House on the Lagoon

by Rosario Ferré

  Father carved his furniture in the morning, Carmita played roulette in the afternoon, and there was often little to eat on our table when dinnertime came around. Abby had to prepare stews like the ones she had learned to cook at the farm, with the yams, roots, and tubers they sent us from Abuelo Lorenzo’s land. Carmita’s hobby soon became an addiction, and she didn’t just gamble at the casino; the minute she went out on the street, she was looking for the lottery vendor, or she would go to the racing agency to bet on next day’s favorite horse. If she didn’t have any money, she would simply take whatever jewelry she was wearing to the pawnshop. She was hardly ever home, but spent the greater part of the day wandering the streets, asking people for money. Father worried about her all the time. At dinner he hardly spoke to me; it was almost as if I wasn’t there. That was when Abby insisted we move in with her. She could take much better care of me at her house than at the workshop, she said, and after that she bathed, dressed, and fed me, and took me to school every day on the bus.

  Abuela Gabriela died one day unexpectedly of pneumonia, and Abuelo didn’t want to live without her, so he went a week later. Carmita inherited a considerable sum of money, in spite of the fact that she had five sisters. Abby and Carlos were both amazed; they thought Abuela and Abuelo had disinherited their youngest child when she had married below her station. “May God bless them and keep them both in heaven!” cried Abby when she heard the news. “Now Carmita can stop complaining about how sick she is of ‘pan y cebolla,’ as she’s been doing since she met Carlos!”

  Carmita’s sisters were all married and had their own houses, so they let us move into the house on Aurora Street. Abuelo Vicenzo had long ago sold his coffee farm in Río Negro and invested the money in real estate. Mother’s part of the inheritance—several houses and some commercial properties in Ponce—needed tending, so Father closed his workshop in Trastalleres and the family moved south. From then on, he spent all his time administering Carmita’s money and ceased to be his own man.

  QUINTÍN

  SEVERAL TIMES QUINTÍN HAD been tempted to leave his own version of Doña Valentina Monfort’s story inside the manuscript of Isabel’s novel, to let her know he’d been reading it. But then he thought better of it and destroyed it. He was afraid Isabel would be angry and hide her novel somewhere outside the house—she could rent a safe-deposit box at the bank, for example, or leave it at a friend’s house—and then he’d never be able to finish reading it. That was a chance he wasn’t willing to take.

  As much as he didn’t want Isabel to know he was on to her project, he had unwittingly added a few commentaries here and there in pencil, in a tiny script which was almost invisible; perhaps Isabel had noticed them. He had thrown Doña Valentina Monfort’s story into the wastepaper basket. Perhaps she had found and read it as well.

  Every night, when Isabel was sound asleep, Quintín would creep out of bed and search the house high and low, but he didn’t find any more pages. Either she had hidden them so well he would never find them (like most men, he could barely find the socks in his own dresser drawer without her help), or she had destroyed the manuscript entirely. But what if someone else had it? He immediately rejected this last possibility. Isabel wouldn’t risk someone else’s reading it and telling him about it.

  One night, after looking in all the closets and cupboards, Quintín went back to the study at three in the morning and sat down despondently at Rebecca’s desk. It was an elaborate affair, with gilded tendrils decorating its sides and four Egyptian caryatids serving as legs. There was a secret compartment, where long ago Rebecca had hidden her own portfolio of poems. He was curious to see if they were still there, so, gingerly, he removed the center drawer and slowly put his hand in the hollow behind it. He groped around for the tiny key that was usually in the lock, but it wasn’t there.

  Quintín was suspicious, but he went back to the bedroom and lay down quietly on the bed. Isabel, as usual, went on sleeping undisturbed. The next morning, when Isabel was in the shower, he searched in her jewel chest, which was open on her dressing table, and found the tiny bronze key. Quintín left it there and finished dressing, but the following night he returned on tiptoe to the study, key in hand. Breathless with excitement, he opened the desk’s secret chamber and, sure enough, instead of Rebecca’s elaborate portfolio of poems, with its silver clasps on the side and water lily embossed on the front, he found Isabel’s tan folder with her manuscript inside.

