House on the Lagoon

by Rosario Ferré

  My own family’s foibles were well known to me. Abuela Gabriela had been a feminist to the point of fanaticism; Abuelo Vicenzo had been a womanizer; Abby was a bit of a political radical; Carmita had been a compulsive gambler; Father, a born loser. Now I would get to know the Mendizabals’ shortcomings.

  Buenaventura’s bad temper was legendary. Everybody in the house on the lagoon was afraid of him. One Sunday morning the whole family went to Mass and afterwards out to lunch. When we got back to the house, we heard an infernal noise coming from the second floor. Buenaventura and Quintín ran upstairs and found the plumber, his face red with indignation and dripping with sweat. He had been unclogging one of the toilets when the family left for church. Everyone had forgotten about him. When he finished his job, he discovered that the gate at the top of the stairs was locked and he couldn’t get out. All the windows had grilles on them, so he couldn’t jump out, either. He called for help, but none of the servants in the cellar heard him. After two hours, he became desperate and began to bang the gate with a pair of pliers. When he finally saw Buenaventura and Quintín coming, he began to swear: a veritable stream of foul language spewed from his lips. Rebecca, Patria, and Libertad covered their ears and began to scream. Buenaventura was furious. He opened the gate with his key—which hung at the end of a gold chain attached to his belt—and escorted the man down the stairs and out of the house. He paid him his fee, asked him for a receipt, and when the plumber was about to leave, Buenaventura punched him and knocked him out cold. He couldn’t just let his wife and daughters be insulted like that in front of everybody, he said.

  Buenaventura was always trying to win me over in his rough, unsophisticated way. “I’m over sixty and I feel as if I were made of iron,” he said to me one day, as Petra brought in dish after dish of ham shank, rice with sausage, and pigs’ feet stewed with chickpeas. “Never pay attention to what doctors say; greasy food is really very good for one’s health.” He couldn’t understand why I was so particular about what I ate. “You’ll have to train that queasy stomach of yours,” he’d say to me. “People from Extremadura are primitive and hardy. They like to eat hearty foods because when grease burns it gives off energy, in business as well as in bed.” He was proud of his teeth, and he liked to boast he’d been to the dentist only once in his life and didn’t need a single filling. “When one is born with delicate teacup teeth like you, it’s a bad sign,” he’d say to me in jest. “It means the genes have degenerated and their owners have become too civilized.”

  Buenaventura was semiretired, and as Quintín gradually took over the business, he began to go to the office only in the mornings. He had a small dock built under the terrace, and he kept a fifteen-foot motorboat there. Sometimes in the afternoon he would invite me to go for a ride through the mangrove swamp. We would cross Alamares Lagoon, and once we entered the bayous, he would cut the motor. We’d slide silently beneath the green maze. The mangrove swamp went on for miles, spreading lazily across the horizon, seemingly without end. Buenaventura would pilot the boat from the stern, and I would lean over the prow, taking in all the beauty and mystery of that strange place. From time to time I warned him that the water was too shallow, that there was danger of running aground. “These channels are frequently used for smuggling by the people from Las Minas,” Buenaventura told me on one of our trips, pointing to a nest of huts on our right. “That’s why I always carry a .42 caliber gun hidden in the first-aid kit under my seat.” He never mentioned the fact that once he had used the swamp’s intricate waterways to bring his own merchandise illegally into the island.

  After cutting across Morass Lagoon, we would usually head for Lucumí Beach. For twenty minutes we could hardly breathe, floating over the stinking brown quagmire. Then suddenly the muddy water would clear and at the end of the mangroves we could see the white surf of the Atlantic roiling in the distance. The beach was spectacular, all golden sand dunes with miles of elegant palm trees weaving in the wind.

  There were usually several black women waiting for us on shore. Tall and strong, with onyx-black skin, they bore a striking resemblance to Petra, and I wondered if they were related to her. But I never dared to ask. They always seemed to know in advance we were coming and they seldom spoke. The minute we arrived, they started cooking for us on their coal furnaces, silently dropping the batter for the fritters into black kettles full of boiling oil. Later they offered us fresh coconut water, which Buenaventura spiked with a shot of illegal pitorro rum.

