House on the Lagoon

by Rosario Ferré

  Ermelinda kept the card, but didn’t pay Don Bolívar much mind. She had met his kind before; the sensuous lips and the lustful gleam in the eye gave him away. He wasn’t so much interested in justice as in saving damsels in distress, and Ermelinda could very well save herself. She marched to the capitol the following week, but the strikers were not able to get their petition to the legislature. The local police were waiting for them, clubs in hand, as they walked down Ponce de León Avenue, and in the battle that ensued on the capitol’s steps several women were wounded, and also a little girl. Puerto Rican legislators, bribed by the tycoons of the garment industry, had worked around the National Labor Relations Act, and the workers were not allowed to enter the building. The strike was declared illegal, and the poor conditions and low salaries in the needle industry stayed just as they were. Ermelinda landed in jail, and after two weeks of suffering indignities at the hands of her captors—she was raped twice, Esmeralda told me—she wrote a letter to Don Bolívar, asking for his help. Ermelinda was set free on bail the following day. When she walked out of La Princesa jail, he was waiting for her at the door in his yellow Mercury convertible. He drove her to Ponce himself, bought her a house in Callejón Amor, and moved in with her a month later.

  The house was small but very beautiful. It had a raised balcony with columns; acanthus leaves decorated the capitals, and a small leaded-glass oval window graced the entrance. On the glass was a gay detail: a blindfolded cupid taking aim with his bow and arrow at whoever walked up to the front door. Don Bolívar would spend three days a week with Doña Ermelinda, and two with Doña Carmela in his official residence nearby. Everybody was happy. Next to her house, Ermelinda set up a small workshop with several Singer sewing machines, opened a boutique in front named Frivolité, and plunged into her work. She was so discouraged by the needleworkers’ defeat she swore she would never bother to march for labor rights again. But she hadn’t given up the fight. Fair or foul, one day she was going to win the struggle against powerful men.

  Doña Ermelinda’s lavish bridal gowns and evening dresses soon became famous in Ponce. All the young ladies and debutantes of the town visited her home. In fact, having a gown cut and sewn by Doña Ermelinda was the same as joining an exclusive fashion academy. But it was more than that. It meant becoming part of one of the oldest professions of all: that of woman of the world. Rumor had it, moreover, that Doña Ermelinda’s ability with needle and thread went further than just good taste and a gifted sense of style. Tongues in Ponce wagged about the way her gowns made women mysteriously seductive, so that their escorts would inevitably become infatuated or fall head over heels in love with them.

  After a customer of Doña Ermelinda ordered a new gown and paid for it (in advance), she would visit the boutique several times. First she would choose the material and the design of the dress; then she would go for three mandatory fittings; and finally she would pick out the accessories: what kind of doeskin glove to wear, whether up over the elbow or daintily trimmed at the wrist, what shade to dye her dancing slippers, what type of minaudière to carry in her hand. Everything had to be harmoniously assembled; to be a fashionable woman of the world entailed a wisdom acquired through the centuries, a knowledge just as important for one’s survival as knowing when and where to invest one’s savings. In Doña Ermelinda’s opinion, a needle was as powerful an instrument of war as the lance had been for the Conquistador or the Mauser rifle for the American foot soldier during the Spanish-American War.

  Doña Ermelinda’s young clients knew each other well and would sit in rocking chairs in her living room, sipping passion-fruit juice with a nip of rum, and listening to her talk. She taught them a very important lesson, which she had learned during her tragic stay in La Princesa, San Juan’s jail. Desire, she told them softly so the servants wouldn’t hear, is the iron spike on which the world turns, the cause of its every happiness and of its every misfortune. And the way to oil desire’s spike, she whispered to them, is to tantalize men. Everything a woman did should have temptation as its final objective. If she took a bath, put French perfume behind her ears, and dabbed herself with powder mixed with cinnamon, it should be to entice a man who was worth her while. If she cinched her waistline, making her bodice so tight that her breasts seemed about to spring playfully out of her dress, or spent hours making her hairdo into a work of art, it should be to seduce a convenient suitor, one who could support her in style. A woman of the world never wasted her ammunition on penniless candidates and only let herself be approached by millionaires.

