were still a close-knit family. I’ll never forget the day we walked into the beautiful house on Aurora Street. None of us except Carmita had seen anything like it before. Abby had lived very simply after she left the farm in Adjuntas, and when she entered the living room at Aurora Street and saw the Beauvais tapestries, the chairs and settees upholstered in blue damask, the chandelier that hung like a huge chrysalis from the ceiling, her black eyes narrowed to granite points. “Porvou que ça dure!” she said, shaking her head reproachfully as she quoted the words of Napoleon’s mother, Letizia, when she learned that her son had crowned himself Emperor in Paris. Carlos managed to calm her down. “Never look God’s gift in the mouth, even if you don’t agree with His methods,” he said. “Just enjoy it while it lasts.”

  We went into the kitchen and Abby asked the cook to make us some rice and beans, as well as empanadas and pionono
s, my favorite ripe-plantain pies. We took the silver, china, and crystal from the pantry’s cupboard and had a banquet that very day. But the real feast came when we walked into the library, where Abuelo Vicenzo kept his collection of books. Abby and Father loved to read, and I took after them. At the dining-room table, we would talk about music and literature for hours. Abby always said that a family that reads together stays together, and it probably would have been true if it hadn’t been for Carmita’s confounded hobby.

  I loved Father deeply, but he was a weak man. Maybe that’s why I can’t remember what he looked like. When I try to picture him, I see a faded photograph; sadness has washed away the sharp contours of his face. He could never say no to Mother—no matter how harebrained her requests. If Carmita wanted to spend a fortune on beauty creams, Danish chocolates, or French perfumes, it was fine with him. He was always eager to please her, as if she were a child, and at first he thought it amusing when she started to sneak out of the house to gamble in San Juan’s elegant casinos.

  After Abuela Gabriela made Carmita got rid of the baby, Carmita began to gamble more and more. At four o’clock every afternoon she would begin to feel restless, as if Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse” had taken hold of her. She would hurry to the corner, hail a taxi, and have it take her to the Continental Club, the only casino in San Juan that was open during the day. She enjoyed the Lady Luck Afternoons, when until eight in the evening a lady got six chips for every dollar, instead of three. She met all kinds of women there, housewives running away from unhappy marriages, widows bored with their lives and afraid to travel by themselves, prostitutes looking for an early customer. Carmita was running away, too, though none of us could ever figure out what she was running away from. She lived in a fantasy world; reality was the roulette table. Between the “faitez vos jeux” and the “rien ne va plus,” everything was possible: trips to Europe, Dior’s latest fashions, Tiffany jewels—all the privileges she had had to give up when she married Carlos and moved to his workshop.