House on the Lagoon

by Rosario Ferré

  Rebecca was amazed at Doña Ermelinda’s uninhibited behavior. A total stranger, she was acting as if she had known the Mendizabals all her life. Rebecca scrutinized her more closely. She was elegantly dressed, but there was something about her that didn’t ring true; she couldn’t figure out what. She was still thinking about it when the music started playing the first paso doble of the night.

  Ignacio had hired a popular band to liven up the evening and ordered them to play only Spanish music, to please his father. Buenaventura came over to ask Rebecca for a dance.

  “You’ll have to accept that girl as your daughter-in-law one day, Rebecca,” he said to her. “If I know Ignacio, he’s going to want to marry her as soon as he graduates from college; you know he’s as headstrong as you are. I think you’d better get used to the idea.” And when Rebecca didn’t answer, but kept opening and closing her fan and staring over Buenaventura’s shoulder to see what Doña Ermelinda was doing, he tightened his arm around her to bring her closer.

  “Remember when we were almost the same age and fell desperately in love the night of your coronation ball? I was penniless but I was the happiest man on earth,” he said. “Today we can afford to be lenient and spare our children some of the difficulties we had to face.” Rebecca fanned herself slowly as Buenaventura went on whispering in her ear. He always got romantic when he danced a paso doble, and right now they were dancing Pisa Morena, one of his favorites.

  All of a sudden Rebecca put her hand, sparkling with diamond rings, discreetly on his chest to make him keep his distance. “Stop behaving like a teenager and steer me as close as you can to Doña Ermelinda; I think I’ve discovered what was bothering me about her.” They spun around the dance floor, picking up speed, Buenaventura’s patent-leather shoes and Rebecca’s rhinestone sandals sliding in perfect unison over the mosaic floor. Rebecca looked attentively at Doña Ermelinda. When they were close enough, she made Buenaventura spin around again, flung her right hand in an arc, and struck Doña Ermelinda’s golden turban with her fan. The music stopped and everyone gasped.

  When Buenaventura saw the turban fly off Doña Ermelinda’s head, he stopped in his tracks. Rebecca bent down to pick it up and, looking surprised and dismayed, gave it back to Doña Ermelinda with a smile. She excused herself and insisted she had been looking the other way when Buenaventura unexpectedly whirled her around. Doña Ermelinda’s face had turned gray. Several people began to laugh, pointing to the thick mat of hair that rose from her head, and some began to make unkind comments. But Doña Ermelinda didn’t bat an eyelash. She stared right back at them, stood up proudly from the Spanish Conquistador chair, and shook her head vigorously, to make her wild curls stand out even more. Then she walked over to Esmeralda, took her by the hand, and they walked out of the house together, heads held high.

  That sad event, which gave the San Juan social set something to gossip about for months, had serious repercussions in the Mendizabal family. Ignacio was furious at his mother for having shamed him. He began to court Esmeralda openly, in defiance of his parents’ prohibition. If he persisted in seeing her, they told him, they would cut off his monthly allowance and refuse to pay for his airplane tickets to fly home from school on vacations. But Ignacio wouldn’t listen.

  Doña Ermelinda came every so often to the capital, to purchase the tulles and silks she needed to create her debutante gowns, and when Esmeralda was home from school in the States, she would accompany her on those trips. Usually they stayed overnight at a small but very nice house overlooking the bay in Old San Juan. During the rest of that summer vacation, they stayed there several times. Ignacio would come to the Márquezes’ pink house in the evenings, stand under Esmeralda’s balcony, and sing her romantic songs with a guitar trio accompanying him. He spent a fortune on these serenades, and on the bouquets of gardenias he sent up to her door every night. But Esmeralda never opened the balcony’s louvered windows to see who was singing. The insult to Doña Ermelinda’s pride had been so great she would feel vindicated only if Esmeralda roundly rejected Buenaventura Mendizabal’s heir.