  Quintín’s anger and disappointment vanished. She was so crafty, he thought, and in a way he admired her for it. They had always argued a lot, but people who fought a lot often loved each other very much, and he loved Isabel more than anyone else in the world. But would she really be able to write a good novel? He didn’t know. At any rate, to substitute her own manuscript for Rebecca’s poems in the secret compartment was a clever touch.

  Quintín sighed deeply and sat down on the study’s green leather couch with the manuscript in his lap. A shiver—of pleasure? anguish? he didn’t know for sure—went down his spine. The room was absolutely quiet, and dark. There was no wind in the mangroves that night; all one could hear was the gentle lapping of the waves of the lagoon against the walls of the house. He turned on the bronze lamp next to the sofa, and a bright spot of light fell on the manuscript’s first page. It was the fourth part of the novel and was entitled “The Country House in Guaynabo.” Quintín stared; it was sure to be full of appalling stories and yet it would be impossible to resist. Two of the new chapters were about the Rosich history, Rebecca’s side of the family; a third chapter was about Carmita and Carlos—Isabel’s star-crossed parents.

  As he began to read, Quintín saw himself as a child at his grandparents’ house in Guaynabo. What was Isabel going to do with him now? What metamorphoses would she make him undergo? He was sitting on his grandparents’ terrace, listening to his father argue heatedly with his grandfather, without being able to do anything about it. It was an eerie experience, reading himself as if he were someone else.

  He smiled wistfully as he turned the pages. Obviously, Isabel sympathized with his mother’s relatives more than with his father’s. Don Esteban, his great-grandfather, as well as Madeleine, his grandmother, were given a good press, whereas Buenaventura was described once more as a brute and a provincial Spanish rustic. He had beaten his wife black and blue after her enactment of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, and then had had the gall to attend Thanksgiving dinner at his in-laws’, where he complained to Don Esteban that he was unhappy because he had to pay taxes, something he supposedly never had to do in Valdeverdeja. The absurdity of the scene was hilarious. Would Madeleine and Arístides have invited Buenaventura to Thanksgiving dinner after he had beaten up their daughter? Didn’t they know? Could Rebecca have kept something like that from them? It was all a fantastic fabrication.

  Quintín was overwhelmed with curiosity. Why would Isabel portray his family that way? There was an irony underlying the whole scene which must have a definite purpose. Maybe Isabel meant his mother had been psychologically battered by his father, and wanted to show how some women reacted under the circumstances.

  But there was a grain of truth in what she said. Rebecca often put up a quiet resistance to Buenaventura’s authority, and she had been able to get away with a lot, thanks to her “dead fly” technique. It was the traditional way for a married woman to behave in those days; very different from today. Rebecca’s apparent meekness and “obedient” stance were often highly effective. Quintín was amused, remembering that whenever she acted that way, Buenaventura turned to putty in her hands. If Isabel’s purpose was to describe the tactics of married women in the past, she had been entirely successful.

  In the next chapter, “Chief Arrigoitia’s Ordeal,” Puerto Rican history was again at the center of the novel. Isabel’s Independentista sympathies clearly got the better of her, and her style grew stilted and didactic as she depended on historical data more than was necessary. What was worse, she made another historic slip: wh
en Isabel talked about San Juan Bay, she was describing the way it looks now, polluted by the huge tourist ocean liners that visit the city daily, not the way it appeared in 1937. In 1937 there was very little tourism on the island and very few ocean liners. The waters of San Juan Bay were crystal-clear, and fishermen brought in a good catch almost every day.

  Quintín and Isabel would never see eye to eye politically. Quintín was for statehood and liked to think of the United States as his real country. He considered himself not a citizen of Puerto Rico but an American citizen—a citizen of the world. “If Puerto Rico ever becomes an independent nation, like the Nationalists and Independentistas would like,” Quintín would tell Isabel, “we’ll be on the first plane to Boston, where my family still owns some real estate.”

