House on the Lagoon

by Rosario Ferré

  When I finished my part, there was a short burst of applause. I did a grand jeté and exited toward the side. I didn’t go backstage, however. My throat was tight with anxiety as I watched the stage from the wings. Estefanía, totally ignorant of the Firebird’s true identity, began the adagio with passionate brio. She was in top form, dancing with masterful ease; she looked happy and relaxed in the Firebird’s arms. We were all supposed to know the choreography of the other dancers by heart, so that in case of emergency we could serve as understudies, and it didn’t take me long to realize that the sequence Estefania was dancing was something totally new. I had never seen it before. It was much more complicated choreography than anything we had rehearsed at the studio. More than classical ballet, it looked like a mating dance, a splendid rendition of the attraction the female wields over the male.

  Estefanía and the Firebird were one with the music; it filled them completely. Estefania wove her snow-white arms around the Firebird’s neck, and his flame-red cape spilled over her shoulders and enveloped her in its blaze. When they finished dancing, I was on the verge of fainting, and the theater seemed about to collapse from the thunderous applause. I lost track of how many times the red velvet curtain rose and fell as Estefania and the Firebird took their encores. They had completely forgotten about me. No one asked me to share in the standing ovation, so spectacular was the last duo.

  Yet I had earned my place in the limelight, so I walked boldly out onstage. I took a quick bow standing next to Estefanía and the Firebird, but I could see it wasn’t me the audience was applauding. I blushed, took another bow, and exited immediately. Estefanía and the Firebird took three more curtain calls, and finally the curtain came down for the last time and the stage went dark. But some people went on clapping. Suddenly a long whistle rose from the left side of the orchestra, where Tony’s friends and relatives were seated, and the theater went silent.

  “God bless our great Tony Torres,” someone cried out. “Today he’s brought great honor to Machuelo Abajo!”

  At that moment an invisible hand pulled a lever backstage and the floodlights came up again; the curtain rose. Estefanía and the Firebird were still standing in the middle of the stage. Only the Firebird had taken off his mask and Professor Kerenski was kissing Estefanía on the mouth; he was kissing her and she was letting him kiss her, as if there was nothing she could do to prevent it. The audience, which had begun to file out of the theater, stopped in its tracks and stared at the couple onstage. At least ten seconds must have gone by while Estefanía and Professor Kerenski stood there kissing, deaf to the booing, whistling, and stomping which soon reached a crescendo as people began to turn back—especially Tony Torres’s friends, who were furious, crying out that The Firebird had been a sham, that Kerenski had deceived them, that the ballet had been a cruel impersonation: Tony had never been given a chance to dance the second act.

  His friends crowded together at the foot of the stage and began to throw shoes at Professor Kerenski, handbags, umbrellas, cigarette cases, whatever they could find in their handbags, yelling that he was a cheat and a liar, that he had led everyone to believe he was giving Tony Torres the star role when he had planned to take his place from the start. But it was as though Kerenski and Estefanía couldn’t hear them; they went on kissing in front of everyone, the floodlights pinning them down like insects, wrapped in the blazing feathers of the Firebird’s cape.

  After the recital Abby walked me home without saying a word. Neither Mother nor Father had come to the theater to see me dance, and it was just as well. When we got home, I locked myself up in my room, but Abby came and knocked at my door. She brought me a glass of milk and a piece of pound cake she had just baked and put it on my night table. “Now you can eat everything you want,” she said. “You won’t starve yourself to death because of that preying vulture. Thank God you weren’t the one to fall into his arms tonight, because right now I’d be in jail for smashing my umbrella over Kerenski’s head. That’s what I felt like doing when I saw poor Estefanía Volmer in her white-feather dress, helpless as a dove in his clutches.” I couldn’t say a word. I simply put my head on her shoulder and cried.