  A few days before he left for school in September, Ignacio came to our new apartment to talk to Quintín in private. “You have to help me make Mother apologize to Doña Ermelinda,” he said. “It’s the only way she’s going to let me see Esmeralda again.” Quintín was sitting at his desk reading Suetonius’ The Scandalous Lives of the Caesars. He looked up from his book and said, with sadness, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you, Ignacio.” But Ignacio. insisted, and he wouldn’t leave.

  Finally Quintín got tired of Ignacio’s pleading and decided to stop beating around the bush. “You can’t go out with Esmeralda Márquez, because she’s part black. Father and Mother will never stand for it,” he told him point-blank. They were sitting in the living room, and Ignacio was incensed. (And so was I, but I was too afraid to say anything.) Ignacio gave Quintín a violent shove, so he stumbled and fell. Quintín got up from the floor and slapped Ignacio, and his gold-rimmed glasses went flying across the room. It took all my levelheadedness to make them stop the fight.

  Some weeks later Esmeralda was engaged to Ernesto Ustariz. Ernesto was head over heels in love with Esmeralda, and he had convinced his father to pay for Esmeralda’s education at the Fashion Institute. As soon as they were married, they would move to New York, where Ernesto planned to enter New York University Law School. They set the wedding date for November in San Juan, because Doña Ermelinda wanted all of San Juan society to attend. Ignacio, Quintín, and I were invited to the reception at Alamares’s poshest hotel. After the wedding, the newlyweds would spend the night in Doña Ermelinda’s pink house on the bay before boarding a plane for New York, where they would honeymoon.

  Ignacio left for Florida State University at the end of September and was back on the island two weeks later. He wasn’t feeling well, he said, and wanted to take the semester off. The day of Esmeralda’s wedding, Ignacio woke up sick. He suffered from asthma, and the emotional stress of the past week had induced a serious attack. He could scarcely breathe and went around the house on tiptoe, with an inhaler in his hand, as if walking underwater. He was by turn furious at Esmeralda and terribly unhappy. After lunch he went to a bar in San Juan to try to forget his woes. Rebecca insisted we all ignore him. He was only seventeen, and would eventually get over his silly obsession.

  That evening we went to the wedding together. Ignacio had had more than a few drinks and was strangely silent. He said a courteous hello to Esmeralda and her mother on the receiving line, as if nothing had happened between them. At three in the morning, however, when Quintín and I were ready to go home, we couldn’t find Ignacio anywhere. Finally we had to leave the hotel without him.

  Quintín was worried about his brother, but there was nothing he could do. When we got to our apartment, we went directly to bed and fell asleep.

  It must have been four in the morning when the phone woke us up. Quintín answered. It was Rebecca. “Ignacio is being held at the police station,” she said, almost spitting out the words. “After the wedding he drove over to Doña Ermelinda’s house and began to fire at everything in sight. I’d like to know why you left him behind at the reception and came back by yourselves. After all, he’s your younger brother, Quintín, and you’re responsible for him!” Quintín could hear Buenaventura in the background, his voice cracking with worry as he tried desperately to get a lawyer at that hour.

  Quintín got out of bed and hurried to the police station. I called Rebecca and told her I was sorry; we had looked all over the hotel for Ignacio, but he had simply disappeared. She was terribly angry. “You may know a lot about books, young lady,” she almost hissed, “but you know very little about responsibility and respect!”

  It wasn’t until later that I found out what had happened. Ignacio had gone to the wedding armed with Buenaventura’s gun, waited until the bride and groom left the hotel for Doña Ermelinda’s house in Old San Juan, and emptied it point-blank at the door. The newlyweds
fled into the bathroom at the back of the building, but not before a bullet came through the front door and seriously injured Esmeralda’s little finger. When he heard her scream, Ignacio stopped firing and collapsed on the sidewalk. The noise woke up the whole neighborhood; lights went on in the houses nearby, and not five minutes had elapsed before a police siren was heard.