  Doña Ermelinda had three daughters with Don Bolívar, and she named the three of them after jewels: Opal, Amethyst, and Esmeralda, who was the oldest of the three. Don Bolívar had no children with Doña Carmela, so he gave his daughters everything they asked for: the best education, travel in Europe, exquisite clothes, membership in the best clubs in town. But as he was never married to Doña Ermelinda, the three Marquez girls were officially illegitimate and couldn’t use their father’s last name in their signature. Dona Ermelinda had hopes that one day this would change and Don Bolívar would do right by them.

  The girls were equally beautiful: they had inherited their mother’s willowy figure and light cinnamon skin, but only Esmeralda inherited the Márquezes’ green eyes and fair hair, which fell in waves of honey over her dark shoulders. They were so beautiful that in town they called them the three sorrows, rather than the three graces, because every young man of good family in Ponce who set eyes on them fell madly in love.

  Esmeralda Márquez met Ignacio Mendizabal in 1955, the summer Quintín and I got married, at the Bougainvillea Ball. She had come to the ball—which took place at the Escambrón Beach Club at the end of each summer—accompanied by Ernesto Ustariz, the son of a rich cattle rancher from the south of the island. Doña Ermelinda had married her other daughters to two prosperous merchants from Ponce, and wanted her oldest to marry into one of the prominent families of San Juan. Ernesto was a fine young man, and even though Doña Ermelinda had consented to have Esmeralda go out with him this once, she thought he was too much of a cowboy for her daughter. Esmeralda had told her Ernesto was studying at the university in Río Piedras and planned to go on to study law. But in the summers he worked on his father’s dairy farm from dawn to dusk, milking cows and helping the farmhands lead the animals through vats full of chemicals to kill the ticks and gnats on them. This gave him a rustic aura that Doña Ermelinda didn’t approve of.

  Doña Ermelinda chaperoned her daughters everywhere, and she planned to bring Esmeralda to as many parties in San Juan as she could that summer, so she would have the opportunity of meeting young men from the capital. Thanks to Don Bolívar’s political connections—he was a devoted Popular—they had already been invited to the Mayor of San Juan’s lechonada at Christmas, and there Esmeralda had met several of the sons of local politicians, as well as the son of the owner of La Prensa, the most important newspaper on the island. But Doña Ermelinda didn’t want Esmeralda to have anything to do with them. She wanted her daughter to meet the boys from the really good families of San Juan, the sons of the bankers, industrialists, and powerful merchants whose businesses were well established.

  The night of the Bougainvillea Ball, Doña Ermelinda sat on a chair at the back of the Escambrón’s ballroom, keeping an eye on her daughter, who was dancing a merengue with Ernesto Ustariz. Most of the men wore white dinner jackets with red carnations in their buttonholes, and from her vantage point, Doña Ermelinda recognized several of her young Ponce customers wearing her latest creations, which she had copied that season from Vogue. Esmeralda’s evening gown was the most stunning of all. It was emerald-green silk, with an off-the-shoulder cowl neck which contrasted beautifully with the young woman’s honey-colored hair, combed in an elegant beehive.

  Doña Ermelinda herself always dressed in black. Ponce’s tongues used to wag that her skirts were made of tar, better to catch the young men who fluttered around her daughters like flies. But she compensated f
or the severe look of her dresses with the elaborate turbans she wore on her head. That evening she was wearing a yellow silk one that looked exactly like a pineapple. A crowd of young people were shaking and shimmying to the beat of Rafael Hernández’s ballroom orchestra, when suddenly she noticed an aristocratic-looking young man in a black tuxedo who approached Esmeralda and cut in as she was dancing with her partner. Ernesto Ustariz was so surprised he didn’t know what to do when the young man in the tuxedo took Esmeralda by the hand and whirled her away. They sailed off together to the farthermost corner of the dance floor and soon were nowhere to be seen.