  I never went back to the Kerenski Ballet School or saw André again. He was accused of child molestation by several students at the school and had to leave the island soon after. Estefanía’s parents sent her to live with an aunt in Worcester, Massachusetts, until the whole thing blew over. When she returned to Ponce some years later, she was married to a yoga grand master, and they opened the first Sri Pritam Academy in town. She was as reckless and happy-go-lucky as ever. She used to bathe naked at the public beach with her husband and meditate in the lotus position as the sun went down. Once the police put them both in jail for indecent exposure, but being a Rinser Volmer, Estefanía didn’t stay there very long. Tamara kept the ballet school going by herself, and in time she managed to establish a solid tradition of classical ballet in Ponce. Several of her pupils have gone on to be internationally known stars, and today she is worshipped as their beloved ballet teacher. Tony Torres, on the other hand, vanished from sight. He never went back to Machuelo Abajo, and no one ever heard of him again.

  18

  Vassar College

  AFTER THE KERENSKI EPISODE Abby and I became very close. At least twice a week I went with her to the Silver Spoon, one of the slums of Ponce, where she taught children to read and write, and taught them skills like sewing and cooking as well. One day she wrote to the president of a new Kodak plant that had just opened in Ponce, asking him to donate twenty Polaroid cameras for the children of the poorer neighborhoods. He replied that he was sorry he couldn’t accommodate her: he couldn’t donate his competitors’ cameras. But he was sending her twenty Brownie cameras as a gift, with fifty cartridges of Kodak film.

  Abby thought teaching slum children to take pictures of their surroundings might be useful. She had them take photos of trash cans with hungry cats perched on top. The garbage, of course, was ugly, but the cats were beautiful, because they were so alive. The children might also photograph stray dogs. The Silver Spoon was full of them; all one had to do was go to the butcher and get a few large beef bones, and soon a dozen dogs would be milling around. Abby thought all mongrels were special. She had three of them at our house in Ponce, named Fly, Flea, and Tick. They were brown, yellow, and white, respectively, with muzzles black as tar and scruffy coats. Abby insisted they were more intelligent than purebreds and also more grateful, because they knew you had saved them from the dogcatcher and they owed you their lives.

  Life could be transcendent even in the most squalid surroundings, and the contrast of the children’s smiling faces with the abject poverty around them was excellent artistic material. Abby sent the children to take pictures of Ponce’s huge municipal sewers, which emptied near the Silver Spoon, and had them pose inside the cement cylinders, as if they were playing at an amusement park. When they finished their photographic excursions, Abby picked out the best shots and showed the kids how to crop the pictures at a photography lab. Then she sent the pictures to a photo contest in the States which she had seen advertised in The New York Times, and the Silver Spoon children won first prize. Several of those children went on to become professional photographers, founding the first school of photography in Ponce.

  Four years after the Kerenski episode, in 1950, I graduated from the Ponce Lyceum. I had been accepted at Vassar College, and Abby had promised to send me there so I wouldn’t brood about my failed dreams of becoming a dancer.

  One evening, a few weeks before I was to go away to college, Abby and I sat in our living room poring over the Sears catalogue. I had picked out a handsome green trunk studded with brass nails, six pairs of shoes, three sweater sets, two wool skirts, a camel’s-hair coat, a pair of black rubber galoshes, and an oilcloth raincoat—and had written it all down on the pink order form at the back of the book. Stores at home didn’t carry any of these items, but thanks to the Sears catalogue we now had access to them,
and a lot more besides. During the forties and fifties, Sears had no stores on our island. Sears wasn’t a place, it was a state of mind; ordering from the Sears catalogue was like ordering from heaven.

  There was a Sears catalogue in every middle-class home in Ponce at that time. Like most families on the island, ours was divided politically. Carmita and Carlos were for statehood, whereas Abby was defiantly Independentista. But we all liked to browse through the Sears catalogue. Having it at hand was reassuring—proof that Puerto Rico was an inseparable part of the United States. We weren’t like Haiti or the Dominican Republic, where people still hadn’t heard of the telephone and kept food fresh in wooden crates with blocks of ice instead of in General Electric refrigerators. Thanks to the Sears catalogue we had the same access as the people of Kansas and Louisiana to the latest inventions and home appliances, and we could import them from the States without paying taxes. The cardboard boxes and crates came by ship from “el Norte” and took months to get to the island, but when you opened them up, you felt the invigorating cool of the United States trapped inside like a breath of fresh air against your face.