  Quintín got his brother out on bail that morning, and Ignacio never mentioned Esmeralda’s name again. He went back to college the following semester and finished his four years at Florida State University. But he never fell in love again. When he came home for vacation, he enjoyed taking his fifteen-foot sailboat out on Alamares Lagoon all by himself. He named the boat La Esmeralda and insisted that sailing was the only love of his life.

  23

  Petra’s Kingdom

  THE CELLAR OF THE HOUSE on the lagoon mesmerized me from the beginning. It dated from the days of Pavel, when Rebecca was a very different person from what she had become when I met her. The cellar gave the house much of its mystery, the feeling that events weren’t always what they seemed but could have unexpected echoes and repercussions. My own house on Aurora Street had no cellar. Ponce’s soil is dry and hard, very different from the swamps of the north, and its basalt foundations make digging into it almost impossible. At the house on Aurora Street, events were easy to classify: there was a right and a left, a front and a back to everything—there was little room for ambiguity or doubt. But at the house on the lagoon, things were often misleading.

  The first thing that caught my eye when I entered that strange world were the huge steel beams that supported Pavel’s golden terrace. They jutted out majestically from the walls of the house, all rusted and half eaten by the salt air. Even though they weren’t supposed to be seen, they had an Art Nouveau elegance which seemed almost organic, as if Pavel had designed them to blend in with the nearby mangroves. The area under the terrace was used as a common room by the servants, and it was here that they ate, smoked, and sat talking and relaxing after work. The dirt floor

  was hardly noticeable; the servants sprinkled it with water and swept it carefully every day. Petra had furnished it with an old set of wicker furniture which had originally been used at the house and which Rebecca had discarded. Her wicker peacock throne was an important feature of the sitting room. Every night she would sit on it, wearing her brightly colored bead necklaces and bracelets. She would listen to the servants’ complaints, and give them advice.

  One by one, the servants would come and sit next to her on a low stool, pouring out their grievances in a whisper. If Rebecca had had a tantrum, for example, and given Eulodia hell for dropping a wineglass on the floor, Eulodia was to be patient with her and say nothing; Rebecca wasn’t completely in control of her nerves. If Rebecca had ordered Brunilda to iron her new evening gown and had not bothered to take off the designer tag, and Brunilda was shocked to see the dress had cost five hundred dollars when her own salary was eighty dollars a month, Brunilda was to keep quiet about it. Rebecca was Buenaventura’s wife, and she had the right to spend whatever she wanted on clothes, which were an important symbol of her husband’s position in the world.

  At the center of the common room, a door had been cut into the dirt wall. It dated back to Pavel’s time; you could tell because of its Gaudiesque design. It was decorated with tendrils and leaves of a fantastic vegetation. It led to a dark tunnel into which twenty cells opened. The cells had earthen floors and no windows; they were ventilated by grilles imbedded into the top of each end wall. Originally, the rooms had been intended for storage: for wine, codfish, or Buenaventura’s precious imported hams. When Buenaventura moved his merchandise to his warehouse on La Puntilla, however, the storage rooms had been turned into servants’ quarters.

  There must have been two dozen servants living in these cells when I visited the cellar the first time, and they were all related to Petra Avilés: Eulodia, Brígida, and Brunilda, her three nieces; Confesor, Buenaventura’s tailor, who was Petra’s nephew; Eustasio, the gardener, who was her cousin; Eusebia, Rebecca’s seamstress, who was Petra’s sister; Carmelo, the farmhand, who was her brother; and Brambon, her common-law husband, who was the chauffeur—among others. They got along very well together, and there were rarely arguments among them.

  Buenaventura liked to bathe in the fresh spring water because he was convinced it kept him young. Every time he stepped in, he felt as if he shed years. Pavel had designed a marvelous underground chamber for the spring, decorated with a mosaic of indigo waves, and golden dolphins playfully chasing each other around. A bronze door, beautifully decorated with seashells and stars, opened onto it from the right side of the common room. Buenaventura had always liked this grotto and left it standing when he tore down the rest of Pavel’s house. The servants bathed in a cement trough that had been built adjacent to it, which was also fed by the underground spring.