  “When I die, I want to be buried near this place,” Buenaventura confessed to me one day as we sat on the beach, eating the golden, crispy morsels. “I want to fly up to heaven on the wings of a codfish fritter and lay my head on an alcapurría when they lower me down to my grave.”

  Once we walked inland for half a mile and visited the palm-thatched village of Lucumí, where the black women on the beach lived. At one end of a single mud street with huts on either side was a solid cement building with a sign reading “Mendizabal Elementary School.” Buenaventura had donated the school to the village, and he took a special interest in having the children who graduated from it go on to study at a high school in town. One day I noticed that some of the black children coming out of school had gray-blue eyes like Buenaventura. When I asked Quintín about it, he bowed his head and didn’t say anything at first. But I persisted, and Quintín confessed his father sometimes liked taking the black women of Lucumí to the beach, where he made love to them on the sand for a few dollars. Once he had even invited Quintín to join him, but Quintín had refused. I was incensed by the revelation. Buenaventura disgusted me, and I swore I’d never go back to Lucumí Beach with him.

  When Arístides Arrigoitia died, Rebecca inherited her own money, so she didn’t have to suffer from Buenaventura’s miserliness anymore. She was always giving tea parties and luncheons for her friends at the house, and I was supposed to attend all of them. Patria and Libertad were sixteen and fifteen, respectively. They were interested in boys and had activities of their own, so I usually had to help Rebecca pour the coffee and pass the hors d’oeuvres among her guests. Each tea party meant a trip to the beauty salon and another one to the dressmaker. After six months of this, I was bored to death.

  Rebecca had been friendly toward me, but after Quintín and I were married, she ceased being affectionate. It was as if she wanted me to prove that I loved her son as much as I should. I wondered why she was jealous of me, when she herself didn’t care for Quintín. She was always caustic toward him; in her opinion, he could never do anything right. Quintín, on the other hand, never held his mother’s peevishness against her. Rebecca was on a pedestal, and if I made the slightest disparaging remark, he would immediately draw the line. “Remember Rebecca is my mother,” he’d say to me, “and she’s suffered a great deal.”

  For years Rebecca had obeyed Buenaventura and lived the spartan life he had imposed on her, but when I met her she was tired of playing the martyr. She was getting old; her skin was wrinkled like yellowed ivory. Discipline and order were no longer so important to her. She wanted to enjoy life, and for this reason she preferred the company of Ignacio, her second son, and that of Patria and Libertad, to Quintín’s.

  Ignacio was always joking and made Rebecca laugh. Quintín, by contrast, seemed morose. He had such an intense look on his face that he made Rebecca uneasy. Blond, and with sapphire-blue eyes, Ignacio had inherited the Rosiches’ northern Italian good looks. He had a cheerful personality; Rebecca had pampered him since birth. He had never lived in the cellar, as Quintín had for the first years of his life because he reminded Rebecca of happier times. And she did not let Buenaventura bully Ignacio into studying business as he had bullied Quintín, or force him to work long hours at Mendizabal & Company, lowering codfish crates into the warehouse with a forklift. When Quintín and I were married, Ignacio had just turned seventeen and was a freshman at Florida State University. He didn’t want anything to do with business, he said; he wanted to study something that had
to do with art, but he didn’t know exactly what.

  Rebecca, meanwhile, had begun to live for the body, trying to postpone its deterioration for as long as possible. She needed more servants to pamper her, she said, so Petra brought several of her nieces who lived in Las Minas to the house. Every day, it seemed, a boat would arrive from Morass Lagoon bearing one of her relatives. The boat would anchor at the small dock under the terrace and the new servants would soon be installed in the cellar. Petra then taught them their new jobs: one was to be Rebecca’s masseuse; another would do her hair and nails; a third would see to her clothes.

  One day Petra was on her knees, vigorously scrubbing the dining-room floor. “Rebecca should have gone on dancing and writing poems,” she said to her niece Eulodia, who was polishing the silver. “Maybe then she wouldn’t be so tiresome, asking silly questions like what’s the secret of youth.” Petra, in spite of being older than Rebecca, didn’t have a single frizzy white hair on her head, and Rebecca wanted to know why. “Ask your husband,” Petra said, her steel bracelets jangling as she walked by, carrying a basket full of freshly ironed sheets on her head. “It was Ponce de León, a Spanish Conquistador like Buenaventura, who went to Florida looking for the Fountain of Youth. We Africans never grow old.” And when she got together with Eulodia and the rest of her relatives from Las Minas that afternoon, I heard her laughing at Rebecca behind half-closed doors.