  Quintín considered Nationalists and Independentistas a dangerous lot. Nationalism was more a faith than a political conviction, and Nationalists were fanatical. They were touchy and capricious; one day they might wake up feeling worthless and decide to shoot the President. It had happened more than once, and it might happen again. In 1950 there had been a shootout at Blair House—an attempt on President Truman’s life. A few years later, in 1954, a seamstress named Lolita Lebrón, the son of a furniture-maker named Rafael Cancel Miranda, and Andrés Figueroa Cordero—who looked more like a jockey than like a fire-spewing terrorist—had showered bullets on the House of Representatives in Washington.

  Quintín was pleased that a plebiscite was to be held on the island in five months. Puerto Ricans would finally choose whether they wanted to become a state of the Union or an independent nation. He felt sure statehood would win. Commonwealth status, which had come into existence in 1952, didn’t really count. Voting for commonwealth wasn’t going to solve anything; it would be perpetuating the status quo. Becoming a state would be the only way to put the lid on Nationalist and Independentista terrorism.

  But statehood wouldn’t resolve the language problem. Isabel had attributed his grandmother’s failed marriage to the fact that she had never learned to speak Spanish. The American governors never learned to speak it, either, and in Isabel’s opinion the Nationalist riots during the thirties and forties were in part a consequence of that situation. Commissioner Easton’s ordinance making English the official language at school seventy-nine years ago was a historical fact, and everyone agreed today that it had been a mistake. But the truth was that learning English had given the island a great advantage over its Latin American neighbors. English had made it possible for Puerto Ricans to be a part of the modern world, whereas Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti were still in the Middle Ages. Today English and Spanish were official languages in Puerto Rico, and this was so by public consent. The official use of both languages was inevitable because of the intricate way the island’s industrial and economic development was linked to the mainland. Declaring Spanish the island’s only official language—as Isabel would no doubt prefer—would cause a huge outcry. People would be up in arms, in the legal and in the business world. Quintín believed the island was well on its way to becoming bilingual, especially with the three million Puerto Ricans commuting to and from the U.S. “Today the Bronx is practically a suburb of San Juan,” he used to say, “and American Airlines is Puerto Rico’s most popular bus line.”

  By now, everyone knew what Thanksgiving was, everyone ate turkey and was thoroughly acquainted with the Pilgrims and George Washington. Would Isabel herself give up English if the island became independent? Would she have written her manuscript in English if she didn’t think English was important? If she had written her novel in Spanish and published it in Puerto Rico, why, only a handful of people would read it! But if she published in the United States, thousands would read it.

  What troubled Quintín the most was Isabel’s blatant disregard of history. For example, she described the Nationalist cadets almost as if they were martyrs. “Many of the cadets couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old,” she had written, “and they looked straight at Arrigoitia, as if daring him to fire.” This, of course, was inaccurate. People of all ages were part of the Nationalist cadets, and they were from all walks of life. They had only one thing in common: if they could let themselves be murdered in cold blood, it was because they could kill in cold blood. Governor Winship was right to insist that the Nationalists be wiped out. They were bloody fanatics as well as experienced guerrillas—just like Uruguay’s Tupamaros or Peru’s Sendero Luminoso.

  The shooting of the Nationalist cadets had taken place on Easter Sunday, 1937—nobody could deny that. But the lens through which the event was seen had been subtly altered, and the blame laid on the wrong party. That was what Governor Winship had done when he held Arístides, Quintín’s grandfather, responsible for the Nationalists’ massacre. And Isabel perpetuated the error in her manuscript.