  Our family’s Sears catalogue was always on the living-room table, and we used to thumb through it and dream of the wonderful things we’d never seen. When I was a child, I once ordered a beautiful Madame Alexander doll for Christmas. There were no Madame Alexander dolls in Ponce; dolls were made of ordinary plastic or stuffed with cotton, with clumsy paste hands and feet. My Madame Alexander doll had a delicately veneered face, real teeth, and soft brown hair. She came in a brown cardboard trunk with a complete travel wardrobe, exactly like the trunk Abby ordered for me when I was about to leave for college many years later.

  Carmita purchased the latest Philips electric oven, Kelvinator clothes washer, and Electrolux vacuum cleaner from the Sears catalogue. Carlos enjoyed looking at the General Electric steel drills and automatic handsaws, and also at a special toolbox which came with all kinds of complicated contrivances for carving furniture. Even Abby liked to sit for hours with the catalogue on her lap. The section she liked best was gardening. She would read about the new revolving lawn sprinklers from Delaware, the pine-bark bird feeders from Maine, the redwood furniture from California, the golden zinnias, flame-red dahlias, and blue morning-glories from Arizona, which would never grow in the tropics but which Abby planted anyway, because she believed in the brightly colored flowers on the outside of the paper envelopes full of seeds. Looking through the Sears catalogue, Abby was tempted more than once to renounce her Independentista ideals, and vote for statehood, just like Carmita and Carlos. But she didn’t.

  I felt a great deal of sympathy for independence in my youth, perhaps because I was so close to Abby. When I saw how contradictory Abby’s point of view was, however, I didn’t know what to believe. She wanted the island to become independent for moral reasons, and in this I agreed with her wholeheartedly. She felt Puerto Rico was a different country from the United States, and that asking to be admitted to the Union as a state wouldn’t be fair to the U.S., or in the long run to us. In a way, it would be like deceiving the American people, who had treated us well. But Abby also put great store in progress, and cherished her American passport as if it were a jewel.

  In Puerto Rico we’re all passionate about politics. We have three parties and three colors we identify with: Statehood and the New Progressive Party are blue, Commonwealth and the Popular Party are red, and Independence is green. Politics is like religion; you are either for Statehood or for Independence, you can’t be for both. Someone has to be saved, someone must burn in hell, and if you’re for Commonwealth you’re floating in limbo. People become so fanatical at election time that they are capable of doing away with their opponents for the silliest of reasons. During the last election campaign, for example, an Independentista in a Barrio Canas basketball game was found with a flagpole buried in his back, an American flag still attached to it, because he didn’t take his cap off when they played La Borinqueña, the Puerto Rican national anthem. I hate violence—I’m not a violent person at all, and this kind of thing horrifies me. That’s why I like to think of myself as apolitical, and when election time comes around, I don’t like to take a stand. Maybe my indecision is rooted in the Sears catalogue; it goes back to the times I sat as a child in the living room of our house in Ponce with the catalogue on my lap, wishing for independence and at the same time dreaming about our island being part of the modern world.

  Many people believe that commonwealth is transitory. It’s probably the most convenient status for us, but it can’t last forever. People want to have a clear idea of who they are; they like to see things in black-and-white, signed and sealed at the bottom. The purpose of a commonwealth is precisely to preserve the possibility of change. It’s the most flexible and intelligent political solution for us, but it makes others feel insecure, in danger of losing themselves. That’s why one day we’ll have to choose between statehood and independence.