  I began to feel sorry for Rebecca, despite our being so different. There wasn’t a single book of poetry in the house on the lagoon; Rebecca’s library had disappeared when Buenaventura demolished Pavel’s house. One afternoon we were sitting out on the terrace when I made up my mind to ask her about her writing. “Is it true you once wrote a book of poems?” I ventured. “I’d like very much to read it.” Rebecca sat for a minute, head bowed, without saying a word. When she finally looked up, she had tears in her eyes. “How kind of you to ask,” she said. “I’d be happy to show it to you.” And she went to her room to get it.

  It wasn’t so much a book as a folder of poems, and it was just as Quintín had described it to me, with a beautiful Art Nouveau binding, a water lily carved on the cover and silver clasps on the sides. The pages were yellow and wrinkled; Rebecca hadn’t written a single line for years. I read the whole book in one night and the next day I waited until after breakfast, when everybody had left the house, to let her know my opinion. I told her how much I’d liked it. Then I delicately suggested she change an adjective here, a metaphor there. I swear I said it candidly. I was still young and inexperienced; I didn’t mean to hurt her. After all, Rebecca had never studied literature; she wrote poetry from inspiration and was ignorant of the intricacies of form. Naïvely, I thought suggesting how she might improve her verses would help us become friends.

  “You think you know so much, just because you graduated from Vassar College!” Rebecca said angrily, snatching the folder from me. “You go around with a chip on your shoulder and you don’t know a chit about life. One day you’ll come asking for my help and you’ll have to pay your dues!”

  22

  A Dirge for Esmeralda Márquez

  IT WASN’T UNTIL THE Esmeralda Márquez affair that I realized how deeply I had wounded Rebecca. The incident was important because in a way it was one of the strands in the skein of resentment that later enveloped the whole Mendizabal family. Ignacio and Quintín never felt the same toward each other afterwards, and Rebecca never trusted me.

  Esmeralda was from Ponce, and a childhood friend of mine. In fact, she’s still one of my best friends. We lived near each other when we were teenagers—her house was on Callejón Amor, two blocks away from Aurora Street—and even though Esmeralda is four years younger than I, we went to the same teenage parties and picnics. She had also been in the Kerenski Ballet School and had danced in the corps in Swan Lake at our recital at La Perla Theater.

  Esmeralda was the daughter of Doña Ermelinda Quiñones, a famous dressmaker from Ponce and the official mistress of Don Bolívar Márquez, a well-known lawyer who often mediated in sugarcane-labor disputes. Don Bolívar was married to Doña Carmela Márquez, a fat, pious woman who spent most of her day praying in church. Doña Ermelinda had been Don Bolívar’s mistress for years. He took her with him everywhere: to the Continental Club, to the Ponce Country Club, even to private parties where he knew his friends wouldn’t turn Doña Ermelinda out. This wouldn’t have been at all surprising, since in Ponce gentlemen with a certain social position often had official paramours. Doña Ermelinda was a light-skinned mulatto—and a very beautiful one, at that.

  Ermelinda was born on a small farm on the outskirts of Mayagüez, a town on the west coast of the island, famous for its needlework. Her mother was a widow with seven daughters, and by the time the youngest was eight years old, every one of them knew how to sew. They would stay up all night huddled around a gas lamp in their palm-thatched hut, plaiting, looping, and twisting thread. By morning they would have finished the most beautiful lace nightgowns, slips, and bodices that could be found in town. When the First World War was raging in Europe, German submarines had made it impossible for the United States to import lace lingerie from France. The owners of several large factories in New York and Boston then turned their eyes to Puerto Rico, which was already famous for its Mundillo pillow lace. They traveled to the island and established dozens of workshops in the interior. “Puerto Rican lacemakers,” said the garment-industry ads that appeared in the States, “had fingers as slender as flower stems, and were as fragile and sensuous as the maidens of Ghent.”