  Arístides was a tough police chief, absolutely loyal to Governor Winship. His ferreting out of the Nationalist terrorists was hardly the reluctant crusade Isabel made it out to be; it was a heroic endeavor. He had put his life on the line, trying to establish law and order. On the morning of the parade, he went to the Mayor of Ponce’s house, got him out of bed at gunpoint, and forced him to sign a document canceling the Nationalists’ permit to hold the march. Then he went to Marina Street, where the cadets were already assembling, and showed them the document. But they refused to budge.

  Arrigoitia had been a hero in the island’s struggle for statehood, and here was Isabel, who didn’t know a chit about politics, daring to sling mud at him and stain his reputation. His grandfather would have his niche in island history when it finally became a state; he was sure of that. And how dare she describe him fantasizing about his grandmother erotically just before the shooting of the cadets! There was no way Isabel could have known what Arrigoitia was thinking at that moment, and her description certainly wasn’t like him.

  What was Isabel trying to prove? That Quintín was wrong? That she knew more about the Ponce shootout than he did, in spite of his being a historian? And why would she try to prove that, anyway? It would be impossible to respond to all the false statements Isabel had put in her novel. Such an effort would turn into a historical treatise, and he certainly didn’t have time for that.

  PART 5

  The House on Aurora Street

  16

  The Kerenski Ballet School

  ONE OF MY FAVORITE STORIES concerning my side of the family began on the day we arrived in Ponce, after my grandparents died. It was Sunday, and Father, Mother, Abby, and I had traveled in the público and got out at Plaza Degetau in the center of town. I was ten years old.

  I had never been to Ponce before, and the first thing I noticed when I stepped out of the público was the heat. The Indian laurel trees planted around the square had been trimmed to look like giant mushrooms, but they did little to diminish the sultriness that rose in waves from the pavement. A band played gaily by the firehouse; people were streaming in and out of church and strolling along the square very elegantly dressed. They milled around the marble fountain of Plaza Degetau, listening to the music and exchanging greetings.

  The Firemen’s Band was playing Puerto Rican danzas, and once in a while they worked in “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.” The bandstand was decorated with frosted accordion paper bells and tinsel Christmas trees that shimmered in the breeze. This was no puny small-town band. There were forty musicians in all—dressed in navy-blue uniforms, and wearing bright red caps with shiny patent-leather visors—and they were playing brand-new instruments, or at least it seemed so to me. Six trumpets, four tubas, four trombones, and at least a dozen clarinets and saxophones gleamed in the sun as if they were made of gold. The first thing I thought when I saw them was that in Ponce firemen must be very rich. Men strolled on the right and women on the left side of the plaza, listening to the music, and when I looked at their reflections in the tubas’ brass bells, they seemed to be gaily chasing each other in circles.

  I asked Abby if the
firemen were trying to cool down the crowd with their music, and she laughed. She said she doubted it; they were playing in honor of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who was on an official visit to Ponce and was sitting right there next to the mayor, on the dais in front of the bandstand. I liked everything I saw at Plaza Degetau: the fountain with its six bronze lions spewing water from their gaping muzzles, the stone benches with verses from local poets carved on them, the huge laurel trees whispering secrets over us.

  In Old San Juan—which was near Trastalleres—plazas were narrow and treeless. They had been used by the Spaniards for military maneuvers, and there was an austere, martial air about them. Houses were crowded together like dominoes on each side of the narrow streets. They had cramped balconies and balusters that looked like rows of matchsticks, and there were no trees to provide shade. Ponce, on the other hand, had wide streets and plazas, as if it had been built with elegant parties in mind. Houses were set comfortably back from the street; they had wide terraces in front and enclosed gardens at the back where mangoes and honeyberries leaned over the walls like dark green anemones. They were usually one story high and were painted light colors—pastel blue or peach, or ivory. It was a beautiful city. From afar, it looked like a wedding cake put out to set in the sun.

  After we tired of strolling around Plaza Degetau, we walked to Aurora Street, where I had been told our house was. As we approached it, I saw a tall building with a Greek portico in front. “That’s La Perla Theater, where the Kerenski Ballet School performs every year,” Abby said. “Our house is just a little farther down the street.”