  The way I see it, our island is like a betrothed, always on the verge of marriage. If one day Puerto Rico becomes a state, it will have to accept English—the language of her future husband—as its official language, not just because it’s the language of modernity and of progress but also because it’s the language of authority. If the island decides to remain single, on the other hand, it will probably mean backwardness and poverty. It won’t mean greater freedom, because we’ll probably fall prey to one of the local political caciques who are always waiting in the wings for a chance to become dictator. There’s no question in anyone’s mind that independence would set our island back at least a century, that it would mean sacrifice. But we can’t help being what we are, can we?

  The day finally arrived when I was supposed to travel to the States to go to Vassar College. I folded my new Sears clothes neatly and put them in my new Sears trunk. Abby accompanied me to San Juan in Abuela Gabriela’s old blue Pontiac and then to Isla Grande Airport. I cried as I boarded the Pan American Constellation flight which took me to Idlewild, but the minute I arrived at school, I was a different person. The four years I spent at Vassar were the happiest of my life. Fortunately, English was taught at every level of the Ponce Lyceum, so I was thoroughly bilingual and I never had any difficulty with my studies. I loved the college, with its winding pebble paths under the weeping willows, its fine departments of Greek and Latin and English literature, its brilliant professors and its liberated students. It was there I learned that Ponce, which seemed as large as the universe itself when I lived on Aurora Street, was really a very small town.

  QUINTÍN

  TWO WEEKS HAD GONE by since Quintín had found Isabel’s novel-in-progress in the secret compartment of Rebecca’s desk. He hadn’t said a word to her, but he had been unable to stop thinking about it. In the early hours of the morning, he would steal back to the study, the small bronze key in hand, to see if there were any new installments, but he was disappointed each time. The folder was still there, but no new pages had been added. On the fourteenth night, when he took it out of the hidden drawer it seemed heavier, and, sure enough, there were three new chapters.

  Quintín suspected Isabel knew he was reading the manuscript. It had all been too easy; he always found the little key in the same place, at the bottom of her jewelry box, and she never woke up or complained when he got in and out of bed in the middle of the night. It was almost as if they had a secret understanding: if they both kept quiet, Isabel wouldn’t stop writing and Quintín wouldn’t stop reading.

  Quintín sighed with relief when he realized that the new chapters were all about the Monfort family. Because he wasn’t in them, he wouldn’t have to suffer at seeing himself through Isabel’s eyes. He was amazed by his wife’s perseverance. She had written the new material entirely without his help; indeed, she rarely asked him questions anymore. Her style had become more unencumbered; it flowed with a naturalness which surprised him. She was becoming a better writer as the novel progressed; she was blossoming before his v
ery eyes. The Kerenski chapters were especially well written and could probably be published alone as a short story. He had read them eagerly, conscious of the aesthetic pleasure he was experiencing.

  But his pleasure was tinged with resentment. He could have been an artist, too. After all, a good historian is as creative as a good novelist. But he simply never developed that part of himself. There were too many people to feed, too many obligations to attend to. First Mendizabal & Company and the Mendizabal tribe when Rebecca was alive, then Gourmet Imports and his own family. Like all men who were responsible heads of households, he had had to bite the bullet. He never had the opportunity to sit around doing nothing, fanning himself on the terrace as Isabel did, watching the pelicans dive into the lagoon and waiting for ideas to come to him so he could capture them in beautiful words. He felt he had been shortchanged. Creating a work of art must be one of the most satisfying experiences in life. If only he had time.

  He wasn’t bitter about his life, however; he’d always felt proud of his work. You had to be a daring spirit to be an entrepreneur, creative in a different sort of way. You had to be orderly and tenacious to keep a company going. Many of his employees had worked for Gourmet Imports for more than twenty years, and he had made it possible for them to live with dignity, earning an honest salary with the sweat of their brows so they could raise their families and educate their children. He paid taxes religiously and contributed to making the island a better place. But, in the end, nobody would remember what he’d done. The dust of anonymity would settle on his name; he would become just another cipher in the long list of citizens who had lived responsible lives. When he died, his family would rush to snatch their inheritance, and the government would take the rest.