  Ermelinda was the oldest of seven sisters, and once a week she went with her mother to sell their wares at the garment factory in Mayagüez, where they were paid twelve cents for each exquisitely finished piece of underwear. Ermelinda’s mother was a responsible factory worker, and Mr. Turnbull, the factory manager, trusted her. He let her have several rolls of silk and lace to take back to the farm with her and only charged her a slight commission to work at home.

  One day Ermelinda was sitting on the sidewalk, waiting for her mother to come out of Mr. Turnbull’s office, when she spotted an old copy of Harpers Bazaar lying near the gutter. Ermelinda attended public school in Mayagüez and had been taught to read English, thanks to Commissioner Easton’s decree. She picked up the magazine and began to look through the ads at the back. One of them struck her fancy: it showed a beautiful girl with blond curly hair, getting ready for bed. She was wearing the very same silk negligee she and her little sisters had finished only three weeks before, for which Mr. Turnbull had paid her mother exactly fifty cents. It was selling for fifty dollars at a store called Saks Fifth Avenue in New York. Ermelinda couldn’t believe her eyes. She was so angry she told her mother she would never sew for Mr. Turnbull again.

  She was sixteen and very good-looking—tall and willowy, with fine features. Her eyes were the color of molasses and her skin was a light cinnamon. Her only drawback was the mat of corkscrew curls that grew on top of her head, so wild and thick and spirited there was no way to comb them into a civilized hairdo. For this reason, ever since she turned fifteen, Ermelinda wore a red turban tied around her head.

  In the nineteen-twenties, women on the island were becoming ever more conscious of the need to get out of the home. The local suffragettes, taking their cue from women on the mainland, marched in all the towns, fighting for the right to vote as well as the right to work. Needleworkers constituted more than half the labor force, but they were paid way below the minimum wage for men: six dollars a week for those over eighteen, four dollars a week for those under eighteen.

  Ermelinda heard there was going to be a needleworkers’ strike, and she decided to join it. She had read about strikes in a booklet published by the American Federation of Labor that had come her way. She went all over the island on muleback, wearing a pair of old U.S. Army pants she had acquired at the Salvation Army, and keeping dry under a huge arum leaf she held high over her head every time it rained. She began to make speeches at
meetings, urging women to organize and join the strike; otherwise, they would never amount to anything.

  One Sunday, at Plaza Degetau in Ponce, Ermelinda got up on the Firemen’s Band platform during intermission and began to make a speech. At that moment Don Bolívar Márquez rode by in his yellow Mercury convertible. His wife, Carmela, was at ten o’clock Mass in the Cathedral, and as Don Bolívar never set foot in church, he drove around in his car while waiting for her. Ermelinda was haranguing the women in the plaza to support the needleworkers’ march the following week. She accused the needle industry of paying its workers a salary of hunger and of promoting a false image of Puerto Rico in their advertising campaigns. “If the lacemakers of Puerto Rico have fingers as slender as flower stems,” she said, “it’s not because they’re born frail and sensuous like the maidens of Ghent, or any thick-witted nonsense like that, but because they have t.b. And if the children of Puerto Rico,” she would add, “can sew as daintily as elves, it’s not because they’re born delicate by nature, or any shit like that, but because they have tapeworms and are starving.”

  The striking women, said Ermelinda over the megaphone, were to travel to San Juan the following Monday, and they would march to the capitol together to press their demands, wielding their scissors in their right hands and wearing red handkerchiefs tied to their wrists. The poor working conditions of the needlework industry were to be reassessed by the local legislature, since, as part of the United States, the island would soon be subjected to the new code of conduct of the NLRA, the National Labor Relations Act, which had recently been passed in Washington.

  With her red turban glinting in the sun—she always stuck her needles in it before she made a speech—and her ample bosom resting on the rail of the platform, Ermelinda looked like an Amazon about to set the world on fire. Don Bolívar was impressed. He got out of the car and walked up to the wooden platform and waited for Ermelinda at the bottom of the steps. “Congratulations on your excellent speech,” he said with a polite smile. “As a lawyer, I’ve always been opposed to the unfair way the needle industry operates on this island. If you get to San Juan and should meet with trouble, feel free to get in touch with me.” And he gave her his card.