  Ernesto stalked off to the bar to get a drink, and Doña Ermelinda sat up higher on her chair, her eyes skimming the dance floor like radar beams, until she finally spotted Esmeralda’s glimmering green dress at one end of the ballroom. They made a handsome couple—both were blond and they were about the same height. The orchestra now played a tango and they looked like two skaters as they glided over the polished wood floor. Doña Ermelinda asked her neighbor at the table who the good-looking young man in the tuxedo was. His name, she learned, was Ignacio and he was Buenaventura Mendizabal’s youngest son. Doña Ermelinda’s heart gave a leap. If Esmeralda should marry Ignacio Mendizabal, who cared if Don Bolívar didn’t officially recognize his daughter and if she couldn’t use his last name as part of her signature? Esmeralda would never have to worry about such insignificant things again.

  During the rest of the summer Doña Ermelinda designed Esmeralda’s dresses with the utmost care, each more exquisite than the one before, so Esmeralda would hypnotize Ignacio as a candle will a moth. At first, Ignacio asked Esmeralda to dance with him only once in a while at parties. He was never very athletic and didn’t like to dance—he tended to be a bit pudgy because he liked rich foods. He was also nearsighted and wore a pair of round-rimmed glasses that were constantly slipping down his nose because he perspired easily. But he was very sociable and liked to tell funny stories that made the ladies laugh. At every gathering there were usually three or four lovely girls flirting with him at the same time. This flattered him, because he didn’t think of himself as handsome, but he couldn’t make up his mind about any of them. After seeing how beautiful Esmeralda looked at parties, however, he began to ask her to dance more often.

  Quintín was the first person in the family to perceive the effect Doña Ermelinda’s strategy was having on Ignacio. He didn’t know anything about Esmeralda or her family, except that she was a good friend of mine, and I decided not to tell him more than was necessary. He had met Esmeralda at one of the parties we attended that summer and was impressed by her looks, as was everyone else.

  I didn’t see anything wrong with Ignacio’s falling in love with Esmeralda. I would have welcomed her as my sister-in-law. That way she would move from Ponce to San Juan, and we could live near each other. But I couldn’t be sure how the Mendizabals would feel.

  One day Rebecca told us Ignacio was acting strange. She was sure he was seeing someone, she said. He never got back home before three-thirty in the morning, and when he did, he’d lie down on the bed without taking off his clothes, smelling the white gardenia a girl called Esmeralda had given him before she said goodbye. Rebecca spied on Ignacio every night through the keyhole, and suspected he didn’t sleep at all.

  Ignacio had always been very particular about the way his food was prepared, but lately he had become impossible. Every morning at breakfast, when Petra asked him if he wanted his eggs scrambled soft or hard, or if he wanted goat or Gruyère cheese melted over his toast, he told her he didn’t care. He didn’t want any breakfast at all, because he didn’t want to spoil the taste of mocha cream puffs he still had on his lips after kissing Esmeralda the night before. When at lunchtime Eulodia asked if he wanted his beefsteak rare or well done, his rice with red beans or white beans, he said he didn’t care; he didn’t want to forget the odor of truffled pheasant that came from Esmeralda’s armpits when they had danced the mambo at the Copa Marina the night before.

  Rebecca was near hysterics. When Ignacio went for a week without eating or sleeping, she asked Quintín to talk to him and find out who Esmeralda was.

  Quintín went to Ignacio’s room and had to wait up for him until dawn. “If you keep on like this, you’ll get sick, and you’ll never get back to Florida State University when summer vacation is over,” Quintín told Ignacio when he came home at six in the morning. Ignacio looked up to Quintín and usually heeded his advice.

  “I’m in love with Esmeralda Márquez and I need your help,” Ignacio confessed, a pleading look in his eyes. “I want Father and Mother to meet her and I don’t know how to go about it. First impressions are very important, and Esmeralda is so beautiful I’m sure, once they see her, Buenaventura and Rebecca won’t mind who her mother is.”

  “And who is Esmeralda’s mother?” Quintín asked cautiously.

  “Doña Ermelinda, a well-known fashion designer from Ponce. She’s been the official lover of Don Bolívar Márquez—a labor-relations lawyer—for twenty years. But Don Bolívar refuses to marry her, even though his wife, Doña Carmela, died, and he’s been a widower for five years. I’m afraid this might put Esmeralda in a disreputable light,” Ignacio added.