  The cellar had a third door on the left, which opened onto the kitchen. From it one could step out into the yard, hidden from the avenue by a tall hibiscus hedge. This was where the family laundry was hung to dry after Brígida and Brunilda had scrubbed it on a rough stone slab. On the right side of the cellar, another door opened onto an enclosed patio where the animals were kept. Buenaventura’s Doberman pinschers were there in a large cage. Fausto, the original black male who had mysteriously arrived from Germany on one of Buenaventura’s ships, had long since passed away. But Buenaventura had paired him off with a handsome bitch before he died, and now he owned two black Dobermans: Fausto and Mefistófeles, who were the apple of his eye. Buenaventura also owned a cow, which was milked for him every morning; a dozen chickens, which laid fresh eggs for his breakfast; and a pigpen, from which Petra chose Buenaventura’s beloved pigs’ knuckles and ham shanks every week.

  There was only one cage which didn’t belong to Buenaventura and his family—where the land crabs were kept and fattened up. The crab cage was made of wood and it was on stilts. A large stone sat on the lid to keep the crabs from pushing it open. Brambon, Petra’s husband, had made the cage himself. Land crabs proliferated in the mangroves and had to be hunted down periodically by the servants, especially when it rained and the water in the mangrove swamp rose a few inches closer to the house. Otherwise, they would soon be seen scuttling down the cellar corridors and even climb up the terrace’s iron beams. Fortunately, Fausto and Mefistófeles would sniff the crabs out and rip off their claws, so the crab population was kept under control.

  Land crabs were considered black people’s food at the house on the lagoon; no one in the Mendizabal family would have been caught dead eating them. But the servants loved crab. Petra said the crabs reminded her of warriors in full armor, and she swore they made people brave. Every Saturday night the servants would sit around a table in the cellar in front of what looked like a heap of blue cobblestones. Except that the cobblestones had spiny legs, huge claws, and eyes that stood out like red seeds on top of their heads. Then they would take a mallet, crack open the cobblestones one by one, and pry out the sweet white flesh with a fork.

  Petra’s room was the first one on the right at the end of the cellar’s underground tunnel. The walls of her room were lined with bottles and jars filled with strange potions and herbal unguents. She always knew what remedy to prescribe for each ailment: orange leaf tea for nervous disorders, rue for menstrual pains, aloe for insect bites, witch hazel for ear inflammations or sties.

  Petra ran Buenaventura’s bath with perfumed bay leaves every day, and once every two or three months she boiled all kinds of roots which she said had magical powers and poured the liquid into the grotto’s blue basin before Buenaventura stepped in. Buenaventura was convinced Petra’s baths helped him do good business, especially when a price war was taking place at Mendizabal & Company. If he was trying to defeat his competitors from California, for example, who had slashed the price of Green Valley asparagus, he would take one of Petra’s baths and his white asparagus from Aranjuez would miraculously begin to sel
l. Suddenly there would be a fad for them in the capital, and people would start eating rolled white asparagus sandwiches, white asparagus casseroles with cheese, lobster and white asparagus bisque. Buenaventura would make several thousand dollars overnight.

  The servants respected Petra, and it was through her that order was established and maintained at the house. Petra was Buenaventura’s marshal; everything he commanded was done by her. The servants considered Rebecca second in authority; before they did what she asked, they always checked with Petra. They were grateful because it was thanks to Petra that they had managed to leave the stinking quagmire of Las Minas in their rowboats and could live in relative comfort under Buenaventura’s roof.

  Petra always gave special attention to Quintín, although she made it clear that his privileged status depended on his carrying out Buenaventura’s wishes. Buenaventura, as the years went by, felt a growing sympathy for the Independentista cause, and once had secretly donated money for it. He had lived on the island for many years, he’d say, longer than he had lived in Spain, and it was difficult for him to accept the fact that his adopted country was only partly self-governed. Not to be able to trade with other countries, for example; not to have a say in the election of the President; not to go to war with another country if the need arose—these were difficult things for him to accept as a proud descendant of the Conquistadors.