  Quintín was open-minded then; he didn’t think people living together without being married was anything extraordinary. It wasn’t until later that he disapproved of that type of arrangement. He cautioned Ignacio, however: it wasn’t wise to shock people, and their parents would undoubtedly be scandalized when they found out—especially Rebecca. Buenaventura and Rebecca had probably never heard of Doña Ermelinda or Don Bolívar. They knew very few people from Ponce—their friends were all from San Juan, and that would be to Ignacio’s advantage. Quintín told his brother to go to bed, and that he’d think about helping him.

  Quintín was more concerned about his parents’ reaction than he had let on, however. That night, when he came back to our apartment, he complained that his brother was taking an unnecessary chance with Esmeralda Márquez. There were many beautiful girls among the young people Ignacio had grown up with in Alamares, and differences in how one was brought up were often more important than differences of culture and even of language. I tried to make him look at the whole thing from a different angle. Esmeralda was a friend of mine, I told him, and I knew her very well. She was not only beautiful, she was also very intelligent. She had managed to get a student grant and would soon be attending the New York Fashion Institute. She had inherited Doña Ermelinda’s excellent eye for line and color and would probably be able to get a good job in a fashion house in the States after she graduated. If Ignacio liked Esmeralda, it was his business; there was no reason why he shouldn’t ask her out. Doña Ermelinda, on the other hand, was a very elegant lady, who would do her utmost to make a good impression on Buenaventura and Rebecca, as on San Juan society. As to Don Bolívar, it was improbable that they would ever meet him. He was an old man and never went anywhere with Doña Ermelinda.

  A few days later Quintín told his brother he was willing to help him out. Esmeralda was a sweet girl; with her blond hair and green eyes, she might convince Buenaventura and Rebecca to overlook her illicit home, of which she was the innocent victim. I was glad when Quintín decided to help Ignacio. He was still my old Quintín, the one I had fallen in love with when he came to visit me in Ponce.

  Quintín and I went to parties regularly that summer and Rebecca often let us invite friends over to the house on the lagoon. Buenaventura liked to entertain, too. He particularly enjoyed trying out new wines and imported delicacies on his friends. It was no trouble for Quintín to organize a get-together for the following Saturday. Quintín invited a good number of his friends from San Juan, and some of my old friends from Ponce, and Esmeralda Marquez was among them.

  Esmeralda and her mother arrived at the house in a black Fleetwood Cadillac Doña Ermelinda rented for the occasion, with a uniformed chauffeur at the wheel. When Esmeralda stepped out of the car, she was w
earing the most beautiful evening gown I have ever seen: the top was of Swiss embroidery and clung to her breasts like snow; the skirt was of silk organza and swirled around her like a waterfall. Right behind her came Doña Ermelinda dressed in tar-black taffeta, with a golden ziggurat sitting on top of her head. She was putting all her cosmetic wisdom to the test, and her skin looked almost pearl-white next to the opulent black of her dress.

  Ignacio introduced Doña Ermelinda and Esmeralda to both his parents. Buenaventura was enchanted. He liked exotic people and felt immediately at home with Doña Ermelinda. He shook her hand warmly, took her around the living room to have her meet his friends, then offered her a glass of champagne. Ignacio took Esmeralda by the arm, so she would get acquainted with the young people, and after a few minutes of conversation drifted off with her to the golden terrace, to show her the moon trembling over the lagoon. When Rebecca saw them holding hands, a shiver of apprehension ran down her spine. Esmeralda Márquez looked like a nice girl; she was certainly beautiful in her white dress, which made her suntan very becoming. But Rebecca had absolutely no idea who she was and had never heard the name Márquez before.

  Rebecca sat down next to a friend and began to observe Doña Ermelinda from afar. Buenaventura was showing her around the house and had taken her into the dining room, where Doña Ermelinda was busy admiring the Conquistador chairs. The dining room opened out onto the terrace, where the dance was soon to begin, and Doña Ermelinda decided to sit in one of the chairs because it offered a good vantage point. She pushed the chair to the edge of the terrace and made herself comfortable. From out of her bag she took a black lace fan Don Bolívar had bought her in Spain, and began to fan herself. She had finished her champagne and beckoned a waiter for another glass. Several ladies, the mothers of some of the other young ladies who had been invited to the party, came and sat next to her. They all began to talk and laugh among themselves.